Below is an excerpt from my #1 bestselling book Making Meaning: Counseling Psychology & Buddhist Practices to Create & Live the Life You Want, which you can get buy here https://www.amazon.com/Making-Meaning-Counseling-Psychology-Practices/dp/B09HFXS491 or read for free with Kindle Unlimited.
Do you want to know a secret? The unspoken goal of all sciences and arts (psychology included) is to create superhumans. This statement might sound like a conspiracy theory; however, it is just my inquiry into the intention behind humanity’s constant search for improvement, even if it is by the paradoxical means of learning to accept yourself as you are without judgement, such as in many of the Buddhist philosophies and Carl Rogers-based psychotherapy modalities.
If you take a moment to think about it, anything that scientists, artists, doctors, coaches, and psychotherapists do is in an effort to make us all smarter, healthier, stronger, more capable of dealing with life’s struggles, and better able to constantly expand our perceived limitations of our potential.
Good thing, right? Well…it definitely seems like these professionals work hard, but the results are not quite there, yet. People are genuinely not as happy and satisfied as they would like to be. By the way, what about you? How satisfied are you in the different areas of your own life?
This book is a combination of lessons from psychology, philosophy, and science, also combining my own journey and the life journeys of my counseling and coaching clients and counseling students.
The intention of this book is to make you a superhuman. The difficult part is that this can happen only if you give yourself the permission to envision that what is possible in your life is beyond what can be imagined right now.
I know that you do not know me yet, a situation that is similar to my first session with a new client, though hopefully that will change throughout this journey. Trust comes from knowing each other, so I do not wait too long before I give you a gift. It is a gift that many were not ever given, which might be the biggest obstacle to happiness and fulfillment. I certainly was not given this gift, at least not directly, and not until a later age.
My offering to you is to say this, as directly and clearly as possible. Please, pay attention now:
“You now, officially, have the permission to be what you truly want and need to be, and much more than that. It is okay, and It is possible.”
It is up to you, however, to first entertain the possibility that this journey is completely available to you. It is up to you to read this book not from the perspective that life is happening to you, but through the outlook that life is something that is sculpted by you.
In addition, it is up to you, while reading this book, to allow yourself to ask new questions, while being open to new answers.
Third, it is up to you to be willing to break out of your established patterns and actually experiment with implementing ideas that you read here, or through the further exploration of the ideas mentioned in this book, that resonate with you, in your own everyday life.
When people first dive into the compassionate ideas of Buddhism or into abundant self-help literature they might find it difficult to hold the paradoxical ideas expressed that, on the one hand, you are told that you are already perfect as you are, while on the other hand, the boundaries of that perfection can be forever, compassionately and without judgement, expanded. Many people become confused over the idea that “If I am perfect, why should I change?”
The only way to grow is to change.
As legendary motivational speaker Les Brown says, "If you put yourself in a position where you have to stretch outside your comfort zone, then you are forced to expand your consciousness and to strive and achieve"
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