Well, nobody ever said it was going to be easy. A couple of weeks ago, the stress and tiredness finally got the better of me. I was feeling awful. The place of peace inside me was still there, but got hard to reach, even during my practice. Waking up too early and not being able to go back to sleep made me feel worn out. I was barely able to do the minimum to hold my life together. It was clear that the blocks my life’s journey had created in the flow of life were getting the better of me.

To be honest, the whole thing felt like defeat. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after all these years of spiritual work and effort to find peace, I should have found the answer by now. I should have found a clear path to peace and not feel so sorry for myself. I should have found a way to remove those blocks and just be happy. Surely having failed to do so means that I’m useless as a spiritual person, let alone as a spiritual teacher. I’m failing at the thing I most care about, so I’m a failure as a human being.

So I talked to a few trusted friends. First of all, they assured me that I’m not a failure. And they had some good advice. My friend Lou recommended this book, a classic in self-help Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Feeling Good, The New Mood Therapy by David. D Bruns. So I bought it and started reading it. And I learned something that I had never realised before.

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