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.

I have always read and been taught that your thoughts create your reality. Often this was presented as an exercise in positive thinking and visualisation. If you believe you are going to be rich, you will be. That kind of thing. The bit I'd never realised before, is that our thoughts literally create our emotions. When I think I'm a failure as a human being, this thought will instantly create a bad feeling.

Conversely, I always believed that the bad feelings I had, that fear of one day being found out to be a fraud, the sense of being overwhelmed by relatively trivial tasks, all these things were the source of my trouble. I really believed that if I could somehow rid myself of these bad feelings, I would then be able to think positively and be more productive in my life.

According to the theory of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT for short), it's exactly the other way around. It's because my thoughts are negative and distorted, that I'm feeling bad. And the beauty of it is that, with some hard work and training, people can change their thoughts. There is a way of clearing the blocks in the river of life that has helped many, many people. Just realising this made me feel ten times better.

So I've started. I'm doing the basic exercises from the book to train myself to think more realistically about myself. "I never get anything done," a thought that often crosses my mind and makes me feel inadequate and bad about myself, turns into: "You get plenty of things done. You did some gardening and completed all the course paperwork this week." It's obvious which of those two is closer to the truth.

Well, I'll see how that goes. It seems obvious that it'll take some work to change a thinking habit of nearly four decades. But it also seems obvious that, if I do make some headway, it'll make it easier for me to see myself for what I truly am - an expression of Spirit - and to grow as a human being. At least it would seem that I'm attaching the problem from the right angle now.

The interesting thing is, that through my bouts of misery - including the latest one which was probably one of the worst ever - my guiding spirits never give up on me. I keep receiving ideas about how the world works and how I can live my live consciously and in relationship with the world around me. And it is beautiful. Next, you can expect some thoughts about waking up and paying attention.