contributes to its becoming bigger than life. You become drawn into making it more real and powerful than it actually need be and concretizing it as a deeply engrained part of your life.

            One of the biggest traps we fall into is that we look for the origins of what we find disturbing as if it were a medical disease rather than an emotional state of dis-ease. Even the choice to give a disturbing experience a pathological name, like "symptom" or "problem," takes us further into a dark and immobilizing view of our condition and situation. When we pathologize our life, we become like an architect who designs a psychological structure for imprisoning our potential to move forward. As a victim of a symptom, it naturally follows that we will be dominated by a fear of the condition returning. What we fail to see is how the power of a symptom derives from the way we feed our fear of it. We fail to trust life and the processes it uses to teach and guide us.

            The way out involves no particular understanding of your past or present situation, but a chaotic in how you relate to it. In my own personal encounter with anxiety, I moved from a terrified fear to a mobilized curiosity, and that was enough to take away the potency of its powerful grip. There are endless ways of relating to the disturbances that enter our life. However, any response that sets us up to conquer and eradicate the problem may paradoxically make it more present and discomforting. Any way of relating to the symptom that brings forth more imaginative and resourceful responses will not only loosen its grip but may very well result in gracing the quality of our life.

            The mistake we make with discomforting experience is that we try to beat it rather than join it. We go to war with our discomfort, first giving it a name, that justifies our going into psychological or medical warfare with it. The main reason people are in trouble and end up going to a therapist is that they have already been doing psychology with their life and have spent weeks, months, and even longer trying to fight their symptom. The last thing needed is an escalation of this warfare with one's inner life.

            Everyday soul is about fully attending to what is present and finding a way to resourcefully relate to it so as to bring forth a graceful outcome, even when this involves the most difficult and painful circumstances. Everything in life is a teacher with a lesson that is perfectly made for you during the time in which it is received. We are never given more than we can bear. Grace, the divine presence and generosity of spirit, befalls those whose hands are open to receive it. The work of spirit is toward making graceful outcomes and blessing all that we receive in life. It steps away from seeing problems that need to be solved and difficulties that must be surmounted. Spirituality embraces all of life, its upsides and downsides and does so with the serenity and calmness of a still but powerful compassion for the whole of creation. 

The Alchemy of Change

            A soulful approach to life does not fight the disturbances that come to you It invites you to find a way to transform them into grace. The legendary psychotherapist Milton H. Erickson mastered this way of utilizing symptoms. He once treated a twenty-two-year-old man who had been biting his nails since tic was four. He originally bit them until they bled, hoping it would get him out of having to practice the piano, but his mother made him practice anyway. He then grew up to flunk out of two medical schools and finally saw Milton Erickson at the insistence of his father. Rather than ask, "Why do you think you're biting our nails" or