It wasn’t too long ago that I’d hit an all-time low. I’m talking all-time. My best friend had just died from cancer, my legs were riddled with pain from a soulless tech job, my daughter was battling Covid-related anxiety, and my lovelife was on the rocks, to put it mildly. Oh, and I’d just been freshly diagnosed with PTSD—a consequence of my having been abandoned by my mother at age five, who was innocently trying to address her childhood trauma, and then repeatedly sexually abused by my father, who was battling his own demons, needless to say. 

Please know I don’t say this to win pity, but rather to showcase my humanity. Strange as it may sound, I view every traumatic event that ever happened to me as a huge gift. Because if there’s one thing I’m 100% sure of, it’s that we’ve all been wounded in one way or another. Our brains register trauma in our neural tissue going back at least 500 years! Yet the incredible thing, the truly revolutionary thing, is that we don’t need to be defined by our trauma. We can use it as a springboard for enormous growth and evolution—the key factor is how we process each thought passing through our mind moment by moment. 

Like many people, I tried traditional psychotherapy for years and it provided little relief. I also read a zillion self-help books. But the confusing thoughts swirling inside my brain just wouldn’t stop their relentless invasion of my psyche. No matter what I did, no matter how bravely I faced my “stuff,” they were always there to remind me that I was unworthy, unlovable, invisible, unseen, valueless, unbelonging… you get the picture.

Fast forward through decades of feeling lost. Utterly lost. Occasionally, I’d experience a momentary flicker of hope, when some insight or another captured my attention, but it never stuck. It never even came close. Until one day, while listening to a podcast called “Rewilding Love with Angus & Rohini Ross,” I happened to come across an understanding known as the Three Principles, which revealed with utter certainty that we don’t need to take our thoughts seriously. Not in the least.

The mystery of it all is that I felt a profound calmness overtake me the exact instant I heard about these principles—long before I truly comprehended them. If that seems a bit woo-woo to you, I get it. It did to me too. I’d always been a logic-based, highly academic person (B.A. in Math from UCSB and M.A. in Economics from Harvard), so I would have never dreamed in million years that something like this would happen to me.