Words are cool.

Quite helpful things.

Words are pointers, communication tools, and ways to somewhat capture the indescribable nature of life.

So they’re pretty amazing.

But they’re not the things they refer to.

And we forget that all the time.

Is that a big deal?

Well, yes, it is.

Or at least: it can be.

Because we can suffer a lot when we believe that words really ARE things.

Take ’the psyche’, for instance.

A very important thing that seems to rule and regulate and dominate our lives.

It can be healthy, or very sick.

It’s deep and dark and complex and full of beliefs and secrets and old stories.

And it also doesn’t exist.

The psyche is not a thing.

It’s a word.

We use it to talk about the human experience, it enables us to have conversations about what’s happening in our lives.

But when we somehow believe it’s a real, tangible thing (like most of us do), a thing that’s an important part of us, a thing that can be fucked up and broken and unfixable, we can create a world of mysterious, endless suffering.

Of course, all words are empty vessels that we can fill with personal value and meaning.

I love words, obviously, I LOVE them.

It’s just that when words become things that keep us from living in freedom, when words become things that seem to hide under our imaginary beds, waiting in the dark to eat us alive, it’s good to take a step back and see them for what they truly are.

What doesn’t really exist, can’t be broken.

What doesn’t exist, doesn’t need to be fixed.

And you know what?

We don’t even have to talk about repairing or healing the psyche.

We can just as well talk about experiences, things we go through, things we find difficult and painful, and things we’re ashamed of.

That’s good enough.

That’s totally workable.

And then we can take it a step further, and explore how these experiences entered our awareness and left again, silently, and discover that they’re not as bad and scary and personal as we always thought they were.

When we realize how everything is created, when we see the words that are innocently used deep within us to build our wonderfully messy lives, we can find that there’s nothing broken in the first place.

We can go beyond things like ‘psyche’, ‘anxiety disorder’, or ‘subconscious beliefs’.

We can start looking for what’s powerful and insightful and wonderful and blissful about us, and invite more of that into our lives.

And we can stop trying to heal things that never existed to begin with.