“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.”

Marshall McLuhan, Media theorist

“I don't need you to change. And I don't need anything from you. Whether you believe it or not, you don't need to do a thing…”

I burst into tears.

The year was 2004, and I'd just travelled several hundred miles to have a session with a coach. When I arrived, I explained that I really needed a breakthrough, and was worried that if I didn't “get it right”, my time and money would be wasted, and I would be no further forward. Worse still, I would be stuck in the stress and dis-ease that had me come to him in the first place.

He told me I didn't need to do anything, and I burst into tears. And as I sat there with tears streaming down my face, I started to feel more peaceful. We sat and talked for three hours, and by the time we were finished, I felt better than I had in ages. And I was so happy that I was feeling better, I didn't think to ask some obvious questions…

1. Where do the deep, rich, profound feelings in life come from?
2. Where do they go when you're not aware of them?
3. What are the factors determining whether you're aware of them or not?

Your understanding of how life works

Your understanding of how life works has more influence than any other factor over your experience of life, and the results you get. We each behave in accordance with what makes sense to us:

• In Aztec culture, it “made sense” to sacrifice people to the gods in order to keep the community thriving.
• In England in the 1850s, it “made sense” to dump raw sewage into the River Thames and carry small bunches of flowers to protect against illness.
• In Japanese culture, it “makes sense” for many people to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for months or even years on end (the Japanese even have a word, karōshi, which means literally “death from overwork”).

In 2004, my understanding of “how life works” dictated that all feelings and states could be recreated, accessed and utilized by manipulating a person's body, their breathing, and their thinking patterns. Mental-emotional states were something a person “chose”, “got into”, and “managed”.

But, as you start to understand the principles behind clarity more clearly, the idea of managing your states shows a misunderstanding of what states, feelings and emotions are; the idea of “state control” stops making sense.

You have innate clarity and peace of mind

Clarity and peace of mind are the “default position” for people – the factory settings. While these are context-sensitive – they can show up differently depending on the situation – they're the baseline for a person when there's nothing else in the way. And what gets in the way? Contaminated thinking.

Like a football being held underwater, as soon as you let go, it rises to the surface. And like the grass pressing up through the cracks in a city pavement, your resilience and clarity is always doing its best to find its way through the paving slabs of your contaminated thinking…

Clarity is the small child's standard setting. Up to the age of around four years old, children return easily to the default setting of their clarity and well-being. While they often get upset, they don't stay with it. The pull of their clarity is too strong, and their contaminated thinking is not powerful enough to keep them from it.

The average three-year-old:

• Tends to be deeply engaged, easily amused and satisfied with the simple joys of life; is present and in the moment, finding lots of things fun and funny.
• Is loving and open-hearted, connecting easily with others.
• Knows they don't really understand how life works; is curious, often puzzled, and constantly learning, coming up with new ideas and creative insights.
• Gets over upsets quickly and easily; doesn't tend to dwell on past mistakes or worry about the future.
• Is in touch with their deeper wisdom, often aware of “the elusive obvious” that the adults around them aren't seeing.

The average three-year-old spends a lot of their time in clarity, because they're allowing their psychology to do what it's designed to do. The psychology of little children is an example of the mind's self-correcting system given the freedom to do what it does best; return to a set point of clarity and well-being.

Your mind is a self-correcting system. Its set point is clarity, resilience and well-being… The benefits of allowing the mind to find its own way back to clarity vastly outweigh the benefits of external intervention.

Why? Because external intervention stops the self-correcting system doing its job.

Clarity is what a person's psychology is always endeavouring to return to. Innate clarity and resilience are always shining a beacon, even when a person seems hopelessly lost. You see…

Clarity isn't an achievement; it's a pre-existing condition…

It's not something you need to practice or “work on”. It's an expression of who you really are.

The infinite creative intelligence of MIND shows up in every aspect of our experience, gently pointing us towards clarity and well-being. The capacity for clarity is there within each one of us, tirelessly working to guide us in the direction of our most inspiring, rewarding and meaningfully successful lives.

When you turn your attention away from the grinding familiarity of contaminated thinking, you make space for clarity, and the powerful inevitability of fresh, new thought. That's when you find yourself looking in the most generative, nourishing and resourceful direction there is…