Our unconscious organizing principles most clearly reveal themselves when we find ourselves stuck,  imagining that our happiness is conditional on having a certain kind of experience, on being or becoming a certain kind of person, or on being treated in some special manner. …Practice allows us discover that our happiness is not dependent on any of the things which we once thought so crucial. The old organizing principles that forever were warning us, “Do it this way or else!” are suddenly found irrelevant. Life offers us the unexpected pleasure in our own aliveness, vitality and responsiveness. Being just this moment, we learn that we don’t have to become anything new, or somehow jettison all those shameful parts of ourselves in order to partake of this newfound bounty.

Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind