I was sitting outside in the hot tub tonight, up in these hills away from town, dark outside and the snow falling all around. This is a place I house sit each winter, and the hot tub is where I sit when I need to think something out. It is private, quiet, and has a vast, lonely and lovely view of the surrounding mountains. Coyotes howl each night.

You would think I was enjoying it, but I usually go to the hot tub to think, rather than to experience the joy of being out in the tub in my birthday suit, looking at the wild view, watching the snow fall around me, listening to the occasional howling. I think out there, I work things through. Then when it’s done, I’ll sit and enjoy. Tonight, I was feeling bad. Just plain bad. Rather than enjoying the beauty of this new snow falling, all I’m doing is complaining and dreading in my mind; all this new snow means that I will have to get up at around 4 in the morning, to be shoveling for about three hours here; then I will go to the motel where I’m groundskeeper, and shovel snow there where the motel has quite large grounds; then I will go to the other house downtown that I am house sitting, and shovel snow there.

What I really want is to wake up in the morning and do more of this writing, which I love to do and which is ‘authentic’ to me… but the morning will be all about shoveling, sweating, and it will make my muscles and my injured back very sore and very tired for the next couple days. Sitting there in the hot tub I began thinking about this project, and these mind tools. Do they work? Am I happy? I am feeling, if not miserable, at least not happy. A little bad, tonight. How can I write all these tools for clearing up our minds, and our lives, if I am not happy myself, much of the time? That means they don’t work, right?

So I let myself ‘go there’ for awhile, I allowed a breakdown session. We’re not talking about a screaming, tearing out hair thing, where the neighbors over the hill have to wonder and call the police. But I just let myself have self-pity, dark doubts, I voiced these fears and allowed whatever I felt to just arrive. A little frustrated, a little sad, a little humbling, a little self-disparaging, a little uncertainty, a little suffering, a little crying. I’ve allowed these releases to arise once in awhile for years, when it seems to be needed. Instead of holding it all together, I’ll allow it to fall apart for awhile. It keeps me excruciatingly honest with what’s going on inside me.

I’ve been going through this intense transition, these life changes towards wisdom and clarity, for about two decades now, yet I’ve kept it mostly hidden. For the past few years I’ve been ‘normal’, schlepped away at drabby jobs I don’t enjoy, always straining to perfect my clarity and honesty and strength, in hopes to one day arrive at some state where I know I have come far enough to ‘start’; to start letting it leak from me, into the people and circumstances around me. This blog is the beginning of that, and there are so many books I need to write. I’ve been so quiet, yet screaming inside, to start this move towards getting what is inside me, out. That is how important this blog is to me.

Yet tonight I have so many doubts. I wrote the first tool yesterday (Free Your Thinking), and now all I have is doubt: should I write it using personal events, really keep it human… or should I create it to sound more like it’s coming from a very advanced and divine guru who has already dealt with his personal problems and which no longer appear in his writing? And how about length… should I write all these articles to be a similar word count, or long, or short, or all different? And what about the comprehensiveness… each article can easily be made into thousands of words, and yet I don’t want them to be so long as to be unreadable as a blog.

And, as mentioned, what about the tools themselves? Who am I to write and send these out, when I myself have not found happiness yet? I’m still struggling. So why would anyone listen? These, and a few more things, just rolled out of me as I allowed this gentle breakdown session.

But any breakdown session, whether it’s tiny gentle ones, alone and in controlled circumstances, or whether it’s a huge breakdown where you’re seen in public and they have to cart you away in the straightjacket… these allow you to become, for a little while, excruciatingly honest with how you are feeling about some things. You see your own suffering very clearly, for awhile. Rather than suffering and hiding it and putting on a face… you see your suffering. And that seeing, creates some kind of a calm-after-the-storm. The act of catharsis does carry away with it much of the stress, the falseness you were holding together, and allow you to see things more clearly.

And so, after a few minutes of my little breakdown-on-training-wheels, it all became clear: these tools are not meant to create happiness for anyone, including myself. Happiness will be built upon many circumstances of your life, whether clear or not. Some of these tools will help your happiness, others will help your clarity, others will help both, and a few might slip by and just not register anything within you. I do not have those answers. I have these humble tools, and I know they work on some level, and I know some of you will read them and others will not. I know that just the reading of them is all it takes for them to begin working, in anyone, if it is ‘time’ for that person to be learning a tool’s particular lesson.

These tools DO help increase and improve clear thinking. I have become infinitely clearer than I was years ago, and these tools are responsible for that. I am not miserable anymore; even when I feel suffering, it is a small percentage of what it used to be, and a small percentage of what most people call suffering. I am amazed at the emotional and mental strength these tools have built in me, and at the patience, the ability to pierce through my own confusion and nonsense and lies, and those of others. These tools earned me this strength.

This blog is a gift, these tools are a gift, and for now they don’t have to adhere to some form that I deem perfect, or divine. This is just writing, comfortably, happily, with a hope and a certainty that each one will implant a pure, beautiful tiny seed of clarity, to anyone who really wants it at that moment. I need for each tool to help just one reader, just a little bit. Not for it to be perfect and all-encompassing, but to give, to help, just a little bit.

And tonight, this is another tool to add to my list. There are many tools I am consciously aware of using, and many that hide awhile before I discover they’re there. I’ve been allowing these gentle breakdowns for years… but tonight in the hot tub, after those self-pitying thoughts, after the subsequent clarity, then the statement arrived: ‘You have a backlog of tools waiting to be written… but here is a fresh one, straight from the oven, right after you’ve used it yourself. Give it to them fresh: ALLOW YOURSELF A GENTLE BREAKDOWN ONCE IN AWHILE’.

There. Those are a few of the thoughts that came to me, immediately following the cleansing that resulted from allowing my short polite breakdown. Instead of waiting for things to bottle up to the exploding point inside you… let off a little steam, in littler amounts, and more often instead of rarely. Do it gently and bravely.

Find smaller, more frequent, healthy ways to release your stress, tension, unhappiness, sadness, rage, frustration, instead of letting any of these bottle up over time into a dangerous explosion waiting to happen. The calm aftermath of it will clear up your mind in some subtle and wonderful ways, and be exactly what you needed at that time, to peel away a few layers of pretense and bare a little excruciating self-honesty.

Allow a gentle little ‘breakdown session’ once in awhile, FIND HEALTHY RELEASES.