I have escaped my abusive childhood; it has no hold over me.  I am free of it.  For years, its shadows enveloped me and covered the path I walked. As a result, I suffered from chronic depression for more than ten years, and I really couldn’t see any point in anything I did, or in the world around me.  I was so lacking in self-worth that I couldn’t bring myself to buy a new pair of trousers, or apply for a new job, or, well, just live and take a big bite out of the mind-tingling, sensation-cartwheeling joy of it all.

 

And because I’m free of it, I can show you what happened to me and how I found the key to the door through which life really begins, to a life that is without fear and a world that is the platform on which you can sing your unique song.

 

The first thing you have to know is that my story isn’t true.  But, then, nor is yours.  Of course, all those wretched things happened (like my father not talking to me for seven years but instead whistling at me!), but it’s not true.  Not really.

 

The second thing you need to know is you don’t just carry the past around with you; I’m afraid it’s much more serious than that.  You are that past.  There isn’t any difference between the past—that agglomeration of memories of abuse, fear, loneliness—and you.  Put it another way, and as one of my central koans puts it: The thought thinks the thinker.

 

 

The past makes ‘you’ you, just as the thought—which is an energetic impulse from the past—thinks you into being.

 

This is a life-changing moment if you can really ‘get’ this.  If the thought and the thinker, and the past and you, really are one and the same thing, who actually is there to be rid of it all?

 

The desire to be free of our past, and to disperse the shadow of abuse, is a movement from the thing itself!  It’s circular and ultimately self-defeating—worse, it gives more power to that past.

 

So, rather than you trying to improve, be better or work on yourself, it’s enough to see the process of thought itself.  I have prepared 21 simple programs to help you do that in my book The Untrue Story of You — because it’s not easy. Understanding your true nature is a bit like trying to see your own eye.  They will help you observe the mercurial, quicksilver thought forms take shape and create you (actually, there are three selves that make you a ‘you’ –but who’s counting?)  In the clear light of intelligent observation, the phantoms of the past—and you as the hurt, abused you—dissolve.

 

And so that’s why your story isn’t really true.  Because it never happened to you in the first place — not the wonderful, infinite, eternal, joyful, natural you that encompasses everything but is untainted by none of it.  Welcome to the true story of you.

 

My new book ‘The Untrue Story of You’ is available now.  Visit my website at: www.bryanhubbard.net