This is a consolidated transcript from a past lecture that had accompanying slides. My hope is that the core ideas continue to resonate, despite their somewhat clumsy presentation in this format. Enjoy! -Dalton
Imagine you were born wearing a pair of red-tinted glasses. You’ve never taken them off. For your entire life, everything you’ve ever seen has had a red hue. You wouldn’t know that the world wasn’t red. You would just think, “That’s the way things are.”
This is how our stories and beliefs function. They are the lens through which we interpret reality, and most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re wearing them. We mistake the lens for reality itself.
Our language reveals these stories. When we say things like, “I am anxious,” “I am a procrastinator,” or “I am not good enough,” we are not just describing a temporary state; we are stating an identity. We are claiming that this story is us. This is the root cause of so much of our suffering. The problem isn’t the feeling of anxiety; the problem is the story that says, “I am an anxious person.”
Think about the difference between a child and an adult dropping an ice cream cone. A child might cry for a few minutes, overcome with the raw emotion of loss. But soon enough, they’ll see a butterfly or a puppy and be completely captivated by the new experience. The emotion passes because there is no story attached to it.
An adult, on the other hand, might spill their coffee and launch into a whole narrative: “Of course, this would happen to me. My whole day is ruined. I’m so clumsy. I can never get anything right. This is just like that time when…” The feeling of frustration doesn’t just pass; it’s held in place, perpetuated and amplified by the story we tell ourselves about it.
This is the difference between a feeling and an emotion. A feeling is like the weather—it’s a temporary, passing state. An emotion is like the climate—it’s a weather pattern that gets held in place by a story. The story is what stretches the feeling out over time, turning a momentary state into a long-term identity.
So, how do we take off the glasses? How do we separate ourselves from our stories?
It begins with a process of negation. Look at the statements you believe about yourself, the ones that cause you pain. Take the statement, “I am not good enough.”
Now, negate it. Write down: “It is not true that I am not good enough.”
Sit with that. How does it feel? There might be resistance. Your mind might immediately jump in with all the “evidence” for why the original story is true. That’s okay. The point isn’t to instantly believe the new statement, but to create a little bit of space. You are gently prying the lens away from your eye, just enough to see that it is, in fact, a lens.
Let’s try another. “I am a procrastinator.”
Negate it: “It is not true that I am a procrastinator.”
What if you are not, in your essence, a procrastinator? What if you are a whole, complete, and powerful being who sometimes engages in the behavior of procrastination? By separating the identity from the behavior, you give yourself the freedom to choose a different behavior. As long as you believe “I am a procrastinator,” you are bound to that pattern. It’s who you are.
This isn’t about lying to yourself or engaging in toxic positivity. It’s about recognizing that the part of you that is aware of the story is not the story itself. The part of you that can observe the feeling of anxiety is not, at its core, anxious. It is the awareness in which the anxiety is appearing.
By consciously examining and negating the stories that limit us, we stop reinforcing them. We stop giving them our energy. We take off the red-tinted glasses and begin to see the world—and ourselves—as they truly are: not defined by a fixed, negative story, but as a space of infinite possibility.