There is a middle path between indulgence and suppression, but the culture has overwhelmed that in the cacophony that has been created in the modern world and the commercial encouragement of avoidance and indulgence on the one hand, or suppression and "just do it," treating yourself as an object on the other. We've got to find a way that's more compassionate, softer, that allows us to move forward towards the kind of lives that we really want to live.

There is a middle path between indulgence and suppression, but the culture has overwhelmed that in the cacophony that has been created in the modern world and the commercial encouragement of avoidance and indulgence on the one hand, or suppression and "just do it," treating yourself as an object on the other. We've got to find a way that's more compassionate, softer, that allows us to move forward towards the kind of lives that we really want to live.

Processes of avoiding the world within in order to try to regulate your behavior, or becoming entangled in your thoughts interfering with your ability to take advantage of what's around you, or losing contact with your values for fear that you'll know more about the places where you hurt - those kinds of processes are just normal psychological processes. And if you take the mode of mind that works great in 95 percent of your life and apply it within, it then implodes. It starts creating barriers, and that's true at work, it's true in our culture, true in our politics.

Our children are exposed to 10, 20, 30 times the number of words that our great-grandfathers were exposed to. We're exposed in a single day or two to more horror on our Internet Web pages than our great-grandfathers were exposed to in decades of living. We have not created modern minds for that modern world. Science and technology has just dumped it on us. And I think people yearn for it. I think you see it in what's popular. Why are people wanting to learn about meditation and talking about a purpose-driven life? It's because they know more is needed in the modern world.

There are times when you felt especially important to another person, or cared about or loved or accepted. Well, loving relationships aren't something you can have like a precious little jewel you put in a box and then put on your shelf. It's something you walk towards. And there's always difficulties; there's always pain in relationships. But you can keep walking towards that beacon in the distance. That process, that journey, is called life. And if you're moving towards the things that you value, life is more vital, flowing; it's more empowering.

It's pretty clear in how things are moving in empirically supported treatments that we're going to be speaking to the culture in a different voice. It's going to have some echoes of some of the deeper clinical and spiritual and religious traditions that had wisdom in it. If we're not going to get there through religious means and things of that kind, we're going to have to find a way to put it in the culture in a different way, because we need something right now other than yet another cable shoutcast or yet another Internet Web page showing us the cellulite on the actress's rear end.

Holding anxiety as your own enemy, and that it has to go down, diminish it, go away and not happen here is a kind of self-invalidating, interiorly focused process that would get you even more entangled with these processes. Instead, what we're going to need to learn to do is to allow your history to bring into the present thoughts and feelings and memories, and to sort of hold them mindfully and self-compassionately, and then focus on what you do and bring them along for that journey.