I received a comment on my post, “You Are Not a Fixer Upper — You Are Perfect Exactly as You Are!”, that made me want to clarify my philosophical position. Here is the comment: For the good, well-intentioned people of this world, ...
My husband and I have been married for 23 years. Our relationship began with a love at first sight moment with all of the fireworks and giddiness that go along with that experience. I've heard one of my teachers, Ron Hulnick, say many times, when that happens, run in the opposite direction. However, having the optimism and insight of a 24-year-old, I ran straight into the flame. The laws of gravity seem to apply to relationships as well. What goes up must come down. My husband and I have experienced tremendous highs and lows in our relationship. There aren’t many challenges...
You might ask yourself, how relevant are spiritual principles when you get a call from your teenage daughter at 3 am on a Sunday morning, when you think she is safely tucked away in her bed? A spiritual understanding of reality may not be the first thing that occurs to you as you get dressed to pick her up from the parking lot of a local church where she is waiting with two police officers and several of her friends. The essence of her formless nature may not feel that present as you hear she has a curfew violation, and...
Quite a long time ago, while visiting Japan I was graciously served tea from a bowl that had once been broken. Its cracks had been repaired with gold. I was struck by the beauty of an accepted and accentuated imperfection, one with no attempt to cover-up damage or disappear history. — Barbara Bloom I am writing from a personal point of view, but my intention is to point to the impersonal and not be self-indulgent. I remember watching American Idol and hearing Simon Cowell give singers feedback they were self-indulgent. Then other singers would be praised because their performances were transcendent....
“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.“ — Wei Wu Wei There are times when self-worth is not an issue for me. I don’t think about it. I confidently do whatever I need to do. I feel self-assured. These times I am not thinking about myself. I am doing, serving, being, enjoying the moment. Other times I feel filled with insecurity and feelings of unworthiness. At these times, I become self-focused and see all of the things I don’t like about myself. I can...
I belong to a Mastermind Group where we rotate the opportunity for each member to take a deep dive and receive support and feedback from the group meeting to meeting. It was my turn, and I shared I was feeling overwhelmed with being the main financial provider for my family. My husband recently left his full-time job to join forces with me in my consulting practice. This is absolutely the right move for us, and our family, but I was feeling under pressure. As a result of sharing my fears out loud, my thinking settled. I began to see more clearly....
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. — Anaïs Nin I had an experience of shame recently. The belly dropping, sinking feeling, burning in the solar plexus kind of shame. I noticed how visceral the experience was. After it happened, I saw how the thinking that initiated my emotional response had been outside of my conscious awareness. It happened so fast. All of a sudden the feeling was present. In the past, I would have reacted to my shame. I would have used my emotional experience...
I was bullied in middle school. I didn’t know how to stand up for myself. My mother told me to turn the other cheek. I did my best to ignore the bullying, but I still hurt. I remember a friend coming home with me from school on the bus. She was shocked at the taunting and name calling thrown at me. I felt I should do something. I felt I was weak. I felt something was wrong with me for not standing up for myself. That is partly why writing feels so good. I am no longer hiding. I am...
One of the things that put me off writing in the past was the blank page. I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t trust that something, anything, would come forward. And if it did, I didn’t trust that what I wrote would be good enough. I felt I would be faced with my unworthiness, lack of competence, and impotence — my nothingness. What I didn’t understand was that nothing is not the same as unworthy. I didn’t know that not knowing is actually a transformative experience, not something to avoid. I now see that not knowing is not to...
It is easy to get attached to the feeling of a good mood. It is understandable to want try to hold on to a good feeling or try to recreate it. Self-help and mainstream psychology focus on teaching techniques to help us control and manipulate our moods so we feel good. They create an illusion of vulnerability by teaching us something is wrong when we are in a low mood, and we should try to change it. The challenge is, we are not capable of controlling our moods. It is impossible to never have a low mood. Fluctuation of mood is...
Cathy Casey & Mark Howard – Practical Spirituality –
Cathy Casey is a highly skilled and experienced trainer of the Three Principles understanding of experience. Her work ranges from corporate consulting with blue-chip companies through to the public sector, such as health and hospital programs, government organizations, and juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. Cathy is especially known for pioneering teaching the Three Principles to prison inmates in the California Correctional System. Because of her experience of having a father who is a World War II veteran, her current vision is to bring the principles to all veterans of any war. Cathy is currently teaching veterans who are incarcerated.
Mark Howard
Dr. Howard is a licensed psychologist who is the founder of the “Three Principles Institute” located in Burlingame, California. He recently retired from Kaiser Permanent Redwood City Chemical Dependency Services after 27 years of service. Dr Howard is recognized as one of the professionals bringing the Three Principles to psychology and related fields. He was introduced to the principles in 1982. He has taught clients, families, business professionals, and mental health practitioners about these principles. In 1994 he brought the understanding of these Three Principles to the Department of Alcohol and Drug Services in Santa Clara County California. In 2008, Dr Howard was awarded the “Outstanding Career Service” award by the Santa Clara Psychological Association for bringing the principles to Santa Clara County, California.
Chip Chipman – The Simplicity of Syd’s Teachings
Chip had the honor of being mentored by Sydney Banks from 1975 until 2009. From 1994 to 2004 he conducted retreats with him in Europe and North America. His guidance during these events about sharing in as deep and simple a manner as possible guides his work to this day. He currently shares his understanding though speaking engagements, retreats, and webinars worldwide. From his base on Salt Spring Island, he offers one on one Skype sessions as well as retreats for individuals, couples, and groups. The books and recordings of Sydney Banks are fundamental to all his work, helping countless people find happiness and understanding after being touched by those original materials. Chip is President of the Three Principles Foundation, and in 2008, co-founded the Three Principles School on Salt Spring Island, dedicated to sharing the simplicity and purity of the Three Principles, “As discovered and taught by Sydney Banks”.
Spiritual Facts
After earning his Ph.D. in Anthropology from London’s Brunel University, Aaron joined Pransky and Associates, a world leader in the pioneering approach to human potential. During his decade-long tenure, Aaron developed applications and courses to meet challenges of senior management in large corporations: leadership and cultural change, leveraging team performance, improving customer loyalty, and increasing earning potential.
Aaron is a recognized international speaker in the State of Mind field, and leads workshops in the private and public sectors. With a goal of reaching the business world in a more profound way, Aaron co-founded One Thought with Mara Gleason in 2010. One Thought also runs a professional institute, based in London, where they train emerging practitioners.
Christine Heath & Judy Sedgeman – Spirituality and Resilience
Christine Heath
Christine, the co-founder, and executive director of the Hawaii Counseling and Education Center since 1985, has nearly 37 years’ experience as a marriage and family therapist. She met Sydney Banks in 1981 and has been sharing her understanding of the Three Principles since then. She was instrumental in setting up one of the first Three Principles-based clinics in the world. She is certified as a substance abuse counselor and she is an AAMFT Approved Supervisor. She provides training programs for graduate and postgraduate therapists. She offers training, coaching, consultation, and seminars based on the Three Principles locally and internationally to professionals and lay people alike.
Judy Sedgeman
Judith A. Sedgeman, Ed.D., has been dedicated to sharing the Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought professionally for more than 30 years. Dr. Sedgeman has worked over the years with many other practitioners of the Three Principles throughout the United States and around the world. Judy enjoys work with teams and sees collaboration and partnership as key to extending the power of the Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought to awaken health and well-being across diverse populations. Dr. Sedgeman has long been a leader in mentoring, teaching and practicing leadership in the presentation and development of Three Principles education and services.
George & Linda Pransky – Psychological Freedom and Spiritual Understanding
In 1976, George and Linda Pransky stumbled upon a new way of helping people that was radically different from the traditional counseling methods they’d been using in their work. They learned these new principles directly from Sydney Banks, and they had a huge impact on their personal lives, their relationship with each other, and the way they worked with their clients. They began to teach these principles and became pioneers in a new field of psychology that profoundly changed their clients in a short amount of time.
George and Linda have taught the Three Principles for over thirty years to individuals, couples, businesses, and colleagues. Currently, Linda is on the executive committee of the Three Principles Organization (3PGC), faculty of the One Thought Institute and senior partner at Pransky and Associates. George is also a senior partner at Pransky and Associates and on the executive committee of the Three Principles Global Community. He is one of the two professional founders of the understanding of The Principles of Mind, Thought, and Consciousness, the author of The Relationship Handbook and has made more than 50 audio recordings. During his career, he has served on the faculty of three graduate universities and continues to pioneer sharing the teachings of Sydney Banks in new industries.
Rohini Ross
Rohini Ross is passionate about helping people wake up to their full potential. She is a transformative coach, leadership consultant, a regular blogger for Thrive Global, and author of Marriage (Soul-Centered Series Book 1) available on Amazon. Rohini has an international coaching and consulting practice based in Los Angeles helping individuals, couples, and professionals embrace all of who they are so they can experience greater levels of well-being, resiliency, and success.
Are you self-critical, hard on yourself, and constantly trying to “fix” whatever you think is wrong with you? Perhaps you have tried all kinds of different personal growth techniques and spiritual practices in the hope of solving all your problems. This cycle can be exhausting and never-ending, because there will always be something to improve about yourself, from that mindset. Sydney Banks’ teachings can help you to see how your humanness is normal and not something that needs fixing: as a spiritual person, you don’t need to change or eradicate your humanness! Seeing yourself as normal allows you to love and accept yourself exactly as you are—warts and all. Adopting this perspective naturally brings out the best in you and helps to find peace with your personality. Self-love and self-acceptance is your natural state, and any disconnection from your true nature is only temporary. What a relief!
In our culture, success is often associated with hard work and narrowly defined as material gain. However, authentic success, as shared by Sydney Banks, includes such intangibles as happiness, well-being, love, joy, compassion, and peace of mind that are innate in each one of us, along with outward goals and achievements. It honors the whole person in all walks of life, whether you are a professional, leader, executive, solopreneur, employee, mother, teacher or student. From this knowing and experience, you can access the infinite wellspring of love that is your essence, then share your gifts with the world from a place of fulfillment and meaning, through a profound understanding of the interaction between your psychological and spiritual natures. While conventional success can deplete you, authentic success only fills you up.
Your ability to enjoy life comes from being present in the moment rather than caught up in habitual, negative thoughts that take you out of the Now. Sydney Banks’ wisdom supports you in becoming aware of how you get seduced by your limited personal thinking and thus, create a painful reality of misunderstanding, fear and restriction. When you recognize how and why this happens, you can step free of the pattern. This understanding assists you to dismiss unhelpful thoughts and not take them seriously. Unlike traditional self-help or therapy, experiencing more psychological freedom and enjoyment does not rely on techniques. There are no magic bullets on the path of well-being. All you need to do is follow an internal compass that points to the truth of who you really are—beyond transient thoughts to your unchanging, formless essence.
Greater psychological freedom is the gift that keeps on giving. How grateful would you feel if you no longer had to listen to your negative, self-punishing and painful inner narrative, day in and day out? Understanding the role of thought and recognizing how it creates your feelings of insecurity and self-doubt is truly liberating! You will be better able to hear and heed your inner wisdom and become less driven by the noisy thoughts of fear and constriction. As an ongoing practice, this allows you to more fully experience your resilience and reach a greater sense of clarity about how you want to move forward in your life. As a result, you can live in a way that feels authentic and true in every area, including your career, family, home, creative expression, play, relationships and overall well-being.
When you no longer give authority to the fear-based thoughts in your consciousness, all you are left with is happiness. Through the teachings of Sydney Banks, you can see how your psychological functioning works, which makes you less compelled to follow those thoughts that do not serve you. Becoming more aware of the wholeness and integration of both your human and spiritual natures helps to ground you in the unchanging essence of who you are, and ride out the ups and downs of your emotional experience more gracefully. Accepting the normalcy of your humanness will naturally reduce your anxiety and fear and enhance your joy and happiness in each moment. By placing less pressure on yourself to feel a certain way or be hung up on self-improvement, you may find that low moods do not derail or debilitate you; instead, you will become much more attuned to your innate wellbeing and peace of mind and experience more happiness as a result.
One of the first areas people often experience profound transformation from the teachings of Sydney Banks is in their relationships, both personal and professional. While it often seems like another person’s irritation, anger, indifference, insensitivity, rudeness, etc., directly affects your experience, in reality your disturbance is a product of your own individual thinking. By making someone else responsible for how you feel, that person automatically becomes the cause of your suffering. Once you understand that you always have a place of well-being inside, independent of another’s behavior, it is easier to maintain equanimity through their changing moods and behaviors. Romantically, you may experience deeper love and intimacy with your partner, but the teachings benefit all relationships. This awareness supports more authentic connection and expression, while facilitating greater understanding, improved communication, reduced reactivity, more acceptance of self and others, and improved ability to work out differences and find common ground. Best of all, just one person shifting in a relationship is enough to transform it.
Clare Dimond
Alongside her career in international marketing and public relations, Clare spent decades looking for a way to feel more at ease with life. Along the way she gathered qualifications in many fields of personal development including psychology, NLP trainer, master hypnotist, yoga and meditation teacher and an MBA but nothing seemed to really explain our experience and who we really are.
Her search ended (thankfully!) with the understanding put forward by Sydney Banks. She is now a full-time coach, speaker and author of REAL: the inside-out guide to being yourself. As well as a yoga teacher (she still loves that) and a mum of two.
Scott Kelly
Scott has spent over 25 years as a coach, mentor, and integrative health practitioner assisting individuals in reconnecting to their health and well-being, improving performance and living with clarity.
Scott brings state of mind coaching as the foundation to his health and well-being programs and has worked with professional athletes, Olympians, couples, family’s, teams, corporations and individuals who want to live, work, perform and play from their Zone Of Genius.
Scott’s integrative approach to health and wellbeing involves evaluating the metabolic, nutritional, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of one’s health. His extensive skills and experience enable him to create powerful coaching relationships for transformative outcomes.
Scott is a dynamic and impactful presenter and teacher. He designs and delivers workshops and talks that leave people with a new and insightful understanding of their own health, well-being and potential.
Barbara Patterson
Amy Johnson, Ph.D., is a coach, social psychologist, and the author of Being Human (2013), and The Little Book of Big Change: The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit (2016).
She experienced severe anxiety, panic attacks, and binge eating/bulimia for several years. She was told by many well-trained, well-intentioned professionals that these issues would likely be with her for life in one form or another. But nothing could be further from the truth today.
Several years ago, she came across the down-to-earth spiritual understanding of life shared by Sydney Banks and that changed everything for her. It is the basis of everything she teaches and writes about, and the foundation for her groundbreaking new approach that helps people find true, lasting freedom from unwanted habits and anxiety. In 2017, Amy created an online school and community called The Little School of Big Change, where people worldwide find freedom from what holds them back. Amy has been a regularly featured expert on The Steve Harvey Show and Oprah.com, as well as in The Wall Street Journal and Self magazine.
Amy is also a wife, Willow and Miller’s mom, and a lover of coffee, yoga, travel, documentaries, library books and a full night’s sleep.
Barbara Patterson
Barbara Patterson works with businesses, leaders, coaches, and entrepreneurs from around the world. She has over 20 years experience coaching & working globally as both an executive and outside consultant. As an executive, Barb was the head of a large global function responsible for talent management, executive development, change management and employee engagement. Today, she runs her own coaching and consulting business, bringing the insights from the understanding taught by Sydney Banks to clients across the globe. In addition to her own practice, Barb partners with Linda and George Pransky, developing principles-based practitioners through mentoring, training and one-on-one work.
Michael Neill
Michael Neill is an internationally renowned success coach and the best-selling author of You Can Have What You Want, Feel Happy Now! and both the Effortless Success and the Coaching from the Inside-Out audio programs. He has spent the past 23 years as a coach, adviser, friend, mentor, and creative spark plug to celebrities, CEOs, royalty, and people who want to get more out of themselves and their lives. He is the also the founder of Supercoach Academy, an international school training people from around the world in the art and science of transformative coaching from the inside-out understanding based on the teachings of Sydney Banks. Michael’s books have been translated into 13 languages, and his public talks, retreats, and seminars have touched and transformed lives at the United Nations and on five continents around the world. He hosts a weekly talk show on Hay House Radio, and his weekly blogs can be read on his website and The Huffington Post.
Dicken Bettinger – The Spiritual Nature of the teachings of Sydney Banks
Dicken Bettinger, Ed.D., received his doctorate in counseling psychology and practiced as a licensed clinical psychologist for 32 years. In 1986, he met Sydney Banks and feels fortunate that for 23 years he was able to learn the Three Principles directly from him. Dicken co-founded one of the first Three Principles centers in the US. Dicken was also a senior staff member at Pransky and Associates for 16 years, where he developed and led corporate and university leadership trainings, team development experiences, and executive coaching programs. In 2012 Dicken founded Three Principles Mentoring. He now shares the Three Principles in seminars throughout the US and worldwide. Dicken has been married to Coizie for 46 years. He is blessed with two adult children and two adored grandchildren. He enjoys photography, hiking, canoeing, kayaking, and traveling.
Elsie Spittle – The Soul of the Principles
Elsie Spittle has been an internationally recognized trainer and consultant for over four decades. She is one of the few people who knew Sydney Banks, the originator of the Three Principles, before he had his profound insight, and who stuck by him, despite her own early strong resistance.
Elsie had the privilege of receiving “on the job” training directly from Mr. Banks, traveling with him to address mental health practitioners, educators, and others seeking a deeper understanding of life.
Since then, Elsie has been invited to consult with all levels of executives and employees in the corporate world and has been instrumental in transforming disadvantaged communities. She has worked with staff and youth in juvenile justice settings, as well as with individuals via coaching and retreats, and is a co-founder of the Three Principles School, dedicated to sharing the integrity and purity of the Principles for the benefit of future generations.