Are you In Your Own Way?

Lucas invites you to give yourself one breath of presence before anything else. You feel what expands and contracts, the sensation in your nostrils and what happens in your diaphragm. He also offers it as a tool for later: whenever you feel overwhelmed, let that breath return you to the moment.

The seeker tries to dodge the sage's usual surprise question by asking his own first: if all obstacles are of my own doing, how do I get out of my own way? The reply is to treat every misfortune as a blessing, and every blessing as a curse. It is a way of loosening your fixed judgments about what is good or bad for you.

The track asks how often life brought you a blessing and you saw it as a curse, and the reverse. The point is that your perception shapes what you do next. Questioning both directions keeps you from assuming you already know what is helping or hurting you.

Lucas says there will always be things in the way of your success. You can't remove them all, so the aim is to avoid adding yourself to the list. He pairs it with the idea that you can't control the outside world, but you can control how you respond.

It invites you to look back at what happened and reread it, which fits the end of a day. The close is also gentle: you don't need to be improved, all you need is already within you. Hearing that before bed lets you set down the day's self-judgment.