"I mean, it works. All you have to do is do it. You don’t even have to do it well – or right."

~ Mary Karr

"You are the awareness of your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. You can let your thoughts happen. Just know that the real you is the awareness."

~ RuPaul

"Finding the dickhead inside [lead to] actually finding quite a liberation."

~ Damien Rice

"Fiction, like poetry, works at its best when it brings together emotion as well as idea, passion as well as characters in the illusory unfolding we call time—when it works close to the timing of the human pulse, to the flow of our blood, to the beat of our heart."

~ Alan Cheuse

When I first started practicing mindfulness, I saw internal words — aka verbal thoughts — as my opponents. Like most people, I thought the point was to not think. When verbal thoughts were present, I was obviously not. Start over. Try harder.

There's just one problem with this approach. It is normal for the mind to think in words.

Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reductions, we create meaning. 

These reductions are the world as we see it – they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world. 

~ Peter Mendelsund

"This simple act of acceptance – which may only last a few seconds – offers a taste of that open space of essence love, an acceptance of the warmth that is your basic nature, the heart of your own being."

~ Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Stories and our individual lives share the same elements: protagonists, antagonists, conflict, plot, action, climax, and resolution.  What are the atomic components that make these narrative elements possible?