The Mountain Is You

WHY IS THIS EFFECTIVE?
Think of your feelings like water running through ducts 
in your body. Your thoughts determine whether or not the 
ducts are clean. The cleanliness of the ducts determines 
the quality of the water.
If you suddenly have a feeling that you dislike and don’t 
expect—a sudden rush of water, let’s say—it’s common 
to want to shut that valve off and not allow it to pass. 
However, stopping the flow of water does not make the 
water go away. Instead, it begins to intensely pressurize 
and create serious damage to the parts of your body that 
are no longer receiving flow. This begins to have a ripple 
effect on your entire life.

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Sometimes, the water disperses itself gradually. Other 
times, it implodes and creates what we see on the surface 
as a complete emotional breakdown. When all of that 
water finally comes through and we grieve and cry and 
fall apart, we are going through a process of being reset. It 
is positive disintegration: We are gutted, but at the same 
time, feel better when it’s over.
All that happened in that implosion was that your feelings 
became validated when you gave yourself permission to 
feel them—because you had no other choice. This is what 
we do in therapy. This is what we do when we vent. This 
is what happens when we experience a catharsis. A sad 
movie that we kind of enjoy being sad about allows us to 
feel sad in a world that otherwise does not.
But there’s a healthier, easier way, which is learning how 
to process our feelings in real time.
“Validating your feelings” sounds like a big term, but it 
really means one thing: It’s just letting yourself have them.
When you are healing past trauma, often a big component 
is allowing yourself to experience the full expression of an 
emotion. You have probably done this in the past. Think 
about the passing of a relative whom you loved but were 
not overly attached to. When you learned of their death, 
you were undoubtedly sad. But you didn’t attend their fu-
neral, cry for an hour, and then carry on with your life as 
though nothing happened.

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Instead, you probably experienced a bout of sadness then, 
and then maybe the next day, and then maybe a week later. 
The waves of grief came and went in varying intensity. 
When you didn’t resist them, you cried and felt sad, or 
maybe took a nap, a hot bath, or a day off from work. 
And then, without much effort from you, the feeling 
passed, and you felt better.
Once we have and acknowledge an emotion, it will often 
go away on its own. If there is no course of action to 
take—if all we really need to do is accept it—then we just 
have to let ourselves be there. 
The reason we don’t do this more naturally is because ob-
viously we can’t burst into tears at our desks every time we 
feel bothered by something. Turning off the water valve is 
perfectly fine, as long as we can go home and let it out later. 
It is okay to control when and where we process, and in fact, 
it’s better when we learn to do it in a more stable, safe space.
This can look like taking a few minutes to “junk journal” 
each day, spending time by ourselves where we can simply 
experience how we feel, without judgment, and without 
trying to change them. It can be as simple as allowing 
ourselves to cry before we fall asleep. We often think of 
that as a sign of weakness, when really, the ability to cry 
freely is a huge signal of mental and emotional strength. 
It’s when we can’t cry about what’s truly broken in our 
lives that we have a big problem.

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Validating the way someone else feels is an exercise in ra-
dial empathy. It is starting the conversation with: “It is 
okay to feel this way.” Because when we point out how 
wrong someone is to feel the way they do, they shut down. 
And they shut down because they feel shame. They al-
ready know it’s not right to feel the way they do. If you 
start the conversation by heightening someone’s defenses 
or making them panic and suppress even harder, you make 
the situation worse.
But if you start with reminding them that anyone in their 
situation would probably feel similar to how they do right 
now, and that it is very possible that they can have strong, 
overwhelming emotions that don’t necessarily mean their 
lives are completely ruined, and that it is okay to feel dev-
astated when devastating things are before us, we lighten 
their load. We know this because when we stop resisting 
feeling sad and just let ourselves be sad, we realize that it 
will not last forever. We see that sometimes, the biggest 
problem isn’t that we are devastated, but that in refusing 
to accept what is in front of us, we create so much more 
suffering than we would if we had just had a cry when we 
needed to have a really good cry.
Validating other people teaches us how to validate our-
selves. And when we learn how to validate ourselves, we 
become stronger. We see that our emotions are no longer 
threats, but informants. They show us what we care about, 
what we want to savor, and what we want to protect. 
They remind us that life is fleeting, and challenging, and 

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gorgeous. When we are willing to accept the darkness, it 
is only then that we find the light.
A D O P T I N G Y O U R O W N P R I N C I P L E S
If you feel lost, or as though you don’t know where you 
want your life to go next, or worse, fear that everything 
you have built could come crashing down, you don’t need 
more inspiration. You don’t need more positive thinking. 
When you have money problems, you need money 
principles.
When you have relationship problems, you need relation-
ship principles.
When you have work problems, you need work principles.
When you have life problems, you need life principles.
More money does not solve money problems. Different re-
lationships do not solve relationship problems. New work 
does not solve work problems. Your future life will not solve 
your life problems.
This is because money does not make you good with 
money. Love does not make you love yourself. Rela-
tionships don’t make you good at relationships. Work 
doesn’t make you good at your job or capable of work/
life balance.

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Problems don’t inherently make you a stronger person 
unless you change and adapt. The variable here is you. The 
common denominator is whether or not you shift your 
foundational perspective on the world and how you be-
have within it.
Let’s be very clear: Someone who makes $500K can be as 
seriously in debt and struggling as someone who makes 
$50K, and in fact, this happens more often than you would 
ever think. People who make less money are required to 
learn how to manage it better, and people who make more 
think they can eschew principles because of the quantity 
they are attaining.
You can screw up your dream relationship just as quickly 
as you can a hook up, because the way you relate to others 
is an issue with you, not something that shifts depending 
on whether or not you meet the most perfect person who 
never triggers or annoys you and relates to you with un-
conditional positive regard.
You can be just as unhappy in your ideal job, with your 
perfect hours, at your most desired pay rate, if you don’t 
know how to ration your time, relate to others in your 
workplace, or move your career forward. People who are 
“living their dreams” and “following their passion” can be 
just as unhappy as people who are not.
If you don’t have principles, your life is not going to get 
better. Problems are only going to follow you and get big-
ger as your life does.

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The good things that happen to us in life are like a mag-
nifier. They show us where we still need to grow. True 
love shows us to ourselves. Money shows us to ourselves. 
Dream jobs show us to ourselves. The good, the bad, the 
desperately-needs-to-change-right-now.
If you don’t have principles now, you won’t have them later. 
If you don’t have the money principle of living beneath 
your means, you won’t be able to do it when you have 
more money. If you don’t have the relationship principle 
of not relying on others for your sense of self, it won’t 
magically resolve itself when you meet the “right person”; 
you will only sabotage that relationship, too.