3 Sentence The Mountain Is You Summary
The Mountain is You is a book about self-sabotage. Brianna Wiest makes you feel calm & completely inspired to move forward toward greater things with this book. She discusses the root cause and triggers of self sabotage, and recommends actions that will help anyone stop it from taking over their lives.
Summary Read Time: Less than 5 minutes
Actual Book Length: 182
First Published in: 2020
Below is the detailed yet quick The Mountain Is You book summary:
Self Sabotage & Recovery
On the surface, self-sabotage looks masochistic. It seems to be a product of self-loathing, lack of confidence, or lack of will. In reality, self-sabotage is simply the existence of unconscious needs that are met by self-sabotaging behavior. Overcoming this requires going through a process of deep psychological digging. We need to find traumatic events, let go of unprocessed emotions, find healthier ways to meet our needs, reinvent our self-image, and develop principles like emotional intelligence and resilience.
This is not an easy task, but one that we must do at one point or another.
What Self Sabotage Really Is?
Self-sabotage is when you have two conflicting desires. One is conscious, one is unconscious. You know how you want to move your life forward, and yet you are still, for some reason, stuck.
When you have big, ongoing, insurmountable issues in your life, especially when the solutions seem so simple, so easy, and yet so impossible to stick with — what you have are not big problems but big attachments.
When it comes to self-sabotaging behaviors, you have to understand that sometimes, it’s easy to get attached to having problems.
Feelings Versus Truth
Now that you have begun to identify your self-sabotaging behaviors, you can use them to uncover deeper and more important truths about who you are as a person and what you really want and need out of life.
Our triggers do not actually exist just to show us where we are storing unresolved pain. In fact, they show us something much deeper.
When we can identify why something is triggering us, we can use the experience as a catalyst for a release and positive life change
Anger: Anger is a beautiful, transformative emotion. It is mischaracterized by its shadow side, aggression, and therefore
we try to resist it.
Sadness: Sadness is the normal and correct response to the loss of something you very much love.
Regret: Much like jealousy, regret is also another way that we show ourselves not what we wish we could have done in the past, but what we absolutely need to create going forward.
Fear: When we cannot stop returning to fearful thoughts, it is not always because there is an actual threat in front of us. Often, it is because our internal response systems are underdeveloped or sidelined by trauma.
Building Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, interpret, and respond to your emotions in an enlightened and healthy way.
People with high emotional intelligence are often able to better get along with different types of people. They feel more contentment and satisfaction in their everyday lives, and consistently take time to process and express their authentic feelings.
Mostly, though, emotional intelligence is the ability to interpret the sensations that come up in your body and understand what they are trying to tell you about your life.
The root of self-sabotage is a lack of emotional intelligence. Because without the ability to understand ourselves, we inevitably become lost. These are some of the most misunderstood aspects of our brains and bodies that inevitably leave us stuck.
Releasing the Past
Releasing the past is a process, and a practice—one that we have to learn. This is where we begin.
You cannot force yourself to let go, no matter how much you know you want to.
Right now, you are being called to release your old self: your prior afflictions, past relationships, and all of the guilt from the time you spent denying yourself what you really wanted and needed out of life. Recovering from self-sabotage always necessitates a process of letting go.
You start to let go on the day you take one step toward building a new life and then let yourself lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and cry for as many hours as you need.
You start to let go on the day you realize that you cannot continue to revolve around a missing gap in your life. And going on as you were before will simply not be an option.
You start to let go at the moment you realize that this is the impetus, this is the catalyst, this is that moment the movies are made about and the books are written around and songs are inspired by.
This is the moment you realize that you will never find peace standing in the ruins of what you used to be.
Inner Work & Finding Yourself
A popular tool in psychotherapy is something called inner child works, or the process of imagining and reconnecting with your younger self. In this process, you offer yourself guidance. Even going back to certain traumatizing events and readdressing them with the wisdom you have now.
But more often, the process of reconnecting with your inner child is to let them communicate with you. It is how you can rediscover your inherent desires, passions, fears, and feelings.
The process is akin to reverse engineering, which is when you identify the end goals for your life and then work backwards to see what you need to do each day, week, month, and year to get there. However, it works the opposite way as well. You can use a visualization technique to
connect to your highest potential future self.
Inner Peace
The Buddhists believe that controlling the mind is the path to enlightenment. Enlightenment, by which they mean, spontaneous and true happiness.
The idea is simple in theory and complex in practice. By both exploring our understanding of the mind and training it to behave in a certain way, we sort of purify ourselves to experience the essential nature of what we are, which is, as they believe, joy.
If you’ve ever sat in a meditation class, you’ll know that the first principle of mind control is the opposite of what you’d think. It’s about letting go.
To truly master the mind, the Buddhists practice non-attachment, in which they sit placidly, breathe steadily, and allow thoughts to rise up, cohere, and then pass.
Their approach is that controlling the mind is actually a matter of surrendering to the mind, allowing it to behave as it pleases while regulating their reaction to it.
