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Namaste and welcome. This class is a second part of a two-part series called Beyond the

Controlling Self. After I gave the first part, talking about the over-controller, I had a

number of people either directly after class, talked to me or email saying, I know you were

talking about me. It's one of those talks that's really all of us. Unless we're completely free,

there's some identification with an ego that's trying to control things. That's just the way it is.

So the deal is to get curious and interested and relate kindly to it because when we start noticing

we can start stepping out of the old habits that actually keep us really small and grim and kind of

stuck because the whole idea of the over-controller is this habit of chronic doing.

Not just doing the needful, but just chronic doing and sometimes it's busing ourselves physically

and often the doing is a mental, ongoing, mental narrative of what's going wrong and what I need

to worry about and what's wrong with somebody else and just usually has a kind of problem around

the corner framed to it. Does that make sense? This is the over-controller. So what happens is we

move through our day and we kind of rush and we lean forward and we're skimming the surface

and then the despair for the over-controller is that I haven't really arrived in my life. I've

been kind of racing to the finish line but not really living the moments.

I often think of John O'Donohue who says it so beautifully. He says that we're so busy managing

our life that we forget this great mystery we're a part of. Not just really. That one rings true.

So the challenges in the way we're talking about it is that we have the ongoing pattern of just

overdoing and then we have the kind of reactive controlling that arises where we're set off

by something and then we can actually cause more harm in our life but the bottom line is under

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