Valda Monroe

Valda met Sydney Banks with Keith in 1977, and they taught the Three Principles together from then on, from their home in La Conner, Washington. She brought no degrees to the work, as she’d tell you herself, but she brought a love of logic and order and an out-of-the-box way of looking at things. She retired from the work in 2022, after a stroke.

It was Valda who created a way of teaching Syd’s understanding as a paradigm. That way of teaching has been used in hospital systems, leadership training, coaching and counselling. It started as a diagram called “The Illusion of 3 Paradigms”, with one simple question for anyone who looked at it: “Where do you think your feelings are coming from?” It has since been updated to “Two Ways of Using the Same Mind”, but the question is still Valda’s.

Valda was a big proponent of the word neutral. In the context of the Three Principles, she showed, neutral simply means: “The Three neutral Principles will not pick or choose for you what to think or feel.”

In Valda’s own words:

“If you know something is not possible, it is a lot less tempting to believe in than if you think it is possible.”

“The Three neutral Principles will not pick or choose for you what to think or feel. But there is nothing neutral about the truth of their impact. There is absolute direction, unavoidable evolution, and self-correction built into them. This paradigm enables us to insightfully recognize what is not possible and, therefore, what is not true.”

“The problem is not your thinking. The problem is believing that your feelings are coming from something other than Thought in the moment. This is a Three Principles paradigmatic discriminator. Feelings/experience/reality is being created always, only, this one way.”