Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Wilson Schaef

A three-sentence mantra that refuses the comfort of a finished product. Anne Wilson Schaef, writing out of the self-help and recovery milieu, aims straight at one of the most stubborn modern fantasies: that the self is a project you can complete if you just optimize hard enough. By repeating “process” with escalating scope - life, then “we,” then the universe - she does a neat bit of reframing. Your personal turmoil isn’t proof of failure; it’s evidence you’re alive inside a larger, ongoing motion.

The intent is quietly corrective. Schaef’s work often circles addiction, codependency, and the compulsions that come from trying to control what can’t be controlled. In that context, “process” is both permission and discipline: permission to be unfinished, discipline to stay engaged. It undercuts the binary thinking that dominates both shame (“I’m broken”) and perfectionism (“I should be fixed by now”).

The subtext is almost anti-consumerist in its spirituality. A “process” can’t be purchased, mastered once, or displayed as status. It’s also a rebuke to static identities. If “we are a process,” then the stories we tell about who we are - the labels, the roles, the worst thing we’ve done - are snapshots, not destiny.

Making the universe a process completes the move: it relocates personal change from the realm of exceptional self-improvement into the basic operating system of reality. That’s why it works. It turns surrender into something sturdier than resignation: alignment with how things already are.