Hi dear friend.
There is a voice that lives in most of us. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t wait to be invited. It just starts talking, usually at the worst moments, and it always sounds reasonable.
Mine has a particular script. You should be doing more. You shouldn’t have said that. You should fix this for your kids. You shouldn’t look the way you look. It knows exactly where I am soft, and it goes there first.
For a long time, I thought the work was to argue with it. To gather evidence, build a case, prove it wrong. That is exhausting and it never ends, because the voice doesn’t actually want to be right. It wants to keep talking.
So now I do something different. When it starts, I say three words.
Oh, you again.
And almost instantly, it shuts up. Not because I defeated it. Because I stopped feeding it. I named it as a visitor instead of treating it as the truth, and a visitor who gets no reaction tends to leave.
Joe Dispenza says the same thing in his own language
I love that Dr. Joe Dispenza teaches a version of this. He talks about how most of our thoughts are not fresh, they are reruns. The same loop firing the same way it fired yesterday, wearing the same groove deeper each time. He says the moment you catch yourself mid-loop and go there is that old program again, you have already stepped outside it. You are no longer the thought. You are the one watching the thought.
That is the whole trick. The voice only has power while you believe it’s you speaking. The second you see it as an old recording, a habit of mind running on autopilot, it loses its grip. Dispenza would say you just interrupted the pattern. In Yoga we would say you just loosened a samskara, one of those deep grooves the mind carves by repetition. Same mountain, two paths up.
Oh, you again is my shorthand for all of it. It’s me catching the rerun before it convinces me it’s the news.
The tyranny of should
Notice how much of that voice speaks in shoulds. You should be further along. You should be thinner. You should be calmer by now. The world should be kinder. And its evil twin, you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t feel that, you shouldn’t want that.
Louise L Hay said years ago that we would all be a great deal happier if we stopped shoulding all over ourselves.
I have never forgotten it, partly because it’s funny and partly because it’s true. Every should is a small act of violence against the person you actually are right now. It takes this moment, which is fine, and measures it against an imaginary moment where you are already perfect, and declares you behind.
The body knows this one well. Almost sixty years on this planet and the voice still finds the mirror. You should. You shouldn’t. This body carried me across continents, through three pregnancies, into handstands and out of some very hard years. These days I meet the mirror with something closer to thank you for still carrying me than with a list of corrections.
The kids are the other place it lives loudest. You should fix their problems. You should solve this for them. But taking their struggle away from them is not love, its interference dressed as care. They are allowed their own path. My job is to stand close, not to clear the road.
And then the big one. You could do more. This one shows up as ambition so you will not notice that it’s just dissatisfaction. A real work ethic rests when the work is done. This voice never lets the work be done, because being finished is not the point. More is the point, and more never arrives.
This practice is thousands of years old
In Yoga philosophy there is a name for exactly what we are doing here. It is called pratipaksha bhavana. It comes from The Yoga sutras or Patanjali, and the literal meaning is cultivating the opposite.
When a disturbing thought shows up, you don’t wrestle it and you don’t pretend it never came. You notice it, and then you deliberately turn toward its counter. The should gets a truer thought set down beside it. You could do more, becomes I did enough today, and enough is a real amount. You shouldn’t feel that, becomes this feeling is allowed to be here, and it will pass.
This is not positive thinking. Positive thinking slaps a nice sticker over something rotten. Pratipaksha bhavana is more honest than that. It says the dark thought is real, it arrived, and you are simply not obligated to host it for the rest of the day.
The reason to catch it early is that a thought left alone recruits friends. One should become a story, and the story becomes a mood, and by evening you cannot remember that it all started with a single rerun you could have greeted and released. Nip it in the bud, and there is almost nothing to pull out later.
What actually changes
Nothing dramatic happens. There is rarely a morning when the voice is simply gone. What happens is quieter than that. The gap between the thought arriving and you believing it gets wider, and in that gap you get to choose.
Over months the voice loses its power. It still comes. It just no longer runs the place. You hear the old rerun start, you recognise it, oh you again, you set a kinder and truer thought down in its place, and you carry on with your day.
Oh, you again. Not today.
Until next time, stay curious and grateful.
Light and joy,
Kim