The Consequences of Ignored and Rejected Expressions

I had a long-term working partnership that went sour.

We ran a yoga studio together. In the beginning, we shared a strong connection and many profound conversations. That began to change when I suggested creating a contract that would define the financial split if either of us ever wanted to leave the partnership.

My business partner became angry and accused me of being greedy. Trust broke down, and the connection between us began to disappear.

We tried to repair the relationship, but each new misunderstanding seemed to deepen the divide. Eventually, I reached a tipping point and ended the partnership—even though doing so meant giving up my ownership of the studio.

The relationship ended, but the conflict did not end inside me.

I was still angry. I still felt misunderstood. I believed my former partner had twisted my words and used them against me. The conversation had never reached a true resolution, and I was left with what I call an incompletion: an unresolved experience from the past that continues to affect us long after the relationship—or the moment itself—is over.

Principle #1: Unacknowledged thoughts and feelings keep us stuck in the past and prevent us from fully connecting in the present.

An incompletion is the nagging feeling that remains when we try to communicate something important but do not feel truly understood. Sometimes our words are dismissed. Sometimes they are contradicted. Worse, they may be distorted and used against us.

Whatever form it takes, the result is the same: frustration and hurt from the past continue to occupy the present.

This experience of not being received or understood is at the heart of an incompletion. One person tries to express something, but the other person rejects it, minimizes it, argues with it, or simply fails to grasp its meaning. The person speaking is left feeling that something essential never landed.

They tried to communicate, but their experience was not acknowledged. They feel misunderstood, rejected, hurt, and often alone.

This happens in nearly every relationship. But when it happens repeatedly, trust begins to erode. We can no longer relate to the other person as they are in the present because part of us is still trapped in the moment when we were not heard.

If that continues for too long, we may begin to shut down. Eventually, we stop communicating altogether.

Principle #2: Misunderstandings breed mistrust.

When we feel that we are not getting through to someone, we usually respond in one of two ways: we confront or we withdraw.

Some of us raise our voices, repeat ourselves, or become increasingly insistent. Others avoid the conflict, pretend nothing is wrong, and hope the problem will disappear on its own.

Neither response resolves the underlying incompletion.

If we keep trying to make ourselves understood and the other person still does not seem willing or able to hear us, we eventually become exhausted. We start censoring ourselves. We hold back what we really think. Or we stop communicating entirely.

Not every misunderstanding is a crisis. But even small moments of being ignored or misread can accumulate. We all want to feel understood, especially by the people closest to us. When someone repeatedly cannot—or will not—see our point of view, trusting them becomes difficult.

Silence begins to feel safer than risking another rejection.

When this happens with a partner, family member, or close friend, the damage can become profound. Left unresolved, it can cause the relationship itself to collapse.

Principle #3: Incompletions distort our perception.

When we feel misunderstood, our view of the other person begins to change.

Their flaws grow larger in our minds while their good qualities recede. We exaggerate their negative traits and overlook the qualities that once drew us to them. Gradually, we stop seeing the whole person and begin seeing only the source of our pain.

That is what happened with my business partner. In my mind, she went from being a trusted colleague and friend to “a crazy lady with a personality disorder.”

That distortion is one reason incompletions are so difficult to heal. The unresolved experience remains with us, whether we never addressed it or tried to address it and became too overwhelmed to find a resolution.

The relationship may continue under the weight of that frustration, or it may come to an unhappy end. We may even move on and find someone new, hoping to leave the problem behind—only to discover the same pattern emerging again.

Principle #4: Pain that is acknowledged and felt can heal; pain that is ignored festers.

We can begin recognizing incompletions by paying attention to how our relationships feel.

When something seems off—when there is tension, distance, or a persistent sense that something is not quite right—an incompletion may be present. We can also look back across our relationships and ask whether any important misunderstandings remain unresolved.

Once we recognize an incompletion, we have to be honest about its effect on us. That means allowing ourselves to acknowledge and feel the pain beneath it.

This can be difficult, particularly when we have already shut down or disconnected from the person involved. But ignoring these feelings does not make them disappear. They remain hidden in the mind and body, weighing us down, dimming our spirits, and clouding our clarity.

When we are willing to confront them, something begins to open.

We can start to understand what we were trying to say that the other person could not receive. We may also begin to recognize what they were trying to express that we could not hear.

Principle #5: To repair a relationship, we must be willing to listen first.

Repair requires someone to break the stalemate.

Counterintuitively, that may mean temporarily setting aside our own hurt and frustration so we can genuinely listen to the other person. We might begin by saying:

“Okay. I’m willing to listen. Can you tell me again what I haven’t been hearing?”

When we feel misunderstood and hurt, distancing ourselves from the person who caused the pain is a natural response. But if we want to resolve an incompletion, the first—and often most difficult—step is becoming willing to hear the other person, even when they have not yet been willing to hear us.

This does not mean denying our experience or pretending our pain does not matter. It means creating enough space for the other person to express the assumptions, disappointments, and feelings they have been carrying.

Someone has to create that opening.

Principle #6: Take a step back and see the situation from the other person’s point of view.

To move beyond an incompletion, we have to become curious about the other person’s perspective—even when it feels uncomfortable and even when we disagree.

Understanding is not the same as agreeing.

We do not have to adopt their interpretation or abandon our own. But we do have to acknowledge that their perspective makes sense within the context of their history, experiences, and understanding of the world.

When we invite someone to tell us what we have previously rejected or deflected, we are attempting to step into their shoes. We are trying to see how the circumstances appeared from where they stood and how their experience emerged from the life they had lived.

We are not listening merely to their words. We are listening for the world beneath them.

Principle #7: Completing the past allows us to fully embrace the present.

An incompletion begins to dissolve when we sense that the other person genuinely understands our experience.

The nagging feeling that something remains unresolved begins to disappear. We no longer feel that the person does not understand us—or does not care enough to try. In that moment, we are no longer trapped in the past.

We are complete.

Melissa, for example, becomes upset when she feels that household responsibilities are not being shared equally. Sometimes she expresses that frustration through criticism or shame. When that happens, I become resistant to hearing her perspective or acknowledging her feelings.

But when Melissa can understand the deeper impact of her words—and the emotional history those words activate in me—something changes between us. I feel understood, which makes me more receptive to understanding what she needs from me.

When the incompletion disappears, we become more available to enter the other person’s world. We become less invested in proving that we are right and more interested in understanding their experience.

When we feel understood, the impulse to understand the other person often arises naturally.

But somebody has to begin. Somebody has to create the opportunity for the other person to empty out everything they have been carrying. That move may feel counterintuitive, but it can generate profound relief.

When both people feel understood, it is as though a weight has been lifted. The relationship becomes lighter, clearer, and easier. From there, we can work together to prevent similar misunderstandings and create new possibilities for the future.

If that ease does not emerge, something may still remain unheard or unacknowledged. More patience, honesty, and effort may be needed.

It is easy to ignore what we feel. It is easy to let misunderstandings slide, avoid confrontation, or sweep discomfort under the rug. But what we refuse to address does not disappear. It creates distance between the people we care about and us.

If we are not willing to courageously understand the other person, we may never create the conditions in which we can be understood ourselves.

Listening is how we begin to heal. Understanding is how we find our way back to one another.

There is also a quieter version of incompletion—one that does not look like conflict.

You notice the thing.

You decide it is not worth saying.

You offer the smoother version instead, or say nothing at all, and the day goes on.

Do that for years, and eventually the incompletion is no longer only with them.

It is with you.

I wrote a book about that. I’m Chad Herst, a coach and licensed acupuncturist (LAc) in San Francisco.

The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes long, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email, and I’ll send it to you.

The Costs of Withholding Truth

Do you ever find yourself in a situation where something is bothering you, and you have the urge to say it but hesitate because you anticipate a negative reaction from the other person? We don't want to deal with their response because it may be overwhelming and could cause more conflict or discomfort. We can all be conflict-averse. So instead, we decide to stop speaking up. We start holding our tongues and ignoring our own needs. We know it isn't healthy, but the alternative seems impossible.

Michael has been married to Louise for three years. He never wanted to be married to her in the first place. Before they did so, he would voice his misgivings, but Louise would always fall into despair. He eventually stopped sharing his concerns and consented to marry her because the guilt and shame became too overwhelming.

Even today, whenever he considers sharing any reservations or upsets, guilt and shame immediately take over, stopping him from saying anything. Not telling the truth is eating away at Michael's confidence. He fears he'll always be stuck in that relationship, without choice or his voice.

Sometimes we must find the courage to tell someone the uncomfortable truth despite how much it may hurt them. Being honest is one of the essential components of any healthy relationship dynamic – without it, any sense of trust or emotional closeness between both parties will corrode over time. Being dishonest with ourselves and others can lead to anxiety, guilt, shame and insecurity.

Telling the truth can be difficult for many reasons, even if it serves a healthier and more fulfilling relationship. For example, Michael has stayed in his marriage to Louise out of fear that voicing his true feelings may cause her to become too distraught. A fear like this can make us feel like we have no choice but to keep our concerns unaddressed and remain in an unfavorable situation. 

Additionally, when trying to express difficult truths, there are practical barriers such as feeling overwhelmed by words, not knowing how to start a conversation or gaining the courage to speak up. On top of these worries, there are also certain emotions tied with telling the truth, such as guilt which can further impede any progress towards expressing our true thoughts and feelings. 

Finding Our Clarity

Speaking up after having withheld our truth can be difficult, as emotions can often be overwhelming. This feeling of damming up can make it difficult to express our thoughts and feelings clearly and rationally. The fear of unloading our emotions, which have been so tightly held for so long, is daunting. We often feel like we cannot control the raw emotion that follows when we finally open up to someone. It's an intimidating process.

When we prevent ourselves from communicating our true feelings, it can become difficult to see the situation objectively. Our blocked emotions cloud our judgment and create a sense of hopelessness that makes us doubt the chances of finding a solution. We view the other person in an unfavorable light, failing to recognize the human component that intrinsically exists in all relationships.

When we put our feelings on the back burner, it can be difficult to see the entire issue. Taking time to acknowledge the backlog of emotions is key to regaining clarity and objectivity. We might do this in meditation, journaling or dialogue with a friend or guide. Approaching our feelings with understanding and kindness can feel counterintuitive, particularly if we're inclined towards relying on shame and guilt to hold our feelings back. 

Additionally, it is important to sort through the impact our past experiences and traumas might have on our present relationships and work through those issues healthily and honestly rather than allowing them to dictate or harm one's current relationships. We might explore how our emotional reactivity might be related to events from our past. It can help to gain perspective by uncovering patterns that we could not see before.

Finding Courage

Before Michael ever had the conversation with Louise, he'd need to find his courage. We can be assured that the other person will react in hurt and dismay whenever we commit to telling the truth after holding it back for a long time. They might be angered. We don't know their reaction. We can be sure, though, that there will be upset feelings.

It can help to acknowledge the critical parts that doubt that anything good would come of telling the truth. It's easy to sink into a cynical point of view regarding honest communication. Our past experiences with one another convince us that nothing good could come out of open dialogue, so we keep our feelings hidden. But while this may seem like the safest option, it can often lead to a disconnect between individuals. This severing of ties diminishes the level of connection and understanding in the relationship, leaving both sides feeling isolated and unable to move forward. 

Not only do we have to acknowledge the cynical parts, but we want to acknowledge the scared ones, too. Telling the truth can be daunting. We never know how the other person will respond. When we withhold our honest thoughts and feelings, we avoid pain, but we step right into it when we tell the truth. To be courageous, we willingly step into and embrace uncertainty. By learning to accept the unknown instead of shying away, we can become more courageous in the face of uncertainty and find ways to overcome difficult situations.

Small steps are key to building courage, allowing us to explore our potential at our own pace. We can gradually develop more confidence in speaking up and expressing ourselves instead of hiding our thoughts and feelings. Over time, these small steps will help us prepare for the "big conversation" and the uncertainty that may come with it.

Clarifying Your Intentions

Sometimes, it's not just cynicism and fear that hold us back, but it can also be a lack of clarity about what we want. We need to better understand what we want from the conversation. What is our desired outcome? In many cases, we may think our desired outcome is clear-cut and not particularly complex. However, upon closer examination, it is often the case that our goals are more nuanced. 

For example, when considering a conversation between Michael and Louise, Michael may think the discussion is about separating. Still, on deeper introspection, it could very well be that his goal is far more nuanced. It could be that he wishes to find ways of speaking about topics that are off-limits in the relationship without emotions getting elevated. He may hope to create structures of relating that feel safe for both him and Louise. He might seek to rebuild trust, foster a healthier dynamic, or even gain some closure. Perhaps he may want to ensure that Louise understands his feelings and respects his decision to end the relationship. 

Understanding the desired result before beginning a difficult conversation is essential, as it may be more complicated than originally thought. Additionally, having an intention guides the conversation, keeping us focused on the outcomes we seek. Failing to clearly indicate what we want from the conversation can lead to confusion and, ultimately, an unsuccessful outcome. Consequently, it is imperative to keep an intention in mind throughout the conversation to ensure that it remains productive and focused. 

Holding back our true thoughts and feelings can result from various factors, including fear of negative reactions, guilt, shame, and past traumas. It can lead to a lack of clarity and objectivity in our relationships and erode trust and emotional closeness. However, it is important to find the courage to express our true thoughts and feelings, even if it is difficult. This can involve taking time to acknowledge and process our emotions, seeking support from friends or guides, and exploring past experiences that may influence our present relationships. We can work towards healthier and more fulfilling relationships by finding the courage to speak up.

Summary:

• Withholding our truth wreaks havoc on our relationships not just with others but with ourselves.

• The weight of unspoken truths can drag us down, but the courage to speak them can bring us freedom.

• What is not faced, will fester. What is faced, will heal.

When We Feel Like We’re On Our Own

When We Feel Like We’re On Our Own

Chad Herst

Are you constantly feeling burnt out from always having to support and help others? It may seem like your loved ones, friends, or team members are always leaning on you for time, energy and attention. It can be tough always having to be the one in charge, making decisions for everyone, and being the go-to person. It would be nice for once to have someone else be the go-to person and not always have to be in charge. Being the main one to guide and direct can be both tiring and unfulfilling.

Take Sara, for example, she runs a successful venture capital firm, but she's feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work and decision-making that comes with being the boss. Despite having a team, she finds it hard to trust them and delegate tasks. She feels like she's the only one who can make things happen, and everyone depends on her. It's not just at work, though. She feels the same way in her personal life too. Her kids, husband, and family members are always asking her for advice and opinions on everything. It's like they can't make a move without her say-so. It's understandable that she's feeling the stress, and it's taking a toll on her health.

It's normal to have doubts about other people's abilities and to wonder if we can trust them. But when these doubts become so strong that they prevent us from trusting anyone, it can be a problem. At work, we might start to think that our colleagues aren't smart enough, experienced enough, motivated enough, or dedicated enough to do what we need them to do. At home, we might secretly start to wonder if our loved ones are selfish, unsupportive or just inept.

Deep down, we might wonder if this is just how things will always be - that we will forever be expected to focus on everyone else's needs. It can feel like a heavy burden, almost like carrying a ton of bricks. When it seems like we can't count on other people, we tend to believe that we're alone and that nobody's got our back. Instead of feeling like we have a team or a family of support around us, it feels like we're the only ones doing all the work.

The Dangers of Underestimating Others

Sara tends to treat her team members as if they were children rather than capable adults. She consistently micromanages them, preventing them from making mistakes and making decisions on their own. Her team members feel unable to make decisions independently and are afraid that if they do, they may face repercussions.

This tendency to micromanage and lack of trust in others also affects her personal life, particularly in her relationship with her husband. She finds it difficult to relinquish control and delegate household responsibilities to him, which leads to her dissatisfaction with the outcome when he does take charge. Furthermore, she worries that he may resent having to do the work in the first place, which preemptively makes her feel guilty.

When we underestimate the capabilities of others, we may treat them like children instead of adults. This behavior is not intentional, but it stems from a lack of trust, which leads to excessive interference, nitpicking or taking over. When we don't have confidence in their ability to handle tasks effectively, we may disregard their opinions, ideas or assistance. As a result, individuals who we expect to develop and grow are not given the support they need to do so.

Additionally, when we don't trust others, it can create an environment where they may be hesitant to express their doubts or admit to mistakes. They may fear that they will be seen as incompetent or that their mistakes will be met with negative consequences. This lack of trust can lead to a lack of communication and a lack of open dialogue. Furthermore, it can lead to a lack of confidence and cooperation among team members, which can negatively impact the overall performance of the team.

Uncovering the Root of Our Mistrust

If we don't investigate and initiate the process of healing the source of our mistrust, we may never be able to overcome it.

When Sara was a girl, she had to act like a grown-up and look after her dad, who was an alcoholic and her mom, who was a narcissist. Her parents depended on her to make sure her dad's drinking didn't get out of control, and her mom's need for emotional stability was always taken care of.

Growing up, a lot of us had to take on grown-up roles when the adults around us acted like kids. Maybe our parents had an addiction, mental health issues, or tough backgrounds. We might have had to step up and take care of our siblings, manage the household money, or manage our parents' emotional instability.

We often find ourselves taking on the responsibility of our siblings or filling in for our parents to ensure that our family is stable and functioning well. We may feel like we have no choice but to step up and take charge to maintain a sense of normalcy in our lives. The alternative is chaos, and there may not be anyone else to turn to. We take on these responsibilities in order to prevent things from getting worse. Without stepping up and taking control, our lives may have spiraled.

The Perils of Being a Caretaker

As a result of not being able to rely on others, we may develop an unhealthy view of ourselves, thinking that we are only valuable when we are constantly taking charge and doing things for others. This can be especially detrimental when we have to take on adult responsibilities and care for others at a young age. It can lead us to believe that our worth is solely based on our ability to focus on and take care of others and that taking care of ourselves is somehow wrong or selfish.

We may feel like we are being selfish or neglecting our responsibilities if we take time for ourselves. This can manifest in various ways, such as feeling guilty for taking a vacation or taking time to pursue personal hobbies or interests. This can cause us to constantly put others' needs before our own and neglect our own self-care or personal growth.

It's tough to find people we can trust and connect with when we're not used to trusting others. It can make it hard to pick out who we can rely on and who shares our values. This can make building healthy relationships and making good decisions about who we let into our lives difficult. It can also make it hard to be open and vulnerable in relationships, which is so important for building trust and intimacy.

We might also have trouble setting and sticking to boundaries.

In her personal life, Sara finds it tough to turn people down. She's always putting her family first - her kids, husband, sister, mom, and extended family - even if it means she doesn't get anything in return. That can make her feel taken advantage of and unappreciated, which eats away at her self-esteem.

Giving and not getting anything back in relationships can make anyone feel like they're being taken advantage of and mess with their self-confidence.

It's natural to be suspicious of other people's skills and reliability, but when that suspicion is all-encompassing, it's important to remember that these doubts usually come from our own insecurities, not from them. Our trust issues usually come from when we were kids and had to do more than we should've had to, like taking care of others when our parents couldn't.

When we're young, it's easy to go along with what other people want, but as grown-ups, it can be exhausting and make us feel like we're being taken advantage of if we're always helping out. It's important to get to the bottom of why we have trust issues, especially if they stem from our past. Once we recognize and understand these issues, we can start to work through them and create healthier relationships down the line.

Summary:

• Doubts about others' abilities can be normal, but when they prevent us from trusting anyone, it's not good.

• Trust issues often stem from childhood experiences, such as having to take on responsibilities beyond our age.

• Acknowledging and understanding these issues can help us build healthier relationships.

When Your Caveman Brain Takes Control

A few years ago I was at a dinner party, talking politics, when someone said something that landed as racist. I wanted to say so. I could feel the heat come up in my face and the words right there. Nothing came out. I sat there tongue-tied while the moment passed.

I tend to freeze. That's my move. You have one too.

Most of the time you're fine. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you let it go. A colleague hands you hard feedback and you can take it. You've got a window you operate inside, a range where you can still think and choose and act like the person you mean to be.

Then something pushes you past the edge. It might be volume: you were holding a newborn and a deadline and a crisis, and the whiny email is the thing that breaks you. It might be an echo of something old, this moment a carbon copy of one that once flattened you. Whatever it is, you slip outside the window, and an older, faster part of you takes the wheel.

That part isn't subtle. It doesn't think, and it doesn't empathize. It reacts. It was built for a tiger, and it can't tell a tiger from your mother-in-law. Embarrassment, failure, conflict: to the old brain those all read as threat, and it does what it's always done. It moves before you can.

It has four moves. Fight, flee, freeze, appease. Most of us live in one. Some people puff up and attack, with a glare or a jab or a raised voice. Some go small and scarce and change the subject. Some go blank, the way I do, the fog coming down. And some appease.

The appease move is the one I want to name, because it's the one that looks like getting along. You keep the peace. You play nice. You laugh at the comment you hate and change the subject, the way I've watched people do at a trade show booth, going along so the powerful men in the room stay comfortable. From the outside it reads as easy. Inside, you're trading a piece of yourself for the safety of not making waves, and if you do it long enough you stop noticing you're doing it. It eats at your confidence from underneath. The more you play nice, the less of you is in the room.

None of these are character flaws. Each one kept somebody alive once. The work isn't killing the reaction. It's learning to recognize it early, the way it feels in the body before it fully has you: the heat, the racing, the fog coming down.

Peeling Away Layers of Our Onion

Just when we think we have completed a body of personal work like overcoming shame, self-loathing or chronic insecurity, it can sneak back up on us. The tendency is to think that we've regressed and that all the previous work we'd done is null and void. This perspective can leave us feeling hopeless.

What's happening is that we had learned one side or aspect of what our pain was attempting to teach us. The realizations we previously came to were useful, but as we evolve, and life around us changes, our previous breakthroughs don't always hold up.

That we revisit old, painful patterns isn't a step backward but an opportunity to come to understand ourselves at a more profound level. Emotional pain calls us into a deeper relationship with ourselves. It's as if we have peeled away one layer of an onion, only to discover that there is another layer. We mistakenly believe that there will come a day when we will no longer have layers to peel away.

The sooner we come to grips with the fact that our wounds never go away, but instead are like sirens calling us into a deeper accord with ourselves, the less we will resist them. The point isn't to eliminate them, but to learn to accept them as a doorway to our next level of evolution.

Dismember to Re-member

Collectively we are all being forced to reassess what's important and what matters. Shelter-in-place is forcing many of us to look within, to find out what we're made of, what's driving us. This virus is forcing us to remember, to remember our dreams. In a way, we are being dismembered in order to re-member. We are being disintegrated in order to reintegrate.

Are we going to try to go back to the way things were? We so easily forget what it was actually like only a few months ago: the striving, the pressure, the speed and intensity, the addiction to being busy. Most importantly, we overlook the twin misconceptions afflicting our collective consciousness: the fallacy that we are never enough as we are and that something outside of ourselves will pacify this emptiness we feel inside.

We aren't skinny enough, aren't young enough, aren't smart enough. Our rampant materialism has been an unconscious attempt to cover up this subtle feeling of inadequacy and dissatisfaction. Material things can never fill this void. What we desire exists only in relationship to ourselves, to another, to others and to spirit.

As we consume more than we need, we lose touch with our interdependence with one another and to this earth. Our disconnection upsets what truly matters. We upend the balance of nature, which we are utterly dependent on for our survival. Our waters become poisoned, and our earth is scorched to feed our insatiable greed. We can see its effect in our own homes as we watch our children growing addicted to video games and drugs.

Nature has been poking us to remember for some time, but we have been ignoring her calls in the form of natural disasters, mass killings and lying politicians. The more we ignore her, the more we can see how it affects not just ourselves but everyone around us. It's hard not to see today that this fundamental choice to come back home to the heart and to remember what matters effects everyone.

We don't like to feel confined in our homes, but sheltering in place is the perfect excuse to drop in and confront our ego's delusion of not enough-ness. We will never find what we are looking for through our consumption. Until we figure this out, nature will continue to humble us, to remind us that we are of the earth. We are related to all life and to The One Life. This moment is dismembering us so that hopefully we can re-member.

Blind Spots

Lettuce in your teeth is no big deal, but it stings to learn about it after the meeting, when everyone saw it, and nobody said a word. People stay quiet because pointing out someone's flaw feels rude. If it's that hard to mention lettuce, imagine how rarely anyone tells you you're on the wrong career path, or marrying the wrong person. And you wouldn't want to hear it from them anyway. What do they know?

Here's what I keep running into, though. The signs are usually there. The selfish partner is the same one who stiffed the server on the third date. The eighty-hour job started with an interview that asked for a dozen examples of how you go above and beyond. When you miss the signs, it isn't that they weren't there. Something in you did not need to see them.

The blind spots that run deepest come from beliefs set so early they feel like the marrow of you. Bigger is better. Hard work earns your worth. Needing things is weakness. You don't examine these. You live by them.

My friend Jamie pivoted her business and got good feedback on the vision, but she couldn't sell it past the early adopters. She pushed harder. Hard work had always paid off for her before. She wanted to build a multimillion-dollar company, double revenue for ten years, and employ a big team.

Two things stayed hidden from her. In front of her, the market wasn't ready for what she was building. Inside her, her gut kept saying the real work was with her clients, not an empire. She ignored her gut for a long time. Then she hit a wall, overstretched and burned out, and couldn't ignore that working harder wasn't working.

When she stepped back, she saw what had been driving her. She had always measured her worth by what she achieved. Grades, money, title. If she didn't hit the goals, she'd let people down, and letting people down might mean she wasn't good enough. So she looked hard at "good enough" and found it was a moving target she could never reach.

She asked a different question. What if I'm good enough already? What's really in front of me, and what do I want?

The CEO she was trying to become had not come from her. It came from school, from her family, from the places she'd worked. It was a rule she never chose, running her life from a spot she couldn't see.

Meet Your Inner Critic

Somewhere in you there may be a part that doesn't buy your own worth. It has the evidence ready, filed and tabbed. A chain of failures. Every criticism you ever took. Side-by-side comparisons with people who are better. What could have been.

When you're absorbed in something, it goes quiet. When things stall, it starts up. There you go again. You're not enough. You're lazy, weak, and inept. If people knew what you were really like, they'd want nothing to do with you. You're not enough.

It's one looping track, the same lines remixed. Sometimes flat and matter-of-fact, like coordinates read over a radio. More often with a cutting edge. And it comes with such authority that you take it for the voice of your deepest truth.

It isn't. This is the inner critic.

It forms early, around five, when you're first stepping toward independence and absorbing everything. What the adults expect. What gets you approved of? What gets you in trouble? It's built to keep you safe by getting ahead of the criticism, landing it before anyone else can. That's the whole job. And it works with a five-year-old's idea of safety, even while it sounds like an adult. When you're down and need to get back up, it's just as likely to shove you deeper in.

I've worked with hundreds of people. CEOs, founders, people the world calls successful. I have never met one without an inner critic. Even Mr. Rogers wrote about wrestling his, after twenty-five years of teaching children, they were lovable as they were.

Lisa was a star in tech. She'd started and sold two companies by thirty. She thought of herself as an extraordinary leader, and so did everyone else, until her husband left her within a year of their child being born. He'd been having an affair with her best friend. She was leveled by the betrayal and by running a company alone with a newborn. That much would flatten anyone. But her critic went to work on top of it. It berated her for not seeing the affair. It listed every way she'd failed the marriage. By the time she came to me, she'd decided her whole career had been luck, and that the divorce proved she was unlovable.

Here's the move that helps, and it isn't fighting the critic. Fighting it makes it louder. You step back and get curious about it instead. Take a breath, notice it's here, and ask what it's afraid of.

The critic tells Lisa she's weak, and she doesn't deserve the job. So the question isn't whether that's true. It's when she first learned that being weak wasn't safe. Who was watching? What she was protecting. Underneath, most of the time, is a rule you took on so young it never occurred to you it was a rule. Be strong for everyone. Never need anything. Don't be a burden.

The critic is enforcing that rule. It thinks it's keeping you safe, keeping you from being left. What it's doing is holding you to terms you never agreed to, and it's done it so long that you took its voice for your own.

Befriending the Inner Child

One of my clients describes this experience she had in grammar school. Being the chubbiest and slowest of the other kids performing wind sprints in Mrs. Wahlberg's P.E. class, my client would often come in last. Already tired and overwhelmed from being beaten, Mrs. Wahlberg would make her run several more wind sprints on her own while been scoffed at by the other kids. To this very day she pulls out her own Mrs. Wahlberg when the tax bill hasn't been paid; the bags from last weekend's vacation haven't been unpacked; and, oh yes, when she has totally forgotten to write a thoughtful response to that person who emailed her last week. As the "to do's" build up, so does the overwhelm.

The anxiety can be so debilitating that it swirls inside of her, almost like a lava lamp. Throughout most of her day, she anxiously wonders to herself, "What have I let slip through the cracks? Am I doing 'the right thing' at this moment? Am I on the right track?" Secretly she wonders, "Will I ever know what 'the right track' is?"

Instead of gathering her wits about her, my client invites Mrs. Wahlberg and the kids in her class to mock her: "You're chubby. You're slow. You're weak. You're lame." All the while, my client mistakenly believes that this will somehow motivate her to get unburied from the mountain of tasks, known and unknown, that await her.

This may sound like someone else's story, but it's actually all of our stories. We've all come to believe in some particular way that we are weak, slow, defective, ugly, unlovable or just plain, "not enough." We've gathered plenty of evidence that validates our insufficiency. When we find ourselves yet again in situations that confirm our flaw, we beat ourselves up.

Here's the kicker. We mistakenly believe that if we're mean or cruel enough, somehow we will slough off our bad habits. Instead, we're practicing being cruel to ourselves, which stimulates the stress hormone, cortisol, into our blood, sending us into a depression that deepens the hole we're already in.

Below the self-loathing and the accompanying longing that we'd just get this part of ourselves handled is a deep and old wound. It's the kind of wounding that can happen in Mrs. Wahlberg's P.E. class; when dad married the bitch that wished I hadn't existed or; as in my case when my brother took his life and nobody knew how to help.

These experiences leave exquisitely tender marks on the mind, body and spirit. To make contact with these imprints can be like putting our hand on a hot stove. They burn. We don't know how to keep these parts of ourselves company; in fact we've spent a lifetime wishing they would just go away.

There comes a point for many of us, however, when we stop running from them, when we stop attempting to beat ourselves into submission. Maybe someone shows up who can help us, or maybe we end up completely overwhelmed and can no longer keep up the facade. However it happens, instead of running from them, we turn around and look. We find a gentle and tolerable way to keep these parts of us company. When we do, we begin to discover that instead of needing to be excised, these parts of ourselves are actually hidden with treasures of insight, compassion and wisdom.

As my client learns to keep this underlying pain company, to welcome it, to have compassion for herself, she's starting to discover that when she's triggered, she can use it as an invitation to come back, come back to the chubby, little girl being abused in Mrs. Wahlberg's class.

"Above all else," she says, "We don't abuse children. Above all else, I don't abuse myself."

Let Go of Perfectionism

Perfect is a goal you can't reach and can't put down. Chasing it grinds you down, makes you afraid of risk, and leaves a steady hum of not-enough under everything you finish. Almost every leader I know struggles with some version of it.

High standards aren't the problem. The problem is what perfect is standing in for.

Somewhere early, you had experiences that overwhelmed you, and you came out of them believing you were inadequate in some way. The inner critic formed to manage that belief. Its logic is simple: if it is harsh enough with you, you won't be so weak, so needy, so sensitive, so whatever-it-was, and then you'll be safe. Perfectionism is the critic's project. Be flawless, and no one can leave you.

Watch the move it makes. The critic doesn't let you feel the old hurt directly. It converts the hurt into a to-do list and sends you back into the project called " How do I fix myself.” The project is endless by design. It has to be. If it ever finished, you'd be left alone with the feeling it exists to avoid.

I know the project from the inside. When my brother took his own life, I had just started university, hundreds of miles from home, already lonely and unsure of myself. The grief distorted and exaggerated all of it. I smoked way too much marijuana trying to numb what I felt, and it only deepened the aloneness. Nothing moved until I stopped treating the pain as a mistake to be erased. The pain pulled me out of school for a while, toward yoga and meditation, back when those were things for people considered weird or broken. I wasn't fixing myself, though I probably would have said I was. I was following something.

That's the reframe perfectionism can't survive: the pain isn't evidence against you. It's a signal. It tends to know more about what you need than the project does.

This doesn't mean you rip off the armor. Stripping away what protects you feels unsafe because it is. It means you stop taking the critic's word that what's underneath is a defect. You are human, which is to say a knot of brilliance and shadow, vulnerability and strength, and no amount of polishing gets you out of that.

Perfect keeps receding. That day won't ever come. So when the not-enough feeling arrives, the question isn't how to finally be flawless. The question is what the feeling is pointing at.

Burnout

Several years ago, I completed burned out in my work. I had started to feel a dimming of interest in a work project I’d been involved in.  I'd been co-running a yoga program in San Francisco with a colleague for five years, and I had stopped feeling that magical feeling.  I kept bumping into a kind of been-there-done-that fatigue along with a nagging sense that there was something else out there, something unclear waiting for me.  I'd had these sort of feelings before. I'd been started yoga programs like the one I’d been co-running for more than fifteen years, so aversion was not new hat.   I thought this one would fade like the previous times, but in this case, my frustration persisted.

Sorting Through the Confusion

It's often hard to detect when feeling associated with burnout are just a passing reaction or when it's a message from the deeper interior that change in needed.  We all have periods of time when our jobs or our relationships are just kind of blah.  That's normal.  The notion that we're always supposed to be happy all the time is b.s.  Even the best of job or relationships can go stale on us or just irritate us to the core.  That's normal as long as it doesn’t last forever.  

When that difficulty is prolonged, however, it can be a message that it's time to slow down and reflect on what we're bumping into.  Sometimes it is a message that it is time for a change.  Deciphering burnout can be difficult, though.  It can be immensely helpful to have wise counsel we can trust enough to help us distinguish the wisdom of our inner callings from the voices that deceive us.

I shared the experience with my coach.  I said, "Okay, I'm feeling burned out. I'm starting to wonder if it’s time for me to let this project go.  I want to name this urge, but I don't want to make a decision just yet. I want to use these next two months to see if, in fact, I am done, or I am just a little fatigued or bored."  

Sure enough, after two months, the feelings had passed.  I felt reinvigorated by some responses I'd had to some blog writing I was doing about the intersections of yoga and life coaching and started to see that the project I was in was a great platform for the expression of this cross-breeding.  

Then a friend contacted me and said, "I'd like to partner with you to do some consulting work in corporations.”  I'd really wanted to explore that possibility, but I was too tired to take on another project.  I just could not muster the energy to begin.  My days were too filled with teaching classes and working with my coaching clients that I couldn't possibly give it the attention it deserved.  Not being able to do this left me completely frustrated.  Once again, I began thinking that it was time for a change, but somehow I wasn't quite ready.

 And then I had this experience that absolutely changed me forever…

Letting Go

After an arduous bike ride to the top of Mt. Tamalpais, I stood on a hillock overlooking the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco Bay, The City of San Francisco, and the East Bay.  As I stood there taking in the scenery, I felt a sense of gratitude for the beauty that surrounded me. I started to do a little, improvised gratitude jig, somewhere between a yoga sun salutation and a dance.  

As I did so, I started to hear a clicking noise behind me that kept the rhythm.  And when I turned around, I saw this raven standing only a few feet from me with a seed of sorts in its beak. The clicking was coming from the raven's beak making contact with the seed, and I had this clear sense that the raven was relating to my movements by keeping the rhythm.  

I continued to dance my gratitude dance around the hillock.  Each movement I made to the left, the raven moved to the right.  Each movement I made to the right, the raven moved to the left.  We were in a dance together, and the raven was keeping the rhythm.  At the same time this dance was taking place, I'd had this intuitive sense that the raven had a message for me.  Who knows whether I was making it up or not, but it was a message that moved me:

"It's time to let go, to stop dancing someone else's dance, to dance you're own steps, and to trust them."

For me this was code. I'd spent the last 20 years being faithful to my yoga teacher and the tradition he taught me.  I'd been his student and I’d taught hundreds of people his method. The crow’s message for me was that it was time to let go, to trust a deeper and more personal wisdom, rather than following someone else’s path.  

Gulp.  I'd been a student of and run these sorts of programs for so many years because they had given me access to deep teachings, the security of a teacher, a community, some sense of authority to back up my own teachings, and an identity.  Now, the raven-teacher was giving me the the sage advice, “Let it go!"

My need for change wasn't so much about leaving the program or about being burnt out.  Rather, it was about making room for something more personally truer to enter.  I realized that I had to make space for that to come about.  And for that brief moment, I felt released.  Released from the burden that by leaving, I was betraying my students, my business partner, or the tradition.  It was a visceral experience, this clear sense that not only was it okay to make a change, but I was being called forth to make it.  And while I'd been preparing for this moment for the nine months of back-and-forth, the inner teacher's message had clearly arrived.

Living with Uncertainty

Within a week of this experience, my partner and I met.  I shared my decision, and we both wrote a public announcement about that decision.  By the way, this doing, this action required little to no effort.  The challenge was living with the uncertainty for almost nine months.  One of my teachers used to call this form of waiting, "holding the tension."  Holding the tension is another way of saying, living with uncertainty.  It's called holding the tension because it feels uncomfortable to live between a question, to live in ambiguity.

Each of us has a propensity to try to get ground underneath our feet by wanting certainty or clarity.  That's why we turn to self-help programs, gurus, yoga traditions, techniques, methods, and philosophies.  But if we're following our inner guidance, the messages come in only when we're really ready.  Sometimes we must undergo a trial by fire before the message is clear.  You can't always coax the interior into a "yes or no decision."

But when the message is announced, it comes in declarative tones from what the Quakers call that still small voice within: "Call her."  "Go to New York." "It's time." "Let go!"  And when we disregard these messages because they're inconvenient, we sometimes find ourselves in the throws of depression.

My doubting voices continued to peep up, even after I had made that decision; in fact, the moment I made it, I started to really enjoy teaching, again.  All of the previous feelings of burn out completely vanished.  In fact, some aspects of my teaching, which previously had been driven by a proving energy, altogether diappeared  I no longer had to prove anything to anyone anymore.  And as that went away, I began enjoying the process again.

But I knew at a much deeper place of my being why I was doing this.  This decision was not whimsy.  I had struggled valiantly with it.  I had endured lots of back and forth while continuing to live with uncertainty.  And since that certainty came, I had to be willing to trust it in spite of the fact that I wanted to second-guess my decision. 

If we want real and substantive change, we have to be willing live for sustained periods with the discomfort of ambiguity and doubt.  In fact, one might say that most of life requires us to get accustomed to uncertainty.  The sooner we get that message, the less we'll fall prey to quick fixes and the more our lives will become aligned with our higher calling.

Facing Negativity

Mary was 48 and had spent her whole life driven to make it big in the corporate world. She arrived at my office and said, "I am totally burnt out and am just going through the motions of my life." She wasn't sleeping. Her relationship was suffering. She'd already been to a psychologist, and that work had shown her why she felt stuck. Knowing why hadn't moved anything.

When I asked why she didn't leave the job or change it, she said even the thought felt like torture. Her sense of self rose and fell with her work. She'd spent decades getting to the top, and now that she'd made it she was looking around asking, is this as good as it gets.

She said the money was why she couldn't move. She also knew, when she looked at it, that her family would be fine on less. The money was the cover story.

Underneath it was this. Her mother drank, and was sometimes present and sometimes gone altogether. Mary had built a life of professional accolades so she would never again feel the way she felt as a little girl: scared and destitute. That was the deal. Keep achieving and you never have to feel it.

Most of us carry a version of that sentence. I never want to feel that again. The stories that run our lives are not just about succeeding. They are about not feeling something.

So the work with Mary wasn't reframing her situation. It was meeting the feeling the whole structure was built to avoid. When she turned toward it, it showed up in her body: fluttering in the chest, queasiness in the stomach, a knot in the throat.

Clients ask me, "Why would I want to be with this shit?" Fair question. The answer I keep coming back to is that whatever you refuse to feel gets to run things. The fear of ending up destitute had been making Mary's decisions for forty years. She had never once looked at it directly.

When she met the terror instead of managing it, it loosened. Not gone. Loosened. She stopped being afraid of feeling it, and the job question got simpler. Over the next six months she found her way to work that looked, from the outside, like a demotion. She sleeps. She has dinner with her girlfriend. She is not going through the motions.

Learning from Adversity

Early in his career, Abraham Lincoln was hired onto a celebrated patent case. He threw himself into the work, prepared a long brief, and traveled hundreds of miles to Cincinnati for the trial. When he arrived, he learned the client had brought in a hotshot lawyer named Edwin Stanton instead. Stanton pulled the client aside and asked, within earshot, why they'd brought "that damned long-armed ape."

Lincoln stayed anyway. He sat in that courtroom for a week and studied how Stanton worked. Stanton and the other lawyers never once invited him to a meal or on the walk to court. He told a friend afterward that the trip was so painful he hoped never to see Cincinnati again.

Six years later, as President, he made Stanton his Secretary of War.

The story usually gets told as a lesson in resilience, and it is one. But I keep looking at a different part of it. Lincoln let the humiliation be real. He said it hurt. He named the gap between himself and the college-trained lawyers, and then he went home and studied. What he did not do was conclude that he was the humiliation. The pain was a fact of the week. It was not a fact about him.

Most of the high performers I work with run it the other way. A failure isn't something that happened; it's evidence in an ongoing case about what they are. And once failure can prove something about you, every setback has to be managed. You spin it, hide it, deflect blame. The lesson inside it goes untouched because touching it would mean admitting the failure was real.

That's the contract underneath: worth is something you earn, and a big enough failure can take it away. Believe that, and you're imprisoned by looking successful. You trade learning for defense.

Adversity is coming either way. Loss, humiliation, plain dumb luck. It will knock you sideways, and it will burn. The facts of it will be as hard as granite, and they will mean nothing except what you decide they mean.

Lincoln decided the week in Cincinnati was painful, useful, and not a verdict. He hurt, and he studied. That's the part I keep looking at.

The Thread

There's a common formula for finding your purpose: look for the spot where what you care about, what you're good at, and what the world needs all overlap.

It's a decent map. But watch what happens when a high performer picks it up. The second circle eats the other two. What you're good at produces results, results produce approval, and somewhere along the way, the question "what do I care about?" gets quietly replaced by "what can I win at?" You can build an entire career inside that substitution. Plenty of people have. The work pays, the work impresses, and the work feels hollow, and the hollowness gets filed as ingratitude instead of information.

The hollowness is information. It's telling you the work has come loose from anything you care about. Flat, uninspired, disconnected from meaning: that's not a character flaw. That's a signal.

Here's the other half. Most of us have moments, scattered across a lifetime, when we felt on purpose. Alive, in the flow, giving something that was received. Mostly we let those moments pass without paying them much heed. But gather them up and look at them together, and patterns start to show. To some degree or another, you have been circling the same thing for as long as you can remember. The thread was already there. It just never got much attention because it didn't always score.

So finding yourself is less about inventing a purpose than noticing one. Ask what you were doing in the moments you felt most alive. Ask a few people who know you well what they see; they often spot the thread before you do. Then let what you find start informing the yeses and the nos.

It won't settle everything. It gives you somewhere to look.

Burn Out

When Bob first came to me, he wasn't sleeping. Panic kept him up most of the night. He was taking sedatives to get down and amphetamines to stay sharp through the day, and the cocktail his doctor gave him had stopped working. He was on a mission, money and doing right by the planet both, and he worked like the mission couldn't spare him. He was burning out and moving too fast to see it.

We treat the body like a thing. Most of us live a few inches behind the eyes and experience the body as an appendage hanging below, a slab of meat and bone that carries the head around. And we'd rather it didn't speak. When it does, when something hurts or drags, we reach for the fix: the pill, the drink, the screen, whatever dulls it. I haven't got time for the pain.

The body will carry that for a while. It wants a little rest to repair itself, and because we've trained ourselves past its signals, we override them, and it gives way anyway. First, it's fatigue. You cover the fatigue with coffee, then more coffee, then the coffee makes sleep hard so there's a pill for that, and the pill doesn't rest you, so the morning cup becomes a double. At some point, the body stops negotiating. That's the part we call burnout, and then we're puzzled that we can't work the way we used to.

What Bob found, when he stopped and dropped his attention into what he was feeling, was that the feeling wasn't new. It had been with him since he was a teenager. He was seventeen, his team had won the state championship, and he brought it to his father. His father said, "That's child's play." From then on, Bob had a searing drive to be worthy of the man, and the drive ran straight through his body's limits. The panic at night was the old ache, still asking to be enough.

You can't always translate what the body is saying, and you can't always fix what aches. You can listen. It has been talking the whole time.

Emotional Strength

We build a guard around the heart. Most of us do it early, to keep pain out, and we keep it up long after the danger that built it is gone. We get good at not feeling. There's always something to help: the feed, the drink, the next episode, the next thing to achieve.

The guard doesn't only keep pain out, though. It keeps everything at the same low volume. You can spend years like that and call it steadiness.

What we call strength usually runs the other way. Not the ability to override what you feel and keep moving. Most of us already know how to do that in our sleep. The harder thing is turning toward the feeling you've spent a lifetime turning away from.

It's counterintuitive, and it's daunting. Let the heart feel again and the first thing through the door may be a lot of pain. Stay with it and it moves. It rises, it crests, it comes down. What's left is steadier than the guard ever was, because it isn't braced against anything.

Few of us find our way there alone. Asking for help isn't a sign you're weak. It's a sign the stakes got higher and the tools you have stopped being enough. Look for someone who lets you test what they teach against your own experience instead of taking it on faith. If it makes sense, and it holds up when you try it, you've found something.

The tradition I trained in has a word for what's under the guard: bodhichitta. Pema Chodron calls it the wounded, softened heart. Not a heart that got fixed or armored. A heart that stayed open in the middle of things. That's the part the performance taught you to hide, the part that feels and needs. It was never the weakness. It's what the guard was built on top of.

Keeping Company with Yourself

Compassion means to suffer with. When a small child breaks an arm, you don't decide to feel for them. You hold their hand, you say something steadying, and it takes a little off the edge of it. You can't stop the pain. You stay near it.

Self-compassion is that, turned inward. Keeping company with yourself when you're the one suffering. Most of us were never taught to relate to ourselves at all, let alone kindly. We assume the kindness has to come from someone else.

The inner critic is suspicious of it. It is sure that if you go easy on yourself you'll go soft, cave to your worst tendencies. So it keeps the pressure on.

But self-compassion isn't self-pity, and it isn't a pint of ice cream. It isn't letting yourself off the hook or turning on other people. It's refusing to abandon yourself at the exact moment things hurt.

And it isn't earned. The kid with the broken arm didn't do anything to deserve your kindness. Neither do you. The idea that you have to be good enough first, that comfort is a reward for performing well, is the same contract the critic runs on. Compassion doesn't wait for you to measure up.

The parts of you that get shamed, told to shut up and get it together, don't leave when you attack them. Demanding they pull it together has never once worked, has it.

If being kind to yourself feels foreign, it's worth practicing on purpose. The loving-kindness meditation from the mindfulness tradition is one way in. You sit, and you turn a few plain wishes toward yourself. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be well. For a lot of people this feels awkward at first, even irritating. That isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign of how long you've gone without.

My Favorite Books: A Collection of Spiritual Classics and Modern Wisdom

The Alchemist was everywhere when I started what I think of as my real search. My brother Scott had died in 1991, not long before. The death of someone close knocks the wind out of anyone. Suicide is a different animal. After the burial I went back to school hoping to be a freshman again. At a party, my date asked where I'd been. I told her the truth, and she said, "Did your brother know that suicide was a sin?" That was the moment I understood I would not be normal again.

So I read. Ram Dass recordings carried me through a chaotic stretch in my late teens and early twenties. Then the Tao Te Ching, in Stephen Mitchell's translation. Siddhartha, which I still pick up every few years. Patanjali. Kornfield. Pema Chödrön. Campbell. I told myself I was studying, and some of it was study. But underneath the study was something else. I was reading the way I would later work, like the next one might be the thing that finally settled it.

That's the move I write about now. You believe the next win will fix the ache, and it doesn't, so you reach for another one. I ran the same pattern on wisdom first. Some of that reading was probably its own kind of performance. I couldn't have told you that at the time.

The strange part is that the books kept saying so. Ram Dass said seeing the possibility of transcendence is not the same as being it, and chasing the glimpse again and again doesn't get you there. Lao Tzu said in the pursuit of knowledge you add something every day, and in the practice of wisdom you drop something. George Leonard said the plateau is not a failure, that the flat stretch is where the change comes from, and I treated every flat stretch as a mistake to fix. Kornfield trained under a hard teacher and came out gentle. I studied with some harsh teachers. His image of training the mind like a puppy stayed with me. You don't beat it into staying. You pick it up and start again.

These are still the books I hand people. Pema Chödrön first, for anyone in a rough stretch. She tells you to admit that right now you feel like garbage, and to look at it anyway instead of flinching. Grace and Grit made me cry in a café in New York in my early twenties, and what I remember isn't the philosophy, it's the love story he wrote with his wife, Treya, who died of cancer.

The Alchemist didn't fix any of it. It gave me the sense that the grief I was in was one leg of something longer.

I wrote a book about that. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I'll send it to you.

I’m Chad Herst, a coach and licensed acupuncturist (LAc) in San Francisco. I wrote a book of my own. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I’ll send it to you.

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Mastery by George Leonard

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras translated by Chip Hartranft

A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon

A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield

Siddartha by Herman Hesse

The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo

Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Artwork of Ram Dass courtesy of Barabeke

Tao Te Ching translated by Stephen Mitchell

Grace and Grit by Ken Wilber

Paradox: Discipline v. Freedom

Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century Indian mystic, taught with a picture I think about often. When you plant a sapling, you put a fence around it so the cattle don't eat it and nobody tramples it. When the sapling has grown into a tree, the fence has to come off. Leave it up and the fence starts doing the opposite of its job: the trunk grows into it and gets trapped. The grown tree doesn't need protecting anyway. It drops fruit, even for the cattle that once threatened it.

When I first built a daily meditation practice, I needed the fence. It took me a few years to learn the discipline: early to bed, early up, eating properly, enough rest. I needed all of it in order to grow, and I loved it. It fed me deeply.

After a while, though, the fences produced rigidity instead of growth. I caught myself judging people who didn't practice as "unconscious." The fragility I'd once protected had given way to a kind of spiritual arrogance. When curiosity goes, that's the sign: either the structure needs to change or I need a new way into it.

Taking the fence down is the hard part, and the reason isn't mysterious. Our identities get wrapped up in the structure and the recognition it brings. When a community considers you advanced, and you're identified with that role, letting go can feel like a kind of identity suicide. We need recognition; humans do. But most of us are starved enough for it that we trade our own experience away to stay loved, admired, wanted, needed. And then we miss the life that was supposed to be the point.

One tell is the word should. When I hear myself saying I do the practice because I should, my heart has already left it.

The point of practice was never to end up more disciplined. It was to put us in contact with our own wisdom, and, past that, to give what we find. That's the end of Ramakrishna's picture: the fruit falls to everyone, even the cattle. But none of that happens while the fence is still up. The trunk just keeps growing into the wire.

Midlife

I was teaching a workshop a while back and realized I was the only one in the room with gray hair. I don't mind the gray. What caught me was quieter than that: I wasn't young anymore, and nobody had mentioned it, including me.

The phrase everyone reaches for is midlife crisis. Crisis isn't what I mostly see. What I see, in myself and in the people I work with, is a question that arrives once the outer life fills in.

Clients come to me who have done everything right. Good marriage, good salary, kids they love, a home they built and keep safe. And some part of them feels trapped in it, and they're ashamed of that part, because on paper there is nothing to complain about.

The question underneath usually takes one of two forms. For the ones who caught the dream: Is this all I get? I thought there would be more. For the ones who didn't, it's an accounting of the nevers. I will never be a millionaire. I will never have children of my own. Either way, midlife is when the carrot we've been chasing finally gets inspected.

The first half of life mostly runs on someone else's map. We build a self that can survive and succeed: in the family, at school, at work. That structure is not a mistake. It got us here. But it's aimed entirely outward, at goals and wins and the next thing, and somewhere in the middle of life, the wins stop reaching whatever they were supposed to reach.

The danger is taking the urges at face value. Quit the job. Leave the marriage. Buy the car. Those are translations, and usually bad ones. The restlessness isn't proof you chose the wrong life. It's the part of you that got left out of all that climbing, asking to be included. An affair won't include it. Neither will a Ferrari.

We have no ritual for this crossing. No myth, no ceremony, nothing that says: this is real, this is what it's for. So people either pull the sheets over their heads and say "I'm forty and I feel old," or they blow life up. I don't have the ritual either. I'm in the room with the question, like everyone else, paying attention.