What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Life Without Should
January 10 2012
Most people go through life evaluating their thoughts, actions, feelings, and experiences against their beliefs about how things should be.
An anticipated event is judged against the expectations you built up beforehand. You compare your appreciation of a beautiful sunset to how you think you should respond to those glorious colors. You evaluate your actions against what you think the people around you are expecting — and against how you feel you should behave.
It seems natural — but is it really?
A client told me, “I’ve been noticing how my thoughts are all about self-judgment. It’s like a running ticker-tape in my head constantly evaluating whether I’m measuring up to standards. Am I experiencing what this monitor in my head thinks I’m supposed to be experiencing? Are — of all ridiculous things — my reactions to what’s happening authentic enough?” She made an inarticulate sound that combined amusement with frustration. “As if there were such a thing as ‘authentic enough’!”
I agreed, and asked her, “What would life be like without all that evaluation? Life without should — what would it feel like?”
She didn’t have an immediate answer, but the question sparked her curiosity.
Of course it’s not possible to flip a switch and turn off the mental ticker-tape comparing actual experience to what you’ve been conditioned to believe should be. But curiosity — as my clients discover — is a powerful way of shifting perspectives and finding doorways into freedom.
Here are some things you might discover, if you choose to explore life without should.
Adrift — or — not?
In the week after our conversation, my client wrote, “I feel adrift. It’s as if there aren’t any guidelines for my behavior, or even for how to think. I don’t want to stay stuck in all those shoulds, but if I don’t follow them, what DO I follow?”
What, I asked her, is really adrift? Isn’t it the part of her that was already tied into the should dynamic? In staying curious, could she discover what it is that’s seeking a guide — and what already knows?
Bigger context, deeper experience
As my client noticed, when you let go of the conditioned responses — all those shoulds — it can feel like the framework of your life has suddenly vanished.
But has it really? Or is it the artifical constructs that are dissolving? Can you allow a deeper, more authentic response and action to arise, naturally, organically, and effortlessly?
“All right, yes,” she wrote back. “I get what you mean. Of course it’s the same part of me that believes in the shoulds that wants them to stick around as guidelines, and feels fear when those guidelines aren’t available. And there’s something deeper, something more real, something that feels like freedom.”
Yes. When you rest in the space that’s already there — the space that’s revealed when you perceive the hollowness of the conditioned shoulds — there’s often a great feeling relief and freedom.
Who cares?
“It’s weird,” my client said in our next session. “I feel as if I don’t care any more about what other people think. It’s not aggressive. It’s not a ‘screw you’ sort of don’t care. It’s just ... here I am, and it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not — either is perfectly okay.”
What she’s describing isn’t, as she says, indifference or defiance. It’s not even what we’d traditionally call confidence, because that’s often puffed up and egotistical.
It’s simply a lack of self-consciousness.
And as I pointed out to her, it isn’t that she doesn’t care what other people think. It’s that she’s stopped caring what the censor in her mind thinks — that ticker-tape of judgmental thought. Because what you’re really reacting to when you worry about what other people will think isn’t what they will think. It’s what you think they’ll think. Your judgment of your behavior is based on your beliefs about how you should behave.
In recognizing your own wholeness, the shoulds become irrelevant. Your wholeness responds without self-consciousness to what’s true for you in each situation.
“It’s empowering,” a client observed. “But — that’s not the right word. It’s not that I’ve been given anything extra, or that I’ve taken anything I didn’t already have. I guess it’s a process of fully inhabiting myself, fully inhabiting all of who I am, instead of trying to adapt myself to what I think other people expect, or what I think I should be.”
Life without should can initially seem — as my clients have described — disorienting, perhaps even frightening. To the judgmental mind, it can feel as if you’re letting go of the framework that tells you how to behave.
But as my clients discover, when you live without should, there’s a deep, natural way of responding to and flowing with your life that’s truly authentic, and far more rewarding.
“A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind.” Elly Roselle, Canadian author and founder of Core Belief Engineering
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