How To Rewrite Your Rules For Life

Each of us has formulated a set of unconscious 'rules' or beliefs about ourselves and the world, which shape behavior and ultimately, the outcome of our lives. Here's a powerful experiment for you to try at home, to release yourself from the limiting beliefs about yourself and the way you show up in the world. If you want to unhook from rigidity and desensitization and build more lightness, joy, and fun in life, this exercise is a great start.

Transcript

Hello well-being family,

Lovely to be with you again.

It's the most amazing,

Bright,

Lovely spring morning today and it's my birthday and I'm heading off with my youngest son and a couple of friends later on today to do a five-day walk in Kalula National Park.

It's called the Kalula Great Walk and so I have been upskilling on all things camping.

I've bought so much camping gear because I'm at this juncture in my life where things are changing and this really ties in with what I want to talk about today,

About allowing the changes to happen.

Because for many of us there's a way that we have been living for many,

Many years,

Often for decades,

Our entire lives and it's based on experiences that we had a long time ago and decisions that we made which actually become unconscious.

So they become fixed beliefs that we believe to be true about the world and the way that we need to be in the world but they're actually out of conscious awareness and they're influencing behavior.

I've spoken about this many times and today what I want to talk about is how we can unhook ourselves from those unconscious beliefs and of course the first thing that needs to happen which is a bit counterintuitive is that we need to turn the volume up on them.

We need to listen in,

We need to hear what they're saying,

We need to actually hear what these unconscious beliefs are which have been playing out in our system.

So I'm going to talk a lot about my own experience of this you know and I'm hoping that that will help you to work with yours right because there are very simple ways that you can start this work on your own and really the way that I see therapy is that therapy is about exactly this,

It's about diving so deeply into your experience that you start bringing up these unconscious,

Out of awareness,

What we call interjects or rules.

So they're like the rules that we're living by without even realizing that there are rules,

Okay.

And I was actually listening to Clarissa Pinkala Estes recently and the women who run with wolves and she actually went through this little exercise and I remembered that this is something I used to do on the retreats in Bali and it was always the best day of the retreat.

So I called it letting go of the shoulds where we would actually write out all of the shoulds that,

So this is the way she talks about it,

My mother says I should,

My father says I should,

My religion says I should,

My culture says I should,

My husband says I should,

My children say I should,

My work says I should,

Right.

So you can start with each of those little seed sentences and then write down what you think all of those people are telling you you should be doing with your life and then you can do the same exercise with my father says I should not,

My children say I should not,

My husband says I should not.

Because often these decisions that we've made become projected out onto other people.

Sometimes they really are coming from other people but often it's actually a projection of our own internal belief system.

So I actually did this with a client recently and it was just so powerful where I got her to go home and write down the rules of life because she was living this life that was full of responsibility and commitment and overwork and just it was miserable and she came back triumphantly with this set of rules and said I've written down these rules and I recognize them but I don't want them anymore and it was just so delightful and of course that is the whole purpose of doing this exercise that once you bring them into awareness you have choice right and now your choice might be to stay with those rules like yep that's the way my parents lived,

I'm loyal to my parents and to the culture that I grew up in and to my religion,

I agree with these rules,

I want to keep all of these rules.

That's where you might end up or you might end up like me wanting to free yourself from the strictures of living in such a rigid way.

So if I think about you know the the beliefs that I grew up with,

The rules that have really run my life for a long time,

They would be things like I must be useful,

I must work hard,

I must be compassionate and kind to others,

I must care about other people,

I must put other people before me.

That that's a few of them and you can see how they've driven like I became a doctor then I became a psychotherapist and now at the age of 62 I'm actually at this point of,

I'm not going to say retiring because I'm not retiring,

I'm actually moving away from the shoulds and having to see clients all the time and and heal help in the healing of others towards actually doing the things that bring me joy,

Which actually also are in the service of the greater good,

Right?

So here I am on Insight Timer or in my podcast sharing these ideas and that gives me joy and it can be helpful.

Do you see how that's a subtle difference but it's actually a huge difference because I'm no longer saying no to myself and yes to other people,

I'm saying yes to myself and yes to others.

So it becomes a win-win,

Like when we can become really conscious of what our rules are and then start to powerfully choose what we want the rules to be,

That's when it can become,

Life can become a win-win and it can become so much more joyful.

So today I'm heading off on this trip and this has been a very deliberate choice.

You know I decided that my goals now at this age are that I want to work in client,

Work less and I actually want to do more things that bring me joy,

There's one goal.

I want to make good friends for myself,

There's another goal and I had a third one,

Can I even remember it?

I'm not sure,

It'll come to me but just those two,

Just oh and to not,

The third one was to not give in to the habitual worry about money and will there be enough.

Those are my three goals because that is just a habit,

That is just a habit and actually there is enough and it's okay for me not to,

Not to work for money in the way that I have all of my life.

So you know as I say those goals,

I'm really excited and they replace the rules that I've been living from for the last 30 years.

So I'm not saying that this is a quick process right but I am saying that you can start to unhook yourself and it's like you know we talk about awareness as being like an onion because you peel layers off and then you peel another layer off and when you're ready the next layer comes off and I've been doing this for a long time now,

I've been doing this for 15 years or more and the layers are still coming off so that onion continues to peel and peel and peel and as each layer comes off I get lighter and more joyful and more able to be in the world in a way that brings me joy and actually lights others up as well.

So this is what I want to offer you today and I would really urge you to do this practice,

This little practice that I just described of I should or I must or my mother says I must,

My father says I must and you may find that certain voices are more powerful than others.

For older people it might be my children say I must.

Like I remember very very clearly I was in Bali once with my two children and they were quite young they were I think they're about eight and ten something like that and we went into a shop and I tried on a dress and they both said mum it's too short and that was it.

Like my children say I should not wear short dresses right.

Now not everything that others say becomes an interject,

Not everything that we hear is brought inside and kept forever but a lot of things are and obviously in childhood that's a time when we really are vulnerable to taking on the ideas of others and then using them for a lifetime right.

Adolescence is another time and you may actually be able to pinpoint experiences that you had,

I certainly can,

As an adolescent where someone has said something to you and it's just stayed with you for the rest of your life and that may not be serving you right.

So this exercise and therapy generally I would say if you're looking to extend this further is a way to start freeing yourself.

It's about liberation,

It's about freedom,

It's about no longer being subject to these unconscious beliefs that are no longer serving you.

I talk about it as how they actually have a use-by date and that when we're living our lives from these outdated beliefs and ideas and views about ourself eventually life just becomes stale and rigid and dull and numb and you can see that in adults all the time that as adults it's almost like we shut ourselves down.

I read a great book once by Dan Siegel which was about the adolescent brain and one of the things he said is adults can actually learn a lot from adolescents because adolescents are social and they try new things and they're out there engaged in the world whereas in adult life we can get really stuck in a rut and I guess that's what I see a lot of in my work because that's the niche I work in.

I work with professional women and often professional women like myself have obeyed these internal rules so intensely to the point where you know they've got the three PhDs and the 12 degrees and they're serving on 12 boards for free and they're in a job where they're working 80 hours a week and they're doing extra things on the side and it's just not tenable.

It reaches a point where it just feels as if there's numbness and desensitization in order to get through the week and that there's nothing in your week that's actually designed to bring you joy and that's not okay.

Like you're not here just to serve others.

You're actually here to be a joyful pillar of light and to excite and ignite everyone around you and that's an exciting place to be.

That's actually my goal to be a joyful pillar of light and excite and ignite other people around me and I'm going to tell you how my experiment is going.

So since I started this new set of goals I have joined a choir,

I have started ceramics and I've extended those practices a lot and I've started meeting new friends and I've actually made two really lovely new friends with whom I have so much fun and I feel so treasured and it's like we bounce off each other.

They're also pillars of light.

So here's the other thing,

We attract the vibration that we're putting out right.

So when you start liberating yourself from these beliefs that keep you small and dull and rigid and fixed,

You become exuberant and bright and light and you will attract other people who are also releasing themselves or interested in releasing themselves and who are exuberant and bright and light and I don't know about you but they're the people that I want to hang out with right.

So I think this is a really important piece and like I know from my training that the conditioning and the introjects that we have,

They are really the source of all the other modifications that we make to how we show up in the world and how we do life and so you know the signpost is that if you're feeling numb,

Desensitized,

Dull,

Lacking in joy,

Then work with this.

This is a really good place to start.

Do a little journaling exercise about my mother says I should,

My father says I should,

My culture says I should,

My religion,

My husband,

My children say I should.

You can extend that to whoever else is in your life that you feel might be impacting you in that way and then go through them.

Notice how you feel when you read those rules and decide whether or not you would like to rewrite them and now here's the really powerful piece and this is what we used to do in Bali.

This was always my favourite part of the week.

I would ask people to then rewrite the rules so that they can burn the original set and state,

Declare what it is they would like to bring into their lives and so we would have a ritual in the evening where we would light a fire and each person could come to the fire,

Read the interject,

Read the rule,

The original rule and place it in the fire and then replace that rule,

Declare how they actually wanted to live their life,

What the new rule would be and it was so liberating and so powerful.

So it's a start right,

It's the beginning,

It's one step on the journey to begin this process of unhooking yourself from beliefs and rules that are not necessarily contributing to your happiness or the happiness of those around you in fact.

A lot of the interjects would come up around motherhood,

A good mother should,

A good mother does,

A good mother,

A good mother,

A good mother or a good father or a good daughter or a good son.

So really let yourself dig deep,

Don't inhibit yourself.

Sometimes we can inhibit ourselves from writing these things down because it feels like a betrayal right,

It feels like a betrayal of family but I really urge you to let yourself dig deep and then allow these rules to be in consciousness so that you get to choose,

You get to upgrade your operating system.

This is what I call it with my clients,

An upgrade of the operating system so that you can start to create a life where you can feel vibrant and vital and fun and excited and joyful.

Who doesn't want that?

I don't know anyone who doesn't want that.

So I want to invite you into this process and I'll leave you with that.

It's been lovely to be with you as always.

Reviews

Wisdom though no formal meditation

Thank you for this encouraging suggestion. I think I shall give it a try. 🦋

Thank you for this message! I was able to relate to everything you mentioned, but so difficult and challenging to rewrite my rules. Thank you for giving permission to live my life. 🙏🏽🙇🏻‍♀️

Beautiful and so freeing! You're absolutely correct about all of the areas and people the "shoulds" come from! I made the choice to catch myself from "shoulding" for over 10 years now! It has made a world of difference in the peace and contentment I feel within. This talk has made me want to reevaluate where there may be anymore "shoulds" lurking around and redirect them... Thank you for your brilliant work! 🙏🏽✨💜🙏🏽