What an incredibly thorough post on the development of the inner critic and how we continue to let it run our reactions to life if we don't intentionally choose the work of developing awareness with curiosity and a trust in our ability to navigate life in a new identity we can build with choice. For me, the most important part of this work has been the acceptance that there is no "finish line", but that this is a continuous process of grounding into this awareness and making choices that are responses to life as it is, rather than reactions on repeat from our childhood stories. How wonderful that we get to do this most important work of supporting the only person we will spend our entire lives with! Ourselves! But, yes, big overhauls of our behavior will usually fail if we don't do the micro work of examining the patterns that have produced our behaviors in the first place.
This is such an important reframe — failure isn’t a character flaw, it’s a nervous system response. What I’d add from my work with trauma-informed yoga and Yoga Nidra: the goal isn’t to make change small enough to slip past the threat detector. It’s to stay with the nervous system long enough that it stops detecting threat in the first place. That’s a slower path, but it’s the one that actually rewires. If this resonates, I write about exactly this intersection — embodied neuroscience, rest, and sustainable change — over at Embodied Grace on Substack.
What an incredibly thorough post on the development of the inner critic and how we continue to let it run our reactions to life if we don't intentionally choose the work of developing awareness with curiosity and a trust in our ability to navigate life in a new identity we can build with choice. For me, the most important part of this work has been the acceptance that there is no "finish line", but that this is a continuous process of grounding into this awareness and making choices that are responses to life as it is, rather than reactions on repeat from our childhood stories. How wonderful that we get to do this most important work of supporting the only person we will spend our entire lives with! Ourselves! But, yes, big overhauls of our behavior will usually fail if we don't do the micro work of examining the patterns that have produced our behaviors in the first place.
This is such an important reframe — failure isn’t a character flaw, it’s a nervous system response. What I’d add from my work with trauma-informed yoga and Yoga Nidra: the goal isn’t to make change small enough to slip past the threat detector. It’s to stay with the nervous system long enough that it stops detecting threat in the first place. That’s a slower path, but it’s the one that actually rewires. If this resonates, I write about exactly this intersection — embodied neuroscience, rest, and sustainable change — over at Embodied Grace on Substack.