Believe it or not, there are many people who prefer to stay in familiar pain than live in the uncertainty of healing. Pain is familiar and therefore known. Embarking on a journey of any kind that may transform or transmute, change or rearrange anything within our body, mind, or spirit is unknown.
The image of pain is easy to understand physically, but mentally, it may be a stretch for some. In my experience on and off the yoga mat, pain often manifests as mind stuff—our monkey minds. While mental swirls may not feel like actual pain, the time we spend spinning in our heads is no less draining than dealing with a physical injury.
Hearing Your Mind to Change Your Mind
This brings me to a quote I heard from Michelle Nolan, a fabulous tarot reader. She says, “We need to understand our minds and hear our minds in order to be able to change our minds.” I interpret this in several ways—from literally being able to pivot our thought process to the shift required to see something from another’s perspective.
How, then, do we learn to understand our minds or hear our minds? There are several ways, one of which is meditation, whether seated or through movement. I’ve written before about ways I connect with my mind: sometimes it’s in stillness, and at other times it’s while biking, running, doing the dishes or doing yoga. The idea here is to witness and pay attention to when we may be caught in mental loops—that endless cycle which these days gets turning because of worry. We need to find a way to put a stick in the that wheel or worry and step off.
But we don’t understand how to do that because we’re so used to worrying.
When Worry Masquerades as Love
Many of us have conflated worry with love or worry as the cure for doing something about things we cannot control. An example: if you’ve got children, of course you’re going to worry about them from time to time. But if you are constantly worrying about your children, that does two things. It doesn’t make you feel any better, and it actually disempowers them because the message they receive is that they can’t figure things out for themselves.
As parents, we of course want to make the world a better place—joyful, peaceful, and easy. Yet for some of us, that desire takes over in ways that become counterproductive. Parents who strive to alleviate all challenges or hardships in order to shield their kids from worry may actually prevent necessary growth that can only come from dealing with life their way first, then asking for help when and if needed.
This kind of worry comes from fear and the need to control situations and outcomes, or from a need to be a featured player in the lives of others instead of playing a supporting role—which may actually be the most valuable and rewarding position for everyone involved.
Because worry isn’t the same as care or empathy. Worry is all about us—our emotions and fears—and not really about the other person at all. It gives us something to do, but it doesn’t get us anywhere.
There are those of us so used to worrying as a default—by no fault of our own—that we normalize it. We don’t consider it a problem, especially when there is a lot to worry about at home, within ourselves, or outside of ourselves.
But here’s the key question: How is all that worry working for you? I mean, really?
Are you waking up ready to embrace the day ahead, or are you bracing for the day ahead?
The energy between these two choices is vastly different. Embracing is expansive; bracing is constricting. Even saying the two words to yourself—notice what happens in your body. Saying “embrace,” you can breathe, you feel your shoulders and jawline loosen. But say “brace”—what happens? Immediate tension in one or several places, right?
If we can acknowledge our worry and have heart-based conversations about it, we bridge the gap between the imbalances we may be experiencing within our own energy centers—such as insecurity and overthinking—and move from operating from our heads to feeling from our hearts. We learn to speak with love and kindness versus our egoic minds. When we do this, we create space that literally interrupts the worry cycle. And when we speak our truth with kindness—for example to our kids—we demonstrate our respect and trust in their ability to step up and figure things out.
Getting Curious About Our Internal Instructions
I offered a workshop recently and was pleased to see how the people showing up were ready to learn what makes them tick. They showed up curious to learn about their internal instructions. They wanted to understand, for example, how to break free from endless mental loops. They wanted to understand why certain situations or people trigger them and why others don’t.
They wanted to get a better understanding of why they feel so insecure or disempowered, or why—admittedly—they’re so egotistical and think they know it all, and so on. As you know by now if you’ve been reading my content or listening to my podcasts, the ways in which we understand our internal instruction manual is through the chakra system, our energy wheels. And as I say, “When you understand how your wheels turn, you can drive the vehicle of your body anywhere.”
When we get curious about why we do what we do, when we stop long enough to hear our minds, we also get clarity from our body about where we might need to change something. The areas in our body that give us signals—such as tension or discomfort—are the barometers measuring how our instructions are working and how our wheels are in balance or imbalance.
Whether we want to literally change our minds to come from a different perspective, or change our habits to shift our behaviors, or adjust how we speak to ourselves or others, we must quiet the mental chatter that clutters our inner knowing and hearing.
Rewriting Our Instructions
We are allowed to rewrite our instructions from what is no longer working for us to what may work moving forward. We are also allowed to admit when we have no idea how to do that, or to confess we thought we knew it all and didn’t need to even consider doing any of this kind of work on ourselves.
So if you’re used to worry as your default setting or you falsely think it’s giving you something to do, pause and step back. Really listen to where and how and when you might get to change your mind, and change the way you operate your mind. Your mind feeds so much within you. If you’re in a constant state of worry and anxiety, the rest of your body is going to feel that way as well.
The Body Keeps the Score
In the work I do, it’s hard for some to connect with the esoteric language I speak. Our overthinking? That’s our sixth chakra, our third eye, communicating. But for those unfamiliar or uninterested in words like “chakra” or “third eye,” saying we are stuck in our heads and caught in repetitive thought patterns is more familiar, you see?
We are all caught up from time to time with real-world problems at home and globally that weigh on our minds and trickle into our bodies. Our shoulders get tight, our jawline as well. We may have headaches or other aches and pains. Obviously, please see a doctor for anything requiring medical attention, but if some of the pain is energetic—from overthinking and over-worrying—we can learn to adjust our thought processes and patterns from creating dis-ease to ease within ourselves.
I get super excited to encounter clients and students willing and ready to learn more about themselves, which is why I do what I do. That’s why I write. It’s why I teach. It’s why I coach. It’s why I podcast. I want everyone to understand themselves from the inside out. And one of the easiest ways we can recognize when we’re in an imbalanced situation is when that monkey mind gets going and we find ourselves spinning in repetitive thought unable to hit the pause button.
Presence: The Mental Hack
Mental loops keep spinning only if we allow them. If we remain trapped there, we really can’t come from a place of balance in order to make decisions, to have dreams, or to just really be with the thoughts that nourish us instead of deplete us. So to me, one of the most powerful ways we can interrupt this pattern is through presence. My newest catch phrase for the week: The mental hack to take our power back is presence.
Presence provides the proverbial stick in the wheel and creates the necessary pause where we get to ask: Whose thoughts are these and why am I so willingly caught up in them?
Rethinking Balance and Strength
“When the mind is weak, the situation is a problem. When the mind is balanced, the situation is a challenge. When the mind is strong, the situation becomes an opportunity.” – Buddha
When I first encountered the Buddha quote above, something didn’t sit well with me about it. In my training, a balanced mind seemed to be all we need to view situations as opportunities. However, when delving more deeply into the difference between a balanced mind and a strong mind in this quote, I learned the line describes a kind of evolution of perception—how our inner state shapes the way we interpret external events:
- A weak mind reacts from fear, insecurity, or overwhelm. Everything feels like a “problem” because it threatens our stability.
- A balanced mind has regained composure and emotional regulation. It sees difficulty as a “challenge”—something to meet, not run from.
- A strong mind, in this model, goes beyond neutrality. It not only manages the situation but transmutes it—finding growth, creativity, or possibility within it. What once caused pain or struggle becomes a platform for transformation.
In yogic philosophy, equanimity—a balanced mind—is actually the highest state. It’s when we’re neither reactive nor forcefully striving. From that inner steadiness, we naturally see opportunity, not because we’re “stronger,” but because we’re clearer.
Balance and strength are not sequential—they’re intertwined. A balanced mind is a strong mind, because it’s anchored, aware, and capable of seeing beyond polarity. This makes much more sense to me.
With no disrespect to Buddha, part of my mission on this planet—or so I’m told, and I gratefully embrace—is to take ancient philosophy and make it digestible and workable for the bodies we are living in today. So I’d like to offer a reframe of this quote:
“When the mind is weak, life feels threatening. When the mind is balanced, life feels workable. And when balance deepens into wisdom, life itself becomes the opportunity.”
This honors the idea that, opportunity reveals itself through balance and presence, not from pushing harder or trying to control outcomes.
So I invite you: Step out of the loop. Hear your mind. Change your mind. And discover what becomes possible when you choose presence over worry, embracing over bracing, and balance over overwhelm.