Who Says You Shouldn’t?
One day I bought myself a soft-serve late in the afternoon and ate it all instead of saving it for dessert for dinner and when my husband asked, “what’s for dinner,” I told him I wasn’t really hungry. I broke a lot of rules.
Rules are shortcuts. You adopt them so you don’t need to waste your time making decisions over and over again. Of course you adopted many of them under pressure. You don’t have much choice when you’re a child. If you want to get approval or avoid punishment, you do what the grownups in your life expect you to do.
A lot of your rules are left over from childhood. Others you may have created for yourself. You may have decided that you shouldn’t eat sugar or you should walk 10,000 because you think it will be good for you. Or you may have decided to always buy a certain brand or never shop somewhere because you disagree with their politics.
What happens when you break your own rules? Do you decide, I made the rules for a reason and the reason isn’t valid anymore? Or do you feel guilty and uncomfortable?
When you find it hard to break an old, no longer useful rule, the three sentences you learn in LETTING IT GO will help you feel better very quickly. Just insert “this belief that I [should, shouldn’t, can’t, etc.] into each sentence you say aloud, and notice what happens. Try it. It’s amazingly easy.
This post is a comment I wrote about a passage on Page 61 revised edition, Page 67 original of Letting It Go: Relieve Anxiety and Toxic Stress in Just a Few Minutes Using Only Words (Rapid Relief with Logosynthesis®). You can see the passage in the book. You can also see the excerpt here. This link will take you to Bublish.com, where I regularly publish comments on parts of this book. This is a site where authors share of their work. You can subscribe to my musings, there, as well as to the musings of many other authors. It’s a great place to learn about new books and I recommend that you visit.