Many may be able to relate to the experience of feeling like you aren’t doing enough, like there is this nagging voice at the back of your mind saying ‘you can do more’, ‘you’re not doing enough’, ‘you can do better’, ‘you should do better’.
Whenever I would have these types of thoughts come up, I used to go into quite an emotional reaction – feeling angry, disappointed, sad, guilty, pitying myself, victimizing myself, blaming everyone and everything else. What I’d try to do was to use these reactions as a motivation to do more and do better. Suddenly ‘lunging myself forward’ and ‘trying to be better’, ‘trying to do more’ – go go go. But that never really worked out. My starting point would be energy, and as a result I’d be in a continuous state of stress, with this experience of ‘not doing enough!’ and ‘am I doing enough?’ constantly ‘haunting me’ in the back of my mind.
For a while I also tried to get those thoughts to not come up anymore – to just ignore them or simply suppress them. That also didn’t work out very well – because here my starting point was resistance – trying to avoid the emotional experience from coming up by suppressing/ignoring these thoughts. In essence – trying to ‘fight it’ – and then, of course, only feeding them more in the statement that the thoughts are ‘more than me’ and ‘I can’t handle them’.
And here’s the first key: that I had defined the thoughts themselves as ‘problematic’ – believing that the experiences and reactions were ‘inherent’ to the thought or words or statement ‘I can/should do more/better’. When I would hear or see these words – I would perceive them as a judgment and a problem in many respects – and didn’t consider that it’s not the thought/words/statement that is really the problem. They are just words. It’s me who had defined my relationship to these words as emotional, judgmental and problematic – and so the problem wasn’t the thoughts, it was ‘who I was’ in relation to these words.
When removing the automatic reaction of self-judgment and emotional turmoil – a different scenario becomes possible. For instance, when the thought/words/statement of for instance ‘I can/should do more’ comes up, I can simply ask myself: Well, can I? And here, I can then practically assess: can I do more? In what area do I see I can do more? What is holding me back from doing more? How can I support myself to do more? Etc. It doesn’t HAVE TO be emotional. The dynamic can change from: ‘these thoughts come up and turn into a huge emotional experience that haunts me’ – to: ‘this came up within me – ok, let me see if there’s anything to it and if so, what can I do about it’. From the thoughts, reactions and energy being the directive principle, I can be the directive principle.
Here's also a cool example of how there are more options than either submitting to our mind or trying to fight our mind - we can work with our mind. When we are the directive principle within ourselves, we can direct ourselves to use the mind as a supportive tool - we determine our relationship to everything within us - and we can change these relationshps.