Usually when we’re told to relax, we often fall asleep on ourselves. So when somebody says relax, be easy, be gentle with yourself and we relax, we consider it self-indulgence, almost like bingeing.

When you’re on a so-called diet where you’re disciplining yourself, on the other hand, you’re going about cataloguing everything you have done: “I wake up, and then I meditate, and after I meditate I go for a walk. Then I have breakfast, and since I know what to eat, I’m going to eat this, because I’ve tried that, and so on and so on …”

In either one of those circumstances, you’re moving away from something. When you’re bingeing, you’re moving away from dieting. When you’re dieting, you’re trying not to binge.

But in either case you’re not moving towards anything. You’re not actually moving closer to who you are and what you want.

In order to really, really change into becoming more and more yourself, becoming who you deeply are, you have to work with the obstacles that keep you from being yourself. That’s the process of change. What gets in the way for you being who you truly, truly are? So that you’re free. And you’re empowered. And you’re moving to who you are and what you want, and what you’re doing, and what you’re eating, and who you’re in a relationship with, and your life, is a reflection of that.

In order to truly change, it takes moving towards, not moving away, because moving away is not good enough. Old habits don’t ever get eradicated, like the habit of eating when you’re anxious, or eating when you’re stressed. Or of getting triggered off immediately when something happens or of talking to your spouse in a particular way. Or of not being close and having your heart closed. Those are habits that we’ve gotten into.

Habits never get eradicated, uprooted and completely thrown out because, as all the new science of the brain has let us know, the neural pathways in the brain get grooved and grooved deeper and deeper. And so, the more you’ve done something over the last forty, fifty, sixty years, the deeper the groove is in your brain. The habit is just a lot of different chemicals and neurotransmitters falling along the synapses and the pathways, firing one after the other in a particular direction.

To make a new way of being and living, of eating, of relating requires change. Who you are in relationship. How you are. How you speak. How you relate. To actually become and act and be a different way takes knowing what you want to move towards. Not just what you want to move away from.

If you don’t have a sense of what you wan to move towards, the fuel of moving away from something is not going to last long.

Words like should, shouldn’t, right, wrong, good, bad, they don’t work. They don’t work, because that’s not enough of a heart inspiration. Because, unless you know what you want, you will flip and flop from one to the other.

So ask yourself: What do you want? Who do you want to be? What matters to you? And move towards it.