Joe discovered a pattern across six or seven experiments: a practice would work beautifully at first, then stop. The pattern was always the same—it worked when he didn’t know what would happen, and stopped when he started using it to manage himself.
“If I did a practice and I didn’t know what was going to happen it worked really well, but as soon as I was using the practice to manage myself it stopped working.”
This is the same principle as loving something to make it go away—the moment your wonder turns into management, the magic dies. If you’re meditating to calm yourself, you’re managing, not meditating. If you’re doing breathwork to fix your anxiety, you’re managing, not exploring.
The insight: any tool used for self-management becomes self-management. Stay in wonder and impartiality (VIEW), and tools keep working. Use them to get somewhere, and they stop.
Related Concepts
- Loving something to make it go away stops working
- Self-improvement is self-annihilation
- Tools stop working when used for self-improvement