The Grip and the Two Yokes — Turn Down the Noise with Sonja Irina Johansen
Episode Transcript
You were never broken. You were biological. I'm Sonja Irina Johansen, and for decades, I believed my struggle with food was a character flaw, until I learned the science that said otherwise. This is Turn Down the Noise, the show about why we really reach for food and the gentler way through.
Your body was not disobeying you. Your body was going back home. The braced state is the state it has practiced the longest. I'm gonna say that again. The braced state is the state it has practiced the longest, so it's the state it returns to. That's all a habit is in muscle form. And the moment you can watch it happen, soften, creep, soften again, you're watching your own wiring work in real time.
We don't notice this normally, but you just did. So reminder, the grip coming back isn't failure. It's your body going home to the state it has practiced most. This season, we practice a new home. So how does the home ever change? You may remember from chapter three how the rewiring of our neural pathways works.
The worn trails, the new roads getting laid down beside them. Practice, not force, right? Okay, here's the part we didn't say back then. Where do the new roads actually get laid down? Not in the trying, in the rest. I'm gonna say that again because it's the whole thing. Not in the trying, in the rest, and that is so anathema to all of us hardworking perfectionist folks, which is the next chapter we're gonna be working on next time.
You cannot rewire a nervous system that's braced. The change sets when the body drops out of alarm. Deep rest isn't the break from the work, it's where the work sets. So those few minutes we just took, not indulgence, not the warm-up before the real class. That was you on purpose practicing the state where change actually happens.
That's why we'll keep coming back to it gently. Enough visits and soft becomes the state where your body goes to. And that quiet you dropped into underneath all the noticing, that has a name too. That's what I've termed the hum, H-U-M. You didn't make it just now. You finally got to hear it because the noise went still for a minute, hopefully.
It was there the whole time, my dear ones. It's not two jokes, it's two yokes. Most of us carry two yokes, not one. The first is the task itself, often ours to keep. The second is the war we wrap around it, the rush, the resentment, the story that it... this is robbing us of a better life. That one we can set down without abandoning a single thing. Same task, two completely different yokes. Excuse me, different walks. Okay.
The dishes, again—
I don't care if you live alone, I don't care if you've got a passel full of peeps, I don't care. The dishes again, braced at the sink. I never get a minute to myself. You might say that. If I don't do these, nobody will. Nobody even sees it. That might be a mantra. Every single night, me and this sink. I could disappear tomorrow and the only thing that get noticed is the pile. Oh God, I gotta take a deep breath.
I've said I probably want every one of those things. But if you click on it, look what you get. I don't know about you, but I feel better already. Warm water, true. A quiet kitchen. My hands moving. This is the home I love. And I just wanna honor that you can always pick this thing back up. You can take on that second yoke again. Just wanna honor it.
What about dread? The inbox. Substitute that for, I don't know, anything.
Any task. The whole day held hostage before it's begun. Everybody wants a piece of me before I've had my coffee. I answer 40, and by lunch there are 40 more. It never ends. It never will. What do you think this is gonna do? Think about how this feels when you're looking at this and how it feels when this pops in.
Ugh. I can't tell you how crazy that affects my nervous system. I haven't even read anything yet. One at a time. Done is done. And look, some of these are people glad to hear from me. What? We don't always see that stuff when we're focused on this stuff. Okay. There's a whole list. There's a whole list here, guys.
So I felt the shift when I clicked on that link and saw the green screen. But listen to how many shoulds are packed into that little song, okay? On the dishes. Hold that thought. We're coming back to those for a minute. So same sink, but here's what happens when we set the second yoke down. The task didn't change one bit.
They didn't miraculously clean or vanish, but the state you carried it in changed.
That right there, that is turning down the noise around one ordinary moment. That's the whole protocol in one dish.
I wanna share something really quickly because this is kind of hilarious. But I don't know, um, it must have been 30 or 40 years ago. I must have been in my late 20s, early 30s. I couldn't have even been married yet.
We went to a seminar. It was a woo-woo seminar in Seattle. I went with my sister-in-law and her sister. All three of us were, like, crazy woo-woo chicks. I'm just holding up space for all of us woo-woos, okay? We walked in and there was a seminar being held on standing, staying in the moment.
This was before Kristin Neff, uh, mindfulness. This was before any of that, and we listened to someone talk about how, how, um, wonderful it is to stand and do the dishes. And I have to tell you, we all left giggling and thinking, "Oh my God, so much bullshit. There's never any way I'm going to find sublime and gentleness and wonderfulness in doing my dishes."
But I'm here to tell you I have. And when I don't feel that, when I feel prickly and outsized, that's when I know I need some self-care. That's when I know. So I'm here to say I was wrong back then. I wish I knew who that lecturer was 'cause I feel like I know I didn't disturb them or distress them, but I certainly didn't give them applause.
Now, next one. This one's fun. Same move, wider still. Now, it's in the words you tell yourself, and I'll go first because this one's easier to feel than explain, and it's on this, um, this form, but I'm just gonna say it here.
I want to host the holiday. I can't even get the whole sentence out without the choke in my throat. I want to host the holiday.
Do I wanna host it? Or do I wanna be the one they can't do it without? Or do I know no one else will host it if I don't host it? Or am I supposed to do it because I've always done it?
That, my friends, might be a should wearing a wants costume. I want to host the holiday.
Probably I should host the holiday, right? Okay, what about this one? I should rest.
Feel the difference? That isn't a should at all. That's a need that got demoted somewhere along the way. Rest was never a gold star for good behavior.
I should rest. Ugh.
How about I should send cards to everybody?
How about I want to say yes to this.
How about I should call my friend? Oh, this is one of my favorites. I love doing all the baking.
Try saying any one of those out loud. Notice, does it open or does it tighten? Your body knows which one it is before your mind finishes arguing. Now, I just wanna say, when you say, "I should host the holiday" or I want to host the holiday. Either one comes with an entire underlying mess of stuff. I used to host most of the holidays.
I was closest to my mom and my dad, and they were divorced, and they couldn't go to either house, and my brother never wanted to host it.
And I just caught myself saying my brother never wanted to host it. I suppose if I hadn't given the green light, he would've maybe stepped up. I don't know. We'll never know.
Notice does it open or does it tighten when you're saying these things? And there's a whole list of them on that form, on that little fun little toy that I shared just a moment ago. Your body knows which one it is before your mind finishes arguing. A should contracts, a want opens, and a need, oh, a need has been waiting years to be called by its right name.
I feel silly with this part, but, um, I'm really hung up on the yoke.
Hmm. Understanding the yoke, and I'm looking at the definitions for yoke 'cause I thought I knew what yoke was, and I'm like, I wonder if I'm the only one. I wonder if Sonja knows somebody might be hung up on that word yoke. I love that question. Thank you. And I'm sorry for- Yes.
No, no, no... I know you love words, and I'm like, I wanna... I'm... You paint beautiful visual pictures, and so that is why I'm hung up on the yoke. So one of the things I grew up with, um, in Michigan, um, my grandfather was a farmer, and he had a cow, and the cow would pull the plow. And let me just see if I can come up with an image for you.
Um—
And yeah, these are good. Okay.
Let me just look at this and tell me if this doesn't make any sense. The yoke is this thing here that is holding and providing the connection between the cow and the plow. The yoke is the device that allows the cow to pull this. It has so much force. So just imagine if there were two pulling the same plow.
Now, if you could imagine, sometimes I use this analogy for the magic, because the magic itself allows for people to share something out that they've been carrying on their own. And so instead of one yoke, there's 18. And the weight is incredibly less. Now, I'm using this analogy in a different way here, but the yoke itself. I don't know who made that big plow, but thank you.
The yoke itself, um, is the thing that we have to do as adults, the adulting thing that we have to do. God bless us all. We have things we get to do that we don't want to do, but we know need to get done. And the second part of that phrase is the part that I want you to set down.
The part that says, "Because no one else will." That's adding to your burden. That's like putting a second plow. That's like digging rocks instead of beautiful ground earth. That's the difference in the two yokes. The first yoke is a thing we do, and we get strong doing it. We can handle all sorts of things.
We can juggle the most amazing issues that come up. We have mad skills, and we can do all of these things. It's when we add that second yoke, that second burden to the problem. When we add that second burden to the problem, it's creating a bigger problem, and a problem that we don't need.
We can sit here and blame others for the problem. Like for instance, the dishes. I could blame everybody else in this house for the fact that there's a sink full of dishes. I could blame everybody else, and it would be true. But is it gonna serve me? I've gotten so good at doing dishes, it takes me less than seven minutes to empty and fill a dishwasher.
Try it. I want you to set your timer once and see. Set your timer and see how long it takes, and then remember the next time you're complaining about doing the dishes. It is crazy.
So it's two different types of analogies, right? To spread the pain and spread the heartache and spread the joy and amplify and share it across many, many shoulders, that's many, many people carrying your burden with you. That's one way of looking at a yoke. The second way that I'm talking about here is adding to your burden unnecessarily. I am not suggesting that you don't have a right to be upset with others, and that you can't help teach a beautiful lesson.
There have been times when the dishes have piled up and piled up and piled up, and somebody says, "Hey, we don't have any of these." "Yeah, I know. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, we don't have any of those things." I am not suggesting that there aren't lessons to be learned for these tasks, and that's where they get to be really evaluated in the moment.
And are they important enough to be evaluated? I don't know. It depends. We learn lessons in all different places. But the yoke itself that we are carrying is part of being an adult, and it's sometimes hard on our parts. It's sometimes hard in the environment that we're in. It's sometimes an extra burden when we're in pain.
It's sometimes an extra burden when someone else that we love is in pain. All of those things affect the heaviness of the second yoke. I just wanna say this second yoke is of our own making, and we are sentient beings, and we can shift this, and we can look at this thing in a completely new perspective that will help us, that also will trickle down to everyone else.
Does that make sense? Thank you, Tommie, so much for asking that question.
So I wanna come back for just a second to that first thing that we did this morning, the quiet, um, the humming, the body scan, the yoga nidra, the non-sleep deep rest. That didn't come from me, and it didn't come from the meditation, that quiet that you found this morning. It was already in you.
You just got to hear it once the noise dropped. And that's the whole season right there. Not one more thing to do. The volume turned down until you can hear what was actually in there. So I wanna reiterate what we did today. One move four times, wider and wider. Your body, a moment, a word, a life.
Turning down the noise so you can hear yourself. Any time you can do that is going to help you the next time.
If I can say this again with earnestness and effort, receive today lightly. Don't grasp at all of it. Let the pieces that land do the quiet work. They will. And this week, when you catch your shoulders up by your ears at some red light, and you will now, you can't unsee it, just drop then, smile, and know everybody else in this room is catching theirs at the very same moment.
Every catch counts.
I want most for you to understand a nervous system that feels seen has more room to soften than one that feels surveilled. So you know you're seen, you know you're seen by each other, and you're certainly seen by me.
Keep your plan. Keep your practitioner. Keep your medication. This is company, and not instead. Thanks for walking with me today. Everything I make lives at transformwithsonja.com. Until next time, with love and light, Sonja.
