Release Your Shoulds and Supposed Tos: A Meditation for Inner Freedom and Authenticity
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Release Your Shoulds and Supposed Tos: A Meditation for Inner Freedom
Most of us have a running list of “shoulds” and “supposed tos” living within us…
I should be more disciplined.
I shouldn’t feel this way.
I’m supposed to have it more together by now.
I’m not supposed to struggle, or be vulnerable, or imperfect, or needy, or human.
The pressure of it is immense.
And what makes it so insidious is that often we don’t even notice it or question it. We just believe it.
It’s become the water we swim in and the lens through which we see ourselves.
I often say that in my early life, I burnt myself out chasing goals that weren’t even mine. There was so much pressure coming from every direction to be this perfect, non-feeling, needless, super productive “good girl.” It felt like there was no space for my own needs, feelings, or desires. And honestly, I didn't even know what my needs, feelings, or desires were. I had lost touch with them so completely that I wouldn't have known where to begin looking. So I just kept striving and working and pushing through and pretending I was fine.
I was capable, so I kept going. And it burned me out so deeply, so completely, that I eventually had no choice but to stop and ask myself: whose life am I actually living?
I think so many of us know this feeling, and that’s why today’s meditation for inner freedom and authenticity means so much to me.
How We Learned to “Should On” Ourselves
From the time we're very young, we’ve been absorbing messages about who we're supposed to be. Some of those messages are subtle, woven into the fabric of family dynamics and cultural expectations. And some of them aren't subtle at all. Some of them are said directly, repeatedly, and with immense force.
Either way, we’ve internalized a long list of what's acceptable and what isn't. What's lovable and what needs to be hidden. What's safe to express and what will cost us too much. And over time, those messages become part of how we see ourselves, part of how we breathe and hold our bodies and move through the world.
We begin organizing our lives around an idealized image of who we think we should be, and we spend enormous energy trying to live up to it.
We contort and edit ourselves, performing versions of ourselves that we hope will be accepted, approved of, and loved.
And what's so important to understand is that this makes complete sense. When we're young and dependent, belonging feels like survival. Learning to adapt ourselves to meet expectations, to suppress what wasn't welcome, and to become whoever the people around us needed us to be was often the most intelligent and protective thing we could do.
But that self-protective strategy that once helped us belong and feel safe can become a huge pressure that separates us from our authentic selves and weighs us down. And often, our conditioning goes right on serving everyone around us while quietly costing us so much.
The Hidden Weight of Shoulds and Supposed Tos
Here's the part that most people don’t fully realize: these shoulds and supposed tos don't just live in our conscious thoughts. If they did, we could simply notice them, question them, and choose differently. But they exist much deeper within us.
They're woven into our nervous systems, our bodies, our posture, our breath, and the subconscious interpretations of everything that happens to us. They color our expectations and assumptions before a single conscious thought even forms.
They shape how we interpret other people's words and expressions. They quietly determine what we tolerate, what we avoid, what we reach for, and what we believe we deserve. In very real ways, they influence how much safety, love, and authenticity we allow ourselves to experience.
And they feed a chronic, low-grade self-criticism. We judge ourselves for not living up to our idealized image. And then we judge ourselves for “shoulding on ourselves” in the first place. It becomes an exhausting loop.
And all of these internalized shoulds and supposed tos limit our connection with our own authentic needs, feelings, and desires.
When we’ve spent years overriding what we actually feel in favor of what we’re “supposed to” feel, we can find ourselves honestly unsure of what we want, what we need, or who we even are beneath all the conditioning.
And we often don’t recognize any of this as conditioning, because it doesn’t feel like rules. It just feels like reality. It feels like us.
But the body knows. It registers the weight and pressure of all of this even when our minds have normalized it completely. And when we find ourselves stuck in these patterns, cycling through the same self-criticism and the same sense of not being enough, it’s not because we’re failing. It’s because these implicit rules are still quietly shaping how we experience ourselves and the world, often beneath the level of consciousness.
How We Actually Free Ourselves from Shoulds and Supposed Tos
This is why today's meditation works at the somatic level rather than just the level of thought. Telling ourselves to just stop shoulding, or trying to replace our inner critic with positive affirmations, doesn't truly create lasting change. Real freedom from these patterns requires us to go somewhere thought alone cannot reach, beneath the surface of the conscious mind and into what's actually being held within us, in the body, in the psyche, in the subconscious layers of our experience.
In this meditation, we use a somatic emotional processing technique called Regenerating Images in Memory®, or RIM®, to do exactly that. RIM helps us drop below the level of conscious thought and connect with what's actually being carried within us, what we feel in our bodies, what lives in our subconscious, what has been quietly shaping our experience long before our conscious minds had any say in it.
It's a tender and deeply effective process, and it's one of the most powerful ways I know to create real, lasting change in patterns that have resisted everything else.
Coming Home to Your Authentic Self
What we find, when we slow down and go that deep, is that our authentic self is never actually lost. It’s been here all along, underneath the conditioning, underneath the years of striving and contorting and performing.
And when the shoulds begin to soften, what remains is you. Your real needs. Your genuine feelings. Your own sense of what matters and what you want and who you actually are. In this meditation, we'll gently reconnect with that authentic self through the body, sensing what it actually feels like to be you beneath all the conditioning, and beginning to trust that felt sense as a real and reliable guide.
That’s what inner freedom really means to me. Not some grand declaration, but a quiet, felt return to yourself. Freedom from the internalized voices that have been running so much of your inner life. The freedom to finally have space for your own needs, feelings, and desires, and to trust them as real and worthy and worth listening to.
That's what we're moving toward in this practice. And I'm so glad you're here for it.
Listen to Release Your Shoulds and Supposed Tos: A Meditation for Inner Freedom and Authenticity now!
Episode timing:
00:00 - How We Learned to “Should On” Ourselves
05:21 - Healing Meditation to Release Your Shoulds and Supposed Tos
35:53 - Conclusion and Reflections
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How was that Guided Meditation To Release Your Shoulds and Supposed Tos for you?
How do you feel now? And what did you realize?
Please let me know in the comments!
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Thanks so much for joining me today!
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Enjoy more like this: RIM® Exercises, Somatic Emotional Processing
About me
Hey, I’m Karena!
I’m a somatic emotional healing coach here to help you quickly identify and heal the subconscious blocks, old emotional wounds and self-sabotaging core beliefs that are holding you back!
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