Speaker A
So, if you haven't noticed by now, there's a strange principle that the harder you try, the worse your life tends to get.
Explores the paradox that trying too hard worsens life, advocating effortless acceptance and awareness for true confidence and flow.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Trying too hard often backfires and worsens your life experience.
- True confidence and flow come from being, not trying or forcing.
- Allowing all emotions, including negativity, without resistance is healing.
- Your attention fuels your ego and thoughts; choose what to focus on wisely.
- Effortless acceptance and present-moment awareness enable positive change.
What the video covers
- The harder you try, the worse life tends to get, known as the backwards law.
- Trying to convince yourself of something implies you lack it, which creates inner conflict.
- True confidence and flow arise naturally without forced effort or positive thinking.
- Effort often goes against the natural flow of life and creates a division of lack.
- Allowing negative emotions fully instead of suppressing them leads to positive experiences.
- Effortless guidance and presence in the moment are more effective than forced change.
- The ego gains power from the attention you give it; awareness reduces its influence.
- Negative thoughts lose power when not engaged with, causing their neural pathways to shrink.
- Reprogramming the mind becomes easier when you stop fighting negativity and focus gently on positivity.
- Living in relaxed ease and acceptance raises your state and helps things flow naturally.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to the Backwards Law
- 00:51Effort Against the Natural Flow
- 01:41Acting 'As If' and Being Present
- 02:19Paradoxical Nature of Life
- 03:08Effort Blocks Flow
- 03:54Effortless Guidance and Acceptance
- 04:34Allowing Negativity Without Suppression
- 05:11Power of Focus and Ego Fuel
- 05:56Controlling the Mind vs. Awareness
- 06:39Handling Negative Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
This is commonly referred to as the backwards law. And the reason this is the way it is is because if I need to try to convince myself that I am something or that I have something, then by essence, I'm kind of saying that
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I don't have it or that I am not it. It's like me going into a job interview, constantly trying to convince myself that I am confident and that I'm going to crush this job interview.
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On the surface, it seems positive, right? You're like, "Oh, well, I'm thinking positive thoughts. I'm thinking confident thoughts." But people who are truly confident don't even think those kinds of thoughts.
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They just completely are confident. So effort is against the natural flow of life. And most people are completely wired to just constantly make this effort to make things other than they are.
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And when you really think about what that's doing is that's creating this division of lack.
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When you're constantly saying that life is not amazing and great the way it is now, and one day it will be when I finally, you know, get this thing or change my identity or whatever, then you're constantly putting what you
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want and who you want to become on a pedestal. That one day I will be this when I try hard enough.
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But when you really break down the teachings of act as if, they're talking about being that now.
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And you can't necessarily try to be what you already are. If I had $1 million in the bank account, how hard would I have to try to convince myself that I have $1 million in the bank account?
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There's no reason for me to try to convince myself of it because it already is.
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So, this is where I think people can get held up because it's counterintuitive, right? It's like a backwards law.
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It's paradoxical in a sense. When you really start to get deep into life and how it flows, you'll realize that a lot of stuff that sounds logical on the surface is paradoxical.
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Like, for example, you would think that if negative emotions arise or negative thoughts arise, that by trying to control them and suppress them and focus on the positive, that that would make things better.
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But that actually makes things far worse. The paradoxical truth is that by fully allowing negativity, it is actually a positive experience.
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It's also true about getting into a state of flow where things really start to effortlessly work out for you and things just start to come together.
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The harder you try to be in a state of flow and to reach that, the more you are blocking it.
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So, in essence, a lot of this reality creation stuff and even just simply feeling really good in your personal life and in a high state is simply getting out of your own way.
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That's actually a lot of the stuff that we are constantly doing to try to make our life better that is keeping us in this perpetual state of not having.
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Now, this doesn't mean that you can't direct your experience in any way, right? I'm not saying that just forget about it all, completely say screw it, you know, I'm just going to live and hope things work out.
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There's still a certain amount of guiding that you can do. But it's more an effortless guidance.
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And this can only happen from your true state of being, from being here in the present moment.
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And embracing what is going on now. What I mean by this is instead of forcibly constantly trying to, you know, make yourself into this new version,
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more think, you know, relaxed thoughts about it, while not identifying with and not giving attention to any thought that is against it.
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So there's actually a really different energy to what I'm talking about here. Because from the state I'm talking about, you're not trying to suppress negativity.
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You're not trying to control your mind. You're allowing your mind to be exactly as it is, right?
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If negativity rises, then negativity rises. If positivity rises, then really allow yourself to fully indulge in that positivity.
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When the negativity rises, we have the choice of how much belief and how much power that we give to it.
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The thing is when it comes to being positive, it is only what you allow yourself to focus on that grows.
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And your mind or ego, it only has as much power as you give it.
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The fuel for the ego is your attention and your interest. So eventually you start to wake up to this truth that who you really are is this open space of awareness.
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You are this kind of relaxed attention that is allowing the mind to exist. But most of us spend our time completely distracted and lost by the mind.
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And what we try to do is we try to control our mind and control our life's situation from the level of the mind.
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So instead of rising above the mind and seeing it for what it is, which is a series of thoughts and feelings, we try to get down and, you know, dirty with the pig in the pig house or whatever. I
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don't know. Get in the mud with it and try to convince it of why it's wrong or why it's right.
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So let's say a negative thought arises, right? Something that I don't want to think because theoretically it would bring a negative reality.
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A thought of fear, let's say. Well, do you know what would be giving a lot of power to that thought?
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Is for me to go into the mind and think about why that thought is actually not true.
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By doing this, what I'm really saying is that this thought has some sort of reality to it.
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If it had no reality, then there'd be no reason to try to convince it that it wasn't true.
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It would just be a thought. It would arise. You would see it. Oh, there it is.
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And you wouldn't give any attention to it, so it would eventually just kind of float away into nonexistence.
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I mean, think about something that you do truly believe about yourself that's positive.
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If a negative belief around that came up, but you had total conviction in the positive side of it, then you simply would not entertain that negative belief.
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You would just completely disregard it as being not true. So when you notice yourself being like really pulled towards a certain negative way of thinking about yourself, it's probably because there's been a huge amount of reinforcement towards that specific neural pathway.
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And you have very, very commonly followed that exact pattern of thinking. And there are certain patterns of thinking that we have that, if you've noticed by now, are a lot more strong than others.
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So, those patterns of thinking, they really come up and they grab your attention. And they pull you out of being this open space of awareness, and they pull you in down into its, you know, story, and you start following
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it around and believing in what it's saying. And there's this concept of, you know, you've heard probably before, what fires together wires together.
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And that is true. But what is also true is that what doesn't fire together starts to shrink.
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So, when you cease to be engaged with these certain negative thoughts, which takes no effort at all, by the way, it takes no effort to not follow a thought.
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It's just it arises, you don't engage any further, it's here in your space of awareness, and eventually it'll go away on its own.
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When you start to cease engaging with these really strong negative stories that you've been telling yourself, the actual neural pathways that have been keeping these stories and beliefs alive, they start to shrink.
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Now, you can probably see why from this place it is so much easier to reprogram your mind.
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Because you're not in a constant state of war between the negativity that's arising and the negative beliefs and the positivity that you're trying to force over top of it.
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It's like you stop feeding one way of thinking, neural pathway, because you see that it was never true to begin with and was just, you know, a story that you've been repeatedly telling yourself.
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And you just begin to allow your awareness or attention to be gently, you know, focused on positivity.
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When a positive thought arises, you know, rea
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And when the negative stuff arises, don't indulge in it at all. Just don't even give it any reality or any truth.
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Don't argue with it. Don't try to change it. Don't try to uh force any positivity over top of it.
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Just completely treat it as if it's no you know, has no importance whatsoever to you.
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And when you stop to be when you stop being pulled in by all of these really negative, you know, thoughts.
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And also when you stop constantly trying to like try super hard and technique everything away.
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And what I mean by that is you're like, "Oh my god, like this is a problem, you know. People are telling me I can't be thinking negative or I can't Sorry, someone someone just just messaged me lo- me made me lose my train
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of thought. Um Yeah, so instead of treating your current life situation, the present moment, as a constant problem to be solved, you begin to just embrace the present moment as it is.
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And live here now. Cuz a huge part of what I'm talking about, the backwards law, and letting go of effort, is simply being completely here now.
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Allowing yourself to think the natural thoughts that someone in the place you want to get to would think.
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Without it being this kind of forceful, efforted technique that you're fearfully doing to like, you know, cuz you're so scared that it won't work out. You're there constantly all day like, all right, yeah, I know it's going to work out. I'm
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super confident, super great, you know, this is this is this is awesome. I am I'm rich.
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You know, it's more like you're in this relaxed ease. And from this place of just allowing life to be as it is, with not being at odds with experience, your state starts to become higher.
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You start to feel more relaxed and better. And you attract whatever state that you're in.
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So, when you begin to let go of this fearful-based way of thinking, in this constant efforting that uh experience needs to be other than it is right now, and you just allow yourself to drop into the present moment,
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then naturally you start to think more positive. You know, it becomes a more natural way of being.
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You start to feel more in a state of flow, where things just seem to start to work out for you.
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You see opportunities where you didn't before, because you have a more open state of awareness, where you're able to be receptive to things showing up.
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The mind that you used to fear and constantly be trying to control, you now kind of see as your annoying roommate that's just blabbing in the background, where you're not giving importance or attention to it's you know dramatic stories.
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But just like a little word of wisdom from someone who's been down this path for a long time this is uh easier said than done for for the most part especially in the beginning because your mind is going to have an
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extreme amount of momentum. It's going to be like a rushing river just taking you over you know grabs your attention and all of a sudden before you know it you are thinking all these negative scary thoughts ruminating on
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what could go wrong. And this is a very normal and natural part of the experience.
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So don't beat yourself up and also if thoughts come up that are beating yourself up don't engage with those either.
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Just be as you are allow experience to be as it is. Gently allow yourself to just indulge and engage in positivity and positive visualizations.
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And stop treating the negativity as anything that's even worth your attention. Anyway, I hope this helped.
Topics:backwards laweffortless flowconfidencenegative thoughtsegoawarenessmindfulnesspresent momentreprogramming mindletting go
