Know Your Self-Sabotage, Use Playfullness To Improve And Heal Your Life

What's really behind self-sabotage — and why does success itself sometimes scare us more than failure? In this episode of Lights On! Podcast, Kyahnasun and Anamika dig into the patterns that keep us stuck on repeat: old trauma, the fear of shining, and the quiet ways we dim our own light to stay comfortable.

They unpack the Hawaiian story of The Bowl of Light from Tales from the Night Rainbow — a teaching on how we collect "stones" of pain and resentment over a lifetime, and how to tip the bowl and return to our original brightness. From there, the conversation moves into Gay Hendricks' concept of the Upper Limit Problem from The Big Leap, exploring why we crash after big wins, expansive experiences, or moments of real joy — and why that crash is a measurement, not a failure.

Threaded through it all is the case for playfulness as a healing tool and a business strategy: how bringing play into everyday tasks (even taxes) builds resilience, sustains high performance, and keeps relationships — and inner child — intact.

In this episode:

• Why self-sabotage is self-love in reverse, and how to spot the loop before it repeats
• The Bowl of Light: a Hawaiian teaching on releasing stored trauma
• Gay Hendricks' Upper Limit Problem and the post-expansion "crash landing"
• How playfulness rewires resistance into flow, in business, healing, and marriage
• Practical pattern-recognition as a tool for breaking repeating life lessons

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#TheLightsOnPodcast #SelfSabotage #BowlOfLight #UpperLimitProblem #GayHendricks #Playfulness #InnerChildHealing #PersonalGrowthPodcast #HawaiianWisdom #SelfLove

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Three, two, one.

unknown 0:06

Lights On!

Speaker 0:11

On a scale of one to ten, where are you at right now? An eight. All right. I see I'm an eight too. Yes. We're matching. I love it. We did dance before this. Every time just to get pumped up. Get our lights on. We want our lights on so that we can share those lights with you. We try not to bring in heaviness or any kind of mood that can happen. It happens. But we always try to bring good energy into every shared event with other people. And you know, it's tough some days. Some days you feel like shit or like you got battered by life. And it does come from all directions at the same time. Sometimes it's overwhelming. But we always have that option to take the hits, but move up, go up a level, go up higher, turn your lights on brighter. Or else, if you just get pummeled and that's it, ouch. There's not much more you can do from that space.

Speaker 1 1:12

In last week's episode, we talked about other people trying to take out your lights. But how would you deal with your own self?

Speaker 1:21

Oh boy. Well, it's kind of starts there, right? Other people can't sabotage you. You are your own sabotage. And we manifest those characters. That's the deeper truth from last week's episode. Sabotage, it's still a work in progress. I didn't figure it out. I'm not gonna pretend that I have it all figured out because that would be lying, and I try to be as honest as I can. But I'm a lot better at it, for sure. When you find your game, you find your mission, your calling, and that focus is clear. You know what the game is and what is required of you as a player, as a human in service to that vision, to that calling. It changes the way you look at sabotage. Because now you have skin in the game. You want that vision. You are playing for it. Your future self knows it's happened, right? I love that future self. We we play from that field all the time, the future self. And because there's no time. That's the irony. It sounds silly, people don't really think about it every day because we live by this clock. And in actuality, there is no time. We are so programmed to believe this clock is the epicenter of life. And the older I get, the more I realize time is just a construct in our brain. You can play with it, you can stretch time, you can go back in time and heal aspects of your younger self when you were a child or a young adult. You can heal any kind of trauma or just something painful that you went through. You can go back to that version of you and unwind those tangles and heal yourself. I look at it as time travel because it unravels and loosens all that up so that you're not locked in that in that previous version of yourself. And then your present self feels more attuned to your future self. There's like multiple layers going on. There's your future self, your present self, and your past self all coinciding in this space. And who's the loudest version of you? People often talk about identity. So that future self, who you want to be, who you are, who you are awakening and unfolding to be. Is that the voice that's running your show? Or is it your old past hurt self, you know, that went through something painful? Or is that the version that's running your show? And I think a lot of people are running from that place. And I for sure used to do that a lot. I mean, I don't really want to go into deep personal stories, but I just will put it this way. I've been through a lot. And I know we all have, but I you probably wouldn't imagine I've been through violence, I've been through very mean people, I've been lied and betrayed. And these are all like the things that you go through in life, especially when you're on the path of finding yourself, finding your deeper truth. What is all this about? What is this grand adventure for? Time is non-existent if you want to play that realm. And I love to, especially when you're in flow state or in your calling or when your lights are on. You are in a timeless zone. And those are my favorite places to be in creativity, the flow state. That to me is a value of success on the daily for me to be able to exist in that field and create from there. But to go back to the self-sabotage, when we have not healed our pains and traumas, we will recreate them until you run them into the ground and the pain is so great, you have a choice. You can no longer carry it with you, it's too much to bear. Or you go for another round, another painful round, and they get louder until you learn your lesson. Yeah. It's like a loop. And one thing I don't like in life is being stuck on loops. When I see those patterns replaying, I I literally drop everything and look at it and examine, uncover the rocks, dig deep, get it by the root. Because if we don't do that, it will come back again and again in slightly different forms, in slightly different packages. It's always the same loop, the same lesson. And it's I see it as a game, a school of life. And each lesson we learn and graduate from, we get tested again. And if we are on the path, those tests get slightly lighter and slightly more distant until it's just this faint image. That's when you know the work that you're doing is moving the needle for you. The other side would be you are hitting your head against this brick wall and continuously going through the same characters, the same hardships, the same lessons, and you're not connecting the dots, you're not seeing the pattern that is ultimately coming from the inside of you. And pattern recognition, I think, is a superpower. Everyone has it. You just have to attune yourself to be able to see it. And I think just that first intention of wanting to see the patterns in your life so that you can do and choose better, that right there opens the door. That desire and clear intention to do so. People that don't want to grow and learn, they'll just hit those lessons. I see a lot of people that I know personally that keep doing that. And there's nothing wrong with it at all, or to be ashamed of. Everyone hits their lessons at a different pace and velocity and repetition. We are all doing the same journey ultimately. And I think that's the beauty of it too. Like we're all connected by this, by these hardships and commonalities. And you never know the battles someone is facing at all. It's a good reminder of humility and to look at each other as we're all facing those same demons in a different order. Self-sabotage is a reflection of self-love or the lack of. The less you self-sabotage yourself, the more you realize how much you love and care for your well-being and protect yourself and set yourself up for success by creating great relationships around you, systems around you that create an environment for you to thrive. That is self-love, right? And that is actually required to be in service to humanity and to walk and live your calling. Self-love is the epicenter of that. It's a journey. I mean, I'm almost 46, and I feel like I've hit this new arc of self-love where I'm not trying to love myself. I do. That's a big difference. My 30s, uh yeah, that those were rough years. I'm not gonna lie. And they made me who I am, so I give thanks to every dark, sad, and angry version that I experienced in my 30s because now I'm free. I feel totally free myself. And that is a form of self-love, which would coincide with the importance of recognizing what is self-sabotage. I self-sabotage ridiculous amounts because I was afraid of success. I was afraid to shine because I was around people that didn't like me to shine. And sad as it is, I didn't shine because of it. That's my own fault, my responsibility, because A, I shouldn't give a shit about what other people think I should shine, and B, I should surround myself with people that support my shine or at least neutral to it.

Speaker 1 8:55

Yeah. And that's the thing too, when you surround yourself with the wrong people, you dim your own light to match where they're at and where their frequency and where their lights are. You have to surround yourself with people who light you up and you light them up. It's not a one-way street. Yeah, I love how you say things.

Speaker 9:13

Yeah.

Speaker 1 9:15

I love how you say things.

Speaker 9:16

It can't be a one-way street because it's not self-sustaining. If you just give and you don't receive, you know what happens. We all know what happens with that. But if you just take, oof, that's rough. I think we've all been in that dynamic with a taker.

Speaker 1 9:33

Yeah.

Speaker 9:34

And for sure. What happens? They never really get what they want. You don't get what you want. It's a lose-lose, and ultimately they just go on to the next person so that they can take more. It's like you're like one in a long line.

Speaker 1 9:50

It's like, oh, you're out of light. Let me go, let me move on.

Speaker 9:53

Or oh, you don't want to play this game. All right, on to the next. Okay, good luck. With good luck with that shtick.

Speaker 1 9:59

You figured out my games.

Speaker 10:01

There's a beautiful story from Hawaii that's called Tales from the Night Rainbow. And there's this one story called The Bowl of Light. And I love this metaphor because I think we can all relate. We're like born as a child, as a baby, as this beautiful pure beam of light, like this bowl of light. And what happens as we get older and we grow through childhood and into adults, we start to gather these stones that are placed in our bowl of light. And these stones represent traumas, anger, resentment, sadness, painful experiences. One day we realize our entire bowl is full of these stones, and our light is dimmed. They're like obstructed and blocked. And the beauty is, and what I love about the story is that the rocks are not permanent. You can literally tip the bowl over and all the rocks fall out, and your light is preserved back to your original form, this purity, this brightness. Your lights are on. When you're a baby, you're just this pure ball of joy and light, you know. The story really shows how we can gather these stones unknowingly. And then all of a sudden you realize, gosh, I'm just not as bright as I used to be, or I feel heavy. And you can't carry this entire bowl of rocks for very long. It's it's too much. So there's a choice. You can literally tip it over, or even you don't have to be so extreme. You can just take one rock out at a time at the pace that you feel is right for you. But just know it's there. You can literally dump it over and just say, I'm done, or you can do a gradual healing process. And that's what it means for us when we say lights on. You're in that state of purity, of joy, of curiosity, of openness, of expansiveness and wonderment. One thing I love, and this is how I measure where I'm at, am I in wonderment right now? Because that is such a high form of curiosity and excitement and aliveness. And when you're in that wonderment like you were as a child, it's such an innocent place to be. And if you can be pummeled by life, I mean steamrolled, stomped, thrown around, all that shit, but you can still come back to wonderment. I say that is an indication of success in life. That is true wealth to me, to be able to have that level of purity and see and have survived the ugliest in people. And I mean that, guys. Uh, I have interacted by choice, I take full responsibility, with some of the ugliest aspects of humanity. And I was damaged for quite some time from it. I had to really pick up the pieces, find what that meant for me. And and I did. I made sure I scrubbed every crevice and looked at every puka, every hole, every leak, everywhere. Because one thing I am in this life that I'm certain of is I like to be thorough. And these lessons, when life hits like that, and you wake up like, okay, I'm listening now. Yeah, at some point, you gotta just try something different. Just for kicks. Once you've lost everything, there's no more fear. I do feel you can come at life with a bit of with a bit more honesty. Self-sabotage, eh? I'd say it's an ongoing journey. It's uh it's the one that gets us all.

Speaker 1 13:50

Yeah. There's actually a really amazing book by Gay Hendricks. It's called The Big Leap. And I don't know if you guys have heard of it.

Speaker 14:00

Such a worthy read. And shout out to Dr. JC Dornick for recommending that book.

Speaker 1 14:06

Woo! And in this book, he talks all about the upper limit. And the upper limit, it's essentially your limit of how much good you allow yourself to feel and have and experience in your life. And I think we all have an upper limit. This ties back to self-sabotage.

Speaker 14:26

Totally. Because we all have, like what you said, we all have that upper limit. And that upper limit grows. It's like a flabby muscle. And the more you work it out, like the more goodness you can experience and handle, then you kind of like raise the notch a little bit, and then you can experience more and more for longer sustaining times. And it's such a journey, it's like it's a moving goalpost.

Speaker 1 14:49

Yeah.

Speaker 14:50

Gay Hendricks does a great job of simplifying it. You know, we self-sabotage because we hit our upper limit. You know, oftentimes you'll go to these events or expansive experiences, and then you go back to your quote unquote normal life and it's a crash landing, and people wonder why. And it's just you hit your upper limit.

Speaker 1 15:09

Yeah.

Speaker 15:10

And sometimes, and I've been noticing it more lately, is we've been able to like keep on soaring. I like to use that as a measurement of how much we can hold and sustain that goodness in our life before we allow something to either take it out or cause a dip. And it's guaranteed that there's going to be some attempt, whether it's the computer glitching at the most important moment, uh, a neighbor being, you know, what's or someone that you know that's close to you that just comes and vomits their their negative life experience.

Speaker 1 15:46

Or getting annoyed at little things and even injuries, too. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we laugh a lot about that. It's like right when you're about to expand or go to a big event or have a big change in your life, there's always some way that your shadow self finds a way to sabotage. Right. And it could be stubbing your toe, it could be getting sick. There's so many different realms to it, and it all leads back to the upper limit. I love that. Another example for the crash from a big event pertaining to the upper limit is I would always find myself in a slump after expanding so much. And that's something that I've really had to work through over the years, and I'm still working through it. It's a continuous process.

Speaker 16:34

I remember, yeah, you would come back from 4-H camp and you would be so high from the expansion, and you were a leader and had fun, and you were on this high performance level, and then you would come back and feel kind of the sad crash, and that was definitely your upper limit. That's the upper limit. Yeah, but also, I mean, there's two things. There's a part of us that loves to be in that field. When you're a high performer or a or someone who wants to play a big game, you really thrive in those high-intensity environments like that camp or the Pashna. The Pashna or Monroe Institute or Inner Triangle for the Limitless Live. Yeah. And uh the all these events, it's so expansive. And that's the measure. I think it's important to remember to not be hard on oneself. Yeah. When you crash, that's okay. That's just a measurement. That's all it is. It's just showing you you were way up here and now you've landed here, and there's room to grow so that you can sustain yourself from such a drastic dip down. And that's all it is, is a measurement. And so I like to take those, okay, how long did we sustain this round after such an expansive experience? It could be a vacation, it could be an interaction with someone that just completely lit you up. And then you wonder, okay, how long can you hold your lights after that encounter?

Speaker 1 18:00

It's like a game. It is. That's you always have to incorporate play into your life. And there's this quote I I'm blanking on who it's by, but all the greats throughout history were playing the entire time. And it's so true. I think all of us have kind of lost that childlike aspect of ourselves, and we need to bring that back and integrate it because everything will flow. Everything flows when you're at play. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 18:26

Wise words, woman. Yes, and that is also a val super important value is playfulness, especially as an entrepreneur, because you know, if you're not playing through the whole process, and of course there's like hard work and tasks that aren't as fun and they don't light you up, but if you bring playfulness to everything, it completely changes the field and makes it sustainable. Because in order to be in service to the greater good, we need to be in a sustainable environment or you we will burn out completely. But playfulness instantly changes the field. Yeah. For everything, even in relationships. My husband and I, we have such a beautiful relationship. We don't have drama, we play with each other. That's something that's really important, the glue that holds a family together.

Speaker 1 19:13

Yeah, it can bring marriages back together, too.

Speaker 19:15

It is true. Just like when we were children, like back to the ball of light, innocence, playfulness, this beaming purity of light. That is who we are. And we forget life happens. We get hardened, there's rust, there's leaks, but we can flip it around at any moment and play with it. Like what you're saying, play with your healing. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it's tender and it's sore and it needs cleaning out and bandaging and proper care. But we also can be playful in our healing process.

Speaker 1 19:52

And another thing, too, with the play aspect, I feel like it's healing your inner child because again, he or she gets suppressed, and when you're bringing that play back to the surface, it's healing. Beautiful.

Speaker 20:08

When I do tasks for the business or for the house, I pr I bring play into it. I mean, if I'm dusting my keyboard off, you betcha I'm dancing. I'm making it a fun game, or I'm making it a zen moment. You know, it's either playful for me or zen, like meditative, because those feed into the work that I do and I know it. So I am continuously weaving these higher states into any activity. I mean, even down to taxes when I was doing like tax. Remember how much I used to hate it. Oh my gosh. I used to like pout. I was avoiding it. Now I love it. Dreading, yeah. Now I'm like, all right, let's crunch those numbers.

Speaker 1 20:49

Let's get our tax all.

Speaker 20:51

I do taxes in the bath because I love baths. So I mean, I make it work, guys. I do. I get creative and it and to be able to gamify things that might feel daunting or stagnant, or just there's a lot of resistance, play can help dissolve some of that resistance. Because that's what we are. We're playful creatures. We are innately playful. We always crack jokes around here about oh, you hit your upper limit. And we laugh. And I think just that ability to poke fun at oneself. It's acknowledging it and bringing it to the surface. Exactly. But you're just keeping it light. Light.

Speaker 1 21:28

It doesn't have to be this heavy thing.

Speaker 21:30

Yeah, or punish yourself for it, or like be mean to yourself or hard on yourself. Why? Just play.

Speaker 1 21:37

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Speaker 21:47

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Speaker 3 22:51

Keep the lights on. In the car.

Speaker 2 22:55

Stay lit. 320. Stay lit. Stay lit.

Speaker 3 23:04

Stay lit. You gotta stay lit. Stay late. You gotta let it get. You gotta stay lit. Tangle legal. Tangle leads on. Primal like fall.