That’s the first line of a book I’ve been reading called Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland. I want to share what’s been useful in it because it might help you too.
The chapter that’s been on my mind since our most recent community Wonder Questions call is the one about pendulums.
what a pendulum is
When a lot of people think about the same thing for a long time, all that thinking turns into a kind of pull on the people who keep thinking about it. Zeland calls these pulls pendulums.
A pendulum has forward pull to keep going. It stays alive by pulling energy out of the people who pay attention to it. It doesn’t care if you agree or disagree. Both put energy in.
Some pendulums are easy to spot. A sports rivalry, for example, or a political argument. For example, right now in Brazil trading World Cup stickers has crazy momentum. The malls even have special areas set up for people to trade.
Others are harder to see. Your Substack feed is one. Your Stripe dashboard in the middle of a mini-course launch is another.
When you're caught in one, it doesn't feel like a “pendulum”. It feels like your own thoughts guiding you. Sometimes even an intuitive hit.
three ways to tell you’re caught in an unhelpful pendulum.
The first one is energy. You spend half an hour scrolling and you feel tired. You didn't move your body. You didn't even talk to anyone. But you have the experience of less to give to the work you wanted to do today.
Next is your attention. You sit down to write the thing you meant to write. Instead, you end up replying to someone else’s post or comment which was just a little bit triggering. The work you planned for today slides into tomorrow.
The third one is a feeling of urgency that shows up out of seemingly nowhere. The feeling that you need to respond to something right now. The urgency feels like something you own. Most of the time, it actually belongs to the pendulum from an energetic perspective.
If you can learn what that urgency feels like in your body, and how it touches your emotional center, you can catch it before you act on it.
fighting makes it stronger
The first move most people often make is to push back. They write a long reply about why the intention behind the comment is wrong, or they mute or block the person who sent it and walk off feeling slightly better.
That action helps a little.
When dealing with a pendulum, fighting and agreeing are the same thing. They both require energy being invested. You can spend an hour writing a takedown of someone’s bad idea. What you’ve done is give the bad idea another hour of life.
This is why someone you can't stand can sometimes take up as much of your time in your life as someone you love. You read every post they put out. You complain about each one. Either way, the hours have been spent. The pendulum doesn't care which side you're on.
how to actually stop one
You stop a pendulum by not pushing against it. That’s the whole technique.
When the urgency shows up, you don’t have to act on it. You let the feeling pass and keep doing what you were doing.
In real life, this looks like leaving your phone face-down for a minute when everything within you is screaming to grab it. Or seeing a post that’s getting a lot of attention and choosing not to write one like it just because it would do well for the algorithms . Nothing has to change externally. What changes is the internal stance you choose to adopt.
two questions
When I feel that urgency now, I ask myself two questions. They are simple.
Question one.
“Is this feeling coming from what I actually care about, or is it coming from whats coming into awareness?”
Sometimes the answer is the first one. The urgency is real and I should act. Most of the time, that’s not the answer.
Question two.
“If I weren’t under the pull of an external force, what would I actually want to do?”
This one is more useful. The answer often surprises me. There is an opportunity to choose differently.
not caring is also a trap
Most of us never get good at this because we think the only way to stop being pulled is to stop caring. That isn’t true.
Not caring is its own pendulum. It’s a heavy one. You have to keep reminding yourself that you don’t care about things you actually do care about. That takes effort, and the effort drains you.
What Zeland calls neutrality is something else. Neutrality means you care about something without giving it your energy. You can still respond and you can still act. You just don’t get pulled around by what’s in front of you.
It feels like reading a comment on something you wrote and noticing the small urge to defend yourself. You let the urge pass through before you reply. Then you reply, or you don’t. The reply tends to be better. And you don’t lose the rest of the day to the task.
what this has to do with your business
Your business is one of the strongest pendulums in your life. Most people assume the actual work is what wears them out. Then they look back at their week and notice the writing or coaching took just a handful of hours. The rest of the time went to obsessively checking the sales dashboard and reading the group chat of their favorite community to size themselves up against what other people had done.
A lot of people Carolina Wilke and I work with have spent years doing inner work. They think if they keep going deeper, the pull of negativity will stop. The inner work matters. But it usually doesn’t break a pendulum.
What helps is changing how you relate to the forces at work around you. You can keep posting on Substack and stop allowing your energy to swing with what you see being published on the platform. You can keep watching your sales dashboard without letting it decide what kind of week you had. From the outside, you can’t tell the difference. Inside, the stance is different.
Sometimes for success to become more stabilized in our client’s businesses, all they to focus on is stopping from bleeding energy into the parts of their business that pull their focus away from the things that matter. The strategy is often fine. The patience to stay with day by day ordinary parts of running their business is being draing by things they didn’t even realize were robbing them of their energy.
try this for a week
Before you check anything, ask yourself one question. “Is this me, or is this what I’m about to look at, pulling on energy?”
Don’t change what you do. Just answer the question.
The first week I tried this, my Stripe number dipped for three days, then came back. The writing got better my sleep got better too.
You are not as free as you think you are. The part of you that doesn’t want to hear that is the part the pendulums rely on to keep them going.
That’s worth thinking about.
Phil (& Carolina)
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 24th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.