My good witch healer acupuncturist knows a lot about a lot. Most times, as she’s putting tiny needles in my body, soft ohm beats playing in the background, we end up talking about things that stretch far beyond meridians and muscle tension.

I always tell her at the end of my sesh, “I always learn so much when I’m here.”

She really is a brilliant healer and teacher.

She has deep roots in Buddhism. And yesterday, as I’m telling her how the last few weeks have been filled with the swirl of starting my new job—going back to high school—she says, calmly and without preface: “You know there’s an old Buddhist teaching: the root of all suffering is attachment. But really, all attachment is actually what we know to be expectation.”

I’m familiar with the Four Noble Truths. I’ve heard that line about attachment being the root of suffering so many times it’s practically a bumper sticker in my brain. But I always interpreted it through the lens of relationships—codependency, emotional entanglement, staying too long, giving too much. I thought that was what attachment meant.

But when she said it—expectation is attachment—something cracked open.

Because I’ve lived most of my adult life trying to be spectacularly un-attached to people.
But I am marvelously attached to outcomes.
To how I think things should go.
To the color-coded, overplanned blueprint in my head that tries to engineer peace through control.

And suddenly it made sense—why I can’t unclench.
Why I wake up with full-body tension I didn’t fall asleep with.
Why the waiting—on classrooms, on emails, on certainty—makes me feel like I’m not breathing all the way down.

Turns out, control wears a lot of disguises.
And mine looks an awful lot like “being prepared.”

Expectation.
That old thief.

A 2,500-year-old concept.
Still hitting like gospel.

And I felt it in my bones.

It’s why I feel tight in the chest when things don’t go the way I plan.Why my stomach knots when something catches me off guard. Why I’ve been gritting my teeth for weeks, waiting to get into my new classroom—knowing full well it’ll all come together eventually.

It’s not just about letting go of people or outcomes or the story I told myself. It’s about loosening the grip on how I thought things would be.

And that, I’m starting to realize, is what I’ve been working on all along. That’s what “putting it down” really means.

I’ve been paying special attention to the kiddo this week—who’s got his first day of high school in just five days—try to make sense of this same terrain. He came home from orientation heavier than when he left—but honestly, he’s been carrying the weight of it all summer. From the moment he got his schedule and summer reading book, I could see it starting. He’s more than nervous; he’s trying to map out the whole path before he even steps onto it. Trying to plan every step instead of letting it unfold in front of him. And I see what it’s doing to him.

And now it’s starting to manifest in his body—his eczema flaring up, neck strains turning into headaches, a little less patience when the dogs bark. His nervous system already bracing for a world that hasn’t even happened yet.

I reminded him to stay open.
To lead with wonder, not worry.

And then I had to laugh at myself—but not in a funny way. More like a quiet, aching kind of laugh. Because I’ve spent 26 years as a teacher, preaching curiosity and flexibility, and I still forget how to do it myself.

I watch him try to outmaneuver uncertainty and I realize: I do the exact same thing. I’ve spent most of my adult life clenching to control—gripping the wheel with white knuckles, calling it preparation. And my body has kept the score: blood sugar, cholesterol, carrying weight, the constant hum of a nervous system that never learned how to rest.

But watching it play out in front of me—in someone I love, in someone still soft and growing—that hits different.

It hurts different.

We’re both navigating here—just at different altitudes. Letting anxiety creep in through the cracks of unfulfilled expectations. Waiting for everything to line up just so before letting ourselves feel peace.

But what if peace isn’t on the other side of some to-do list?
What if it’s already here—if we can just stop reaching for it?

The real magic of acupuncture is when my healer leaves me to “cook”—and for about 45 minutes, I melt into stillness. I lose track of where my body ends and the bed begins. It’s like being pulled away from shore, into a wide, quiet sea—not scary, just in the most liberating way.

Out there, in that silence, nothing is urgent.
None of the dumb shit I trip over every day even exists.
It’s just peace. And breath. And the faint feeling of being held.

And when she came back in, I told her I was starting to feel weightless and asked if this kind of conscious vastness is possible in everyday life.

She said she only knows like two people in her circle who live that way every day…but the best place to start is accepting and realizing this very basic concept: “Your inner narrator is always sorting things into three baskets: I like this. I don’t like this. I don’t care about this.”

The simplicity of it stopped me cold.
Three baskets.
And all day, every day, it’s so fucking true—I’m dropping every single one of my experiences into one of those three baskets.

Someone says something kind—I like that.
A plan falls through—I don’t like that.
Carrots—I don’t care about carrots.

The sorting happens so fast I don’t even know I’m doing it. But underneath it all is a constant scan, a basic bitch Brita filter:
Is this good or bad? Safe or dangerous? Worth my energy or not?

It’s automatic.
But it’s also the mechanism that keeps me anxious, reactive, and closed off from the moment I’m actually in.

This, in Buddhist thought, is called vedanā—the feeling tone. Not emotion exactly, but the immediate impression: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And it turns out, just recognizing that our ego is so simple that it separates our entire life into just those three tones—just noticing that I’m doing this—is the beginning of freedom.

Because it’s not the experience that causes suffering.
It’s the grasping.
The pushing away.
The zoning out.

I cling to the pleasant.
Resist the unpleasant.
Sleepwalk through the neutral.

And in doing so, I’m missing what’s actually happening.

When I asked her for more clarity, she told me to pay special attention on the first day of school. Not just to the lesson plan or the nerves or whether the whiteboard markers are dried out again—but to the voice in my head. Because even then—especially then—my narrator will be sorting my students into the three baskets:

Like.
Don’t like.
Don’t care.

And that hit me somewhere deep.

Because maybe—just maybe—that’s where I used to land, too.
Maybe, as a solid C student with abandonment issues and a lot going on behind the scenes, I got dropped into the “don’t care” basket by more than a few adults.
Maybe some of the people I needed most didn’t even realize they were sorting me.

And maybe the most radical thing I can do—
as a teacher, a bonus adult, a human in a messy world—
is to stop doing that.

To break free from the reflex to judge or rank or dismiss.
To see what’s really in front of me.
To become present in the room I’m actually in.

The question, of course, is: how?
How do you stop sorting when your brain’s been trained to do it forever?

She told me the first step is awareness without judgment. Noticing when you’re sorting—but without shame. Just: “Oh, look. I’m doing the thing.”

Here are a few things I’m gonna start trying:

• Micro-pauses.
  Before I react, respond, or label something, lemme take one deep breath and ask: What is this moment asking for? Not what I like, but what’s real.
• Curiosity check-ins.
  When I feel myself shutting down—toward a student, a coworker, a family member—I’m gonna ask: What don’t I know yet? Because the answer is always: a lot.
• Name the basket.
  If I catch myself thinking “ugh” or “meh” or “yes, please,” I’m gonna try to mentally say: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. That’s it. No story. Just identify the tone.
• Reverse the lens.
  When I’m tempted to judge someone, I’m gonna ask myself: What basket would they put me in today? It’s humbling. It’ll soften me.
• Moments of silence.
  I’m gonna try to create at least one sliver of silence in my day where I’m not inputting anything. No podcast. No playlist. Just breathing and noticing what’s rising up without narration.

It’s not a transformation. It’s a practice.
Over and over again.

Noticing.
Interrupting.
Returning.

And maybe, if I keep at it—gently, imperfectly—I’ll learn to live less from the voice that’s always sorting, and more from the quiet, spacious place beneath it, the place I go in the open waters of acupuncture, where nothing needs to be earned or explained in order to matter.