Tiny Buddha

Tag: self-compassion

  • The Power of Imperfect Work in an AI-Driven, Perfection-Obsessed World

    The Power of Imperfect Work in an AI-Driven, Perfection-Obsessed World

    “Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.” ~Salvador Dalí

    We live in a world that worships polish.

    Perfect photos on Instagram. Seamless podcasts with no awkward pauses. Articles that read like they’ve passed through a dozen editors.

    And now, with AI tools that can produce mistake-free writing in seconds, the bar feels even higher. Machines can generate flawless sentences, perfect grammar, and shiny ideas on demand. Meanwhile, I’m over here second-guessing a paragraph, rewriting the same sentence six different ways, and still wondering if “Best” or “Warmly” is the less awkward email sign-off.

    It’s easy to feel like our messy, human work doesn’t measure up.

    I’ve fallen into that trap plenty of times. I’ve delayed publishing because “it’s not ready.” I’ve rerecorded podcasts because I stumbled on a word. I’ve tweaked and reformatted things no one else would even notice.

    Perfectionism whispers: If it isn’t flawless, don’t share it.

    But over time, I’ve learned something else: imperfection is not a liability. It’s the whole point.

    A Table Full of Flaws

    One of the best lessons I’ve ever learned about imperfection came not from writing or technology, but from woodworking.

    About a decade ago, I decided to build a dining table. I spent hours measuring, cutting, sanding, and staining. I wanted it to be perfect.

    But here’s the truth about woodworking: nothing ever turns out perfect. Ever.

    That table looks solid from across the room. But if you step closer, you’ll notice the flaws. The board I mismeasured by a quarter inch. The corner I over-sanded. The stain that didn’t set evenly.

    At first, I saw those flaws as failures. Proof that I wasn’t skilled enough, patient enough, or careful enough.

    But then something surprising happened. My wife walked into the room, saw the finished table, and said she loved it. She didn’t see the mistakes. She saw something that had been made with love and care.

    And slowly, I began to see it that way, too.

    That table isn’t just furniture. It’s proof of effort, process, and patience. It carries my fingerprints, my sweat, and my imperfect humanity.

    And here’s the kicker: it’s way more fulfilling than anything mass-produced or manufactured as machine-perfect.

    Why Imperfection Connects Us

    That table taught me something AI never could: flaws tell a story.

    Machines can produce flawless outputs, but they can’t create meaning. They can’t replicate the pride of sanding wood with your own hands or the laughter around a table that wobbled for the first month.

    Imperfections are what make something ours. They carry our fingerprints, quirks, and lived experiences.

    In contrast, perfection is sterile. It might be impressive, but it rarely feels alive.

    Think about the things that move us most—a friend’s vulnerable story, a laugh that turns into a snort, a talk where the speaker loses their train of thought but recovers with honesty. When was the last time you felt closest to someone? Chances are, it wasn’t when they were polished, it was when they were real. Those moments connect us precisely because they are imperfect.

    They remind us we’re not alone in our flaws.

    The AI Contrast

    AI dazzles us because it never stutters. It never doubts. It never sends an awkward text or spills coffee on its keyboard. AI can do flawless. But flawless isn’t the same as meaningful.

    But here’s what it doesn’t do:

    • It doesn’t feel the mix of pride and embarrassment in showing someone your wobbly table.
    • It doesn’t understand the joy of cooking a meal that didn’t go exactly to plan.
    • It doesn’t know what it’s like to hit “publish” while your stomach churns with nerves, only to get a message later that says, “This made me feel less alone.”

    Flawlessness might be a machine’s strength. But humanity is ours.

    The very things I used to try to hide—the quirks, the rough edges, the imperfections—are the things that make my work worth sharing.

    A Different Kind of Readiness

    I used to think I needed to wait until something was “ready.” The blog post polished just right. The podcast that’s perfectly edited. The message refined until it couldn’t possibly be criticized.

    But I’ve learned that readiness is a mirage. It’s often just perfectionism in disguise.

    The truth is, most of the things that resonated most with people—my most-downloaded podcast episode, the articles that readers emailed me about months later—were the ones I almost didn’t share. The ones that felt too messy, too vulnerable, too real.

    And yet, those are the ones people said, “This is exactly what I needed to hear.”

    Not the flawless ones. The human ones.

    How We Can Embrace Imperfection

    I’m not saying it’s easy. Perfectionism is sneaky. It wears the disguise of “high standards” or “being thorough.”

    Here’s what I’ve found helps me. Not rules, but reminders I keep returning to:

    Share before you feel ready.If it feels 80% good enough, release it. The last 20% is often just endless polishing.

    Reframe mistakes as stories.My table’s flaws? Now they’re conversation starters. What mistakes of yours might carry meaning, too?

    Notice where imperfection builds connection.The things that make people feel closer to you usually aren’t the shiny parts. They’re the honest ones.

    The Bigger Picture

    We live in a culture obsessed with speed, optimization, and polish. AI accelerates that pressure. It tempts us to compete on machine terms: flawless, instant, infinite.

    But that’s not the game we’re meant to play.

    Our advantage—our only real advantage—is that we’re human. We bring nuance, empathy, humor, vulnerability, and lived experience.

    Robots don’t laugh until they snort. They don’t ugly cry during Pixar movies. They don’t mismeasure wood or forget to use the wood glue and build a table that their partner loves anyway.

    You do. I do. That’s the point.

    So maybe we don’t need to sand down every rough edge. Perhaps we don’t need to hide every flaw.

    Because when the world is flooded with flawless, machine-polished work, the imperfect, human things will stand out.

    And those are the things people will remember.

  • What Finally Helped Me Break Free from Constant Food Noise

    What Finally Helped Me Break Free from Constant Food Noise

    “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” ~Viktor Frankl

    For years, I thought something was wrong with me.

    No matter what I was doing—sitting in a meeting, walking the dog, or watching TV—my brain was busy debating food.

    Should I eat? Shouldn’t I? I could just have one more bite, couldn’t I? What should I eat next? I’ve blown it today, haven’t I? I’ve failed again. Shall I just eat whatever I want and start again tomorrow?

    The chatter was constant. It left me exhausted, ashamed, and convinced that I was weak.

    I told myself it was a lack of willpower. If I just tried harder, surely I could silence it. But the harder I fought, the louder it became.

    The Night Everything Changed

    One night, after a long and stressful day, I stood in the kitchen with the fridge door open.

    I wasn’t hungry. My stomach was full from dinner, but my mind was shouting at me to grab something, anything.

    The noise in my head felt unbearable. It was as if I couldn’t relax until I gave in.

    In that moment, for the first time, I paused. I asked myself a simple question: What am I really hungry for right now?

    The answer wasn’t food. It was comfort. Distraction. Relief from stress I hadn’t dealt with.

    It hit me that food wasn’t the real problem. The problem was the mental chatter about food, what many people now call food noise.

    What I Discovered About Food Noise

    Food noise isn’t hunger. Hunger is physical: your stomach growling, your energy dipping, your body asking for fuel.

    Food noise is mental: urgent, repetitive, often specific. It pushes you toward food even when you’re not hungry, convincing you that you need it to cope or to feel better.

    Learning this was a turning point. For years I had labeled myself a failure. But food noise wasn’t about failing at all. It was about how the brain works.

    Every time I ate in response to boredom, stress, or fatigue, my brain logged it as a “reward.” The next time I felt the same cue, the noise grew louder. The loop repeated itself until it became automatic.

    Understanding this gave me something I’d been missing: compassion for myself. I wasn’t broken. I was human. And if my brain could be trained into these loops, maybe it could be retrained out of them too.

    How I Began to Quiet the Noise

    I didn’t wake up one morning free of food chatter. It quieted slowly, through small practices that I repeated again and again.

    Naming it

    When the thoughts started, I said to myself, “That’s food noise, not hunger.” It may sound simple, but naming it gave me distance. It reminded me I wasn’t my thoughts.

    Pausing before reacting

    At first, I felt powerless against the urges. But I began experimenting with a short pause. Just two minutes. During that pause, I’d sip water, stretch, or step outside. Sometimes the craving was still there afterward, but often it had already passed. That pause gave me back a sense of choice.

    Refuting the chatter

    The hardest part wasn’t the food itself. It was the voice in my head.

    It would say, “You’ve already ruined the day; you may as well keep going.” Or, “One more won’t matter.” I believed it every time, and each binge ended with guilt and shame.

    I finally found help with a cognitive behavioral tool I’d never heard of before: the refutation.

    A refutation is simply answering back to the thought—calmly, clearly, without judgment. It’s like shining a light on a lie.

    The first time I tried it, I wrote my food noise down on paper: “You’ve ruined today, so you may as well give up.” Then I wrote my response underneath: “One moment doesn’t ruin a whole day. If I stop now, I’ll feel better tonight. If I keep going, I’ll feel worse.”

    It felt strange at first, almost like arguing with myself. But slowly, those written words became a voice I could access in real time.

    Now, when the chatter starts, I can hear both sides: the urge and the refutation. And with practice, the refutation has grown stronger.

    Some of the ones I use often are:

    Food noise says: “One bite won’t hurt.”
    Refutation: “One bite keeps the loop alive. Every time I resist, I weaken it.”

    Food noise says: “You can just start again tomorrow.”
    Refutation: “If I wait until tomorrow, I make waiting a habit. The best time to start is now.”

    Food noise says: “You’ve earned this.”
    Refutation: “I’ve earned peace of mind, not more noise.”

    At first, I had to write them down. Over time, they became automatic.

    Self-kindness

    For years, slipping up meant spiraling into guilt and shame. Now, when I give in, I remind myself, “This is hard, and I’m learning.” That kindness keeps me moving forward instead of sinking deeper.

    Each of these practices was like a mental rep in the gym. The more I repeated them, the stronger I became.

    What Quiet Feels Like

    The first time I realized I had gone an entire morning without obsessing about food, I almost cried.

    The silence in my head felt like a gift.

    Quiet doesn’t mean I never think about food. It means food has stopped being the background soundtrack of my life.

    I can work without constant distraction.

    I can sit with my family without guilt.

    I can enjoy a meal without a running commentary in my mind.

    Most importantly, I’ve started to trust myself again.

    The Bigger Lesson

    What I learned from food noise applies far beyond eating.

    Our minds are noisy places, full of chatter about success, relationships, fears, and the future.

    If we treat every thought as urgent and true, we end up exhausted. But if we learn to pause, to name the chatter, and to choose differently, we create space for peace.

    The greatest gift wasn’t just a quieter relationship with food. It was discovering that not every thought in my head deserves a reaction.

    That lesson has changed more than my eating. It has changed how I live.

  • Work Is Not Family: A Lesson I Never Wanted but Need to Share

    Work Is Not Family: A Lesson I Never Wanted but Need to Share

    “The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.” ~Peter Levine

    I was sitting in the conference room at work with the CEO and my abusive male boss.

    The same boss who had been love-bombing and manipulating me since I started nine months earlier, slowly pushing my nervous system into a constant state of fight-or-flight.

    When I was four months into the job, this boss went on a three-day bender during an overnight work conference at a fancy hotel in Boston.

    He skipped client meetings or showed up smelling like alcohol, wearing yesterday’s clothes.

    When I texted him to ask where he was, he replied, “I f**king hate you.”

    When my CEO found out and called me five minutes after I got home, I told him I trusted him to handle it however he saw fit.

    I really believed he would. But over the next five months, the abuse didn’t stop. I just didn’t know it was abuse yet.

    He was over-the-top obsessed with me. He regularly told me:

    • “You’re going to make so much money here.”
    • “You have the ‘it’ factor.”
    • “You know how I feel about you.”
    • “I’m going to fast-track you.”
    • “You’re such a good culture fit.”
    • “This has been your home all along.”

    He told me everything I wanted to hear.

    I had spent the prior fifteen years in corporate America, wondering where I belonged. Wondering where my work family was.

    At first, I felt like I had finally found it.

    Then the attention escalated. What started as friendly check-ins became constant interruptions. The group Teams chats turned into direct messages. The work texts turned into personal texts—at night and on the weekends.

    He asked to go to dinner with me and my husband. He offered to buy me lunch while ignoring my coworkers. He brought in cookies for the office but made sure I knew they were for me. He singled me out in meetings and asked how I was doing while ignoring everyone else.

    I told myself, “There are worse things than your boss liking you.” But over time…I started to feel unsafe.

    My body started to send signals. I was having panic attacks on Sunday nights. I couldn’t sleep. I found myself using PTO just to get away from him. My fight-or-flight response was fully activated, and I finally had to admit I wasn’t in control anymore.

    Eventually, a coworker reported it to the CEO. Which brings me back to the conference room.

    I sat across from the CEO, body tense, heart racing, but filled with hope. I was ready for resolution. Support. Justice.

    That’s not what happened.

    Whatever the CEO said that day affected me in a way I didn’t expect. I felt minimized. Judged. Dismissed.

    Then my body reacted.

    The pressure in my chest started to build until I couldn’t control it anymore. I started shaking—full-body, uncontrollable shaking. I tried to sit still, tried to pretend nothing was happening, but it was too late.

    There was no hiding it. No escaping it.

    Just a forty-two-year-old corporate woman, uncontrollably shaking in a conference room across from the CEO.

    I excused myself and ran to the restroom.

    I lay on the floor of the public bathroom and cried harder than I ever had. My body was forcing the energy out of me. There was nothing I could do but let it come out.

    Once the tears slowed, I left the building as fast as I could.

    What had just happened to me?
    Why did it feel like a gaping wound had opened in my chest?
    Why did I feel physically damaged?

    It would take almost a year before I understood: that was trauma. That was new trauma layered on top of old trauma.

    Almost exactly twenty years earlier, I had been sexually assaulted by a coworker.

    I reported it to the police, and they didn’t even take a statement. I was sent away. Dismissed. Minimized.

    My brain had filed this memory away. But my body remembered.

    That moment in the conference room—being in a position of vulnerability, being ignored, unheard, unprotected—triggered a trauma response that had been waiting quietly inside of me for decades.

    My brain couldn’t tell the difference between past and present. It just knew I wasn’t safe. So it mobilized. It tried to protect me. And it left me raw, shut down, and checked out from the world—including my own kids—for a long time afterward.

    It was the worst time of my life.

    Several months after the conference room incident, I got a new job.

    It wasn’t easy to leave despite everything that had happened. I liked my job. I was good at it. My coworkers were my friends, and we had been through so much together. But I had become a shell of myself, and leaving seemed like the only way to get myself back.

    Even so, the first six months at my new job were not easy. I remained hypervigilant and emotionally reactive. Standard feedback and performance reviews brought me right back to that conference room, no matter what was said.

    That’s when I learned: trauma doesn’t stay with the toxic job. It comes with you. And this was trauma.

    What I Learned About Trauma

    I needed to learn everything I could, so I enrolled in a trauma-informed coaching program and studied my experience through that lens.

    From a trauma perspective, I learned:

    • The brain constantly scans the environment for safety and danger, a process called neuroception.
    • My brain perceived danger in countless ways during my employment and alerted me through my nervous system.
    • I rationalized those signals away, telling myself I could handle it.
    • But the signals—racing heart, insomnia, panic, emotional reactivity—only got louder until they could no longer be ignored.

    It felt like my body was attacking me. In reality, it was trying to save me.

    Trauma is what happens when your system struggles to cope with overwhelming distress, leaving a wound behind. Those wounds don’t need your permission to exist; they only need a trigger.

    That day in the conference room, multiple unhealed wounds surfaced all at once—sexual trauma, financial trauma, friendship trauma, life purpose trauma, and institutional betrayal trauma.

    The new trauma stacked on the old was simply too much for my system to manage. So my body did what it was designed to do: protect me.

    Learning this allowed me to release the shame I was carrying. It allowed me to have compassion for myself and others.

    It made me stop looking backward and start looking forward.

    What I Learned About Work

    While I was learning about trauma, I started asking bigger questions in my new role as an HR consultant.

    I had never worked in HR before, so I studied every conversation, policy, and process to understand how the system works behind the scenes and to view my own experience through the employer’s lens.

    Who really has the power?
    What rights do employees have?
    What responsibilities do employers have to protect them?

    Here’s what I learned:

    • The employment agreement is simple—employees agree to perform the duties on their job description, and employers agree to compensate them for performing those duties.
    • Both parties can end the agreement at any time.
    • HR and employment attorneys are paid to protect the company from risk. Period.

    That’s it. Anything beyond that is optional, unless required by law.

    Work is a contract. It is not a family. It is a system built for labor, not love.

    And this system is not immune to abuse. It is not immune to trauma.

    Just because it’s a professional setting doesn’t mean it’s a safe one. And just because you’re a high performer doesn’t mean you’re not vulnerable to harm.

    The idea that work is a family, that it should provide belonging, meaning, and loyalty, didn’t come from nowhere—it reflects how work itself has changed over time.

    In the past, belonging came from many places at once: tight-knit communities, extended families, faith traditions, and work that was often woven into local or family life.

    When industrialization pulled people into factories, corporations, and offices, many of those community anchors began to lose influence. To fill the void, workplaces leaned into family language—promising connection and loyalty in exchange for more of people’s time, energy, and devotion.

    For a time, many companies did try to live up to that promise with pensions, long-term employment, and mutual loyalty between employer and employee.

    But as work has become more globalized and transactional, that loyalty has faded. Today, organizations still borrow the language of family, but the commitment is one-sided. When it serves them, they lean on employees’ devotion; when it doesn’t, the illusion disappears.

    That’s how we know work is not family—because families don’t withdraw love, belonging, or loyalty the moment it no longer serves them.

    What Helped Me Heal

    The good news is healing is possible.

    For me, healing meant more than just learning about trauma in a classroom and HR policies in an office. It meant implementing daily practices into my life that rebuilt my sense of safety and helped me trust myself again. This included:

    Monitoring my nervous system and honoring my body’s responses to triggers.

    I started noticing the small cues—a clenched jaw, a racing heart, a stomach that wouldn’t settle. Instead of pushing through, I learned to pause, breathe, and respond with care. These moments of noticing became the foundation of feeling safe in my own body again.

    Exploring my past experiences with compassion instead of judgment.

    For years, I believed I had compassion for myself, but it was shallow—more like telling myself to “let it go” than honoring what I had lived through. It wasn’t until I became aware of the experiences that shaped my patterns and behaviors that I finally understood real self-compassion.

    Recognizing the subconscious behaviors that put me at risk.

    Perfectionism, rationalizing red flags, unhealthy coping strategies—these were patterns I had carried for decades. Becoming aware of them gave me the power to make different choices, rather than repeating the same painful cycles.

    Setting boundaries at work to protect my energy and healing.

    I learned how to say no without guilt, how to step away from people who drain me, and how to handle the frustrations of work without getting emotionally activated. Boundaries have become an act of self-love.

    Honoring the complexity of the human body and lived experience.

    This was the hardest lesson of all. I carry a body, brain, and nervous system that remember everything I’ve been through, even the parts I’ve tried to forget. My responsibility now is to honor that complexity in every environment I step into—including work.

    That doesn’t mean molding myself to whatever the workplace demands. It means protecting my well-being first and remembering that I am more than a role, a paycheck, or the approval of others.

    It took time, but these practices slowly closed the wound that had once left me gasping for air on the floor of that bathroom. The open wound in my chest has now been closed for over a year and has been replaced with peace.

    That day in the conference room broke me. But it also cracked me open. I put myself back together, stronger than ever.

    And you can, too.

  • What Happened When I Stopped Expecting Perfection from Myself

    What Happened When I Stopped Expecting Perfection from Myself

    “There is no amount of self-improvement that can make up for a lack of self-acceptance.” ~Robert Holden

    Six years ago, I forgot it was picture day at my daughter’s school. She left the house in a sweatshirt with a faint, unidentifiable stain and hair still bent from yesterday’s ponytail.

    The photographer probably spent less than ten seconds on her photo, but I spent hours replaying the morning in my head, imagining her years later looking at that picture and believing her mother had not tried hard enough.

    It’s strange how small moments can lodge themselves in memory. Even now, when life is smooth, that picture sometimes drifts back. The difference is that I no longer treat it as proof that I am careless or unloving. I see it as a reminder that no one gets it all right, no matter how hard they try.

    I tend to hold on to my “failures” long after everyone else has let them go. My daughter has never mentioned that photo, and one day, if she becomes a mother, she might discover that small imperfections are not proof of neglect. They can be a kind of grace.

    For most of my life, I thought being a good person meant being relentlessly self-critical. I stayed up too late worrying over things no one else noticed, like an unanswered text or a dusty shelf before company arrived. Sometimes I replayed conversations until I found the exact moment I could have been warmer or wiser.

    The list was endless, and my self-worth seemed to hinge on how perfectly I performed in every role. Somewhere along the way, I started expecting myself to already know how to do everything right. But this is the first time I have lived this exact day, with this exact set of challenges and choices.

    It is the first time parenting a child this age. The first time navigating friendships in this season. The first time balancing today’s responsibilities with today’s emotions.

    The shift came on a day when nothing seemed to go my way. I missed an appointment I had no excuse for missing, realized too late that I had forgotten to order my friend’s birthday gift, and then managed to burn dinner. None of it was catastrophic, but the weight of these small failures began to gather, as they always did, into a heaviness in my chest.

    I could feel myself leaning toward the familiar spiral of self-reproach when I happened to glance across the room and see my daughter. And in that instant, a thought surfaced: What if I spoke to myself the way I would speak to her if she had made these same mistakes?

    I knew exactly what I would say. I would remind her that being human means sometimes getting it wrong. I would tell her that one day’s mistakes do not erase years of love.

    I would make sure she knew she was still good, still worthy, and still enough. So I tried saying it to myself, out loud. “We all make mistakes.”

    The words felt clumsy, almost unnatural, like I was finally trying to speak the language I had only just begun to learn. But something inside softened just enough for me to take a breath and let the day end without carrying all its weight into tomorrow.

    Self-compassion has not made me careless. It has made me steadier. When I stop spending my energy on shame, I have more of it for the people and priorities that matter.

    Research confirms this truth. Self-compassion is not about lowering standards. It is about building the emotional safety that allows us to keep showing up without fear.

    And here is what I have learned about actually practicing it. Self-compassion is not a single thought or mantra. It’s a habit, one you build the same way you would strength or endurance.

    It begins with noticing the voice in your head when you make a mistake. Most of us have an internal commentator that sounds less like a mentor and more like a drill sergeant. The work is in catching that voice in the act and then, without forcing a smile or pretending you are not disappointed, speaking to yourself like someone you love.

    Sometimes that means literally saying the words out loud so you can hear the tone. Sometimes it means pausing long enough to remember you are still learning. Sometimes it means choosing kindness even when shame feels easier.

    It also helps to remember what self-compassion is not. It is not excusing harmful behavior or ignoring areas where we want to grow. It is acknowledging that growth happens more easily in a climate of patience than in one of punishment.

    The science supports this. When we practice self-kindness, our stress response begins to quiet, and our nervous system has a chance to settle. This does not just feel better in the moment; it makes it easier to think clearly and choose our next step.

    I’ve noticed other changes as well. Self-compassion makes me braver. When I’m not terrified of berating myself if I fall short, I am more willing to try something new.

    I take risks in conversations. I admit when I do not know something. I start things without obsessing over how they’ll end, and when mistakes inevitably happen, I don’t have to waste days recovering from my own criticism.

    Sometimes self-compassion is quiet, like putting your phone down when you begin to spiral through mental replays. Sometimes it is active, like deciding to stop apologizing for being human. Sometimes it is physical, like unclenching your jaw or placing a hand on your chest as you breathe.

    Over time, these small gestures add up. They rewire the way you respond to yourself, replacing the reflex of blame with the reflex of care.

    We are all walking into each day for the first time. Of course we will miss a detail or lose our patience. Of course we will get things wrong.

    But when we meet ourselves with kindness instead of condemnation, we remind ourselves that love, whether for others or for ourselves, has never depended on perfection.

    And that lesson will last far longer than any perfect picture.

  • How I Found My Midlife Roar in the Beautiful Mess of Perimenopause

    How I Found My Midlife Roar in the Beautiful Mess of Perimenopause

    “Menopause is a journey where you rediscover yourself and become the woman you were always meant to be.” ~Dr. Christiane Northrup

    I recently had a healing session with a dear client of mine.

    “Before we begin,” she asked, “how are you?”

    I blinked and said, “Oh, you know, the usual. Just navigating perimenopause. Hallucinating about living alone without my partner one minute and panicking about dying alone the next.”

    She burst into laughter.

    “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I find myself browsing apartment listings weekly. Good to know I’m not the only one.”

    Ah, yes, the sacred scrolls of apartment listings, or how I see it, midlife porn for the spiritually exhausted woman who just wants to drink tea in silence without someone breathing in her direction in the morning.

    Another friend, a psychologist, recently told me her partner kept his old studio even after they moved in together. Every month, during her hormonal spikes, he retreats there for a few days. Sometimes, they upgrade to one night per week in addition to that.

    Brilliant! I call that preventative medicine. Maybe the couple that gives each other space stays together and doesn’t make weird headlines in the “Relationships Gone Wrong” subreddit.

    Because here is the truth no one prepared me for: perimenopause is not just a hormonal rollercoaster; it’s a full-blown existential rave. One moment, I’m craving solitude like it’s a basic human right; the next, I’m sobbing at a dog food commercial and wondering if I’ll end up alone in a nursing home run by AI robots.

    And then there’s the fog that makes my brain feel like a group chat with no admin and everyone talking at once. My short-term memory, once razor-sharp, now resembles a moth-eaten scarf. Entire thoughts evaporate mid-sentence, names disappear like ghosts, and I have started writing everything down so I don’t forget.

    Add to that the sleepless nights, the 3 a.m. existential spirals, and the relief that I’m not suffering from the other fifty-plus perimenopausal symptoms. At least for now…

    It reminds me of my teenage years when I slammed my door (multiple times, one after another, because once wasn’t enough to make my point!), rolled my eyes, and decided everyone was annoying.

    Well, welcome to perimenopause: the reboot. Only now, you can’t blame puberty. And yet, you are expected to function, hold a job, maybe raise a human or two.

    My partner, bless him, is a genuinely kind, grounded man. He cooks. He shops. He walks our Shiba Inu pup. He supports my business and all my spiritual rants. And yet, lately, his mere existence makes me want to silently pack a bag and join a women-only monastery in the Pyrenees.

    My midlife journey is wrapped in complexities. I have an estranged father and a mother with Parkinson’s disease who lives in the UK. Thanks to Brexit, I can’t just pack up and live with her. Nor does she want to leave the UK.

    And I? I’m nomadic by nature. My roots are in motion, more like driftwood than oak, so even if she wanted to join me, there is no permanent place I call home.

    Recently, I signed a power of attorney for my mum’s health and finances. The doctor had suggested it after suspecting early signs of dementia. “It’s best to get your affairs in order now,” she said.

    I nodded. And then, I woke up with a frozen right shoulder the next morning. My body had declared mutiny, and I knew this wasn’t random. My right shoulder was reacting to the invisible weight, the pressure, the emotional inheritance of being the one who holds it all.

    And I can’t help but wonder: how many of us in midlife are carrying too much? How many of us have aching backs, inflamed joints, tight jaws, and no idea that our bodies are the ones screaming when we don’t?

    Our generation inherited the burnout of our mothers and the emotional silence of our fathers. And now, our bodies are saying, “Enough.” And through it all, my body shows up. Even when aching or confused. Even when the wiring feels off. She—this body—keeps holding me. Keeps asking me to come home.

    But amid the aches and obligations, something else began to stir beneath the surface, and I realized that not all is negative. I also recognize midlife for what it is: a powerful transition. A threshold. A sacred invitation to step into deeper sovereignty.

    I believe that beneath the hormonal rollercoaster lies something deeper: A quiet, seismic shift from performing to becoming. What if midlife isn’t just about loss or exhaustion but also a portal: a wild, fiery, phoenix-shaped portal to something richer and more meaningful?

    In mythology, there is a sacred archetype we rarely talk about: the Crone. The word comes from Old Norse and Celtic roots and was reclaimed by Jungian analyst Marion Woodman and feminist scholars to signify the wise elder woman—she who sees in the dark, who knows, who no longer needs to be pretty or polite.

    She is bone and truth and howl, and what’s even better, she is awakening inside of us, taking up more and more space inside our minds, hearts, and souls.

    Midlife is when we begin to embody her. It’s when we stop whispering and start roaring. It’s when we say, “Actually, no, I won’t do that. I don’t want to. I’m tired. And I need silence, space, and possibly a cabin in the woods with good Wi-Fi and nobody talking.”

    We begin to reclaim our right to be contradictory, to change our minds, to speak from the fire in our bellies instead of the scripts we memorized to be loved.

    I’m proud to announce that my people-pleasing days are over. Gone is the spiritual language I used to soften my rage, to be accepted in the love-and-light circles. I started questioning toxic positivity years ago, but now I am fully allergic to it.

    Don’t tell me “Everything happens for a reason” when there are genocides unfolding as we speak. Don’t tell me to raise my vibration while I’m caring for a mother who might forget my name in the near future. Don’t tell me that anger is a “low frequency” emotion when it’s a healthy response to witnessing atrocities happening everywhere.

    My anger, or sacred rage as I like to call it, is what fuels me to speak up, to raise my voice, to speak about what’s important to me.

    Midlife isn’t just a phase; it’s a rite of passage that comes with many gifts and also responsibilities.

    One: Grounded power.

    While my thirties were spent floating in “ascension” mode—channeling, visualizing, forever raising my frequency—my forties have been a lesson in descension: in landing fully in my body, in the mess, in the moment. In letting my roots grow deep and wild and unafraid. I no longer want to float or ascend.

    Two: Embodied truth.

    Midlife strips us of our masks. I no longer pretend. I tell the truth in my podcast, in my sessions, in my writing. I don’t want clients who expect me to be their guru. I want kinship. I want real, authentic connections.

    And yes, I still have moments of spiraling. I still fantasize about living alone. But I also know now, deeply, that those longings aren’t escapism. They are calls to return to myself, and this return to self needs some form of silence and solitude.

    Three: Fierce compassion.

    I no longer hold back what I feel. But I also no longer feel the need to carry everyone else’s pain. Right now, I am learning to care deeply without losing myself.

    As Anaïs Nin said, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

    Midlife, for me, is the season of blooming open even if the petals are a little singed. I might not go and live alone any time soon, but I will spend a month alone traveling through China this September. And my partner, the understanding man that he is, will stay with my mum to take care of her that month.

    So if you, too, are hallucinating about renting a solo flat, crying over a parent’s future, snapping at your beloved for simply blinking, and wondering who you even are right now, you are not broken. And you are also not alone. You are becoming.

    Welcome to the middle. It’s messy and holy and completely yours. This season isn’t meant to break you. It’s meant to reintroduce you to the version of yourself that was always waiting.

    And if your shoulder or your back starts acting up: Pause. Breathe. Put your hand on your heart and whisper, “I hear you.”

    Then, slowly, powerfully, roar. Because your voice—raw, ragged, and real—was never meant to whisper.

  • How Avoiding Painful Emotions Can Lead to a Smaller Life

    How Avoiding Painful Emotions Can Lead to a Smaller Life

    “Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer.” ~Gabor Mate

    Most of us avoid experiences not necessarily because we don’t like them or want them, but because we don’t want to feel how we will feel when we go through that experience.

    Our lives become altered by the emotions we don’t want to feel because we don’t want to move toward the thing that could bring strong emotions like fear, shame, sadness, or disappointment.

    We don’t want to go to that party because we’ll probably feel awkward and embarrassed.

    We don’t want to chase that work opportunity in case we feel disappointed if it doesn’t work out.

    We don’t want to take that trip because it might feel scary.

    We don’t want to slow down our busy lives because it feels too terrifying to contemplate emptiness and quiet.

    And then we get this idea about ourselves that this is just who we are. We are just:

    • People who don’t like parties
    • People who don’t travel
    • People who are fearful
    • People who are procrastinators
    • People who are just busy but intensely stressed

    We have this idea that this is just who we are, and therefore, this is how we should live. Perhaps we feel an anger or an anguish at being “this type of person.” Or maybe it just feels so unconscious, so embedded in our personality, that we don’t do certain things, that we accept it as just the way we are. 

    For most of my life I thought I was a nervous, cautious, fearful person. That was just how I was born. I thought I couldn’t change it, just like I couldn’t change my hair color or my deep love for mashed potatoes. It felt biological. Some people were brave and courageous; I was fearful and afraid of almost everything.

    I carried this with me, this idea about who I was, until I learned that emotions like fear and terror, anger and rage, and despair or sadness are just emotions that we need to learn how to be with. And if we don’t learn how to be with them, they can create an outsized influence on our lives—creating this idea about who we are and what kind of personality we have and causing us to avoid things that trigger these feelings.

    But what we are actually avoiding is not the experience, people, or things but the feelings we feel when we think about that thing or try to do it. The feelings around meeting new people, starting a new work project, being in the thick of the uncertainty of traveling, etc.

    It’s the feelings that are so difficult for us, not the experiences. So we start to make choices on what we are prepared to do and what we are not. We mold our lives around the things that generate emotions we don’t know how to be with. And we don’t head toward things we don’t like because of how we will feel and what we think will happen when we walk toward that feeling.

    Because our body isn’t used to really being with the emotion we are avoiding, or it has proved problematic in the past.

    This is because a lot of our emotions activate our survival network. And when our survival network has been activated, things feel urgent, maybe even dangerous, unsafe.

    Maybe we have sweaty palms, a feeling of doom in our bodies, a racing heart, a desire to escape quickly, panic, or even an abundance of uncontrollable rage.

    So our brain starts to associate this emotion with survival being activated. It’s like it labels “new work opportunity” or “traveling” as an undesirable or unsafe experience because of the emotions that generate around that experience.

    We just don’t know what to do with these emotions.

    Our brains say, “Don’t go near that! It’s dangerous!”

    So we become like a player in a video game, running around avoiding falling boulders, jumping over pits of snakes, maneuvering out of the way of giant fireballs.

    But what our brain perceives as threats are not actually threats but emotions it doesn’t know what to do with.

    The pits of snakes aren’t snakes but fear around traveling. Or the boulders are the fear of disappointment or despair. Avoiding the fireballs is trying to avoid shame.

    The harsh thing, though, is that even though we are trying to sensibly avoid these emotions, these survival reactions, we don’t get to avoid them completely.

    The shame, the fear, the rage, the terror—they are there in our body and popping up in other places. We can’t avoid them completely, and by trying to avoid them, we simply make our lives smaller and smaller and smaller.

    Are we doomed to spend our lives in avoidance mode?

    Do we just have to accept that some things are just  “too hard,” “too stressful,” “not for people like us”?

    No. Way.

    That is the really exciting thing about our brains. We have learned to be this way because of how we learned to deal with emotions. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a new way. That we can’t ‘rewire’ the responses we have learned.

    By working with my own fear, by learning how to be with it, I stopped feeling so scared about everything in my life. I totally changed how I saw myself.  I no longer believe myself to be a fearful, overly cautious person.

    I gave myself time to learn to be with the energy of the fear in a way that was so gentle and slow that it helped me to feel safe around the emotion in a way I never had before.

    I realized that the problem is not that we are avoiding our emotions on purpose; it’s that we don’t understand them.

    This is what is so hard about how so many of us learn to live our lives.

    We aren’t given the tools to work with our emotions (most of us aren’t anyway), and then we are cast out into the world to just ‘make a life.’

    Have good relationships!

    Be successful! Get a good job!

    Cope with work colleagues / clients / stressed-out bosses.

    Deal with grief, aging, health problems, loved ones dying!

    Be a good parent, even if your parents were a little shoddy, absent, authoritarian, unloving.

    How are we supposed to navigate the world when it generates so much emotion for us and we never learned how to deal with emotion? When we feel constantly pushed hither and thither either by our emotional reactions or other people’s?

    Awakening the act of self-compassion and empathy for the emotions we struggle with is one of the most powerful steps we can take when we start this journey.

    Deciding: Wow, I wasn’t given the tools to navigate the whole myriad of emotions that I encounter every day! And that is tough!

    Giving ourselves a little grace, a little tenderness, a little understanding around this is such a powerful step away from how we normally respond to emotional activation.

    Can we offer ourselves some kindness and understanding instead of blame and judgment? It makes sense I feel like this—I haven’t learned how to deal with emotions like shame, fear, grief, etc.

    Offering compassion in the face of strong emotional reactions is a powerful step because normally we are in the habit of trying to dismiss/justify/vent our feelings: I shouldn’t feel like this! It’s all their fault! I am such a terrible person! Everything is so terrifying! They made me angry!

    Instead, can we decide to start walking toward being on our own side? Can we accept the challenges we have faced with emotions? And instead of blaming and shaming ourselves, can we decide instead to move toward kindness, understanding, empathy, and compassion?

    When we allow our emotions to exist and meet them with empathy, creating a sense of internal safety around them, it’s much easier to support ourselves through experiences that might activate them.

  • Transmuting Shame: None of Us Need to Be Fixed

    Transmuting Shame: None of Us Need to Be Fixed

    “Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” ~Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart

    This past year, I started the journey of investigating—maybe even befriending—“my” shame.

    I use quotes around the “my” because most of the shame is not mine; much of it is internalized sexism, racisim, anti-blackness and homophobia, and/or intergenerational—it was passed down to me. And while I didn’t choose to internalize or inherit it, it is my responsibility to care for “my” shame, to tenderize it with love and compassion so it may be transmuted. I get to alchemize and grow flowers rooted within the rich compost of my healing journey, fertilized by ancestral gifts.

    Shame is one of the most uncomfortable experiences, so much so that we often project our shame onto others to provide some relief from the discomfort. I learned this at the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) teacher training intensive I had the privilege to attend in the fall.

    During the MSC training, I received the blessing of the dharma of shame and learned about its antidote—mindful self-compassion. Five wise practitioners, including Chris Germer, one of the co-founders of the eight-week MSC program, guided about thirty individuals (from across the United States, including some folks from overseas) to experience the power of self-compassion through a week-long workshop.

    Chris shared a wisdom gem I will never forget: shame is rooted in our universal need and desire to be loved. The innocence of shame touched something deep in me; it felt like permission, or an invite, to see the exiled parts of myself battling shame.

    I had never really talked about shame before training to offer mindful self-compassion. It felt like if I talked about the shame, if I named it, you would see the thin film of shame that I felt covered my body for much of my childhood into young adulthood. It felt like if I named it, you would know I was not worthy of the love I felt desperate for.

    There was shame around being a girl, then a woman; there was shame around being expansive in my sexual orientation and gender expression; there was shame in being a survivor of domestic and sexual violence; there was shame around socioeconomic status… the list goes on.

    Mindful self-compassion has helped me look beyond the victim mentality I used to strongly identify with. I see that, like all of us, I have been shaped by early experiences with caregivers and by the environments I have grown in. I see that, like most of us, I have always done the best I could with the tools available to me at the time. And in my experience, I have leaned on—and clung to—many maladaptive tools like using substances to escape.

    Today, I am grateful to know the shame comes from an innocent place and that it can be transmuted into compassion for myself and for all beings everywhere.

    I don’t remember where I first learned this, but Brené Brown also talks about shame’s roots in the universal need for belonging. When we feel we are separate from the rest of the world, when we feel we don’t belong, there is a specific form of pain and suffering that emerges.

    In my experience, feeling like I did not belong, feeling separate, created deep wounds of unworthiness and otherness. Brené goes on to talk about “fitting in” being the opposite of belonging. And in my desperate attempts to belong and be loved, I leaned into the facade of “fitting in,” and the wounding deepened.

    In writing about my lived experience—releasing what’s been floating around for years in my mind-body space—I am reminded of Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart.

    She defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”

    She offers “shame 1-2-3s”: (1) We all have it. Shame is universal and one of the most primitive emotions that we experience. The only people who don’t experience it are those who lack the capacity for empathy and human connection. (2) We’re all afraid to talk about it. Sometimes we can feel shame when we just say the word “shame.” But it’s getting easier as more people are talking about it. And (3) The less we talk about it, the more control it has over us. Shame hates being spoken.

    So, here is my first writing—likely one of many—on shame, as I continue this sacred journey of becoming a mindful self-compassion teacher and offering one of the mindfulness-based programs for mental health that’s been most impactful for me.

    I’ll close with one more share, offered by a beautiful mentor, one of the facilitators of the teacher training intensive: “No one here needs to be fixed.”

    As he shared this at the opening to the week-long intensive, I felt my body soften and exhale. It was received as a love note to little river exiles: I am not bad, I am not unworthy, I do not need fixing. Like all of us, I deserve love, belonging, and connection. We all do; no matter what has happened in the past, no matter what the future holds. Right here, right now, we deserve and are worthy of love, belonging, and connection.

    May we feel love, belonging, and connection. May we know we are loved, we belong, and we are interconnected. May we support each other on the journey of self-liberation.

  • Awareness and Self-Compassion: Two Powerful Tools for Chronic Pain

    Awareness and Self-Compassion: Two Powerful Tools for Chronic Pain

    “Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the tangle of emotional resistance against what is already happening.” ~Tara Brach

    The wooden meditation hall creaked softly as sixty people shifted in their seats, trying to find comfort in the silence. Outside, winter rain tapped against the windows, a gentle metronome marking time. I sat cross-legged on my black cushion, watching sweat trickle down my temple despite the cool air. My legs burned as if I’d been running for hours, though I hadn’t moved in forty-five minutes.

    It was day three of my first six-day silent meditation retreat, and I was learning my first profound lesson about physical pain—not from my meditation teacher, but from my protesting body. Little did I know that this experience would become a crucial foundation for navigating a far greater challenge that lay ahead.

    The pain started as a whisper in my lower back, a gentle suggestion that perhaps I should adjust my posture. Within minutes it grew to a shout, then a scream. While other practitioners appeared serene, their faces soft and bodies still, I was waging an internal war. Every few minutes, I’d shift my weight slightly, trying to find that elusive comfortable position. The cushion that had felt so perfect during the orientation session now seemed as unyielding as concrete.

    The meditation instructions echoed in my mind: “Just sit and observe your breath.” But my body had other plans. Each inhale brought awareness of new discomfort—a sharp knife in my hip, a dull ache in my shoulders, pins and needles racing down my calves. The physical sensations became my entire world, drowning out any hope of focusing on my breath.

    I tried everything. Different cushions borrowed from the prop closet. Various positions—Burmese, half-lotus, kneeling. I even snuck to the back of the hall to lean against the wall, feeling like a meditation failure as I watched the straight backs of more experienced practitioners ahead of me.

    Then, on day four, something shifted. Perhaps it was exhaustion from fighting my experience, or maybe it was the wisdom of surrender, but I finally heard what my teacher had been saying all along: “Don’t try to change what’s arising; just be with it with kindness.”

    For the first time, I stopped trying to fix my discomfort. Instead, I got curious about it. What did the pain actually feel like? Was it constant, or did it pulse? Where exactly did it begin and end? As I explored these questions with genuine interest rather than resistance, something remarkable happened—while the physical sensations remained, my suffering began to decrease.

    “In the midst of pain is the whole teaching,” Pema Chödrön’s words would become my lifeline two years later, when a back injury transformed my relationship with pain from a periodic challenge into a constant companion. I would join the ranks of millions living with chronic pain—a silent epidemic that affects more than one in five adults globally.

    While medicine can sometimes dull the sharp edges of physical suffering, many of us learn that managing chronic pain requires more than just medication. It demands a complete reimagining of our relationship with our bodies and with pain itself.

    The lessons from that meditation hall now played out in vivid detail through every moment of my daily life. Simple tasks became exercises in mindful movement. Getting out of bed required a careful choreography of breath and motion. Picking up a dropped pen became a practice in patience and body awareness. Each movement called for the same careful attention I’d learned to bring to meditation.

    The physical pain was just the beginning. In the darkness of sleepless nights, lying on my floor because no other position brought relief, my mind raced with endless worries: Would I ever recover? Could I continue counseling my clients in person? How would I pay the mounting medical bills? These thoughts circled like hungry wolves, testing the limits of my newfound practice of acceptance.

    Working as a therapist brought its own unique challenges. I vividly remember sitting across from clients, maintaining my therapeutic presence while searing pain radiated from my tailbone through my entire spine. Each session became a practice in dual awareness—being present for my clients while acknowledging my own experience. Some days, the effort to maintain this balance left me depleted, with barely enough energy to drive home.

    There was also the exhausting social dance of chronic pain. The simple question “How are you?” became complicated. Telling people about the constant pain felt burdensome after a while. No one wants to always be the person who’s suffering. So instead, I’d smile and say, “I’m fine,” swallowing the truth along with the discomfort. These small acts of concealment created their own kind of fatigue, a lonely space between the public face and private reality.

    I invite you to pause and reflect on your own relationship with pain. When discomfort arises, what stories does your mind create about it?

    Notice how your body responds—the subtle tightening, the wish to push away what’s difficult. Consider what it might feel like to create just a little space around your pain, like opening a window in a stuffy room.

    Sometimes I think of pain as an unwanted house guest. We didn’t invite it, we don’t want it to stay, but fighting its presence only creates more tension in our home. Instead, we can acknowledge it’s here, set appropriate boundaries, and continue living our lives around it. Some days we might even discover unexpected gifts in its presence—a deeper appreciation for good moments, increased empathy for others’ struggles, or the discovery of our own resilience.

    Working with pain mindfully reveals that healing happens on multiple levels. When we respond to physical discomfort with gentle awareness, we start noticing how our thoughts create narratives about the pain, how emotions arise in waves, and how our nervous system responds to kind attention. Through this practice, we can learn to expand our attention beyond the pain, discovering that even in difficult moments, there is also the warmth of sunlight on our face, the sound of birds outside our window, the taste of morning coffee.

    Years later, my pain isn’t as severe, but it remains a daily companion. I carry a back pillow everywhere as if it’s an accessory, mindfully choosing which events to attend and for how long. Gardening, once a carefree joy, has become an exercise in presence—each movement an opportunity to listen to my body’s wisdom. Some days still find me lying on the floor, being with whatever my body is expressing in that moment.

    But there’s a profound difference now. Where I once pushed through pain with gritted teeth, I’ve learned to respond to my body’s signals with care and compassion.

    This shift feels especially valuable as I age, knowing that new physical challenges will likely arise. Each twinge and ache is no longer an enemy to vanquish but a reminder to pay attention, to move more slowly, to tend to myself with kindness.

    The clock in that meditation hall taught me about impermanence—how even the most challenging moments eventually pass. My back injury taught me about acceptance and resilience. Together, these experiences showed me that while we can’t always choose what happens to our bodies, we can choose how we meet these experiences with awareness and compassion. In doing so, we discover that peace isn’t found in the absence of pain but in our capacity to be with it skillfully.

  • The Art of Being Flawed in a Perfectionist World

    The Art of Being Flawed in a Perfectionist World

    “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” ~Vince Lombardi

    Okay, let’s be real for a second. As I sit here trying to write this perfect essay about embracing imperfection, the irony isn’t lost on me. I’ve rewritten this opening paragraph about five times now. Old habits die hard, right?

    Picture this: It’s 2:37 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon. I’m pacing the lecture hall, watching my law students furiously scribbling away at their exam papers. Their furrowed brows and white-knuckle grips on their pens remind me of, well, me, not too long ago.

    Flashback to my own law school days. There I was, the quintessential overachiever. Nose perpetually buried in a casebook, surviving on a diet of coffee and sheer determination. Perfect grades, perfect internships, perfect career trajectory—these weren’t just goals, they were my entire identity. The pressure I put on myself was so intense, I’m surprised my hair didn’t turn gray by graduation. (Spoiler alert: It’s starting to now, but I digress.)

    Fast-forward to my transition from practicing law to teaching it. I thought I had it all figured out. Professor Kalyani Abhyankar, the flawless legal mind, here to shape the next generation of lawyers. Ha! If only I knew what I was in for.

    It was during one particularly “memorable” lecture that my perfectionist facade began to crack. I had spent hours preparing what I thought was a flawless presentation on constitutional law. I was on fire, if I do say so myself, rattling off case citations like a human legal database. And then it happened. I mixed up two landmark cases.

    The horror! The shame! In that moment, I swear I could hear the ghost of Justice Brandeis weeping. I stood there, frozen at the podium, waiting for the ground to swallow me whole.

    But then something unexpected happened. A student raised her hand and asked, “Professor Abhyankar, are you okay?”

    And just like that, the dam broke. All my insecurities came flooding out in front of my class. My fear of not being good enough, the crushing weight of always needing to be perfect, the anxiety that one mistake would unravel my entire career.

    To my utter shock, instead of judgment, I was met with… understanding? Empathy, even? One of my students actually said, “Wow, Prof. We always thought you were this untouchable legal genius. But this… this makes you human. It’s kind of inspiring, actually.”

    Inspiring? Me? The one having a meltdown in front of her class? But as I looked around the room, I saw nodding heads and relieved faces. It was as if by showing my own vulnerability, I had given them permission to be imperfect too.

    This was the beginning of my messy, often frustrating, but ultimately liberating journey toward embracing imperfection. And let me tell you, it wasn’t a smooth ride.

    At first, I tried to schedule “imperfection time” into my day. Yes, you read that right. I, Kalyani Abhyankar, recovering perfectionist, tried to perfect the art of being imperfect. The irony is not lost on me, I assure you.

    There were setbacks galore. I’d resolve to be more laid-back in class, only to find myself obsessively color-coding my lecture notes at 2 AM. I’d promise myself I wouldn’t overthink my students’ questions, then spend hours agonizing over whether my off-the-cuff answer about tort law was comprehensive enough.

    But slowly, oh so slowly, things began to shift. I started to pay attention to my classroom with new eyes. I noticed how the most engaging discussions often arose from questions I couldn’t answer right away. I saw how students learned more from working through mistakes than from memorizing perfect responses.

    Here are some of the changes I stumbled my way through:

    1. Practicing self-compassion

    Instead of berating myself for every perceived failure, I tried to treat myself with the same kindness I’d offer a struggling student. This meant acknowledging my efforts, regardless of the outcome. And yes, sometimes it meant looking in the mirror and saying, “You’re doing okay, Kalyani,” even when I felt like a total impostor.

    2. Setting realistic goals

    Rather than aiming for an impossible standard of perfection, I learned to set challenging but achievable goals. This allowed me to celebrate progress and maintain motivation. Novel concept, right?

    3. Embracing the learning process

    I started to view mistakes—both mine and my students’—not as failures but as valuable teaching moments. Each setback became an opportunity to deepen understanding and foster critical thinking. Who knew that “I don’t know, let’s figure it out together” could be such powerful words in a classroom?

    4. Cultivating a growth mindset

    Instead of seeing legal aptitude as fixed, I began to emphasize to my students (and myself) the capacity to develop skills through effort and practice. This made us all more willing to tackle challenging legal problems, even if we didn’t always get it right the first time.

    5. Letting go of comparison

    I realized that constantly measuring myself against other professors or legal scholars was about as productive as trying to teach constitutional law to my cat. Instead, I focused on my unique strengths as an educator and mentor.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. I still have days where my inner perfectionist rears its meticulously groomed head. I still occasionally find myself up at midnight, agonizing over a single word choice in my lecture notes. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and recovering perfectionists aren’t cured overnight.

    But here’s the kicker: As I’ve learned to embrace my imperfections, I’ve actually become a better professor. Free from the paralysis of perfectionism, I’m more creative in my teaching methods, more willing to tackle controversial legal topics, and more open to feedback from students and colleagues.

    My students seem to prefer this new, slightly messier version of Professor Abhyankar. They’re more engaged, more willing to take risks in their thinking, and—dare I say it—they seem to be having more fun. Who knew that constitutional law could actually be enjoyable?

    To those still caught in the grip of perfectionism, whether in law school, legal practice, or any other field, I offer this hard-won wisdom: Your worth is not determined by flawless performance. There is profound strength in vulnerability, in admitting that you’re still learning and growing.

    Embrace your imperfections. They’re not weaknesses to be hidden but unique aspects of who you are as a professional and human being. Let go of the exhausting chase for perfection and instead, chase growth and authenticity.

    In doing so, you may find that you achieve things far greater than perfection—you achieve a life that is fully and beautifully lived. And if you happen to mix up a few Supreme Court cases along the way? Well, you’re in good company.

  • How to Stop Living in Perpetual Guilt and Forgive Yourself

    How to Stop Living in Perpetual Guilt and Forgive Yourself

    “I have learned that the person I have to ask for forgiveness from the most is myself. You must love yourself. You have to forgive yourself every day. Whenever you remember a shortcoming, a flaw, you have to tell yourself, ‘That’s just fine.’ You have to forgive yourself so much until you don’t even see those things anymore. Because that’s what love is like.” ~C. JoyBell C.

    Have you ever wondered why, despite doing your best to heal and grow, you can’t seem to shake off the feeling of inadequacy and only see minimal results for all your efforts?

    Maybe, like myself, you don’t know you live with a very subtle yet perpetual feeling of guilt.

    The first time I became familiar with this chronic guilt was when I learned about self-awareness. At the beginning of my healing journey, I knew that to change anything, I must first be aware that it is there.

    Although this sounds good in theory and might work when we look at it from a logical standpoint, often it doesn’t apply when we are in the arena, going through the imperfections of the healing process.

    In his book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza explains how our bodies become addicted to certain chemicals we release based on the thoughts we think and the emotions we feel.

    If you are used to feeling guilt, your mind will unconsciously look for it in everything you do, so the body gets the hit.

    Going back to self-awareness, let me ask you this:

    What do you do when you discover a pattern you want to change or a toxic habit you want to heal—for example, that you people-please? Do you reach for understanding and compassion or judge yourself, feeling like you “should” act differently?

    Exactly.

    It’s almost like we think if we are harsh enough with ourselves, we will do better next time, soldier up, and get it “right.” While in the process, we are crushing our souls, unconsciously sabotaging our healing, and feeling smaller each day.

    As I dove deeper into exploring my guilt, sometimes the things I judged myself for blew my mind. I judged myself for how I felt, and once I observed it, I judged myself for judging myself for how I felt. Or I would use guilt to unconsciously validate the belief that I am not enough.

    Even when I made healthy decisions, like distancing myself from people who weren’t good for me, I would judge myself for bailing out and not staying around and trying harder. There was always a reason to feel guilty.

    It took me a long time to discover these patterns, and I still spot them today. It was and still is a part of my self-talk, although not as often as it used to be. However, while developing a more loving approach to my guilt, I realized that only a healthy dose of love, compassion, and understanding could heal me.

    We may find it challenging to spot chronic guilt since its presence is very subtle. If guilting and judging ourselves is our way of life, we may think, “This is how I always feel. It’s normal.”

    But it isn’t. We weren’t meant to swim in the waters of inadequacy or not-enoughness. If you think, “But what if I let the guilt go and relax, and then don’t feel the drive to do more, heal more, grow more?”

    Although guilt may seem like a fuel that pushes us forward, from my experience, it keeps our healing at bay. It takes away the feeling of being alive, motivated, inspired, and courageous. It makes us shrink and brings uncertainty and self-doubt.

    I remember a time when I started to have digestive issues right after I left my marriage and began the process of a divorce. The hardest things for me to overcome were the anger and guilt I felt for the things I’d allowed, although I wasn’t aware of this at that time. All I knew was that I was pissed. This, of course, made my digestive issues even worse.

    During this time, I began learning more about the connection between my gut and my mental and emotional health and how my anxiety, sadness, and stress affect the health of my physical body.

    One day, as I spoke to a friend on the phone, I broke down crying, knowing that I was responsible for how I physically felt.

    After I calmed down, we sat in silence for a few moments after she said, “Maybe it’s time you forgive yourself for it.”

    Her words immediately touched my heart, and I knew that I had to come back to the basics of my healing, which so often lay in forgiving myself. Since then, I’ve approached my digestive flare-ups and healing with an attitude of forgiveness. This has allowed me to ease into the moment and has helped me look at the whole situation with more love and understanding toward myself.

    I’ve realized that living with the attitude of forgiveness isn’t a one-time event but a mindset. And from everything I understand about this sacred and soulful practice, these are four steps I always follow.

    1. Get curious. 

    When you observe a behavior about yourself that you don’t like or experience what I call a healing relapse (the time when you act in old, unhealthy ways), instead of immediately reaching for judgment, get curious.

    Healing relapses are real, and they happen to all of us. You will take one step forward and two steps back. Eventually, it will be two steps forward and only one step back. At some point, you may move back to your old ways. You say yes when you want to say no and don’t reinforce your boundary, then feel a sense of resentment. It’s okay. Give yourself permission to be imperfect.

    A simple affirmation I use to remind myself to live a judgment-free life is, “Although I see myself going back to judgment, people-pleasing, seeking validation, etc., I choose to stop here, stay away from judgment, and get curious instead. It’s okay to make mistakes as I heal.”

    2. Ask yourself challenging but healing questions. 

    When you notice judgment or guilt and get curious instead of resentful or judgmental, turn inward and try to understand. Explore deeper aspects of your self-talk and see where you are still choosing guilt over kindness and compassion.

    Here are three common questions I ask myself:

    “How can I better understand the part of me that I want to judge?”

    “If receiving forgiveness is difficult for me, what wounds or pains do I need to attend to more to open my heart to healing?”

    “How can I see this moment of judgment as an opportunity for growth? What can I learn from it?”

    3. Use meditation as your self-forgiveness tool.  

    Meditation has been my number one tool in healing my wounds. I’ve used it for self-forgiveness, inner child, self-love, and more.

    A few years back, I was part of a weekly coaching group. Each month, we worked through different subjects, and at that time, the topic of the month was forgiveness. The person leading the group invited us to meditate together. I got comfortable in my seat and closed my eyes. We started with a series of breathing exercises to get grounded and relaxed. Then he asked us to repeat after him. The first thing he said was, “I forgive myself.”

    The moment I mentally uttered these words, I broke down crying while feeling an immense release. It’s like a giant burden fell off my chest. This was my first practice of self-forgiveness, and it made me realize how much guilt and judgment I carried around on a constant basis.

    Since then, using self-forgiveness meditation has become one of my favorite tools to work through my guilt.

    4. Heal negative self-talk with self-compassion. 

    As I mentioned earlier, living with the attitude of forgiveness is a way of life, not a one-time event.

    At first, you may find yourself going back and forth between judgment and understanding. This is a part of the process, so don’t feel discouraged. Instead, every time you notice that you are judging yourself, pause. You can also say “pause” to yourself mentally or out loud. This will interrupt the thought pattern of judgment that’s taking place.

    Then, attune to your negative self-talk and don’t resent it. You can use this compassionate statement, “I know you,” referring to your mind, “are here to protect me by offering thoughts that are known and familiar and feel safe. However, I choose to approach myself differently moving forward. I am worthy of compassion and forgiveness and choose to treat myself kindly.”

    —

    Healing from guilt isn’t a quick fix but rather a process of changing the core of the relationship you have with yourself.

    Be patient while navigating this journey, and when you notice yourself going back to your old ways, just take a deep breath and declare with all your heart: I am worthy of a guilt-free life, and this time, I choose forgiveness.

  • Silent Storms: How Mindfulness Helped Me Reclaim My Self-Worth

    Silent Storms: How Mindfulness Helped Me Reclaim My Self-Worth

    “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” ~Jon Kabat-Zinn

    We often hear about storms as powerful forces of nature, but for many of us, the most intense storms are the silent ones—those we battle internally. For me, this storm took the shape of bullying. While I appeared to handle the daily microaggressions and malicious rumors, inside, I was crumbling.

    The bullying didn’t stop in high school; it followed me into adulthood. Every time I thought I had weathered the storm, another wave of hurtful comments would crash over me, leaving me feeling trapped and powerless.

    The constant gossip, whispers, and passive-aggressive remarks from others chipped away at my self-worth. I questioned my value, wondering if I deserved the treatment. Was there something inherently wrong with me? Why was I the target of this relentless negativity? These thoughts haunted me for years, leading to a vicious cycle of self-doubt, anxiety, and fear of being judged.

    At one point, the weight of all these feelings became too much to bear, and I sought counseling. It was in therapy that I first learned about mindfulness, a practice that would transform my life.

    Mindfulness helped me confront the storm I had been carrying inside for years—the shame, hurt, and loss of self-worth brought on by years of bullying and mistreatment. Here’s how this practice helped me heal and reclaim my self-worth, and how you, too, can apply it to your life if you’ve experienced bullying, mistreatment, or any form of emotional harm.

    How Bullying and Mistreatment Lead to Low Self-Worth

    Bullying and mistreatment don’t just hurt in the moment—they can have a lasting effect on how we see ourselves for years.

    Whether it’s gossip, exclusion, or direct harassment, these experiences erode our self-worth. We begin to question our value, internalizing the cruel words and actions of others. Over time, we might start to believe that we deserve the mistreatment, or that there’s something wrong with us.

    This low self-worth can affect every aspect of our lives, from our relationships to our careers. We might shy away from opportunities, convinced that we’re not good enough. We might struggle to form meaningful connections, believing that we’re unlovable. The effects of mistreatment run deep, but they don’t have to define us.

    Mindfulness, self-compassion, and community support can help us rebuild our sense of self. By acknowledging our pain, letting go of what we can’t control, and surrounding ourselves with people who lift us up, we can reclaim our self-worth and begin to see ourselves as deserving of love, respect, and kindness.

    Acknowledge Your Pain and Validate Your Emotions

    For years, I hid behind a mask of indifference. I convinced myself that the bullying didn’t affect me. I didn’t want to give my bullies the satisfaction of knowing they had hurt me. But in reality, each cruel word, each whisper, left a mark on my self-worth. The more I bottled up my emotions, the more they festered, eroding my sense of self.

    The first step in my healing journey was acknowledging the pain and allowing myself to feel it. Through mindfulness, I learned that running from my emotions only gave them more power over me. Instead, I had to sit with them—feel the sadness, frustration, anger, and betrayal. I had to give myself permission to grieve the parts of myself I had lost to bullying. Only then could I begin to heal.

    Tip: If you’re struggling with emotions from past mistreatment, take a moment each day to ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now?” Don’t judge yourself for feeling anger, sadness, or resentment—acknowledge these emotions and sit with them. By allowing yourself to feel, you can begin the process of healing.

    Use Mindful Breathing to Regain Control

    There were countless moments where the weight of gossip and harsh comments felt suffocating. I often felt powerless, lost in a spiral of negative thoughts. Every time I walked into a room, I felt like everyone was judging me, like they had already formed opinions about me based on lies. I didn’t know how to cope with the overwhelming feelings of shame and fear.

    Mindful breathing became my anchor—a simple yet profound technique that helped me center myself in these overwhelming situations. Instead of allowing my mind to spiral, I learned to focus on my breath. It was the one thing I could control, even when I couldn’t control the rumors or the people spreading them. In those moments, mindfulness gave me back a sense of power and control over my emotional state.

    Tip: The next time anxiety or fear begins to take hold, focus on your breath. Inhale deeply, paying attention to the air entering and leaving your body. This simple practice can bring you back to the present moment, offering a sense of calm and control when you need it most.

    Build Self-Compassion to Heal the Hurt

    For a long time, I let the words of others dictate how I saw myself. I internalized the bullying, believing that if so many people thought poorly of me, it must be true. I criticized myself relentlessly, convinced that I was not good enough, smart enough, or likable enough. The words of others had become the lens through which I viewed myself.

    Mindfulness taught me the importance of self-compassion. I realized that I was treating myself far worse than I would treat a friend in need. Through this practice, I learned to be kinder to myself—to approach myself with the same care and empathy I would offer someone else who was struggling. Slowly, I began to rebuild my self-worth, not based on what others thought of me but on how I chose to treat myself.

    Tip: Each day, write down three things you appreciate about yourself. Whether it’s a strength, a skill, or even just how you made it through a tough moment, these small affirmations can help rebuild your confidence. Self-compassion is a powerful defense against negativity, reminding you that you are deserving of kindness—especially from yourself.

    Practice Letting Go of What You Can’t Control

    One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that I couldn’t control how others perceived me. I spent years trying to defend myself against rumors, trying to correct false assumptions people had about me. The more I tried to control the narrative, the more exhausted and frustrated I became. I realized that no matter what I did, some people would always see me in a negative light—and that wasn’t my responsibility to fix.

    Mindfulness taught me that while I couldn’t control the rumors, I could control my response to them. I learned to let go of the need to be liked or understood by everyone. Instead, I focused on how I saw myself and how I wanted to show up in the world. Letting go of what I couldn’t control was liberating—it allowed me to focus on what truly mattered: my own peace of mind and self-worth.

    Tip: Visualize the hurtful words—or, in my case, the hurtful people—as leaves gently floating down a stream. Observe them as they pass by, acknowledge their presence, but resist the urge to hold onto them. This practice allows you to create emotional space and frees you from being weighed down by things beyond your control.

    Find Strength in Community

    Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. While mindfulness was essential in my recovery, finding support from others played a significant role too. For years, I had isolated myself, afraid that opening up would make me vulnerable to more judgment. But through counseling and support groups, I realized that sharing my experiences with others who understood helped lift the weight I had been carrying.

    Opening up to trusted friends, seeking professional help, and connecting with a community of people who understood what I was going through helped me regain my voice. It allowed me to shift the narrative that had been imposed on me, to reclaim my story, and to see myself not as a victim of bullying but as someone who had the strength to heal.

    Tip: Don’t hesitate to seek help from others, whether through counseling, support groups, or mindfulness communities. Finding a group where people understand what you’re going through can provide both personal growth and emotional support, reminding you that you’re not alone.

    Mindfulness Is a Lifelong Practice

    Healing from mistreatment and reclaiming your self-worth is not an overnight process—it takes time. For me, mindfulness became the foundation of my recovery, and it’s something I continue to practice daily. By integrating mindfulness into my routine, I learned to navigate emotional challenges with grace and resilience.

    Tip: Start small. Whether it’s taking a few moments of mindful breathing or journaling your emotions, every step helps you regain control. Remember, you are stronger than the words that hurt you. With mindfulness, self-compassion, and a supportive community, you can reclaim your self-worth—one step at a time.

  • Healing from Chronic Fatigue: The Amazing Impact of Self-Compassion

    Healing from Chronic Fatigue: The Amazing Impact of Self-Compassion

    “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ~Dalai Lama

    In my mid-thirties, my active and adventuresome life as a broadcast journalist collapsed. It began with a trauma, followed by flu-like symptoms that stuck around for thirteen years. Almost overnight, I lost the pep to walk around the block, much less file reports for the evening news.

    A battery of doctors diagnosed me with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), among other diagnoses. They said I’d have to live this way since there was no reliable cure. I became one of the medical mysteries I used to cover.

    Needless to say, I was terrified and grief-stricken. To add insult to illness, I beat myself up for ‘failing’ to get well. I should be able to master my new vocation of healing, reasoned my Type A personality.

    I used every ounce of energy I had to research my own health story. Intravenous vitamins, antiviral medications, sage-burning healers—I tried them all. I eliminated the foods I enjoyed and washed my elimination diet down with mounds of herbs.

    Sadly, I was also feeding myself bitter pills: self-pressure and self-criticism. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t make my body well, save a career I loved, or actualize the family I dearly wanted.

    There were enormous reasons for grief. But I didn’t have the support in and around me to feel this maelstrom of emotions. My mind swooped in to distract me.

    I blamed myself mercilessly, even though my symptoms started after I was sexually assaulted by a man who walked away free. There’s something unhealthy about a society that rarely punishes rape, even though an American is sexually assaulted every sixty-eight seconds, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network.

    We also know that people who experienced adverse childhood experiences have higher rates of chronic illness as adults. There’s mounting evidence that adult stressors and trauma can also topple our health. This is what happened to me, although it took years to make this connection.

    No matter whether we’ve experienced big ‘T’ trauma, little ‘t’ trauma, or the unavoidable insults of being human, we need self-compassion. This quality was once illusive to me. But after years of illness, I started softening.

    It was too painful to endure the pressure of trying to be a perfect patient. The hard-driving approach I adopted in my journalism career didn’t work when I could barely cook a meal.

    Exasperated by the medical maze, my yoga mat and meditation cushion became my medicine. I’d stretch like a cat in my backyard patch of grass. Trees, birds, and poetry became my companions.

    Eckhart Tolle’s voice was a melody to my nervous system. I steeped myself in his words each day. Instead of lamenting all the things I couldn’t do, I began to actually enjoy the imperfect present moment.

    You could say I accidentally fell into self-compassion. It’s not that I gave up on healing, but I began treating myself kindly for my very real suffering. I resonated with Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Kindness, in which she writes:

    “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.”

    I awakened with sorrow and spent many insomniac nights mired in it. Much as I wish joy had become my teacher, suffering got the job.

    Soon, I started noticing kindness in and around me. My parents would drop by for a movie. We’d curl up on the couch, ditch my anti-candida diet with a bowl of popcorn, and sink into the relief of other people’s stories.

    Meanwhile, my state disability ended, and I was petrified about how I’d support myself as a single woman without a job. One day, a flier came in the mail saying, “Kindness is like a boomerang that comes back to you. We’re dedicated to financially supporting members of the media in a life crisis.”

    That was me! I’d never heard of this non-profit and don’t know how I got on their mailing list. I applied, got financial aid, and managed to save my house from the clutches of foreclosure!

    In the face of crisis, life’s generosities abounded. A friend listened to my heartbreak. My mom brought homemade chicken soup. One yoga teacher came by with superfood treats.

    Since I paused my pursuit of a cure, I decided to use my spoon-sized energy for an online writing class. Here, I found a community of kindred spirits. A fellow writer told me she recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome through a type of mind-body healing.

    This approach was brought forward by John Sarno, Howard Schubiner, and other physicians who realized the role of unresolved emotions in perpetuating chronic symptoms. Miraculously, her story gave me a sudden boost of energy and catapulted my recovery!

    I stepped into a new paradigm and realized I could overcome my seemingly endless flu-like symptoms. Rather than attacking viruses, I learned to soothe my brain and nervous system.

    No wonder I was hypervigilant. I’d first experienced a massive trauma, then suffered the stress of living with chronic symptoms I felt powerless to overcome. I’d subsequently lost my ability to support myself financially and function in the world during the prime of my life.

    My dear father also passed away during these years, as did three other close family members. My brain was on overload and became stuck in a hypervigilant state—exacerbated by fears that I was ill for life.

    In a training I took a year later, Dr. Schubiner described fibromyalgia as PTSD for the body. I finally felt seen and understood. This was the polar opposite of how I felt with most of the fifty practitioners I saw over my CFS saga.

    While allopathic medicine is miraculous in fighting infections and saving lives, it often neglects the role of emotional stress and trauma on our physical health. Physician and author Gabor Maté writes, “All of the diagnoses that you deal with—depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma.”

    I needed to explore my storehouse of trauma, which I did through meditation, writing, and somatic therapy. I also shifted my beliefs about my condition and moved slowly back into activities. It took months of dedicated practice to retrain my brain so that I could safely inch out of my bubble.

    I brought mindfulness to personality traits like people-pleasing, pressure, and perfectionism since they can fuel chronic symptoms. I once heard a physician named John Stracks say, “When I think of why people develop pain, self-criticism is at the top of the list.”

    I wanted tools to soften my harsh inner dialogue, so I dove into Kristin Neff’s work. The research psychologist says self-compassion fills us with good-feeling hormones like oxytocin, while self-criticism fuels stress hormones like cortisol. This alone causes a cascade of physical symptoms.

    When our subconscious brain senses danger—even if it’s an internal, psychological one such as “There’s something wrong with me”—it activates our nervous system. In flight or fight, we might feel anxious or aggressive. In freeze, we can feel immobile or dead.

    Neff describes three elements of self-compassion: mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness. Here’s the gist of each one as I understand them.

    Mindfulness: We acknowledge and witness our physical or emotional pain as a felt experience in our body. We might say something like, “It’s hard to feel so sad and exhausted.”

    Humanity: We remember that suffering is part of being human. Although our circumstances are unique, we’re not alone in this universal experience.

    Self-Kindness: We treat ourselves as we would with a dear friend, offering ourselves the supportive words we yearn to hear. When we’re struggling, we ask with sincerity: What do I need right now?

    With self-compassion as my companion, I started speaking to myself tenderly. An indescribable relief would wash over me. Instead of feeling abandoned by life, I felt seen and witnessed by the only one who knew what I needed: myself.

    This dovetails beautifully with mind-body healing. A big part of my recovery was tracking sensations in my body with open curiosity. Fatigue felt heavy. Pain was burny. Brain fog felt spacey.

    To the extent I could, I stopped fighting or fleeing from my feelings and started holding them with curiosity. Often, restlessness and rumination reared up. When I stuck with it, sometimes my system settled and my symptoms shifted into emotions.

    Other times, my body spoke to me. Please don’t push so hard. Don’t say yes when you mean no. Tell me I’m okay just how I am. I need to do something fun.

    As I tended to my hurts in this new way, the physical symptoms began subsiding. This took patience and persistence. Many months later, I was back in the land of the living. Not only that, I was experiencing life in a more authentic and embodied way than I had before the CFS.

    This isn’t woo-woo mumbo-jumbo. Neuroscience shows that our brain creates pain, fatigue, anxiety, and other stress-related symptoms. It does so based on a perception of danger, whether that’s a wayward car, an angry spouse, or harsh inner dialogue.

    “Certain behaviors can bring us to a state of high alert without our even realizing it,” writes Alan Gordon in The Way Out. “There are three habits I see again and again in my patients that trigger fear and aggravate neuroplastic pain: worrying, putting pressure on yourself, and self-criticism.”

    When our nervous system shifts into a threat state, it communicates through symptoms. Sensations from dizziness to dullness are encouraging rest and inactivity. With ongoing stress, our brain can become sensitized, firing memos to our body in rapid succession.

    Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion corroborates this. “Pain is often caused by tension and resistance, so when we soften a little bit as opposed to a harsh reactive stance, it tends to reduce the amount of pain we physically experience,” Neff says in The Healthy.

    Recently, I felt tension flare when speaking with a curt customer service agent who couldn’t help with a large payment I was supposed to receive. It was, apparently, stuck in limbo. My stress level rose, and I felt a knot in my throat—surely full of all the things I wanted to say to her!

    After two hours, my money was still missing in action. My frustration soared as I’d frittered away precious time I’d set aside to write my blog, conveniently on self-compassion. (The irony is not lost on this writer.)

    Instead of trying to fix it further or rush back to work, as I would have done before, I acknowledged that I was angry and scared. I reiterated how impossible the modern age is sometimes. And I said to the trembling part of me, “I am sorry you’re dealing with this stress. What do you want and need right now?”

    It turns out that I needed to growl (literally!). I needed to walk (briskly). And I needed to practice somatic meditation. I did all three and felt a wave of calm energy. The oxytocin potion, perhaps?

    I was ready to return to work with vigor and fresh material for my blog, conveniently enough. That jives with studies showing that self-compassionate people are less anxious and depressed than self-critical people.

    If self-compassion feels like a foreign concept to you, you’re simply a modern Homo sapien. For a long while, it was like a distant planet to me. With intention, we can cast our gaze towards self-kindness and move steadily into its orbit.

    The next time you feel hurt, scared, or symptomatic, you might pause and ask yourself: How am I feeling right now? What words or deeds would feel supportive to me? You may be surprised by what you find in the medicine chest of your very own heart.

  • The Amazing Power of Listening to Your Inner Critic

    The Amazing Power of Listening to Your Inner Critic

    “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” ~Aristotle

    Over the past few years, I began to feel a shift in my career. Despite spending years earning certifications and degrees and building skills, my work no longer felt meaningful.

    As I contemplated a change, a persistent thought echoed in my mind: “Why can’t you just be grateful for what you have?” I had many things to be grateful for, yet I wasn’t happy and constantly judged myself for it. After months of unsuccessfully trying to push this thought away, I decided to sit with the feeling of guilt and approach it with curiosity.

    Here’s what I discovered: This was actually an inner critic part of myself that was created to keep me safe.

    My critic was telling me to feel grateful because it didn’t want me to make a change. If I was grateful for what I had, then, it reasoned, I wouldn’t pursue the things I really wanted, and I couldn’t fail. I also wouldn’t be seen, so I couldn’t be judged. These things were crucial to that part of me. And this is why ignoring it didn’t help.

    Understanding Your Inner Critic

    We’ve all heard the advice to silence our inner critic. For years, we’ve been told to push through and dismiss that critical voice. But ignoring your inner critic is one of the worst things you can do. It’s tempting, I know, because that voice can be harsh and relentless. However, pushing it aside is like telling a scared child to stop making noise and go away.

    Parts of you, like your inner critic or the parts that feel shame or guilt, were created during childhood to keep you safe. And they are really effective.

    If my inner critic tells me I’ll never be able to do something and I listen, I won’t try, and therefore, I can’t fail. It’s done its job of keeping me safe. However, if I ignore it and go for it anyway, I might make some progress, but it can feel exhausting and overwhelming because that part wasn’t on board. This creates a split in my energy.

    When these parts aren’t integrated, your self-worth takes a dip. That’s the key—you’ve got to start listening to and integrating these parts.

    Listening to Your Inner Critic

    So what do you do with a scared child? You listen. You sit with them, ask what they need, and provide comfort. When you do this, they start to calm down. The same principle applies to your inner critic. Instead of pushing it away, try listening to it.

    When you acknowledge your inner critic, you begin to understand where it’s coming from. Often, it’s trying to protect you from perceived danger or failure. By listening, you can address your underlying fears and anxieties. This doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything it says, but understanding its perspective can help you find more compassionate ways to respond to yourself.

    Practical Steps to Embrace Your Inner Critic

    Acknowledge Its Presence

    When your inner critic pipes up, take a moment to recognize it. Say to yourself, “I hear you. I see that you are scared.” This simple acknowledgment can start to defuse the intensity.

    Identify the Source

    Try to understand why your inner critic is being so loud. You could focus on it and journal in response to the prompt, “What do you need from me to feel safer?” Being curious and open can provide you with some understanding of what you might need to move forward in a more powerful way.

    Dialogue with Compassion

    Imagine your inner critic as a younger version of yourself who’s scared and needs reassurance. Speak kindly and offer the support you would to a friend or a child.

    Practice Self-Compassion

    Remind yourself that it’s okay to feel what you’re feeling. Validate your emotions and give yourself permission to rest, take a break, or seek help.

    Shift Your Perspective

    Instead of seeing your inner critic as an enemy, view it as a part of you that needs healing. This shift can transform the way you interact with your inner voice.

    The Power of Self-Compassion

    Embracing your inner critic is a powerful step toward greater self-compassion. When you listen to and address this critical voice with kindness, you create a more nurturing internal environment. This approach can lead to profound changes in how you handle stress, challenges, and setbacks.

    Remember, self-compassion isn’t about being complacent or lazy. It’s about recognizing you are a human being rather than a human doing and treating yourself with the same care and understanding you would offer to a loved one. It’s about finding balance and allowing yourself the space to rest and recharge when needed.

    My Journey to Self-Compassion

    Reflecting on my own experience, I realize that the more I’ve listened to my inner critic rather than pushing it away, the quieter it has become. With my inner critic on board, I’ve experienced significantly higher levels of creativity and productivity. This has been a clear reminder that taking care of myself leads to better outcomes.

    As I practiced self-compassion, I noticed a positive shift in my life. Tasks that once felt daunting became manageable, and I found joy in activities that previously seemed burdensome. By listening to my inner critic with empathy and understanding, I created a harmonious relationship with myself, leading to a more fulfilling and balanced life.

    The journey to embracing your inner critic is not always easy. It requires patience, practice, and a willingness to be vulnerable. But the rewards are immense. By listening to and understanding your inner critic, you open the door to greater self-compassion, which in turn enhances your overall well-being and productivity.

    The next time you hear that critical voice, take a moment to pause and listen. Ask what it needs and respond with kindness. Remember, your inner critic is a part of you that’s seeking love and reassurance. By embracing it, you take a significant step toward a more compassionate and fulfilling life.

    I encourage you to reflect on your relationship with your inner critic. How do you typically respond to it? What changes can you make to start embracing it with compassion?

  • How to Boost Your Self-Esteem: 6 Tips to Like Yourself More

    How to Boost Your Self-Esteem: 6 Tips to Like Yourself More

    “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” ~Buddha

    I have, as I believe many of us do, grappled with the thorny issues of self-esteem for much of my life. But it was only when I became terribly unwell with an autoimmune disease six years ago that I began to see how much low self-esteem was affecting my day-to-day life and my health.

    I started to see how focusing on external validation and bending and folding, putting the needs of others ahead of mine, like a reed being dragged back and forth by the currents of a river, was a damaging way to live.

    As I began to heal, I could see how not really valuing or trusting myself was filtering into almost every aspect of my life. I began to understand how even the little decisions that said “yes” or “no” to my true self were affecting my health and happiness.

    I didn’t really know what I liked or didn’t like, who I was, or what I wanted from life. Well, at that point, I mostly wanted to be well, but I knew that emotional work was an important component of that. I also knew that developing greater self-worth would be key to my healing.

    I began reflecting on what I value and enjoy. I began listening to messages from my body and from my intuition. I started to ask myself questions like, “Am I people-pleasing from a place of low self-esteem, or is my true self saying yes in all its honesty and wisdom?” and “Am I bending to please or placate someone else’s wishes just to accommodate them, to the detriment of my health and happiness?” I began to believe in myself and to recognize the value I add to this world.

    Having high self-worth or self-esteem can be one of the most transformational and wonderful things for your happiness, health, and success, but how do we get from not holding ourselves in high regard to having high levels of love and esteem for ourselves?

    Self-esteem is the way we value and see ourselves. It is our assessment of our overall worth or value. It is how much we like ourselves. It is something that forms over time, but, along with the rest of our subconscious beliefs, it is mostly formed at a young age.

    Many of us suffer from low self-esteem, but it is totally possible to change and reframe our limiting beliefs.

    “Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your handbrake on.” ~Maxwell Maltz

    Having low self-esteem can really hold us back from living a full and happy life. We might feel anxious and awkward around others because we feel unlovable or paralyzed by low self-esteem, unable to move forward and succeed in life because we don’t feel we’re worthy.

    Low self-esteem often leads to high levels of self-criticism and ideas of not being good enough. It’s a feeling of generally thinking negatively about yourself and your life.

    It may stem from things like bullying or abuse, mental or physical illness, stress, work, or relationship problems. It can often begin in childhood and develop over the years.

    Low self-esteem can manifest in numerous ways, such as:

    • people-pleasing
    • being indecisive
    • not having positive relationships
    • getting angry or irritated easily
    • regularly feeling overwhelming sadness
    • Having difficulty creating boundaries
    • holding a pessimistic outlook on life
    • doubting your capabilities and capacity for success

    The great news, however, is that developing love for yourself and creating a happier, more successful life is totally possible. Here’s how.

    1. Work on developing self-compassion.

    I can be hard on myself at times—much harder on myself than on others. Nurturing self-compassion has helped me soften toward myself and, in doing so, view myself with a kinder lens.

    Kristen Neff explains, “Tender self-compassion is the capacity that allows us to be with ourselves just as we are—comforting and reassuring ourselves that we aren’t alone, as well as validating our pain. It has the gentle, nurturing quality of a mother toward a newborn child.”

    A useful technique for being kinder to yourself is to think about how you might respond to a good friend or a young child if they were beating themselves up about something. Just noticing how differently we speak to ourselves and beginning to adjust that to something kinder and gentler is an excellent way to start building compassion toward ourselves.

    Loving-kindness meditations have been very helpful for me in cultivating self-compassion. Incorporating one into your routine is an excellent way to develop self-compassion as a tangible practice.

    2. Set goals, and don’t break your promises to yourself.

    Building trust in yourself and your capabilities is an important part of developing self-worth. However, be careful not to allow goal-setting to be just another stick to beat yourself with.

    I live with a chronic illness, so setting goals can be challenging. My health can often dictate what I can achieve, so I have to be gentle in my approach to this. I keep my intentions reasonable, realistic, and compassionate. That means if I have a setback with my health, I don’t end up feeling bad for not keeping my promises to myself.

    Showing up for yourself and not letting yourself down tells your subconscious that you’re worth it. As long as you remain flexible and kind to yourself, setting small goals and then reveling in your accomplishments can begin to change the narrative you might have created around your abilities and not being good enough. Set realistic goals so you don’t set yourself up for failure, and build up over time as you develop your confidence and self-worth.

    If, like me, you have health woes, perhaps one of your goals might be to make sure you do a gentle yoga flow that you know helps with your pain. Or maybe even something as simple as making sure you spend ten minutes outside first thing in the morning so you get some sunlight and fresh air. The crucial thing is to show up for yourself and let your subconscious know that you matter.

    Or, if you are terrified of speaking up in meetings at work, set yourself a goal to say something once in the coming week. This small goal will feel more manageable than committing to speaking up in every meeting, and you’re more likely to achieve it, thereby swerving the shame spiral and negative self-talk trap. When you do speak up, really celebrate it!

    3. Take stock of your achievements.

    Make a list of things you’re good at. Start with small things like: good at being kind, funny, on time, tidy, whatever it may be. Come up with as many as you can, but ten is a good goal. Just writing this list will boost your confidence and shift you out of negative thought patterns.

    Then think about things you’ve achieved over your life—things like excelling in a sport or learning to cook or play an instrument.

    Next, consider what you’ve achieved at school, university, or work. Chances are, you excelled somewhere along the way, but you’ve told yourself a story to the contrary. It’s time to rewrite that story. Really revel in those successes. Maybe you could even write some words of praise next to each one. Go on, give yourself a gold star—you know you want to!

    I have an evening journaling practice, and sometimes, especially at times when I’m feeling a little down on myself, I write three things I did well that day. This always helps boost my mood and affects how I feel about myself.

    4. Accept compliments.

    I don’t know how many times I’ve deflected a compliment I’ve received: “You look nice today.” “Ugh, no, my hair’s awful” or some other such brush-off.

    I’ve started making a conscious effort to simply say, “Thanks very much” when someone pays me a compliment. I can’t say I feel totally at ease with it all the time, but it’s a warmer experience of receiving appreciation. I think it probably feels nicer for the person bestowing their kind words too.

    When we don’t feel good about ourselves, accepting a compliment can feel really awkward because we just can’t imagine how it’s true. It’s also considered culturally polite to modestly negate or refute a compliment, so it almost feels like a natural reflex to bat it away quickly and move on. But doing this keeps you in low self-worth and maintains the narrative of negativity you spin for yourself.

    The next time someone pays you a compliment, I invite you to just say, “Thanks so much” or “How nice of you to say.” The more you practice responding in this way, the more you will start to elevate your thoughts and feelings about yourself and develop higher self-esteem.

    5. Practice self-care.

    Looking after yourself is such an act of love. Consistently putting yourself and your needs first tells your brain that you’re worth it. Putting yourself first does not make you selfish. It actually enables you to give more fully to the people and things in your life that matter. It really is true that you can’t pour from an empty cup.

    Self-care absolutely looks like meditation, yoga, etc., but it also looks like getting enough sleep, eating well, moving your body, getting out in nature, and doing things you enjoy.

    Add it to your plan for the week. Build it into your calendar because it’s just as important as the meetings or whatever else you have filling up your week (more so, IMO!). Self-care is a way to keep showing up for yourself, showing yourself that you are worthy of care and love, which will raise your self-esteem to no end.

    One of my favorite self-care practices is to light a load of candles and incense, get some relaxing music on, and read a book. It makes me feel cozy and comforted and relaxes me. It can be all manner of things—whatever helps you show yourself the love you deserve.

    6. Try positive affirmations.

    Affirmations are a wonderful tool to help improve your self-esteem, but they need to be done right. Until I learned more about how affirmations work, they felt a bit meaningless to me.

    For them to work, our subconscious mind needs to accept them as true.

    If you have low self-worth, for example, chances are you won’t just immediately believe, at a subconscious level, the affirmation “I am worthy of love.” Once your self-esteem is a little higher, affirmations like that will work well, but when you’re coming from a place of low self-worth, your critical faculty won’t let “I am” affirmations pass go.

    While you’re developing your self-esteem, try using affirmations like “I am learning to feel worthy of love” or “Every day, in every way, I am learning to show myself the love and respect I deserve.”

    Affirmations like these feel much more credible to your belief system. Over time, they will help rewire your subconscious and, in doing so, help you raise your self-esteem.

    —

    I know firsthand that raising self-worth can be a slow and bumpy road, but it’s a journey well worth taking. Self-esteem is a crucial aspect of having positive relationships with yourself and others.

    By being gentle with yourself, accepting loving words from others, focusing on your achievements and skills, continually showing up for and looking after yourself, and reprogramming your subconscious mind, you can make a huge difference to your levels of happiness and success in life.

    A better relationship with yourself is the first step toward creating better relationships with those around you, and, if you ask me, loving, joyful relationships are what life is all about. As RuPaul says, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”

  • 22 Things That Have Helped Me Grow and Love Myself

    22 Things That Have Helped Me Grow and Love Myself

    “Be brave enough to take off the masks you wear out there and get to know who you are underneath. Be vulnerable enough to accept your flaws and know that they are what make you human; they are what make you real. Be confident enough to accept and cherish your strengths. Don’t minimize them or hide them. They are your beautiful gifts to share with the world. Be brave enough to say, you know what, all of this is who I am. I make so many mistakes. I can be forgetful, I am messy. But I am doing my best with what I’ve got. And I am so proud of that. I am so proud of me. And I am proud of who I am becoming. ” ~Nikki Banas

    A few years ago, a kindergartener came up to me with a small Valentine’s balloon. He handed it to me and said with a sweet and innocent smile, “This is for you. Since you probably aren’t getting anything else.” I laughed so hard I wet my pants.

    Over the years I have learned the importance of being your own Valentine. There is no greater love than the love you can give yourself. And if I know one thing for sure, it is that we have the rest of our lives to spend with ourselves. So we might as well learn to love ourselves. Am I right?

    In that moment, I was reminded of just how far I had come on life’s wild ride.

    I remember on Valentine’s Day, about ten years ago, I walked into a Target to do some serious retail therapy. I barely made it twenty steps before I saw a shelf filled with coffee mugs. You know, the ones that have one initial on the front, but you can never find your exact initials. You can only find X, Q, and Z. Well, I kid you not, there were three lined up perfectly that spelled out J-E-N. Jen, my ex. The one I thought I would marry.

    As her name glared at me from the shelf, “Since You Been Gone” played on the loudspeaker. I nearly had a breakdown on aisle four. At that moment, my world felt like it was imploding. It seemed as if the world was against me. Loneliness and grief flooded my body.

    I darted straight for the alcohol aisle, then I went home and drank myself into oblivion. I don’t even know what oblivion is, but I know I drank myself there. I didn’t know any other way to soothe myself. Drinking was my answer for everything.

    Two months later, I would almost drink myself to death. Self-love, self-compassion, and self-worth were not words in my vocabulary. I had heard them before, but I had never fully put them into practice.

    People had told me that I was loved. But what do those words mean if you don’t believe it yourself?  If you don’t love yourself, those words sound a lot like Charlie Brown’s teacher. “Muah. Muah. Blah blah blah blah blah.” Telling me that I was loved was a sweet sentiment, but it felt rather meaningless for me at that time in my life.

    I did attempt the journey of self-love before I got sober. But addiction stunts your growth. You can only grow so much when you are numbing out to some of life’s greatest opportunities for learning.

    My sobriety propelled me into a real and authentic journey of self-love. A journey that I was able to fully envelop and embrace. Self-love changed my entire life. It changed how I viewed myself. And, in turn, it changed how I viewed the world.

    Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein, president of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, wrote, “Self-love is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological, and spiritual growth. Self-love means having a high regard for your own well-being and happiness. Self-love means taking care of your own needs and not sacrificing your well-being to please others. Self-love means not settling for less than you deserve.”

    For years I had cared so much about what other people thought, and I would often put on a show to try and convince other people of my worthiness—when, in fact, I was the one that needed convincing. “Hustling for worthiness,” as Brené Brown calls it, is exhausting.

    And a foundation built on what others think of you is about as unstable as a foundation built of candy corn. Why candy corn? I have no idea. But one tiny windstorm or a small bit of turbulence and you are screwed.

    Self-love, self-compassion, and self-worth are not just things you hope for; they are things you work for.

    I had to start by letting go of anything that might be holding me back from stepping into my true self. I had to peel away the layers. Years of using alcohol to cope and survive, shame around my sexuality, trauma and grief related to my family’s deaths, the way religion tried to convince me that I was broken… the list goes on and on. I had to face these things head on and fully accept all parts of myself. The light and the dark.

    Brené Brown, one of my all-time favorite authors, states in one of my all-time favorite books, The Gifts of Imperfection, “Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.”

    I worked through some tough stuff and began to see myself in a different light. Realizing that I was not broken was an incredible gift. A gift that I would not have been able to unwrap without first healing some past wounds and facing some hard things that I had so long avoided. And I continued to love myself through the entire process.

    Self-love, in my opinion, is the most powerful kind of love. Without it, I find it almost impossible to authentically love someone else. Without self-love, my life would become a bit of a dark alley. Without self-love, I would stay stuck in that dark alley. And the good Lord knows, ain’t nothing good going on in a dark alley.

    Self-love gives me the lantern I need to help light the way out of the darkness, back to my authentic self. Back to my truth. Back to my own light. 

    Brené Brown also makes reference to this courage and this light. She says, “Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of OUR light.” Self-love guides the way.

    Self-love is more than just the state of “feeling good.” It is much more than buying yourself some chocolates and taking a bubble bath, although chocolates and bubble baths are nice too. Self-love is about diving and digging deep into your own life. It is about letting go of those limiting beliefs and negative loops that have been telling you lies for years.

    It is about learning to talk to yourself in the loving way that you deserve. It is discovering how to feel comfortable in your own skin and recognizing that you matter. It is standing up for yourself in areas that might scare you at first but will empower you in the end. It is about letting others see you. The real you.

    Self-love is a way of life.

    It is about rewiring your brain and changing your old story. It is about having compassion for ourselves and celebrating ourselves. All parts of ourselves. It doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t do one abdominal workout and wake up with a six-pack the following day. Otherwise, I would be rocking a six-pack.

    Just like training and toning our muscles takes commitment and time, training and toning our minds and our hearts takes consistent dedication and a willingness to stay on course. Unlearning is hard work. But hard work that is worth it, since it means living happy, joyous, and free (most of time).

    My old ways of thinking certainly make “cameos” in my life these days. The difference is, they don’t run the show.

    At forty-five, I have the confidence to say that self-love has changed my entire life. My self-love journey is ever-evolving, and I certainly still have my rough days. But, if we are looking at the big picture, I have become quite fond of my qualities. I truly feel like I am light in this world rather than just a useless bump on a log. Actually, who is to say that those bumps on logs are useless? Maybe someone loves those bumps. Okay, that might be stretching it.

    Anyway, when I used to experience any type of emotional disturbance, I would often choose unhealthy and negative ways to deal with my feelings. Now, I have a laundry list of practices that help promote a healthier and more productive response so that I can move through the disturbances with grace and dignity rather than self-pity and self-sabotage.

    The triggers don’t ever go away, but the way we respond to them most certainly does some shifting.

    Where does one even start to discover self-love? I think you have to see what works for you. Some things that have been and still are vital to my growth include:

    • therapy
    • breathwork
    • meditation
    • writing
    • taking time for myself
    • getting to know myself
    • forgiveness
    • being of service
    • listening to others’ stories of hope
    • unplugging
    • long baths
    • doing things that make me happy
    • not shaming myself for needing medication for my depression
    • getting outside of my comfort zone
    • staying sober
    • laughing and not taking everything so seriously
    • making empowering choices
    • interrupting negative thoughts
    • reading a lot of Brené Brown books
    • vulnerability
    • being open and honest about my own story
    • nature

    These are just some of the things that are in my self-love satchel. Do people still use that word, satchel? Satchel. Satchel. Now it sounds weird. Anyway, those are just a few things that have helped and continue to help keep my train on the tracks.

    The journey of self-love is hard work. But nothing that is worth it comes easy. What challenges you, changes you. And getting to know myself and accepting all parts of myself was one of the most challenging things I have ever tried. And at the same time one of the most rewarding.

    I’m looking forward to the day that I meet my other Valentine.

    That kindergartener was right, though. The balloon was the only gift I would get on that particular Valentine’s Day. But I had already given myself the greatest gift on earth: the gift of self-love.

  • How to Heal from Rejection (Without Getting Down on Yourself)

    How to Heal from Rejection (Without Getting Down on Yourself)

    “This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I give myself the compassion I need.” ~Kristen Neff

    The handsome man I was dating sat on the easy chair to tell a difficult story. We were in my loft, and he was avoiding eye contact. I studied the symmetry of his jaw as he spoke.

    “I did something stupid,” he said.

    I thought he was confiding in me. Maybe this intimacy would bring us closer. Maybe his eye had wandered but he was choosing me. I leaned in.

    There was someone else, but not in a way I ever would have guessed. The ugliness of his admission was at odds with my glowing perception of him.

    Adding to my cognitive dissonance, at the end of his tale I was stunned to hear the words, “and that’s why I can’t see you anymore.”

    My hands shook. I set my wine glass down on the coffee table. We’re all flooded with stress hormones during separations because we’re social creatures. My body felt like it was drowning. I had daydreamed this man would be a buoy to reach for and hold me in safety during life’s challenges. Instead, he put on his coat.

    “I’m sorry,” he said, with genuine sentiment. Then he left, slipping away into the night, leaving me alone on my sofa in the riptide of emotion.

    I was at once disappointed, disheartened, sad, betrayed, and scared to be alone. Yet in light of his revelation, I was also relieved.

    I’d been broken up with before, but this time there was no punishing blame put upon me, and the shame was all his. For the first time I could see rejection as impersonal. It had nothing to do with my worth, value, or actions. It was about where he was at in his life, the recognition that I wasn’t in that same place, and the fact he didn’t want to take me.

    Nor did I want to go there. His story was that he lost his cool while DJing a wedding on the weekend. A woman kept pestering him to play a song he’d already played. When she became irate and shouty he spit on her.

    Her friends called the police, who charged him with assault. Spitting on someone is a criminal offense. It’s also disgusting and degrading. Now he was dealing with the legal consequences, something he was taking responsibility for on his own.

    My brain said, “This breakup is for the best,” while my body processed the rejection as a bereavement. Our fun concert dates, record shopping field trips, and song sharing were over. He was gone, and so was the hopeful promise of our budding relationship. The indulgent illusion and fantasy of early-stage dating evaporated in an instant.

    Alone on my sofa I wrapped myself in a fuzzy blanket, sipped wine, and watched a movie. I don’t remember which one. I was numb. But after that my rejection coping veered off the usual script.

    The Old Post-Rejection Story

    There’s a standard RomCom break-up montage—you know the one. The star of the story gets dumped then self-destructive. She gets drunk, sends the messy message she shouldn’t, wallows in her pajamas with unkempt hair, and eats pizza and ice cream until a bestie intervenes. Then she hits the gym, regains confidence, gets a new look, and is all set for a surprising meet cute with someone else.

    But what if after a rejection you could skip the self-sabotage?

    To sail through rejection, you’d have to see it as not personal, as I did with my crush. You’d also need to know it’s not perfect by perceiving people and situations as flawed, the way things really are. And you’d need to accept that nothing’s permanent and not be attached to outcomes. You would go in and out of relationships like a graceful butterfly, with no ego, expectations, fantasy, or old baggage.

    In other words, you’d be a learned Buddhist, or Eckhart Tolle. I don’t know about you, but I’m nowhere near there yet in my conscious evolution.

    But there’s another way to process rejection as an adult that also sidesteps the hapless drunken humiliation and numb hiding. It’s so simple we don’t do it, or if we do, we don’t apply it enough. We have to love ourselves.

    Why Loving Ourselves Heals

    It’s taken me a long time to learn that self-love is not just cheesy sentiment. It’s more than a positive mental attitude or a meme from RuPaul’s Drag Race. Active self-love is self-soothing, and for those of us who’ve ever felt inadequately comforted, seen, heard, or understood (i.e., virtually everyone), this concept can be hard to grasp.

    I didn’t fully appreciate self-soothing until a few years after that breakup with the handsome spitter, when I moved to a new city by myself. In the lead up to the move I was so busy planning and packing I didn’t fully feel my myriad feelings. It wasn’t until I arrived and unpacked that I grieved the loss of my friendships and familiar comforts I’d grown used to. It was like I’d broken up with a whole city.

    Then, facing the pandemic on my own, without my full support network, I took a deep dive into neuroscience, reading everything I could about resilience, anxiety, and burnout. In the process I discovered Kristen Neff’s groundbreaking research on fierce self-compassion.

    I learned the reason rejections and losses are so painful is that the separation triggers all the times we’ve felt bereft before. We feel this in our bodies, which sound alarms. We typically react with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions, and our minds spiral. We might blame or shame ourselves, twisting “this isn’t working,” “things change” or other impersonal reasons into harsh feelings of “I’m bad,” “I’m unworthy,” or “I’m not enough.”

    If we act with self-love and compassion instead, we acknowledge the pain and sadness we’re feeling. We comfort ourselves like we would a sobbing small child—with soothing actions that calm down our activated nervous systems.

    What We Get Wrong About Self-Love

    In adulthood our attempts at self-soothing too often numb the pain instead of healing it. We blanket ourselves in escapist binge watching or video games. We reach for another glass of wine or something stronger. Or we overwork to exhaustion. Sitting with difficult emotions we’d rather avoid is too uncomfortable and scary.

    But the worst thing we can do is to take our raw, unprocessed emotions and lash out at someone else. That’s when feelings turn into reactivity and abusive behavior, like spitting on someone or harassing them with tirades of vitriol. That’s when hurt people lose it and hurt others.

    That means the corollary is also true: the best thing we can do for ourselves, families, friends, partners, communities, and the world is to feel our feelings fully and ride them, surf-like, to shore. To do that we need to be present and aware and know how to take care of our emotions through self-soothing. That’s healing.

    Self-Love Practices That Really Work

    Self-soothing is about being in your body, not checking out or judging yourself harshly. I’m still a novice at self-soothing, but so far, the methods that work for me are:

    -Wrapping myself in a self-hug, or rubbing my upper arms

    -Breathing in quickly and then releasing a long, sigh-like exhale at least three times

    -Standing up and shaking out my hands, shoulders, arms, and legs, or dancing it out

    -Taking a moment to notice as many details as I can about where I am (colors, sounds, smells)

    -Breathing in steam from a hot cup of tea or a warm bath

    -Listening to calming music

    -Lighting a candle to watch it sparkle

    -Going for a walk

    -Doing gentle yin yoga

    When I try to think my way through rejection I either spiral into rumination or shut down. Telling someone what happened can help make sense of it and provide validation. But the only words that truly salve the sting are loving reassurances we tell ourselves, like: “You’re okay. I’ve got you. You’re safe.” In this way, repeating positive affirmations can help too.

    Remember It’s a Process!

    One important thing to know about self-soothing is that it takes time! In our rushed, busy-is-better culture we don’t gift ourselves with time-outs enough. That’s why we’re so often on the edge and reactive. But self-soothing in the moment we feel the first sting of rejection completes the stress cycle faster. It takes less time to heal by self-soothing than we’d normally spend ruminating, numbing, or fuming.

    And when you soothe yourself, you might see new ways to connect with others. I didn’t date the handsome spitter again, but by not taking our breakup personally I didn’t build up a wall of shame or blame against him either. We became friends and continued seeing concerts together until I moved to my new city.

    Everything changes. Along with the best, the worst things are always going to happen. Loved ones leave or die. Opportunities are fleeting. Material possessions break or fade. There’s grief in losing the familiarity of a home you once lived in, even when it’s time to move on. Remember you’ve still got yourself to live with.

    Loving yourself is a reason to keep going, find joy wherever you can, and attract more love. Loving yourself is the rescue buoy that’s always there. It’s the soft soothing comfort and calm power you’ve always longed for.

  • 8 Signs You’re Carrying Deep Shame and How to Start to Heal

    8 Signs You’re Carrying Deep Shame and How to Start to Heal

    “If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.” ~Brené Brown

    Did you know that one of the biggest causes of suffering is unacknowledged shame? It makes us believe that there’s something wrong with us and we’re not good enough.

    When we have deep shame inside, instead of being true to ourselves, we “dress to impress” so others will like us, which eventually makes us tired, depressed, and anxious because we’ve become disconnected from our true essence.

    Having shame isn’t the issue; the real issue is resisting or trying to cover it up. The more we try to keep shame hidden, the more we live in limitation and self-protection and experience stress in our system.

    We may experience self-hate and a constant critical inner voice. Those parts of us don’t want to be suppressed, forced to change, or told they’re bad or wrong; they want to be seen, heard, and embraced in unconditional acceptance and love.

    Many of us try to hide our shame because we don’t want to feel that deep pain. And if people look at us in a weird way, criticize, judge, or leave us, then what? We’ll be all alone. Well, that may not be true, but that’s what we may have experienced in the past, and we fear it happening again.

    We may want a new relationship and to be intimate, but a part of us may push it away because we’re afraid that they’ll see that we’re not perfect human beings and leave. Then that would re-affirm the false belief that we’re unlovable or unworthy.

    We may want to share our creativity and/or express ourselves in some way, but we’ve been shamed for doing so in the past, so we stop ourselves because we don’t want to be hurt again.

    We may want to do inner healing, but if we do, we’ll get in touch with the parts of us that are hurting, and feeling those feelings may seem overwhelming because we’re used to suppressing them and they’re attached to past pains or traumas.

    Some of us were shamed for making a mistake in the past, even though making mistakes is part of learning. When we fear making mistakes, we tend to self-sabotage or procrastinate.

    Sometimes we use food, drugs, alcohol, or being busy to try to numb and get away from our painful and shameful feelings.

    Sometimes shame manifests as chronic fatigue, self-criticism, depression, low self-esteem or painful sensations in our body. We may feel self-conscious, anxious, and insecure and have a hard time speaking up or receiving gifts and compliments because we don’t feel worthy of them.

    So what is shame really? It makes us believe that we’re bad, wrong, unlovable, or unworthy. Those ideas stem from not meeting other people’s expectations of how we should be, or from experiences that made us feel embarrassed.

    Because we didn’t know how to cope with or process our feelings at the time, we developed a negative lens through which we now see ourselves and others that dictates what we do and don’t do.

    If we were shamed for or felt shame about something as children, we usually try to find a way to compensate for it as adults. What do I mean?

    As a child, I was teased for being fat and ugly, and I blamed my body for me not having any friends and for my father criticizing and teasing me.

    At age thirteen, my doctor told me to go on a diet. When I lost weight I received compliments and recognition; however, I took it to the extreme, and at age fifteen I became a severe anorexic. No matter how many therapists or treatment centers I went to (which were numerous), I wouldn’t let go of the disordered eating behaviors that I thought kept me safe.

    I developed survival strategies, exercising non-stop and eating very little, so I would never be fat and teased again. However, as much as I tried to protect myself from the shame of being fat, I was now being shamed for how and what I ate and what my body looked like.

    My father told me he was embarrassed to be seen with me, and I was made fun of, criticized, and judged from people on the street, the therapists I was seeing, and the those in charge in the treatment centers I was in.

    So, in a sense, I was being shamed for trying to cope, feel safe, and survive.

    At age fifteen I became obsessed with money to try to compensate for the powerless, shameful feelings I was having.

    Money gave me a fleeting, false sense of power and worthiness. If I wasn’t working and earning money, I felt like a horrible person.

    I was trying to hide my deep shame and feel worthy, valuable, lovable, and safe by controlling my food and weight and how much money I made and saved, but none of that ever made me truly feel okay or healed my deep pain and shame. Deep inside, I was still experiencing depression, anxiety, a critical voice, and self-hate, and I was acting in self-harming and self-depriving ways.  

    When people used to say to me, “Debra, you just need to love yourself,” I thought, “Yeah right, what does that even mean? I don’t deserve to be loved and cared for. I’m bad. I deserve to suffer, to be punished, criticized, and deprived, and to struggle in life.”

    This is what unresolved shame does. It creates a shame-based identity. It runs our subconscious programming, disconnects us from our authenticity, and makes us believe that there’s something wrong with us—that we’re unworthy, unlovable, and not good enough.

    We don’t stop loving the ones who shamed and hurt us; we stop loving ourselves, and we start treating ourselves in the same ways they did. The external rejection becomes our own internal rejection.

    It may be helpful  to understand that people who blame, shame, or criticize us are also hurting and have deep wounds that make them feel as if they’re bad, unworthy, and unlovable. Their inner child is saying, “Please love me” just like ours is.

    When we feel a sense of shame, most often our attention is focused on fixing ourselves to fit into the standards of the world so we can be loved and accepted. By doing so, we often deny how we’re truly feeling and instead look for the “right things” to say and do, which keeps us from living our truth.

    Instead of fixing ourselves to cover up how we’re truly feeling, we need to take the time to understand why we’re feeling, thinking, and acting how we do, which may be coming from past traumas, hurts, and wounds. 

    If we keep our shame hidden, we may feel stuck inside, which makes us feel stuck in our lives because our minds and bodies continue to react automatically from the past painful and unresolved experiences.

    Not sure if you’re carrying deep shame? How much of this is true for you?

    • You’re unable to find inner peace. Deep inside you don’t feel good enough, like there’s something’s wrong with you.
    • You need to be loved and approved of by others in order to love and approve of yourself.
    • You feel insecure and unworthy and constantly compare yourself to others.
    • You see yourself and others through the lens of past painful experiences.
    • You’re afraid to try new things, share your creativity, share how you’re truly feeling, or ask for what you want and need because you don’t feel worthy, or you’re afraid of feeling embarrassed or shamed.
    • You mold yourself to try to fit in with what everyone else is doing instead of following what has true, heartfelt meaning for you.
    • You often feel anxious and afraid, and you have a constant critical inner voice.
    • You try to achieve as a way to prove that you’re worthy, valuable, and lovable.

    Since being shamed makes us want to hide those parts of ourselves that were unacceptable, healing happens when we bring those parts into the light of awareness and embrace them with unconditional acceptance and love.

    Healing starts to happen when we recognize and break free from the trance we’re living in. We do this by going to the root cause(s) of the shame and resolving that unresolved pain with compassion, love, and a new understanding.

    Healing starts to happen when we learn how to be more compassionate with ourselves and instead of saying “Why can’t I just…?” We ask ourselves “What keeps me from…? How can I help that part feel seen, heard, understood, and loved?”

    Healing starts to happen when we begin to uncover, discover, and embrace our natural qualities, talents, and abilities and allow those parts of us to be felt and seen.

    Healing starts to happen when we learn how to speak to and treat ourselves in more kind, compassionate, and loving ways, and also believe that we’re worth it.

    Please remember that healing is a process. Our system is conditioned to be a certain way, and our minds and bodies love to stay with what’s familiar. Working with our tender, hurting parts with love and compassion can help us break out of the trance of past hurt and wounds and experience what true love and inner peace really means.

    So, instead of trying to get rid of the shame or cover it up, embrace the parts you’re ashamed of with unconditional acceptance and love. Let yourself and your inner child know that you are beautiful, valuable, and lovable as you are, even with your wounds and scars.

  • How Pain Can Be a Teacher and Why We Need to Stop Avoiding It

    How Pain Can Be a Teacher and Why We Need to Stop Avoiding It

    “The strongest hearts have the most scars.” ~Unknown

    I always hated pain when growing up. For as long as I can remember I tried to avoid it. Physical pain was uncomfortable, but emotional pain was the real torture. It was sometimes easier to have a fight and stop communicating than to have a challenging conversation.

    Disconnecting emotionally and withdrawing from painful experiences was my de facto subconscious strategy. I still pursued goals and succeeded, but this didn’t feel painful to me because I used my passion and bravado to drive through the long hours and grueling work.

    If I wasn’t avoiding pain, I was in denial. It cost me. Ignoring a painful feeling made me numb all over. Denying an unpleasant emotion made me oblivious to the whole spectrum of sensations.

    Avoiding dentists created more issues and massive bills down the road. Dodging challenging scenarios and boredom cost me passions and hobbies that could have led to a different career or a creative outlet.

    This continued until one day I found myself without busy work and distractions when taking a career break. Not being able to hide behind time fillers, a whole army of emotions and feelings came at once. The bottled-up monster escaped, the dam broke, and the castle fell under attack.

    It was overwhelming and frightening. Remembering from my coaching training that sensory adaptation will kick in at some point, I let it all play out. I meditated for hours observing the emotions rising and falling like an ocean tide. Eventually, the monster deflated and the flood dried out.

    Recognizing that there is an issue is the first step to resolving it. I realized that this was not the way I wanted to continue living. After learning more about mind machinery, I became aware of my behavioral patterns. Enneagram type 7, called Enthusiast or Epicurian, perfectly described how I ran “Me”—motivated by a desire to be happy and avoid discomfort.

    Before that, I accepted my pain avoidance patterns as an unchangeable status quo. I did not see reality in any different way. With time, I learned that pain was not the bogeyman to be afraid of.

    Pain became my teacher, an early alarm that something was not going well, and a motivator. Getting praise and encouragement for good behavior isn’t the only way to learn. Our participation prizes-driven society creates a false sense of entitlement, preventing us from personal growth.

    Teacher pain can fix unproductive behavior or an issue almost instantaneously. As cruel as they can be, these lessons are long remembered and followed sometimes our whole lives. A perfect example of this is how Tony Robbins made his early mark as a quit smoking coach by making clients associate nausea and fear of his booming voice with cigarettes.

    To be clear, I’m not suggesting we should knowingly hurt ourselves or others as a teaching tool; just that we need to stop avoiding pain and discomfort because they can both lead to growth.

    When I became appreciative and respectful of pain, I was able to slow down and learn more about what it taught me.

    Our bodies communicate through sensations. Pain is one of the common languages that the body uses to make us understand in a split second that something isn’t right. It also can speak for both your body and mind, as our emotional and physical circuitry is interconnected. Taking Panadol can ease the pain of social rejection in the same way it can fix your headache.

    It is the language that bonds us with other humans. Shared painful experiences do not need to be explained. They are understood on a deeper level. Compassion is born from the language of pain, as it makes us appreciate what another person is going through.

    What would our lives be like if we never experienced pain? Without an early alarm system, a broken bone would not hurt, eventually causing a deadly infection. A serious illness would go unnoticed until a person perished. Congenital insensitivity to pain is a very rare condition affecting 1 out of 25,000 newborns. It is also very dangerous, and most affected people do not survive their childhood.

    When we strip away pain from its emotionally excruciating quality, it is essentially a sensation. Experienced meditators can attest that knee and back pain during long seated meditation sessions eventually lead to the emotional context fading away, showing pain for what it really is.

    It took time to learn the language of pain. Running out of breath, having sore muscles, or feeling anxiety before a performance is good pain. Sharp pain in joints or feeling of discomfort, leading to a crippling flight-or-fight response, is a different animal.

    Good pain keeps us wanting more of the experience. It motivates incremental growth by forming a habit of seeking that familiar feeling. Its bad cousin will cripple us if left unnoticed or overwhelm us, teaching hopelessness.

    The school of pain can’t be skipped. We can’t call in sick or cheat our way out of it. The teacher pain will keep calling our names until we show up for the lesson. Avoiding it would eventually cost more. It is feeding a bottled-up monster that one day turns into a formidable Godzilla.

    It’s pointless to hide from it. Just like Buddha found out about death, sickness, and old age despite his parents’ best efforts to shield him, we will all have to accept that it is ever-present in our lives.

    Walking a life journey made me realize that sometimes there is no other option but to face pain. As uncomfortable and frightening as it may be, if I don’t square up to the monster, it will never go away.

    The saying “the only way out is through” holds true. The next level of personal growth has to happen through discomfort. Though these victories may be invisible to everyone else, they are uniquely valuable to us.

    It may sound like I’ve mastered the art of facing the uncomfortable and I am no longer concerned about pain. That is not true. The lessons I get from pain are still challenging.

    As much as I don’t want to sit through hard lessons, I’ve learned to respect and heed pain’s presence. Knowing that becoming invincible to it is impossible, I’ve learned to recognize the challenge and see it as a catalyst for growth.

    Anticipating pain keeps me motivated to avoid its visits and learn on my own. I will probably never tolerate pain as some people do. I am probably wired that way. But nature can always be complemented by nurture. Resilience, acceptance, and embracing the suck make it valuable learning.

    In her influential book The Upside of Stress, psychologist Kelly McGonigal challenged conventional thinking that stress kills. The research shows that how we perceive stress can turn a negative into positive. Pain can be seen in the same way.

    We can’t pick and choose which parts of human experience we want to face. As tempting as it is to only eat the cherry on top of life’s cake, this will never make us appreciate life wholly. We need to accept all of it. Without pain, we do not know pleasure. Without the discomfort of ignorance, there is no bliss of knowledge.

  • Anxiety Sucks, But It Taught Me These 7 Important Things

    Anxiety Sucks, But It Taught Me These 7 Important Things

    “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” ~Soren Kierkegaard

    Let’s be clear:

    This isn’t an article about positive thinking.

    This isn’t an article about how silver linings make everything okay.

    This isn’t an article about how your perspective on anxiety is all wrong.

    The kids call those things “toxic positivity.”

    No toxic positivity here.

    This is an article about my lifelong relationship with anxiety and what I’ve learned from something that won’t go away. At times the anxiety spikes and feels almost crippling. I have a hard time appreciating the learning at those times, but it’s still there.

    That is what this article is all about.

    Please do not confuse me learning things from something that won’t go away with me endorsing that thing or saying it’s a good thing. I would trade everything I’ve learned from anxiety for less anxiety. I don’t even like writing about it because focusing on it this much gives me anxiety. But I want to write things that help people.

    How a Bare Butt Sparked My Anxiety

    Stranger Things has shown how cool the eighties were. For the most part, this is true. I miss arcades and the music. I miss the freedom I had as a kid that I don’t see kids having these days. I miss some of the fashion. I don’t miss people not knowing anything about mental health.

    We used to play football every day after school at a baseball field/park in our little town. This was unsupervised tackle football with kids a lot older than me.

    I remember one time a guy broke his finger. It was pointing back at him at a ninety-degree angle. He took off sprinting toward his house. One of the older kids said, “He’s running home to mommy!” and we all went back to playing.

    Oddly enough, possibly breaking my finger didn’t worry me. What did worry me was one day when a kid was running for a touchdown, and another kid dove to stop him. He only caught the top of his pants, pulling them down and exposing his bare butt. He made the touchdown anyway, but while everyone else thought it was hilarious, it scared me to death.

    What if that happens to me?

    I started tying my pants up with a string every day, pulling it tight enough to make my stomach hurt (remember, this was the eighties—I was wearing those neon-colored pajama-pant-looking things). I started to feel sick before we played football, before school, and before everything.

    You would think it was obvious that I was dealing with anxiety, but you have to remember that in the eighties and nineties, we did not talk about mental health like we do now. We didn’t throw around terms like anxiety and depression. I was just the weird kid that threw up before he went to school.

    The anxiety has gotten a little more noticeable over the past few years. It seems to have gotten worse since having COVID in 2020 and 2021. I don’t know if that’s a thing, but it feels like it is. It has forced me to deal with it mindfully and with more intention. It’s never pleasant, but I’ve learned a few things.

    1. Anxiety has taught me to be present.

    The crushing presence of high anxiety forces me to be exactly where I am at that moment. I’m not able to read or write. I cannot play a video game or watch a movie with any kind of enjoyment. There’s nothing I can do.

    This roots me in the moment in a very intense, authentic way. That might seem bad since I’m anxious, but there’s another layer to it. When I can be completely present with the physiological sensations of anxiety, I recognize that they are energy in the body. When I’m super present, I can see how my mind is turning those sensations into the emotion we call anxiety, and that’s where my suffering comes from.

    2. Anxiety has taught me about control.

    I’ve been told that my hyper-independence and need to be prepared for anything is a trauma response. I was a therapist for ten years, and I still don’t know what to do with this information. I do know that anxiety gives me a crash course in what I can control and what I cannot control.

    The bad news is that I can’t control any of the things that I think are creating anxiety. The good news is that I can control my response to all those things. Anxiety forces me to do this in a very intentional way.

    Anxiety also puts my mind firmly on something bigger than myself. Maybe it’s that higher power we hear about in AA meetings and on award shows. It’s good for me to get outside my head and remember that I’m not in charge of anything. It’s helpful to only box within my weight class.

    3. Anxiety teaches me to have good habits and boundaries.

    I’m bad about allowing my habits and boundaries to slip when times are good. I start eating poorly, I stop exercising, I stay up too late, and I watch a bunch of shows and movies that beam darkness and distraction directly into my head.

    I also start to allow unhealthy and even toxic people to have a more prominent role in my life. This is all under the guise of helping them because people reach out to me a lot. Over the years, I’ve learned I have to limit how close I let the most toxic people get to me, no matter how much help they need.

    When I’m feeling good, I start thinking I can handle anything, and my boundaries slip. Anxiety is always a reminder that the unhealthiness in my life has consequences, and I clean house when it spikes.

    4. Anxiety reminds me how important growth is.

    Once I clean house, I start looking at new projects and things I can do to feel better. I start taking the next step in who I want to be. This has been difficult over the past three years because the waves of anxiety have been so intense, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel as the good habits I put in place and the new projects and things I started are beginning to come to fruition.

    I chose to let my counseling license go inactive and focus on life coaching because it’s less stressful, and I’m better at it. This would not have happened without anxiety. I have changed my diet and exercise in response to blood pressure and anxiety, and these are good habits to have whether I am anxious or not.

    5. Anxiety taught me to be gentle.

    I’ve written and spoken a lot about my desire to be gentler with people. I’m not unkind, and I have a lot of compassion for people, but this is often expressed gruffly or too directly. It’s how I was raised, and I often feel like I am patronizing people if I walk in verbal circles when I’m trying to help them with something.

    When I’m experiencing high anxiety I feel fragile, which helps me understand how other people might feel in the face of my bluntness. I started working on being gentler around 2018, and I was disappointed in my progress.

    It was also around that year that anxiety began to become a fixture in my life again. As I look back now, I can recognize that I am a lot gentler with everyone around me when I’m anxious. Being a little fragile helps me treat everybody else with a little more care.

    6. Anxiety taught me to slow down and ask for help.

    When I started experiencing increased anxiety, it led me to make quick decisions and change things to try to deal with it. This makes sense. Evolutionarily, anxiety is meant to prompt us to action.

    The problem was that these decisions rarely turned out to be my best ones and often led to other consequences I had to deal with down the line. Because of this, I’ve learned that an anxiety spike is not the time to make big decisions.

    If I have to make a decision about something, I slow down and try to be very intentional about it. I’ve also learned I need to talk it out with somebody else, something I’ve never been inclined to do. Asking for help is a good thing.

    7. Anxiety helps me speed up.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the opposite of what I just said.

    Let me clarify.

    One of the most important quotes I’ve ever read came from the folk singer Joan Baez: “Action is the antidote to anxiety.” (Years later, I learned she might have said despair instead of anxiety, but I heard it the first way).

    Some tasks bring anxiety that I do not want to deal with. These usually involve phone calls or emails to bureaucratic organizations or errands that I find unpleasant and anxiety-inducing (avoiding these also makes sense—our evolutionary legacy cannot understand why we would do something that may feel dangerous).

    Over the years, I’ve learned that anxiety diminishes if I take the steps I need to take to address these tasks. The cool thing is that this has translated over to many of my day-to-day tasks.

    By acting in the face of anxiety, I’ve gotten pretty good about doing things when they need to be done. I mow the lawn when it needs to be mowed, take out the trash when it needs to be taken out, put the laundry up when it needs to be put up, and get the oil changed in my truck when it needs to be changed.

    Once we start addressing tasks immediately, it becomes a habit. Anxiety helped me do this.

    Anxiety Still Sucks

    So there you go. Seven things anxiety has taught me. I’m grateful for these lessons, but they don’t make anxiety any less difficult in the moment.

    Anxiety is meant to suck. It’s meant to make things difficult and uncomfortable for us until we do something to address the problem. The problem, unfortunately, is often un-addressable these days.

    We worry about things like losing our job, not having enough money, divorce, and the general state of the world. Anxiety did not develop to address any of these things, so sometimes being comfortable with discomfort is the best we can offer ourselves.

    Maybe that’s the last thing anxiety is teaching me.

  • How I’ve Stopped Letting My Unhealed Parents Define My Worth

    How I’ve Stopped Letting My Unhealed Parents Define My Worth

    “Detachment is not about refusing to feel or not caring or turning away from those you love. Detachment is profoundly honest, grounded firmly in the truth of what is.” ~Sharon Salzberg

    A few months ago, my father informed me that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Although he seemed optimistic about the treatment, I knew that hearing such news was not easy.

    After a few weeks, I followed up with him. He ignored my message and went silent for a couple of months. Although his slight ghosting was common, it made me feel ignored and dismissed.

    In the meantime, I went to India for a couple of months. A few weeks before I returned, he reached out, saying he needed to talk. Although he wasn’t specific, I knew something was happening and immediately agreed to speak to him.

    It was Sunday afternoon when he called. After I picked up, I immediately asked about his health. He went on to explain the situation and the next steps of the treatment.

    The call took one hour and twenty-six minutes. I learned everything about his health, where he goes hiking, what food he eats after the hike, what time he wakes up, the fun he and his girlfriend have, what his relationships with his students is like, and where he goes dancing every Saturday night.

    The only thing he knew about me was that my trip to India was great. He didn’t ask me what I did there or why I even decided to take such a radical step.

    Right after the call, somewhat discouraged because of his lack of interest, I received a call from my mom.

    Since my parents are divorced, I must divide these calls and often keep them secret in front of each other.

    The call with my mom went pretty much the same way. The only difference was that she repeated things numerous times without realizing it since she is on anti-depressants, often accompanied by alcohol.

    After both calls were over, thoughts of unworthiness started hitting me. At first, I judged myself for expecting my father to care about my life and used his health as a justification for his treatment. Then I realized I always made excuses for my parents. It was the way I coped with their behavior.

    Although talking to them was more of a duty than anything else, I knew not having contact wouldn’t resolve the issue. However, I didn’t know how to deal with these feelings. It felt as if every phone call with them reminded me how unworthy and unimportant I was to them.

    While growing up, my mother struggled with alcohol, and my father abused the entire family. When I began dating, I naturally attracted partners that reflected what I thought of myself: I was unworthy and unlovable.

    Although I wasn’t sure how to handle it, I knew there must have been a solution to this emotional torture.

    Typically, when I ended my calls with my parents, I would reach for thoughts of unworthiness and inadequacy. However, this Sunday, I chose differently. For the first time, I stopped the self-destructive thoughts in their tracks and asked myself the fundamental question that changed everything: How long will I let my unhealed parents define my worth and how lovable I am?

    After sitting in awe for about ten minutes and realizing the healthy step I just took, I asked myself another question: How can I manage these relationships to protect my mental health and, at the same time, maintain a decent relationship with them?

    Here is how I decided to move forward.

    1. Setting boundaries while finding understanding

    I always dreamed of how it would be if my mom didn’t drink. I remember as a fourteen-year-old kneeling by the couch where she lay intoxicated, asking her to please quit drinking. As a child and as an adult, I believed that if she could stop the alcohol abuse, everything would be better. She wasn’t a bad mother but an unhealed mother.

    Today, I understand that this may not be possible. Although watching someone I love destroying themselves almost in front of my eyes is painful, after working through my codependency, I understand that it’s impossible to save those who have no desire to change their life.

    Therefore, emotional distance for me is inevitable. I decided to use the skills I learned as a recovering codependent when appropriate. If I feel guilty that I moved far away, stopped financially supporting my mom since she drinks, or that I am not there to deal with her alcohol issue, I pause. Then, I forgive myself for such thoughts and remind myself that the only power I hold is the power to heal myself.

    If I find myself secretly begging for the love of my father, I reflect on all those loving and close relationships I was able to create with people around me.

    Another self-care remedy I use when feeling sad is a loving-kindness meditation to soothe my heart, or I talk with a close friend.

    2. Accepting and meeting my parents where they are

    Frankly, this has been the hardest thing for me to conquer. For years, the little girl inside me screamed and prayed for my parents to be more present, loving, and caring.

    Because I secretly wished for them to change, I couldn’t accept them for who they were. I wanted my father to be more loving and my mom to be the overly caring woman many other mothers are.

    When I began accepting that the people who caused my wounding couldn’t heal it, I dropped my unrealistic expectations and let go.

    I also realized that instead of healing my wounded inner child, I used her to blame my parents. Therefore, I was stuck in a victim mentality while giving them all the power to define my value.

    Today, I understand that expecting change will only lead to disappointment. Frankly, my parents are entitled to be whoever they choose to be. Although it takes greater mental power and maturity, I try to remind myself that this is what their best looks like while considering their unhealed wounds. This realization allows me to be more accepting and less controlled by their behavior. It allows me not to take things too personally.

    3. Practicing detachment

    Frankly, I felt exuberant when I chose not to allow my parents to define how I felt about myself when we last spoke. It wasn’t anger or arrogance; it was detachment. I remember sitting there with my phone in hand, mentally repeating: “I won’t let you define my worth anymore.” After a couple of weeks of reflecting on this day, I can say that this was the first time I took responsibility for my feelings concerning my parents.

    Although this story doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, it feels empowering, freeing, and unbelievably healing. Breaking the emotional chains from the two most important people in my life is the healthiest decision I could have made.

    After my first victory in a years-long battle, I feel optimistic that this is the beginning of immense healing. Although I know that thoughts of unworthiness will creep in when interacting with them in the future, now I understand that I hold in my hands the most powerful tool there is—the power of choice.