BBR #158: Navigating Personal Growth and Self-Acceptance

Traveling solo through Mexico for six weeks wasn't just an adventure, it was a journey of personal growth and resilience. 

I faced unexpected hurricanes and a sea of unfamiliar experiences. Yet, in each moment of discomfort, I found a chance to reinvent myself and learn to prioritize self-care. 

Hear the story of how I traded feelings of guilt and comparison for acceptance and change, and navigated the stormy seas of my own resilience.

Have you ever questioned the constant pursuit of self-improvement? I have and I share a unique perspective on self-acceptance that may just change your daily routine. 

I get into the potential pitfalls of perpetual self-improvement and how embracing ourselves as we are can lead to a healthier mindset. 

Get in there and give it a listen for more! 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

What is up? Hello there, my name is Jessica Paching Bunch, you can call me JPB, and this is Brain Body Resilience. This is a podcast dedicated to growth, human development and stressing a little bit less so you can go ahead and live a little bit more.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Hello, and welcome back to episode number 158 of the Brain Body Resilience podcast. I am your host, jpb, and I am blown away that we are headed into year four of this podcast. Time is a wild thing. Thank you for being here. I am so happy to be back talking into this microphone. We will eventually reach your ears. This is the first episode I have recorded in almost two months.

Speaker 2: 1:00

I did batch record about six episodes back in September so that the show could go on while I was away. If you follow me on instagram or get my newsletters, you probably know that I was on a great adventure for the last six weeks. I had the opportunity to travel a bit and so I took it. Seeing and learning about new places in the world is one of my most favorite things and I wanted to take the opportunity I had and go do that, and I recognize fully what a privilege this is the privilege I hold to be able to take this time and go eat, pray, love myself for some weeks. I don't have people who depend on me to take care of them and I have the financial means to do this, and I am incredibly grateful for this. When this was a little baby idea that my husband and I talked about, I felt like I couldn't possibly take the time or resources for myself to do this. Who the fuck am I to go do this thing? Just take this time and go travel around. And this is an opportunity that so many people don't have. And so I sat in that discomfort and guilt and comparison of circumstances and I decided to allow myself to do this thing and receive the help to do so. In the end, the result of me not choosing joy, not receiving the help and taking the opportunity I have for this experience, the end result is not that someone else gets to do that. It doesn't make that better for anyone else. So I took this opportunity and I am incredibly grateful. I'm going to back up a bit.

Speaker 2: 2:52

This story starts a long time ago, but we'll start in July. I had several seizures that were pretty severe and because of that I applied for a medical leave from work, which I was granted. One of the seizures sent me to the emergency department and I was able to get in with a new neurologist. I am very grateful for that. The first neurologist I was working with was not super helpful. He said there was you know. He's like hey, there's this medication and I had terrible side effects. I told him it was not going to work. He didn't recommend anything else, he just said like Okay, we don't really know what is going on here. We've done all the tests and can't really find any solid answers, and that was kind of it. So I kept putting off finding another neurologist to work with, because that first experience was entirely unhelpful, and so this new neurologist that I met in the emergency department was more helpful in about 10 minutes than the first one over several months. So I met with this new person who suggested a different type of medication. It seems to be working well so far. And so we're all caught up there Seizures, emergency department medication, medical leave and I decided that I could spend this medical leave hanging out at home, kind of doing the usual, or I could go see something new in the world, and so I did choose that.

Speaker 2: 4:25

There were several people concerned understandably so about me having seizures while I was away my husband at the top of that list I forgot to mention this was a solo adventure, and my responses to these were kind of like well, if I have seizures here or there or wherever, it doesn't really matter. If it happens, it happens. So finding this new medication did make concerned parties feel more at ease and it felt better for me. So I'm on medical leave and I left Portland. The first part of October. I stopped by LA to say hello to some friends for a few days and then headed down to Mexico. There were a few different places I wanted to visit, and so I divided my time there.

Speaker 2: 5:14

My plans did change a bit because of the hurricanes on the Pacific coast, the first one being in Puerto Vallarta, and it was a bit nerve wracking for me. I'd never been in a hurricane and I live in the Pacific Northwest. Here in the US We've got a lot of rain, but definitely not hurricane rain or wind, so it was a little bit scary, not knowing what to expect, but it wasn't too bad. There were some power outages and some downed trees, but I didn't see too much like devastating damage. In the days after that and then further into my trip, I was supposed to travel through Acapulco for a few days on my way to see what the nail. But a couple of days before I was supposed to go they experienced a major category five hurricane that did devastate the area, and I'm so grateful I wasn't there and at the same time, my heart breaks for the people who live there who lost homes and businesses and who were all the people that were injured and lost lives. And so if you're feeling with that information, if you're feeling altruistic and want to go look more into that, I know that that area could use some support.

Speaker 2: 6:28

So, aside from my plans changing and adapting to that and making the last minute changes to flights and finding other accommodations and all of that, there was just the baseline and uncertainty of just being in these new places. I wasn't familiar with places that I was meeting for the first time and I spent the first couple of weeks on this adventure really trying to figure out what I was supposed to be learning there. A big part of my reason for traveling during this time, aside from just my love of learning about the world and wanting to see new places, was to get a sense of and experience myself in the world as this current version of me, how I would cope with the stress and discomfort of uncertainty here. The last time I traveled alone was 10 years ago about 10 years ago, and I just drank and smoked a lot to cope with the discomfort, the culture shock and the loneliness.

Speaker 2: 7:33

And so another part of my reason was that after the the trauma work that I've been doing in the last year, specifically after shedding some of the protective layers that I had used to keep myself safe and feeling safe for so long, I realized that without those layers underneath, I was scared. I was scared to be alone. I was scared to do anything without my husband, who I know I'm safe with. I was scared to be alone in all things, in small situations, just like walking around my apartments, in everything, and I didn't want to continue like that. I wanted to prove to myself that I am still capable of doing things on my own, that I am capable of caring for myself without the defense mechanisms that I had that had helped me for so long but are no longer useful, that I can both be scared and be safe at the same time, that those things can coexist and it does not mean that there is real danger.

Speaker 2: 8:40

So I set off with all of this in mind on this adventure, and I didn't think I really had an agenda or any expectations for my time, any kind of expectations of a grand outcome. I just wanted to go be in the world as this current version of myself and see how I navigate and adapt and deal with the stress and discomfort now that I'm not just trying to drink and smoke it all away. And I really thought that I didn't have any expectations. But in the first couple of weeks I was trying so hard to figure out what I was doing there, what was I supposed to be learning and I realized that I did have some expectations. I had this vision of something like an 80s movie montage of Rocky meets Dolly Lama training, spending most of my day working out and stretching and mobility and meditating with some kind of profound epiphany about me or my life and I'm sure this is a major spoiler here. There was no earth-shattering moment of clarity and I did not spend most of my time training anything. So what did happen was when I stopped trying to figure out what I was supposed to be learning, when I stopped trying to force and control the outcome, I did actually learn some things.

Speaker 2: 10:08

What I learned is that the truth about this journey of self-care and self-improvement improvement is that you may become the best version of yourself, learning and growing and doing these care things, but when you learn about what you should be doing breeding, working out, meditation, breath work, learning, getting up at a certain time. Whatever this list looks like for you, you do create a mental checklist of all of the things you need to be doing to be better and you begin to use that against yourself. If you don't meet these things, if you're not doing the daily checklist that you have to make sure that you are caring for yourself, to make sure that you are improving, and you measure your care for yourself by this checklist. And the truth is, self-improvement is only part of that equation of caring, and the goal isn't never ending improvement. It's not fixing or becoming a better person. The other part of the journey is the part that truly allows for less shame, less judgment, less criticism, and it is self-acceptance Accepting where you are, who you are in this minute, your flaws, your mistakes, small and big wins, accepting what is present in this moment and allowing that to exist as it is, allowing yourself to make mistakes because you are a human, allowing yourself to be imperfect, allowing yourself to accept the insecurities and the worries and Whatever is present allows us to accept and move through this.

Speaker 2: 12:01

The tools we have the nervous system care and hygiene, tools that we are learning and practicing are to give us resources to help us move through these different emotions and states of being a human the good, the bad, the ups, the downs, all of it. It doesn't take these things away. It's not trying to take these things away. It doesn't transform you into someone else, some better version of you. You don't need to be better, you don't need to be something else. What we need to do is accept who we are and what we've got going on right now, in this moment, so that we can then choose how we want to care for ourselves with more clarity, with more mental and emotional space and less reactivity, less sinking into the patterns that are familiar and not necessarily helping us to maintain self-regulation and agency within ourselves.

Speaker 2: 13:01

And I realize I spend a lot of time and energy resisting what is resisting who I am. In moments I have some acceptance to practice and I have some some practice to do around accepting that it's okay for me to make mistakes and that is the only way to learn, and that resisting who I currently am, what currently exists for me, only takes away the opportunity to move through it. And I've said these things over and over again. I know them in my head, I know them intellectually, but I never truly let it sink into my heart. And this time away was time away from my usual routine and environment gave me the space to do that. And no, I don't think you need to go somewhere else or have have a different environment to be able to do this.

Speaker 2: 14:03

And it's not about escaping and then having to go back to real life. Everything we do is in our real lives. This is all real life. It's more about integrating all of the learning pieces that we do wherever we are, so that we can have those references as we move forward, to be able to move forward with more informed perspective and accepting where and who we are right now, without trying to self-care it away and have this never-ending goal of being better, which really just means being someone we're not. So. These were some of my reflections from this time and I wanted to share them here with you. Thank you for being here, thank you for spending your time and attention with me, and thank you for your comments and connections. Thank you for sharing the episodes that resonate with you. I am grateful to be back here, in your, in your ears, and I am wishing you the most beautiful week ahead. Cheers, and we will do this again. Jpb out.