How to Practice Radical Self-Kindness

Can radical self kindness be the key to your healing journey and if so, how do we practice it?

In this episode, we celebrate one year of the Permission to Love podcast as well as discuss the practice of radical self-kindness, exploring why it's crucial for healing and self-love.

Thank you for being a part of this podcast for the last year. This podcast would not be possible without you the listeners.

I am so grateful that you’re here and are a part of this community. I look forward to another year of going on this journey with you as we discover how to heal our relationship with ourselves by giving ourselves the permission to love ourselves.

In this episode we discuss how self-kindness can rewire our nervous system, counteract self-abuse, and promote genuine self-compassion. This episode is filled with personal anecdotes, practical exercises, and thought-provoking insights to help you embark on your journey towards radical self-kindness.

Key Points:
1. Introduction to Radical Self-Kindness:
    * Radical self-kindness as an essential practice for healing and transformation.
    * The role of self-kindness in rewiring the nervous system and transforming shame.

2. The Impact of Self-Abuse:
    * How years of self-criticism and harsh judgment wreak havoc on our well-being.
    * The necessity of replacing self-abuse with self-kindness as an expression of self-love.

3. Personal Journey:
    * My personal experiences with resistance to self-kindness.
    * My journey of understanding that punishment is not corrective and that it is love and kindness that are the true corrective forces.

4. Overcoming Resistance to Self-Kindness:
    * Common objections to self-kindness and addressing feelings of unworthiness.
    * Challenging the belief that one’s mistakes or flaws make them undeserving of kindness.

5. Healing Through Kindness:
    * How self-kindness helps us relax in our own presence and fosters self-acceptance.
    * The importance of creating a safe environment for self-examination and healing.

6. Practical Steps to Practice Radical Self-Kindness:
    * Journaling and self-inquiry to understand when and why we are unkind to ourselves.
    * Replacing unkind behaviors with kind actions and supportive self-talk.
    * Treating oneself with the same kindness and understanding one would offer a friend.

7. The Healing Process:
    * The transformative power of meeting oneself with love and understanding.
    * Visualization exercises to heal the inner child and provide corrective experiences.

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You know, when I look at myself as a five-year-old kid, or you look at yourself as a child and you understand that a lot of the behavior that you deal with and the coping mechanisms that you develop came from the experiences of that precious child and that that's how they learned to figure out how to face this world and to stay safe. And you start to see that part of you and you realize that when you're beating yourself up, you're beating that part of yourself up again, You're judging the person who tried to figure out how to survive through coping mechanisms that they developed to try to stay safe, and you're heaping on more judgment and more abuse. Can you look at that child, or can you look at that part of you that experienced that? Can you understand that what they needed in that moment was kindness, radical and unconditional love and kindness, and then can you come in and give that part of yourself a corrective experience? Hello friends, it's Jerry and welcome to the Permission to Love podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to helping people understand how to heal their relationship with themselves, because when we heal our relationship with ourselves, everything in our life changes how we feel about ourselves changes, the relationships that we have changes and what we manifest in our life totally changes, you can live a life where you're at peace with yourself, you have healthy relationships in your life and that you're manifesting the things that you so deeply deserve and desire for your life. So I'm glad you're here and I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

Speaker 1: 1:39

Today's episode is a very special episode to me and it is the one-year anniversary of when I launched this podcast, so I want to take some time today and reflect on the journey, talk a little bit about why I started the podcast, and to also share one of the most beautiful practices that has become a part of my life. That has been extremely healing for me. So I want to talk about that as well today. So it really is hard to believe that it's been a year a year of producing podcasts, a year of getting this message out about how we can heal our relationship with ourselves, how we can move from shame to self-love, how we can transform trauma, how we can begin to view ourselves differently, how we change the way that we think about ourselves, talk to ourselves and the way that we view ourselves in totally transforming our lives. Because, why? Because the most important relationship that we have is the one that we have with ourselves, and when we heal that relationship, we heal every other relationship in our life.

Speaker 1: 2:41

You know, when I first started this journey, I wasn't sure where it was going to go. I just knew that I had some things inside of me that I wanted to share with other people. I knew that I had learned some things about healing my relationship with myself, and in healing that relationship it totally transformed everything in my life. And so I just wanted to help people. I wanted to share what an ordinary guy had learned about healing his life how to heal decades of carrying unhealed trauma and the shame that came from that and the self-loathing that then led into relationship challenges, that led into addictions, that led into my life completely falling apart and imploding. And I didn't realize that what was happening with me was that I had a broken relationship with myself and that that relationship had gotten broken through trauma and other painful life experiences. And that breaking of the relationship caused me to make some decisions about myself and I decided that I was unlovable and that there was something wrong with me. And that core belief that there was something wrong with me followed me around my entire life, made me feel like an imposter, made me self-sabotage, made me isolate myself, made me feel like there was nobody I could be with or go to and that I could never be my authentic self in person, and it just caused so much pain in me. And it caused the pain to where I wanted to escape myself, which once again led to those addictions. And so, as I learned how to heal all that and transform all of that in my life, I simply wanted to pass that along to other people, and I wanted other people who felt the way that I felt to feel seen. I wanted people to understand that healing is possible, that you're not the only person on this planet who's not going to be able to heal. I mean, that's often a message that shame gives to us, and I also just wanted to provide some real, practical tools as a way for people to heal. What a journey that has been.

Speaker 1: 4:40

What a journey it has been with you, the listeners, because you're the reason that this podcast exists. And if it wasn't for you, if it wasn been with you, the listeners, because you're the reason that this podcast exists, and if it wasn't for you, if it wasn't for you listening, showing up, faithfully, sharing it with other people supporting the show and all the things that you do, there would be no reason for this podcast. So thank you for being here, thank you for being who you are and thank you for going on this journey together with me about how we heal our relationship with ourselves. And going on this journey with you has also been a real learning process for me. I've learned more about myself, I've learned more about the process of how we heal, and I've learned from you the questions that you've sent to me, the discussions that we've had and all of the things that have happened just as a part of this community existing. And this community has become so important in my life.

Speaker 1: 5:30

I know it's important in your life because you're here, and I know it's going to continue to grow and be important in the lives of other people, because I think there's something that's really happening on this planet and it's the realization that when we heal, when we transform, everything changes in our lives, but also in the lives of other people, because as we shift our energy and we begin to put out an energy that's loving, it really does raise the temperature and it raises the vibration or whatever language you want to use of love on this planet, you know, when we see things like war and destruction and how we treat each other on this planet. All of that can get transformed when we learn how to heal our relationship with ourselves, when we learn how to love ourselves. And what I hope we begin to see as a human race or as a species is that it is in loving others that we're loving ourselves, and it is in loving ourselves that we do have the capacity and ability to love other people. And so it is time for us to normalize self-love. It is time for us to begin to see the value and the power of self-love, to not see it as something that is soft, to not see it as something that's just selfish or egotistical or narcissistic or all the things that people say about it. It is time to normalize self-love because it is in the loving of ourselves that we are empowered to love others, and it is love that is going to transform this world and change everything.

Speaker 1: 7:00

So thank you, thank you once again for being here, thank you for being a part of all of this, and as a part of this one-year celebration, this one-year anniversary, I'm going to ask you a couple of favors. I'm going to ask you to do some things as a part of this celebration, and the first thing, I'd invite you to reflect on some of the things that have been meaningful to you as a part of this podcast, maybe some real core lessons that you've learned, that you've come away with. And what I'd ask you to do is, as you've thought about and reflected on some of those transformative things, is I'd ask you to share them. I'd ask you to share them on social media in a couple of ways. One I'm going to be making a post about this episode as a one-year celebration. You can find that on my Instagram account, which is Jerry A Henderson, or you can see the show notes in this episode for that link, and so what I'm going to ask you to do on that post is share in the comment section some of those lessons, some of those things that have been so meaningful to you, and maybe start some discussion around that on that post. Now, if you're watching this podcast episode on YouTube, I'd ask you to consider making those comments in the comment section here and start that discussion here on this platform. So that'd be really meaningful to me to see that impact, to see the things that you're getting from this podcast as a part of this celebration, and I know it'll also be meaningful to the other members of this community for you to share the impact that this podcast has had on you.

Speaker 1: 8:27

I want to take a quick moment and talk about my book Returning. It's a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing. I designed this book to help you on your journey of moving from shame to self-love. It's divided in three sections. The first section is about seeing seeing that you're not alone. The first section is about seeing, seeing that you're not alone. The second section is about understanding that healing is possible. And the third section is designed to remind you and to show you that loving yourself is the path back to yourself. I've heard from a lot of people that they're using it as a daily reflection guide, where each day, they're selecting a passage, reading it, meditating on it, journaling on it, and it's really helping them in their healing journey and helping them understand that they are worthy of love, that they can heal, that they're not alone, and I know it can do the same for you. So if you haven't picked up a copy yet, please take a moment to do that, and if you have picked up a copy already. It would mean a lot to me if you'd take a moment and review the book, because the more positive reviews the book gets, the more likely people are going to become aware of it and benefit from the work. So thank you, thank you for picking it up, thank you for reviewing it and thank you for passing it along. Maybe, when you're done with it, you can pass it along to somebody else or pick up a copy for somebody else that you know could benefit from the work. You can get it on Amazon, or you can simply see the show notes in this episode to get your copy.

Speaker 1: 9:51

So let's go ahead and jump into this principle or this practice that has just been so transformative to me and I know it's been so transformative to many of you as well and it's the practice of radical self-kindness, to be radically kind to ourselves. Now, why is that so important? Why is that so transformative? Well, because the practice of being kind to ourselves is one of the key things that can begin to heal us. It can begin to rewire our nervous systems, it can begin to transform shame, and self-kindness is a practice or it is an expression of self-love. So self-love is the decision that I'm going to love myself, or the practice of being loving towards myself. One of those expressions is being kind to myself, to treat myself in such a way that it begins to heal my nervous system. Because if you've been with yourself for years and years and years beating yourself up, telling yourself what a loser you are, you know all of these things that we've done to ourselves. We've been so abusive towards ourselves and you're treating yourself in ways that you would never treat anybody else and that's wreaking havoc on you. And the antidote to that is self-love. And one of the expressions of self-love, once again, is self-kindness.

Speaker 1: 11:11

I remember the first time my therapist told me that I should be more kind to myself and more gentle towards myself, and I immediately pushed back on it. I could feel my entire nervous system pushing back because I was thinking to myself well, I don't deserve it. I don't deserve to be kind to myself. What I deserve is punishment. I need to beat myself up more. I need to tell myself what a bad person I am, because I thought in my head that if I beat myself up enough and punished myself, that somehow that was going to correct me, that was going to change me.

Speaker 1: 11:40

But as we talk about a lot in this podcast. Punishment is not corrective. Punishment is punitive. Love is corrective. Love is the most corrective force on this planet because love is healing. And a part of love healing us is that love expresses itself in kindness, of being radically kind and gentle towards ourselves.

Speaker 1: 12:03

And I can tell you this about me and I know that many of you will probably relate to this is that I was so radically kind to everybody else. I was so busy people-pleasing and trying to make everybody think I was a kind and nice person, but I was terrible towards myself, so abusive towards myself, and there was such a massive gap between how I was treating myself and how I was treating other people and gap between how I was treating myself and how I was treating other people, and what I thought I was worthy of and what I thought other people was worthy of. And so kindness, being kind towards yourself, is going to counteract that belief that there's something wrong with you. It's going to counteract that abuser and it's going to shift your energy away from believing that you deserve punishment, that you deserve those things, to one of helping you really see that you are worthy of kindness, that you're worthy of kindness from yourself.

Speaker 1: 12:56

Now, when I share this with people about being radically kind towards themselves, the first pushback I get is that I don't deserve it. It's like, how can I be kind to myself when I'm this type of person? Well, let me ask you a question what type of person? What have you done that's so terrible? What makes you so special that your mess ups, the thing that you've done, has made you the one person on this planet who doesn't deserve kindness. I mean, I bet you can easily come up with reasons why other people deserve kindness. I bet you can find things in your brain about people who've done bad things, or maybe have done bad things towards you, and you can make a case in your head as to why they deserve kindness. You might even think to yourself well, they're a human being and all living things deserve kindness. Well, are you a human being? Are you one of the all things? And so don't you deserve kindness? And see, that word deserve triggers a lot of people Like well, no, I don't deserve it. Well, yeah, you do. Well, why do you deserve it? Because you're a living being, because you exist, because you are a person who's on this planet. You deserve kindness.

Speaker 1: 14:10

Now, the problem is, we've lived with ourselves long enough to know all of our thoughts, all of the behaviors, all of the secret things, all the things that we've done that nobody else knows about. You know, we all have our little black box in life, right when we've stored certain things that we've done or thoughts that we've had that nobody else knows about, and we are convinced that it's the things that live inside that black box that keep us from being lovable, that keep us from being able to be kind to ourselves. But I want to tell you something it doesn't matter what's in that black box and when I say it doesn't matter, I'm not discounting it. I'm not discounting the pain that we've lived through or the things that we feel bad about. I'm not discounting that. But I'm saying it doesn't matter in terms of qualifying whether or not you're a good or a bad person, or whether or not you deserve kindness or you don't. And I can tell you that whatever's in that box, other people have that in their box and no matter how bad your behavior is, there's somebody out there who's got behavior that is worse than that. That tops it. And we're not trying to get into comparative behavior here, but I'm just trying to set something in your mind to help you understand that your box is not the one box on the planet that's so bad that you don't deserve kindness, then what that can do is it can release you, to start understanding and believing that you deserve your own kindness, that you deserve better treatment from yourself, that you're going to stop being your abuser and you're going to start being your friend, and friends are kind to each other.

Speaker 1: 15:44

Now let me just take a quick moment and talk about what radical self-kindness is going to do for you when you start to practice it, and why it's so healing for us. Well, the first thing that self-kindness is going to do is it's going to allow you to relax in your own presence. Why? Because you're not going to be there beating yourself up all the time. You're going to be there beating yourself up all the time You're going to be kind to yourself, and when you're in the presence of a kind person, you're able to relax. And so your nervous system is going to start relaxing because it's not going to be anticipating all of this abuse from you. It's not going to be on red alert, thinking oh my God, you know I did this, and now how is the future self going to treat me, or how am I going to treat myself five minutes from now because I did X, y or Z thing? When your system begins to anticipate kindness from you instead of judgment from you, you're going to be able to relax a lot more in your own presence.

Speaker 1: 16:34

Now, when you relax in your own presence, some things are going to begin to happen. As a result of that, you're going to be able to open up to yourself. You know we talk about you having a relationship with yourself, right, and part of that relationship are the parts of you that are hiding from you because they know that you're going to be judged by you and you say well, what do you mean hiding from me? Well, there are parts of you that are scared of you that kind of hide from you and they're not willing to open up to you and tell you why they're in pain. They're not willing to open up to you so that you can begin to observe and see what's actually going on with you. For example, you might think that you got angry because so-and-so did so-and-so. Well, that may be the case. Their behavior may have been inappropriate and you might be saying to yourself well, they just made me so angry. Well, they didn't make you angry. You made a choice to get angry as a result of what happened and that behavior that that person did triggered something in you.

Speaker 1: 17:34

Okay, and that trigger is there because of something that's happened in your life. And now I obviously want to be clear that you know there's just things that people do that can be annoying, right, or it can be agitating towards us, and it doesn't always have to be some deep trigger. But if there's things that are getting triggered in our life on a consistent basis, there's some experience that we've had underneath that trigger. And when we don't feel safe in our own presence to open up to ourselves and allow self-examination to happen, we really are never going to get to the source of why that trigger's there. And if we never get to the source of why that trigger is there, we're not going to heal, we're not going to move forward.

Speaker 1: 18:13

Okay, and in order for us to get to the source of that trigger, that part of us needs to feel safe with us, and it's not going to feel safe if it feels like it's going to get shamed or it feels like it's going to get judged, so it's going to stay closed down and shut off. So, for example, if part of that trigger was something that happened in childhood, that when it happened you felt weak, you felt powerless, now for you to look at that now and to feel those feelings of powerlessness or to feel that sense of shame, and then for the present you to look at that and start to judge it and say why were you so weak and why couldn't you have spoken up for yourself? Why couldn't you have been stronger? Why did you allow that to happen to you? You see, you're shaming that part of yourself because you're not being kind to it and now it's beginning to close down to you and so now it's staying trapped in that energy because you're not getting to the core, root issue of what's happened behind it. Now, if you start to do the opposite of judging that part of yourself and you start to be kind towards that part of yourself, and when those feelings come up of being a powerless kid or feeling like you didn't speak up for yourself, you didn't handle the situation right or whatever the narrative is and instead of meeting it with judgment and having that part close off to you, you start meeting it with kindness and you start seeing the person that experienced that and you start seeing the pain that was caused. And you start to see the child who experienced that and, instead of reshaming that child and causing that child to shut down to you, you practice kindness towards that child and you begin to understand what was happening and you begin to love that part of you and you begin to tell that part of you that you're so sorry that that happened to you and you're so sorry that you had to develop coping mechanisms that were trying to serve you. And you're so sorry that you had to develop coping mechanisms that were trying to serve you, to keep you safe, that you're now judging yourself for those coping mechanisms. And instead of judging yourself for those coping mechanisms, you start to practice kindness towards that part of you that said I need this in order to stay safe. I need to shame myself and judge myself to stay safe. And you begin to love that part of yourself and speak kindly to you in that moment and to understand why you dealt with it that way. And you develop those coping mechanisms in order to survive, and so you meet that part of yourself with kindness and when you meet that part of yourself with kindness.

Speaker 1: 20:41

It no longer needs to retreat, it no longer needs to be shoved back down, it no longer needs to be medicated out of sight, out of mind for us, and it starts to feel safe, to be able to present to you the pain that was experienced, to present to you the coping mechanisms that got developed as a result of that trauma or that painful life experience. It just begins to present to you the opportunity to heal because it feels safe in your presence. It's not going to be judged, it's not going to be medicated, it's not going to be shoved away, it's going to be allowed to have a voice. And once it gets to the point where it has a voice, then things can begin to be healed. Because remember, as you're judging and condemning and shaming, I mean whoever feels safe in that energy. You don't feel safe in that energy. You didn't feel safe in that energy as a kid or in relationships, and that's why you are judging that part of yourself and pushing that part of yourself down. So if you allow that part of yourself to feel safe by meeting it with kindness, then it gives voice. And then, if you listen to that voice and you'll begin to investigate and ask questions of yourself and begin to investigate those parts of yourself, then you can begin to heal them.

Speaker 1: 21:52

Because what we're not aware of we can't heal, and the way that we become aware of it is creating an environment where we feel safe. And the way that we create the environment to feel safe is through being kind to ourselves, meeting ourselves with love and that love being expressed through radical self-kindness. And then what eventually begins to happen is we're actually retraining ourselves. We're retraining the way that we engage with ourselves, we're retraining our nervous system, our neural pathways are rewiring, our body is changing and the trauma that we've gotiring Our body is changing and the trauma that we've got released in our body is beginning to get released. And so everything about our nervous system is beginning to transform because it's beginning to be met with kindness instead of continual abuse.

Speaker 1: 22:35

You know, one of the passages in my book Returning is that shaming and relentlessly criticizing yourself doesn't ever bring about the change that you want. It simply turns you into your own abuser. And because we've been living with an abuser 24-7 for so many years, our nervous systems are just haywire all the time, anticipating the next abusive language or thought or action from us towards us, and that self-kindness really will start to heal our nervous system. So how do we do that? How do we start to practice radical self-kindness when we don't feel like we deserve it? Well, the first thing that we want to do is we want to understand that kindness is not weakness. You're not being weak to yourself. When you're being kind to yourself, you're not letting yourself off the hook, you're not putting yourself in a dangerous situation because we'll think that I need to keep punishing myself, right.

Speaker 1: 23:24

And so if I start being kind to myself, then all of a sudden, I'm probably prone to do the things that I don't want to do, or I'm going to put myself into bad situations again. And as long as I've got this voice inside of me shaming me and criticizing me, it's going to keep me safe. It's going to keep me from repeating bad decisions and bad behaviors. Well, it's not. That voice of shame is not going to keep you away from anything. It's actually going to push you towards the things that you don't want to do. Because as long as you believe that you're bad, you're going to keep trying to produce evidence that supports the belief that you're bad. And if you start being kind to yourself, not seeing it as weak, you start treating yourself with kindness, you're eventually going to start believing that you deserve that kindness because your brain is going to see you being kind to you. It's going to hear you talking in ways that are kind towards yourself and that's going to start allowing you to see that you do deserve that kindness.

Speaker 1: 24:20

So that's going to lead me to the second point about how do we practice self-kindness is that we don't wait to feel worthy of kindness. We understand that kindness is what's going to make us feel like we're worthy of kindness. It is an opposite approach. It's an upside-down approach for many people. For many people, they keep waiting to have enough time under their belt without behaviors that disqualify them for kindness, and they just keep on this never-ending path and they just keep thinking that someday I'll deserve kindness from myself. Absolutely doesn't happen.

Speaker 1: 24:53

You start now. You start with kindness right now, today. You take a moment and you decide to be kind to yourself in this present moment. The future self of you being kind to yourself someday in the future only exists when the present self starts. The habit starts, the practice starts using the muscles of self-kindness. And that's exactly what it is it's a habit, it's a practice and it's an understanding that you deserve kindness. No matter what's in the black box, you deserve the kindness. I know that that can be hard to overcome, but I know it's possible. I've done it and I've seen other people do it. You can move from a place of being terrible to yourself, awful towards yourself, to consistently being kind to yourself.

Speaker 1: 25:40

Here's a practical exercise I want to give you. And yes, you guessed it, it's going to require some journaling, it's going to require some self-inquiry, it's going to require you sitting with yourself and examining yourself and listen, you're worthy of that. I mean, we've got time to do so many other things, right. So why do we keep avoiding being with ourselves? And the reason we're avoiding being with ourselves is because we know that that's our pathway to healing and we often don't want to heal because the unhealed version of us we're used to and it's kept us safe and we have a whole story and concept of who we are around that version of us. So moving into a healed version of us seems scary and it's the unknown. But what's on the other side of that is the life that you're wanting. The life that you're wanting is found in the things that you're avoiding and the thing that you're avoiding of being with yourself is the gateway, is the pathway to your healing. So let's talk about this exercise.

Speaker 1: 26:34

I want you to sit down and examine the way that you treat yourself. How are you treating yourself? When are you prone to be unkind to yourself? Is it when you repeat a pattern in your life? What is it? What's that trigger? When are you prone to be unkind to yourself? And the second part of it is to then identify how do you start to behave towards yourself. What are the unkind actions that you do? You might binge eat, you might drink, you might start beating yourself up and talking to yourself negatively. You might cut yourself off from everybody and isolate. What is it? What's the behavior that unkind behavior towards yourself that you're demonstrating when you've done something that you don't feel good about?

Speaker 1: 27:21

Now the third part of the exercise is I want you to replace it with something that would be positive. I want you to replace it with a kind behavior. Identify what a more kind and loving behavior would be to do towards yourself when you experience those tough moments. So, if you start beating yourself up, disrupt it and start talking to yourself in a kind way. Start telling yourself whatever kind words you would need to hear in that moment. And if you're struggling with this, identify what you think you'd want to hear from a friend in that moment, or from somebody who loves you. Or what would you say to somebody when they messed up? How would you start speaking to hear from a friend in that moment, or from somebody who loves you? Or what would you say to somebody when they messed up? How would you start speaking to them? How would you try to encourage them and start doing that to yourself? So, whatever it is that that unkind behavior gets expressed as, find some way to replace it. That's something that's more kind towards yourself. Now you might be thinking easier said than done, yep, easier said than done, 100%.

Speaker 1: 28:20

But when you realize that you're rewiring, you're retraining yourself and you're going uphill for a little while, right, you're going up that hill. You're pushing against core beliefs, you're pushing against old behaviors and old patterns. You're pushing against this momentum that's trying to get you back into old ways of thinking and old ways of doing. When you realize that that's what it is, not that it's impossible, not that you're uniquely broken and that you can't change because there's something wrong with you. No, you're rewiring a habit. You're taking yourself from a place of self-judgment to self-kindness.

Speaker 1: 28:54

And why I call it radical kindness is because you're going to be kind to yourself even when you don't think it makes sense. You're going to be kind to yourself in every moment and in everything. Why? Because you've been beating yourself up about every moment and everything. You're so often to the left and often to that space where you know, no matter what you do, there's some reason why you're going to tell yourself you're awful and beat yourself up about it. So now we're going to swing that pendulum all the way over to the other side and we're just going to be kind to ourselves. We're going to be loving to ourselves, we're going to be understanding as to why that behavior got manifested and we're going to investigate. We're going to be with ourselves and we're going to be with ourselves and we're going to heal ourselves. And one of the key ways we're going to heal ourselves is being kind to ourselves. And that's going to rewire that nervous system, because you're going to start to see yourself as a friend, as an advocate, as somebody who's got your back instead of somebody who's beaten your back.

Speaker 1: 29:50

So realize it's going to take time. Don't give up on yourself. Find those ways that are going to keep you motivated. So if you need to write it down somewhere, you need to write it on your mirror, you need to put it wherever. You put that in front of you, you're going to be kind to yourself, you're going to practice radical self-kindness and I promise you it can transform your life. It has been the most healing and transforming thing in my life to be kind to myself, to meet myself with understanding, to let go of the thoughts as to why I need to beat myself up. And when those thoughts come up and I want to start beating myself up to then turn to it with kindness, with love, with understanding.

Speaker 1: 30:29

And let me just say this you know, I'm just kind of prompted to say this you know, when I look at myself as a five-year-old kid, or you look at yourself as a child, and you understand that a lot of the behavior that you deal with and the coping mechanisms that you develop came from the experiences of that precious child, and that that's how they learn to figure out how to face this world and to stay safe, and that that's how they learn to figure out how to face this world and to stay safe and you start to see that part of you and you realize that when you're beating yourself up, you're beating that part of yourself up again. You're judging the person who tried to figure out how to survive through coping mechanisms that they developed to try to stay safe and you're heaping on more judgment and more abuse. Can you look at that child, or can you look at that part of you that experienced that? Can you understand that what they needed in that moment was kindness, radical and unconditional love and kindness? And then can you come in and give that part of yourself a corrective experience? Can you take the part of you that experienced all of that, got the message that there was something wrong with them and, instead of being met with kindness and gentleness, they were met with anger and wrath and judgment and disapproval and shame and punishment and abuse? Can you give that part of you a corrective experience and can you say to that part of you that you're sorry, that you love them and that you can meet them now with kindness and gentleness, because kindness and gentleness heals the wounds. Abusing it and pouring more salt on it isn't going to heal it. You're going to heal it by being kind to yourself. You're going to heal it by being gentle to that child within you that experienced that and you're going to love the heck out of that part of yourself. So anytime that you're tempted to judge and beat yourself up, it can be a really helpful practice to then visualize the little you, to visualize the child who experienced all of that, and say what did that child need in that moment? I'm going to give that to myself now. I'm going to give myself a corrective experience. Well, thank you.

Speaker 1: 32:39

Thank you for joining this very special episode of the Permission to Love podcast. One year, wow. Well, if you've been listening to this podcast for any time and you haven't yet had a chance to subscribe or to follow, I'd encourage you to take a moment to do that, because that's going to keep you updated on when new episodes come out. And then also, if you've not had a chance yet to share it with other people, to pass it along. I'd ask you to do that. That'd mean a lot to me, because the more that we can get this message out about how people can heal their relationship with themselves by giving themselves the permission to love themselves, the better this world's going to be. So, thank you.

Speaker 1: 33:13

So thank you for taking a moment to do that the better this world's going to be, so thank you. So thank you for taking a moment to do that. I also want to remind you that, if you haven't had a chance yet to download my free self-assessment and 30-day guide to a healthier relationship with yourself, take a moment to do that. You'll see the link in the show notes in this episode, or you can go to my website at jerryhendersonorg. I know it'll serve you in your journey of healing your relationship with yourself as you evaluate the five key areas of what makes up a healthy self relationship. As I close out this episode, I want to remind you, as always, that you are worthy of your own love, and I look forward to another year of going on this journey with you as we learn how to heal our relationship with ourselves.