Finding Compassion for Yourself and Others in the Present Moment

It's been a wonderful three years of creating and producing this podcast, but for now it's time for a break. I am so appreciative to all of you who have joined me for each episode, supported me on the journey and contributed to its success.

I figured an appropriate topic for this last episode would be looking at how we decide when we are complete with a project, and how do we choose to part ways. It can be emotional, cathartic, and exciting all at the same time. What might you be able to accomplish next with the energy you free up from the old project?

I wish for all of you to connect with your inner knowing, to be at peace with your decisions, and to move forward confidently in all that you tackle. May your 2024 be filled with delightful experiences, and may you always trust yourself to know what your next right step is. I'm cheering for you! 

Your donations mean the world to me and allow me to continue to create content each week. I ❤️you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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It’s important to refuel yourself regularly if you want to have the energy and inspiration to take care of others or make a huge impact on the world around you.

It is often our most selfish hobbies and downtime that allows us to have the energy to serve others.

This week we look at the signs and symptoms of overwhelm and explore ways we can provide more kindness and tenderness to ourselves to interrupt that trajectory.

Restorative time sprinkled with praise and appreciation for ourselves creates so much hope, love, and desire to return to the outer world and give from our hearts.

May you recognize all of your accomplishments and discoveries this year and pave the way for your future endeavors with grace and ease.

Your donations mean the world to me and allow me to continue to create content each week. I ❤️you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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When life presents us with difficult situations, we often forget to pause and assess ourselves for all of the things we are capable of and offer. But when we do, we can bring so much more to the situation and give ourselves a lot more appreciation in the process.

Last week I listened to Matt Khan giving a Loving Kindness Meditation and this podcast explores my takeaways from that transmission. I really enjoyed it!

There are ways to address ourselves that give us a great deal of energy, love, and kindness as well as respect. There are ways we can undermine ourselves by unconsciously judging ourselves for the situations we find ourselves in and the way we may have dealt with things in the past.

So this week, we contemplate how life might change if we addressed ourselves with great love and belief, and how to make a habit of thinking of ourselves that way.

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When we’re stretching for a goal, we often find ourselves procrastinating and not understanding why we aren’t doing it.

We can easily self-sabotage when working toward a goal by believing that it’s not worth bothering to try because we have unreasonable expectations about timelines.

One of the lies we tell ourselves is that we can start tomorrow, and we believe that somehow tomorrow we will feel better about it or it will be easier to start than it is right now – but that’s not true. It will be just as hard tomorrow, we will have only succeeded in putting off what we could have started today.

We think something outside of ourselves will make it easier to do something, but really it is through the action of doing a thing that makes future repetitions easier.

When we know that, we can relieve ourselves of the expectation that it will feel better tomorrow or that it will be easier another time. This frees up more space to tackle the issue with the energy we have now.

It is wonderful to nurture the thought that you can do hard things and that having some stress in your life is a good thing. Especially if the stress is from something you chose to do rather than something outside of your control.

A great strategy to overcome procrastination is to allow yourself to consciously indulge in something restorative before tackling the goal – and then stick to your timeline and practice your goal for a short burst of time. This is more doable than dedicating an entire day or several hours to your project and can jumpstart your ability to begin.

Setting our sights too high to reasonably accomplish also can derail us from starting.

There is a lot of energy gained from building in praise for yourself for your efforts and rallying yourself and/or others to cheer you on and give positive feedback to you to sustain your efforts.

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Sometimes we have feelings about the hobbies we choose to pursue, despite starting with all good intentions.

Part of learning any new skill is coming to terms with being terrible at it in the beginning and facing our own frustration with this each time we show up to learn more.

We can get through a lot of the initial frustration by focusing on curiosity or interest in the process of learning how to get past each obstacle.

When we are kids, we have a large amount of this kind of curiosity and interest and it allows us to learn all kinds of new things before we give up, especially about topics that we find particularly interesting.

It’s okay to be frustrated and feel like we aren’t getting anywhere. We don’t need to see success every day or even every week – progress is happening and when we are in the process we might not be able to notice our own improvements.

It can help to think of practicing new habits or hobbies as a ritual because at the beginning we don’t know what to expect. We can create some safety and predictability by creating a simple ritual that gets you started and embarked on the journey.

Accepting that the feeling we have at the beginning of learning a new skill is generally fraught with frustration as well as interest. It is what it is – and as you progress, your feelings may swing more toward accomplishment, pride, joy, and inspiration. It’s OK to not be overwhelmed with inspiration at the beginning, that’s just how it is at the beginning.

Rest and sleep are super important when learning new skills, too. Without that rest and sleep, we don’t consolidate the new information and skills – and with it, we accelerate our learning, which is amazing and so much fun!

It’s also helpful to have an idea of where you want to end up with each of your goals and come up with ways to move toward that result, with a timeline for evaluation.

It also helps to consistently ask yourself for small amounts of time to practice instead of demanding hours of your time, which is harder to commit to in general and even more so when you’re feeling frustrated or disappointed in your progress. Small chunks of time accumulate into big wins over time.

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Friendships change throughout the course of our lives. As children, it seems like friendships are much easier to initiate than as adults. Friendships grow easily with shared experiences. 

When we are kids, we are put into the same environment and mutual situations as entire classrooms of peers, whereas in our adult lives, people live separate lives and have fewer shared experiences than they did when they were younger.

As our experiences diverge, creating closer relationships becomes more challenging. 

This is why creating opportunities for shared experiences has such a huge impact on our friendships and intimate relationships. We become closer the more common experiences we share. 

It’s why choosing to show up for each other is important – if we don’t make the time to be together, even if it is virtually online at the same time – we stop having anything to talk about or agree upon. We no longer have shared memories.

As adults, we are fortunate that we have had time to decide what we truly enjoy and want to spend time doing, and hopefully find others who equally appreciate the same activities we do. Once we are in charge of our lives, we are no longer at the whim of whatever after-school activity fits our parents’ schedules or going to the class we were assigned to rather than where we wish we could go.

The best relationships have withstood arguments and strife and overcome that together. The people who are there for us in our most difficult moments are the ones we have put time and love towards as well.

Prioritizing friendships leads to a whole host of benefits that even resonate into our physical health. It’s OK to inconvenience ourselves to spend time with others, because what we get back in return is so much more than the effort we put in. It’s great to enjoy our relationships with each other and bring more joy into the world. 

What would bring you a lot of delight and joy, and who could you share that with today? 

Your donations mean the world to me and allow me to continue to create content each week. I ❤️you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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Depending on how you work best, you might prefer a schedule that is fairly rigid and has smaller bursts of scheduled activities, or you might thrive when you clock out multiple hours for work that fits a certain theme.

When I feel like there isn’t enough time to immerse in a subject, I avoid that activity like crazy. I can find all kinds of reasons to procrastinate when I feel like I will be interrupted when I get into something.

There are other personality types that need the interruption or they won’t stop working. You know who you are. So look at your schedule and build in alarms or interruptions that help you move on to other topics and activities. And if you need longer periods of time to get started in the first place, rearrange your schedule to give yourself bigger chunks of time so you can be productive.

I find also that grouping tasks that use the same skillset and thought process helps increase productivity massively. It’s why we have assembly lines – we excel at figuring out a process and then going on with it automatically. When we switch tasks constantly, it slows us way down and gets more intense and it is easy to lose our place and get distracted.

Also, we tend to only schedule things that are chores or that we “have to” do. It’s important to schedule activities that fill us back up and give us the energy to do the “have to’s” in our lives. Restorative time is as important as productive time, so notice if your schedule is heavy in either direction and see if there’s space to balance that out.

Your donations mean the world to me and allow me to continue to create content each week. I ❤️you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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Our bright and large emotional reactions to small things stem from earlier situations that we’re still dealing with emotionally.

It’s easy to roll with inconveniences when they are few and far between and we are otherwise happy, cared for, and well. When we are depleted emotionally and mentally, anything that impedes our progress in the day can set us off. When that happens, we resonate with our underlying unaddressed emotion. The inconvenience brings it to the surface.

We can come to a more peaceful place more easily when we offer ourselves the praise and appreciation we feel are missing elsewhere in our lives.

Getting enough kindness and positive interactions in a day than negative feedback in a ratio of 5 positive to 1 negative makes us more resilient and joyful overall.

You can also set aside 90 seconds to truly sit with whatever negative emotion arises so that you complete the cycle and it no longer has as much control over you. When we get interrupted in feeling our feelings, either by ourselves or an outside event – we get stuck and repeat the feeling until it’s over. And that can take a long time, even all day! So taking the break to move through a feeling is very much worth it, and it’s something we haven’t been taught and generally don’t even consider to be possible.

Your donations mean the world to me and allow me to continue to create content each week. I ❤️you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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How do you use technology? Do you feel it benefits you? This week I share my experience using fitness trackers and the ways it has both helped me and stressed me out. 

How was my life different when I could only use analog feedback like writing down my workouts and weighing myself on the scale each day? What is it like now when I have instantaneous and constant feedback for how my body is moving, resting, breathing and otherwise functioning?

In a lot of ways, over time I became increasingly dependent on the numbers the tracker gives me. But instead of using it to improve my fitness, which is where I started out – eventually, I found I was judging myself for my numbers and feeling obsessed with looking at it while not changing a whole lot about how I live my life. Now I was living the same way but feeling worse about it than if I wasn’t tracking.

I ask myself now, can I trust my own perception of my health, body, and movement? Can I trust if I slept well or feel good even if I don’t have a tracker telling me how good or bad the night was in terms of heart rate, oxygen levels, and REM sleep? 

There are benefits to tracking, and I am finding that I ought to use mine for the specific benefits that make me feel good about myself. I am letting go of the obsessive need to check the app and judge myself for how good or poorly I seem to be faring that day.

Instead, I am choosing to assess how I feel for myself before checking, and if my feeling and the tracker’s perception of the state of affairs differs, I am choosing to defer to my own feelings first and take the tracker’s input as an advisor but not an authority over me. Take that, step goal!

Your donations mean the world to me and allow me to continue to create content each week. I ❤️you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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What’s the emotion that’s sparked the most often by the sources of information and entertainment you consume or are exposed to?

Having a big emotion sparked makes it more difficult for you to respond to situations, it instead elicits reactions from you.

Some basic truths about what sparks emotional reactions in us can be helpful.

When we watch something visually, full of music, fast cuts back and forth and fast pacing, it primes you to be on edge and more emotional. This makes you more receptive to whatever message they are pitching you.

Reading slows us down, even though we recognize emotional words. But we do need to train ourselves to notice the frequency and flavor of the emotional words that are used so that we can recognize that the articles we are consuming aren’t neutral – they have a stance and a message.

Listening to information, we follow the cadence and emotional tone of the speaker or presenter. We are social animals and built to target in on other’s emotions and stance and either to agree or disagree.

We are in a never-ending onslaught of information these days, and it can really help to consciously choose times when we disconnect and allow for quiet and space to think and be present.

Can we consciously curate what we consume to provide us with more opportunities for uplifting emotions? This is the space where we are able to solve more problems.

Pain needs to be moved. It needs to be acknowledged and healed. But continually poking at our pain cannot give us the space or creative availability to show up as our better selves. For that to occur, we need to create a pause, provide ourselves with the circumstances that nurture us and soothe and inspire us.

Your donations mean the world to me and allow me to continue to create content each week. I ❤️you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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Thanks for listening!