Speaker 1: Is this thought I'm having giving me access to peace, power, joy, ease,
Speaker 1: or pleasure in my life? No? Then why am I
Speaker 1: invested in thinking it? Welcome to the one you feed
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think ring true, And yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Sonya Renee Taylor, a former national and international
Speaker 1: poetry Slam champion, author, educator, and activist. Sonja is also
Speaker 1: the founder of the Body Is Not an Apology, which
Speaker 1: is a digital media and education company promoting radical self
Speaker 1: love and body empowerment as the foundational tool for social justice.
Speaker 1: And global transformation. Today, Sonja and Eric discussed her book
Speaker 1: The Body Is Not An Apology The Power of Radical
Speaker 1: Self Love. Hi, Sonia, Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much for having me here. It is a real
Speaker 1: pleasure to have you on. We're going to be discussing
Speaker 1: your book, The Body Is Not An Apology, The Power
Speaker 1: of Radical Self Love. But before we start with that,
Speaker 1: we'll start like we always do, with the Parable. In
Speaker 1: the Parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her
Speaker 1: grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves
Speaker 1: inside of us that are always at battle. What is
Speaker 1: a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
Speaker 1: and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
Speaker 1: grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.
Speaker 1: He looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother,
Speaker 1: which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Thank you. I think one
Speaker 1: of the things that may be most excited about coming
Speaker 1: on your podcast was this parable, which I find so powerful,
Speaker 1: and for me, I think my work really centers on
Speaker 1: what is the relationship between the one we feed as
Speaker 1: individuals and the one we feed as a collective. I
Speaker 1: believe that we are innately good. We come here with
Speaker 1: the good wolf. We come here with the wolf that
Speaker 1: is inherently connected to kindness and love, compassion, can action,
Speaker 1: and I think that we are immediately birthed into a
Speaker 1: world that's like, Hey, here's this other wolf, and it's
Speaker 1: the one we've been feeding for a long time, and
Speaker 1: so we expect you to feed it too, and then
Speaker 1: through that process we become split. But I don't think
Speaker 1: we start off split. I think we become split as
Speaker 1: a result of the conditions of our world, the conditions
Speaker 1: of our families, the conditions of our own sort of
Speaker 1: encounters with lack or not enoughness, and then that becomes
Speaker 1: the wolf we feed. Yeah. I love that you talk
Speaker 1: in your book early on about a concept of natural intelligence,
Speaker 1: which I think speaks a little bit to what you're
Speaker 1: saying here. Could you tell us a little bit more
Speaker 1: about what you mean by natural intelligence? Yeah, So, one,
Speaker 1: I don't want to take credit for a term that
Speaker 1: is not mine. I was speaking in the book about
Speaker 1: a quote that I had heard from author Marian Williamson,
Speaker 1: who was comparing this idea of natural intelligence to an
Speaker 1: oak tree, and that an acorn doesn't have to state
Speaker 1: that it intends to become an oak tree, right, that
Speaker 1: it is imbued with all the mechanisms cellularly that it
Speaker 1: needs to become its highest version of itself. That's natural intelligence.
Speaker 1: That we come here already wired for the highest versions
Speaker 1: of ourselves, or the good wolf, if we're going to
Speaker 1: compare to that parable, and then the work is not
Speaker 1: about like how do I become the good wolf? The
Speaker 1: work is how do I identify all of the things
Speaker 1: that are obstructing the good wolf from flourishing into the
Speaker 1: fullness of its being? What's in the obstruction of that acorn? Right,
Speaker 1: if that acorn falls from a tree and lands on concrete,
Speaker 1: then it will not be able to do its job.
Speaker 1: But if that acorn falls from the tree and lands
Speaker 1: and fertile soil, it will. And so how do we
Speaker 1: create the conditions of fertile soil so that that which
Speaker 1: is already cellularly within us can come to its fullest fruition.
Speaker 1: I love that idea. I practice zen Buddhism, and we
Speaker 1: talk about this all the time in Zen. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just your original nature if you just when you
Speaker 1: strip everything else away, it's what naturally emerges. And it's
Speaker 1: always right here. It's always right here, exactly exactly. And
Speaker 1: we all have so many different names for it. And
Speaker 1: in my work I call that radical self love, you know,
Speaker 1: but there are all kinds of terms, you know, mirroring
Speaker 1: lives and calls it natural intelligence, you know, Buddhism calls
Speaker 1: it Zen. Like we have all of these terms for it,
Speaker 1: but it really does speak to what is innately in
Speaker 1: us that wants to become manifest in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I want to return to this idea of radical
Speaker 1: self love, the term that you use. But before we
Speaker 1: do that, why don't we start with the title of
Speaker 1: the book, which is The Body is Not an Apology.
Speaker 1: Share with us the story of where that idea is
Speaker 1: birth from, because I think it's pretty powerful as a
Speaker 1: story in and of itself, and I think it's pretty
Speaker 1: central to everything that's going to come after it as
Speaker 1: we talk totally, So, I've had many iterations of lives.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've lived many lives in this lifetime.
Speaker 1: And one of those iterations was as a professional performance poet,
Speaker 1: traveled around the world competing in poetry slams. And I
Speaker 1: happened to be in a poetry slam in not Sville, Tinnacy,
Speaker 1: getting ready to compete with a group of folks, a
Speaker 1: team friends of mine from Washington, d C. And I
Speaker 1: was in the room with one of my friends having
Speaker 1: a conversation and we are having you know, I'm a scorpio,
Speaker 1: and so I'm notorious for having really deep conversations, whether
Speaker 1: you want to be having them or not, It's just
Speaker 1: kind of my nature. And so I'm having this intense
Speaker 1: conversation with my teammate and she is sharing with me
Speaker 1: that she is afraid that she might have an unintended pregnancy.
Speaker 1: She's not sure yet. And we start to sort of
Speaker 1: unfold this conversation and it becomes clear to me that
Speaker 1: the person she thinks she might be ignify is just
Speaker 1: kind of a casual uh partner sometimes, not anyone she's
Speaker 1: particularly invested in. And I am also, as a result
Speaker 1: of perhaps the scorpio placement as well as one of
Speaker 1: my former lives as a sexuality health educator, I'm a
Speaker 1: person who will get in your business from a place
Speaker 1: of love, is the way I think about it. Like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask you some uncomfortable questions, never from judgment,
Speaker 1: but always from a here are the things that I
Speaker 1: would explore in this Have you explored this? You know?
Speaker 1: So I asked my friend why she was having unprotected
Speaker 1: sex with this casual partners. She wasn't all that into
Speaker 1: since we know how babies happen. And my my friend,
Speaker 1: you know, answered me. I like to say that three
Speaker 1: things were present in this conversation that created what I
Speaker 1: like to think of as like a transformative portal, this
Speaker 1: opening where all of a sudden life got rearranged. And
Speaker 1: I think that those three things were radical honest, the
Speaker 1: radical vulnerability, and radical empathy. I asked a radically honest question,
Speaker 1: but I asked it from a radically empathetic place. I understood,
Speaker 1: and she responded to me in radical honesty and radical vulnerability.
Speaker 1: And my friend had cerebral palsy, and she said that,
Speaker 1: you know, her disability made it difficult already for her
Speaker 1: to be sexual, and so she didn't feel entitled to
Speaker 1: ask this person to use a condom. And when she
Speaker 1: said that, the words came through me, they were not
Speaker 1: of me. It was like, oh, this is coming from
Speaker 1: someplace else for this moment. And I said to her,
Speaker 1: your body is not an apology. It's not something you
Speaker 1: offer to people to say sorry for my disability. And
Speaker 1: when I said that, something stuck. That wasn't just for her,
Speaker 1: it was immediately for me too. It was like, for
Speaker 1: all these ways that I too have given myself away
Speaker 1: as an apology. I'm sorry for, you know, my blackness,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry for my womanness, I'm sorry for my loudness,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry for my fatness. I'm sorry for my you know, depression.
Speaker 1: I'm said, there are all these things I'm sorry for.
Speaker 1: And there was this moment where it was like, oh,
Speaker 1: what if there isn't anything to apologize for? And so
Speaker 1: I said it, and I was like, damn, that was
Speaker 1: really poetic. I'm gonna have to do something with that.
Speaker 1: And so I decided I was going to write a
Speaker 1: poem because I was a poet, and so I wrote
Speaker 1: this poem called the Body is Not an Apology, and
Speaker 1: I began performing it. And about six to eight months
Speaker 1: after I had written the poem, I had this selfie
Speaker 1: in my phone that I've been hiding. I really felt
Speaker 1: fabulous in it and delicious and beautiful, and I had
Speaker 1: been afraid to share it. And so someone one night
Speaker 1: in February of two thousand and eleven shared a photo
Speaker 1: of a plus sized model on my Facebook page and
Speaker 1: she was fabulous, and I googled her and she had
Speaker 1: on the same exact kind of outfit that I had on.
Speaker 1: And I had this moment where I was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: this person is being very unapologetic in their body and
Speaker 1: they're being paid for it, all right, somebody paid her
Speaker 1: money to put her juicy thighs on the internet without shame,
Speaker 1: And here I am hiding this photo where I feel
Speaker 1: beautiful but I feel like I'm not supposed to. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna share it. And I asked people because I'm always
Speaker 1: recruiting other people to do the things that I'm scared
Speaker 1: of with me, and so I asked a strategy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's totally my life strategy. It's been working, uh, And
Speaker 1: so I was like, share a photo where you feel
Speaker 1: powerful and embodied in your body. And the next morning,
Speaker 1: thirty people that tag me and photos. I was like,
Speaker 1: this is awesome. Like maybe we just need a space
Speaker 1: where we're allowed to like where we have permission to
Speaker 1: be unapologetic in our bodies. So I'm gonna make a
Speaker 1: Facebook page. And since I have this poem called the
Speaker 1: Body is Not an Apology, I guess I'll call the
Speaker 1: Facebook page the Body is Not an Apology. And we
Speaker 1: started with thirty people, and then we have you know,
Speaker 1: three hundred and three thousand and thirty thousand, then writers,
Speaker 1: and then a company and then a book deal, and
Speaker 1: then it has transformed my life. Well, thank you for
Speaker 1: sharing that story. And maybe there's some people when they
Speaker 1: hear that story they don't have an interior feeling of
Speaker 1: knowing like, oh my god, that's me, but I certainly do.
Speaker 1: And I'm a straight white male, right. You know, as
Speaker 1: I read this book, it was so clear to me
Speaker 1: that I don't know that you can grow up in
Speaker 1: this culture and not have body issues unless you're nearly perfect.
Speaker 1: And even then, I think it's just so much a
Speaker 1: part of everything, absolutely, And I think, you know, if
Speaker 1: we think you don't have body issues, then you're probably
Speaker 1: defining body way too narrowly, which is what I usually
Speaker 1: experienced people like, I mean issues with my body, and
Speaker 1: then I'm like, mmmm, you know, what were the messages
Speaker 1: that your father told you about your manhood when you
Speaker 1: were a child, and you're like, oh, I'm not allowed
Speaker 1: to cry? What do you mean do Where do tears
Speaker 1: come from? Friends? They come from your body, right, Like?
Speaker 1: So part of it is about really expanding and understanding.
Speaker 1: When I say body, what I'm talking about is all
Speaker 1: of the ways in which we do life in this
Speaker 1: corporal vessel, and all of the relationships that we've been
Speaker 1: told about that the relationships with our identity with gender,
Speaker 1: our relationship with size, our relationship with race, our relationship
Speaker 1: with age, our relationship with ability, our relationship with mental health.
Speaker 1: All of those things are the body. And so when
Speaker 1: I say the body is not an apology, I'm not
Speaker 1: just talking about do you like what size genes you're wearing?
Speaker 1: You know, I'm saying, what are the messages that we
Speaker 1: have been told about our humanity based on these physical vessels?
Speaker 1: And how has that stifled the ability for that acorn
Speaker 1: to become the yoak tree? How is that squashing our
Speaker 1: natural intelligence? How is that feeding the wolf we don't
Speaker 1: want fed? Yeah? I think that is really well said.
Speaker 1: And as you go through that list, you know, one
Speaker 1: of those is aging so even if somehow you get
Speaker 1: to a certain age where like I've always felt great
Speaker 1: about how I look in my body, You're like, well,
Speaker 1: but just hang on because it's coming. It's coming with age.
Speaker 1: Although as somebody who is just the upper side of fifty,
Speaker 1: I will say that in addition, one of the great
Speaker 1: things that age has brought is time to heal some
Speaker 1: of those things so that I don't have the same
Speaker 1: fears and challenges around it I had as a child.
Speaker 1: And that's really what I would like to maybe spend
Speaker 1: our time on, is what can people do to heal
Speaker 1: the issues they have around their body, around their self image,
Speaker 1: around all these different things. And I thought maybe we
Speaker 1: would start with first saying, you know, you talk about
Speaker 1: that what we want is radical self love, and I'd
Speaker 1: like to contrast that with terms like self esteem and
Speaker 1: self confidence as a starting place to sort of say
Speaker 1: that that's not really what we're talking about. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: So I opened the book by being like, here's what
Speaker 1: you're not going to get in reading this book. You're
Speaker 1: not going to get help with your self esteem and
Speaker 1: your self confidence. And the reason that I say that
Speaker 1: is one because both of those things are a very
Speaker 1: conditional experience. This how you feel about yourself, how your
Speaker 1: confidence is situated varies from day to day depending on
Speaker 1: what's going on. Did I get the promotion that I
Speaker 1: thought I was gonna get? Right, I feel great going
Speaker 1: into the meeting. I come out feeling like, man, I'm
Speaker 1: just just this never works for me. You know that
Speaker 1: I'm in my story about I'm not good enough, right,
Speaker 1: Confidence shock for the day. Self esteem, it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: I feel important or good or fabulous. You know. I
Speaker 1: often give the example of like I put on a
Speaker 1: fly outfit. I'm like, yes, it's fabulous, and I go
Speaker 1: outside and no one gives me a compliment on my outfit.
Speaker 1: That day, I'm like, wait a minute, maybe I'm not
Speaker 1: as cute as I thought I was. I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to wear this again, all right, and so so these
Speaker 1: things that are conditional and externalized and change with the weather,
Speaker 1: right and again. Radical self love is not fickle in
Speaker 1: that way. It's not conditional. It's not determined by whether
Speaker 1: or not it is externally validated by the outside world,
Speaker 1: the same way an acorn doesn't become a fig tree
Speaker 1: because somebody outside said you look better as a fig tree. Right.
Speaker 1: Like it is wired inside of itself to be an
Speaker 1: oak tree, we are wired inside of ourselves to have
Speaker 1: radical self love. And when I talk about it, I'm
Speaker 1: talking about that inherent state of enoughness that we arrived
Speaker 1: here with that unconditional certainty that we were amazing. I
Speaker 1: think I've said this on every single talk I've ever done,
Speaker 1: is you've never seen a self loathing toddler, because I
Speaker 1: think it's an important marker for us to remember that
Speaker 1: there is a point through which we passed where we
Speaker 1: were embodied in our enoughness, and then something shifted right.
Speaker 1: And so if we recognize that we came here embodied
Speaker 1: in our enoughness, then the question isn't like, oh did
Speaker 1: it leave. No, I mean, just from a physics standpoint,
Speaker 1: it couldn't leave. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed,
Speaker 1: only transferred. Then it's still there. It's just doing something different.
Speaker 1: What is it doing different. It's being usurped by the
Speaker 1: messages of our external world that say that we're not enough,
Speaker 1: and that profit off of us really deeply believing that
Speaker 1: we're not enough, and so radical self love is different
Speaker 1: from those things because it is already there. It is
Speaker 1: the foundation. And then The other thing I think is
Speaker 1: really important for me about why it's not self esteem
Speaker 1: and self confidence is because I love folks, and I
Speaker 1: love what I do, and I actually want people to
Speaker 1: have good self esteem and self confidence. But I would
Speaker 1: not devote the amount of time and effort that I
Speaker 1: spend in my life tending to people's individual self esteem
Speaker 1: and self confidence. I'll get anything out of that. What
Speaker 1: I do get something out of is recognizing that there
Speaker 1: is a society that is rooted in our messages about
Speaker 1: who is good enough and who is not good enough,
Speaker 1: and that as much as we internalize those messages, we
Speaker 1: reinforce that system of not enoughness for other bodies. So
Speaker 1: the body that you are judging yourself against about whether
Speaker 1: or not you are enough is someone else's body, which
Speaker 1: means you are in the way of them being able
Speaker 1: to be in the fullness of their radical self love.
Speaker 1: As long as we believe that certain bodies, that white
Speaker 1: bodies are more valuable than black bodies on a structural
Speaker 1: level than I, as a black woman, am always going
Speaker 1: to be in a harder road towards accessing my radical
Speaker 1: self love. As long as we believe that neurotypical bodies
Speaker 1: are more valuable than neuro atypical bodies or you know,
Speaker 1: bodies that we say don't have mental health issues, as
Speaker 1: long as we believe that I have a harder road
Speaker 1: to radical self love, and so I do this work.
Speaker 1: The radical part of it is that we wake up
Speaker 1: to this system that we've all been indoctrinated in, and
Speaker 1: we get out of our own way, and then we
Speaker 1: get out of each other's way so that we can
Speaker 1: all grow into the highest versions of ourselves. That's why
Speaker 1: it's radical self love. Right, And you talk a lot
Speaker 1: in the book about I'm paraphrasing, but there's a real
Speaker 1: two way street or a mutuality about this, right. It's
Speaker 1: by learning to both love myself and love others. Those
Speaker 1: things they mutually reinforce or what's the opposite of reinforced
Speaker 1: tear down. Right, the more that I learned to love me,
Speaker 1: the more I'm able to love you, And the more
Speaker 1: I'm able to love you, the more I'm able to
Speaker 1: love me. It's a it's a good thing versus. The
Speaker 1: more I judge myself, the more I judge you, the
Speaker 1: more I judge you, I end up judging myself. These
Speaker 1: things play off each other absolutely I mean, we're all
Speaker 1: in an interdependent relationship, and so you know, we go
Speaker 1: into these often this kind of work. You know that
Speaker 1: people often lump my work into like personal development work,
Speaker 1: and I you know, I can see why they do that,
Speaker 1: except I'm very clear that I do social justice work.
Speaker 1: I'm just very clear that society is made up of people,
Speaker 1: and so people have to change in order for society
Speaker 1: to change. And so inside of this story in our
Speaker 1: current society is the story of individualism that it's all about.
Speaker 1: I can change, and then I changed by myself, and
Speaker 1: then my life improves, as if our lives are not
Speaker 1: intertwined with one another, as if we are not dependent
Speaker 1: on each other in hopes of ways. And so as
Speaker 1: I divest from this system that says that I am
Speaker 1: not enough, I become aware of all the other people
Speaker 1: it is said is not enough. And if I believe
Speaker 1: that that system is lying to me, then that system
Speaker 1: must be lying about all those other bodies too. And
Speaker 1: the only way for me to actually be able to
Speaker 1: live in my radical self love without obstruction in the
Speaker 1: world is to remove all of the obstructions that tell
Speaker 1: us that we're not enough, not just the ones that
Speaker 1: impact me, because eventually another one will pop up that
Speaker 1: will be obstructing your lane again. And so we've actually
Speaker 1: are tied to each other in this journey of really
Speaker 1: living into the full possibility of radical self love for
Speaker 1: ourselves and in the world. You say that moving from
Speaker 1: body shame to radical self love is a road of
Speaker 1: inquiry and insight. Say a little bit about those two words,
Speaker 1: inquiry and insight. What is it we need to do.
Speaker 1: We got to ask ourselves questions. We have to be
Speaker 1: willing to explore that which is unexplored in us. So
Speaker 1: much of the experience of body shame, so much of
Speaker 1: the experience of body based oppression exists because we don't
Speaker 1: ask questions about it. We don't ask questions about our
Speaker 1: own thoughts. They operate on autopilot inside of us. You know.
Speaker 1: I have to give the example of you go to
Speaker 1: a dressing room and you're trying on some genes and
Speaker 1: they don't fit, and the immediate thought is that there's
Speaker 1: something wrong with your body. The immediate thought is, oh,
Speaker 1: my gosh, a gain. And then they were in this
Speaker 1: cycle of self judgment about our bodies. Right. That happens
Speaker 1: probably a billion times a day around the world with
Speaker 1: very little inquiry into the story that lives behind it,
Speaker 1: the story about why I judge my body, rather than
Speaker 1: being like, why I don't make these games and more
Speaker 1: expensive sizes? Right, and immediately I take on the ownership
Speaker 1: of fault. There are all of these ways in which
Speaker 1: our ideas and beliefs about our bodies just go uninterrogated,
Speaker 1: and so inside the book I talk about in order
Speaker 1: to really begin this journey of radical self love, you
Speaker 1: have to engage in what I call it thinking, doing,
Speaker 1: being process. The first thing is that we actually we
Speaker 1: have to become aware of our thoughts. Oh, here's this
Speaker 1: self deprecating, judgmental thought I think every single day about myself.
Speaker 1: Then at this point I don't even ask myself about it,
Speaker 1: just runs on autopilot. What happens when I raised that
Speaker 1: to consciousness? What happens when I asked myself questions about it? Well,
Speaker 1: who's told me that I'm supposed to believe that? Who
Speaker 1: told me that this is true? Why do I believe
Speaker 1: what they said? Why am I applying that into my life?
Speaker 1: One of my favorite questions is does this give me
Speaker 1: access to peace, power, joy, ease, or pleasure in my life?
Speaker 1: Is this thought I'm having giving me access to peace, power, joy,
Speaker 1: ease or pleasure in my life? No? Then why am
Speaker 1: I invested in thinking it? Oh, let's let's get into that,
Speaker 1: because each time you do that, some new insight shows up.
Speaker 1: That's where the insight comes up. It's like I had
Speaker 1: an inquiry and then it was like, oh, right, because
Speaker 1: that's what my mother used to say to me, and
Speaker 1: so I'm actually just talking to myself in the voice
Speaker 1: of my mother. Oh that's what that is. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: now that it's at consciousness, I actually have a choice
Speaker 1: about how I move forward. Once we raise the thing
Speaker 1: to consciousness, then we are at choice about how we
Speaker 1: engage it. And so from that point I can say,
Speaker 1: what would an opposite action that did give me access
Speaker 1: to peace, power, joy, pleasure, at ease? Look like, okay,
Speaker 1: can I take that action today? Just today? And each
Speaker 1: time we do that repetition that thinking raising a thing
Speaker 1: to consciousness, choosing a new action, raising a thing to consciousness,
Speaker 1: choosing new action, the repetition of that creates a new
Speaker 1: way of being. All of a sudden, we stop being
Speaker 1: in the practice of it, and it just is how
Speaker 1: we show up. So now that self deprecating thought that
Speaker 1: I used to think all the time just doesn't show up,
Speaker 1: or it's so low now that it doesn't impact how
Speaker 1: I move. And now when I see it, I recognize
Speaker 1: and I'm like, that's not even my voice. Child boom,
Speaker 1: be quiet, and then I go on about my life. Right.
Speaker 1: And so that's the process of inquiry and insight that
Speaker 1: we have to engage in if we're gonna take this
Speaker 1: journey back to remove those obstructions that are in front
Speaker 1: of our radical self love. I love that loop there
Speaker 1: of of thinking, taking a different action, finding our way
Speaker 1: into a new way of being. It reminds me of
Speaker 1: what happens in recovery from addiction. Right. Is the thoughts
Speaker 1: are there, I must have a drugs right, and but
Speaker 1: I take a different action. I examine those thoughts. Why
Speaker 1: am I thinking that? What's happening? I take a different action,
Speaker 1: and over time I live my way into a new
Speaker 1: way of being where those thoughts don't have so much power.
Speaker 1: There's a great line in the introduction to your book,
Speaker 1: I cannot pronounce the woman who wrote it. Could you
Speaker 1: pronounce her name for me? Yes? Ie gioma a Luo,
Speaker 1: Thank you. She has a line in there basically that
Speaker 1: an epiphany doesn't undo lifetime of conditioning. And I love
Speaker 1: that idea that, like, we can have these insights and
Speaker 1: yet it takes a while to live these things out
Speaker 1: of our system. So I think that process of insight
Speaker 1: and inquiry is really powerful. Let's talk about the three pieces.
Speaker 1: And when we say peace, we mean like peace as
Speaker 1: in the you know, the peace sign, not pieces of pizza,
Speaker 1: although we could mean that because pizza pizza is good too,
Speaker 1: But talk about the three self love? Yes, absolutely, let's
Speaker 1: talk about the three pieces. Yeah, So again I talked about,
Speaker 1: like what are the foundational things that we've got to
Speaker 1: kind of grapple with when we decide we want to
Speaker 1: take this journey. So if the thinking doing being is
Speaker 1: about like how do I begin to live a radical
Speaker 1: self love process? How do I stay on the road,
Speaker 1: this is about how do I even get on the road.
Speaker 1: In order to get on the road, there are three
Speaker 1: things we have to make peace with. The first thing
Speaker 1: we have to make peace with is not understanding. We
Speaker 1: live in a world that says you should know everything,
Speaker 1: and if you don't know everything, something's wrong with you.
Speaker 1: Everything should be google able, right, and so there's this
Speaker 1: relationship to the instant access of knowledge that forgets the
Speaker 1: reality of the mystery of humanity, and that forgets the
Speaker 1: reality of lived experience that you can't know because it's
Speaker 1: not your journey. As soon as we just give up
Speaker 1: needing to understand everything, we have a different kind of expansiveness.
Speaker 1: Some things just are because they are Oh wow, Oh
Speaker 1: that feels really uncomfortable, and it stops me from having
Speaker 1: to feel like I actually can control the whole world,
Speaker 1: because it can't. I can't control everything. And if I
Speaker 1: get that that there are things I just don't understand,
Speaker 1: it creates some access around there because once we recognize
Speaker 1: that we don't understand everything, then we have the ability
Speaker 1: to make peace with difference, and making peace with differences
Speaker 1: about saying, right, there are things in this world that
Speaker 1: are just different than me. And we have so long
Speaker 1: equated difference with danger, difference with bad, difference with not
Speaker 1: belonging that it has created a world where we are
Speaker 1: desire to homogenize ourselves. But it's totally unrealistic and impossible. Right,
Speaker 1: It's actually not possible to be homogeneous as human beings,
Speaker 1: and that we don't expect that in any other part
Speaker 1: of the natural world. I did not see your dog
Speaker 1: and be like chihuahuas. Why are all dogs not air dales? Right?
Speaker 1: Like right, I've never looked at a Saint Bernard and
Speaker 1: been like, you should be a poodle. Right. I expect
Speaker 1: there to be difference. I don't look at oak trees
Speaker 1: and think that they should be you know, rose bushes.
Speaker 1: There is natural diversity in the world that we value
Speaker 1: and need and see as beautiful, and then when we
Speaker 1: bring it to humans, were like, Nope, we don't want
Speaker 1: that diversity totally right. And so the invitation to make
Speaker 1: peace with difference, which again starts with making peace but
Speaker 1: not understanding. It's like, oh, there's beauty in this thing
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about. That's totally different than me,
Speaker 1: but brings new insight, that brings new perspective, that brings
Speaker 1: new possibility. How do I let that in? Because once
Speaker 1: we do all of those things, then that helps us
Speaker 1: get to the third piece, which is making peace with
Speaker 1: our own bodies. Because if I can accept that there
Speaker 1: are things I don't understand, and I can accept that
Speaker 1: difference is an innate and absolutely valuable part of human diversity,
Speaker 1: then I can accept it in myself. Then I can say, oh,
Speaker 1: here are the ways that I am different, That my
Speaker 1: body is different than the stories that have been told
Speaker 1: about what a body should look like. Here are the
Speaker 1: ways in which my brain operates differently than what I've
Speaker 1: been told about what a body should look like. And
Speaker 1: how do I meet that without judgment? How do I
Speaker 1: meet that without making myself bad or wrong? Because if
Speaker 1: I can meet that without making myself bad or wrong,
Speaker 1: I am opening the door to return to a radical
Speaker 1: self love way of being. You talk about radical love
Speaker 1: being a process of de indoctrination. You know that we
Speaker 1: look unflinchingly at our current set of beliefs about our
Speaker 1: and the world and explore them. What are some of
Speaker 1: these beliefs about ourselves in the world that we need
Speaker 1: to let go of? Yeah, so I think there are
Speaker 1: some that are very universal, and then I think there
Speaker 1: are some that are particular depending on the body that
Speaker 1: you inhabit in the world. Right, But some of those
Speaker 1: things I really do believe, Like, if we start with
Speaker 1: whatever story is attached to it, I'm not enough, arm
Speaker 1: too much, and whatever it is that wherever that road
Speaker 1: takes you, right, I'm not pretty enough I'm not smart enough,
Speaker 1: I'm not rich enough, I'm not whatever the enough is.
Speaker 1: That is the first place to look for. Oh, where
Speaker 1: have I been indoctrinated? Because the story of enough is
Speaker 1: just not true? Right? Like the acorn is enough to
Speaker 1: become an oak tree, you don't have to do nothing
Speaker 1: to do it. It is enough. It came here enough,
Speaker 1: and that's true for us too. So the question is
Speaker 1: where is this story not enoughness impacting my life? And
Speaker 1: wherever that not enoughnessness is a place of indoctrination. It
Speaker 1: is a place where you've been told that because if
Speaker 1: it's not true, then it means we got it from
Speaker 1: someplace that isn't us. Then I can start being in
Speaker 1: my investigation and my inquiry where is this message coming from?
Speaker 1: I think that's a great idea. Let's take the stories
Speaker 1: of not enough and follow that. Where I think this
Speaker 1: gets hard is that a lot of the not enough
Speaker 1: is because there's something we want that's out in the
Speaker 1: world that we feel like I'm not enough to get
Speaker 1: for me. Right, growing up as a boy, when you're
Speaker 1: a young man, to be too skinny is just as
Speaker 1: bad as being too big. Right, You're just you're just
Speaker 1: a little whimp right, you're you know, scrawny, And so
Speaker 1: my thing was no woman, no girls ever gonna like me.
Speaker 1: There's a broad I'm not enough, but that I'm not
Speaker 1: enough ends in a very specific thing. I'm not enough
Speaker 1: to be loved by somebody that I would be interested in. Right,
Speaker 1: And those things seem crazy real when you're stuck in them. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: they absolutely seem crazy real. That's why the work is
Speaker 1: to be in the confrontation of it, right like that,
Speaker 1: the work of radical self love is to choose to
Speaker 1: go slay the dragon under your bid, the thing that
Speaker 1: seems really real. The premise that I am proposing, and
Speaker 1: this is the foundation of whether or not you take
Speaker 1: the journey or you don't, right, is the premise I'm
Speaker 1: proposing is it's not real. It is not real that
Speaker 1: being skinny makes you unlovable, no matter how much it feels,
Speaker 1: no matter how real it feels, and it does feel real,
Speaker 1: and we do live in a society that will reinforce
Speaker 1: that belief absolutely, And what I assure you is it
Speaker 1: isn't real. And the only way to really know that
Speaker 1: is to go and test it out. And so the
Speaker 1: invitation that I give to people to this work is Look,
Speaker 1: you're living in this construct or right now, and it
Speaker 1: already sucks, right like, it already sucks. It sucks thinking
Speaker 1: that you're not good enough. It sucks, thinking that you're
Speaker 1: never gonna be loved. It sucks. And so if it's
Speaker 1: gonna suck anyway, if it's gonna be hard anyway, if
Speaker 1: it's gonna be hard, be hard and test the thing
Speaker 1: that is likely to get you closer to your own freedom.
Speaker 1: If I'm gonna do hard, I'd rather do hard in
Speaker 1: service toward my own freedom. And I think this is
Speaker 1: something they talked about in recovery to like, recovery isn't easy, right,
Speaker 1: but it's like what do I get? What might I
Speaker 1: get if I just trust that it's possible. That's the
Speaker 1: invitation of this book. Can you just maybe try the
Speaker 1: experiment and see where it takes you? Yeah? And I
Speaker 1: think that's really powerful because the belief starts with just
Speaker 1: take your whatever, I'm not ex enough to be loved,
Speaker 1: and we then believe that, and so then we start
Speaker 1: acting that way in all sorts of ways that make
Speaker 1: it really likely that we're going to prove our theory
Speaker 1: true exactly. We it's a it's you know, it's a
Speaker 1: self fulfilling prophecy. And again, like I said, we live
Speaker 1: in a world that's happy to validate that for us.
Speaker 1: We are very very profitable inside of that belief. We're
Speaker 1: very manipulable inside of that belief. And so it's gonna
Speaker 1: have to take some daring. And I think, you know,
Speaker 1: various people in the world are off bring like the
Speaker 1: You don't have to sort out the fact that isn't
Speaker 1: true yet, you just have to be willing to try
Speaker 1: a new thing and see right, like, I'm gonna hold
Speaker 1: the belief that it isn't true that I wrote a
Speaker 1: whole book to tell you it isn't true. Now just
Speaker 1: play with it, didn't see right, that's the invitation. That's
Speaker 1: the invitation. There's four pillars of practice. So we've talked
Speaker 1: about how to even get on the journey. We talked
Speaker 1: about this thinking, doing and being process, and then there
Speaker 1: are four pillars of practice that I thought we could
Speaker 1: talk about because I think if we hit those four
Speaker 1: we cover a lot of ground of various points I'd
Speaker 1: like to hit. So let's start with what the four
Speaker 1: pillars of practice are. These will not be in order.
Speaker 1: I'm going to say them and then I'll order them
Speaker 1: later collect a compassion unapologetic action. I'll give them to
Speaker 1: your mind matters and taking out the toxic, taking out
Speaker 1: the toxic, thank you, and we just send them backwards.
Speaker 1: So the person was taking out the toxic. And so
Speaker 1: for us, just to explain why I have such hard
Speaker 1: time remembering my own pillars, is when I wrote the book,
Speaker 1: I wrote tin Tools to Radical Self Love, and these
Speaker 1: were one are the practical applications that we can do
Speaker 1: every single day that help us practice build this radical
Speaker 1: self love muscle live into this. And after I wrote them,
Speaker 1: I realized that they each fell on or a category
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, well, this helps people understand
Speaker 1: that the sort of like subheading of these categories. So
Speaker 1: I always forget the subheadings, but I remember the tools.
Speaker 1: So anyway, taking out the toxic, it's really about first
Speaker 1: if we're inside of this thinking doing, being paradigm. And
Speaker 1: remember all of these things are like scaffolding of a building, Right,
Speaker 1: I gotta build this layer and then I build this layer. Right,
Speaker 1: so we've built a layer. We understand that in order
Speaker 1: to take this journey, we've got to be in a
Speaker 1: thinking doing being processed. Here's your first thinking project taking
Speaker 1: out the toxic. Where am I, on a regular basis
Speaker 1: taking in messages that reinforced my belief that I'm not enough,
Speaker 1: that reinforced my belief that I need to be in
Speaker 1: comparison to assign my own worth and value, that reinforce
Speaker 1: my idea that somehow I'm deficient and failing. Where where
Speaker 1: is that message coming from? And how do I turn
Speaker 1: it down? How do I find the volume nob on
Speaker 1: that and turn it down? Some of that is literally
Speaker 1: the stuff we pay for. We're in a growth restore,
Speaker 1: picking up a rag magazine that's gonna tell us all
Speaker 1: the ways in which we need to do this, that
Speaker 1: and the other to be desirable, and the thing we
Speaker 1: need to buy to be desirable. And why haven't we
Speaker 1: become desirable yet? And maybe if we did this particular thing,
Speaker 1: then we'll be desirable. And we just gave somebody ten
Speaker 1: dollars to deface us in the pages of their magazine, right,
Speaker 1: And so where am I taking in those messages? Where
Speaker 1: am I watching things that reinforce the message that somehow
Speaker 1: I'm not smart enough, not capable enough, not beautiful whatever
Speaker 1: that is? And how do I start raising that to
Speaker 1: consciousness and then removing some of that, And then also,
Speaker 1: where am I reinforcing that message inside of my own
Speaker 1: relationship with myself? Where do I notice that I just
Speaker 1: immediately go to shame, to body shaming myself, to talking
Speaker 1: disparagingly about myself. You know, I saw a meme one
Speaker 1: time that said, if you talk to a friend the
Speaker 1: way that you talked to yourself, how long would y'all
Speaker 1: stay friend? Right? And I was like, absolutely, absolutely, how
Speaker 1: do we begin to say, Oh, how do I how
Speaker 1: do I have a more loving dialogue with myself? And
Speaker 1: where is the toxic way in which I'm relating to myself?
Speaker 1: And then how do I do a fast of that?
Speaker 1: And maybe that's just for one day. I'm turning off
Speaker 1: every time I hear something that is trying to sell
Speaker 1: me a reason I'm deficient, I just cut it off.
Speaker 1: How many times did I have to cut off the radio?
Speaker 1: How many times that I have to turn off the TV?
Speaker 1: How many times did I have to get off the
Speaker 1: social media platform? Right? So many? And again, once you
Speaker 1: raise that to consciousness, you're like, oh, this is what
Speaker 1: I've been doing to myself? Yeah, totally. I often joke
Speaker 1: that I generally don't watch TV because I feel so
Speaker 1: susceptible to it. Just show me one beer commercial with
Speaker 1: a lot of beautiful people, and I go, it's not
Speaker 1: that I even want It doesn't make me want a beer.
Speaker 1: It just makes me go, why is my life not
Speaker 1: like that? And boom instant. I have noticed how susceptible
Speaker 1: in certain mind states I am to that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff or can be. And the truth of the matter is,
Speaker 1: like it works. That's why they do it. Like if
Speaker 1: the beer commercial thought you weren't gonna be susceptible, it
Speaker 1: would not be dumping millions of dollars into advertising in
Speaker 1: that way. It knows it works, and so we have
Speaker 1: to become as consciously aware of how it works as
Speaker 1: the advertisers. Yes, right, that's the work. So that's the
Speaker 1: taking out the toxic. How do we become aware of
Speaker 1: what it is the messages that were being fed, and
Speaker 1: then how do we start auditing that so that we
Speaker 1: can consciously decrease it. Number two is mind matters. Yes,
Speaker 1: and so if we've done this thing to say, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take out all this trash that I've been
Speaker 1: dumping in my ears, and eyeballs every day. Now that
Speaker 1: that space is clear, I've created some room. What do
Speaker 1: I want to put in it? What am I trying
Speaker 1: to cultivate in that space? Because like any tilled patch
Speaker 1: of grass, if you let it go long enough, we
Speaker 1: will pop up right. And so my matter says, all right,
Speaker 1: now that I've done that, what do I consciously want
Speaker 1: to begin replacing it with? And you know, in the book,
Speaker 1: I begin talking about meditation and meditations power to really
Speaker 1: begin to create space and shift our neuropathways to actually
Speaker 1: get us to start thinking differently. If we're talking about
Speaker 1: how do we get to that being part of the
Speaker 1: thinking doing being process, Meditation is one of those powerful
Speaker 1: ways to get us to the being part by sitting
Speaker 1: and practicing, letting that clutter that comes in our brains leave,
Speaker 1: leave us right, and then what what do we want
Speaker 1: to put in that space? It also is about challenging
Speaker 1: some of the paradigms that that toxic thinking has had
Speaker 1: us in. So where am I stuck in binary thinking?
Speaker 1: Where am I stuck inside of things are either good
Speaker 1: or bad? I'm awful or I'm here you know our awfuler.
Speaker 1: I'm an angel, I'm a villain or I'm a hero,
Speaker 1: I am a victim, or I'm a you know, or
Speaker 1: a perpetrator. Right, We're all inside of these really binary
Speaker 1: ways of thinking that limit the scope of our full humanity.
Speaker 1: How do we start to challenge those when they come up?
Speaker 1: How do we see that and then offer ourselves a
Speaker 1: more expansive version of our own humanity so that we
Speaker 1: have a wider field to play in as we explore
Speaker 1: leaving these toxic messages behind and beginning to learn how
Speaker 1: to hear our own radical self love voice. That's the
Speaker 1: mind matters part. Unapologetic action is next. So if we've
Speaker 1: taken out the toxic, we've seen the things we've been
Speaker 1: dumping in that aren't good for us, and we've started
Speaker 1: planning some new seeds. Right now, it's time to do
Speaker 1: something right now, we're in the doing part. We dealt
Speaker 1: with the mind, We dealt with the thinking. What's the doing?
Speaker 1: What are the actions that I can take every day?
Speaker 1: How do I become reconnected to my own body? How
Speaker 1: do I reclaim joy? And in this vessel that I've
Speaker 1: gotten so many messages that's deficient. Right. I talked about
Speaker 1: in the book being a kid and when you're a
Speaker 1: child in the teacher rang the veil for recess. I
Speaker 1: don't know about you, but I like grew wings in kindergarten.
Speaker 1: I grew wings and I flew outside. That's how fast
Speaker 1: I needed to get outside and play. And there was
Speaker 1: a joy to going and moving and being embodied. And
Speaker 1: then somehow we were stripped of that joy and it
Speaker 1: became drudgery. Moving our bodies became punishment. Moving our bodies
Speaker 1: became the thing that we paid twenty four hour fitness
Speaker 1: twenty dollars a month to never do because we never
Speaker 1: feel like going right like it became, it became this
Speaker 1: really tense, visceral, antagonistic relationship. And so, what would it
Speaker 1: look like to reclaim joy in my body? What would
Speaker 1: it looked like to reclaim pleasure in my body? What
Speaker 1: would it look like to reclaim connection in my body?
Speaker 1: And how do I take action to do that on
Speaker 1: a daily basis? How do I replace those old activities
Speaker 1: of deprecation with things that actually bring me a lot
Speaker 1: of joy. And so basically all of these things, these tools,
Speaker 1: I've created a workbook where people can actually practice putting
Speaker 1: them in place, doing them on a daily basis, and
Speaker 1: so inside of the workbook and give us an assignment
Speaker 1: to rediscover the games that brought us the most joyous kids,
Speaker 1: like when's the last time you play red Light? Green Light?
Speaker 1: When is the last time you played? How do you
Speaker 1: go seek with a bunch of adults go outside? And
Speaker 1: so there's this invitation to return to our site of joy,
Speaker 1: to reclaim that for ourselves, and so an unapologetic action,
Speaker 1: that's what we're asking. The other piece inside of unapologetic
Speaker 1: action is about, now that we recognize the stories we've
Speaker 1: been telling ourselves about how deficient we are, the stories
Speaker 1: that reinforce the larger societal and doctor nations. Now that
Speaker 1: we recognize those things, how do we create a new story?
Speaker 1: How do I literally tell myself a different story worry
Speaker 1: than the story I've been telling myself historically. And you know, again,
Speaker 1: inside the workbook, I give us the opportunity to actually
Speaker 1: practice writing a new story. To take that thing that
Speaker 1: was the most shameful that I had the most judgment
Speaker 1: about myself, the story of being the skinny boy who
Speaker 1: was never going to be loved. How do I turn
Speaker 1: that story around in a literal way and right right
Speaker 1: myself an ending that is more aligned with my truth,
Speaker 1: and then how do I practice them living into that? Right?
Speaker 1: And so as we exercise these muscles, we create the
Speaker 1: conditions for medical self love not to feel like a
Speaker 1: distant thing, but to fill up close to us, like
Speaker 1: a thing we can practice and live into on a
Speaker 1: daily basis. Yeah. I love that there's so many good
Speaker 1: things in there. I mean, I think about stories, and
Speaker 1: I've talked about this on the podcast so many times.
Speaker 1: We're making them up. So if we're making them up,
Speaker 1: why on earth would we not choose ones to back
Speaker 1: to your your earlier question like, is this belief or
Speaker 1: this thing giving me more peace, joy, ease, power? If
Speaker 1: my stories aren't doing that, Once we sort of really
Speaker 1: look at and go, oh, I'm making meaning out of it.
Speaker 1: I'm the one that's creating all this. Why not? Why not?
Speaker 1: If I'm going to write a story, might as well
Speaker 1: write the one where it's a happy ending. That's right,
Speaker 1: right as well? That's right? And then the last one,
Speaker 1: and this one I know is really important to the
Speaker 1: whole picture, which is why I wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: we got to it is collective compassion. Talk about this one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, I say in the book like you
Speaker 1: could do everything, you could do all the things I said,
Speaker 1: you could do all the tools. If you don't do
Speaker 1: these last two tools, you're gonna struggle in this journey.
Speaker 1: You're gonna find yourself like on a side of a
Speaker 1: of a steep heel that's mud trying to climb up.
Speaker 1: Collective compassion is one that this is not an individual journey,
Speaker 1: which I said at the beginning of our conversation, that
Speaker 1: this is not about individualism, that this is about interdependence.
Speaker 1: And the truth of the matter is you have an
Speaker 1: entire societal infrastru picture of systems and organizations and edifices
Speaker 1: that are designed to keep you not feeling enough, that
Speaker 1: are designed to make sure that you don't actually think
Speaker 1: that you can affect change in your own life or
Speaker 1: in the world. They are intentionally created as such. So
Speaker 1: if you think you're gonna just do battle with that jugger,
Speaker 1: not by yourself, you're gonna be sadly mistaken. It's going
Speaker 1: to be very very difficult, near impossible to be able
Speaker 1: to maintain any kind of sense of power against that.
Speaker 1: And so we need each other in this. We have
Speaker 1: to be in a collective experience where we are battling
Speaker 1: those voices, not just me up against the machine, but
Speaker 1: us against it. Right. And so the more that you
Speaker 1: find your people, the more that you find the people
Speaker 1: who are in alignment with with the journey that you're
Speaker 1: interested in taking, far easier, the journey becomes so much
Speaker 1: more doable and sustainable, the journey becomes and so collective
Speaker 1: compassion requires us to find community and to do this
Speaker 1: work in community again, because our liberation is tied up together,
Speaker 1: our radical self love journey is tied up together. And
Speaker 1: then the last piece, and this is tool number ten,
Speaker 1: final tool, the most important thing you're gonna do. If
Speaker 1: you do everything and you fail to really live into this,
Speaker 1: you will find yourself back in this old Pairadigne, and
Speaker 1: that is give yourself some grace that we actually have
Speaker 1: to recognize that this is not a journey of perfection.
Speaker 1: And as soon as we're inside of a conversation of perfection,
Speaker 1: we're outside of a conversation of radical self love. As
Speaker 1: soon as you are judging yourself because you got it wrong.
Speaker 1: See I always get it wrong. You know. I did
Speaker 1: a workshop on time and uh, the participant called it
Speaker 1: meta shame, shame for having Shane I like this too much, y'all,
Speaker 1: just too much, and I feel bad for feeling bad,
Speaker 1: and now I feel bad. But it's a lot. And
Speaker 1: so what I invite us to do is say, of course,
Speaker 1: I'm imperfect in this journey. That is one of the
Speaker 1: actual beautiful parts of my humanity is that I'm imperfect,
Speaker 1: that I'm gonna get it wrong, that I get to
Speaker 1: experiment and mess up and try again. That is part
Speaker 1: of the journey. I tell people all the time. I
Speaker 1: run an entire organization. I dedicated the last decade of
Speaker 1: my life to nothing but radical self love. And there
Speaker 1: are days I do not feel very loving about myself
Speaker 1: and I don't feel that. And the work, the work
Speaker 1: of radical self love is can I love the Sonya
Speaker 1: that doesn't feel loving toward herself until Sonya loves herself again.
Speaker 1: I love you Sonya that feels not enough. I love
Speaker 1: you Sonya that got it wrong. I love you Sonya
Speaker 1: that don't feel like loving me. And the more that
Speaker 1: I open up to that experience of love, of loving
Speaker 1: the imperfect version of me, the more I returned myself
Speaker 1: to the stasis of love, to love as the foundation
Speaker 1: of how I'm moving through there's so many things in
Speaker 1: what you said there that if we can interrupt that cycle,
Speaker 1: that meta shame cycle, it's so important because what we
Speaker 1: end up doing is we go, Okay, I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: on a journey of radical self love and I'm not
Speaker 1: doing it good enough. And so wherever we can interrupt
Speaker 1: that cycle is so good. And then that last piece
Speaker 1: about the collective compassion and that that grace for ourselves
Speaker 1: is again it's that reciprocal cycle we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: The more that I have grace for myself, the more
Speaker 1: I can offer you grace. And the more I offer
Speaker 1: you grace, the more I have for myself, you know.
Speaker 1: And so it really is that interdependence that we talked about,
Speaker 1: and being on this journey alone is like you said,
Speaker 1: it's too hard. Yeah, it's just not sustainable. And I
Speaker 1: think if nothing else, what we can be looking at
Speaker 1: in this world right now is we need things that
Speaker 1: are sustainable. Yeah, we're running out of a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff here. We might be figuring out what what makes
Speaker 1: this journey possible for the long run, and that's together. Yeah. Amen, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for taking the time to come
Speaker 1: on the show. I have really enjoyed this conversation. I
Speaker 1: loved the book. There are a ton of stories in
Speaker 1: the book I would have loved to get to which
Speaker 1: we didn't. But we'll have links in the show notes
Speaker 1: to your book. People can find you online, and I
Speaker 1: hope people check you out because it was a really
Speaker 1: great book and I've really enjoyed this awesome Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you inviting me. Thanks so much. Thank you.
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