Tag: self-kindness

#4 Being Kind to Ourselves

(an abridged excerpt from the book)

There are so many aspects to this seemingly simple concept that I have chosen to pick out just a couple from the book: self-love and self-esteem.

We are going to look at what they are, why they matter and a couple of ways of working on them.

What is the Difference between Self-love and Self-Esteem?

These two concepts are really interconnected, but there are key differences that make it important for us to work on them separately at least some of the time.

Self-love is unconditional; we love ourselves as we would a baby. Not many adults can run around naked, weeing and pooing everywhere and still be loved, but a baby can, and that is what self-love is. It comes with truckloads of acceptance and no need to prove anything or even have bladder control.

Self-esteem is about us thinking that we are good and valuable, so it does have an element of evaluation in it. With healthy self-esteem we may feel we are attractive, competent, interesting, worthwhile, amongst other qualities. We know we are valuable and look at things in a way that confirms that (rather than confirmation of the opposite as with low self-esteem).

Why We Need Good Levels of Self-Love and Self-Esteem

It is essential for our health and happiness. Narcissism is on the rise, and although this may seem an extreme display of self-love, it actually reflects a deep uncertainty of our worth. If you have good levels of self-love and self-esteem, you don’t go fishing for that on social media, using the perfect selfie as bait.

Self-love and self-esteem are also essential for:

  • self-care
  • healthy relationships
  • accepting ourselves no matter how we act or what we are doing
  • loving ourselves even if we do not fit society’s idea of perfection or manage to rise to unattainable standards of wealth or beauty.

If we have low self esteem we may even get ill (sick), in fact low self-esteem has been linked to immune- and cardiological-disorders. No pressure!

Working on Self-Love and Self-Esteem

A cursory look around self-help books and online articles will show a lot of people value external and practical ways of boosting self-love and self-esteem. Although I think that there is a lot of value in improving the external aspects of our lives, for this section I really want to focus on internal work.

This is because the roots of our attitudes to ourselves are within us, and improvements in self-esteem may not last if they depend on keeping up certain habits or changes in our environment. Self-care is hugely important, but knowing that we deserve it vastly more so.

In the two sections below I have included one exercise each from the book, I hope you enjoy them!

Working on Self-Love

Just think: “wow, I am amazing” and now notice your reaction. Is it internal laughter, discomfort, complete agreement? With self-love there is nothing to prove, nothing you could possibly do to get more love. You are just enough as you are. An advertiser’s nightmare. A tiny baby’s reality. OK, let’s have a go at the first exercise.

Exercise: Calling in a Self-Love Mentor

You know how little children can have invisible friends? We are going to intentionally create one for ourselves. This friend is going to be our self-love mentor; both a teacher and a mirror reflecting our own love back to us whenever we think of them throughout the day.

It can be a unicorn, an angel, a 6ft teddy bear, a purple monster. On a more mundane level we could call it a tool for focusing our attention in a specific way. But this mentor is far from mundane, they are brilliant. You can have them look like and be literally anything. Glitter explosions may go off every time they move, they may be a superhero with special powers; whatever feels right to you. If you have no clue what they should look like, I would go with a capybara.

Please close your eyes, take your time and visualize the perfect self-love mentor for you, in as much detail as possible. You can try imagining them in the room with you. Throughout the day, as often as you feel like, you can tune in to them and see how they are responding to how you are acting or how you are feeling about yourself. Their job is to send you love and accept you unconditionally, seeing you as the best version of yourself. They are all for you.

Visualise them looking at you with complete love, acceptance and appreciation for the entirety of who you are. Then let yourself see them through your eyes and bask in that perspective.

I want you to regularly visualize this mentor standing near you, maybe once a day. Send love from your heart to them and the instant it reaches them feel it reflect back to you, strengthened and doubled in volume. Even though your first few steps towards self-love maybe tentative this mentor believes in you and is there to model the perfect way to give yourself love.

You can change the image of this mentor if you choose, but at the end of the day what you pick is not too important, so do not worry. The most important thing is your sense of their way of being, which is perfect self-love and self-acceptance. Deep within us all is the knowledge of how to have self-love, our mentor is simply with us to remind us and help us to get to that state.

In the future when you feel ready you can simply send all of that love to yourself, feel it within yourself, without the aid of a mentor. But until you are ready to accept love for your own sake, you can work with your invisible friend to help fill you up and to teach you how it is that we can have nearly perfect self-love.

If you want to, you can draw your mentor or describe them. You can also journal about your progress, including details of what comes up for you when you feel love, any blocks or emotions that are triggered, and if there are any areas of yourself that you feel are hard to love. For fun you can write a message or even a letter to yourself from your mentor, giving you feedback, and you can write a letter of appreciation to them. Getting in touch with an invisible friend gives us a way to access a part of ourselves we don’t know that well, so get to know them as much as you like! It’s all you at the end of the day.

Working on Self-Esteem

Low self-esteem may be seen as the route of many of our issues in society today, even contributing to mental and physical health issues. You would think that growing up relatively privileged in the West, safe, educated and with a bright future we would all be full of self-respect and esteem. Unfortunately the opposite seems to be true.

Do not be hard on yourself if you have realized your self-esteem is low. Maybe it is hard to believe that we deserve all these resources when so much of the rest of the world is poor. Maybe it is the way we were raised, or the social norms that surround us. Whatever the reason, working to improve it as it will have a great effect on our quality of life.

Exercise 1: Inner Child Work for Self-Esteem

Because our self-esteem levels have their roots in our childhood experience, it makes sense to do some work with our inner child. We may say horrible things to ourselves, that we would never say to a friend or a child, so working on boosting the self esteem of our inner child also helps us to bypass that negative self-talk.

1. Sit or stand somewhere you are comfortable, where it is quiet so you can do the visualization in this exercise. Picture yourself as a child in your mind’s eye. Whichever age feels right is good, but if you are not sure, then pick 4 or 5 years old. Visualise your clothes, your chubby little hands, your round face, your mannerisms.

2. Now say hello to this child in your mind. They may come up to you and want a hug or to sit on your lap, or they may be content to stand or play where they are. I would like you to imagine sending them love, from your heart. This love surrounds them, as with a warm blanket and you can actually feel them accepting this love.

3. Now I would like you to tell your inner child what you really like about them. If you want to, you could write out a list of statements and then one by one say them to the child. With each statement really see the child’s reaction. You might see them swell with pride, or feel warm, feel secure. They won’t be about achievements (such as you won that award), but things you like about their personality and maybe even appearance. The statements might look like any of these:

You are really funny

You have a wonderful sense of imagination

You are very clever

You are very brave

I like your hair

Just to name a few.

4. And now that you have done that, sense the child’s state, how they are feeling. Now repeat the exercise, but every time you say one of the statements to the child have them repeat it back to you, and try to really take it in. Imagine that if you cannot accept the compliment, the child will not be able to believe it, as you are the same person. So really try and let that positive statement in. After each statement that you give to and receive from your inner child, repeat it from both of you as a “we __” statement.

For example, you say to your inner child “you’re very brave”, she says the same back to you, you bask in that for a moment together and then you visualize both of you saying “we are very brave”.

5. You may find that when you are doing this exercise you feel some kind of block. Maybe it is hard to visualize yourself as a child, or it is hard to remember yourself happy, or you find it hard to find compliments or accept them. Wherever your block is, the first step is to accepting that it is there and to accept the emotions around it. Send a feeling of love to this block or blocked feeling. If you cannot work around it right now, try and accept that too.

I highly recommend that you journal about this exercise. You can include the phrases you told your inner child and yourself and what reactions you felt. You can then repeat this exercise in the future and compare the results.

Motivation for Increasing Self-Esteem

Here are a couple of thoughts that may help motivate you to do this work:

  • We can be role models for others, especially the younger generation and inspire others to be kind to themselves.
  • We can build our lives, careers and relationships on a solid foundation of kindness and respect. For example; a friendship between two people with good self-esteem is a meeting of the minds and sharing enjoyment, but low self-esteem can lead to over-attachment based on fear, competitiveness, rivalry and/ or a need to keep the other person down at our level.
  • It helps us to have great intimate relationships. Rather than expecting our partner to fill us up, we feel we have permission to take care of ourselves.
  • We can ask for what we want and need and really believe that we deserve it.

So I hope you have learned a couple of useful things about why and how to be kind to yourself and I really hope you put it into practice. Kindness starts at home, and then ripples out to everyone else. This is genuine love and kindness and you will really feel a difference when your giving and receiving comes from a place of satisfaction and grace.

#3 Being Connected to our Bodies

(an abridged excerpt from the book)

How often do you think about your body in a day? Are you aware of it at all, except for when it is painful or tense?

And how would you define body awareness? Would you say it is:

  • good proprioception
  • co-ordination
  • dexterity
  • balance
  • knowing how healthy we are
  • sensing tension or hydration
  • taking care of our bodies
  • keeping our bodies good-looking
  • keeping our bodies youthful?

The truth there are many different aspects to body awareness including the above and more. Connecting to our bodies lets us know about movement and health, but also allows us to connect to instinct, intuition and emotion.

If we know how to listen, our body can tell us what food it wants, what exercise it likes, what posture is good for it, what people it likes, how much rest it needs, where it is comfortable, what feels safe and more. Our bodies have a kind of intelligence of their own and in order to get in touch with it them we need to be able to hear what they are saying, rather than just letting the mind run everything all the time.

This is very different to the mind-over-body approach most of us are brought up with – the body just serves anything we want to do. We make it exercise, rest, slouch, sit – it is our servant. A body-centred approach brings our bodies into the forefront and with that we can learn a lot more about ourselves, including how to keep ourselves happy and healthy.

In my book there are a few different exercises for connecting to our bodies, but for this excerpt we will focus on just one. I will also discuss some other ways you can work on increasing your physical connection below. This is a journey that will not happen overnight.

Learning to listen to our bodies (and other people) takes patience and humility. I recommend that you enjoy it, rather than trying to rush to a result. The connection happens while you are aware of and experiencing your body. Take your time.

As with all of the exercises on this site, please only do it if you are feeling well enough, and if you start feeling overwhelmed at all, take a break and if you need to seek professional help please do so before continuing.

Physical Movement and Appreciation

Loving our bodies is very hard for many of us, and culture does not always support a full-on love affair with our bods, so we will be actively working on this in this section.

Before we dive into an exercise, I’d like to point out a few things that may seem obvious:

  • Our bodies have carried us through our whole lives, often without even complaining very much. Think of how much airtime our minds get. Now compare it to how much attention our bodies get – for most people this is not even close.
  • Our bodies have dealt with all of the late nights, early mornings, sudden workouts, long workouts, hours on the sofa, horrible stress, hours hunching over phones or laptops we have inflicted upon them. How much gratitude do we give them?
  • Every time we damage ourselves or get ill our bodies work to recover; they try as hard as they can to be healthy and strong for us. Do we appreciate them?

Can you think of a time you were ever as dedicated and tirelessly hard-working as your body? I think for many of us some appreciation is long overdue!

The following exercise is designed for use when you are fit and healthy, if you are not able to do it relatively easily then just do the appreciation side of it, and leave the physical side until it is safe to do it.

Exercise: Body Awareness and Thanks

For this exercise you may want to be somewhere private and wear comfy clothes.

  1. Just stand and move your body a little. Notice any tension, pain or restriction and gently move in a way that helps (but do not push through any pain).
  2. Let a general sense of love and appreciation spread throughout your whole body as you think of everything it does for you.
  3. Ask your body if there is any movement it would like to make and make it. Keep and open mind and do it with the intention of listening to your body and making it feel heard and appreciated. Enjoy the sense of connection to your body.
  4. When you feel like it have a moment of stillness. Be comfortable in yourself and stay aware and open to your body. Let a feeling of warmth and love grow in your heart and spread out to your whole body, bathing it. Feel your whole body fill with a feeling of appreciation and gratitude.
  5. You can take this opportunity to say anything you want to to your body. You may think “sorry for being so down on you for having a bit of cellulite/ not having enormous biceps” or “thank you for keeping me safe and letting me go anywhere I want to go”, for example – anything you really feel. I suggest you keep it positive, as this is about creating a better connection between you and your body, but if you need to express anything negative feel free to let that out too.
  6. As you continue to sense this feeling of love and appreciation with your body, you can ask your body what it would like to have more of, or what it would like to change in your day-to-day life, and wait quietly with an open mind for the answer.

Take a moment to notice how you feel. Does your body feel happier? Told you it had its own kind of intelligence! Keep working with it to keep strengthening your connection.

Conclusion

There are loads of great ways of enjoying and connecting with our bodies, I urge you to find one or several you enjoy and make them a regular part of your life. Here are a few, but I recommend just trying a couple out, especially ones you feel drawn to:

Walking Running Dancing Stretching Exercise classes
Yoga Pilates Acrobatics Aerial dance Swimming
Touch rugby Rugby Tennis Football Golf
Frisbee Boxing Tai Chi Kung Fu Qi Gong
Circuits Cross Fit Ju Jitsu Karate Taekwondo
Mime Acting Climbing Parkour and more

There are also some great therapies that can help you to access more of your body and have a deeper connection to it:

Many types of Massage Acupuncture Assisted stretching Craniosacral
Somatic Experiencing TRE Osteopathy to name a few

It is important to tune in to our bodies often enough to keep our connection strong.  If we create a partnership with our bodies I believe we will stay a lot heathier and have much more fun, so a little regular effort is well-worth it for the benefits we will get. Enjoy your body!

#2 Feeling Our Feelings (How to do it)

(an abridged excerpt from the book)

Ughh feelings – always changing, often confusing and often out of reach of our conscious minds; getting to grips with them can be hard!

But being able to know how we are feeling is an essential life skill. I’m not even talking about knowing what to do with them –  just to know what they are, and this is already above average for the general population. Really we should learn this in school, rather than in the therapist’s office for a select few.

In this brief overview we are going to look at 3 of the reasons that feeling your feelings is important, 3 reasons we may have stopped and  a couple of ways to get in touch with them.

Reasons to feel our feelings

  1. Not being aware of our feelings can make us ill (sick) – it has been linked to higher mortality, chronic health conditions and physical pain.
  2. In order to deepen relationships we need to be emotionally intelligent; this has a big effect on our success at work and in our personal lives
  3. We cannot know ourselves and have a meaningful life without being able to get in touch with our feelings.

Reasons we may have stopped feeling our feelings

  1. It can hurt and if we push feelings down then things stay “manageable”
  2. We want to avoid conflict – better to ignore our own anger (and needs and desires) than to rock the boat
  3. This can keep us stuck and out of touch with ourselves

Ways to get in touch with our feelings

  1. Sense Your Body

When doing the exercise below try to stay as open-minded as possible and not get “into your head” too much. The goal is to connect with the feeling itself, not let our mind tell us what it is.

a) Sit somewhere quiet and comfortable, breathe and relax your body.

b) Notice if there are any sensations in your body that are more in the foreground, more obvious.

c) What is that feeling like, is it; warm, cool, light, heavy, a ball, spread out, tense, relaxed, does it have a shape, or a colour?

d) When you feel it quite clearly, say “hello” to it in your mind, and ask it if it wants anything/ has anything it wants to say. Wait with an open mind for its answer.

e) You can converse with this feeling, find a way to give it what it needs (in real life or through visualization, as relevant).

This is the abridged version of the exercise, but a really good starting point for getting in touch with your feelings. If you get stuck you can revisit this later, if it is new work for you it takes a little while to get used to.

2. Know the Words

One of the main problems my clients have when talking about their feelings is that they do not know the right word for what they are experiencing. If we are not brought up in a very emotionally-aware environment it is likely our vocabulary will be limited to very simple feelings; good, bad, stressed, sad etc.

If you are wondering what you are feeling, why not have a look at Gloria Willcox’s “Feeling Wheel” below which represents many of the common emotions, and try and find yours.

Once you have found it, accept it and acknowledge it within yourself.

Beyond the exercises above it is important to try and cultivate and open mind and an ability to accept what you are feeling. If we have made a judgment that certain feelings are unacceptable they go straight on the reject pile and play havoc under the radar, instead of just speaking to us like they are meant to.

I just want to leave you with the thought that emotions are the things that bring the world into colour. They can be subtle, nuanced and surprising. They make us human and life worth living. What are you doing to make space in your life for your feelings?

“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”

― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

#1 The Best Approach for Self Development

In this article I want to talk about the things that I have found help and hinder working on ourselves in my professional and also personal experience.

I have found that many seemingly different issues and concerns often have their roots in a few areas that are foundational to us being happy and healthy. These are a great idea to work on, rather than only focusing on whatever surface problem has popped up recently.

Broadly speaking these areas and abilities include:

Being able to tune into our feelings

Being aware of our bodies

Being kind to ourselves

Having a good level of self-esteem

Being able to accept whatever we are feeling

The ability to take enough time

Knowing what is authentic to us

Having clear minds

Knowing our values

Having the right balance of structure (i.e. our beliefs) and flexibility (i.e. the ability to adapt those beliefs as needed)

The ability to give and accept love

I’m sure there are more that I have missed out, and then there are a lot of peripheral other ones, for example; regular exercise, good diet, making good decisions, having great relationships. However, there are so many other things that impact our lives and I want to focus on the main things that impact our progress with our own development.

We can easily approach self-development in a way that actually hinders our progress in the long-term. The following examples are patterns I have seen many times over:

Some engage in self-development work to try to improve themselves because deep down they feel they are not enough. So no matter how much they work on their self-development, it never feels like enough.

Others of us may be wonderfully focused and physically and mentally aware, but not kind to ourselves. This makes the more vulnerable parts of ourselves retreat out of sight – becoming impossible to work with, leading to a stalemate.

Some of us may be in a rush to arrive at our destination already! But nothing reinforces progress so much as recognising our achievements and kindly giving ourselves the time we need to process everything and let the changes filter through our whole being.

Or the people who are wonderfully astute mentally, but have little connection with their bodies and see them as superfluous to the type of development they are interested in achieving? They will always be pulled back by lack of connection to their bodies, which are an incredible resource.

Or we may be constantly striving to give love to others, but only able to accept a little in return. We might feel comfortable working with people who are perceived as less fortunate in some way, so that there is no risk of having to open up to a reciprocal relationship. Without the ability to accept love we will lack the internal space that is needed for great self-development work, and we will probably also not fully believe we deserve to be happy and taken care of.

Do any of these ring true even a little? We would all rather play to our strengths and this often means there are some surprising blind spots in us, areas we typically work around rather than look at directly. And I get it – it’s really hard for all of us to look at areas that we may not like or that make us feel vulnerable, but if we continue to avoid them they will always hold us back. So why don’t you have a look at the above list slowly, and have a think about which one you least prefer, would rather avoid. That one should be your focus.

Before I mentioned the quality of “internal spaciousness”. Sounds a bit strange doesn’t it? Like a cavity in our torso or something. This space is not a negative feeling of emptiness inside us, that is a completely different thing. This quality is a little hard to describe, but let’s compare a few things that increase or reduce the spaciousness inside us:

 

Increase Reduce
Acceptance Harsh judgement/ rejection
Self-esteem Self-criticism
Allowing time Rushing on too hastily
Being open-minded Being very closed-minded
Breathing fully Shallow sips of air

The feeling that you get when reading the first column can show you what having internal spaciousness feels like (and the second column, the lack of it).

What this space does, is allow us to be completely and fully aware of our feelings and experience. It gives emotions the space they need to transform and express themselves, and thoughts the space they need to fully develop. This spaciousness can be thought of a little as the flexibility people allow within themselves, but it also requires kindness to ourselves too.

So be kind, be spacious and don’t forget to celebrate your successes! Self-development is a long road and it shouldn’t be all grind, or all just in one direction to the detriment of all others. And above all – at least sometimes – it should be fun.

Self Development; Not for the Faint of Heart

When I am asked what I do, I have habitually refrained from saying I work in self-development, and not just because I don’t really want to hear all about someone’s problems when I’m at a party. More so, because it is a pretty broad category that is hard for people to get a hold on.

So why in engage in self-development? Aren’t we good enough just as we are? Well I believe we can be good enough and still work on ourselves because life is about learning and expansion. Although they say that if you are standing still you are falling behind, I believe we should engage in this work out of love of exploring more of life and ourselves and enjoying new challenges, rather than out of fear.

What self-development is could be defined differently for each of us at different times throughout the day. Is it self-care? Yes. Is it having the courage to ask someone we like out on a date? Yes. Is it trying to move beyond our comfort zone. Yes, but it is also knowing when to give ourselves a break and rest.

So many things can be involved in our own development, because it is about living life to the full, taking care of ourselves, being self-aware, trying to be good people, create meaningful connections, work towards a purpose, be expressive, be creative, be kind and have fun. So… just all of life then.

It does not have to be doing yoga, being skinny, reading the latest self-development book (I take that back, please read mine!), doing charity work – it does not have to be anything. It just is anything that makes us more fulfilled, balanced and self-aware people.