Tag Archives: Tara Brach

Loosen your unworthiness habit.

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Girl in field of daisies: You are holy. You are perfect. You are beloved. You are safe.

“I hope she always looks at herself like that … “ This is my friend’s wish for her four-year-old daughter. Her photo shows her daughter looking in the mirror, admiring her new French braid, and she’s simply ecstatic with herself.

We all used to look in the mirror like that. When was the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror and were completely satisfied, even ecstatic, with the woman looking back?

What happened?

What happened is culture, family, church, school, patriarchy. We’ve been told so many lies about women’s worth – our bodies, our voices, our places. We absorb them from birth, if not before. They’re in the air we breathe.

I spent three days last week in a quarterly retreat with 65 other mostly women entrepreneurs. We were asked to reflect on our biggest obstacle. Hands down the biggest obstacle was that we were “playing small.”

Why? Because we’re afraid that if we go big, get visible, and say exactly what we mean, we won’t be safe. Here’s what I wrote: “I believe that the real me is unlovable. So I have to send out fake me to fool everyone with my perfect façade. Staying small and fuzzy keeps me safe, and I have to feel safe at all times.”

I know that none of this is true. Yet my default pattern when I’m about to say something that I think someone might not like is to freak out and silence myself in advance. I default to “I have to prove that I’m lovable. And being lovable means no one will ever get mad at me and everything will always go smoothly.” 

Ownership of ourselves comes after awareness of our patterns. I’m noticing this pattern, finally, and dismantling the thoughts that make me suffer. Because they’re lies.

You heal this oh-so-painful pattern by gradually, one-by-one, relieving yourself of the weight of those lies. Your belief in your belovedness is down there, underneath all the garbage. Beloved shiny you, the you who looks in the mirror ecstatically, will rise up, expand, and gradually take her rightful place as you lift off the garbage piece by piece.

How to lift off the garbage? Here are a few suggestions, in order of time commitment required.

High Five Habit: Basically all you do here is look yourself in the mirror and give yourself a high-five. For more, check out Kara’s Unf*ck Your Brain episode with Mel Robbins.

RAIN: Dr. Tara Brach’s four-step process for becoming aware of what’s going on with us and giving ourselves kind regard. 

Awareness Wheel: A simple tool for self-awareness. 

Thought Work: Dismantle those lies through gentle, self-compassionate inquiry. 

And finally, find a photo of yourself as a child, frame it nicely if you want, and put it where you’ll see it all the time. Ask yourself if that kid is unworthy. Does she need to prove her belovedness? Would you let anyone else tell her she’s not okay just as she is?

Our habits of unworthiness are based on false beliefs.

There is no lasting safety in playing small.

There is no true joy in smooshing ourselves into little appropriate boxes.

Making our belovedness dependent on how others treat us only leaves us bereft of our own kindness and compassionate self-regard.   
 
We’re still the beautiful beings we were when we were babies, toddlers, and four-year-olds, before we started to believe the hurtful lies. Beloved, your belovedness is a given. Your belovedness hasn’t gone anywhere. Your belovedness is within you, waiting for you to remember.

Who do you think you are? How do you treat yourself? These are ultimately theological questions, deeply related to our conceptions of Being and our place in the cosmos.

Want to go deeper? Contact me for a free no-strings-attached conversation.

PS. Happy holidays and happy New Year! I’ll see you in January, beloveds. 

Photo Credit: Melissa Askew on Unsplash

More soul. Less façade.

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Girl blowing out candles on a birthday cake

If you want to heal, you must live more from your soul and less from your façade. This is the first of four healing shifts I teach to my coaching clients.

I came face to face with this reality again on our recent Grand Canyon pilgrimage. I saw again, more deeply than before, how my insatiable search for safety after my dad died was driven by my social self. My façade. The part of me that desperately wanted to feel secure, and thought that following the rules and keeping everyone around me happy was the way to do that.

Our façade has many names. Martha Beck calls this part of us, constructed in response to social expectations that begin virtually at birth, our “social self.” Franciscan and prolific author Richard Rohr calls it our “false self.” Jungian James Hollis calls it our “psyche.” Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach calls it our “spacesuit self.” It’s the part of us that speaks in “should” and “have to.” The part that strives to be nice at all costs.

Our facades will never know peace. Only our souls know peace.

We all have facades. Our facades are necessary. Our social selves keep society’s gears running smoothly. Our social selves help us navigate four-way stops and dentist appointments. Our façade, our social self, the part that looks outside ourselves for direction and approval, has its place.

Maintaining our façade, our social self, requires energy. Façades, because they’re constructed and flimsy like false store fronts in old Western movies, take work to keep up. This is why many of my clients run out of steam in their middle decades. They’ve been working so hard to be who everyone outside themselves expects them to be, that they hit a wall.

The first half of life is often about running around accumulating identities – credentials, careers, achievements. The second half of life is often when we shed this surface stuff, because maintaining it takes energy we just don’t want to expend anymore.

This feeling of running out of steam, of hitting a wall, is commonly known as a “midlife crisis.” It’s when women wake up, look around at the life they’ve created with their choices, and decide to recommit to themselves and their priorities.

What’s the alternative to living from your façade?

Living from your soul. Your soul is sturdy, rooted, and peaceful. Your soul is who you came into this life as. The same teachers listed above also have many names for the soul: “True self.” “Essential self.” “Authentic self.” Your soul says “I want to” and “I yearn for.” Your soul craves real, kind, and good, not nice. 

Parker Palmer calls our soul the “taproot,” the part of us that connects us to what James Hollis calls the Divine Energy. Since my Camino vision of God as a deep Wombish Heart, I imagine my soul as an umbilical cord connecting me to that Divine Energy, my source and nourishment.

Your metaphor for your soul will be personal to you. You may have many metaphors for your soul. I hope you do, because something this foundational is too important to contain with only one label.

How do you know if you’re living from your façade or living from your soul?

They feel different in your body.

When we’re situated in and identified with our social selves, we won’t feel peaceful. When our social selves are driving the bus, we feel graspy. Anxious. Unrooted and ungrounded. And fearful.

Remember a time in your life when you experienced deep peace. What sensations did you feel in your body? That’s your soul’s signature. Hold onto that knowing. 

So what? Why does this matter?

Learning to discern whether you’re living from soul or façade is foundational to healing. When you choose to redirect your precious energy and attention away from maintaining your façade, when you focus instead on relearning the contours of your soul and regaining trust in yourself, you will, inevitably, recommit to your life and your priorities.

When you recommit to your life and your priorities, you bring your authentic, whole, messy self with all her strength, knowledge, and compassion to our shared world.

We don’t need you to be nice. We need you to be who you are, fully and honestly. We need you to bring your gifts to this wild party!

(For a light-hearted cinematic take on this shift, check out “Legally Blonde,” now streaming on Netflix.)

Want to explore this shift more deeply? Contact me to schedule a free, no-strings-attached conversation about coaching together. I’d love to connect! 

For my latest news about coaching, workshops, and pop-up opportunities, subscribe to my newsletter here. While this blog is great, my newsletter is where I go a little deeper into what I’m up to in my coaching practice, and how we can hang out together.

(Photo by Jorge Ibanez on Unsplash)

How to feel sad.

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"Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer... when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings." Pema Chodron

Are you feeling sad? I am. Lately, I’ve been feeling sad pretty much constantly. I have abundant reasons for sadness these days – gun violence, climate chaos, divisive politics, and the accumulated losses of my last six decades among them.

But I don’t enjoy feeling sad. I’d really like not to feel so damn sad. But not feeling sad doesn’t work. If I don’t feel my sadness, it just keeps hanging around asking for attention, getting more and more demanding.

In my 60s, I’m learning to accept that sadness and her cousins grief and pain are necessary ingredients of this whole embodied enchilada.

I’m starting to suspect that sadness will be my constant companion for the remainder of my journey, and the healthiest course of action is just to plan for that.

Because to reject sadness – to numb it through distraction or addiction, to push it away – is to reject Joy.

Sadness, pain, and grief are necessary companions of joy and love. They walk together. They’re a package deal. We simply cannot have the good feelings without the awful ones. It just doesn’t work that way. We don’t work that way.

Yes, sad or mad or scared feelings are uncomfortable. They hurt. They make us cry and rage and cower. They feel terrible. And most of us weren’t taught how to live with the discomfort of so-called negative emotions. We were likely taught to push away sadness, fear, and anger in all their permutations.

But resisting our uncomfortable feelings makes us brittle and mean. Resisting our uncomfortable feelings makes us less compassionate toward ourselves and other beings. Resisting our uncomfortable feelings turns us into pale ghosts of who we could be – shadows afraid of our own shadows.

So, let’s learn how to feel the hard stuff. Let’s be the bad-ass warriors we are, and learn to be with the emotions that make us dig deep and grow up. Learning to be with sadness, especially, is how we heal.

Not wallowing. Not denying. Just giving sadness a place at our abundant table.

Feelings are meant to be felt, not rejected, stuffed, and numbed. Your emotions will not overwhelm you if you feel them. Feelings are simply sensations that carry information.

You can survive a feeling. You can be with yourself, all of yourself, and receive the gifts of your uncomfortable feelings.

Here’s one way to be with a painful feeling (adapted from Dr. Tara Brach’s RAIN process):

  • 1. Notice the feeling. This is often the hardest step, because we’re so used to pushing painful feelings away.
  • 2. Allow that feeling to be what it is. It’s surprising how quickly feelings pass when we just allow ourselves to have them without judging ourselves.
  • 3. Give kind, curious attention to the feeling. Where does it show up in your body? Is it hot or cold? Heavy or light? Open or closed? Does it have a color? A shape? A message for you?
  • 4. As the feeling wanes, give yourself kindness. You might want to mentally tell yourself you’re safe, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m here. You might want to put your hand on your heart. Experiment to find what words and gestures bring you comfort.

And why do we do this, again? Why would we choose to feel challenging feelings?

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön puts it this way:

When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.

In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things, the genuine heart of sadness.

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet when we don’t close off and we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.

Only when we embrace all of ourselves, including uncomfortable feelings like sadness, fear, and anger, can we truly embrace other beings. Only when we embrace all of ourselves can we be a true fountain of healing water for our thirsty world.

Some Resources:

Buddhist Psychologist Tara Brach’s RAIN of Self-Compassion, from whom I’ve adapted the process above.

Pema Chödrön: When Things Fall Apart

Contact me if you’d like to explore feeling your feelings further. I offer a free, no-obligation consultation and would love to walk with you through this process.

Photo by Aliyah Jamous on Unsplash, edited on Canva