Author Archives: Susan McNamara

Beyond Wrong

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I’m in the middle of teaching my Healer Within program and I am prepping for the class that focuses on what I refer to as “Learning the Language of Your Body.” In other words, coming to see the symptoms and sensations of the body as vital and necessary communication you want to be in touch with. Working with this material keeps drawing me back over and over again to one essential truth: In order to learn the language of your body, you must be willing to go beyond “wrong” when it comes to what your body is doing.

This is not easy to do. In fact, it’s exceedingly difficult given the intense conditioning by our current conventional medical system that insists, despite any evidence to the contrary from other health systems, that any imbalance in your body is a problem, an inconvenience, a misstep on the part of your biology that must be addressed with pills and procedures.

There’s more. For you to suspend the belief that there is something wrong with your body is also to tap into another deep-seated piece of conditioning we are all subject to: There is something wrong with you. Something wrong with you if you think differently than your tribe. Want differently than what the culture offers up in terms of its insane pace and inhumane approach to life and living. Feel differently about what you are told and sold when it comes to who you are and what you are capable of.

In other words, don’t stick out, don’t be too great, don’t rock the boat. Instead, do all that you can to never be wrong in the eyes of another.

Bottom line? To even consider to begin to unwind from the wrongness you unconsciously direct at yourself and your body each and every day is to knowingly make the choice to depart from any and all of the places you make yourself wrong. Whether those places exist in your own mind, or are reflected back to you from a consensual reality that is predicated on you fitting into it. Even if that means it needs to snuff out any chance of you questioning the current reality by undermining you with a big dose of, “You’re wrong to step out of line as we have drawn it.”  

This can feel like an enormous task and even quite scary to take on. Why? Because we use making ourselves wrong to dim our light in order to belong. And we use something being wrong with our bodies as an escape hatch to avoid getting to know our bodies more fully, while learning how to claim full responsibility for them.

However. It can be simplified and made doable by asking one penetrating question:

If I wasn’t making myself/my body wrong right now, what would I know?

 

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Do You Know What’s Creating Your Reality?

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Every day we get to decide the quality of our lives based on one thing, and one thing only, our thoughts. As the old adage goes, your thoughts create your beliefs, your beliefs create your habits, your habits create your actions, and your actions create your life.

But in order to make use of this reality, we must first know what it is we’re even thinking about to begin with. This is not as easy as it sounds.

We have on average 60,000 thoughts each day, with the vast majority of them being negative, what we have been thinking about for years, and here’s the kicker, aren’t even aware of. Our thoughts being so “comfortable” and familiar to us, that we are mostly unconscious of what is going on in our own minds. Other than maybe, we’re not so comfortable after all.

In other words, not only are we often unaware of what we’re thinking, we believe all, or most of our thoughts, to be fact. Whether that thought is about who we are, who others are or how the world works; insisting that the thoughts we think, are in fact, the truth. Even when our current lived situation may be pointing to another reality entirely. Even when our thoughts are creating suffering.

This past week I caught myself in one of these places. Struggling with a lingering cough for several weeks, in a moment of rare clarity over this, I realized that with the exception of a few select moments, I have been locked in a very old, very habitual thought pattern without even knowing it. Every day for weeks now, I have been thinking the same version of the same thing over and over again.

In my world, what I think about manifests itself in my life. In this case, being the health of my body. Specifically, an unwanted cough that keeps repeating over and over again; wearing me thin on many levels and being driven by my repetitive thinking.

What was I thinking about? What has my mind been locked on? The fear that if I cough around other people, they will be disturbed and that I will be made to pay somehow for their disturbance. My thoughts have been telling me that to disturb another is to risk negative and even dangerous consequences of some sort or another. Maybe they will form an opinion of me I don’t feel is true. Maybe they will aggress on me with a cutting word. Maybe I’ll be kicked out of the relationship, or even emotionally annihilated.

I know this last part may seem overly dramatic. But it’s not. To the psyche that was forged in childhood, where all of our beliefs around safety, survival and belonging are formed, to fall out of the good graces of another, i.e the grown-ups in your life, is to risk everything from disapproval to the fear you won’t be loved or cared for.

Which is why so many of us, without even knowing it, are enslaved by our childhood beliefs about who we need to be. Unless, of course, we choose to pay attention to what we are thinking about and consciously update those thoughts to reflect what we really want.

If this makes sense to you, create a new habit of thinking by catching your thoughts across the day while asking yourself a question or two. What am I thinking about right now, and why? What does it remind me of? Is this thought true? Is it even mine?

I will say that when you tap into those thoughts that feel like your safety is at stake, like my fear thoughts that a cough will disturb someone enough to make them want to hurt me somehow, there will be resistance to being with that thought.

Deep in our own psyches, at a very unconscious level, is the belief that some of the thoughts we think and the behaviors we engage in, are what has kept us alive, safe, belonging and able to fit in. And on some level for many of us, this idea would not be untrue given our past circumstances.

But at some point, maybe we are at a place where we can begin to deeply question if it’s true that coughing is dangerous, and whether or not it is still worth it to manage yourself to keep another from being upset.

Personally, I am coming to the conclusion that it’s worth the risk to challenge something that keeps me trapped in a false sense of safety. Not to mention how at odds it puts me with my own body and my right to exist exactly as I am. No matter what anyone else might think.

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What The World Is Really Here To Give You

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“The world is not here to make you happy. It’s here to make you conscious.” I heard these words spoken last week by Eckhart Tolle, renowned teacher of Presence. It came at exactly the right moment for me as the words broke through the haze of being lost in a deep well of grief.

I am no stranger to grief and sorrow. They have been traveling companions of mine for my whole life. Grief over the ways of the world. Sorrow over missed and lost connections in personal relationships. Sadness over how we treat ourselves and others.

At times, I have felt broken and victimized by how grief-stricken I have been over the ways our children’s innocence is being violated via the screens. I have been filled with sorrow over how we allow our lives to be gobbled up by distractions. And I have been heart-broken over how often the wrong things are in charge; despite the obvious destruction they bring.

This and more is what I have been revisiting of late, being “stuck in a grief loop,” as one of my practitioners so aptly put it.

But when I heard Eckhart’s words, something in me snapped to attention. Something in me knew immediately the Truth of those words. And all at once, I could see that the lifelong suffering around the grief and sorrow I have always felt has been not just because of how devastatingly sad all these things are, but because I have been expecting the world to take this sadness away from me by being other than it is.

Now, I know that our minds might go immediately to Well, what sane person wouldn’t want the madness of the world to end? What sane person wouldn’t want more respect for life? 

This is not to negate that healthy yearning. But it is to point out that when we refuse to acknowledge how things are, not how we want them to be, we suffer; fighting in vain like a fish on a line.

To see that there is something greater at play than even your most heartfelt and noble expectations of the world is to step into an entirely new game. It is to open to your spiritual nature and the real reason you are here. Which is to grow in consciousness. Which is to walk the path of remembering who you really are, and why you are here.

When I look at my life through this lens, I can say with certainty that this is so. For each time the world has not made me happy, and I have chosen to let it grow me, I have changed. And always for the better. Every unfairness and disappointment that the world has ever delivered to me, a blessing.

I guess it’s time for me to step out of the grief loop I’ve been in.

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Letting The Mud Settle

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Each morning, I begin my daily practice in exactly the same way. I sit. I literally just sit. I breathe. I look out the window. I might sip hot water. But basically, I sit and do nothing as I allow myself to be exactly as I am. Whatever that might be. Sad. Unwell. Frustrated. Inspired. None of it matters as I do the most profound thing I will do all day; sit and do nothing.

What would possess a person to do nothing? 

The discovery that when all the mud settles, the mud being the difficult and troubling thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations threatening to take over, a sense of spaciousness washes over me; creating enough space for me to see, clearly and effortlessly, what is real and what is true.  

From this spaciousness, a greater connection to my body and its truths becomes available to me. This means that any problem I have, any solution I am seeking, or any balm needed for my broken heart or suffering body, is there. Always.

I first discovered this practice when my mind would kick into high gear in an absolute frenzy over everything I needed and wanted to get done after my kids had gone off to school. My mind hounded me about how much I had to do and in what order, how fast, and how well. It was maddening. So much so that I couldn’t settle into yoga or meditation because the demands of my mind were that intense.

Initially I sat, doing nothing, in protest. It was my way of saying to the thoughts, I want out. I am not playing anymore. I will not negotiate with you. 

And then, at some point, what began as an exasperated refusal to participate with an agitated mind, turned into a portal transporting me to a whole new universe I didn’t even know was accessible with so little effort. It turns out, I didn’t need to hack my way into the ease and peace I was seeking. It was already there.

Letting the mud settle does take time and some getting used to. Some days, it only takes a few minutes for everything to settle down. Other days, it takes a lot longer. But even on the days my mind pushes me to get going, to do something for god’s sake, I know better now. I know that in doing nothing, everything I have ever hoped for will show up when given the space it needs.

So sit back. Keep your feet on the Earth. Feel the warmth of the sun or the coolness of the air. Let your breath be where you put your attention. Breathe in a way that allows your body to be big enough to include all of what you are experiencing in this moment. 

Think of a candle melting and allow yourself to flow down in the same way. Follow that image over and over and over again until you feel weighted in a pleasant and settled way. When you feel like the mud has settled, even a little bit, notice what reveals itself to you by way of what is real and true in your body in this moment.

A little caveat. To the busy, stressed out, divided, and fear-based mind this practice can feel like a death. It is. But it’s only the death of things that needs to go anyway. The death of anything you would be better off without; like all the ways that your mind is unfair and unkind to your body as you unnecessarily fret over imagined problems. So when the mind screams and screams and starts rolling out all the heavy artillery around what a slacker-loser you are for not doing more, nod your head and continue to sit, knowing that when all the mud settles out, you will be left at home in your own body.

This blog was excerpted from my book Trusting Your Body: The Embodied Journey of Claiming Sacred Responsibility for Your Health & Well-Being 

If you are interested in purchasing the book from a site that donates to local book stores, please go to: Bookshop.org

Otherwise, it can also be purchased on Amazon



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The Things In Life That Are Too Big For Us

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This week, I heard someone use the phrase, “Too big to address and too big to walk away from,” in reference to one of the big issues we as a people are facing. I had never heard that expression before, but boy did it land for me; so aptly describing an experience many of us are having when we look out into the destruction and chaos of a world gone mad.

Too big to address and too big to walk away from.

At first glance, it may feel like being between a rock and a hard place. Nowhere to go. Nothing you can do. I think this is where many of us live these days. Stuck in limbo. Recognizing that a lot needs to be addressed, challenged and changed, but feeling like it is far too big for us to have an impact.

So we fall into despair. Apathy. Frustration. Cynicism.

Or maybe we throw all of ourselves at an issue. Working overtime. Dedicating ourselves to some external cause that we pour our heart and soul into. Doing more than our share and sometimes feeling resentful that others don’t care as much. Or are not pulling their weight.

In the face of the world’s “issues” it can be so easy to fall into “this is just the way things are now” or to kick into high gear and start trying to fix everything. But what if the issues that are too big to address and too big to walk away from are actually a visioning opportunity, a call from our very own soul? One that requires we go into our very own lives and handle our big issues, before we turn our attention to the world.

This inner anchoring in the face of world overwhelm grounds us and give us access to deeper ways of knowing beyond the knee-jerk reactions so typical of us when we confront big, scary issues. We need some kind of inner referencing because the truth is, neither apathy nor overwork are the path of wisdom. The way of thoughtful action. The way of understanding that always, and in all ways, anything out there big enough to be a problem, needs to be known in here, inside each one of us, first.

Otherwise, we add to the chaos and the confusion as we bring our own blind spots, fears and agendas to the situation at hand. To go into the bigness of your very own issues is to understand, in seed form, the big issues the world currently faces.

If this is so, it begs the question, “What in your life feels too big to ignore, and simultaneously too big to handle? We’ve all got one. That core issue that just won’t go away. The one that seems to be at the root of everything else. The one we work really hard to cover up.

Do you know what yours is?

I guarantee you something: Figure out what yours is, along with all of its ins and outs, and you will have a gold standard template for addressing the biggest and most intractable world issues. The ones we can’t seem to solve. The ones that overwhelm and frighten us the most.

Try it. Look to your own life. What are you pretending not to know?

Use this question whenever you meet up with your big life issues and watch how not only your life begins to change, but you start to have a much clearer sense of how to be with what is too big to address and too big to walk away from when it comes to the world at large.

 

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A World Running On Empty

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I had something happen recently that sums up what I often experience in our world of “convenience” with its emphasis on ease and the perfection of appearance. For my father-in-law’s birthday dinner, we had purchased a cake from Whole Foods. I was looking forward to it. But after eating a meal I felt deeply nourished by, I can only say I felt starved by the perfect looking little cake.

So starved, in fact, that I went back for seconds. Some part of me desperately believing that more of nothing would somehow magically bring me something.

It took me days to figure out what had happened. Despite the cake’s perfectly formed shape and the bullet proof container it came in… Despite the perfect little edging and the personalized lettering… Despite the “convenience” of not needing to bake it myself… It was empty. Empty of a taste that satisfied. Empty of sustenance. Empty of care.

That “little”cake has become a recent and poignant symbol for me of the emptiness that has crept into our daily existence.

Here’s what I mean:

Despite the rich assortment of ways we can be in touch with one another, the full and satisfying feeling of being in connection with others is ever absent and in its stead, a ghostly emptiness between us has grown as we draw back from the reality of relationships in real time.

Despite all the “choices” we have now when it comes to what we can eat, we have never had more food-like substances that leave us both over-fed in our attempts to make up for what is lacking, while simultaneously being under-nourished by all the empty calories.

Despite all the “advances” medicine is daily bringing to us in terms of the technologies, our interactions with our healing practitioners are too often characterized by an emptiness of care, time and attention.

Despite all the information we now have at our fingertips, our capacity for original thought is increasingly empty of critical thinking, tempered opinions and a desire to interact in lively and necessary debate.

Despite all the ways that AI can help us write an email, edit copy, write an article or (god forbid) a book, we have never been emptier when it comes to the  power of the word to heal, communicate, transform and inform.

Beyond the empty nature of the cake itself was the contrast I felt that night between it and the meal I had eaten. So much thought and planning had gone into the dinner. And because the family is blessed with many skilled cooks who can also work together quite well in one kitchen, there was a spirit of collaboration and love built into the food. Along with lots and lots of care.

That’s it. Both care and love were decidedly absent from the perfect little Whole Foods cake.

I have decided the supposed convenience of that perfect little cake is not worth the price of an empty experience. That it doesn’t even deserve to be in the same room as a well tended to meal. Going forward, I think I am going to learn how to bake birthday cakes. The kind that takes into consideration not just the preference for what kind of cake and frosting the person wants, but also for all of the dietary restrictions in the family.

Maybe it will be a bust. Maybe the frosting will get dinged up in transit without that perfect little container. Maybe it will be lop-sided and messy. But at least it won’t be empty of what matters most. Lots of care and love.

Because here’s the thing. What’s going to happen when we no longer have the substantial, essential and nourishing things in life still around to offer us a comparison of what empty looks and feels like. Will the generations to come, and even the ones here now, do what I did? Continue to go back to what is empty, hoping that somehow they will feel fed?

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Is Caring For Yourself A Burden?

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It occurred to me recently how easy it is to see needing to take care of ourselves as a burden. As something unwanted or unfair. Overwhelming or an inconvenience. How we can see the little (and big) things that arise in the body as a problem. A sure sign of danger. Proof that the body is broken, a hassle and doesn’t know what it is doing.

But on one particular day recently, it really dawned on me in a moment what an incredible opportunity it can be to choose to tend to something. To decide that it is a blessing to be able to turn towards your own life and care for it. This is not something we are taught. Nor is it a way of being that is supported in the “take a pill and be done with it” culture.

What brought this on for me was the strange and somewhat numbing sensation I have been experiencing at the end of one of my big toes. At first I was ignoring it, hoping it would just go away on its own. So far, it hasn’t. Which then prompted my mind to begin turning towards naming it as a way to get control of what was going on. The only thing that came to mind was “Neuropathy.” Not because I knew it to be that, but because I had heard others talk about it.

My response? Nope. Don’t want that.

Given what I’ve heard about this “condition” it only brings up fear as it feels like some of the things I love to do most, running, walking, hiking, being physical, would be negatively impacted. Which is why a little mind battle showed up next as I tried to find that balance between actually being with the sensation I was experiencing right now and the need of my fear-based mind to layer on a diagnosis and prognosis based on what other people say or have been through.

The point I want to make here is that it is never a good recipe for creating a satisfying relationship with your own body, one where you are in it first and foremost, to take up what you have been told about the body. Yes, there can be “comfort” in the “knowing.” But there can also be a deep short-changing of a way of being that honors the truth of what is possible in a body; beyond diagnosis and prognosis.

Paying homage to the kind of relationship I want with my body, I sat down, literally, with my toe and began to wonder what it needed. What I got was it needed to be warmer more often. OK. I can do that. I can keep you warm with socks. I can massage you. I can rub ginger oil into you.

Will this “cure” what is going on? I have no idea. But to my point, a “cure” may not even be what is most in order. The real point being, when I’ve got something going on with my body, can I see it as an opportunity to get closer to myself? To be with myself. To tend to myself as only I can.

This is vastly different than blaming it on age, the frostbite I got in my early twenties, or something nefarious lurking beneath the surface. Different than jumping to a diagnosis. Or doing the opposite, by denying what is going on. Different than going so quickly and fearfully to that place of needing to know a name for what I am experiencing.

Can a name help? It can. But in our information-saturated, fear-driven health culture, in our obsession to know everything and figure everything out, when does naming something create obfuscation? When does a name demand that we bypass something vital?

That “Something Vital” being the direct experience of being in and being with our bodies in a tender, open and trusting way. A way that allows us to see that learning to care for ourselves at this level is the greatest gift we will ever offer not only to ourselves, but also to a world in dire need of some open, trusting tenderness.

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Ditching The Scale

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Out on a run this morning through new fallen snow, it occurred to me that we are at that time of year when so many people’s well-intentioned resolutions begin to fade and fall away; leaving many of us convinced that we are weak and without willpower. That we are incapable of making lasting change.

As someone who now finds herself in the position of having made many changes over the years that not only  stuck, but that also got richer, deeper and truer over time, I spent the run wondering why that was so. The wondering took me all the way back to being twenty-five years old and thirty pounds overweight. To a time where I hated myself for being “fat” and for the cruel ways that I was treating myself.

At some point I just got so fed up with the diets, the use of food as medication and the way I felt about myself, that I made two radical choices. To get rid of the scale, and to figure out why I was using food to beat myself up with. It was scary to let go of the scale. Without that constant external number policing me, it felt like things might get even worse. More out of control. That without that constant reminder of either my failings or of the longed for number, I wouldn’t know what to do.

But that’s not what happened.

What happened was, as soon as I made the choice to stop policing myself with the scale, some internal “weight” lifted. I felt freer. Over time, a new kind of relationship began to form with myself where less and less was I turning to something outside of me to tell me whether I was good or bad. The less I was in the habit of thinking in those terms, the better I began to feel. The more I began to trust myself.

The self-trust that began to emerge after I ditched the scale, provided the foundation for exploring why I was using food the way I was. Not from a punitive place, as in “There’s something wrong with me,” but more from a place of recognizing that there just had to be a reason why I was doing what I was doing.

And there was. As a matter of fact, some very good and sane reasons why I was doing what I was doing.

Though it took a long time to get to it and to unwind from it, all along the way, I was learning how to be in relationship to myself where I was moving towards something, as opposed to away from something. In other words, instead of trying not to be overweight or hating on myself, I began to turn towards learning about myself and what it was that I needed. What it was that had been missing and that had been driving me to do what I was doing with food.

The more I moved towards myself (as opposed to what I didn’t want), the better my life became.

Which brings me to why so many of our intentions just do not work. When we see the diet or the program as something short-lived and separate from who we are and how we will live beyond a particular time period, we define ourselves according to something fleeting and in the direction of what we are trying to move away from. In essence, whenever we are focused on “the scale” as opposed to putting ourselves in the position of being with ourselves, understanding how it is that we tick, what we need, what is not working, we will never feel integrated enough to follow through with the very best of our intentions.

As long as we are in relationship to ourselves from a distance where we are imposing something on ourselves as opposed to knowing ourselves, we are tied to what we do not want. From this place we are at war with ourselves as we avoid dealing with the underlying reasons of why it is so difficult for us to care for ourselves. In so doing, we leave the most important parts out; dooming us to fail because we are not all there or all on board.

But when we begin to get interested in ourselves and why we do what we do, not only do we get the “results” we want, we come to find that the results pale in comparison to what is possible in our lives. For example, all I wanted all those years ago was to lose weight. Which happened only when I stopped trying to coerce myself. But that was nothing compared to the way that my mind and emotions began to change to the positive and to what was possible. To the way that my life has taken me on a decades long journey of exploring what it means to feed myself and others in life-affirming ways. And to the deep, deep understandings I hold about myself; who I am and what it is that makes me tick.

All because I decided to ditch my scale.

 

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Sleepless Nights

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Did you ever have one of those nights that not only can you not fall asleep, but you just feel awful all around? Maybe something in the body hurts. Maybe the room is too hot. Maybe your mind is buzzing away or you are awash in fear.

I just had one of those recently and it left me prickly and surly the next morning. Mostly, because I could not run down the cause of why I had the night I did. Was it the late afternoon chocolate? The extra moments I spent watching something on a screen when I knew I felt like I was being assaulted? Was it the chicken I ate? Maybe it was raised in fear and that was what I was experiencing. Was it my husband’s restless sleep next to me or the storm blowing around outside? Or how about the volatile energies in the collective?

Maybe it was everything all together all at once?

It was like a tsunami of human experience ripping though me. At first I tried to sort through each one of the possible culprits to figure out what it was. But there were too many to know what was what. I went from deep and burning frustration right into despair. Not over what was happening per se, but because I just could not figure it out.

There it is. Being in the middle of a storm is one thing. Believing that you can manage it, or even understand its origins or purpose is quite another. That understanding right there is the difference between heaven and hell. Our need to figure something out, coupled with our downright refusal to say “Yes” to what is happening becomes our vote for hell.

Whether we know it or not.

I’m not saying it’s not important to run down the things that bring on a sleepless night. Or any other disturbances we find in our lives for that matter. Of course it matters. If only to learn to take responsibility for our own experiences, what it is the body needs, along with the consequences of the choices we make.

What I am trying to say here is that not everything can be figured out. Not everything can be known. Then what?

Do we fight like a fish on a line against what it is we do not want? Do we rail against the unfairness of it all? Or do we let go? Into the deep and demanding rigor of being alive in a body having all kinds of experiences. This requires going beyond our expectations and demands that Life be a certain way for us to be ok. It means going beyond us putting our stamp of approval or rejection on what is happening.

Lest you believe this means giving up, it’s just not the case. In fact, it is anything but. Instead, to let be whatever is happening is to align with the Truth that we cannot know everything, that everything is not within our control, and that to believe it is, is to create a kind of living hell.

Mostly, it is to forgo the peace that is available to us in every single moment. No matter what is happening.

Which is why the next day, I turned my attention not to the potential culprit of my terrible night’s sleep, but to my response to it. And what I found was a woman so bent on fixing something that she was not able to just be with herself, without demand, in the midst of a terrible storm.

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Self-Respect

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I recently read someone making the point that when we are lacking in self-respect, we will find ourselves agreeing to things we know are not good for us. This lines up well with a Lakota teaching about the evil spirit Iktomi whose nefarious power is to not only get you to believe the wrong thing, but to act on it.

Seems this human frailty to be led astray has been around for a very long time. A long history, if you will, of  the ways in which we can be duped, taken advantage of, lied to even, and how we will take up that intentional obfuscation of reality as a basis for how we choose to act in the world. Even when we know it is neither true nor good for us.

From what I can see, it seems this predicament has never been more prevalent. More ubiquitous. More threatening to our very existence when it comes to who we take ourselves to be, and how it is best to be using our limited time here.

I am, of course talking directly, but not exclusively, about the screen technologies and all of its offshoots. Given that we have not been able to wisely and humanely integrate the current technologies into our lives, truly making our life here better, how do we imagine we will be able to handle the likes of 5G and AI?

If you doubt the negative impact, or believe this is just how it is now, you need look no further than the skyrocketing rates of loneliness, depression, anxiety, obesity, increased societal drop-out levels amongst our young and wide spread polarization to see but a fraction of the harmful effects that have been caused through how we use the current technological iterations.

Given how we struggle with what we have now, just what do we imagine we will do when all the lines between virtual and actual reality have been totally blurred? How will we make our way when every minute of every day we are being convinced to engage in activities that somewhere deep in our human hearts, minds and bodies we know is not good for us, but feel compelled to do anyway?

We focus on developing greater self-respect as the very bedrock of our existence.

To respect one’s self is to value one’s life. No. Matter. What. If this makes sense that this quality can serve as an antidote to what we are facing, believing and doing, it becomes necessary to ask yourself a few questions. What does self-respect even mean to me? Have you ever thought about it? Do you know when you are choosing to violate it?

To live grounded in self-respect is to refuse to believe in or participate with anything that devalues you. Anything that dings the preciousness of your own life. And you cannot look outside of you as a reference point. While this has always been so, it has never been more so because the culture at large has fallen under the spell of Iktomi. Fallen into believing the wrong things about what it means to be alive. Fallen into a very abnormal abyss when it comes to what we accept as just the way it is now.

This is a solo mission. An inside job where we begin to walk back the “little” daily choices we make that undermines our value. Maybe it’s the endless scrolling and envy you feel while on social media. Maybe it’s gossiping or thinking mean things about yourself. Maybe it’s ingesting substances or over scheduling yourself in ways that dull your life force.

Whatever it is, you will know it by its telltale sign: Self-Destruction. A kind of slow drip killing off of your very magnificence. Of your life-giving capacity to act on your best behalf. So when you find yourself engaged in that telltale sign of believing the wrong thing and acting on it, get out of it as quickly as you can.

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