I was at a good place while watching the video. With that being said, I have learned much from Tara’s audio books and seminars that have been incredibly helpful to me. When I am mad at myself, I engage in mindful meditation which allows me to extinguish the “inner judge” and replace it with compassion for myself. That “pause” is miraculous.
I’m grateful to be alive after having cancer twice.
It was when I was in college that I first discovered the power of yoga and mindfulness and listening to soothing music. Choosing to reconnect in full faithfulness with my loving Heavenly Father guided me through my cancer journeys in gratitude for my life to once again feel energized and successful daily striving to overcome life’s usual ups & downs. So now I strive to be happy in every circumstance and offer kindness & empathy to all as we are all on various levels of self discovery & resolving daily challenges in this earth life. We cannot control the choices others make that affect us but we can choose to minimize our reaction to their choices.
I felt hopeful and uplifted by the energy those feelings released. It was especially helpful to have the reminder to not behave with self in a way that I would never behave with a friend.
I felt calm then a sense of self-accepting with tenderness. I realised I have not really connected with my core self, and there is much yearning for love and compassion.
I brought kindness to the chronic pain I am dealing with. I was assaulted i 2018 and it brought me to my knees. I wasn’t out partying or anything I was at a friends house and was drugged and raped. It brought feelings of shame , terror, uncontrollable fear. I had never been afraid of much my whole life. But to bring light into my world now I have my affirmations and the guiding light of my crisis counselor and I explore sites like this one to be sure I have knowledge to overcome.
Thank you
Empowered1
A sense of warmth and peace came from the inside, a sweet tenderness. I can see compassion, and self love. Reassuring words, calming the feeling of anxiety and fear of failure that have accompanied me for many years.
Kindness to myself?? I found it difficult still to be kind to myself because I felt like I wasn’t understanding or learning from the video as much or as quickly as I should have been!
What I felt when I did the exercise was a strong sense of calm and self acceptance. I will most definitely use this with clients. I am looking forward to viewing the next two videos in the series.
I was experiencing much confusion about many aspects in my life. I did the practice . Immediately I felt a calming of like saddness and then flowing into it is alright you can be okay about this in such a shifting deep way. Felt truly life changing. Thank you. ?
Tara I want to thank you – I’ve listened to your meditation posts on insight timer and I believe they have changed my life – I’ve just been to Vietnam for a month on my OWN – started painting and really living my life.
I find that I need constant reminders tho otherwise I lose myself in negativity -your video today has brought me back to myself I felt like I was giving myself a hug and comforting myself… so the anxiousness started to dip.
My next step is to start relationships without feeling like my whole world is going to implode… Do you have any advice for allowing yourself the feelings to love another – and not lose you ? Namaste xx
Hello instead of being my own harshest critic I found that by saying to myself that I’m not a failure and I’m not unworthy and that I deserve love and care as much as everyone else, I did feel a sense of relief as I was understanding to myself as I would be to others
Became aware is I was feeling sad. Wasn’t aware of that feeling beforehand, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I’m sure if I sat with it I would have connected with a memory.
I’m recognizing sadness about the possible loss of a friendship. I blame myself for an outburst I had with her husband over politics and racism. I wish I hadn’t bursted out, but I did. I asked for forgiveness and she (and he) forgave me. But I fear she no longer wants to be my friend. My kindness is telling me that I did what I could and if my friend Denise chooses to leave our friendship, then I need to accept it, move on, and embrace and be embraced by the people who are my friends.
when I ask myself what is happening inside me what calls my attention is a sense of intense activity, a flurry of activity that is out of focus and hovering above a sense of despair which in turn arises out of feelings of unworthiness.This feeling is like the flapping of a thousand wings all fluttering and trying to distract me from looking directly at my pain and fear. When I asked can I be with this with kindness I immediately felt a lessening of the flurry, a softening. And although the lack of focus was still there it was less frantic and intense. And I felt a sense or feeling of calming, and an expectation that I was going to finally be set free and that it was something for which I had been waiting for for a very long time.
Overwhelmed! Deep sobbing! I’ve had so little kindness shown to me in my life, that even showing myself a little kindness, creates overwhelming sadness for the little girl, the teenage girl and the young woman, that never got to experience the feeling
of being good enough.
Darlene M, Another Field, Nevada City, CA, USAsays
When i try to bring kindness to myself I at first resist! Then i remember that my thinking is sometimes-well-wrong! I am not all that bad. I am actually an awesome human being. I deserve kindness and love. Even self love. The problem lies in habitual thinking patterns that tell me i am not good enough in some way. so the practice of accepting and reminding myself that i can be compassionate to ME helps.
I’m a lot kinder to myself as I get older. My ego isn’t as affected as I used to be. I’m becoming the person I wanted to be all along. I treat everyone with kindness and try to do that for myself as well.
I love the simplicity of the questions, particularly the second, “Can I be with this?” I think mostly because It intrinsically dissolves an assumption I — and I think most of us — never meant to make: That we CAN’T be with/handle/befriend or otherwise successfully relate to our own feelings. As if it just isn’t even an option. Implicit in which is that we somehow aren’t up to the task, so we’d better run from it. So when we think we are “protecting” ourselves from the “dangerous” feelings by shutting them down, jumping away from them, etc, what we are really doing is internalizing/re-creating a belief about ourselves that we typically wouldn’t choose to stand by. I don’t really think I’m lame-brained, or scared of my own feelings, but if I do the knee-jerk thing and run away from them I am in those moments unintentionally embodying a version of myself as inadequate and less-than, even if this is not something I really believe. It’s an understandable habit, likely learned very early on, but it’s clearly one that no longer serves me, or the world around me, that Both deserve my presence. The kindness and non-judgmental attitude implicit in the asking of both questions allows me to immediately vanquish all those insidious, silencing tyrannies that never did belong to me. The shutting down, tuning out may have seemed to protect or save me once upon a time. But I’m a grown-up now, and I can choose freedom.
Thank you for this, Tara. It brought forward ways of feeling and thinking and believing (in myself in freedom), that I’d not imagined were possible, so quickly. Namaste!
Thank you for the video, Tara. I love the 2 questions. They were simple but spot on. I felt some anxiety due to expectation to myself to achieve something as if I am not good enough if I am not doing anything. I just stayed with it and realized that it is a conditioning from childhood. Offering care to the anxiety makes it less intense. It is not totally gone, and maybe that is okay too. Being kind means I am not trying to get rid of the anxiety, just being aware of and accept whatever appears.
This is an area of development I’ve been working on for a long time. I think years in the past I would have been crying throughout the whole presentation. But I have become stronger and more accepting of myself. When asked to just be with what is …and view it from a place of kindness. I could feel a softening within my core. It’s nice to feel that I’ve actually made some progress.
It felt like someone cared and that its ok to be who i am and we are not here to be judged by others but just to be the best we can be. Depression comes and goes. Its sux when ur in it but you just want someone not to judge u and tell you ur ok and you will feel better. So if u can trust in yourself to be that person u have ur own safety net. Just be kind to urself you are probably doing too much. Just give urself credit for the daily little things u can do today. Build yourself up.
Hi Debb,
Never let the world tell you how it is or should be; it is what it is for you, and you are a precious human being just as you are, where you are, even if there is more healing to come.
My husband has this sort of ‘double bind’ issue you mention quite strongly, but mine has shifted at last.
For me, I ended up in intensive therapy for a couple of years through a Centre Against Sexual Abuse. My therapist was a constant solid intuitive presence, always compassionate, who let me speak or be silent as necessary without judgement — ever. I can’t express how important that was for me because it modelled how I could be with myself (when I was ready to take that in). Occasionally she’d ask me ‘What is happening for you right now?’ when she sensed the right moment; inviting me back from one of my many deep and distant dissociated gazes out the window into the mindful and compassionate moment with that simple question. And I would melt, and she would still be there ( ever so gently ) with me. Trust! She would not abandon me until I was ready to let go.
One day, I had the strong picture/sense/reality of prison bars with an overwhelming claustrophobia. As we worked through the meaning of this for me, I felt the bars became less immovable. Eventually (it was many weeks), it was as if they had gone but I couldn’t leave the prison yard; and then I gradually took tentative steps outside.
It’s a work in progress and possible always will be; but I am so much more able to be my own friend now. There are still times I find it hard to be in my own skin, but I have learned to sit with the discomfort better, knowing now that it will eventually dissolve away like those prison bars, and that when I am ready again, I can step out. For me, that is being compassionate to myself; allowing myself to experience the way it is for me ( forget about how it is for anyone else ) without believing that is how it will always be or being angry with myself for it being that way.
It just is. Whatever is, just is. I am learning to sit with that reality more each day and enjoy the feel of sunshine or wind on my face or the play of light through leaves which makes all kinds of different greens or sharing a random smile from a child or the feel of gently stretching my body or the companionship with my adult children and my dog. Companionship with my husband can be a bit fraught but we had wonderful rapport once upon a time, and still do from time to time. We are both wounded people and need to learn to be kinder to each other as we learn how to be kinder to ourselves.
It ain’t easy being green for Kermit the Frog and it ain’t easy being human for wounded people… but there are benefits. Wounded people who start to heal and develop healthy/healthier boundaries and a healthy/healthier sense of self can become wise and finely attuned people.
Thank you.
I appreciate you sharing your story with me, despite the intense emotional trauma you must have experienced. I’m sorry that that had happed.
The last paragraph you wrote resonates with me the merge most.
“It ain’t easy being green for Kermit the Frog and it ain’t easy being human for wounded people… but there are benefits. Wounded people who start to heal and develop healthy/healthier boundaries and a healthy/healthier sense of self can become wise and finely attuned people.”
Sigh. Please let the healing begin. ?
I felt lighter.
It felt possible.
I have known for many years that self acceptance (exactly as I am) is crucial to my well being as well as being essential for allowing me to accept others and reality exactly as they present.
I have spent this year considering/examining exactly what role self rejection has played in my life since 2015 (the patterns are life long but I can look at specifics in this time frame) and I can pin point every poor decision every unfulfilling choice tona form of self rejection and can even remember a physical response to things I did against my better judgment.
I don’t want to throw myself under the bus anymore. I was so lonely in 2018 that toward the end of the year I chose to embrace my aloneness and followed that with a period of solitude and self reliance. It’s been toughens very painful but I’m beginning to fall in love with me and I’m ready to be living my true authentic life.
I have wondered recently how I could take on people’s criticisms as valid feedback on my worth and saddened about how it has impacted me throughout my life believing that others saw me ad not good enough
This video came at exactly the right time as I have been especially emotional and self critical and despairing today. To sit and look in brought those emotions bubbling right to the surface and the brining kindness tends to actually make me feel more emotional at first (I think because it makes it more obvious how unkind I am to myself sometimes so I not only shed tears for my pain but also for the unkindness) but also more whole.
I was at a good place while watching the video. With that being said, I have learned much from Tara’s audio books and seminars that have been incredibly helpful to me. When I am mad at myself, I engage in mindful meditation which allows me to extinguish the “inner judge” and replace it with compassion for myself. That “pause” is miraculous.
I’m grateful to be alive after having cancer twice.
It was when I was in college that I first discovered the power of yoga and mindfulness and listening to soothing music. Choosing to reconnect in full faithfulness with my loving Heavenly Father guided me through my cancer journeys in gratitude for my life to once again feel energized and successful daily striving to overcome life’s usual ups & downs. So now I strive to be happy in every circumstance and offer kindness & empathy to all as we are all on various levels of self discovery & resolving daily challenges in this earth life. We cannot control the choices others make that affect us but we can choose to minimize our reaction to their choices.
I felt hopeful and uplifted by the energy those feelings released. It was especially helpful to have the reminder to not behave with self in a way that I would never behave with a friend.
I felt calm and peaceful ?
I felt calm then a sense of self-accepting with tenderness. I realised I have not really connected with my core self, and there is much yearning for love and compassion.
My thinking resists… but I sense possibilities !
It was good, I placed my right hand gently on my heart and felt a softening of my being and a deep, relaxing sigh, emerge.
I felt softer. More hopeful about the situation. I felt some of the struggle fall away.
I brought kindness to the chronic pain I am dealing with. I was assaulted i 2018 and it brought me to my knees. I wasn’t out partying or anything I was at a friends house and was drugged and raped. It brought feelings of shame , terror, uncontrollable fear. I had never been afraid of much my whole life. But to bring light into my world now I have my affirmations and the guiding light of my crisis counselor and I explore sites like this one to be sure I have knowledge to overcome.
Thank you
Empowered1
This made me feel more relaxed
Tears welled and felt able to let them flow. It was allowed in the spaciousness that I was able to be in touch with. I felt love.
A sense of warmth and peace came from the inside, a sweet tenderness. I can see compassion, and self love. Reassuring words, calming the feeling of anxiety and fear of failure that have accompanied me for many years.
Thanks for the video – It brought thoughts of sadness to me & I felt tearful, realising how hard I am on myself.
Kindness to myself?? I found it difficult still to be kind to myself because I felt like I wasn’t understanding or learning from the video as much or as quickly as I should have been!
What I felt when I did the exercise was a strong sense of calm and self acceptance. I will most definitely use this with clients. I am looking forward to viewing the next two videos in the series.
Just felt lighter, less anxious, happy, relieved….looking forward to the next stage!
I feel like a work-in-progress, the more I practice the keener I become. Thank you!
I was experiencing much confusion about many aspects in my life. I did the practice . Immediately I felt a calming of like saddness and then flowing into it is alright you can be okay about this in such a shifting deep way. Felt truly life changing. Thank you. ?
Shifted thought pattern
This is so helpful! Your voice is so calming. I will certainly use this with clients.
Thank you ??
The video really spoke to me…..I am ready to let go of feeling unworthy
I didn’t feel anything, just numb, blank, tired.
Tara I want to thank you – I’ve listened to your meditation posts on insight timer and I believe they have changed my life – I’ve just been to Vietnam for a month on my OWN – started painting and really living my life.
I find that I need constant reminders tho otherwise I lose myself in negativity -your video today has brought me back to myself I felt like I was giving myself a hug and comforting myself… so the anxiousness started to dip.
My next step is to start relationships without feeling like my whole world is going to implode… Do you have any advice for allowing yourself the feelings to love another – and not lose you ? Namaste xx
Hello instead of being my own harshest critic I found that by saying to myself that I’m not a failure and I’m not unworthy and that I deserve love and care as much as everyone else, I did feel a sense of relief as I was understanding to myself as I would be to others
I felt very emotional. Terrified. And not worth it
I’m so sorry that you felt that way because I completely understand! I hope you keep trying and that you have a breakthrough!
Peace and Blessings ❣️
Became aware is I was feeling sad. Wasn’t aware of that feeling beforehand, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I’m sure if I sat with it I would have connected with a memory.
Today it felt okay, this is a work in progress for me,. When I am not in a settled position the negative voice arises .
I’m recognizing sadness about the possible loss of a friendship. I blame myself for an outburst I had with her husband over politics and racism. I wish I hadn’t bursted out, but I did. I asked for forgiveness and she (and he) forgave me. But I fear she no longer wants to be my friend. My kindness is telling me that I did what I could and if my friend Denise chooses to leave our friendship, then I need to accept it, move on, and embrace and be embraced by the people who are my friends.
when I ask myself what is happening inside me what calls my attention is a sense of intense activity, a flurry of activity that is out of focus and hovering above a sense of despair which in turn arises out of feelings of unworthiness.This feeling is like the flapping of a thousand wings all fluttering and trying to distract me from looking directly at my pain and fear. When I asked can I be with this with kindness I immediately felt a lessening of the flurry, a softening. And although the lack of focus was still there it was less frantic and intense. And I felt a sense or feeling of calming, and an expectation that I was going to finally be set free and that it was something for which I had been waiting for for a very long time.
A sense of ease came ❤
I felt the pressure lift and felt tenderness towards myself.
I tried to resist it. I don’t want to be with my sadness.
Overwhelmed! Deep sobbing! I’ve had so little kindness shown to me in my life, that even showing myself a little kindness, creates overwhelming sadness for the little girl, the teenage girl and the young woman, that never got to experience the feeling
of being good enough.
I have always struggled with not being good enough. I have learned that just being good is enough.
When i try to bring kindness to myself I at first resist! Then i remember that my thinking is sometimes-well-wrong! I am not all that bad. I am actually an awesome human being. I deserve kindness and love. Even self love. The problem lies in habitual thinking patterns that tell me i am not good enough in some way. so the practice of accepting and reminding myself that i can be compassionate to ME helps.
I’m a lot kinder to myself as I get older. My ego isn’t as affected as I used to be. I’m becoming the person I wanted to be all along. I treat everyone with kindness and try to do that for myself as well.
I love the simplicity of the questions, particularly the second, “Can I be with this?” I think mostly because It intrinsically dissolves an assumption I — and I think most of us — never meant to make: That we CAN’T be with/handle/befriend or otherwise successfully relate to our own feelings. As if it just isn’t even an option. Implicit in which is that we somehow aren’t up to the task, so we’d better run from it. So when we think we are “protecting” ourselves from the “dangerous” feelings by shutting them down, jumping away from them, etc, what we are really doing is internalizing/re-creating a belief about ourselves that we typically wouldn’t choose to stand by. I don’t really think I’m lame-brained, or scared of my own feelings, but if I do the knee-jerk thing and run away from them I am in those moments unintentionally embodying a version of myself as inadequate and less-than, even if this is not something I really believe. It’s an understandable habit, likely learned very early on, but it’s clearly one that no longer serves me, or the world around me, that Both deserve my presence. The kindness and non-judgmental attitude implicit in the asking of both questions allows me to immediately vanquish all those insidious, silencing tyrannies that never did belong to me. The shutting down, tuning out may have seemed to protect or save me once upon a time. But I’m a grown-up now, and I can choose freedom.
Thank you for this, Tara. It brought forward ways of feeling and thinking and believing (in myself in freedom), that I’d not imagined were possible, so quickly. Namaste!
Thank you for the video, Tara. I love the 2 questions. They were simple but spot on. I felt some anxiety due to expectation to myself to achieve something as if I am not good enough if I am not doing anything. I just stayed with it and realized that it is a conditioning from childhood. Offering care to the anxiety makes it less intense. It is not totally gone, and maybe that is okay too. Being kind means I am not trying to get rid of the anxiety, just being aware of and accept whatever appears.
I feel like a sense of grace from others and maybe my innerself that I can never be perfect. Never do things totally right. That it is ok.
Feel flawed because of my disease.
This is an area of development I’ve been working on for a long time. I think years in the past I would have been crying throughout the whole presentation. But I have become stronger and more accepting of myself. When asked to just be with what is …and view it from a place of kindness. I could feel a softening within my core. It’s nice to feel that I’ve actually made some progress.
It felt like someone cared and that its ok to be who i am and we are not here to be judged by others but just to be the best we can be. Depression comes and goes. Its sux when ur in it but you just want someone not to judge u and tell you ur ok and you will feel better. So if u can trust in yourself to be that person u have ur own safety net. Just be kind to urself you are probably doing too much. Just give urself credit for the daily little things u can do today. Build yourself up.
More self doubt. Afraid that I wouldn’t succeed in being compassionate and kind to myself even though I want it so badly.
Hi Debb,
Never let the world tell you how it is or should be; it is what it is for you, and you are a precious human being just as you are, where you are, even if there is more healing to come.
My husband has this sort of ‘double bind’ issue you mention quite strongly, but mine has shifted at last.
For me, I ended up in intensive therapy for a couple of years through a Centre Against Sexual Abuse. My therapist was a constant solid intuitive presence, always compassionate, who let me speak or be silent as necessary without judgement — ever. I can’t express how important that was for me because it modelled how I could be with myself (when I was ready to take that in). Occasionally she’d ask me ‘What is happening for you right now?’ when she sensed the right moment; inviting me back from one of my many deep and distant dissociated gazes out the window into the mindful and compassionate moment with that simple question. And I would melt, and she would still be there ( ever so gently ) with me. Trust! She would not abandon me until I was ready to let go.
One day, I had the strong picture/sense/reality of prison bars with an overwhelming claustrophobia. As we worked through the meaning of this for me, I felt the bars became less immovable. Eventually (it was many weeks), it was as if they had gone but I couldn’t leave the prison yard; and then I gradually took tentative steps outside.
It’s a work in progress and possible always will be; but I am so much more able to be my own friend now. There are still times I find it hard to be in my own skin, but I have learned to sit with the discomfort better, knowing now that it will eventually dissolve away like those prison bars, and that when I am ready again, I can step out. For me, that is being compassionate to myself; allowing myself to experience the way it is for me ( forget about how it is for anyone else ) without believing that is how it will always be or being angry with myself for it being that way.
It just is. Whatever is, just is. I am learning to sit with that reality more each day and enjoy the feel of sunshine or wind on my face or the play of light through leaves which makes all kinds of different greens or sharing a random smile from a child or the feel of gently stretching my body or the companionship with my adult children and my dog. Companionship with my husband can be a bit fraught but we had wonderful rapport once upon a time, and still do from time to time. We are both wounded people and need to learn to be kinder to each other as we learn how to be kinder to ourselves.
It ain’t easy being green for Kermit the Frog and it ain’t easy being human for wounded people… but there are benefits. Wounded people who start to heal and develop healthy/healthier boundaries and a healthy/healthier sense of self can become wise and finely attuned people.
Thank you.
I appreciate you sharing your story with me, despite the intense emotional trauma you must have experienced. I’m sorry that that had happed.
The last paragraph you wrote resonates with me the merge most.
“It ain’t easy being green for Kermit the Frog and it ain’t easy being human for wounded people… but there are benefits. Wounded people who start to heal and develop healthy/healthier boundaries and a healthy/healthier sense of self can become wise and finely attuned people.”
Sigh. Please let the healing begin. ?
I got a little tearful during the video… I’m going to have to watch and listen a second time..
I felt lighter.
It felt possible.
I have known for many years that self acceptance (exactly as I am) is crucial to my well being as well as being essential for allowing me to accept others and reality exactly as they present.
I have spent this year considering/examining exactly what role self rejection has played in my life since 2015 (the patterns are life long but I can look at specifics in this time frame) and I can pin point every poor decision every unfulfilling choice tona form of self rejection and can even remember a physical response to things I did against my better judgment.
I don’t want to throw myself under the bus anymore. I was so lonely in 2018 that toward the end of the year I chose to embrace my aloneness and followed that with a period of solitude and self reliance. It’s been toughens very painful but I’m beginning to fall in love with me and I’m ready to be living my true authentic life.
I wondered if I might be able to share these wonderful videos with my high school students…or if they may not yet be ready?
I felt like to be kind toward my shortcomings would be a cop out to trying harder or not doing as well as expected or others.
It felt uncomfortable.
A sense of Calm
I have wondered recently how I could take on people’s criticisms as valid feedback on my worth and saddened about how it has impacted me throughout my life believing that others saw me ad not good enough
This video came at exactly the right time as I have been especially emotional and self critical and despairing today. To sit and look in brought those emotions bubbling right to the surface and the brining kindness tends to actually make me feel more emotional at first (I think because it makes it more obvious how unkind I am to myself sometimes so I not only shed tears for my pain but also for the unkindness) but also more whole.