Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlyn Childress.

I'm a life and parenting coach. And I have

to admit before we even get into this episode, I have found

myself really nervous about this new series I'm

starting called How to Heal. And I've been thinking

about doing a self care summer

camp or a self care series or a

self healing series or something like that for

over a year now. And it just feels so

tender to talk to you about this

very important topic of healing. And, of

course, I have a little bit of insecurity, imposter syndrome,

and all of the feelings that come up when you're gonna teach something new.

But at the same time, I realized that I'm

not necessarily trying to solve the world's

emotional pain problems. What I wanna share with you

is my journey of healing and the things that

have been fundamental to me on my

journey of healing. I had a very traumatic childhood.

I've had a lot of loss throughout my adulthood,

a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of insecurity

around my body, around money, around all sorts of things,

relationships, work, all of these topics,

parenting. Right? Just so many different things. I actually

go through my childhood trauma experiences

in episode 100. And so if you're kind of

curious about my backstory, I

definitely encourage you to go back and listen to that episode

called how trauma informed my parenting. I want

to offer all of you who are listening

a kind of a course on how to heal

based on what I've learned. So I'm gonna start today with

the concept of radical self love and radical

self compassion and get into what I

how I define those, why they're important, and then how to grow your

access to those core values or those

foundational principles of healing. So

before I get into that specific topic around radical love and

radical self compassion, I wanna give you an idea of what this

series is gonna look like and what the goals I have for

this series are instead of the topics that we're gonna talk about over the

next six weeks. This series, my

goal in putting this out in the world is I have four

goals. And the first goal I have for this series

is that you become kinder to yourself. Even after

today's episode, I'm hoping that you have a

greater ability to access kindness to yourself,

loving kindness to you. The

second goal I have is that you make friends with your thoughts

and feelings, as well as your behaviors. So

I want you to be able to become aware of

your thoughts, aware of your feelings, aware of your behaviors,

but come to those things from a nonjudgmental space, from a

compassionate, loving space. That's why foundationally, we're gonna talk

about self love and self compassion first. Because

it's very difficult to look at your behaviors and

your patterns and your habits and your thoughts and your feelings

and wanna make a change or a shift. And if you come at

that decision to change your behavior or change the way you think or

feel, and you come at it from a place of judgment and

criticism and negativity, you're not gonna get the same results.

You're going to still feel badly. I want to help you be

kinder to yourself, make friends with your thoughts and feelings and

behaviors. My third goal is that you notice your

patterns or strategies that don't work for you anymore.

I will call those maladaptive strategies, but I want you to be aware. Now

an easy example, especially for listeners of this podcast, is

become a calm mama. Well, I wanna stop yelling at my kids. That's

a pattern or a strategy that doesn't work for you anymore, and

you wanna change that. So I wanna help you

change your patterns and your strategies, but we need to approach

those from a kind, loving place, being a friend to ourself,

and noticing. And then number four, my goal

is that you make small changes that influence your patterns. So

we're not looking for a big overhaul in the next six weeks, a

huge, I'm gonna fix my life. Like, nothing's broken.

Nothing's wrong. You are a person who has a

strategy that used to work for you, that used to support you,

or it's unconscious and you're bringing awareness to it, and you just

don't wanna do that anymore. And so you wanna learn new

gentle ways to shift, and that's what we're gonna be doing. We're gonna

make small changes. And a lot of those changes, honestly,

they come from internal an internal space. So these are our

goals. Be kinder to ourselves, make friends with our thoughts, feelings, and

behaviors, notice our patterns and strategies that don't work for

us, and make small changes that influence those patterns.

That's kind of the big picture goal of what where we're going, what I

wanna see for you. Now how to approach this

next six weeks, if you're not in a headspace where you

wanna, like, learn how to heal or whatever, that's fine.

You know, maybe you just mirror mark these episodes and

hold off on them until, like, the summer or another time

that is good for you. So don't feel like you have to do this

just because I'm teaching it right now. I say that, but I do

want you to do today, which is radical self love. Everybody can

do this one. This episode on radical self love is

foundational. It is vital. It is a gift to you. You are

entitled to loving yourself. You are entitled to feeling

good about yourself, and I want you to

do that. So just listen to this week if this is all you have capacity

for. But I don't want you to feel like you're making some big huge

overhaul. You can pick a pattern or two in your life that

you are curious about, that you wanna explore, that you wanna find out why

you do it, and maybe learn how to shift into a new pattern.

And just pick one or two and then approach it with the principles that I'm

teaching in this six part series. So what am I

teaching? K? What are the topics? Topic one today

is radical self love, and that is

included radical self compassion. So together, we're talking

about love and compassion for ourselves today. Next, we're

gonna talk about radical trust, and we're gonna talk about

radical honesty. We're We're gonna talk about radical

listening, radical acceptance, and

radical action. Now why do I use the word radical?

Because I think of this as

massive. I think of these things as really

important. And the way that you approach them, you have to

commit completely to love. Like, it has to be

radical love. It has to be radical trust. But if you wanna get

to the depth of this healing that is available to you, you

need to take a radical approach, an extreme approach. You could use the

word extreme self love, extreme self trust.

That is why I'm using the adjective before

is to really help us understand that we are committed

at a big scale at a scope that is transformative. So

we're gonna talk about love, trust, honesty, listening,

acceptance, and action. And those are the topics, and you're gonna

learn what I mean by all of them. For each of these principles, I'm

gonna offer you a statement that you can

take and practice. Saying can become a mantra, can

become a belief system, a value system, a

perspective you wanna own, because all of these different

things that you're gonna be learning about, they require a commitment,

a decision that you stay committed to. So I wanna give you

sentences for each topic so that you can really

own the concept or the topic or the principle

deeper. So for radical love, here's your

sentence. I unconditionally

love and accept all the parts of me, no matter how I

think, feel, or act.

So, again, I unconditionally love

and accept all the parts of me all the parts of me no

matter how I think, feel, or act.

So write that down, put that somewhere, and start to

practice that all week long. I unconditionally love and accept

all the parts of me no matter how I think, feel, and act.

That is radical self love. So now let's get into

some of the concepts that I wanna talk about when it comes to radical self

love. The first question I posed to myself

was, you know, who are you falling in love with? Like,

what are we even talking about? What who are you

loving? Who are you? What is the self that you're loving? Because it

can be hard to love our behaviors, to love

our negative thoughts, to love negative emotion. And

I wanna offer to you that what you're falling in love with,

what you're unconditionally loving and accepting, yes, your behaviors,

because those are strategies that you use to

communicate or cope or soothe your pain. Your

behavior is important. We need to love your behavior because

it helps you in some way. Is it the best

behavior? Maybe, maybe not. We need to find out. We need to be loving and

kind about it and explore it with curiosity. Here's what I

want you to know. At your core, your

essence, your soul, the divinity that lives within

you, you are good.

You are worthy of love. You are

lovable, and you are good enough

exactly as you are, your core self.

And what do we mean by that? Okay. What is this

core self? I want you to start by thinking of a

baby, a newborn baby, just like first

born, like, within the first minute or two of the baby.

Okay? The baby's just born, and it's put on your belly or put on

your chest, or maybe you had a difficult birth and it was, you know,

taken away, or maybe you're like me. Your kid was adopted, and you weren't there

at their birth, but you know that they were born. Right? That

they had a moment where they were a new

soul on the earth. Now thinking of that baby, think of how

deserving it is of love and care. Think about how

there are no expectations of the baby, how it's pure and

worthy of being cared for, worthy of being

loved. It doesn't have to prove anything. It doesn't have to

demonstrate anything. It doesn't owe anybody anything. It's just this

love being. Right? That's the unconditional love

we have for a baby. You are

that same pure soul inside of you. There is

an essence to you that is pure and loving

and good. It is worthy of love. It

is worthy of being cared for. It is

worthy of being treated kindly. It is worthy of

compassion. You are good

at your core. I think about some of the things that

I've learned from, say, Eckhart Tolle. Right? He says that, you

know, you are not the thing that you identify with. Right? You're

not good because you're a woman or because you're a mother or

because you're a teacher or because you're a Christian or because you're, you

know, Catholic or Jewish or whatever you are. None of the things

you identify with are you. Those are parts of you.

Those are roles that you play. You know, decisions that you've made, things

that are important to you, but they aren't you.

You are not your mind. You are not your thoughts. You are not your feelings.

You are not your roles. You are not your behavior. Your true

identity is consciousness itself. It's the

the thing that observes your mind. It's the essence of

you that observes the parts of you. Dick Schwartz from

Internal Family Systems says that your essence is calm,

clarity, compassion, and connectedness. And

that essence of you is what observes you.

It's kinda meta, but I want you to realize that at your core, you are

lovable. Martha Beck, my mentor and the

mentor that I did my life coach training with, she says your true

nature is your essential self, the part of you

that always remembers what it is meant to be. No matter what

happens to her, she is good. So

this core self is

good. Unfortunately, we don't always

live in this essential core

self. We have other subconscious

behaviors. We have subconscious thoughts. We have

influences of how to think and feel and act from our

environment, from people, from parents, from teachers, from our

childhood, from our peers, from our our spouses,

our religions. And it can end up where

we almost create an externalized

self. Like, their core self is in there, and she's good, and

she's perfect, and she's lovable, and she's worthy of everything.

But then on top of it, that that little

essential self can be covered

by our thoughts, feelings, behaviors

that are less easy to love.

Right? Or behaviors that we use to

protect ourselves from pain or protect ourselves from rejection,

thoughts that we have about ourselves that are old habits

and criticisms and, you know,

behaviors and things that we do and think and feel that

are really not loving to us and not loving

sometimes to others. And so I'm inviting

you to love your core self and actually learn to

love your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors

because they are information. And when you are

able to love them and see them as

beautiful strategies that are there or thoughts that you

have that you your little core self thinks that you need

to protect it or behaviors

or feelings that are uncomfortable that you avoid

through strategies or whatever it is, I don't

want us to judge and be mean to us

about those things. I want us to see our core

self is pure and perfect, but sometimes we

lose our connection to that core self, and we start

using strategies that we think will either

help us get better or help protect us. And

so this false self, they're often this unconscious

parts of ourselves. They're defenses that we put up in order to

protect us, soothe us, or punish us. So these

thoughts we have often being ruled by the inner critic, the feelings

we don't know what to do with, like anger and hurt and

resentment, the strategies that we use to either soothe

us, protect us, or punish us. Think about people pleasing,

yelling at your kids, feeling a lot of rage, feeling insecure,

overthinking, drinking too much, overworking, buying new things,

pushing away love, not accepting help, focusing on your external

appearance, complaining a lot, being greedy, being

selfish. All of these behaviors that you look at and you're like, oh my

god. I'm horrible. I don't want you to see them as

horrible. I want you to see them as a form of love

that you think you need to protect your

core self. And the truth is you

don't need to do those things. We do those behaviors.

We have that inner critic. We have those negative feelings that we try

to avoid just because we aren't actually connected

to the pure love that's already within us, that thing that

we can trust and hold on to and rely on. So

if you wanna heal, it really is going to be

like growing in a relationship that you have between your

core self and all these other parts of you. All these

thoughts, all these feelings, and all these behaviors. You have to build a better

relationship between your core self and how you

think, feel, and act. It's this

healing relationship that you will have

where you can then look gently at your thoughts, feelings, and

behaviors and move from shame and avoidance

and criticism towards love,

compassion, and acceptance. I have this book I've read

a bunch of times called loving kindness. It's by Sharon

Salzberg. She's a meditation guru, a meditation

teacher. And she says in her book, we

believe that if we abuse our minds enough with self

hatred and self condemnation, somehow that abuse will be a

path that liberates us. And it's just

not true. You can be mean to

yourself and and hurt yourself all the way through,

but you will not get healed. You can't. Now this

process of healing, sometimes it will be painful, but we are

doing it in love. It's kinda like when you have a

kid and they have, like, a big road rash. Right? They fell and they

scraped and they've got pebbles and dirt and all of those things. With

love, you clean out that wound and you allow it to

heal. But we don't go to the wound and

scrape it really rough and bandage it up and let it fester and

get infected. That's not love. Avoiding pain is

not love, and flagellating or

punishing ourselves because we feel pain is not love.

So for me, I noticed in my life

that the way that my strategies came up is

that I was often hypervigilant. My behavior

because of my insecurity and the lack of self

love made me so insecure, and I was

relationally insecure, physically insecure,

and, you know, insecure many, many ways. And

so I would seek safety through

performance. Right? I wanted I was insecure. I wanted to be

secure. So I would seek safety through relationships, through

friendships, through leadership positions When I was younger, through

sex, money has been one of the things I seek to feel safe.

Some of my maladaptive strategies are that I'm, like, hypervigilant, and I

can be high alert, making a lot of observations to

scanning the environment and trying to figure out if I'm safe, if I'm safe,

if I'm safe. Do I fit? Judging others in order to

make myself feel better. I have a lot of relational

perfectionism that I've healed from. I was, you know, big people

pleaser, overdid it, ignored my own needs, my own wants.

Also, I would create a highly controlled environment. I didn't wanna make mistakes.

I wanted to eat right, dress right, talk right, look right, have the right house,

have the right kids. I felt really rigid. There wasn't a lot of freedom.

But the deeper I came to understanding

self love and falling deeper in love with myself and learning

that I'm okay, that I'm good enough, that I'm worthy of love, that

I'm already enough made it

easier for me to relax and start to change some of these

strategies. It does not happen overnight at

all. I'm still learning how to trust

deeper and deeper levels of love for myself. It's not always

just I wake up in the morning and I'm like, yay. I love

myself and, like, life is perfect. It's not. I

sometimes have maladaptive strategies. I show up in a

way where I'm graspy or I'm needy or I'm mean spirited

or I I have a behavior. And because of self love,

I feel safe enough to take a look at that behavior.

Because I can say, hey, Darlene. I know this is not who

you are because at your core, you are good. You

are loved. You are worthy. You are perfect.

But it feels to me like you've lost sight of who you are because

you're showing up in these ways that are protective

or defensive or punishing or over soothing.

So see how the self love at my core

helps me then take a look at why I'm behaving a certain

way. Self compassion is also a key

part of self love. So not only do

I unconditionally love and accept all the parts of me no matter

how I think, feel, and act, I also know I'm not my

behavior. So I can have compassion

for my thoughts. I can have compassion for my feelings. I can

have compassion for my behavior because I know

that at my core, I am good and perfect.

And if I'm acting a way that shows that

I'm not, then I need compassion for those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

All my behavior makes perfect sense. Self compassion

is like the practice of self love. At

my core, I have to just accept that I'm lovable,

that I'm worthy, that I'm good enough. That's a decision.

We talked about it in last week's episode with Kristen, how really self love

is just a decision you make. You're like, yeah.

I'm good. I'm I'm lovable. I'm I love

me. And then the tool

to practice self love is self compassion.

Self compassion is a practice in which we learn to be a good friend to

ourselves when we need it most, to

become an inner ally rather than an inner enemy,

to quiet that inner critic, to make

friends with your critic. Hey, girl. Why are you being so mean?

What's this about? We're perfect. We're we're filled with

love. We are love. But yet here you are being so mean.

What's going on? And making a friend to

your critic. You cannot push these negative

thoughts away. You cannot push the negative feelings away, and you cannot

push the negative behaviors away. If you don't do

it in love and you don't do it in curiosity and you don't do it

with compassion, you're just gonna swap one behavior for another.

You're gonna just shut down your thoughts with new

mindset tools, but they're not gonna be genuine. Like, I

always say, like, you can weaponize gratitude, like, instead of saying, wow.

I feel really sad. Oh, but at least I still

have my house. Right? Like, the fires happened in Los Angeles,

and people will say, oh, I don't have the right to feel upset about this

thing because at least I still have whatever. And that's a

way of bypassing negative emotion. Self love is really the

invitation to to at the core, to say,

hey, girl. I know you're good. Like, I you don't need to

prove you don't have to have performative behavior to prove that you're

good. You don't need to use gratitude to prove you're good. You don't need to

say you're a victim to prove that you get love and support. You

don't have to bully others in order to prove that you're strong enough.

You have nothing to prove. You have nothing

to do to just

receive unconditional love. It's like having a relationship with

the divine within yourself. There's a lot of things about

the divine or God, however you think of her, him,

them, however you think about God, that there is

this belief, right, that God loves you. And if God

is within you, then you need to love you.

You have divinity within you, and so that means it's an

invitation to fall in love with yourself.

Now here's the cool thing. A person who

experiences self love and demonstrates self compassion

has less depression, less anxiety, less stress, and less

shame. Isn't that what we want? Right?

That's the ultimate results. Right? We don't wanna feel depressed as or we know

we wanna know how to handle those negative emotions. We don't wanna feel anxious or

we wanna know how to handle anxiety. We don't wanna feel stressed or we

wanna know how to handle stress. We don't wanna feel shame, or

we wanna know how to handle shame, how to move

within these emotional states of being

so that we can feel more satisfied with our life, have more

confidence, have more happiness, have more physical health.

Again, the foundation of healing,

it all starts with radical self love.

So I'm gonna give you a couple of tools, and then I'm gonna give

you, a loving kindness meditation to wrap up our time together.

One of the strategies that I use a lot for self love,

especially okay. Well, I catch myself being shitty to

myself. Right? I catch myself being

self hatred, self condemning, self

loathing. Like, I notice my thoughts are

negative. And that took time, and that's part of the process

of the next few steps that you're gonna listen to in the next few episodes

is, like, how to pay better attention to ourselves,

pay better attention to our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors.

But imagine you notice it. Right? And you're like, wow. I'm

being so mean to myself. Then you can ask yourself,

what does your inner child need to hear? How I think about

inner child is, like, there was a little

girl who didn't get what she needed.

She didn't get what she needed from her mom. She didn't get what she needed

from her dad, her peers, the adults in her

life, and she's wounded. So I have this,

like, core self that's beautiful and perfect. And then on top of that, I have

this very wounded little girl, and she's

constantly showing up. She's not me, but

she's part of what happened to me. And so

I give a lot of attention to her, and I ask her,

what do you need to hear today?

What are you wishing you could get?

And I give that message to her. Again, so

this is who's giving it to her? That core self of mine

that I'm learning to love, I'm allowing it to have a stronger and

stronger voice. My core self, which is

love and beauty and wholeness and worth and, you know, all

the all the yumminess, I give her

I give her the floor. Like, you speak to my inner

child. Right? I I'm so tired of my critic taking

over from my core self. I'm so tired

of my social people pleasing parts of me

taking over from my core self. So the

more I trust and love my core self, the more room I give her to

be. Another strategy I use is

best friend strategy. So I've talked about it. My best friend is

Tiffany, and, I mean, she if you ever want someone

in your corner, like, Tiffany is amazing. She literally

thinks everything I do is incredible, and I know

it's not always incredible. She is the

best hype man. Right? Like, the best like, she's, like,

the best hype woman. And I just I just love having her in

my corner, and so I often will channel her a little bit. And some of

my clients say they channel me. Like, what would Darlene say? Right? What would Darlene

say to me? My coaching is rooted

in self love, but my love for you, my

client or my mama that I'm working with, and my core

is love for you. I know. This is why

it's completely shame free in my programs. I,

like, cannot judge you because I have worked

so hard at falling in love with myself that I have fallen

deeply in love in the core self of others. Your children,

I have their core self always in my heart, and I know that they are

loved. My children, my husband, I struggle with my

husband. I mean, I I do believe in him for sure

that he's, like, a wonderful, loving person at his core, but, of

course, marriage is complicated. Anyway, I digress.

But I want you to know that you

get to believe about yourself that you

are worthy of the best hype team ever,

that you get to channel your best friend. You get to channel me. You get

to channel whoever is your big cheerleader. Whoever's like,

girl, you've got it. No problem. Don't worry about it,

and give yourself the pep talk that you wish

somebody would give you. I see this a lot in my coaching

when I talk about marriage, right, or partnerships.

And your partner will come home, and they're burned out and, you know,

overwhelmed with their work life, and you're overwhelmed and burned out with your work

life. And then the kids are involved, and everybody's burned

out. And we both want the other person to hype us up and

to, like, be like, oh my god. You killed it. Like, what? You did mac

and cheese tonight? Whoo hoo. Whatever. Right? Especially if we're

judging ourselves. I'm such a loser. I've done the dishes. Right? All that

criticism. So dumb. Get over it. Stop. Be kind to

yourself. But I know it's there, and then you want someone to be like,

girl, it's fine. You did it. Like, you got calories on the table

tonight. Like, what? You yeah. You get to be that

to yourself. You don't have to wait for somebody else. So

I love that. I also would love to challenge you to

do you know, I teach on the pod this tool called the delight

list, and it's really where you sit down and you write down

a list of 30 things that you like about your kid and

that delight you or that make you happy or make you smile or make you

feel a little bit warm and gooey inside. It's a challenge. 30 is

a lot, and so it's a good thing to do, especially if you're feeling a

lot of resentment. You can do it about your partner, your

spouse. You can do it about your parents if you're, you know, having relationship

trouble, whatever it is. But what about a delight list about

you? I'd love to challenge you to sit this

week and write down, and I'm gonna do it too. K? I promise.

That I'm write down 30 things that you like about

yourself, 30 things that that delight you about yourself. So it's a

challenge, actually, because it's like, I like that I like the

mountains. Right? That's what it's gonna sound like.

I like that I love setting the table. But

this is a good thing to find out what you like anyway. So you wanna

find out what you like about yourself. I like that I'm a good communicator. I

like that I, eat

eat well for myself. I like that I like exercise. Whatever it is.

So make a delight list about yourself. I

wanna offer to you this loving kindness meditation. It's super

simple. It's just four sentences. It really is

a powerful tool for you to get in touch with

deeper levels of self love. So you

start, and you can do this now if you want wherever you are. If you're

walking, you can just do it while you're walking. If you're driving, you can

do it while you're driving. It's very simple. If you're cooking dinner, you can

do it right now. You have your hands free. Go ahead and

put your hand on your heart or anywhere that

feels kind of good. You can just clasp your hands together if you

want, and feel that warmth

and that gentle pressure of your hand. And then just

kind of visualize your body,

your life, you know, just wherever you are, take a

deep breath. Exhale.

And then as you inhale, you're gonna repeat these four phrases. So

inhale, and then exhale. May I be happy?

Inhale. May I be peaceful?

Inhale. May I be healthy?

Inhale. May I live with ease.

You just say it over and over. May I be happy. May I be

peaceful. May I be healthy. May I

live with ease.

So I will say it to you. May you be happy. May

you be peaceful. May you be healthy.

May you live with ease.

That is my wish for you this week as you

grow into greater levels of self love

and self compassion, and you fall deeper and deeper in love with you,

the core you, the you at your essence, the perfect, lovable,

worthy, and good, good enough,

more than good enough person that you are.

Alright, mamas. I will talk to you next week.