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

and this is part two of a series I'm doing talking

to you about the concept of self from internal

family systems. The concept of self really isn't

only in internal family systems. There

are a lot of different traditions, religious traditions and

concepts trying to help us understand

this inner being that we all have. Sometimes people

refer to it as our soul or our spirit or our being

or our essence. And in internal family

systems, it's called self. Sometimes it's called

presence. Sometimes it's called your inner voice. Sometimes

it's called your core. So there's lots of different words to

describe this experience we

all have with knowing that we are not our pain,

we are not our personality, we are not our

behavior strategies. Like, at our core, we are something else.

We are pure and beautiful and

unwounded. If you think about your babies when they are first

born, there's an essence to them that has absolutely nothing

to do with their personality or their behaviors. There's

something in them that is them, that's their core

self. And as we go through life and we get hurt,

it is easy to get more and more disconnected from

that core self, and we get burdened and

we have pain and we have negative behavior strategies and

maladaptive strategies, and we lash out at people and

we hurt ourselves and we hurt others. And when we are

in that pain, like Eckhart Tolle calls it the pain body,

when we are in that pain, many times it's because we have

disconnected from our core self. So

this episode is my best attempt to talk to you

about getting back into your core self,

helping you identify when you're there, when you're not

there, and how to get back to it. I

found this quote, and I really think it's helpful to

talk about this core self that I'm referring to

by thinking of it this way. So inside each of

us, inside of you, there is a place

of clarity, calm and strength,

an inner anchor. It's not a mood, it's not

a mindset. It's who you are at your core. And when

you lead your life from that inner clarity,

that inner calm, that inner strength, when you lead your

life from that place, you make better decisions. You feel better

about your ease in your relationships. You're a better mom. You show up

as a calm mama, right? The essence of being a calm

parent is being able to tap in to

the calm that lives within you. So we talked about it

last week, how being in Calm is not about

just the absence of yelling or the absence of negative

behaviors. That's a really great place to start.

But really what I want to invite you to is kind of a deeper felt

sense of that grounded,

calm, wise place where you're not being controlled by

fear or by anger or by self doubt, like becoming

that anger inner leader. And when you can tap

into that wise part of yourself, you respond instead of

react. So this episode is really the essence of becoming

a calm mama. This podcast is called Become a Calm Mama. And

how do we do that? Of course I want to teach you

parenting strategies, teach you how to connect with your kids, which is what we're going

to talk about next week. I want to teach you how to set limits and

boundaries and do consequences and all of those things. And you are learning

that on this podcast. If you are new to the podcast, go back to the

beginning, the first five or six episodes where I walk you through the calm mama

process. This episode is really an invitation

for you to get to your

access, better levels of yourself, your

core, your undamaged essence,

your authentic self. I talked about last week how

your self is always there. It's always part of you.

It's kind of like how the sun is always in the sky,

but sometimes it's covered by clouds or

sometimes it's covered by darkness, right? We are turned against away from

the sun every day. As the earth turns, you're on

the backside, right? But

the sun is not left. It's just not available to us.

And that's kind of how it is with our self. You always have access

to self, but sometimes it gets

covered. I called it like a soul eclipse, right?

Instead of a solar eclipse, sometimes your soul

is eclipsed. And so I want to help you get

closer and closer to coming to that

self place. So the way I

want to talk about it, the way I want to start, is

having you kind of think about a time

in your life where you felt very calm

or felt very loving, or you stayed really

grounded during a tough situation,

like when all hell was breaking loose. And at the same time you

could feel you were like, wow, I'm okay right now. Even

though everything is terrible. Just

trying to imagine, sometimes we feel this feeling of

real peace if we are

resting quietly, like sitting outside. It's not. The

weather's not bad, right? It's a nice day. You hear the birds, you

feel the wind on you. You can, you know, have this kind

of sense of feeling really, really safe and okay.

Your mind isn't spinning. You're not thinking of all the things

you need to do. You're not worried about your kids or what's gonna happen

later. You're not worried about money. You're not worried about your

body and how you look or, you know, whether people like you. There's just

this centered, grounded space where you can like, almost

breathe deeper, where you can

feel a little bit. I feel it in my belly, like,

kind of like a weight in my belly. Not like sick to my stomach feeling

at all. I feel just kind of grounded. Like my core relaxes,

like, whoosh. And I can kind of sense I'm sitting deeper, I'm

sitting more grounded. And then I feel lighter in

my chest. My head is not heavy, my shoulders are not

heavy. So when you tap into your

self energy, you will notice it

in your body. So I'm trying to help you think about a time that you

have felt that way. I remember one specific

time I felt this way. It was was on a vacation and

I was like, it was almost. The vacation was almost over and I was going

through a really hard time because we experienced infertility as a

couple. And I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really wanted a

baby. And it wasn't happening. And so sad.

I was on that trip and our last name is Childress, and some

people say Childress. And we were at a

restaurant and they're like, Mr. And Mrs. Childless. Oh, my

God. Like, so wounded, right? Mr. This is childless.

Like my deepest fear. And in that moment, I was

like, not in that moment. That moment was terrible. But on that trip, I was

really working through a sense of being okay with my

life. Like, this is what was happening to me and kind of becoming more

accepting and being at peace with whatever was.

Anyway, I was sitting on this bench, and I was looking at the ocean.

There's a slight breeze, and I just was like,

breathing and I could just relax a little bit. And I just was

like, okay, I'm okay. I'm okay.

Whatever happens, I'm okay.

And I can think of several times now in my life

where I've been able to just center and be

okay. One of my best friends and I were talking about this just this

weekend, and she was saying that when

she feels like a lot of energy around

an event, like, we were talking about having our kids like, that need to have

them obey us, right? Or like, listen to us do what we say

and how we can feel, really. And it feel really

intense. Like time feels like. It's like rushing. Like it's been hours

that your children aren't listening to you when maybe it's only been seconds. And

it's like that impulsive reactivity, boom, boom, like

event reaction, right? There's no space. And my friend was

saying, if I can just take a beat

and just stop talking and not

be thinking about what I'm going to say or how I'm going to react and

just be present for even a couple of seconds

and get ahead of it, I can then make

way better decisions. And I turned to her and I was like, yeah, the

pause break, right? That tool that, that I

teach is essentially that it's stopping

and it's getting back into your core self.

It's taking a moment to slow down

time. I really do think of it as pausing time and

buying yourself a couple of seconds so

that you can then get ahead of the next moment.

You aren't reacting to it. You're in a

place where, where you are responding slowly. And

it is really interesting when you do this more and more and more,

you have so much more agency over your life.

I know you're listening to this podcast and you're like, I wanna lead my family,

I wanna lead my life from a

empowered space, but a grounded,

calm, interior, peaceful place, right?

That's what we want. And the way that you get to that deeper

place of calm is by not letting

your ego or your wounded parts steer the wheel of your

life. By taking a minute, a second, literally. I

think it can happen in 10 seconds. Like a pause break doesn't have to

be that long. It will feel like a long time

to you because your nervous system has told you

there's an emergency and response is required

immediately. I noticed this with my kids. I

noticed this with my husband. I used to notice it with my

siblings or at work or like with the

PTA moms. You know, I would feel like everything was just an emergency

and I had to respond. And it was like I was almost sucked into the

drama. I was completely overwhelmed and wrapped

up in my thoughts about things. Instead of

just being okay with the things. I wanted to fix it,

you know, fix it, change it, stop it, solve it. I wanted to get in

there and control. And those are my wounded parts

reacting. That's not my core self reacting.

That's my ego, my fear, my stress.

So some indicators that you are in your self

energy, that self energy is present is you feel a little bit

curious, right? That's one of the ways that we get to compassion

and connection with our kids is by going like, wonder why

they're acting this way. I was Just coaching this mom this week

and she has a two year old, you know, two and a half year old

and well, he's almost three actually. And she was talking about how he was just

like, you know, really kind of out of bounds lately. And we were talking about

developmental things and what could be going on for him. And then I just was

like, hey, do you think he might be cutting molars?

She's like, wait, yeah, maybe. So she

was gonna just poke around and see if he was cutting some teeth. So that

curiosity, like, if we are in a place of judgment and

feeling like something's gone wrong, right? If we think something's gone wrong, we

are judging it because that means there's a right and a wrong. That

means that we are not in curiosity. We're not trying to figure out

why something's happening. We're saying it's wrong. We need to fix it.

That fix it, change it, stop it, solve it. That's the opposite of self energy.

Self energy is curious. It's calm, it's confident,

it's not panicked, it's not anxious, it's not stressed.

It's feeling a little bit confident, having some clarity,

feeling like, okay, even for me, if I'm in this

place where I feel like stressed about

something, if I get quiet and I go back

to the hierarchy of healing and I do

radical listening and radical acceptance and radical

trust, when I'm in that place and I'm

really having a dialogue within myself,

then I know that I am in self energy.

So when you notice that you are able to go

inside of yourself and have a conversation,

hey, girl, what is going on? Why are you screaming

at your kids? What do you need right now?

Do you need to take a break? Do you need to go to the bathroom?

Do you need a night off? Do you need to order takeout

tonight? Do you need to just put some frozen pizzas in the oven and call

it a day? Do you need to go take your bra off? Do you need

to put your pajamas on? Do you need to maybe do

some screen time right now? Turn on the television, Go take care of

yourself. Having that curious

conversation within yourself and really listening

with love and compassion, that's

self energy. And you use it for

yourself, to heal yourself.

Everything that you want, all the healing and all the

beauty and peace and calm that you want, is

available to you within you. You already

have the answers within you. Your core

self. Its intention is to heal you

and to give you more and more access to your

core self. So you'll know

when you are in self energy because you'll feel calm

even in chaos. You'll feel that curiosity instead of

feeling judgmental. It's when you can pause and take a breath

and respond with clarity and compassion

instead of reacting out of habit. So like I

said, for me, it feels like a grounded sense in my belly. It

feels like a lightness in my chest. I have less tension in my neck and

my shoulders. My head feels lighter for

me. Sometimes to get there, I have to actually lay down

on the ground. I have to feel held by. By something.

I remember one time my best friend Tiffany, I've talked about a

lot. She's a therapist and she used to do a lot of

somatic therapy, like embodied therapy, where she would

work with your body to help you feel safe within your body. So

really kind of accessing this full somatic body

healing. And we were. I was laying on her table

and she said this most beautiful statement to me. She said, darlin,

the table can hold you. And

for whatever reason, hearing that I was being held by the table,

help me relax and sink in

and get into that embodied sense of safety.

So a lot of times for me now I will

literally lay on the ground and I will then just put my

arms out. If you do yoga, it's like that Shavasana pose. I will put

my legs my. I lay on the ground with my arms a little bit out

and I'll just kind of like sink and I'll remind

myself that the earth can hold me, that the ground can hold me.

I can rest and relax and release into

this space. Is it weird? I don't know.

Who cares? It just is the thing that

helps me and I think it might help you. It helps a lot of people.

And you can do a body scan to get you back into your body.

Just say, here are my toes, here's the top of my foot.

Where's my ankle? Where's my shin?

Where's my knee? Where's my thigh?

Where's my butt? Where's my core?

Where's my chest? Where's my shoulders?

My neck? My head relaxing, my

eyes and my hands sinking,

reminding myself I'm safe. There's nothing I need to

do right now. I'm enough

exactly how I am. Everything is okay right now.

So some people will start to feel a vibrating energy

being in your body. Sometimes I will imagine a ray of light

moving from the ground up through me. If I do a

standing breath grounded energy exercise,

I will imagine myself being rooted to the earth and then

a ball of light kind of moving through from the core of the

earth up through my feet, up through my shins, my

legs, my core, my chest, up through my head and

releasing. Taking tension from the earth

through my body and releasing it out of my head.

So these are some exercises and some ideas

to help you get into that embodied sense

of self. Trying to help you find ways

to feel safe within yourself,

feel calm. When we access the present

moment right now, this split second, my

guess is that everything's okay. If you're on a walk right now

while you're listening to this and your kids are at camp or,

you know, it's summer right now, so they're at a summer camp, or you have

a babysitter, they're in the stroller, or they're walking with you and

they're on their scooters, right. Looking around. Your children are

safe right now. You're okay right now. You have

enough for what you need this moment.

You have enough money, you have enough time, you have enough

energy, you have enough love, you have enough

capacity right now in this moment.

It's okay. Most moments

are okay. Some moments

are terrible, and then they pass and then

we're okay. That is what it means to be human.

We have very, very stressful moments, and they're really

hard. I'm not doubting that. I've been through terrible, terrible

moments. Times when I've learned of people that I love having

died, my child being in an

accident. I know what it feels like to have

life turn upside down, have getting notified

by your spouse that they've lost their job. You

know, really hard things that make me feel existentially

afraid. You know, politics sometimes has that happen

to me. But when I am able to tap back

into self and remind myself, right now, I'm

okay, my child's okay. Yes. Like when my son broke

his leg and he had to be hospitalized. Yes. He's in the hospital.

I'm here with him. We're okay. Being able to

tap back in to how things are okay.

You're safe. You have enough. You are enough.

That's sort of what meditation does, is it gives us

a slice of time

where we are in that embodied, grounded space

and we are releasing our thoughts and

allowing those to pass through and connecting back to the body.

So meditation, all it is, is a. Is an

internal releasing right thought comes, let it

go, Come back to your breath. You know, sp you

might not notice that you're not in your body for five full minutes. Your

brain took over. That's okay. Guiding yourself back

to now, to the moment to the present that

can help us access self energy. Now, the cool

thing about internal family systems is that we have access

to self, but we actually use it to

help us with those crazy thoughts. We start building

a dialogue with ourself and with those parts

of us that are anxious, with the parts of us that are worried,

with the parts of us that don't feel good enough, with the parts of

us that don't feel safe. And we invite those parts into a

conversation with that core self

and let that part of you that's worried

pass over a worry to self and just kind of relax a little

bit. Your parts of you that worry and that

over plan and are really productive and overthink, those are really

important parts. But let's harness the strengths

of those parts within you and use them in a way that is

more productive, more. More pure, more whole, more

healing. Right now, I'm going through something really hard with one

of my extended family members. Not one of my children or my husband,

but just my nephew. And I was talking

with my therapist, and she was. I was telling her how anxious I was, and

I keep spinning and like looking stuff up on the Internet. And

she said, well, looking stuff up on the Internet, does it make

you feel good? And I'm like, no, it makes me feel like I'm

not doing anything, like it's pointless. And it makes me kind of feel like

at least I did something and I feel a little bit better and then I

can move on or get it out of my mind. And she invited me

to maybe do something else when I feel anxious and worried,

Instead of just looking stuff up on the Internet, instead of having a

giant long conversation with chatgpt, why don't I have a conversation

with myself? And why don't I

invite more love into my. You know, when I think about my nephew,

instead of feeling worry and pain, I send love and light to him.

And it's really stupid and sounds dumb like a mantra,

but I really think about him, put him in my mind. I

send him self energy, right? I tap into the parts of

myself that feel beautiful and love and whole and pure,

and I just imagine myself giving him that ball of light. I know, it's weird.

I didn't expect to talk about that. Anything I can do to help you kind

of tap into what it could look like to have a

conversation within yourself Instead of spinning out

about something you're nervous about. Instead of using your

maladaptive practices and behaviors to

feel better, what if you could find different

strategies that made you feel better? That didn't

cause you so much stress. Like if I spend 10 minutes

looking up something on the Internet, I might get an

answer, I might get an action step. But most of the time I

just kind of spin out until I feel like, okay, I feel a little bit

better now, may move on. What if instead

I just kind of like passed my worries onto my own

self energy and found some clarity within myself about the next

thing to do. When I talk about strategies, I am talking

about these behaviors that we do that help

us feel better in the short term, right? These are when our

activated wounded parts are steering the wheel

of our life, like driving the car of our life. And that could

look like panic attacks, obsessive thoughts, eating disorders,

perfectionism, overworking, caretaking,

sabotaging good things, isolating, emotionally, shutting

down, having judgment, like comparing yourself to others. All of

those behaviors are really when you are not in your

grounded self energy and you do those in

order to feel better, There is another

way to feel better. There is another way

to calm and soothe yourself. And it does look

like pausing, connecting back

out of curiosity, being like your own life coach within

yourself and saying, hey girl, what's going

on? Why are you acting this way? What are you worried about?

What do you need? What's your highest, your

most wise self? What would they do? So how do

we do it? Right, it's that pause break when you're

experiencing a difficult emotion or a difficult

moment or you're showing up in your behaviors that you've already

identified as maladaptive. I've

talked about this a lot. One of my maladaptive strategies is

disordered eating. One of my maladaptive strategies is online

shopping. One of my maladaptive strategies is

like really over productivity, over research.

So I have these behaviors that for me I know

that those are behaviors that are unhealthy. Are they

unhealthy behaviors? I don't know. For other people, maybe

not. But when I act that way, I've learned enough

about myself that when I'm in my maladaptive

strategies, that is because I'm not feeling well,

something's going on. So what we want to do is we

want to pause, connect with ourselves.

It's kind of like using the connection tool with ourselves.

Narrate what's going on. Like, yeah, so

your husband, you know, or your wife or your partner.

Yeah, they lost their job. How are you feeling about that? Are you

feeling really worried and having that self

energy? Have a conversation with the worried part of

you and you can then say to that part

okay, that makes sense, right? We validate that. Of course

you're worried about that, but what. And then we can pivot now what.

What's going well, what do you already know is true

about your financial situation? What do you know about

yourself? So what do I know about my financial decision? I know we have enough

money to last us blank amount of time. What do I know about

myself? I know I always figure it out. What do I know about my

partner? I know he's committed to showing up at the best

possible version of himself and he's going to keep working at it.

What else do I know? I know I'm a team player. I know I can

figure it out. We can work together. We're great together. Like, I have a good

marriage, so it's easy for me to answer those questions. If you don't have a

good marriage starter, right, you have to go tap into yourself. Or like, what do

I know? What kind of support do I have? Well, I know I have my

family. I know I have my friends. So we want to try to

find. There's the one part that's worried,

that's one part that's overwhelmed, one part that's angry and not

weaponize gratitude, not use perspective to

bypass negative emotion, Connect with that motion

emotion, and then guide yourself to other

areas where things are okay.

It will help you feel better

without doing your maladaptive strategies.

So practicing, you know, a check in

with yourself, you can do this every morning.

You can say, what's happening in me right now? Can I approach

this complicated situation with curiosity?

Here's another great question for you. What helps you

feel calm and grounded and connected? Is it

sitting outside and looking out the window for a little while? Looking at the trees

for a little while? Is it getting to bed early? Is

it doing a meditation? Is it doing a gratitude journal?

Is it listening to podcasts like this? Maybe podcasts like this have been

like, spinning you out. Maybe you need to go listen to an audiobook, something fun.

Maybe you don't need to be learning so much. I mean, of course I love

listeners. I want you to listen to my podcast. But if it's not serving you

and it's making you more anxious, like, here's another thing you have to do.

Pause, stop. Ask yourself, what's one

thing I can do today that honors my inner

wisdom, that honors my self?

What can I do? Does that mean I'm gonna take. I'm gonna eat lunch every

day? I'm gonna sit down while I'm eating lunch? I'm gonna

Create a nutritious meal for myself.

I'm gonna do a little meal prep and a little meal planning so that

my week is better for me. How can you

prioritize yourself? I'm gonna start exercising. I'm

gonna take a walk. I'm gonna, you know, turn on that yoga video.

I'm gonna do it every night. Just a couple months ago, I think in

the month of June, I did 30 days of yoga. I followed like yoga with

Cassandra or something like that on YouTube and she had this like

nightly 13 minute yoga thing and it

was so great. I slept way better. I felt so much more

grounded. It was amazing. I don't know why I stopped, but it was wonderful.

So maybe you need to do yoga for 30 days. Maybe you need to do

it one day. Maybe you need to meditate. Maybe you just

practice like get an app and like headspace or

calm or whatever. Just turn on one of those weird 10 minute meditations

and see what comes up. So what you're trying to do

is access those eight C's of, of the self that

internal family systems talks about. Curiosity,

calm, confidence, compassion,

creativity, clarity, courage, connectedness. We're

looking for places in our life where we can grow more

curious, grow more calm. I think curiosity

is really important within myself and also within my

relationships. So if I have a judgment of somebody,

like why are they acting like that? Like am I kid or whatever.

Like right now my son, he just keeps sleeping late, it's summer, he's in college

and I'm just so annoyed, right? But if I turn my

annoyance into curiosity and have a conversation with him, maybe I'll learn

something about him or maybe we can grow or I can offer to him

a different perspective on his life. I don't know.

But if I'm in judgment, it's not going to come off great. So I want

to be as curious I can with myself with

people I love. So there's, you know, like I said, we

can do meditation or quiet times, we can do journaling, we do

nature walks. All of these different strategies are

behaviors that help you access that self

energy. So remember, I just want you to think about.

You already have this person

you inside of you. You were born

with your, with her. She is your essence.

She belongs to you. She has your best

interest in mind. Her intention is always to help you.

And you have access to her whenever you want or need.

All it takes is stopping and trying to find

her. She wants to be found by you. She's waiting for

you to say, hey self,

where are you she wants you to feel

clear and calm and strong and have an inner anchor

that is available to you. So this week

just start thinking about your inner leader, your

self energy, looking for

places in your life where you feel calm,

grounded, places in your life where you are responding

instead of reacting. Or

you can look for places where you are reacting

and get curious about why you are reacting that way.

And getting to the like, what do you need?

I think about this with little kids, how we're like,

you know, little baby like a nine month old, crying, crying, crying and I'll

see a mom and she's like, you know, shaking the, not shaking the baby but

you know, like rocking the baby and holding the baby up and they're like what

do you need? Do you need a, do you need, Are you hungry? Like really

trying to problem solve for this little baby that has no

words, that can't communicate what it needs,

right? It's just crying or fussy and

the parent is saying like let me try to figure this out,

right? Hopefully the parent's not getting angry. Sometimes you might. But your

core self, the core mom in you, it's not angry, you're

just trying to fix it, right? You're trying to help. That's your self energy,

that parentified inner child of yours that

is wounded, right? She needs a mama. So

you get to be the mom to yourself. You get to reparent

yourself, you get to connect back with yourself that's available

to you. If you want any help with this, reach out to me.

You can join the calm mama club. $30 a month. We meet on Tuesdays at

9:30 Pacific for about an hour, coach on all sorts of topics,

behaviors, kids behaviors, mindset. You know, sometimes it

gets deep like it's a fun group. There's about 10 of us right now

and it's really sweet, really lovely. You are welcome to join. I'd love to have

you in there. You get to have a conversation with me, a private conversation

before we get going so that I know a little bit about your backstory and

how old your kids are and what you want to work on. The Calm Mama

Club is always available. You can always, you know, schedule a complimentary

consultation with me 45 minutes just to meet, talk. I'll talk you

through the programs or you can work privately with me. I have a couple of

openings right now. I try not to fill my schedule too much

with those, but I have a couple. I usually sign people up for

six weeks with me and we work together through

either a behavior of your kids or some personal issue that you have

that you want to, you know, get some clarity on. That's what life coaching is.

Totally love to do that as well. Okay, mamas, next week I'm going to talk

about a little bit like I talked about today, about being that self

for your children, actually, what it looks like when

you are calm and you are parenting your children from self

energy, what it sounds like, what it looks like, and why it benefits

your kids. So that's going to be next week on the podcast.

Okay. I enjoyed this talk and I hope you did, too. And

I will talk to you next week. Sa.