Self-Kindness Includes Self-Preservation
This is the transcript - more or less - from Episode 7 of my podcast.
Hi there everybody, thanks for being here with me today.
I’m Dana, and you’re listening to The Revolution Within Podcast. This is the podcast where you’re learning how to revolutionize your relationship within yourself by ditching people-pleasing, prioritizing self-kindness, and finding the fun in dysfunctional. Haha. Making our dysfunctional emotions way more manageable day to day.
But first, some housekeeping. Let me tell you how you can connect with me to work with me: My website is revolution-within.com, I’m on instagram @ revolution_within31, and you can reach me via email at dana@revolution-within.com
Best thing to do is go to my website and get on my email list so you’ll get all of my correspondence for my upcoming book and classes and all the things. When you go to my website there’ll be a pop up, you can put your name and email address in there and you’ll get on my email list.
Okay, so I was having this conversation with my husband about kindness - because that’s my favorite topic, as I believe that all lasting change leads back to having a firm grasp on being really kind to yourself.
And that’s challenging. We’re not conditioned that way. Most of us are…not kind. We’re really hard on ourselves. We get to the end of the day and look back - I should’ve done more. We accomplish something and think - I could’ve done better. We reach a goal - we move the goalposts.
Just me? I doubt it. Anyway, back to the conversation I was having with my husband. This past week things have been happening politically - it’s gettin real wild here - I’m going to avoid that. Let’s just say that it’s been a struggle to remain kind.
And he reminded me that I emphasize self-kindness, and that means that I don’t have to pander to nitwits.
Self-kindness includes self-preservation. It includes stepping away from the news. It includes taking a breather from the scary shit that’s happening.
Now, have I done any of that? Nope. But I’ve been trying.
I come from a long line of people who are very passionate about the “common man,” and we can get very heated about things. What’s going on right now…well, it has me pretty heated.
It’s based in a generational pattern of fear and scarcity, and it takes me a lot of energy to pull my focus away from that scarcity mindset and toward following my purpose.
And my purpose isn’t to perpetuate fear and scarcity; it’s to raise the vibration of hope, kindness and healing.
I think it’s really important to face these days together with kindness and compassion, not further finger-pointing, I told-you-sos, and divisiveness, no matter how tempting.
And ohhhh boy, is it tempting.
But, having said that, I’m in the habit of falling back into the pattern of being really hard on myself when I spend time doom-scrolling. But these habits are well-worn patterns, and they take time to rework.
I talked about this in a Substack article this week - you can subscribe to my Substack at revolutionwithin31.
I’m not going to get all super-sciencey here, but I’d like to explain how anyone can rewire their brain and change a habit - including practicing self-kindness, which is the most crucial one of all.
Our brains have loads and loads of neural pathways. Imagine these as river beds, as in these are the river beds that our rivers (thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — aka habits) run through. And if we want to change a habit, we have to reroute that river.
Most habits are rivers, meaning deeply worn grooves. That means that they’ll take some real effort to reroute. Some may be streams and easier to change, but most are rivers because they often started before we can even remember, when we were little kids.
Absolutely anyone can redirect their thought patterns with practice, patience, and persistence. Yes, anyone. But that person has to be willing to change and stay committed to not giving up, no matter how hard it can be to stay the course.
Now there’s a secret that no one else is telling you, but I will because I’m cool like that.
Here it is.
There’s a main river. All other thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are tributaries of this river and, if you work on rerouting this one, everything else will shift along with it.
When you make significant progress with this one, every other thing you’re trying to improve in your life will start to get better almost effortlessly.
Wait, what? What is it?
It’s learning how to be really kind to yourself.
When you’re able to reroute that river from mentally kicking the sh*t out of yourself to being profoundly kind to yourself, everything shifts. That’s the key to the ocean of change that you’ve been wanting to make in your life.
It requires deep, profound self-kindness to remain committed to growth through difficult times, through painful setbacks, through repeated disappointments. Without it, people retreat into lives of comfortable misery.
For more about comfortable misery, please go back and listen to episode 4 of this podcast.
Innate self-kindness is something very few of us have, and we certainly don’t stumble upon it in this visually-based, consumer-driven society of ours. And social media certainly doesn’t encourage kindness, particularly not to ourselves.
See, our brains — and those rivers — are wired for survival. Survival is the basic instinct passed down from the very first human.
Survival isn’t about kindness, is it? It’s about “Every man for himself” (There’s no mention of any other gender there, either, strangely enough And even though modern technology has flown past The Jetsons in ways we never imagined (although I’m still wondering where my hovercraft is…kinda unrealistic, there, Hanna Barbera), our brains haven’t evolved all that much past the fight-or-flight instincts of the days when man (but only man, though) was being chased by tigers as dinner.
If you’d like to start today, ask yourself these four questions:
How do I think other people see me?
How do I see myself?
How much do other people’s opinions of me matter?
What do I want for myself without anyone else’s wants/needs/desires involved?
You’ll begin the process of practicing self-kindness, because it begins with learning who you really are and prioritizing what you really want…not what other people want you to do for them.
Self-kindness isn’t selfish. It’s the ultimate way to show kindness to others, because when you’re deeply kind to yourself, anything you do for someone else is done from a place of authenticity, not people-pleasing or martyrdom.
Also — for those of you searching for that ever-elusive fairy-dust called “motivation,” here’s some magic for you: Self-kindness motivates you to take better care of yourself. It’s built right into the ripple effect.
And in these trying times, I encourage you to remember the poignant words of the late, brilliant author, Michelle McNamara: “It’s chaos…be kind.” I keep her phrase front of mind to tap on anytime I begin to slide into the chasm of social media doomscrolling. That’s a practice that is not kind to me, and I limit it as much as possible these days.
I prefer to stay informed without self-torture.
If those four questions up there are too overwhelming and you want to start with something super simple, try looking in the mirror every morning and reminding yourself that just showing up is enough; that you are enough.
I’m forever cheering you on, beautiful dreamers.
That’s all I have for this episode. If you’d like to get in touch, reach out at dana@revolution-within.com. Take care and remember - all will be well.