Yay, I have a podcast!!

This week’s blog (and from now on, for the most part) will be the transcript of my podcast. I’ve been wanting to get the podcast going for a while and well…now I have!

The link is on my home page, but you can also access it here:

The Revolution Within Podcast with Dana - Episode 1

And here’s the transcript of my first episode. It’s an introduction to who I am and why I teach self-kindness…please feel free to send me any questions or comments. :)

Hi, hi there I am Dana. Welcome to the Revolution Within podcast, episode number one. No promises as to this having the best quality or not having any technical difficulties, because this is my first episode and I really appreciate you tuning in to listen to it. I'm very excited. Yay!

I started this podcast to help you get a handle on depression, or whatever dissatisfaction you may be living with in your everyday life, by learning how to be profoundly kind to yourself. Why would I teach you how to be kind to yourself? Well, through all of the things that I've learned over my several decades on this earth, I have really pinpointed that self kindness is the magic that we need for the basis of anything, for self-confidence, for manifestation, for applying Mel Robbins' let them theory, anything that you may think of. 

The basis of being content and at peace with yourself begins with self-kindness. Okay, so, as a woman who spent most of her life struggling with her weight and mood swings, I also spent a shit ton of money, time and energy trying to solve those two problems, fully believing that once I did, everything would magically align and unicorns would slide down rainbows and my life would be blissful every day in my life would be blissful every day. Well, I'm going to tell you this. I hit a goal weight many times in my life and it didn't fix everything. It fixed fucking nothing, actually, absolutely zero unicorns arrived, no rainbows showed up. In fact, it only created a new layer of like, “oh shit, how do I stay here?”

Because maintenance tends to be the hardest thing. If you've gone up and down with your weight your whole life, finding maintenance is a whole process in and of itself. But we can talk about that later, because this isn't a weight loss podcast. Well, now I no longer obsess about my weight, because overeating is a symptom of the real issue. Really, any compulsive, addictive, overdone behavior is used for escapism and is always a symptom of something much deeper. And that symptom was keeping me in a cycle of depression too. But I'll get to that more later, too. So that's why I'm not a weight loss coach anymore.

I did start out as one, but now I consider myself a kindness consultant. And I'm here to help you change your mindset to one where you're always being as kind to yourself as possible, even when you've completely fucked up something, because the root to it all any change is learning and practicing self-kindness. Because without it you won't reach the level required to make your improvements, really, just move in for good and not go back to like old habits.

I won't go too deep into my rock bottom that led me to this deep desire to help other people stop beating the shit out of themselves and living in that low level hum of comfortable misery that so many of us do. I will say that my late 40s brought on a number of health issues that had me desperately searching for solutions. Well, the solution was hormone replacement therapy and that led me to studying how to change my negative mindset.

I've had many, many mentors: Joe Dispenza, Mel Robbins (to name a couple) over the past few years and I've learned a lot, and the purpose of this podcast is to share with you what I've learned and hope to help you fix some things for yourself. So the solution around the hormone replacement therapy had me find all of these people, and it was the work that I did to change the way I think about myself and the world around me that enabled me to lose 50 pounds and keep it from coming back. You know, it wasn't a food plan or a gym membership or some magic pill or some guru telling me what to do. It was me figuring out within myself what it was that I kept telling myself that kept taking me back to that place, and that is what this podcast is all about. 

So throughout the process, I became a certified weight loss/wellness coach through what I consider the best weight loss program out there: No BS Weight loss. It’s created by the fabulous Corinne Crabtree. She is one of my mentors and she is the one that I became certified through. Her teachings and the teachings of Brooke Castillo, who's the brilliant creator of the Life Coach School, are where I really began capturing the realization that your thoughts and your feelings aren't facts and that living as though they are had led me into the depression I'd been mired in for almost my entire life.

But I couldn't really get fully, energetically invested in teaching about weight loss, because none of this is about your weight. It's always about how you feel about yourself. Your weight is a reflection of how you feel about yourself. If you have weight issues, you know, of course, some people are born without weight issues and they maybe have other issues. But I was focusing on weight loss because it's something that I've personally dealt with. I’ve had weight fluctuations my whole life, and I had an eating disorder.

And in learning how to love myself - be kind to myself, I’m not even going to use the word love - in learning how to be kind to myself, I have learned what all of the parameters are around getting your mind right in order to take care of yourself. And after I took a course that's taught at Yale by Dr Laurie Santos called the Science of Well-Being (I took it through Coursera online.) That course really drove home that our search for happiness in external sources is really an exercise in futility. I mean, first of all, happiness is a feeling, not a state of being, contentment or peace. Those are states of being. You can have times of unhappiness, but still be at peace because you have the awareness that everything is temporary, in the perspective that tough times are going to happen, regardless of how much stuff you have or how thin you are or what car you drive. Blah, blah, blah. 

So now I teach learning how to be kind to yourself, as well as the practice of being present, rather than constantly living in the past or in the future. I mean, there's a lot more to be said about that and I'll get deeper into that in the future podcast episodes.

So right now, you might be thinking that you know, oh, Dana, I'm kind enough to myself already. Or being kind to yourself is letting yourself off the hook, and if you start practicing being kind to yourself, that you'll slide into a life where you have no ambition. I will tell you this the opposite is true. The harder you are on yourself, the more you want to detach from your reality with whatever method of escapism you prefer. 

I mean, seriously think about it. Do you love being bullied? When someone insults you? Does that inspire you to do good things for yourself and others? When you get yelled at about a mistake or put down, maybe you immediately start looking for ways to fix it, but I'll bet that you're not feeling super confident about finding a good solution, certainly not from being insulted or screamed at or told that you're a failure or that you fucked up or whatever. 

So if you don't like being bullied, then why do you bully yourself? Maybe you don't realize that you bully yourself, so the first thing that you should start doing is - it's awareness. The first thing that you do in learning how to be kind to yourself is start being aware of the way that you talk to yourself. 

So, yeah, I had to answer that question that why do I bully myself? If I don't like to be bullied, why do I bully myself? It's a question that I had to answer for myself, and when I did answer that, I realized that all roads lead from and back to being kind to yourself. The kinder you are to yourself, the kinder you are to others, and the greater the amount of kind people we have in this world and higher and higher and higher energy, because the low energy that we have in our current climate, with all of the really terrible things that have happened in our world…

…if you don't like being bullied, then why do you bully yourself? Well, that's my purpose in putting all of this out there and really being authentic and putting myself out there, which I never would have done 10 years ago because I really cared way too much about what people think of me, which I really don't anymore. I care about what my children think of me and I care about what I think of me and that's about it. 

The reason why I'm doing this is because I understand that the kinder we are to ourselves the more love we put into the world and the divisiveness that has happened in America and all other countries - I’m in the US, so I know all about the divisiveness here - the misinformation and the disinformation that has been just pushed by our media that has created this huge amount of divisiveness, when in fact, most of us agree that having basic human needs met is a good thing…that the teachings of Jesus - that he actually taught - are a good thing, and well. 

You know what, I’m not going to get into a whole religious thing. I am not a religious person. I am a very spiritual person. I believe in God, the Universe and Source. When we raise the collective energy, everything gets better. When we raise our energy, we add to the collective energy and everything gets better. And you don't see it right away, because things take time. Changes take time. Things that happened eight years ago are now coming into the landscape. Things that happened two years ago are now coming into the landscape. That's how change works. It doesn't happen instantaneously.

Okay, so the reason why I say kindness rather than love is because love yourself can be a really difficult concept for many of us who were conditioned, knowingly or not, to do anything but that. Most of the women that I know I'll just say women, a lot of people, men included, people who identify however you want to identify grew up in, even if you grew up in a very loving household. We've been conditioned to stay small, to be humble, to not brag about our accomplishments and doing so have been conditioned to not be kind to ourselves and the idea of self-love not only does it sound really ickkk and trite, but it feels terrible because we're not used to that. 

Any feeling that you haven't experienced before is going to feel terrible at first, like standing up for yourself instead of actually, instead of thinking about confronting someone who pissed you off, you can think of it as having a conversation with that person. You don't immediately have to think about it as, oh my God, I'm going to stand up for myself and immediately feel that fear and that thing that comes up in your throat and it you know it. Yeah, if you're not used to actually standing up for yourself, that's going to feel terrible and you're not going to do it. 

So, right there, that's something that I teach my clients is that, rather than thinking about standing up for yourself as a confrontation, think about it as having a conversation with a person and use “I” statements: Instead of “you're doing this “and “you make me feel like this,” and “your actions do this,”

You can say, “I’m coming to you because I respect you and we have this kind of relationship, and I would like to have an open and honest dialogue with you about how this particular thing made me feel” or “I feel like this. I would like to talk to you about this,” and then, after you lay it out, you can say, “How does that make you feel?” That's how you open a dialogue and have conversation, rather than being afraid to confront people about things.

Okay, I just went off on a major tangent there. I'm going to end this podcast this week. I'm going to try to keep these to like 15 or 20 minutes, and thank you for joining me. My name is Dana. I have a website called the Revolution Within. It's at revolution-within.com, and there you can read my blog. My blogs talk all about how to learn how to be confident and learn how not to shit all over yourself all the time and learn how to be kinder to yourself. And this is episode one, and I will be hopefully hearing from you guys about what you thought of it and I will talk to you next time. Take care.

If you’re wondering about the music, I took clips from my original song “Listening” from my album of the same name released by Outback Records in 2006. You can find it on Spotify or Apple Music.

Email me at dana@revolution-within.com with any questions…I’m happy to chat!

Love and hugs,

Dana