February 17, 2023 • 53 mins
In this episode, we discuss radical self-love: what it is, why we struggle to practice it, and the pathways to cultivate it so that we become the highest version of ourselves. You'll also learn:
- How radical self love is defined and how it differs from self esteem or self confidence
- Why we need to uncover our issues with self love that result from damaging societal messages
- How to bring inquiry, the thinking, doing, and being proces,s that leads to insight and healing
- How it takes repetition and practice to clear the obstructions of self love
- The three “peaces” we need to bring into our life
- How we can learn to let go of the story of "not enoughness" by recognizing it's not real
- The four pillars of practice of radical self love and the practices within each pillar
- How we can participate in the collective nature in this journey to self love
To learn more about Sonya Renee Taylor, click here!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
In case you're just recently joining us, or however long
you've been a listener of the show. You may not
realize we have years and years of incredible episodes in
our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've
decided to hand pick one of our favorites that may
be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth
another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Sonja
Renee Taylor. Is this thought I'm having giving me access
(00:24):
to peace, power, joy, ease or pleasure in my life? No?
Then why am I invested in thinking it? Welcome to
the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized
the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in,
(00:44):
garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true.
And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
(01:05):
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
(01:33):
Our guest on this episode is Sonya Renee Taylor, a
former national and international poetry Slam champion, author, educator, and activist.
Sonja is also the founder of the Body Is Not
an Apology, which is a digital media and education company
promoting radical self love and body empowerment as the foundational
tool for social justice and global transformation. Today, Sonia and
(01:57):
Eric discuss her book, The Body is Not an Apology.
The power of radical self love. Being consistent with your
habits is the engine that drives your transformation and growth.
Think about it. You can't feed your good wolf one
big meal a year and expect it to thrive. Consistent
steady bits of food fuel a good, healthy wolf, but
it's hard to create consistency. You might listen to this
(02:18):
podcast on a Thursday feel really inspired, but then life
takes over and by Saturday night you've forgotten all about it.
That's why I'm hosting a free live Q and a
town hall zoom meeting on Thursday, February where I'll be
answering your questions about how to take what you know
and turn it into what you consistently do. Had to
when you feed dot net slash town hall to register
(02:40):
for this free live session with me. During this town hall,
you'll ask me your specific question and I'll answer it.
It's that simple. So if you would like my help
creating some tools to deal with real life when it
gets in the way of your best intentions, let me
help you. If changing habits feels overwhelming, if you struggle
to make time for things because life is so busy,
if it's easy to get caught up with your to
(03:01):
do list, you feel consistently behind and taking time for
yourself feel selfish, then let's talk. The things we do
consistently are more important than the things we do once
in a while. In this free town hall session, you'll
ask me your questions and I'll help you find what
works for you, how you might look at things differently
and create the structure to help you do the thing
(03:22):
you really want to do. And if you don't have
a specific question, just come listen to the conversation. A
little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.
Truth is, you can make a lot of progress by
doing just a little bit. To register for this free
zoom session on February go to one you feed dot
net slash town hall. That's when you feed dot net
slash town hall. I hope I get the chance to
(03:44):
meet you there. Hi, Sonia, Welcome to the show. Hi,
thanks so much for having me here. It is a
real pleasure to have you on. We're going to be
discussing your book, The Body is Not an apology the
power of radical self love. But before we start with that,
we'll aren't like we always do with the Parable. In
the Parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her
(04:05):
grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. What is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.
He looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother,
which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
(04:29):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. Thank you. I think one
of the things that may be most excited about coming
on your podcast was this parable, which I find so
powerful and for me, I think my work really centers
on what is the relationship between the one we feed
(04:50):
as individuals and the one we feed as a collective.
I believe that we are innately good. We come here
with the good wolf. We come here with the wolf
that is inherently connected to kindness and love, compassion, connection,
and I think that we are immediately birthed into a
world that's like, Hey, here's this other wolf, and it's
(05:13):
the one we've been feeding for a long time, and
so we expect you to feed it too, and then
through that process we become split. But I don't think
we start off split. I think we become split as
a result of the conditions of our world, the conditions
of our families, the conditions of our own sort of
encounters with lack or not enoughness, and then that becomes
(05:36):
the wolf we feed. Yeah. I love that you talk
in your book early on about a concept of natural intelligence,
which I think speaks a little bit to what you're
saying here. Could you tell us a little bit more
about what you mean by natural intelligence? Yeah, So one
I don't want to take credit for a term that
is not mine. I was speaking in the book about
(05:57):
a quote that I had heard from author Marian Williamson,
who was comparing this idea of natural intelligence to an
oak tree, and that an acorn doesn't have to state
that it intends to become an oak tree, right, that
it is imbued with all the mechanisms cellularly that it
needs to become its highest version of itself. That's natural intelligence.
(06:20):
That we come here already wired for the highest versions
of ourselves, or the good wolf, if we're going to
compare to that parable, and then the work is not
about like how do I become the good wolf? The
work is how do I identify all of the things
that are obstructing the good wolf from flourishing into the
fullness of its being? What's in the obstruction of that acorn? Right,
(06:45):
if that acorn falls from a tree and lands on concrete,
then it will not be able to do its job.
But if that acorn falls from the tree and lands
and fertile soil, it will. And so how do we
create the conditions of fertile soil so that that which
is already cellularly within us can come to its fullest fruition. Yeah,
(07:05):
I love that idea. I practice Zen Buddhism, and we
talk about this all the time in Zen. You know,
it's just your original nature if you just when you
strip everything else away, it's what naturally emerges. And it's
always right here. It's always right here, exactly exactly. And
we all have so many different names for it. And
(07:26):
in my work I call that radical self love, you know,
but there are all kinds of terms, you know, mirroring
lives and calls it natural intelligence, you know. Buddhism calls
it Zen. Like we have all of these terms for it,
but it really does speak to what is innately in
us that wants to become manifest in the world. Yeah,
and I want to return to this idea of radical
(07:47):
self love, the term that you use. But before we
do that, why don't we start with the title of
the book, which is The Body is Not an Apology.
Share with us the story of where that idea is
birth from, because I think it's pretty powerful as a
story in and of itself, and I think it's pretty
central to everything that's going to come after it as
(08:07):
we talk totally. So I've had many iterations of lives.
I feel like I've lived many lives in this lifetime.
And one of those iterations was as a professional performance poet,
traveled around the world competing in poetry slams. And I
happened to be in a poetry slam in not Ville, Tinnacy,
getting ready to compete with a group of folks, a
(08:29):
team friends of mine from Washington, d C. And I
was in the room with one of my friends having
a conversation and we are having you know, I'm a Scorpio,
and so I'm notorious for having really deep conversations, whether
you want to be having them or not, It's just
kind of my nature. And so I'm having this intense
(08:51):
conversation with my teammate and she is sharing with me
that she is afraid that she might have an unintended pregnancy.
She's not sure yet. And we start to sort of
unfold this conversation and it becomes clear to me that
the person she thinks she might be pregnant by is
just kind of a casual, uh partner sometimes, not anyone
she's particularly invested in. And I am also as a
(09:14):
result of perhaps the scorpio placement as well as one
of my former lives as a sexuality health educator. I'm
a person who will get in your business from a
place of love, is the way I think about it.
Like I'm gonna ask you some uncomfortable questions, never from judgment,
but always from a here are the things that I
would explore in this Have you explored this? You know?
So I asked my friend why she was having unprotected
(09:37):
sex with this casual partners. She wasn't all that into
since we know how babies happen, And my my friend,
you know, answered me. I like to say that three
things were present in this conversation that created what I
like to think of as like a transformative portal, this
opening where all of a sudden life got rearranged. And
I think that those three things were radical honest, the
(09:59):
radical vulner city, and radical empathy. I asked a radically
honest question, but I asked it from a radically empathetic place.
I understood, and she responded to me in radical honesty
and radical vulnerability. And my friend had cerebral palsy and
she said that, you know, her disability made it difficult
already for her to be sexual, and so she didn't
(10:19):
feel entitled to ask this person to use a condom.
And when she said that, the words came through me,
they were not of me. It was like, oh, this
is coming from someplace else for this moment. And I
said to her, your body is not an apology. It's
not something you offer to people to say sorry for
my disability. And when I said that, something stuck. That
(10:39):
wasn't just for her, it was immediately for me too.
It was like, for all these ways that I too
have given myself away as an apology. I'm sorry for,
you know, my blackness. I'm sorry for my womanness. I'm
sorry for my loudness. I'm sorry for my fatness. I'm
sorry for my you know, depression. I'm so there are
all these things I'm sorry for. And there was this
(11:00):
moment where it was like, oh, what if there isn't
anything to apologize for? And so I said it, and
I was like, damn, that was really poetic. I'm gonna
have to do something with that. And so I decided
I was going to write a poem because I was
a poet, and so I wrote this poem called the
Body is Not an Apology, and I began performing it
and about six to eight months after I had written
(11:23):
the poem, I had this selfie in my phone that
I've been hiding. I really felt fabulous in it and
delicious and beautiful, and I had been afraid to share it.
And so someone one night in February of two thousand
and eleven shared a photo of a plus sized model
on my Facebook page and she was fabulous, and I
(11:43):
googled her and she had on the same exact kind
of outfit that I had on, and I had this
moment where I was like, Oh, this person is being
very unapologetic in their body and they're being paid for it,
all right, somebody paid her money to put her juicy
thighs on the internet without shame. And here I I'm
hiding this photo where I feel beautiful, but I feel
like I'm not supposed to. I'm going to share it.
(12:05):
And I asked people because I'm always recruiting other people
to do the things that I'm scared of with me,
and so I asked a strategy. Yeah, it's totally my
life strategy. It's been working, uh, And so I was like,
share a photo where you feel powerful and embodied in
your body. And the next morning, thirty people that tag
me and photos. I was like, this is awesome, Like
(12:26):
maybe we just need a space where we're allowed to, like,
where we have permission to be unapologetic in our bodies.
So I'm gonna make a Facebook page. And since I
have this poem called the Body is Not an Apology,
I guess I'll call the Facebook page the Body is
Not an Apology. And we started with thirty people and
then we have, you know, three hundred and three thousand
(12:46):
and thirty thousand, then writers, and then a company and
then a book deal, and then it has transformed my life. Well,
thank you for sharing that story. And maybe there's some
people when they hear that story they don't have an
interior feeling of knowing like, oh my god, that's me,
but I certainly do. And I'm a straight white male, right.
(13:09):
You know, as I read this book, it was so
clear to me that I don't know that you can
grow up in this culture and not have body issues
unless you're nearly perfect. And even then, I think it's
just so much a part of everything, absolutely, And I think,
you know, if we think you don't have body issues,
then you're probably defining body way too narrowly, which is
(13:32):
what I usually experienced people like, I mean issues with
my body, And then I'm like, mmmm, you know, what
were the messages that your father told you about your
manhood when you were a child, And you're like, oh,
I'm not allowed to cry? What do you mean do?
Where do tears come from? Friends? They come from your body? Right, Like?
So part of it is about really expanding and understanding.
(13:53):
When I say body, what I'm talking about is all
of the ways in which we do life in this
corporal vessel, and all of the relationships that we've been
told about that the relationships with our identity with gender,
our relationship with size, our relationship with race, our relationship
with age, our relationship with ability, our relationship with mental health.
(14:15):
All of those things are the body. And so when
I say the body is not an apology, I'm not
just talking about do you like what size genes you're wearing?
You know, I'm saying, what are the messages that we
have been told about our humanity based on these physical vessels?
And how has that stifled the ability for that acorn
(14:35):
to become the yoak tree? How is that squashing our
natural intelligence? How is that feeding the wolf we don't
want fed? Yeah, I think that is really well said.
And as you go through that list, you know, one
of those is aging. So even if somehow you get
to a certain age where like I've always felt great
about how I look in my body, you're like, well,
(14:57):
but just hang on because it's coming. It's coming with age.
Although as somebody who is just the upper side of fifty,
I will say that in addition, one of the great
things that age has brought is time to heal some
of those things so that I don't have the same
fears and challenges around it I had as a child.
(15:18):
And that's really what I would like to maybe spend
our time on, is what can people do to heal
the issues they have around their body, around their self image,
around all these different things. And I thought maybe we
would start with first saying, you know, you talk about
that what we want is radical self love, and I'd
(15:40):
like to contrast that with terms like self esteem and
self confidence as a starting place to sort of say
that that's not really what we're talking about. Yeah. Absolutely,
So I opened the book by being like, here's what
you're not going to get reading this book. You're not
gonna get help with your self esteem and your self confidence.
And the reason that I say that is one because
(16:02):
both of those things are very conditional experiences. How you
feel about yourself, how your confidence is situated, varies from
day to day depending on what's going on. Did I
get the promotion that I thought I was gonna get, right,
I feel great going into the meeting. I come out
feeling like, man, I'm just just this never works for me.
(16:22):
You know that, I'm in my story about I'm not
good enough, right. Confidence shock for the day. Self esteem,
it's like, you know, I feel important or good or fabulous.
You know. I often give the example of like I
put on a fly outfit. I'm like, yes, it's fabulous,
and I go outside and no one gives me a
compliment on my outfit. That day, I'm like, wait a minute,
(16:42):
maybe I'm not as cute as I thought I was.
I'm gonna have to wear this again, all right, and
so so these things that are conditional and externalized and
change with the weather, right and again. Radical self love
is not fickle in that way. It's not conditional. It's
not determined by whether or not it is externally validated
(17:04):
by the outside world, the same way an acorn doesn't
become a fig tree because somebody outside said you look
better as a fig tree, right, Like it is wired
inside of itself to be an oak tree. We are
wired inside of ourselves to have radical self love. And
when I talk about it, I'm talking about that inherent
(17:24):
state of enoughness that we arrived here with that unconditional
certainty that we were amazing. I think I've said this
on every single talk I've ever done, is you've never
seen a self loathing toddler, because I think it's an
important marker for us to remember that there is a
point through which we passed where we were embodied in
(17:47):
our enoughness, and then something shifted right. And so if
we recognize that we came here embodied in our enoughness,
then the question isn't like, oh did it lead eve No,
I mean, just from a physics standpoint, it couldn't leave.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred. Then
(18:08):
it's still there. It's just doing something different. What is
it doing different? It's being usurped by the messages of
our external world that say that we're not enough, and
that profit off of us really deeply believing that we're
not enough. And so radical self love is different from
those things because it is already there. It is the foundation.
(18:28):
And then the other thing I think is really important
for me about why it's not self esteem and self
confidence is because I love folks, and I love what
I do, and I actually want people to have good
self esteem and self confidence. But I would not devote
the amount of time and effort that I spend in
my life tending to people's individual self esteem and self confidence.
I'll get anything out of that. What I do get
(18:50):
something out of is recognizing that there is a society
that is rooted in our messages about who is good
enough and who is not good enough, and that as
much as we internalize those messages, we reinforce that system
of not enoughness for other bodies. So the body that
you are judging yourself against about whether or not you
(19:12):
are enough is someone else's body, which means you are
in the way of them being able to be in
the fullness of their radical self love. As long as
we believe that certain bodies, that white bodies are more
valuable than black bodies on a structural level, than I
as a black woman, am always going to be in
(19:32):
a harder road towards accessing my radical self love. As
long as we believe that neurotypical bodies are more valuable
than neuro atypical bodies or you know, bodies that we
say don't have mental health issues, as long as we
believe that I have a harder road to radical self love,
and so I do this work. The radical part of
(19:53):
it is that we wake up to this system that
we've all been indoctrinated in, and we get out of
our own way, and we get out of each other's
way so that we can all grow into the highest
versions of ourselves. That's why it's radical self love. Right,
And you talk a lot in the book about I'm paraphrasing,
(20:14):
but there's a real two way street or a mutuality
about this, right. It's by learning to both love myself
and love others. Those things they mutually reinforce or what's
the opposite of reinforced tear down, Right, the more that
I learned to love me, the more I'm able to
love you, And the more I'm able to love you,
(20:34):
the more I'm able to love me. It's a it's
a good thing versus. The more I judge myself, the
more I judge you. The more I judge you, I
end up judging myself. These things play off each other absolutely.
I mean, we're all in an interdependent relationship, and so
you know, we go into these often, this kind of work.
You know that people often lump my work into like
(20:55):
personal development work, and you know, I can see why
they do that, except I'm very clear or that I
do social justice work. I'm just very clear that society
is made up of people, and so people have to
change in order for society to change. And so inside
of this story in our current society is the story
of individualism. That it's all about I can change, and
(21:16):
then I changed by myself, and then my life improves,
as if our lives are not intertwined with one another,
as if we are not dependent on each other in
hopes of ways. And so as I divest from this
system that says that I am not enough, I become
aware of all the other people it is said is
(21:37):
not enough. And if I believe that that system is
lying to me, then that system must be lying about
all those other bodies too. And the only way for
me to actually be able to live in my radical
self love without obstruction in the world is to remove
all of the obstructions that tell us that we're not enough,
not just the ones that impact me the because eventually
(22:01):
another one will pop up that will be obstructing your
lane again. And so we actually are tied to each
other in this journey of really living into the full
possibility of radical self love for ourselves and in the world.
(22:36):
I've started sending a couple of text messages after each
podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations
to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free, and
listeners have told me that these texts really helped to
pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important.
When you get a text for me during your day
to day life, it's one more thing that helps you
(22:57):
further bridge that gap between what you know and what
you do. Positive messages when you need them for me
to you. So if you'd like to hear from me
a few times a week via text, go to one
you feed dot net slash text and sign up for free.
You say that moving from body shame to radical self
love is a road of inquiry and insight. Say a
(23:20):
little bit about those two words, inquiry and insight. What
is it we need to do. We got to ask
ourselves questions. We have to be willing to explore that
which is unexplored in us. So much of the experience
of body shame, so much of the experience of body
based oppression, exists because we don't ask questions about it.
We don't ask questions about our own thoughts. They operate
(23:42):
on autopilot inside of us. You know. I have to
give the example of you go to a dressing room
and you're trying on some genes and they don't fit,
and the immediate thought is that there's something wrong with
your body. The immediate thought is, oh, my gosh, of gain.
And then they were in this cycle of of judgment
about our bodies. Right, That happens probably a billion times
(24:04):
a day around the world, with very little inquiry into
the story that lives behind it, the story about why
I judge my body, rather than being like, why don't
make these James and more expensive sizes? Right, and immediately
I take on the ownership of fault. There are all
of these ways in which our ideas and beliefs about
(24:25):
our bodies just go uninterrogated. And so inside the book
I talk about in order to really begin this journey
of radical self love, you have to engage in what
I call it thinking doing being process. The first thing
is that we actually we have to become aware of
our thoughts. Oh, here's this self deprecating, judgmental thought I
think every single day about myself. Then at this point
(24:47):
I don't even ask myself about it, just runs on autopilot.
What happens when I raised that to consciousness? What happens
when I asked myself questions about it? Well? Who told
me that I'm supposed to believe that? Who told me
that this is true? Why do I believe what they said?
Why am I applying that into my life? One of
(25:07):
my favorite questions is does this give me access to peace, power, joy,
ease or pleasure in my life? Is this thought I'm
having giving me access to peace, power, joy, ease or
pleasure in my life? No? Then why am I invested
in thinking it? Oh, let's let's get into that, because
each time you do that, some new insight shows up.
(25:27):
That's where the insight comes up. It's like I had
an inquiry and then it was like, oh, right, because
that's what my mother used to say to me. And
so I'm actually just talking to myself in the voice
of my mother. Oh that's what that is. Okay. Well,
now that it's at consciousness, I actually have a choice
about how I move forward. Once we raise the thing
to consciousness, then we are at choice about how we
(25:48):
engage it. And so from that point I can say,
what would an opposite action that did give me access
to peace, power, joy, pleasure, ease, Look like, okay, can
I take that action today? Just today? And each time
we do that repetition that thinking, raising a thing to consciousness,
choosing a new action, raising a thing to consciousness, choosing
(26:09):
new action, the repetition of that creates a new way
of being. All of a sudden, we stop being in
the practice of it, and it just is how we
show up. So now that self deprecating thought that I
used to think all the time just doesn't show up,
or it's so low now that it doesn't impact how
I move. And now when I see it, I recognize
and I'm like, that's not even my voice. Child boom,
(26:30):
be quiet, and then I go on about my life. Right.
And so that's the process of inquiry and insight that
we have to engage in if we're going to take
this journey back to removing those obstructions that are in
front of our radical self love. I love that loop
there of of thinking, taking a different action, finding our
way into a new way of being. It reminds me
(26:52):
of what happens in recovery from addiction. Right is the
thoughts are there, I must have a drugs right, and
but I take a different action. I examine those thoughts.
Why am I thinking that what's happening? I take a
different action, and over time I live my way into
a new way of being where those thoughts don't have
(27:13):
so much power. There's a great line in the introduction
to your book, I cannot pronounce the woman who wrote it.
Could you pronounce her name for me? Yes? Ie gioma
A Luo, thank you. She has a line in there
basically that an epiphany doesn't undo lifetime of conditioning. And
I love that idea that, like, we can have these
insights and yet it takes a while to live these
(27:35):
things out of our system. So I think that process
of insight and inquiry is really powerful. Let's talk about
the three pieces. And when we say piece, we mean
like peace as in the you know, the peace sign,
not pieces of pizza, although we could mean that because
pizza pizza is good too, but talk about the three Yes, absolutely,
(28:00):
let's talk about the three pieces. Yeah. So again I
talked about, like, what are the foundational things that we've
got to kind of grapple with when we decide we
want to take this journey. So if the thinking doing
being is about like how do I begin to live
a radical self love process? How do I stay on
the road, this is about how do I even get
on the road. In order to get on the road,
(28:22):
there are three things we have to make peace with.
The first thing we have to make peace with is
not understanding. We live in a world that says you
should know everything, and if you don't know everything, something's
wrong with you. Everything should be google able, right, And
so there's this relationship to the instant access of knowledge
that forgets the reality of the mystery of humanity, and
(28:42):
that forgets the reality of lived experience that you can't
know because it's not your journey. As soon as we
just give up needing to understand everything, we have a
different kind of expansiveness. Some things just are because they
are oh wow, ah feels really uncomfortable, and it stops
(29:03):
me from having to feel like I actually can control
the whole world, because it can't. I can't control everything.
And if I get that that there are things I
just don't understand, it creates some access around there because
once we recognize that we don't understand everything, then we
have the ability to make peace with difference, and making
peace with differences about saying, right, there are things in
this world that are just different than me. And we
(29:27):
have so long equated difference with danger, difference with bad,
difference with not belonging that it has created a world
where we are desired to homogenize ourselves. But it's totally
unrealistic and impossible. Right, It's actually not possible to be
homogeneous as human beings, and that we don't expect that
(29:48):
in any other part of the natural world. I did
not see your dog and be like chihuahuas. Why are
all dogs not air dales? Like? Right, I've never looked
at a Saint Bernard and been like, you should be
a poodle? Right, I expect there to be difference. I
don't look at oak trees and think that they should
(30:08):
be you know, rose bushes. There is natural diversity in
the world that we value and need and see as beautiful,
and then when we bring it to humans, were like, Nope,
we don't want that. Diversity definitely right. And so the
invitation to make peace with difference, which again starts with
making peace with not understanding. It's like, oh, there's beauty
(30:31):
in this thing I don't know anything about that's totally
different than me, but brings new insight, that brings new perspective,
that brings new possibility. How do I let that in?
Because once we do all of those things, then that
helps us get to the third piece, which is making
peace with our own bodies. Because if I can accept
(30:51):
that there are things that don't understand, and I can
accept that difference is an innate and absolutely valuable part
of human diversity, then I can accept it in myself.
Then I can say, oh, here are the ways that
I am different, That my body is different than the
stories that have been told about what a body should
(31:12):
look like. Here are the ways in which my brain
operates differently than what I've been told about what a
body should look like. And how do I meet that
without judgment? How do I meet that without making myself
bad or wrong? Because if I can meet that without
making myself bad or wrong. I am opening the door
to return to a radical self love way of being.
You talk about radical love being a process of de indoctrination.
(31:37):
You know that we look unflinchingly at our current set
of beliefs about ourselves and the world and explore them.
What are some of these beliefs about ourselves in the
world that we need to let go of? Yeah, so
I think there are some that are very universal, and
then I think there are some that are particular depending
on the body that you inhabit in the world. Right,
(31:59):
But all of those things I really do believe. Like,
if we start with whatever story is attached to it,
I'm not enough for I'm too much and whatever it
is that wherever that road takes you, Right, I'm not
pretty enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not rich enough,
I'm not whatever the enough is. That is the first
place to look for. Oh, where have I been indoctrinated?
(32:22):
Because the story of enough is just not true? Right,
Like the acorn is enough to become an oak tree.
You don't have to do nothing to do it. It
is enough. It came here enough, and that's true for
us too. So the question is where is this story
not enoughness impacting my life. And wherever that not enoughnessness
is a place of indoctrination, It is a place where
(32:43):
you've been told that because if it's not true, then
it means we got it from someplace that isn't us.
Then I can start being in my investigation and my
inquiry where is this message coming from. I think that's
a great idea. Let's take the stories of not enough
and follow that. Where I think this get it's hard
is that a lot of the not enough is because
(33:05):
there's something we want that's out in the world that
we feel like I'm not enough to get for me. Right.
Growing up as a boy, when you're a young man,
to be too skinny is just as bad as being
too big, right, You're just you're just a little whimp, right,
You're you know, scrawny. And so my thing was no woman,
no girls ever gonna like me. There's a broad I'm
(33:28):
not enough, but that I'm not enough ends in a
very specific thing. I'm not enough to be loved by
somebody that I would be interested in, right, And those
things seem crazy real when you're stuck in them. Absolutely,
they absolutely seem crazy real. That's why the work is
(33:49):
to be in the confrontation of it, right like that,
the work of radical self love is to choose to
go slay the dragon under your bid the thing that
seems is really real. The premise that I am proposing,
and this is the foundation of whether or not you
take the journey or you don't, right is the premise
I'm proposing is it's not real. It is not real
(34:12):
that being skinny makes you unlovable, no matter how much
it feels, no matter how real it feels, and it
does feel real, and we do live in a society
that we'll reinforce that belief absolutely, And what I assure
you is it isn't real. And the only way to
really know that is to go and test it out.
(34:32):
And so the invitation that I give to people to
this work is, Look, you're living in this construct or
right now, and it already sucks, right like, it already sucks.
It sucks thinking that you're not good enough, It sucks
thinking that you're never gonna be loved. It sucks. And
so if it's gonna suck anyway, if it's gonna be
hard anyway, if it's gonna be hard, be hard and
(34:53):
test the thing that is likely to get you closer
to your own freedom. If I'm gonna do hard, I'd
rather do hard in service toward my own freedom. And
I think this is something they talk about in recovery too,
Like recovery isn't easy, right, but it's like, what do
I get? What might I get if I just trust
that it's possible. That's the invitation of this book. Can
(35:15):
you just maybe try the experiment and see where it
takes you? Yeah, And I think that's really powerful because
the belief starts with just take care whatever, I'm not
ex enough to be loved, and we then believe that,
and so then we start acting that way in all
sorts of ways that make it really likely that we're
(35:36):
going to prove our theory true exactly. We it's a
it's you know, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. And again,
like I said, we live in a world that's happy
to validate that for us. We are very very profitable
inside of that belief. We're very manipulable inside of that belief,
and so it's going to have to take some daring
and I think, you know, various people in the world
(35:57):
are offering like the you don't have to sort out
the fact that isn't true yet. You just have to
be willing to try a new thing and see. Right, like,
I'm gonna hold the belief that it isn't true, that
I wrote a whole book to tell you it isn't true.
Now just play what it didn't see right, that's the invitation.
That's the invitation. There's four pillars of practice. So we've
(36:43):
talked about how to even get on the journey. We
talked about this thinking, doing and being process. And then
there are four pillars of practice that I thought we
could talk about because I think if we hit those
four we cover a lot of ground of various points
I'd like to hit. So let's start with what the
four pillars of practice are. These will not be an order.
(37:04):
I'm gonna say them, and then i'll order them later,
collect a compassion, unapologetic action. I'll give them to your
mind matters and taking out the toxic, taking out the toxic,
thank you, and we just send them backwards. So the
person was taking out the toxic. And so first, just
to explain why I have such hard time remembering my
own pillars, is when I wrote the book, I wrote
tin tools to radical self love, and these were one
(37:27):
are the practical applications that we can do every single
day that help us practice build this radical self love muscle.
Live into this. And after I wrote them, I realized
that they each fell under a category, and I was like, oh, well,
this helps people understand that the sort of like subheading
of these categories, and so so I always forget the subheadings,
but I remember the tools. So anyway, taking out the toxic,
(37:51):
it's really about first if we're inside of this thinking
doing being paradigm. And remember, all of these things are
like scaffolding of the building, Right, I gotta build the layer,
and then I build this layer. Right, so we've built
the layer, we understand that in order to take this journey,
we've got to be in a thinking doing being processed.
Here's your first thinking project taking out the toxic? Where
am I on a regular basis taking in messages that
(38:15):
reinforce my belief that I'm not enough, that reinforced my
belief that I need to be in comparison to assign
my own worth and value, that reinforce my idea that
somehow I'm deficient and failing. Where where is that message
coming from? And how do I turn it down? How
do I find the volume nob on that and turn
it down? Some of that is literally the stuff we
(38:37):
pay for. We're in a grocery store picking up a
rag magazine that's gonna tell us all the ways in
which we need to do this, that and the other
to be desirable, and the thing we need to buy
to be desirable. And why haven't we become desirable yet?
And maybe if we did this particular thing, then we'll
be desirable. And we just gave somebody ten dollars to
(38:58):
deface us in the pages of their magazine, right, And
so where am I taking in those messages? Where am
I watching things that reinforce the message that somehow I'm
not smart enough, not capable enough, not beautiful, whatever that is?
And how do I start raising that to consciousness and
then removing some of that? And then also where am
(39:22):
I reinforcing that message inside of my own relationship with myself?
Where do I notice that I just immediately go to shame,
to body shaming myself, to talking disparagingly about myself. You know,
I saw a mean one time that said, if you
talk to a friend the way that you talk to yourself.
How long would y'all stay friends? Right? And I was
like absolutely, absolutely, And so how do we begin to say, Oh,
(39:48):
how do I how do I have a more loving
dialogue with myself? And where is the toxic way in
which I'm relating to myself? And then how do I
do a fast of that? And maybe that's just for
one day. I'm turning off every time I hear something
that is trying to sell me a reason I'm deficient.
I just cut it off. How many times did I
(40:08):
have to cut off the radio? How many times that
I have to turn off the TV? How many times
did I have to get off the social media platform? Right?
So many? And again, once you raise that to consciousness,
you're like, oh, this is what I've been doing to myself? Yeah, totally.
I often joke that I generally don't watch TV because
I feel so susceptible to it. Just show me one
(40:30):
beer commercial with a lot of beautiful people, and I go,
it's not that I even want It doesn't make me
want a beer. It just makes me go, why is
my life not like that? And home instant I have
noticed how susceptible in certain mind states I am to
that kind of stuff or can be. And the truth
of the matter is like it works. That's why they
do it. Like if the beer commercial thought you weren't
(40:52):
going to be susceptible, it would not be dumping millions
of dollars into acts in that way. It knows it works,
and so we have to be as consciously aware of
how it works as the advertisers. Right, that's the work.
So that's the taking out the toxic. How do we
become aware of what it is the messages that were
being fed, and then how do we start auditing that
(41:13):
so that we can consciously decrease it. Number two is
mind matters. Yes, And so if we've done this thing
to say, all right, I'm gonna take out all this
trash that I've been dumping in my ears and eyeballs
every day. Now that that space is clear, I've created
some room, what do I want to put in it?
What am I trying to cultivate in that space? Because
(41:35):
like any tiled patch of grass, if you let it
go long enough, weeds will pop up. Right, And so
my matter says, all right, now that I've done that,
what do I consciously want to begin replacing it with?
And you know, in the book, I begin talking about
meditation and meditations power to really begin to create space
(41:56):
and shift our neuropathways to actually get us to start
thinking differently. If we're talking about how do we get
to that being part of the thinking doing being process,
meditation is one of those powerful ways to get us
to the being part by sitting and practicing, letting that
clutter that comes in our brains leave, leave us right,
(42:18):
and then what what do we want to put in
that space? It also is about challenging some of the
paradigms that that toxic thinking has had us in. So
where am I stuck in binary thinking? Where am I
stuck inside of things are either good or bad? I'm
awful or I'm here you know our awfuler, I'm an angel,
I'm a villain, or I'm a hero, i am a victim,
or I'm a you know, or a perpetrator. Right, We're
(42:40):
all inside of these really binary ways of thinking that
limit the scope of our full humanity. How do we
start to challenge those when they come up? How do
we see that and then offer ourselves a more expansive
version of our own humanity so that we have a
wider feel to play in as we explore leaving these
toxic message is behind and beginning to learn how to
(43:02):
hear our own radical self love voice. That's the mind
matters part. Unapologetic action is next. So if we've taken
out the toxic, we've seen the things we've been dumping
in that aren't good for us, and we've started planning
some new seeds. Right now, it's time to do something
right now, we're in the doing part. We dealt with
the mind, We dealt with the thinking. What's the doing?
(43:23):
What are the actions that I can take every day?
How do I become reconnected to my own body? How
do I reclaim joy? And in this vessel that I've
gotten so many messages, that's deficient. Right. I talked about
in the book being a kid and when you're a
child in the teacher rang the veil for recess. I
(43:44):
don't know about you, but I like grew wings in kindergarten.
I grew wings and I flew outside. That's how fast
I needed to get outside and play. And there was
a joy to going and moving and being embodied. And
then and somehow we were stripped of that joy and
(44:04):
it became drudgery, moving our bodies became punishment. Moving our
bodies became the thing that we paid twenty four hour
fitness twenty dollars a month to never do because we
never feel like going right like it became it became
this really tense, visceral, antagonistic relationship. And so, what would
it look like to reclaim joy in my body? What
(44:27):
would it looked like to reclaim pleasure in my body?
What would it look like to reclaim connection in my body?
And how do I take action to do that on
a daily basis? How do I replace those old activities
of self deprecation with things that actually bring me a
lot of joy? And so basically all of these things,
these tools, I created a workbook where people can actually
(44:48):
practice putting them in place, doing them on a daily basis.
And so inside of the workbook and give us an
assignment to rediscover the games that brought us the most
joyous kids, like when to the last time you played
red Light Green Light? When is the last time you
played how do you go seek with a bunch of
adults outside? And so there's this invitation to return to
(45:12):
our site of joy, to reclaim that for ourselves, And
so an unapologetic action. That's what we're asking. The other
piece inside of unapologetic action is about, now that we
recognize the stories we've been telling ourselves about how deficient
we are, the stories that reinforce the larger societal and
doctor nations. Now that we recognize those things, how do
(45:35):
we create a new story? How do I literally tell
myself a different story than the story I've been telling
myself historically? And you know, again, inside the workbook, I
give us the opportunity to actually practice writing a new story.
To take that thing that was the most shameful that
I had the most judgment about myself, the story of
being the skinny boy who was never gonna be loved?
(45:55):
How do I turn that story around in a literal
way and write write myself an ending that is more
aligned with my truth? And then how do I practice
them living into that right? And so as we exercise
these muscles, we create the conditions for medical self love
not to feel like a distant thing, but to fill
up close to us, like a thing we can practice
and live into on a daily basis. Yeah, I love
(46:18):
that there's so many good things in there. I mean,
I think about stories, and I've talked about this on
the podcast so many times we're making them up. So
if we're making them up, why on earth would we
not choose ones to back to your your earlier question like,
is this belief or this thing giving me more peace, joy, ease, power?
If my stories aren't doing that, Once we sort of
(46:40):
really look at it and go, oh, I'm making meaning
out of it. I'm the one that's creating all this.
Why not? Why not? If I'm going to write a story,
I might as well write the one where it's a
happy ending. That's right, right as well? That's right? And
then the last one, and this one I know is
really important to the whole pick sure, which is why
(47:00):
I wanted to make sure we got to it. Is
collective compassion. Talk about this one. Yeah, So you know
I say in the book, like you could do everything,
you could do all the things. I said, you can
do all the tools. If you don't do these last
two tools, you're gonna struggle in this journey. You're gonna
find yourself like on a side of a of a
(47:21):
steep heel that's mud trying to climb up. Collective compassion
is one that this is not an individual journey, which
I said at the beginning of our conversation that this
is not about individualism, that this is about interdependence. And
the truth of the matter is, you have an entire
societal infrastructure of systems and organizations and edifices that are
(47:46):
designed to keep you not feeling enough, that are designed
to make sure that you don't actually think that you
can affect change in your own life or in the world.
They are intentionally created as such. So if you've if
you're gonna just do battle with that jugger, not by yourself,
You're gonna be sadly mistaken. It's gonna be very, very difficult,
(48:07):
near impossible to be able to maintain any kind of
sense of power against that. And so we need each
other in this. We have to be in a collective
experience where we are battling those voices, not just me
up against the machine, but us against it. Right. And
(48:28):
so the more that you find your people, the more
that you find the people who are in alignment with
with the journey that you're interested in taking, far easier,
the journey becomes so much more doable and sustainable, the
journey becomes and so collective compassion requires us to find
community and to do this work in community again, because
(48:51):
our liberation is tied up together, our radical self love
journey is tied up together. And then the last piece,
and this is tool number ten, final to the most
important thing you're gonna do. If you do everything and
you fail to really live into this, you will find
yourself back in this old paradigm. And that is give
yourself some grace that we actually have to recognize that
(49:15):
this is not a journey of perfection. And as soon
as we're inside of a conversation of perfection, we're outside
of a conversation of radical self love. As soon as
you are judging yourself because you got it wrong. See,
I always get it wrong. You know. I did a
workshop on time and ah, the participant called it meta shame,
shame for having Shane. I like this too much, y'all,
(49:35):
just too much. And I feel bad for feeling bad.
And now I feel bad. But it's a lot. And
what I invite us to do is say, of course,
I'm imperfect in this journey. That is one of the
actual beautiful parts of my humanity is that I'm imperfect,
that I'm gonna get it wrong, that I get to
(49:57):
experiment and mess up and try again. That is part
of the journey. I tell people all the time. I
run an entire organization. I dedicated the last decade of
my life to nothing but radical self love. And there
are days I do not feel very loving about myself.
I don't feel that. And the work, the work of
(50:17):
radical self love is can I love the Sonya that
doesn't feel loving toward herself until Sonya loves herself again.
I love you Sonya that feels not enough. I love
you Sonya that got it wrong. I love you Sonia
that don't feel like loving me. And the more that
I open up to that experience of love, of loving
the imperfect version of me, the more I return myself
(50:42):
to the stasis of love, to love as the foundation
of how I'm moving through life. There's so many things
in what you said there that if we can interrupt
that cycle, that meta shame cycle, it's so important because
what we end up doing is we go, Okay, I'm
gonna be on a journey of radical self love and
I'm not doing it good enough exactly, And so wherever
we can interrupt that cycle is so good. And then
(51:04):
that last piece about the collective compassion, and that that
grace for ourselves is again, it's that reciprocal cycle we
talked about earlier. The more that I have grace for myself,
the more I can offer you grace, And the more
I offer you grace, the more I have for myself,
you know. And so it really is that interdependence that
we talked about. And being on this journey alone is
like you said, it's too hard. Yeah, it's just not sustainable.
(51:27):
And I think if nothing else, what we can be
looking at in this world right now is we need
things that are sustainable. Yeah, we're running out of a
lot of stuff here. We might be figuring out what
what makes this journey possible for the long run, and
that's together. Yeah. Amen, Well, thank you so much for
taking the time to come on the show. I have
(51:49):
really enjoyed this conversation. I loved the book. There are
a ton of stories in the book I would have
loved to get to which we didn't. But we'll have
links in the show notes to your book. People can
find you online and and I hope people check you
out because it was a really great book and I've
really enjoyed this awesome. Thanks so much. I really appreciate
you inviting me. Thanks so much. Thank you. If what
(52:25):
you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
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(52:47):
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In case you're just recently joining us, or however long
you've been a listener of the show. You may not
realize we have years and years of incredible episodes in
our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've
decided to hand pick one of our favorites that may
be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth
another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Sonja
Renee Taylor. Is this thought I'm having giving me access
(00:24):
to peace, power, joy, ease or pleasure in my life? No?
Then why am I invested in thinking it? Welcome to
the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized
the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in,
(00:44):
garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true.
And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
(01:05):
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
(01:33):
Our guest on this episode is Sonya Renee Taylor, a
former national and international poetry Slam champion, author, educator, and activist.
Sonja is also the founder of the Body Is Not
an Apology, which is a digital media and education company
promoting radical self love and body empowerment as the foundational
tool for social justice and global transformation. Today, Sonia and
(01:57):
Eric discuss her book, The Body is Not an Apology.
The power of radical self love. Being consistent with your
habits is the engine that drives your transformation and growth.
Think about it. You can't feed your good wolf one
big meal a year and expect it to thrive. Consistent
steady bits of food fuel a good, healthy wolf, but
it's hard to create consistency. You might listen to this
(02:18):
podcast on a Thursday feel really inspired, but then life
takes over and by Saturday night you've forgotten all about it.
That's why I'm hosting a free live Q and a
town hall zoom meeting on Thursday, February where I'll be
answering your questions about how to take what you know
and turn it into what you consistently do. Had to
when you feed dot net slash town hall to register
(02:40):
for this free live session with me. During this town hall,
you'll ask me your specific question and I'll answer it.
It's that simple. So if you would like my help
creating some tools to deal with real life when it
gets in the way of your best intentions, let me
help you. If changing habits feels overwhelming, if you struggle
to make time for things because life is so busy,
if it's easy to get caught up with your to
(03:01):
do list, you feel consistently behind and taking time for
yourself feel selfish, then let's talk. The things we do
consistently are more important than the things we do once
in a while. In this free town hall session, you'll
ask me your questions and I'll help you find what
works for you, how you might look at things differently
and create the structure to help you do the thing
(03:22):
you really want to do. And if you don't have
a specific question, just come listen to the conversation. A
little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.
Truth is, you can make a lot of progress by
doing just a little bit. To register for this free
zoom session on February go to one you feed dot
net slash town hall. That's when you feed dot net
slash town hall. I hope I get the chance to
(03:44):
meet you there. Hi, Sonia, Welcome to the show. Hi,
thanks so much for having me here. It is a
real pleasure to have you on. We're going to be
discussing your book, The Body is Not an apology the
power of radical self love. But before we start with that,
we'll aren't like we always do with the Parable. In
the Parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her
(04:05):
grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. What is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.
He looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother,
which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed.
(04:29):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your life and in
the work that you do. Thank you. I think one
of the things that may be most excited about coming
on your podcast was this parable, which I find so
powerful and for me, I think my work really centers
on what is the relationship between the one we feed
(04:50):
as individuals and the one we feed as a collective.
I believe that we are innately good. We come here
with the good wolf. We come here with the wolf
that is inherently connected to kindness and love, compassion, connection,
and I think that we are immediately birthed into a
world that's like, Hey, here's this other wolf, and it's
(05:13):
the one we've been feeding for a long time, and
so we expect you to feed it too, and then
through that process we become split. But I don't think
we start off split. I think we become split as
a result of the conditions of our world, the conditions
of our families, the conditions of our own sort of
encounters with lack or not enoughness, and then that becomes
(05:36):
the wolf we feed. Yeah. I love that you talk
in your book early on about a concept of natural intelligence,
which I think speaks a little bit to what you're
saying here. Could you tell us a little bit more
about what you mean by natural intelligence? Yeah, So one
I don't want to take credit for a term that
is not mine. I was speaking in the book about
(05:57):
a quote that I had heard from author Marian Williamson,
who was comparing this idea of natural intelligence to an
oak tree, and that an acorn doesn't have to state
that it intends to become an oak tree, right, that
it is imbued with all the mechanisms cellularly that it
needs to become its highest version of itself. That's natural intelligence.
(06:20):
That we come here already wired for the highest versions
of ourselves, or the good wolf, if we're going to
compare to that parable, and then the work is not
about like how do I become the good wolf? The
work is how do I identify all of the things
that are obstructing the good wolf from flourishing into the
fullness of its being? What's in the obstruction of that acorn? Right,
(06:45):
if that acorn falls from a tree and lands on concrete,
then it will not be able to do its job.
But if that acorn falls from the tree and lands
and fertile soil, it will. And so how do we
create the conditions of fertile soil so that that which
is already cellularly within us can come to its fullest fruition. Yeah,
(07:05):
I love that idea. I practice Zen Buddhism, and we
talk about this all the time in Zen. You know,
it's just your original nature if you just when you
strip everything else away, it's what naturally emerges. And it's
always right here. It's always right here, exactly exactly. And
we all have so many different names for it. And
(07:26):
in my work I call that radical self love, you know,
but there are all kinds of terms, you know, mirroring
lives and calls it natural intelligence, you know. Buddhism calls
it Zen. Like we have all of these terms for it,
but it really does speak to what is innately in
us that wants to become manifest in the world. Yeah,
and I want to return to this idea of radical
(07:47):
self love, the term that you use. But before we
do that, why don't we start with the title of
the book, which is The Body is Not an Apology.
Share with us the story of where that idea is
birth from, because I think it's pretty powerful as a
story in and of itself, and I think it's pretty
central to everything that's going to come after it as
(08:07):
we talk totally. So I've had many iterations of lives.
I feel like I've lived many lives in this lifetime.
And one of those iterations was as a professional performance poet,
traveled around the world competing in poetry slams. And I
happened to be in a poetry slam in not Ville, Tinnacy,
getting ready to compete with a group of folks, a
(08:29):
team friends of mine from Washington, d C. And I
was in the room with one of my friends having
a conversation and we are having you know, I'm a Scorpio,
and so I'm notorious for having really deep conversations, whether
you want to be having them or not, It's just
kind of my nature. And so I'm having this intense
(08:51):
conversation with my teammate and she is sharing with me
that she is afraid that she might have an unintended pregnancy.
She's not sure yet. And we start to sort of
unfold this conversation and it becomes clear to me that
the person she thinks she might be pregnant by is
just kind of a casual, uh partner sometimes, not anyone
she's particularly invested in. And I am also as a
(09:14):
result of perhaps the scorpio placement as well as one
of my former lives as a sexuality health educator. I'm
a person who will get in your business from a
place of love, is the way I think about it.
Like I'm gonna ask you some uncomfortable questions, never from judgment,
but always from a here are the things that I
would explore in this Have you explored this? You know?
So I asked my friend why she was having unprotected
(09:37):
sex with this casual partners. She wasn't all that into
since we know how babies happen, And my my friend,
you know, answered me. I like to say that three
things were present in this conversation that created what I
like to think of as like a transformative portal, this
opening where all of a sudden life got rearranged. And
I think that those three things were radical honest, the
(09:59):
radical vulner city, and radical empathy. I asked a radically
honest question, but I asked it from a radically empathetic place.
I understood, and she responded to me in radical honesty
and radical vulnerability. And my friend had cerebral palsy and
she said that, you know, her disability made it difficult
already for her to be sexual, and so she didn't
(10:19):
feel entitled to ask this person to use a condom.
And when she said that, the words came through me,
they were not of me. It was like, oh, this
is coming from someplace else for this moment. And I
said to her, your body is not an apology. It's
not something you offer to people to say sorry for
my disability. And when I said that, something stuck. That
(10:39):
wasn't just for her, it was immediately for me too.
It was like, for all these ways that I too
have given myself away as an apology. I'm sorry for,
you know, my blackness. I'm sorry for my womanness. I'm
sorry for my loudness. I'm sorry for my fatness. I'm
sorry for my you know, depression. I'm so there are
all these things I'm sorry for. And there was this
(11:00):
moment where it was like, oh, what if there isn't
anything to apologize for? And so I said it, and
I was like, damn, that was really poetic. I'm gonna
have to do something with that. And so I decided
I was going to write a poem because I was
a poet, and so I wrote this poem called the
Body is Not an Apology, and I began performing it
and about six to eight months after I had written
(11:23):
the poem, I had this selfie in my phone that
I've been hiding. I really felt fabulous in it and
delicious and beautiful, and I had been afraid to share it.
And so someone one night in February of two thousand
and eleven shared a photo of a plus sized model
on my Facebook page and she was fabulous, and I
(11:43):
googled her and she had on the same exact kind
of outfit that I had on, and I had this
moment where I was like, Oh, this person is being
very unapologetic in their body and they're being paid for it,
all right, somebody paid her money to put her juicy
thighs on the internet without shame. And here I I'm
hiding this photo where I feel beautiful, but I feel
like I'm not supposed to. I'm going to share it.
(12:05):
And I asked people because I'm always recruiting other people
to do the things that I'm scared of with me,
and so I asked a strategy. Yeah, it's totally my
life strategy. It's been working, uh, And so I was like,
share a photo where you feel powerful and embodied in
your body. And the next morning, thirty people that tag
me and photos. I was like, this is awesome, Like
(12:26):
maybe we just need a space where we're allowed to, like,
where we have permission to be unapologetic in our bodies.
So I'm gonna make a Facebook page. And since I
have this poem called the Body is Not an Apology,
I guess I'll call the Facebook page the Body is
Not an Apology. And we started with thirty people and
then we have, you know, three hundred and three thousand
(12:46):
and thirty thousand, then writers, and then a company and
then a book deal, and then it has transformed my life. Well,
thank you for sharing that story. And maybe there's some
people when they hear that story they don't have an
interior feeling of knowing like, oh my god, that's me,
but I certainly do. And I'm a straight white male, right.
(13:09):
You know, as I read this book, it was so
clear to me that I don't know that you can
grow up in this culture and not have body issues
unless you're nearly perfect. And even then, I think it's
just so much a part of everything, absolutely, And I think,
you know, if we think you don't have body issues,
then you're probably defining body way too narrowly, which is
(13:32):
what I usually experienced people like, I mean issues with
my body, And then I'm like, mmmm, you know, what
were the messages that your father told you about your
manhood when you were a child, And you're like, oh,
I'm not allowed to cry? What do you mean do?
Where do tears come from? Friends? They come from your body? Right, Like?
So part of it is about really expanding and understanding.
(13:53):
When I say body, what I'm talking about is all
of the ways in which we do life in this
corporal vessel, and all of the relationships that we've been
told about that the relationships with our identity with gender,
our relationship with size, our relationship with race, our relationship
with age, our relationship with ability, our relationship with mental health.
(14:15):
All of those things are the body. And so when
I say the body is not an apology, I'm not
just talking about do you like what size genes you're wearing?
You know, I'm saying, what are the messages that we
have been told about our humanity based on these physical vessels?
And how has that stifled the ability for that acorn
(14:35):
to become the yoak tree? How is that squashing our
natural intelligence? How is that feeding the wolf we don't
want fed? Yeah, I think that is really well said.
And as you go through that list, you know, one
of those is aging. So even if somehow you get
to a certain age where like I've always felt great
about how I look in my body, you're like, well,
(14:57):
but just hang on because it's coming. It's coming with age.
Although as somebody who is just the upper side of fifty,
I will say that in addition, one of the great
things that age has brought is time to heal some
of those things so that I don't have the same
fears and challenges around it I had as a child.
(15:18):
And that's really what I would like to maybe spend
our time on, is what can people do to heal
the issues they have around their body, around their self image,
around all these different things. And I thought maybe we
would start with first saying, you know, you talk about
that what we want is radical self love, and I'd
(15:40):
like to contrast that with terms like self esteem and
self confidence as a starting place to sort of say
that that's not really what we're talking about. Yeah. Absolutely,
So I opened the book by being like, here's what
you're not going to get reading this book. You're not
gonna get help with your self esteem and your self confidence.
And the reason that I say that is one because
(16:02):
both of those things are very conditional experiences. How you
feel about yourself, how your confidence is situated, varies from
day to day depending on what's going on. Did I
get the promotion that I thought I was gonna get, right,
I feel great going into the meeting. I come out
feeling like, man, I'm just just this never works for me.
(16:22):
You know that, I'm in my story about I'm not
good enough, right. Confidence shock for the day. Self esteem,
it's like, you know, I feel important or good or fabulous.
You know. I often give the example of like I
put on a fly outfit. I'm like, yes, it's fabulous,
and I go outside and no one gives me a
compliment on my outfit. That day, I'm like, wait a minute,
(16:42):
maybe I'm not as cute as I thought I was.
I'm gonna have to wear this again, all right, and
so so these things that are conditional and externalized and
change with the weather, right and again. Radical self love
is not fickle in that way. It's not conditional. It's
not determined by whether or not it is externally validated
(17:04):
by the outside world, the same way an acorn doesn't
become a fig tree because somebody outside said you look
better as a fig tree, right, Like it is wired
inside of itself to be an oak tree. We are
wired inside of ourselves to have radical self love. And
when I talk about it, I'm talking about that inherent
(17:24):
state of enoughness that we arrived here with that unconditional
certainty that we were amazing. I think I've said this
on every single talk I've ever done, is you've never
seen a self loathing toddler, because I think it's an
important marker for us to remember that there is a
point through which we passed where we were embodied in
(17:47):
our enoughness, and then something shifted right. And so if
we recognize that we came here embodied in our enoughness,
then the question isn't like, oh did it lead eve No,
I mean, just from a physics standpoint, it couldn't leave.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred. Then
(18:08):
it's still there. It's just doing something different. What is
it doing different? It's being usurped by the messages of
our external world that say that we're not enough, and
that profit off of us really deeply believing that we're
not enough. And so radical self love is different from
those things because it is already there. It is the foundation.
(18:28):
And then the other thing I think is really important
for me about why it's not self esteem and self
confidence is because I love folks, and I love what
I do, and I actually want people to have good
self esteem and self confidence. But I would not devote
the amount of time and effort that I spend in
my life tending to people's individual self esteem and self confidence.
I'll get anything out of that. What I do get
(18:50):
something out of is recognizing that there is a society
that is rooted in our messages about who is good
enough and who is not good enough, and that as
much as we internalize those messages, we reinforce that system
of not enoughness for other bodies. So the body that
you are judging yourself against about whether or not you
(19:12):
are enough is someone else's body, which means you are
in the way of them being able to be in
the fullness of their radical self love. As long as
we believe that certain bodies, that white bodies are more
valuable than black bodies on a structural level, than I
as a black woman, am always going to be in
(19:32):
a harder road towards accessing my radical self love. As
long as we believe that neurotypical bodies are more valuable
than neuro atypical bodies or you know, bodies that we
say don't have mental health issues, as long as we
believe that I have a harder road to radical self love,
and so I do this work. The radical part of
(19:53):
it is that we wake up to this system that
we've all been indoctrinated in, and we get out of
our own way, and we get out of each other's
way so that we can all grow into the highest
versions of ourselves. That's why it's radical self love. Right,
And you talk a lot in the book about I'm paraphrasing,
(20:14):
but there's a real two way street or a mutuality
about this, right. It's by learning to both love myself
and love others. Those things they mutually reinforce or what's
the opposite of reinforced tear down, Right, the more that
I learned to love me, the more I'm able to
love you, And the more I'm able to love you,
(20:34):
the more I'm able to love me. It's a it's
a good thing versus. The more I judge myself, the
more I judge you. The more I judge you, I
end up judging myself. These things play off each other absolutely.
I mean, we're all in an interdependent relationship, and so
you know, we go into these often, this kind of work.
You know that people often lump my work into like
(20:55):
personal development work, and you know, I can see why
they do that, except I'm very clear or that I
do social justice work. I'm just very clear that society
is made up of people, and so people have to
change in order for society to change. And so inside
of this story in our current society is the story
of individualism. That it's all about I can change, and
(21:16):
then I changed by myself, and then my life improves,
as if our lives are not intertwined with one another,
as if we are not dependent on each other in
hopes of ways. And so as I divest from this
system that says that I am not enough, I become
aware of all the other people it is said is
(21:37):
not enough. And if I believe that that system is
lying to me, then that system must be lying about
all those other bodies too. And the only way for
me to actually be able to live in my radical
self love without obstruction in the world is to remove
all of the obstructions that tell us that we're not enough,
not just the ones that impact me the because eventually
(22:01):
another one will pop up that will be obstructing your
lane again. And so we actually are tied to each
other in this journey of really living into the full
possibility of radical self love for ourselves and in the world.
(22:36):
I've started sending a couple of text messages after each
podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations
to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free, and
listeners have told me that these texts really helped to
pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important.
When you get a text for me during your day
to day life, it's one more thing that helps you
(22:57):
further bridge that gap between what you know and what
you do. Positive messages when you need them for me
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a few times a week via text, go to one
you feed dot net slash text and sign up for free.
You say that moving from body shame to radical self
love is a road of inquiry and insight. Say a
(23:20):
little bit about those two words, inquiry and insight. What
is it we need to do. We got to ask
ourselves questions. We have to be willing to explore that
which is unexplored in us. So much of the experience
of body shame, so much of the experience of body
based oppression, exists because we don't ask questions about it.
We don't ask questions about our own thoughts. They operate
(23:42):
on autopilot inside of us. You know. I have to
give the example of you go to a dressing room
and you're trying on some genes and they don't fit,
and the immediate thought is that there's something wrong with
your body. The immediate thought is, oh, my gosh, of gain.
And then they were in this cycle of of judgment
about our bodies. Right, That happens probably a billion times
(24:04):
a day around the world, with very little inquiry into
the story that lives behind it, the story about why
I judge my body, rather than being like, why don't
make these James and more expensive sizes? Right, and immediately
I take on the ownership of fault. There are all
of these ways in which our ideas and beliefs about
(24:25):
our bodies just go uninterrogated. And so inside the book
I talk about in order to really begin this journey
of radical self love, you have to engage in what
I call it thinking doing being process. The first thing
is that we actually we have to become aware of
our thoughts. Oh, here's this self deprecating, judgmental thought I
think every single day about myself. Then at this point
(24:47):
I don't even ask myself about it, just runs on autopilot.
What happens when I raised that to consciousness? What happens
when I asked myself questions about it? Well? Who told
me that I'm supposed to believe that? Who told me
that this is true? Why do I believe what they said?
Why am I applying that into my life? One of
(25:07):
my favorite questions is does this give me access to peace, power, joy,
ease or pleasure in my life? Is this thought I'm
having giving me access to peace, power, joy, ease or
pleasure in my life? No? Then why am I invested
in thinking it? Oh, let's let's get into that, because
each time you do that, some new insight shows up.
(25:27):
That's where the insight comes up. It's like I had
an inquiry and then it was like, oh, right, because
that's what my mother used to say to me. And
so I'm actually just talking to myself in the voice
of my mother. Oh that's what that is. Okay. Well,
now that it's at consciousness, I actually have a choice
about how I move forward. Once we raise the thing
to consciousness, then we are at choice about how we
(25:48):
engage it. And so from that point I can say,
what would an opposite action that did give me access
to peace, power, joy, pleasure, ease, Look like, okay, can
I take that action today? Just today? And each time
we do that repetition that thinking, raising a thing to consciousness,
choosing a new action, raising a thing to consciousness, choosing
(26:09):
new action, the repetition of that creates a new way
of being. All of a sudden, we stop being in
the practice of it, and it just is how we
show up. So now that self deprecating thought that I
used to think all the time just doesn't show up,
or it's so low now that it doesn't impact how
I move. And now when I see it, I recognize
and I'm like, that's not even my voice. Child boom,
(26:30):
be quiet, and then I go on about my life. Right.
And so that's the process of inquiry and insight that
we have to engage in if we're going to take
this journey back to removing those obstructions that are in
front of our radical self love. I love that loop
there of of thinking, taking a different action, finding our
way into a new way of being. It reminds me
(26:52):
of what happens in recovery from addiction. Right is the
thoughts are there, I must have a drugs right, and
but I take a different action. I examine those thoughts.
Why am I thinking that what's happening? I take a
different action, and over time I live my way into
a new way of being where those thoughts don't have
(27:13):
so much power. There's a great line in the introduction
to your book, I cannot pronounce the woman who wrote it.
Could you pronounce her name for me? Yes? Ie gioma
A Luo, thank you. She has a line in there
basically that an epiphany doesn't undo lifetime of conditioning. And
I love that idea that, like, we can have these
insights and yet it takes a while to live these
(27:35):
things out of our system. So I think that process
of insight and inquiry is really powerful. Let's talk about
the three pieces. And when we say piece, we mean
like peace as in the you know, the peace sign,
not pieces of pizza, although we could mean that because
pizza pizza is good too, but talk about the three Yes, absolutely,
(28:00):
let's talk about the three pieces. Yeah. So again I
talked about, like, what are the foundational things that we've
got to kind of grapple with when we decide we
want to take this journey. So if the thinking doing
being is about like how do I begin to live
a radical self love process? How do I stay on
the road, this is about how do I even get
on the road. In order to get on the road,
(28:22):
there are three things we have to make peace with.
The first thing we have to make peace with is
not understanding. We live in a world that says you
should know everything, and if you don't know everything, something's
wrong with you. Everything should be google able, right, And
so there's this relationship to the instant access of knowledge
that forgets the reality of the mystery of humanity, and
(28:42):
that forgets the reality of lived experience that you can't
know because it's not your journey. As soon as we
just give up needing to understand everything, we have a
different kind of expansiveness. Some things just are because they
are oh wow, ah feels really uncomfortable, and it stops
(29:03):
me from having to feel like I actually can control
the whole world, because it can't. I can't control everything.
And if I get that that there are things I
just don't understand, it creates some access around there because
once we recognize that we don't understand everything, then we
have the ability to make peace with difference, and making
peace with differences about saying, right, there are things in
this world that are just different than me. And we
(29:27):
have so long equated difference with danger, difference with bad,
difference with not belonging that it has created a world
where we are desired to homogenize ourselves. But it's totally
unrealistic and impossible. Right, It's actually not possible to be
homogeneous as human beings, and that we don't expect that
(29:48):
in any other part of the natural world. I did
not see your dog and be like chihuahuas. Why are
all dogs not air dales? Like? Right, I've never looked
at a Saint Bernard and been like, you should be
a poodle? Right, I expect there to be difference. I
don't look at oak trees and think that they should
(30:08):
be you know, rose bushes. There is natural diversity in
the world that we value and need and see as beautiful,
and then when we bring it to humans, were like, Nope,
we don't want that. Diversity definitely right. And so the
invitation to make peace with difference, which again starts with
making peace with not understanding. It's like, oh, there's beauty
(30:31):
in this thing I don't know anything about that's totally
different than me, but brings new insight, that brings new perspective,
that brings new possibility. How do I let that in?
Because once we do all of those things, then that
helps us get to the third piece, which is making
peace with our own bodies. Because if I can accept
(30:51):
that there are things that don't understand, and I can
accept that difference is an innate and absolutely valuable part
of human diversity, then I can accept it in myself.
Then I can say, oh, here are the ways that
I am different, That my body is different than the
stories that have been told about what a body should
(31:12):
look like. Here are the ways in which my brain
operates differently than what I've been told about what a
body should look like. And how do I meet that
without judgment? How do I meet that without making myself
bad or wrong? Because if I can meet that without
making myself bad or wrong. I am opening the door
to return to a radical self love way of being.
You talk about radical love being a process of de indoctrination.
(31:37):
You know that we look unflinchingly at our current set
of beliefs about ourselves and the world and explore them.
What are some of these beliefs about ourselves in the
world that we need to let go of? Yeah, so
I think there are some that are very universal, and
then I think there are some that are particular depending
on the body that you inhabit in the world. Right,
(31:59):
But all of those things I really do believe. Like,
if we start with whatever story is attached to it,
I'm not enough for I'm too much and whatever it
is that wherever that road takes you, Right, I'm not
pretty enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not rich enough,
I'm not whatever the enough is. That is the first
place to look for. Oh, where have I been indoctrinated?
(32:22):
Because the story of enough is just not true? Right,
Like the acorn is enough to become an oak tree.
You don't have to do nothing to do it. It
is enough. It came here enough, and that's true for
us too. So the question is where is this story
not enoughness impacting my life. And wherever that not enoughnessness
is a place of indoctrination, It is a place where
(32:43):
you've been told that because if it's not true, then
it means we got it from someplace that isn't us.
Then I can start being in my investigation and my
inquiry where is this message coming from. I think that's
a great idea. Let's take the stories of not enough
and follow that. Where I think this get it's hard
is that a lot of the not enough is because
(33:05):
there's something we want that's out in the world that
we feel like I'm not enough to get for me. Right.
Growing up as a boy, when you're a young man,
to be too skinny is just as bad as being
too big, right, You're just you're just a little whimp, right,
You're you know, scrawny. And so my thing was no woman,
no girls ever gonna like me. There's a broad I'm
(33:28):
not enough, but that I'm not enough ends in a
very specific thing. I'm not enough to be loved by
somebody that I would be interested in, right, And those
things seem crazy real when you're stuck in them. Absolutely,
they absolutely seem crazy real. That's why the work is
(33:49):
to be in the confrontation of it, right like that,
the work of radical self love is to choose to
go slay the dragon under your bid the thing that
seems is really real. The premise that I am proposing,
and this is the foundation of whether or not you
take the journey or you don't, right is the premise
I'm proposing is it's not real. It is not real
(34:12):
that being skinny makes you unlovable, no matter how much
it feels, no matter how real it feels, and it
does feel real, and we do live in a society
that we'll reinforce that belief absolutely, And what I assure
you is it isn't real. And the only way to
really know that is to go and test it out.
(34:32):
And so the invitation that I give to people to
this work is, Look, you're living in this construct or
right now, and it already sucks, right like, it already sucks.
It sucks thinking that you're not good enough, It sucks
thinking that you're never gonna be loved. It sucks. And
so if it's gonna suck anyway, if it's gonna be
hard anyway, if it's gonna be hard, be hard and
(34:53):
test the thing that is likely to get you closer
to your own freedom. If I'm gonna do hard, I'd
rather do hard in service toward my own freedom. And
I think this is something they talk about in recovery too,
Like recovery isn't easy, right, but it's like, what do
I get? What might I get if I just trust
that it's possible. That's the invitation of this book. Can
(35:15):
you just maybe try the experiment and see where it
takes you? Yeah, And I think that's really powerful because
the belief starts with just take care whatever, I'm not
ex enough to be loved, and we then believe that,
and so then we start acting that way in all
sorts of ways that make it really likely that we're
(35:36):
going to prove our theory true exactly. We it's a
it's you know, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. And again,
like I said, we live in a world that's happy
to validate that for us. We are very very profitable
inside of that belief. We're very manipulable inside of that belief,
and so it's going to have to take some daring
and I think, you know, various people in the world
(35:57):
are offering like the you don't have to sort out
the fact that isn't true yet. You just have to
be willing to try a new thing and see. Right, like,
I'm gonna hold the belief that it isn't true, that
I wrote a whole book to tell you it isn't true.
Now just play what it didn't see right, that's the invitation.
That's the invitation. There's four pillars of practice. So we've
(36:43):
talked about how to even get on the journey. We
talked about this thinking, doing and being process. And then
there are four pillars of practice that I thought we
could talk about because I think if we hit those
four we cover a lot of ground of various points
I'd like to hit. So let's start with what the
four pillars of practice are. These will not be an order.
(37:04):
I'm gonna say them, and then i'll order them later,
collect a compassion, unapologetic action. I'll give them to your
mind matters and taking out the toxic, taking out the toxic,
thank you, and we just send them backwards. So the
person was taking out the toxic. And so first, just
to explain why I have such hard time remembering my
own pillars, is when I wrote the book, I wrote
tin tools to radical self love, and these were one
(37:27):
are the practical applications that we can do every single
day that help us practice build this radical self love muscle.
Live into this. And after I wrote them, I realized
that they each fell under a category, and I was like, oh, well,
this helps people understand that the sort of like subheading
of these categories, and so so I always forget the subheadings,
but I remember the tools. So anyway, taking out the toxic,
(37:51):
it's really about first if we're inside of this thinking
doing being paradigm. And remember, all of these things are
like scaffolding of the building, Right, I gotta build the layer,
and then I build this layer. Right, so we've built
the layer, we understand that in order to take this journey,
we've got to be in a thinking doing being processed.
Here's your first thinking project taking out the toxic? Where
am I on a regular basis taking in messages that
(38:15):
reinforce my belief that I'm not enough, that reinforced my
belief that I need to be in comparison to assign
my own worth and value, that reinforce my idea that
somehow I'm deficient and failing. Where where is that message
coming from? And how do I turn it down? How
do I find the volume nob on that and turn
it down? Some of that is literally the stuff we
(38:37):
pay for. We're in a grocery store picking up a
rag magazine that's gonna tell us all the ways in
which we need to do this, that and the other
to be desirable, and the thing we need to buy
to be desirable. And why haven't we become desirable yet?
And maybe if we did this particular thing, then we'll
be desirable. And we just gave somebody ten dollars to
(38:58):
deface us in the pages of their magazine, right, And
so where am I taking in those messages? Where am
I watching things that reinforce the message that somehow I'm
not smart enough, not capable enough, not beautiful, whatever that is?
And how do I start raising that to consciousness and
then removing some of that? And then also where am
(39:22):
I reinforcing that message inside of my own relationship with myself?
Where do I notice that I just immediately go to shame,
to body shaming myself, to talking disparagingly about myself. You know,
I saw a mean one time that said, if you
talk to a friend the way that you talk to yourself.
How long would y'all stay friends? Right? And I was
like absolutely, absolutely, And so how do we begin to say, Oh,
(39:48):
how do I how do I have a more loving
dialogue with myself? And where is the toxic way in
which I'm relating to myself? And then how do I
do a fast of that? And maybe that's just for
one day. I'm turning off every time I hear something
that is trying to sell me a reason I'm deficient.
I just cut it off. How many times did I
(40:08):
have to cut off the radio? How many times that
I have to turn off the TV? How many times
did I have to get off the social media platform? Right?
So many? And again, once you raise that to consciousness,
you're like, oh, this is what I've been doing to myself? Yeah, totally.
I often joke that I generally don't watch TV because
I feel so susceptible to it. Just show me one
(40:30):
beer commercial with a lot of beautiful people, and I go,
it's not that I even want It doesn't make me
want a beer. It just makes me go, why is
my life not like that? And home instant I have
noticed how susceptible in certain mind states I am to
that kind of stuff or can be. And the truth
of the matter is like it works. That's why they
do it. Like if the beer commercial thought you weren't
(40:52):
going to be susceptible, it would not be dumping millions
of dollars into acts in that way. It knows it works,
and so we have to be as consciously aware of
how it works as the advertisers. Right, that's the work.
So that's the taking out the toxic. How do we
become aware of what it is the messages that were
being fed, and then how do we start auditing that
(41:13):
so that we can consciously decrease it. Number two is
mind matters. Yes, And so if we've done this thing
to say, all right, I'm gonna take out all this
trash that I've been dumping in my ears and eyeballs
every day. Now that that space is clear, I've created
some room, what do I want to put in it?
What am I trying to cultivate in that space? Because
(41:35):
like any tiled patch of grass, if you let it
go long enough, weeds will pop up. Right, And so
my matter says, all right, now that I've done that,
what do I consciously want to begin replacing it with?
And you know, in the book, I begin talking about
meditation and meditations power to really begin to create space
(41:56):
and shift our neuropathways to actually get us to start
thinking differently. If we're talking about how do we get
to that being part of the thinking doing being process,
meditation is one of those powerful ways to get us
to the being part by sitting and practicing, letting that
clutter that comes in our brains leave, leave us right,
(42:18):
and then what what do we want to put in
that space? It also is about challenging some of the
paradigms that that toxic thinking has had us in. So
where am I stuck in binary thinking? Where am I
stuck inside of things are either good or bad? I'm
awful or I'm here you know our awfuler, I'm an angel,
I'm a villain, or I'm a hero, i am a victim,
or I'm a you know, or a perpetrator. Right, We're
(42:40):
all inside of these really binary ways of thinking that
limit the scope of our full humanity. How do we
start to challenge those when they come up? How do
we see that and then offer ourselves a more expansive
version of our own humanity so that we have a
wider feel to play in as we explore leaving these
toxic message is behind and beginning to learn how to
(43:02):
hear our own radical self love voice. That's the mind
matters part. Unapologetic action is next. So if we've taken
out the toxic, we've seen the things we've been dumping
in that aren't good for us, and we've started planning
some new seeds. Right now, it's time to do something
right now, we're in the doing part. We dealt with
the mind, We dealt with the thinking. What's the doing?
(43:23):
What are the actions that I can take every day?
How do I become reconnected to my own body? How
do I reclaim joy? And in this vessel that I've
gotten so many messages, that's deficient. Right. I talked about
in the book being a kid and when you're a
child in the teacher rang the veil for recess. I
(43:44):
don't know about you, but I like grew wings in kindergarten.
I grew wings and I flew outside. That's how fast
I needed to get outside and play. And there was
a joy to going and moving and being embodied. And
then and somehow we were stripped of that joy and
(44:04):
it became drudgery, moving our bodies became punishment. Moving our
bodies became the thing that we paid twenty four hour
fitness twenty dollars a month to never do because we
never feel like going right like it became it became
this really tense, visceral, antagonistic relationship. And so, what would
it look like to reclaim joy in my body? What
(44:27):
would it looked like to reclaim pleasure in my body?
What would it look like to reclaim connection in my body?
And how do I take action to do that on
a daily basis? How do I replace those old activities
of self deprecation with things that actually bring me a
lot of joy? And so basically all of these things,
these tools, I created a workbook where people can actually
(44:48):
practice putting them in place, doing them on a daily basis.
And so inside of the workbook and give us an
assignment to rediscover the games that brought us the most
joyous kids, like when to the last time you played
red Light Green Light? When is the last time you
played how do you go seek with a bunch of
adults outside? And so there's this invitation to return to
(45:12):
our site of joy, to reclaim that for ourselves, And
so an unapologetic action. That's what we're asking. The other
piece inside of unapologetic action is about, now that we
recognize the stories we've been telling ourselves about how deficient
we are, the stories that reinforce the larger societal and
doctor nations. Now that we recognize those things, how do
(45:35):
we create a new story? How do I literally tell
myself a different story than the story I've been telling
myself historically? And you know, again, inside the workbook, I
give us the opportunity to actually practice writing a new story.
To take that thing that was the most shameful that
I had the most judgment about myself, the story of
being the skinny boy who was never gonna be loved?
(45:55):
How do I turn that story around in a literal
way and write write myself an ending that is more
aligned with my truth? And then how do I practice
them living into that right? And so as we exercise
these muscles, we create the conditions for medical self love
not to feel like a distant thing, but to fill
up close to us, like a thing we can practice
and live into on a daily basis. Yeah, I love
(46:18):
that there's so many good things in there. I mean,
I think about stories, and I've talked about this on
the podcast so many times we're making them up. So
if we're making them up, why on earth would we
not choose ones to back to your your earlier question like,
is this belief or this thing giving me more peace, joy, ease, power?
If my stories aren't doing that, Once we sort of
(46:40):
really look at it and go, oh, I'm making meaning
out of it. I'm the one that's creating all this.
Why not? Why not? If I'm going to write a story,
I might as well write the one where it's a
happy ending. That's right, right as well? That's right? And
then the last one, and this one I know is
really important to the whole pick sure, which is why
(47:00):
I wanted to make sure we got to it. Is
collective compassion. Talk about this one. Yeah, So you know
I say in the book, like you could do everything,
you could do all the things. I said, you can
do all the tools. If you don't do these last
two tools, you're gonna struggle in this journey. You're gonna
find yourself like on a side of a of a
(47:21):
steep heel that's mud trying to climb up. Collective compassion
is one that this is not an individual journey, which
I said at the beginning of our conversation that this
is not about individualism, that this is about interdependence. And
the truth of the matter is, you have an entire
societal infrastructure of systems and organizations and edifices that are
(47:46):
designed to keep you not feeling enough, that are designed
to make sure that you don't actually think that you
can affect change in your own life or in the world.
They are intentionally created as such. So if you've if
you're gonna just do battle with that jugger, not by yourself,
You're gonna be sadly mistaken. It's gonna be very, very difficult,
(48:07):
near impossible to be able to maintain any kind of
sense of power against that. And so we need each
other in this. We have to be in a collective
experience where we are battling those voices, not just me
up against the machine, but us against it. Right. And
(48:28):
so the more that you find your people, the more
that you find the people who are in alignment with
with the journey that you're interested in taking, far easier,
the journey becomes so much more doable and sustainable, the
journey becomes and so collective compassion requires us to find
community and to do this work in community again, because
(48:51):
our liberation is tied up together, our radical self love
journey is tied up together. And then the last piece,
and this is tool number ten, final to the most
important thing you're gonna do. If you do everything and
you fail to really live into this, you will find
yourself back in this old paradigm. And that is give
yourself some grace that we actually have to recognize that
(49:15):
this is not a journey of perfection. And as soon
as we're inside of a conversation of perfection, we're outside
of a conversation of radical self love. As soon as
you are judging yourself because you got it wrong. See,
I always get it wrong. You know. I did a
workshop on time and ah, the participant called it meta shame,
shame for having Shane. I like this too much, y'all,
(49:35):
just too much. And I feel bad for feeling bad.
And now I feel bad. But it's a lot. And
what I invite us to do is say, of course,
I'm imperfect in this journey. That is one of the
actual beautiful parts of my humanity is that I'm imperfect,
that I'm gonna get it wrong, that I get to
(49:57):
experiment and mess up and try again. That is part
of the journey. I tell people all the time. I
run an entire organization. I dedicated the last decade of
my life to nothing but radical self love. And there
are days I do not feel very loving about myself.
I don't feel that. And the work, the work of
(50:17):
radical self love is can I love the Sonya that
doesn't feel loving toward herself until Sonya loves herself again.
I love you Sonya that feels not enough. I love
you Sonya that got it wrong. I love you Sonia
that don't feel like loving me. And the more that
I open up to that experience of love, of loving
the imperfect version of me, the more I return myself
(50:42):
to the stasis of love, to love as the foundation
of how I'm moving through life. There's so many things
in what you said there that if we can interrupt
that cycle, that meta shame cycle, it's so important because
what we end up doing is we go, Okay, I'm
gonna be on a journey of radical self love and
I'm not doing it good enough exactly, And so wherever
we can interrupt that cycle is so good. And then
(51:04):
that last piece about the collective compassion, and that that
grace for ourselves is again, it's that reciprocal cycle we
talked about earlier. The more that I have grace for myself,
the more I can offer you grace, And the more
I offer you grace, the more I have for myself,
you know. And so it really is that interdependence that
we talked about. And being on this journey alone is
like you said, it's too hard. Yeah, it's just not sustainable.
(51:27):
And I think if nothing else, what we can be
looking at in this world right now is we need
things that are sustainable. Yeah, we're running out of a
lot of stuff here. We might be figuring out what
what makes this journey possible for the long run, and
that's together. Yeah. Amen, Well, thank you so much for
taking the time to come on the show. I have
(51:49):
really enjoyed this conversation. I loved the book. There are
a ton of stories in the book I would have
loved to get to which we didn't. But we'll have
links in the show notes to your book. People can
find you online and and I hope people check you
out because it was a really great book and I've
really enjoyed this awesome. Thanks so much. I really appreciate
you inviting me. Thanks so much. Thank you. If what
(52:25):
you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making
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(52:47):
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Host
Eric Zimmer
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