September 30, 2025 • 29 mins
Episode 115 Stop Peeling: Escaping the Endless Cycle of Self-Improvement
Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of "Your Inner Advocate," Kimen Petersen explores the pitfalls of the self-help journey, using the metaphor of peeling back the layers of an onion. Kimen shares his personal story of hitting rock bottom, diving into self-improvement, and eventually realizing that the endless pursuit of fixing oneself can become a trap. Through anecdotes, quotes, and practical advice, he encourages listeners to embrace imperfection, live in the present, and trust that true freedom comes not from constant self-fixing, but from living fully and accepting oneself as whole—even with all the layers still intact.
Timeline Summary
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00:00 – 01:00 Introduction to the podcast and its purpose; Kimen sets the stage for the episode’s theme.
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01:00 – 03:00 The “onion” metaphor: the endless cycle of self-improvement and peeling back layers.
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03:00 – 07:00 Kimen’s personal rock bottom: struggles with depression, anxiety, and self-defeating thoughts.
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07:00 – 12:00 The self-help journey begins: books, seminars, and lifestyle changes.
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12:00 – 16:00 Progress and setbacks: learning about the ego, inner critic, and the pattern of always finding new problems to fix.
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16:00 – 20:00 The realization: freedom is found in living, not in endless fixing; shifting perspective to embrace life as it is.
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20:00 – 25:00 The Curiosity Practice: using curiosity instead of reactivity to process triggers and emotions.
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25:00 – 30:00 Childhood memories and formative experiences: understanding the roots of feeling “not important enough.”
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30:00 – 35:00 Forgiveness and self-compassion: practical exercises for healing and letting go.
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35:00 – End Final insights: stop making healing your identity, live in the present, and remember you were never broken. Closing thoughts and call to action.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Welcome to Your Inner Advocate,a podcast by Kimen Petersen,
formerly Conversations with Kimen.
This podcast is a space forinspiration, soulful insights,
and meaningful life lessons.
Your host, Kimen Petersen drawsfrom personal stories and powerful
conversations with remarkablepeople to help illuminate your path.
These episodes reflect his livedexperiences and thoughtful perspectives,
(00:25):
all aimed at encouraging you to live lifewith greater authenticity, joy, and ease.
Your inner advocate is here tohelp you tune in, trust your inner
wisdom, and move through life withmore clarity, flow, and fulfillment.
Welcome back.
(00:46):
Today I'm gonna talk about one ofthe traps around the self-help genre,
and it starts with, maybe it's time tostop peeling back the layers, because
here's the truth, we are onions.
Every one of us, and if you've everbeen on a self-improvement journey,
(01:08):
you'll know that every time you peelaway one layer, another one shows up
and on and on and on, andit feels like it never ends.
There's a quote that I love,you know, I'm all about quotes.
(01:29):
What you look for, you'll find.
And if you're always looking forproblems, you'll never run out of them.
But today I want, I wanna sharewith you my self-help journey.
How I nearly got trapped in an endlesscycle of fixing myself and the powerful
ship that changed everything for me.
(01:51):
And maybe just, maybe it mightchange something for you too.
Part one, my rock bottom.
So in my twenties,
I was overweight.
(02:11):
I was depressed, suffering from anxiety.
I had an incrediblyself-defeating attitude.
My inner dialogue was so loud
and I was to the point ofbeing completely hopeless.
(02:35):
That was the description ofwhat my daily life was like.
There's another quote, of course,rock bottom became the solid
foundation on which I rebuilt myself.
(02:56):
I did.
I swam in hopelessness every day.
I felt like at best, I was displacing acertain amount of air that I would never
accomplish anything that I never wave.
I would never find my way throughthis despair that I lived in.
(03:19):
I had very few friends and I norelationships because who would want
to be with somebody who's that low?
The funny thing aboutrock bottom, though I
is eventually when you're lyingon the bottom, I used to say,
(03:41):
when you're lying in a ditch.
On your back
in the darkness, when you lookup, all you can see is the stars,
and that's when I knew Ihad to change something.
(04:05):
Part two, I was diving into self-help.
So I think I started with like the veryfirst one, uh, very first book was How
to Win Friends and Influence People.
Um, it taught me some good thingsabout human beings, like getting to
(04:27):
know their names or, or rememberingtheir names was extremely important.
And even better if you couldremember their birth dates.
From there, I went on to reading allkinds of books about self-improvement,
about what it means to be human.
(04:50):
I started looking at some otherthings that were going on.
I was incrediblyoverweight and outta shape.
I remember one day I decided I wasgonna just try to run one block.
And I could barely do it,
but I decided I would runthat one block every day.
(05:16):
I looked at my diet and I, Iwas drinking probably too much
alcohol and eating too much.
Really not healthy food.
I don't know if I recognizeda vegetable at that time.
So I started changing the way I ate.
Cutting back on drinking.
Making sure I got proper sleep because Iwould, when I was ruminating at night, the
(05:40):
noise in my head was so loud that I wouldbe up till two or three in the morning
just going over likehow hopeless life was.
So I started sleeping, uh, much better.
I. I, I went to, started going tosome seminars, some really life
(06:04):
changing stuff, which started makingme see things a little bit different.
So I got heavily involved
and it was like piece by piece.
I started fixing all these thingsthat I thought were broken in me.
(06:26):
And slowly over time Istarted seeing progress.
I was digging deeper into me and solvingproblems, and then absolutely elated
When I got through all these, startedbreaking down the walls around me.
(06:50):
Started having more people inmy life, getting more active.
Making positive decisions for my life.
But the funny thing is, as what wasgoing through this self-help genre, I
(07:11):
mean, we're talking years into this.
Yeah, it was interesting, uh,in this genre I learned that I
learned about the ego or the senseof identity or the inner critic.
'cause I think before that Ithought that negative conversation
in, in my head was me, actuallyme, like the truth of who I was.
(07:35):
But I learned that it's kindof an aspect of who we are, but
it's not exactly who we are.
And it's more designed to, to like keepus safe, keep us from getting hurt,
but it does that by keeping us small.
So if you don't stick youryour neck out, you're never
(07:56):
gonna get your head lopped off.
So, so you collapse into yourself andyou spend a life of being as small
as you can, being completely unseen.
Completely unheard
and maybe that's where depression came in.
(08:20):
But I'm, as I'm going through it, I'mlearning these amazing things and I'm
learning ways to deal with this stuff.
I remember course I was doing, it wastalking about the inner dialogue or the
negative inner critic and said, why don'tyou just say thank you for sharing and
you go and do what you need to do anyway.
And I thought, wow, that's empowering.
So over time I found strategyafter strategy to deal with things.
(08:44):
I opened up my eyes and I realized thatmaybe I'm not as bad as I thought I was.
And like I said, every time I likebecame enlightened at some moment,
like I released all this stuff andI was like, wow, this is great.
The elation of peeling a layerlasts for a short period of time.
(09:09):
Because if you're always looking forproblems, you're always gonna find them.
And that's what I realized, thatevery time I peeled back a layer,
there was another deeper layer
and I worked really hard to peel backanother layer and there was another
layer and so on and so on and so on.
It was like a pattern
(09:31):
freedom would follow, and thenthe next problem would arise.
And it typically, it really felt endless
and I realized if I leave this unchecked,I could spend the rest of my life
fixing myself and never really living
(09:57):
because the freedom is not in thefixing, the freedom is in the living.
So I shift my per perspectiveand I decided it was time,
time to stop obsessing over fixing me.
(10:17):
I,
you see, I really realizedthat I was no longer depressed.
I no longer hated myself,and I was no longer hopeless.
In fact.
I was functioning.
I was living life.
(10:38):
I was out there, maybe not completelyon the playing field like I am now, but
I was out there and I realized that I
need to stop this cycle.
I realize that you don't need to beperfect to have a beautiful life.
(10:59):
In fact, some of those imperfectionsare what make us the perfect us.
So I decided that it, it was time to stop.
And instead of searching for whatwrong, what was wrong, I trusted
that if something bubbled tothe surface that truly needed my
(11:20):
attention, it would, it would rise up.
And when it did, Iwould deal with it then.
And then I would re return to living.
And this probably this, this insightprobably came from when I was
doing, uh, the pasana meditation,which is incredibly intense.
(11:43):
Uh, it's rumored to be the meditationthat the sitar Gama, uh, achieved
enlightenment during this meditation.
And it's a sensory based meditationwhere you're sitting and you're, you're
scanning, you're paying attention to eachpart of your body, so you're scanning
through your whole body until somethingarises a sensation of some sort, and you
(12:06):
sit and you watch it and you don't react.
This is based on equanimity, non-reactive,and they say, if you can sit there
and just watch this and not react,
then it may just dissipate, disappear.
And then you're free.
And this was kind of the idea of this islike, I trust that if there's something,
(12:31):
if I suddenly have access to something,
that I won't just react,
that I'll stop and I'll really look at it
and I'll do what I need to do.
To work through that so I canmove on to being happy in my life.
(12:59):
This is what I call theCuriosity Pro practice.
When something arises, when somebody sayssomething, something happens, you miss
a bus or whatever it is, something thatreally elicits a big reaction in you.
Rather than like lashing out at yourselfor at somebody else or at life itself.
(13:25):
Pause,
don't react.
Get curious.
You get curious about maybe somebody saidsomething you could get curious about.
What do you mean by that?
Explain.
(13:49):
See now when I feeltriggered, I ask when this is.
This is my practice.
When was the last time I felt that?
And then I remember.
What about before that?
When was the time beforethat and before that?
And I keep on going back in time until Iget to the first time I ever felt that.
(14:21):
And then that's where I can work with it.
It's like I, so when I was, when I was 17.
My, my parents split up andmy mom sat me down and she
(14:41):
said, I'm leaving your father.
I'm taking your brother andyou can stay with your father.
And I was numb.
I pretended like I didn'tcare, but it hit me.
And later in life it seemed like thesethings happen over and over and over.
(15:04):
Every time somebody turned theirback on me or somebody, I don't
know, they didn't value me at all.
I'd feel the same feeling.
And when, when this kind of thingcomes up, I look at it and I, and
when I go down through the when's thelast time and the time before, and the
(15:26):
time before, the time before, and whenI get to the very earliest memory.
Or something like that, then Istart to understand what it was.
And for me, my earliest memoriesthat surrounds this feeling
of not being important enough
(15:48):
and not being important enoughcame up from my very first memory.
I think I was a toddler and it'sinteresting how your, sometimes,
your first memory is really clear.
And I, I'm kind of in the dark.
I'm in a crib.
There's a black and white TV playing.
My mom's sleeping on the couch.
(16:11):
I can see there's curtains and there'sa little bit of a crack with light
flowing through the curtains and there'slittle dust particles moving through.
There are like little sparkles
and I really want attention.
But something in the little me knewthat if I was important enough, I
would just have the tension I needed.
(16:33):
And so I decided that my compensationfor not being important enough
would be I will be able to be alone.
I'll be alone.
I can make it on my loan.
And the funny thing is I'm so goodat doing things by myself on my
own, and I have no expectationof anybody being there to help.
(16:55):
There's a longing for it.
Even now it's not strong and itdoesn't knock me out anymore.
But there is a longing,a longing for connection.
And it's funny the more, when, whenyou have one of these early things,
the more, the more you assert yourindependence and do everything.
(17:22):
Alone and like really help othersand not expect anything back.
The more you feel how you felt inthat early, early memory, the more
you feel that you're not important.
I,
(17:44):
so what do I do with this?
So what I did.
Was I sat with it at first.
See, I understand that I am veryincredibly gifted at independence,
(18:07):
that I don't need people,
but that doesn't mean Iwant to isolate myself.
But what it does mean for thepeople who are in my life, the
people I choose to be in my life,
they have something so incrediblybeautiful in them that I go against my own
(18:34):
nature to ensure, to keep them in my life.
You know the funny thing is my mom usedto tell me when I was younger, she said,
when you were a baby, you were amazing.
You never cried.
I could, I would forgetyou were even there.
You never cried for food,you never cried for anything.
(18:57):
Yeah, I'm alone.
I'm not gonna cry for it for attention.
That's just not who I am.
And she said, and you hadthis other weird habit.
You, you know, you would, when youwere a little bit older, you would go
into the cupboards in the kitchen whenthe sun was shining through, through
the window, and you would reflectthe, the light onto the ceiling.
(19:21):
Maybe like the sparklesthat came from that curtain.
Maybe that was something formative for me.
If you can remember, just likeVipassana says, between stimulus
and response, there is a space
(19:44):
in that.
Space is our power to choose our response.
And that was from Viktor Frankl.
So what do I do with this now when whensomething arises, somebody says, or.
Does something.
Well, first off, I don't lash out atthem because I know it's not about them.
This is about me.
(20:04):
This is about something deep inside ofme that's just bubbled to the surface,
and it's something I have access.
I have access to gain freedom fromsomething that's always been there.
So I get excited.
I'm like, whoa, cool.
What was that?
Next.
(20:24):
What I do is I look at all the way downthe cycle, right to the first time, the
very first time it happened, and themajority of the time it's it's family.
Those are early formative things.
(20:46):
Then I choose to forgive.
First the person involved,
but if you understandwhat forgiveness means,
forgiveness is just giving up the rightto be right about something forever.
It doesn't mean if there is alegal, financial, moral karmic
(21:13):
cost to their actions that there.
Let off the hook on that, that'sstill up to them to deal with.
The only thing it does is it frees you, itgives you freedom, and that's the value.
So in order to forgive some people,sometimes, you know, either the
person's gone so you can't talk tothem or you don't feel like that would
(21:35):
be, or they it was, would receive.
I, I don't think, um, I don't thinkmy mother would be interested.
Yeah, would be interested in hearing that.
So you write it and then you burn it,or you tear it up, or you release it
(22:00):
and you forgive,
but you're not done there
because now you gotta forgiveyourself and you're like, what?
Forgive, what do you mean?
Not forgive yourself for any roleyou had to play in that moment.
(22:22):
That's what happened, right?
And you don't blameyourself for what happened.
Nothing like that anyway.
Forgiveness isn't about blame anyway.
You forgive yourself forholding onto that situation.
And playing it out in relationshipafter relationship for the rest of
(22:44):
your life, you f forgive yourselffor not Boeing knowing it better,
and you forgive yourself foreverything you put yourself through.
And then if you want to take it tothe next, you apologize to yourself.
(23:09):
You can also, there's a powerful thingyou can do as well, and this is one of
the, I, I forget where I heard this,but this is a powerful visualization.
So if you understand that the majorityof the things that happened, if they
happen when we're so extremely lungyoung, sorry, our cognition wasn't.
(23:33):
Back then wasn't really developed.
Right.
We couldn't logically thinkthrough things, right?
This is why it's so hard to deal withsomething from a childhood with an adult
mind is because you're, you're using logicto try to deal with an emotional being.
It just doesn't work.
It's not effective.
(23:54):
So what you do instead, and for me.
How I see it is one of the most beautifulplaces I could be in this world.
It would be like Rolling Meadows, butthere's a hill with a big tree on the
meadow and overlooking all this beautifulgrassland on a, a warm summer, summer day.
(24:18):
And I call the little meek,I call it my little, because
they're, they were just little.
They didn't know any better.
And I visualize my little sitting inthis tree feeling everything he felt
and that little really feltthat he wasn't important enough.
(24:41):
And I go down to that tree and I pickup my little, and I hold him in my arms
and I just pour into him Important.
You're so important, you're so special.
And I just pour it andtry to fill him right up.
And I'll do that over and over again.
'cause you can't heal a childwith a logical mind and you can't
(25:04):
heal your little with that logic.
You have to go back andheal them emotionally.
There's a quote I really love.
Forgiveness does not change the past.
But it enlarges the future.
(25:29):
I really encourage you if you can trythis exercise, especially with things
that cycle multiple times in your life.
So the truth is what we'relooking at is to go into life
without peeling, no more peeling.
(25:53):
Because we are onions
and yes,
but maybe the point isn't peeling forever.
Maybe the point is enjoying theflavor of life we can, that doesn't
mean don't work on yourself.
You know, spend some timedigging deeper and clearing
(26:16):
things and enhancing your life.
It just means don't get stuck in thecycle of trying to improve and improve
and improve and improve and neveractually live in li Live your life.
Some of the practical tips are prettysimple, live in the present moment.
(26:40):
Did you know that Worry, anxiety,fear all live in the past for
the future that we're holding andcomplete in this present moment.
Trusted issues willservice when they need to.
You know, you don't, you don'thave to go looking for them.
They'll, they'll come up.
You'll have access and work on 'em,
(27:04):
and try not to make healingyour entire identity.
Stop fixing yourself.
Long enough to rememberthat you were never broken.
(27:27):
Thank you for walking throughpeeling layers with me, or at least
stopping peel, peeling layers,
rock bottom, self-help, endlesspeeling the shift, curiosity,
forgiveness, living fully.
That was my path.
(27:49):
Life is not about peeling away ever layer.
It's upbeat about being whole.
Right now, even with layers on,
we are perfect in our imperfectionsand it's okay to peel away until
your feet are on the groundand you're living a happy life.
(28:13):
Just don't stay there.
Hey, you know what?
If this episode resonated with you, uh,like I challenge you, I, I would really
love if you would share it with yourfriends or any friend that's been working
really hard to help themselves, especiallyif they've forgotten to live and
remember, you don't have to peel forever.
(28:35):
You just have to live.
Thank you for spending this time for me.
Keep building your own inner advocate.
Thank you for listening to this episodeof Your Inner Advocate, a podcast by
(28:55):
Kimen Petersen, formerly Conversationswith Kimen if you found value in
today's episode, please follow likeand share the podcast with someone
who you think may benefit from it.
You can listen on Apple Podcast.
Spotify, Podbean, and connect onInstagram @ your inner advocate.
Until next time, keep listening toand developing your inner advocate.
Welcome to Your Inner Advocate,a podcast by Kimen Petersen,
formerly Conversations with Kimen.
This podcast is a space forinspiration, soulful insights,
and meaningful life lessons.
Your host, Kimen Petersen drawsfrom personal stories and powerful
conversations with remarkablepeople to help illuminate your path.
These episodes reflect his livedexperiences and thoughtful perspectives,
(00:25):
all aimed at encouraging you to live lifewith greater authenticity, joy, and ease.
Your inner advocate is here tohelp you tune in, trust your inner
wisdom, and move through life withmore clarity, flow, and fulfillment.
Welcome back.
(00:46):
Today I'm gonna talk about one ofthe traps around the self-help genre,
and it starts with, maybe it's time tostop peeling back the layers, because
here's the truth, we are onions.
Every one of us, and if you've everbeen on a self-improvement journey,
(01:08):
you'll know that every time you peelaway one layer, another one shows up
and on and on and on, andit feels like it never ends.
There's a quote that I love,you know, I'm all about quotes.
(01:29):
What you look for, you'll find.
And if you're always looking forproblems, you'll never run out of them.
But today I want, I wanna sharewith you my self-help journey.
How I nearly got trapped in an endlesscycle of fixing myself and the powerful
ship that changed everything for me.
(01:51):
And maybe just, maybe it mightchange something for you too.
Part one, my rock bottom.
So in my twenties,
I was overweight.
(02:11):
I was depressed, suffering from anxiety.
I had an incrediblyself-defeating attitude.
My inner dialogue was so loud
and I was to the point ofbeing completely hopeless.
(02:35):
That was the description ofwhat my daily life was like.
There's another quote, of course,rock bottom became the solid
foundation on which I rebuilt myself.
(02:56):
I did.
I swam in hopelessness every day.
I felt like at best, I was displacing acertain amount of air that I would never
accomplish anything that I never wave.
I would never find my way throughthis despair that I lived in.
(03:19):
I had very few friends and I norelationships because who would want
to be with somebody who's that low?
The funny thing aboutrock bottom, though I
is eventually when you're lyingon the bottom, I used to say,
(03:41):
when you're lying in a ditch.
On your back
in the darkness, when you lookup, all you can see is the stars,
and that's when I knew Ihad to change something.
(04:05):
Part two, I was diving into self-help.
So I think I started with like the veryfirst one, uh, very first book was How
to Win Friends and Influence People.
Um, it taught me some good thingsabout human beings, like getting to
(04:27):
know their names or, or rememberingtheir names was extremely important.
And even better if you couldremember their birth dates.
From there, I went on to reading allkinds of books about self-improvement,
about what it means to be human.
(04:50):
I started looking at some otherthings that were going on.
I was incrediblyoverweight and outta shape.
I remember one day I decided I wasgonna just try to run one block.
And I could barely do it,
but I decided I would runthat one block every day.
(05:16):
I looked at my diet and I, Iwas drinking probably too much
alcohol and eating too much.
Really not healthy food.
I don't know if I recognizeda vegetable at that time.
So I started changing the way I ate.
Cutting back on drinking.
Making sure I got proper sleep because Iwould, when I was ruminating at night, the
(05:40):
noise in my head was so loud that I wouldbe up till two or three in the morning
just going over likehow hopeless life was.
So I started sleeping, uh, much better.
I. I, I went to, started going tosome seminars, some really life
(06:04):
changing stuff, which started makingme see things a little bit different.
So I got heavily involved
and it was like piece by piece.
I started fixing all these thingsthat I thought were broken in me.
(06:26):
And slowly over time Istarted seeing progress.
I was digging deeper into me and solvingproblems, and then absolutely elated
When I got through all these, startedbreaking down the walls around me.
(06:50):
Started having more people inmy life, getting more active.
Making positive decisions for my life.
But the funny thing is, as what wasgoing through this self-help genre, I
(07:11):
mean, we're talking years into this.
Yeah, it was interesting, uh,in this genre I learned that I
learned about the ego or the senseof identity or the inner critic.
'cause I think before that Ithought that negative conversation
in, in my head was me, actuallyme, like the truth of who I was.
(07:35):
But I learned that it's kindof an aspect of who we are, but
it's not exactly who we are.
And it's more designed to, to like keepus safe, keep us from getting hurt,
but it does that by keeping us small.
So if you don't stick youryour neck out, you're never
(07:56):
gonna get your head lopped off.
So, so you collapse into yourself andyou spend a life of being as small
as you can, being completely unseen.
Completely unheard
and maybe that's where depression came in.
(08:20):
But I'm, as I'm going through it, I'mlearning these amazing things and I'm
learning ways to deal with this stuff.
I remember course I was doing, it wastalking about the inner dialogue or the
negative inner critic and said, why don'tyou just say thank you for sharing and
you go and do what you need to do anyway.
And I thought, wow, that's empowering.
So over time I found strategyafter strategy to deal with things.
(08:44):
I opened up my eyes and I realized thatmaybe I'm not as bad as I thought I was.
And like I said, every time I likebecame enlightened at some moment,
like I released all this stuff andI was like, wow, this is great.
The elation of peeling a layerlasts for a short period of time.
(09:09):
Because if you're always looking forproblems, you're always gonna find them.
And that's what I realized, thatevery time I peeled back a layer,
there was another deeper layer
and I worked really hard to peel backanother layer and there was another
layer and so on and so on and so on.
It was like a pattern
(09:31):
freedom would follow, and thenthe next problem would arise.
And it typically, it really felt endless
and I realized if I leave this unchecked,I could spend the rest of my life
fixing myself and never really living
(09:57):
because the freedom is not in thefixing, the freedom is in the living.
So I shift my per perspectiveand I decided it was time,
time to stop obsessing over fixing me.
(10:17):
I,
you see, I really realizedthat I was no longer depressed.
I no longer hated myself,and I was no longer hopeless.
In fact.
I was functioning.
I was living life.
(10:38):
I was out there, maybe not completelyon the playing field like I am now, but
I was out there and I realized that I
need to stop this cycle.
I realize that you don't need to beperfect to have a beautiful life.
(10:59):
In fact, some of those imperfectionsare what make us the perfect us.
So I decided that it, it was time to stop.
And instead of searching for whatwrong, what was wrong, I trusted
that if something bubbled tothe surface that truly needed my
(11:20):
attention, it would, it would rise up.
And when it did, Iwould deal with it then.
And then I would re return to living.
And this probably this, this insightprobably came from when I was
doing, uh, the pasana meditation,which is incredibly intense.
(11:43):
Uh, it's rumored to be the meditationthat the sitar Gama, uh, achieved
enlightenment during this meditation.
And it's a sensory based meditationwhere you're sitting and you're, you're
scanning, you're paying attention to eachpart of your body, so you're scanning
through your whole body until somethingarises a sensation of some sort, and you
(12:06):
sit and you watch it and you don't react.
This is based on equanimity, non-reactive,and they say, if you can sit there
and just watch this and not react,
then it may just dissipate, disappear.
And then you're free.
And this was kind of the idea of this islike, I trust that if there's something,
(12:31):
if I suddenly have access to something,
that I won't just react,
that I'll stop and I'll really look at it
and I'll do what I need to do.
To work through that so I canmove on to being happy in my life.
(12:59):
This is what I call theCuriosity Pro practice.
When something arises, when somebody sayssomething, something happens, you miss
a bus or whatever it is, something thatreally elicits a big reaction in you.
Rather than like lashing out at yourselfor at somebody else or at life itself.
(13:25):
Pause,
don't react.
Get curious.
You get curious about maybe somebody saidsomething you could get curious about.
What do you mean by that?
Explain.
(13:49):
See now when I feeltriggered, I ask when this is.
This is my practice.
When was the last time I felt that?
And then I remember.
What about before that?
When was the time beforethat and before that?
And I keep on going back in time until Iget to the first time I ever felt that.
(14:21):
And then that's where I can work with it.
It's like I, so when I was, when I was 17.
My, my parents split up andmy mom sat me down and she
(14:41):
said, I'm leaving your father.
I'm taking your brother andyou can stay with your father.
And I was numb.
I pretended like I didn'tcare, but it hit me.
And later in life it seemed like thesethings happen over and over and over.
(15:04):
Every time somebody turned theirback on me or somebody, I don't
know, they didn't value me at all.
I'd feel the same feeling.
And when, when this kind of thingcomes up, I look at it and I, and
when I go down through the when's thelast time and the time before, and the
(15:26):
time before, the time before, and whenI get to the very earliest memory.
Or something like that, then Istart to understand what it was.
And for me, my earliest memoriesthat surrounds this feeling
of not being important enough
(15:48):
and not being important enoughcame up from my very first memory.
I think I was a toddler and it'sinteresting how your, sometimes,
your first memory is really clear.
And I, I'm kind of in the dark.
I'm in a crib.
There's a black and white TV playing.
My mom's sleeping on the couch.
(16:11):
I can see there's curtains and there'sa little bit of a crack with light
flowing through the curtains and there'slittle dust particles moving through.
There are like little sparkles
and I really want attention.
But something in the little me knewthat if I was important enough, I
would just have the tension I needed.
(16:33):
And so I decided that my compensationfor not being important enough
would be I will be able to be alone.
I'll be alone.
I can make it on my loan.
And the funny thing is I'm so goodat doing things by myself on my
own, and I have no expectationof anybody being there to help.
(16:55):
There's a longing for it.
Even now it's not strong and itdoesn't knock me out anymore.
But there is a longing,a longing for connection.
And it's funny the more, when, whenyou have one of these early things,
the more, the more you assert yourindependence and do everything.
(17:22):
Alone and like really help othersand not expect anything back.
The more you feel how you felt inthat early, early memory, the more
you feel that you're not important.
I,
(17:44):
so what do I do with this?
So what I did.
Was I sat with it at first.
See, I understand that I am veryincredibly gifted at independence,
(18:07):
that I don't need people,
but that doesn't mean Iwant to isolate myself.
But what it does mean for thepeople who are in my life, the
people I choose to be in my life,
they have something so incrediblybeautiful in them that I go against my own
(18:34):
nature to ensure, to keep them in my life.
You know the funny thing is my mom usedto tell me when I was younger, she said,
when you were a baby, you were amazing.
You never cried.
I could, I would forgetyou were even there.
You never cried for food,you never cried for anything.
(18:57):
Yeah, I'm alone.
I'm not gonna cry for it for attention.
That's just not who I am.
And she said, and you hadthis other weird habit.
You, you know, you would, when youwere a little bit older, you would go
into the cupboards in the kitchen whenthe sun was shining through, through
the window, and you would reflectthe, the light onto the ceiling.
(19:21):
Maybe like the sparklesthat came from that curtain.
Maybe that was something formative for me.
If you can remember, just likeVipassana says, between stimulus
and response, there is a space
(19:44):
in that.
Space is our power to choose our response.
And that was from Viktor Frankl.
So what do I do with this now when whensomething arises, somebody says, or.
Does something.
Well, first off, I don't lash out atthem because I know it's not about them.
This is about me.
(20:04):
This is about something deep inside ofme that's just bubbled to the surface,
and it's something I have access.
I have access to gain freedom fromsomething that's always been there.
So I get excited.
I'm like, whoa, cool.
What was that?
Next.
(20:24):
What I do is I look at all the way downthe cycle, right to the first time, the
very first time it happened, and themajority of the time it's it's family.
Those are early formative things.
(20:46):
Then I choose to forgive.
First the person involved,
but if you understandwhat forgiveness means,
forgiveness is just giving up the rightto be right about something forever.
It doesn't mean if there is alegal, financial, moral karmic
(21:13):
cost to their actions that there.
Let off the hook on that, that'sstill up to them to deal with.
The only thing it does is it frees you, itgives you freedom, and that's the value.
So in order to forgive some people,sometimes, you know, either the
person's gone so you can't talk tothem or you don't feel like that would
(21:35):
be, or they it was, would receive.
I, I don't think, um, I don't thinkmy mother would be interested.
Yeah, would be interested in hearing that.
So you write it and then you burn it,or you tear it up, or you release it
(22:00):
and you forgive,
but you're not done there
because now you gotta forgiveyourself and you're like, what?
Forgive, what do you mean?
Not forgive yourself for any roleyou had to play in that moment.
(22:22):
That's what happened, right?
And you don't blameyourself for what happened.
Nothing like that anyway.
Forgiveness isn't about blame anyway.
You forgive yourself forholding onto that situation.
And playing it out in relationshipafter relationship for the rest of
(22:44):
your life, you f forgive yourselffor not Boeing knowing it better,
and you forgive yourself foreverything you put yourself through.
And then if you want to take it tothe next, you apologize to yourself.
(23:09):
You can also, there's a powerful thingyou can do as well, and this is one of
the, I, I forget where I heard this,but this is a powerful visualization.
So if you understand that the majorityof the things that happened, if they
happen when we're so extremely lungyoung, sorry, our cognition wasn't.
(23:33):
Back then wasn't really developed.
Right.
We couldn't logically thinkthrough things, right?
This is why it's so hard to deal withsomething from a childhood with an adult
mind is because you're, you're using logicto try to deal with an emotional being.
It just doesn't work.
It's not effective.
(23:54):
So what you do instead, and for me.
How I see it is one of the most beautifulplaces I could be in this world.
It would be like Rolling Meadows, butthere's a hill with a big tree on the
meadow and overlooking all this beautifulgrassland on a, a warm summer, summer day.
(24:18):
And I call the little meek,I call it my little, because
they're, they were just little.
They didn't know any better.
And I visualize my little sitting inthis tree feeling everything he felt
and that little really feltthat he wasn't important enough.
(24:41):
And I go down to that tree and I pickup my little, and I hold him in my arms
and I just pour into him Important.
You're so important, you're so special.
And I just pour it andtry to fill him right up.
And I'll do that over and over again.
'cause you can't heal a childwith a logical mind and you can't
(25:04):
heal your little with that logic.
You have to go back andheal them emotionally.
There's a quote I really love.
Forgiveness does not change the past.
But it enlarges the future.
(25:29):
I really encourage you if you can trythis exercise, especially with things
that cycle multiple times in your life.
So the truth is what we'relooking at is to go into life
without peeling, no more peeling.
(25:53):
Because we are onions
and yes,
but maybe the point isn't peeling forever.
Maybe the point is enjoying theflavor of life we can, that doesn't
mean don't work on yourself.
You know, spend some timedigging deeper and clearing
(26:16):
things and enhancing your life.
It just means don't get stuck in thecycle of trying to improve and improve
and improve and improve and neveractually live in li Live your life.
Some of the practical tips are prettysimple, live in the present moment.
(26:40):
Did you know that Worry, anxiety,fear all live in the past for
the future that we're holding andcomplete in this present moment.
Trusted issues willservice when they need to.
You know, you don't, you don'thave to go looking for them.
They'll, they'll come up.
You'll have access and work on 'em,
(27:04):
and try not to make healingyour entire identity.
Stop fixing yourself.
Long enough to rememberthat you were never broken.
(27:27):
Thank you for walking throughpeeling layers with me, or at least
stopping peel, peeling layers,
rock bottom, self-help, endlesspeeling the shift, curiosity,
forgiveness, living fully.
That was my path.
(27:49):
Life is not about peeling away ever layer.
It's upbeat about being whole.
Right now, even with layers on,
we are perfect in our imperfectionsand it's okay to peel away until
your feet are on the groundand you're living a happy life.
(28:13):
Just don't stay there.
Hey, you know what?
If this episode resonated with you, uh,like I challenge you, I, I would really
love if you would share it with yourfriends or any friend that's been working
really hard to help themselves, especiallyif they've forgotten to live and
remember, you don't have to peel forever.
(28:35):
You just have to live.
Thank you for spending this time for me.
Keep building your own inner advocate.
Thank you for listening to this episodeof Your Inner Advocate, a podcast by
(28:55):
Kimen Petersen, formerly Conversationswith Kimen if you found value in
today's episode, please follow likeand share the podcast with someone
who you think may benefit from it.
You can listen on Apple Podcast.
Spotify, Podbean, and connect onInstagram @ your inner advocate.
Until next time, keep listening toand developing your inner advocate.
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