#68 The Capacity to Heal

Read the full episode transcript

 Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the, Your Favorite You podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains, create the life you've been dreaming of with intention.

My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend. If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

00:57

Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I was inspired to write today's episode while doing a 10-minute meditation yesterday. I love to do guided meditation and have used many different apps. In the past I have used Insight, Timer, Headspace, Deepak Chopra's app, I forget what it was called. I've used the Calm app. You name it and I've tried it. Most recently, I have been exercising indoors because it is chilly here in central Ohio. I've been using the Peloton or the treadmill, so I've been doing a bit of cardio followed by yoga. Then I cold plunge in 45 degrees for 3 to 5 minutes and I come in and sit in front of the fireplace and do a meditation. It sounds luxurious because it is. I'm giving my brain and my body what it needs and it feels so lavish and nourishing. My body and my brain are loving it after 40 years of punishment.

01:52

Anyway, I was doing this meditation with Ross Rayburn on the Peloton app. It was a meditation for healing and in it he said our body has so much capacity for healing. This is true. He offered that if we get a paper cut, our body knows exactly what to do. This is an amazing feat of our human body. As soon as we get the paper cut, our body recognizes it and starts sending cells to the tiny cut to help it heal, to help it fight infection and to help our blood clot to stop the bleeding. It's fascinating, really, when you take a moment to think about it. This is where my brain wandered off to during the meditation the physiology of the healing process. As with all meditation, I had to guide my brain gently back and then it wandered off again to. You should do a podcast on the capacity to heal, and I guided it gently back again. So when we treat our bodies well, by giving them nourishment through healthy food, plenty of water, plenty of sleep, daily movement, our bodies heal so much faster than if we're not treating them with love and nourishment. The same is true for our minds.

03:06

I want to reiterate that we have not been socialized to prioritize taking care of our minds as much as we've been socialized on the importance of taking care of our bodies. I'm hopeful that the tide is changing on this. It seems to me that it is, and that I'm hearing more and more about people taking the time and putting in the effort to take care of their brains as well as their bodies. Maybe it's just because of the spaces that I've chosen to put myself in over the past several years, but it seems to me that this is becoming more and more prevalent. It seems to me that more and more people are seeing this taking care of our brains, of healing our relationships with ourselves and with others as a worthy effort and an essential part of being human. I hope so and I definitely want to be part of that change as much as possible, the way that I do this and the way that I lovingly encourage my clients to do this is to meditate for a few minutes every day, to journal so that you can see all of your thoughts out on paper, so that you can question them with love and to, of course, get coaching on your thoughts every week.

04:17

So I wanted to clear over and over that you yes, you whomever is listening to this podcast have unlimited capacity and ability to heal your relationship with yourself. If you are here, you already believe at least a little bit that you have the capacity to heal. What you may not believe yet is that this capacity is endless. I promise you that it is endless. There is endless opportunity for you to heal and if you are doing life right and taking chances, doing new things, etc. Life will continue to provide you with opportunities to heal.

05:01

None of us is to blame for our less than stellar relationships with ourselves or shitty relationships with ourselves and, believe it or not, the people who raised you, whether that be your parents, your grandparents, your siblings, your extended family, your adoptive parents hopefully you get the idea. None of them is to blame either. Most of us are just going about life blindly, thinking it is what it is, it's how I've always been, this is just me, etc. Without thinking much beyond that. Once you become aware of your ability to heal your relationship with yourself, it does become your responsibility to do so. This is not something that you can unknow without consequences. The best news ever is that it only takes you being willing to peel back layers of the onion that is your life and examine them. This work is best done with a guide, and this is where coaching and or therapy come into play. It is nearly impossible to do this work on your own, because when you are in the middle of the onion, it is hard to see that you're an onion. You feel me.

06:15

Another way to think about this is that when you have been in your own brain for your whole life without recognizing that you were able to examine your thoughts, you might not recognize that all of your thoughts are optional as a reminder, left unattended. Our brains tend to swing to the negative, always on the lookout for what is wrong with us, what is wrong with other people, what is wrong with the world. You get the idea. It is completely natural, for example, for you to get a review at work or to have a conversation with another person where 95% of the review, or 95% of the conversation is positive and amazing, and for our brain to forget all about that as we focus on the one negative review or the one comment we perceive as negative from the other person. We do this to ourselves over and over, so much so that we often start to believe these negative things about ourselves, while completely disregarding any of the positive.

07:22

In addition, most of us have sustained some type of trauma earlier in our lives, either at the hands of our caregivers or our teachers or our prior mentors. As a reminder, trauma can be something bad that happened to you at the hands or words of another, but often probably more often trauma comes as a result of things that should have happened but that did not, and many of my clients were raised by parents who struggled with emotional regulation or who lacked emotional maturity. So they, my clients and likely many of you, were forced to grow up way before they were ready to, based on their chronological age and maturity level, often having to take on the role of the parent, either with their actual parents or with their siblings. They were asked to do this way more than a young child or a young adult should ever be asked to do and then blamed when things did not go exactly to plan.

08:25

The great news is that there is unlimited possibility in terms of healing this relationship with yourself once you start to examine it, and I, as your coach, help you make complete sense of why you have the relationship with yourself that you do. Once we make sense of it, we can start the work of healing. This, like everything else in life, will not be a linear process, as with in meditation. As you start to practice this, this idea of being kind to yourself, your mind will, of course, wander back to being mean to yourself, and you can choose to gently guide it back with love, compassion, and patience for yourself. You get to do this over and over and over again, as many times as it takes. As you are doing this work of healing your relationship with yourself, it truly does help. You see that anything, anything is possible. You start to heal the relationships you have with other people. As I know I have said before, these people do not even need to know that you are doing the work to heal your relationship. If you choose not to tell them. They can even be dead, and you can do this work to heal your relationship with them.

09:42

Once you start healing these most important relationships you start to see all the possibility in your life. You start believing you can give up on attempting to be a perfectionist because you recognize it was just a way of coping that never really worked. You recognize that you are safe to stop people-pleasing. You start to release your need to control other people because you realize it never brought you the healing you were desperately seeking. You start asking for what you want. You start to believe the platitude that you are worthy just as you are. You stop thinking that you're a fucking imposter.

So many of the badasses I coach come to me thinking that they are imposters and that someone is going to finally come and figure out that they don't have all the answers, that they don't have it all figured out. You have always figured it out eventually and once you have a relationship with yourself that is kind and compassionate and patient with yourself, you start to recognize that. You stop thinking that you have to be doing and running and going all the time and you actually start to take the time to give your body and your mind the space and rest you need and deserve. You never have to overcompensate for anything again. You stop thinking that you have to try to fit in and instead recognize that once you belong to yourself, you can belong anywhere you choose to go. You stop feeling guilty for making decisions that are just for you. My goodness, I could go on and on obviously.

11:17

Recently, on my Instagram, I shared a video of Mastin Kipp, a fellow coach, giving a talk at TEDx. He was sharing the idea that just one person who undertakes her own healing can change the entire lineage for the better. When you think about healing in this way, the capacity for healing truly becomes endless. Recent studies by people way smarter than me show that our generational trauma extends back epigenetically for at least 14 generations. That means that the healing that you do will extend forward for 14 generations. Think about that. It's fucking incredible. I love thinking about my healing in this way because I saw that there was a better way for myself and I chose to undertake the work of healing. I have changed the trajectory of my entire family, everyone who comes after me, and because I believe so strongly in this work, I decided to follow my calling to become a coach to help heal any trauma that I have experienced, and now I'm helping them become change makers in their own lineages. This is such a huge honor and I'm so grateful that this is the mark that I'm going to leave on the world.

12:36

If you're listening to this podcast, borrow some of my belief in you that you too have the unlimited capacity to heal. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Please sign up for our consult so that we can get started together. It will be my honor to be your guide.

 Hey, everybody, don't go quite yet. I want to let you know all the ways that you can work with me. If you've been listening to this podcast maybe, especially the episodes where I interviewed my clients, and you are thinking like the older woman in the diner in the classic Meg Ryan Billy Crystal film when Harry met Sally, where Sally, proving a point to Harry, is faking an orgasm while at the diner, Sally finishes and takes a bite of her food and the older woman in the next booth says I'll have what she's having. This is your sign from the universe to schedule a consult with me. I'm currently enrolling clients who want to work with me in a group setting. The group will start on January 10th and we will meet every Wednesday at 1pm until July 3rd, 2024. 

I'm very excited about the women who have already made the commitment to themselves and the investment in themselves to join the group and would love to have you be part of it.

I also have a few spots available for one-on-one coaching with me, if that is a way that you want to work with me. The way to contact me is to go to my website, melissaparsonscoaching.com, and either go to the group page and click Book Now or go to the work with me page and click Book Now. That way, you can schedule a consult. I look forward to hearing from you. Let's make 2024 your favorite year ever, as you become your favorite you.

The way to contact me is to go to my website, melissaparsonscoaching.com, and either go to the group page and click Book Now or go to the work with me page and click Book Now. 

That way, you can schedule a consult. I look forward to hearing from you. Let's make 2024 your favorite year ever. As you become Your Favorite You.