To grow beyond the conditioning of our upbringing and, ultimately, hundreds of years of human conditioning, we have to be honest with ourselves and develop our ability of self-inquiry. If we can take a step back and ask ourselves how much our conditioning is running our lives, we can begin to move in a different direction. A direction that includes seeing ourselves as world citizens responsible for giving and helping those in need. This process leads us to interact with our inner feelings and our inner knowing. Our inner knowing can help us continue to face challenging feelings and develop our relationship to friendly mind. Friendly mind, honesty, and inquiry then become our cherished guides as we learn from our life experiences.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock teaches about learning to face the truths in our lives. Self-inquiry can teach us to see, prioritize, and let go of patterns that aren't beneficial to our personal progress. The process of building awareness of our thought and behavioral patterns can help us steer our rudder in the right direction, rather than beating ourselves up or withdrawing because of our perceived weaknesses and mistakes. Regularly questioning ourselves in a caring way guides our course, helps resolve broken relationships, and builds a more fulfilling, and wholesome heart.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock discusses the importance of identifying and listening to our own wisdom. We can learn to value paying attention to whatever our challenging emotions are at any moment. This is a major victory. It's a part of identifying what are our essential needs so we can guide ourselves toward the best version of who we are. We can ask ourselves "What is it that we most need?" and refer to the Introspective Guides on AwarenessThatHeals.org for specific help. Strock uses examples from his years of experience in psychotherapy to show how we can identify the patterns of distraction and false things we unwittingly tell ourselves that keep us from our needs. As we do, we can learn to shift our tone, behavior, and thoughts to move forward and experience benefit for ourselves and those around us.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock teaches the process of moving from self-criticism to pivoting and accessing our own wisdom through self-inquiry. The process starts when we face challenging emotions. In these moments, we ask ourselves questions, searching for the best of who we are. What is our best self, our best actions, best communication, and best attitudes? These questions will guide us toward the thoughts we will derive benefit to think rather than self-criticizing ones.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock explores how a growing awareness around our own confusion affects self-rejection during serious health or medical changes. It's inevitable to feel loss, emptiness, or fear during drastic life changes. We need to learn to acknowledge our feelings around these challenges. Otherwise, we will increase feelings of depression or agitation rather than deepening acceptance, understanding, and forgiving ourselves. There's a process of learning to see our own expectations and realizing that they're so often unreasonable. When we go through drastic changes, we are going to change how we think and function physically. It is incredibly helpful to realize that anyone going through a similar situation with extreme change and hardship will face similar challenging feelings. The hardship can lead to confusion that, if not faced with greater self-compassion and questioning, lead us to become more judgmental, depressed, or empty. The problem isn't the confusion itself but the rejection of it.

We can train ourselves by leading our awareness to our true intention to heal, where we see our confusion as an opportunity for deeper inquiry and purposeful introspection. The more we look at our confusion with reverence, the more capacity we have to live a courageous life.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock and guest Dave discuss the process of finding the wise part of ourselves that has the ability to speak with an understanding, compassionate inner voice. With this voice, we can identify self-rejection and see it as an emotion and not feed it with continuous thoughts. We also need to be careful not to succumb to premature transcending, where we think we're beyond our challenging feelings when we've really let them sink deeper into our subconscious. We want to develop gradual dis-identification with our challenging emotion(s) and work toward developing the intention to heal. At that point, we can begin to disempower self-rejection. We can increase our ability to see and tell ourselves what we're doing to overcome the various forms of our self abandonment or criticism. Over time, we can dis-identify with these challenging feelings and use our inner voice to encourage and support ourselves, even as we see our shortcomings. Eventually, this ability to identify and alter our inner voice lets us develop a positive direction and tone that opens our hearts for greater kindness toward ourselves, others, and society.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock discusses the long-term process of identifying our challenging emotions and how we can work through them. We are individuals with differing experiences and upbringings. Those experiences affect how we respond to difficult emotions and eventually can turn into self-rejection. We have to look deep within ourselves to identify the actions and thoughts that can lead us away from rejection toward self-acceptance. We can start by asking and identifying our most difficult, challenging emotion. Being aware of and consistently questioning how we're reacting to that emotion helps us develop compassion for ourselves and the greater world. It takes time, but you can process and change how you think and react to the most unwanted emotions.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock digs deeper into developing self-acceptance and balance as we continue on a journey through challenging feelings. Misconceptions about self-acceptance can lead to causing undue harm to others, especially when dealing with anger. However, true self-acceptance comes when we express ourselves with sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and honesty. Part of self-acceptance means saying yes to negative emotions, embracing them, and tolerating them without hurting others. When you accept these difficult feelings, you can heal them. Do you accept yourself when you feel fear, anxiety, or anger? When we have feelings that we don't want to feel, we can look inside ourselves and ask questions to make sure we're caring for ourselves in the process of overcoming the unwanted feelings.

Children often better understand the difference between being kind to others and being kind to themselves. We have to learn to recognize areas of weakness versus areas of compulsion by asking what feelings I am aware of and want to change versus those I don't feel like changing. This process requires developing balance between accepting ourselves and working toward developing into a self-compassionate and compassionate person.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock discusses the value of learning to identify our own challenging feelings, questioning them, and continuing to grow and develop as a person. Each of us must learn that outside standards don't have to define us. It takes time to develop the autonomous self that can name, question, and grow. Self-rejection keeps us from realizing the autonomous self because we get caught in a reactive mode where we identify with what we've been taught.

Developing awareness requires exploring the things that you say to yourself. Strock uses case studies and personal experiences as examples. This process works for those who may have chemical or neurological issues that contribute to their challenging feelings, and those who don't. In either case, asking introspective questions identifies the difficult feelings, names them, and determines the thought process around them. We can each learn to ask important, introspective questions—Am I ready to be honest with myself? What is holding me back from compassion, from happiness, from being a better version of myself? The process of asking these questions leads to continual progression and personal evolution. Each of us can stop self-rejection when we find the will and the curiosity to individually inquire inside ourselves.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.

Host Robert Strock discusses the continuing process of developing self-compassion. Difficult emotions elicit many predictable "normal" forms of self-rejection, such as withdrawing, anger, or fixing. However, normal doesn't mean healthy. We can learn to accept challenging feelings as part of our human experience while learning to stop patterns of self-rejection. As we learn to recognize our forms of self-rejection, we can also learn to look deep inside ourselves and recognize the part, sometimes the small part, of ourselves that acknowledges that we don't feel difficult feelings on purpose and that's ready to provide self-compassion.

This is the ongoing path to self-acceptance, where we look for ways to meet our emotional needs and encourage thoughts that support us. This process of questioning and searching inside ourselves trains us to act as our own guide to a balanced inner life. Finally, the path toward self-acceptance and self-compassion is a process. The skills are developed over years, while we continually work toward recognizing, acknowledging, and empathizing with ourselves.

Read the transcription and listen to this episode at Awareness That Heals.