I invite you to imagine that you are a great big bus driving through life and that all the passengers are different parts of yourself—the part who wants everyone else to like you, the part who just wants to be left alone, the part who is excited about your big goals, the part who just wants to do nothing, and so many other subpersonalities with their own desires and beliefs about the world.

Sometimes, you’re driving along the path through life, aligning with your values, reaching your goals, navigating the twists and turns smoothly.

And, other times, you arrive at a crossroads and the passengers on your bus argue about how to proceed. Do you go left? Right? Turn around? Take a sideroad?

Maybe the parts mediate their disagreement well and choose their next move easily. Or, maybe they start battling it out, trying to yank the steering wheel in different directions, going back and forth about what to do next rather than making forward movement.

Or perhaps, you decide to move forward, but then a part of you slams on the brakes, drains all your gas, hijacks the bus, or careens off the road. As one client wrote: “I kept making promises to myself that tomorrow, I’d do things differently. But then I broke those promises and let myself down again. I didn’t understand why I was acting like my own worst enemy.”

So why such stuckness?

Why such simultaneously conflicting feelings?

Because stuckness is an attempt to meet a need. Because different parts of us have different opinions about which needs we should prioritize and which strategies best meet your needs.

I’ll explain:

Needs are the universal motivating qualities behind everything we do; needs are why we do what we do.

In contrast, strategies are the actions we take to meet our needs; strategies are what we do. Everything that you and I do, from waking to sleeping—even the most harmful actions—is a strategy, an attempt to meet a need.

To understand this better, it can help to go back to the beginning, to the day we were born.

We Come to Identify with Our Strategies

You and I came into this world with lots of needs but no strategies to meet them on our own. And so, from the moment we were born, we started learning all sorts of strategies to meet our needs.

We quickly learned that some strategies earned us frowns and rejection, while others strategies earned us smiles and praise.

We practiced some strategies over and over until they became habits, and over time, we started identifying with some habits, saying things like: I’m the type of person who… or This is just how I am or I always… or It’s just in my nature to… or I was born this way…

To be able to compassionately witness our habitual strategies and cultivate a choiceful relationship with them, it can help to imagine that they are subpersonalities or distinct parts of ourselves. I first learned to call these parts strategy children.[1] Here are some examples of parts that I see often in clients and fellow changemakers:

The Achiever: A part that learned to meet our needs by accomplishing big goals and derives its sense of self-worth from our accomplishments.

The People Pleaser: A part that learned to meet our needs for safety and stability by prioritizing others’ needs over our own.

The Rebel: A part that learned to meet our need for self-respect by going against authority figures and disagreeing with everything they say.

The Judge: The part who judges or criticizes ourselves. In the The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz calls this part the Judge. RuPaul calls this part her Inner Saboteur. Anne Lamott calls hers the itty-bitty-shitty committee. My son, Kai, calls his the Troll.

The Victim: The part that blames others for why things are the way they are and abdicates responsibility for choosing a response that honors their needs. In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz calls this part the Victim. Other names my clients have used include Griper, Slider,

Imagine that you’re an antelope.

You're grazing on the savanna, minding your own business, when suddenly, out of the shadows, bounds a lion straight toward you. You can’t fight the lion, so you leap into action, running as fast as you can. You run, run, run, and miraculously, you escape.

Then, once the lion is gone, you do something that most mammals do after surviving a threat—You shake.

As the antelope, escaping the lion is key to surviving, of course. But shaking after you escape is surprisingly important for your survival, too.

That’s because, as Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain in their book, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, stress and stressors are distinct phenomena that require distinct solutions.[1]

Here’s what that means:

Stress vs. Stressors

Stressors are any stimuli we perceive as a threat. For the antelope, the stressor is the lion.

On the other hand, stress is our body’s response to a perceived threat—a cascade of neurochemicals and hormones that our bodies release to prompt us to find safety. As the antelope, you feel stress when the lion starts chasing you.

Stress is not inherently bad for us; stress is what happens in our bodies when we perceive that someone or something we care about is at risk.

However, stress can wreak havoc when it accumulates in our bodies. As the antelope, even though you escaped the lion, you still need to process the stress by shaking it out of your system.

How to Release Your Stress

Cultures across time and place have known that we need to shake, cry, laugh, dance, and move our bodies to discharge stress.

Unfortunately, modern-day dominant culture, rooted in Puritanism and Calvinist Christianity, disdains physical expressions of emotion.

As a result, many of us learn early on that others will reject us if we tremble, yawn, laugh too loud, or express too much emotion.

But no matter our social conditioning, in addition to dealing with our stressors, we need to deal with our stress, including the stress of heartbreaking, infuriating, or stressful situations that we witness others experiencing, whether through direct care work, policy work, hearing the news, or witnessing our loved ones struggle

If we don't fully discharge our stress, it can stay in our bodies long after we've dealt with the stressors, making it harder to sleep, focus our attention, and access the energy we need to keep going.

The stress can build up until it becomes compassion fatigue or burnout.

The good news is that because stress and stressors are distinct… 

…it is possible to release at least some of our stress even if we don’t have the power to get rid of our stressors.

In Burnout, the Nagoskis write that the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress cycle is (drum roll, please)—moving our bodies. They write:

“Physical activity—literally any movement of your body—is your first line of attack in the battle against burnout.”

Why Physical Movement?

Because we’re mammals. We need to speak our body’s mammalian language. If we were faced with a lion, we would… run! If we’re faced with a challenging boss, we need to… run!  

Of course, you don’t necessarily need to run away from your boss. You just need to run in addition to dealing with your boss.

And, no, you do not need to run, per se. As someone who hated gym class, I am not about to run. What works for me is doing yoga, walking in nature, or hula hooping to reggaeton or ‘90s dance music. You might bounce on a rebounder, punch a kickboxing bag, go for a bike ride, jump rope, take an online exercise class, or crank up the Motown at the end of your day and dance.

Somatic Practice

If you struggle to integrate exercise into your life, all is not lost. Small micro-movements such as swinging your arms, tapping your face, clenching your muscles and releasing them, taking a long exhale, or circling your ankles can be surprisingly effective for discharging stress...

I invite you to pick up an imaginary rubber band.

Hook one end of the rubber band around your right forefinger and the other around your right thumb, with your palm facing away from you. Your forefinger represents the world and the life that you long for. Your thumb represents your current reality.

Imagine pulling the rubber band between your forefinger and thumb and feeling the tension.[1]

I call this inevitable chasm between where we are right now and where we long to be the Gap of Longing. This gap can become a Gap of Despair or a Gap of Hope.

Let’s explore the Gap of Hope first.

The Gap of Hope

Hope is different from optimism.[2]

Whereas optimism expects that our actions will probably bring a positive outcome and everything will probably turn out alright, hope faces reality.

Hope knows there are no guarantees and that in many cases, the odds are not in our favor. And yet, in the face of devastation and peril, hope is the willingness to take a stand for what we love—whether that’s ourselves, our people, or the planet.

In the words of writer and activist, Rebecca Solnit, hope says: “Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.”

When I speak of despair and hope, I speak of them not as emotions but as stances or postures from which action can spring forth.[3]

As abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba writes,

“‘Hope is a discipline.’

[1] I first learned this rubber band model from Peter Senge’s 2006 book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. He calls this the creative tension model.

[2] Rebecca Solnit. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. (Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL: March 16, 2016.)

[3] Meriame Kaba. https://theintercept.com/2021/03/17/intercepted-mariame-kaba-abolitionist-organizing/

Despite all of the evidence of your abilities and intelligence, does part of you believe that you’ll never be enough?

When someone congratulates you or compliments you, does a voice in your head immediately start naming a litany of reasons why you don’t deserve it, telling you things like…

Yeah, but that was just random luck. I didn’t work hard enough. It could have been better. I probably won’t be able to do it again. They didn’t really mean it. I shouldn’t brag. That really wasn’t anything special. Anyone could do that. What if someone finds out that I’m really a fraud? They don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s no big deal. I still need to work on this other thing…?

If that’s you, then I invite you to ask yourself this question:

When you give someone a gift, do you want them to frown, ignore you, or say it’s nothing special?

Or would you rather have them receive your gift with a smile and a thank you?

I for one would prefer the thank you, and I imagine that life would too.

I believe that our abilities, strengths, skills, and talents are gifts that life has entrusted to us, whether through hard work, heartache, luck, study, experience, or the act of being born, and I believe each one of us has a sacred responsibility to reciprocate by acknowledging our gifts.

Self-appreciation does not say—I’m better than you! or I’m more special!

Self-appreciation says—Just like everyone else, I am a miraculously gifted and flawed human. I have areas for improvement, and I have so many gifts I am grateful for.

Self-appreciation is not conceit. Self-appreciation is the skill of giving thanks for who we get to be in this life.

When we acknowledge our gifts, we have an easier time understanding how we’re called to show up for change and which paths might bring us joy.

As botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass,

“This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?”[1] 

And, as healer and dismantling racism trainer, Michelle Cassandra Johnson writes in Finding Refuge,

“It is important to think of oneself as a medicine maker, because each one of us has a gift to offer the collective.”[2]

So from now on, I challenge you to track glimmers of self-appreciation. Here are three practices that might help:

When someone offers you a compliment, notice any initial feelings of discomfort, and then say, thank you.

Keep emails expressing gratitude in a folder and/or a “Done List” of the goals you’ve accomplished.

Learn to articulate your gifts and strengths—you’ll find questions to help you do so in the show notes.

And if you notice yourself wanting to be better at something, that’s great, too! Our skills are not innate. The truth is that with enough desire, time, grit, and support, almost anyone can learn anything.

To cultivate the stamina to learn what we want to learn, we must celebrate our tiny victories. Often the journey to developing new skills looks like a series of plateaus interspersed with occasional upward leaps. On the plateaus, we practice and practice and practice, sometimes with little noticeable change. Then all of a sudden, we have a great big aha! and can do something we’ve never done before.

When we learn to celebrate ourselves, it becomes easier to show up on the plateaus and the dips in the road and to enjoy our leaps forward.

Practice: Your Gifts & Strengths

If you would like to get clearer about your existing gifts, strengths, and skills, I invite you to write down what comes up in response to the following questions:

When do you feel so wholly immersed in the moment that time seems transformed and nothing else seems to matter?

What are you doing when you experience an intense sense of alignment, as if you’re doing exactly what you’re meant to be doing?

What challenges have given you gifts that you long to us...

Your Next Experiment

“Caminante no hay camino. Se hace el camino al andar.”

—Juan Manuel Serrat sings this in Cantares, one of my all-time favorite songs.

In English, the quote is translated as:

“Traveler, there is no path. We make the path by walking.”

This quote is attributed to many sources, including the First Peoples of Australia.

 

I invite you to ask yourself a question:

What parts of your life do you love the most?

This might be a child, a partner, a pet, a job, a creative pursuit, or something else.

Then, ask yourself: How did this person or thing that I love so much come into my life?

Imagine yourself going back in time, trying to trace each step that brought this beloved part of your life into your life.

You’ll probably notice that while there may have been several intentional steps, there were probably many other chance occurrences that you could not have planned for.

For example, I love my work as a city councilor, but joining city council was never in my plan.

Instead, one day in April, 2023, I received a random text from my city council president, telling me that my precinct councilor was resigning and asking if I wanted to do it. Lots of smaller interactions during previous campaigns had led her to think I might be interested.

Initially, I said no. I anticipated—and my predictions proved true—that being on council city would be a huge time commitment with basically no financial compensation, and that it would slow down my plans to bring my book into the world.

I tried to find someone else to take the role, but everyone I asked said no.

And, so after tuning in to my inner guidance and asking my soon-to-be colleagues on council lots of questions, I realized I wanted to do it.

One thing that helped me get clear was something I’d learned from years of career coaching, which is that clarity is an emergent phenomenon. Emergence is the process by which something we could not have foreseen and that is greater than the sum of its parts arises from multiple small steps and interactions.

Just like breathing, clarity is not an endpoint, a destination, or something we check off a grocery list. Getting clear about what to do next is an iterative practice—we notice the possibilities around us, do experiments, have conversations, try things out, gather information, and choose our next steps.

Sometimes the information we gather tells us to keep going. Other times, we learn things that call us to pivot, choose a new direction, and try again.

By repeating this process over and over again, some doors close that we had hoped would stay open, and other possibilities emerge that we might never have expected.

When we resist emergence—as most of us do when we’re deeply invested in a plan or afraid what might happen if things go awry—we can overlook new opportunities, slow down the process, and feel more distress along the way. Of course, we long for certainty, perfect solutions, and an end to all the decision-making. Emergence can be uncomfortable.

In fact, many facilitators call the twisty-turny path between divergence and convergence—between seeing possibilities and making decisions—the groan zone because we so often feel confused, impatient, bored, scared, and other flavors of discomfort during this phase.

When we view our choices through a lens of finality and try to find the best, perfect, or final answer we are more likely to languish in doubt, indecision, and procrastination.

But when we recognize the inevitability of uncertainty and approach each step as an experiment, it becomes easier to engage decision-making with a sense of play, the closing of doors can feel less painful, and new possibilities become easier to see.

Everything is an experiment. We cannot know with certainty where any step will lead us. But we can learn from what happens.

Conducting experiments is like flirting with a path. First, you say hello. Then, you go on a date.

What You Really Need

“We have been raised to fear . . . our deepest cravings.

And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect,

keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for . . .

many facets of our own oppression.”[1]

—Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic

 

I used to think it was indulgent and selfish to acknowledge my needs and desires, especially when so many people in the world suffer so much more than I do.

I grew up with few models of self-love and care, and I was painfully aware of my white privilege from an early age. In my teens and early twenties, my reluctance to take good care of myself and my white guilt mixed together into a brew of savior mentality. I showed up in less-than-helpful ways and lived on the brink of burnout.

Luckily, life sent me a wake up call at a relatively young age. My moment of truth came while lying on my bed in Oaxaca, Mexico, thirty-six weeks pregnant. I’d just returned from an appointment with my midwife. The hospitals in Oaxaca had extremely high rates of medical intervention in births, and I wanted a home birth. My midwife told me that my baby was breech and that my son would need to turn soon in order to have the birth I was hoping for.

Lying on my bed, I placed my hands on my belly and asked my baby what he needed. I sensed his response immediately—Settle yourself.

I’d been through a lot in the year leading up to that moment. My partner, who was undocumented at the time, was racially profiled while driving to work, and six months later, he was deported to Mexico. I had transferred with my job with the hotel workers’ union from New Haven, Connecticut to Phoenix, Arizona to be closer to him.

A few months after that, I discovered I was pregnant, and I spent my pregnancy bouncing back and forth across borders, trying to figure out where we’d live next. Finally, at seven-months-pregnant, I moved to Oaxaca, Mexico.

With my hands on my belly, I realized that to be the mother I wanted to be for my baby, I needed to feel settled in my body, which meant doing many things differently. I promised my son that I would learn to take better care of myself, and that started my journey to share this with you today.

Now, it wasn’t an immediate jump from A to B—from neglecting my needs to honoring them at all times—and I am definitely still a work in progress, but I am so grateful to my son for the wake-up call and for starting me on this path toward aligning my life with my deepest needs and values.

So, now that you know a bit of my story, let’s turn to you.

How would you describe your relationship with your needs?

When people ask you what you need or want, do you know exactly how to answer? Or do you struggle to respond?

And, if you do know what you need, do you prioritize your needs?

Would you like some acknowledgement of how hard it can be to meet your needs, with all of the demands that are on you and the lack of support we receive in our splintered society?

Or would you like some acknowledgement that no one ever taught you to meet your needs well?

One reason I see that many people struggle to understand and prioritize their needs is attachment wounds. So, before we go further, I want to take you on a brief detour to explore attachment theory and how babies learn to honor their needs—or not.

Although most of us come into this world with the capacity to express whether or not our needs are met, we are not born with the ability to meet our needs. Instead, we rely on our caregivers to teach us to meet our needs.

Here’s how we ideally develop the ability to identify our needs and feel safe, seen, soothed, and able to trust ourselves and others, an ability known as secure attachment:[2]

Secure Attachment

Let’s imagine that there’s a baby. The baby wakes up after a nap and starts crying. The caregiver comes into the room, coos lovingly to the baby, picks the baby up, and rocks the baby back and forth.

What You Feel

“White supremacy has used the suppression of feelings to hold down communities.

If you block the pain, you’ll likely block the feelings needed to fight back against oppression.”

—Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement

 

Your body is your compass.

I invite you to imagine that you’ve just been dropped into the middle of a vast wilderness.

What do you want to make sure you have in your backpack?

Sure, water, snacks, and bear/snake/tiger repellant would be great, but your number one tool, by far, is a compass. Without it, you’d wander in circles until your supplies ran out.

On the path toward creating a life of justice and joy, there are many moments where we feel like we’ve been unceremoniously dumped in a vast wilderness. Lost. Stuck. Hurting. When the stakes feel high, it can be hard to discern which step to take next, let alone see possible paths forward.

And yet, we each already have an internal compass. Beneath all the swirling thoughts, there is an inner wisdom that can help us discern our next steps even when we don’t know our final destination.

Your body is your compass.

Our bodies are extraordinarily sensitive navigational systems. When we come to a fork in the road on the path through life, our bodies offer sensations that indicate which direction is a yes, which is a no, and which is a maybe. Like tuning forks, our bodies say, “Don’t go that way. Go this way. Turn that way. Yup. Nope. Not yet. We need more information. Nope. Yup. Maybe.”

Although your conscious mind may not know how to explain or justify your body’s signals—and may not yet even be consciously aware of them, your body is nevertheless processing and communicating all sorts of information below your conscious awareness. Every cell in our bodies is continuously tracking what’s happening in its own way and relaying information back to our brains.

But what if you don’t quite trust your body’s signals? What if you feel dread about doing something that you know is good for you? Or what if you know that you need to get more comfortable with discomfort?

Our bodies’ messages are often not simple. Discomfort doesn’t always mean stop. And comfort doesn’t necessarily mean go.

Our sensations and emotions are information.[1] If you feel tension, constriction, or other uncomfortable sensations, your body is trying to tell you something. If you feel excitement, peace, or deep engagement, your body is sending a signal.

Our feelings are like spokespeople for our needs. But it often takes practice to decipher the messages.

Our first task is to notice what we feel without jumping to immediate reactions or conclusions. Then, after we notice we feel a feeling, our next task is to get curious about what we really need, which we’ll focus on in the next episode.

For now, in this episode we’ll focus on how to discern what we feel in the first place and why noticing and discerning what we feel can be so hard.

Why We Might Struggle to Feel & What Happens When We Don’t

Perhaps you learned at an early age to negate your body’s signals. Maybe someone insisted that you stop crying when you felt sad, that you were fine when you felt sick, that you were making things up when you felt grossed out, or that your emotions or desires were destructive or irrational.[2]

To protect yourself from rejection and meet your needs, you may have made unconscious agreements with yourself to not feel certain emotions, to ignore or suppress these feelings if they ever arose, or to believe that some feelings were wrong, weird, meaningless, dirty, excessive, or shameful. As a result, you might say that you’re anxious when you actually feel angry or that you’re frustrated when you actually feel sad.

If your body holds a lot of unhealed trauma, it can feel excruciating to tune in to your body, so you might dissociate and flee to the apparent safety of your brain’s left hemisphere,

Self-Resonance: How

“When people change the way they speak to themselves,

they change the way their brain works.” - Sarah Peyton

 

In the last episode, I introduced the concept of resonance—that experience of relaxation we feel when we’re accompanied and truly understood by another—and I shared how self-resonance lays the soil in which all the other practices of radical discernment can take root. When we accompany ourselves with warm, precise attunement, it becomes so much easier to soothe our fear and pain, decipher our bodies’ messages, and chart a path that honors our needs and our values.

In this podcast, I’ll introduce you to three fundamental aspects of self-resonance—self-warmth, self-accompaniment, and self-attunement, and six practices to help you cultivate self-resonance.

As you read, I invite you to get curious about how you are or are not already practicing these, because The more awareness we bring to how we treat ourselves, the more choice we have to treat ourselves well.

Aspect One: Self-Warmth 

I invite you to bring to mind someone, real or imaginary, who is exquisitely capable of offering you warmth and care. They see you through kind eyes, speak to you in a caring tone of voice, and if you would like them to, put an arm around your shoulders or hold your hand. You feel your body relax as they offer you love and hold you in unconditional positive regard. This is the feeling of warmth. 

Aspect Two: Self-Accompaniment

In his book, Narrative Medicine, Lakota-Cherokee shaman and psychiatrist Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona writes that the dominant culture’s focus on individual healing is a historically new phenomenon. In shamanic traditions, healing almost always takes place within community.

Mehl-Madrona writes, Beyond any technique, relationships are what heal.[1] Trauma usually occurs in relationship, so healing ideally happens in relationship too.

Accompaniment means to come beside or to go along with. Resonance requires a sense of accompaniment, the sense someone we trust is with us.

We humans are relational creatures who need accompaniment from others to feel whole, and so, ideally, we receive resonance from other people we trust—friend, partner, family member, skilled therapist, coach, or practice buddy. If it feels hard to let ourselves be loved by other humans, we can also receive a sense of accompaniment from companion animals, trees, rivers, landscapes, other aspects of nature, songs, ancestors, or a sense of a greater spirit or the divine. We can also learn to accompany ourselves.

Aspect Three: Self-Attunement

To attune means to bring into harmony. Attuning to ourselves or another is like adjusting the radio dial until we find the signal we’re looking for. To find that signal, we focus our soft attention with genuine curiosity and ask gentle, open-ended questions to understand what is happening for us, without aiming to change the situation.

We know we’ve found the signal we’re seeking when the other person or the part of ourselves we’re attuning to responds with Yes, that’s it!

Now that we have the three aspects of self-resonance, let’s explore six practices for cultivating self-resonance.

Before we go, I want to remind you that when people hold a lot of unhealed trauma, attempting to practice self-resonance can bring up painful feelings. Warmth can melt us out of a numb, frozen state, and sometimes, that can feel uncomfortable or scary.

If that happens for you as you experiment with these practices, please take care of yourself. You might pause, scan the room for safety, wiggle your hands and feet, or do whatever else you need to return to a more comfortable state.

You might also seek out a trauma-informed therapist or another professional who can help you cultivate a sense of inner safety before you dive in alone. It can be hard for us humans to offer ourselves resonance until someone else models resonance for us.

Self-Resonance

“We are all rather like tree rings and shell patterns

in that what has happened to us leaves a permanent record.

The goal of trauma work, therefore, as I see it,

is not to erase or cure but rather to expand and include and

grow larger than whatever has happened to us.”[1]

– Francesca Mason Boring

 

It Feels Good to be Heard

One day when my son, Kai, was six, he and his friend were playing with a balloon at a birthday party. Suddenly, Kai’s friend’s three-year-old sister, let’s call her Gabi, ran crying out of the room.

A few minutes later, I stood up and went to the bedroom, where she sat on the bed crying.

Gabi’s mother was kneeling in front of her, pleading with her to stop crying, and her grandfather was standing in a corner with his guitar, strumming an upbeat song in an attempt to cheer her up.

Meanwhile, Gabi was seemingly oblivious to all their cajoling.

With her mother’s consent, I sat down beside Gabi and asked what was wrong. Between sobs, she told me that the boys had taken her balloon. It wasn’t their balloon. It was her balloon. And they hadn’t asked for it.

I looked Gabi in the eyes and said, “That’s really sad, isn’t it? Are you really sad? Do you really want your balloon back?”

Gabi turned and looked at me with a puzzled expression, as if she was surprised to finally be heard. Then she heaved a huge sigh, put her head on my shoulder, and slowly stopped crying. “Yeah,” she said, seeming relieved that someone had asked her what she needed without trying to convince her to feel differently.

After a moment, we stood up, hand in hand, and went to ask the boys to give her the balloon back.

They promptly did.

What happened between Gabi and me that day was resonance.

What is Resonance

The word resonance comes from the Latin word resonare, meaning to sound back.

Resonance is what happens between two people when one person brings their warm, curious attention to the other in an attempt to understand them, and the second person responds with—Yes, that's it!

When someone shows that they truly get you, and your body relaxes and responds with, Yes! that's resonance. Our human bodies vibrate at different frequencies depending on our emotions, and when we resonate with another person, it’s as though our emotional worlds vibrate together.

Resonance is compassion-plus. Compassion means to suffer with. Self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff identifies three components of self-compassion: 1) mindfulness—an awareness of what’s happening without trying to change it, 2) self-kindness, 3) a recognition of our common humanity and how we are not alone in our pain.[2]

We can feel compassion toward someone else without them even knowing it, but as Sarah Peyton writes in Your Resonant Self, “we cannot be resonant with a person unless we are being relational—resonance is a two-person experience. Someone else can’t simply declare a resonance with us. The receivers are the ones who get to say whether or not someone else’s presence or language feels resonant”[3]

Although I had been deliberately practicing resonance toward myself, my clients, and my loved ones for nearly a decade before discovering Sarah Peyton’s work, I hadn’t been calling it resonance. I’m so grateful to Sarah Peyton for naming the importance of resonance and teaching the neuroscience behind it. This precise language has helped me become even more precise in my practice.

Resonance can happen verbally or nonverbally, and we can receive resonance from a part of ourselves, another person, an animal companion, a song, nature, or any being in the more-than-human realm.

Today, I want to talk about self-resonance, the practice and skill of offering resonance to ourselves.

Rather than practicing self-resonance, when most of us encounter a challenging situation, we ignore, criticize, dismiss, negate, or diminish what they feel; try to fix what’s wrong before truly understanding what’s going on;...

I invite you to ask yourself this question:

When you feel hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad, how do you respond?

Do you ignore how you feel, bypass your body's signals, continue to power through your day, or lecture yourself about what you should be doing differently to feel better?

Or do you approach your uncomfortable feelings as a cue to pause, get curious about what you need, and choose a step toward meeting your needs?

Or do you do some of each, sometimes tending to how you feel and sometimes ignoring yourself?

In Episodes Six and Seven, I’ve shared with you the power of pausing to transform old habits and make choices that meet your needs. If you’re curious to learn more, I recommend listening to those episodes.

Today, I want to build on the practice of pausing by encouraging you to be on the lookout for a new set of cues and to pause when you notice them. These cues can be summed up with the acronym HALT(S).

The HALT(S) practice has its roots in the recovery movement, and its premise is simple: We humans are more likely to make choices that don’t serve us well when we don’t feel good.

Traditionally, the acronym is HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. I add the letter “S” to represent sore, stressed, and sad.

Here’s the practice:

Throughout your days, pay attention to how you feel, and if you notice that you feel hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad, take it as a cue to halt.

Pause.

Then, get curious.

Ask yourself: What small steps am I able and willing to take to feel better now?

Then take whatever steps feel doable.

You may have time to close your computer, go for a long walk, eat a nourishing meal, phone a friend, or get your journal out and reflect on why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. Or you may be in the middle of a busy work day and only have a moment to acknowledge your feelings and needs, and may need to wait to tend to your needs until later that day or week.

If you’re feeling pretty crummy (like a 1, 2, or 3 on a scale where 10 is feeling the best and 0 is feeling the worst), get curious about what you might do to shift to a 5 or 6. If you’re at a 6, get curious about what might help you shift to an 8 or a 9. And, of course, if 10 feels easy enough, go for that. But don’t go for perfection. Just stay curious about what might help you feel a little bit better, and take whatever steps feel doable now.

To help remind you to pause, you might grab a sticky note, write “HALT(S)” on it, and put it somewhere you’ll see it. Then, pay attention, and take notes about what helps you feel better.

Imagine that you are backpacking through life, and keep a list of the basics you need in your pack to feel nourished enough.

I invite you to start that list now. If you’d like, grab your journal and write down a list of the basics that help you feel not bad.

As you learn more about what helps you feel nourished, energized, and supported, add any new practices to your list. Make sure to stay focused on the basics. We can only carry so much comfortably in our packs, and it’s important not to weigh ourselves down with too many must-dos.

Your list may also include some limits you place on yourself—like not staying up past a certain hour or not scrolling the internet longer than is good for you. If part of you resists or rebels against these limits, I invite you to imagine that you are reparenting yourself—taking responsibility for what you need, offering yourself the care you may have missed out on as a little one, and setting loving limits to nurture yourself.

Of course, when we set limits for little ones, they don’t always like it. They might even throw a tantrum especially when they’re feeling hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad. But as an adult who loves them, you know they need limits.

Similarly, self-care sometimes looks like stopping and saying no to ourselves.