Bealtaine is a festival of fertility, love and lust and this year, we're braving the parts of ourselves we find hardest to love...

Full transcript

Thinking again about who you love but this time bringing it more to yourself and thinking about all the different parts of yourself and the parts of yourself you find it easier to love and harder to love.

What parts do you appreciate about yourself and what parts do you find more challenging if love feels too strong? And I want you, if you're familiar with Friends, to remember Phoebe's famous song about that poor smelly, smelly cat. Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, what are they feeding you? Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, it's not your fault. They won't take you to the vet, you're probably not their favourite pet. Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, it's not your fault.

Welcome to episode 56 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast.

Thanks for joining me. I'm your host and producer Eve Menezes Cunningham and this week we're celebrating the Irish Celtic Festival of Bealtaine, also known as Beltane. It's a festival, part of the Celtic Wheel of the Year, of fertility, love and lust.

And for the purposes of this week's podcast and the Sole to Soul Circle membership, we're focusing on love.

The love we have for ourselves and for others can, of course, be really challenging with trauma histories and with ADHD and with rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD). It can be really challenging to feel love and really easy to feel rejection.

The more we can have that awareness around our styles of interpreting the world, the stories we're telling ourselves about what actions mean and being able to love ourselves enough to speak up for ourselves and love our loved ones enough to speak with as much love as possible but expressing our needs and wants.

It can all be really fraught and tense and also so joyful and it's such a lovely time of year with the lambs and the leaves and the flowers and the growth in all directions, that sense of thinking about what you love and the way your love life is, whether you're single, whether you're attached, how you would like it to be, thinking about your ideal love relationships, your ideal in terms of how much time you would be able to spend with your loved ones, thinking about what you already value in terms of your love life and others in your life you love and who love you.

And also using it as an opportunity to do a bit of a love audit and think about where things might be missing, where you can amp up that self-love.

Inner child work is always really powerful, really needed because the more we attend to those wounded parts of ourselves, the less likely we are to project them outwards, the more able we are to hold ourselves and therefore to communicate in a more loving, compassionate way. So lots to be thinking about.

I hope you've got a diary or pen and paper ready so you can pause things, make notes, maybe pause the episode, come back to it.

Starting by thinking about all the things and all the people we love. Maybe pause here and just make a note of all the things you love, things you love to do, things like inanimate things, other things, parts of the world like places, people, animals, whatever springs to mind when you think about what do you love, just let yourself make a list of all the things you love.

We're going to come back to it later and I'm going to remind you again that like all the episodes, this offering is to help you gently explore ways in which you can amp up the love for yourself and for your higher case S Self and for others.

Thinking again about who you love, but this time bringing it more to yourself and thinking about all the different parts of yourself and the parts of yourself you find it easier to love and harder to love.

What parts do you appreciate about yourself and what parts do you find more challenging if love feels too strong? And I want you, if you're familiar with Friends, to remember Phoebe's famous song about that poor smelly, smelly cat. Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, what are they feeding you? Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, it's not your fault. They won't take you to the vet, you're probably not their favourite pet. Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, it's not your fault.

I do a lot of work around Cattitude and Feline Better Every Day and working with polyvagal informed approaches to trauma recovery and VAST / ADHD and recently was talking to someone about doing some CPD for them. And I pitched Smelly Cat! Because the more we love those smelly parts of ourselves, the parts we feel are completely unlovable, mangy, maybe flea-ridden…

All those parts need our love. If that cat were taken to the vet, given a good clean, given an enormous, maybe at a distance – It might be feral – hug. But time and patience and understanding and the commitment to getting to know those smelly, smelly, smelly cats, that cat could become a beautiful magnificat, a wondrous creature. Like most cats in terms of knowing how worthy it is of love and adoration and freedom and safety and all the things all us mammals are worthy of.

When you think of your own inner Smelly Cat or when you think of the Smelly Cats in your life, the people you struggle to love, but most likely the parts of yourself that you struggle with that you just want to kind of ignore and pretend they're not there, potentially worse, you might hurt yourself, you might.

But if you were to imagine the potential for healing with those smelly parts of yourself, those Smelly Cat parts of yourself…

And that brings us then to the kind of love that therapists have for our clients. I never know if I'm pronouncing it right rightly or wrongly, agape or agape, but it's that kind of essence of love and in person-centred counselling, it's known as unconditional positive regard.

You're not, obviously, going to breach any boundaries, but there is that love for your clients in terms of what they're bringing, for your supervisees in terms of what they're bringing. And that in psychosynthesis we have the archetypes of Love and the Will.

Will is really important in terms of making changes, sustaining changes, and there are different types of will. There's the ‘transpersonal will’, the ‘good will’, thinking of the greater good, and there's ‘skillful will’ where we adapt our approaches accordingly, and there's ‘strong will’ where we just kind of plough through, get things done.

But Love is just as strong, just as important as Will. It is more to do with acceptance, with support, and thinking for yourself, like how can you show those Smelly Cat parts of yourself more love?

How can you hold them when you think about the people in your life that you've identified, the ones who are easy to love, the ones that are more challenging to love, if you were to imagine having more patience with them, more understanding for them, more giving yourself and others more grace?

That's what it's all about. And knowing that you and everyone else is worthy of that, and not trying to expect yourself to be like some sort of saint where you only feel love and light, we're humans, we annoy each other.

It's completely normal and natural, but by recognising what is getting churned up, what's getting stirred up, what's coming up for healing, and by attending to it, we can then really use our relationships with the parts of ourselves as well as with others, both loved ones and the people we find more challenging, to help us grow, to help us evolve, to help us develop.

Thinking in terms of the Love archetype, and maybe whether you, and again you might want to make some notes in your journal, your piece of paper, you might want to think maybe the Will archetype is stronger in you? Maybe you're really great at getting things done, at go, go, go, at like figuring out how to make the impossible possible, and maybe it's very much like giving into that ‘good will’? Thinking for the highest good for all concerned, and maybe even surrendering to ‘transpersonal will’?

But we still need that Love energy. Thinking for yourself, with yourself, with a Smelly Cat part of yourself, and maybe more than one part is coming up for healing now, and maybe if you have children, or you have other like kind of young people in your life, or anyone in your life, thinking about how can you be more accepting of those parts of yourself, and of others, without trying to change anything.

I'm laughing now, because this is my work, this is, this has been my work for a really long time now, and I had a little bit of a meltdown at the weekend, at time of filming, where we were on our way back, driving from Cork to Westport. And I am highly allergic to peppers, anaphylaxis, and I am vegan, so no animal products, and we'd stopped at a service station with, I don't know, five, six concession stands.

And I could not get anything that was edible, let alone anything that I wanted to eat, and all I needed to see were the ingredients, like were there peppers? Bell peppers, okay, I can't have that. Instead, people kept pointing me to allergen lists, and bell peppers aren't one of the big 14, so they're not on their lists.

I felt like the smelliest Smelly Cat in the universe, and I'm 49 years old. I've been doing this work on myself for so long, but I felt so vulnerable. I felt like I'd never be able to eat again. I was hungry, I kept it together, but later on that evening, when I got home, I got really upset about it.

And I realised I really needed to attend to that kind of baby toddler part of myself that had felt too much for the adults around me. Not all the time, but at times, I think that had got very churned up. I was able to talk to my partner about it, I can talk to friends about it, but it's still with the allergy, with the being vegan, it's something that gets triggered in me when I go out to eat. Even when I've given the information in advance, and they've assured me it won't be a problem, and then it's like, oh, it's got cream in it, or oh, it's got butter in it, or oh, all these things that aren't vegan. Or worse, peppers. And so I had to really work hard to love that part of myself that didn't cause a scene, but wasn't as gracious as I normally like to be.

I normally like to be, thank you so much, that's amazing, whereas it was just like, ‘OK, can I please have the base of a pizza with some tomato sauce then?’, ‘Would you like cheese with that?’ ‘No thank you, cheese is not vegan.’

They didn't have vegan cheese, and it just felt like with all, and I think Marianne Williamson talks about everything being a call for love, when we think about bad behaviour, when we think about the times we act out, or others act out, and if we're able to see what's behind it, it's just that:

Am I lovable? Am I too much? Am I enough? Am I…?

It's really easy to love, and to help others heal, and to help ourselves heal, but we have to not only start with ourselves, but to help others when they can't do it for themselves, it's not that old, ‘Oh you can't love others, or you can't let love in until you love yourself,’ because that way, so many people would never love.

We do love and heal in connection. We co-regulate. But it is all connected, and when you notice yourself feeling cranky, when you notice yourself feeling frustrated, when you notice yourself not being at your best, if again you were to attach that Smelly Cat love, and know underneath the smelliest of cats is the most adorable divine feline.

You have that within yourself as well. How can you attend to those smelly parts? How can you, I'll get off the Smelly Cat analogy at some point, but not today. How can you just know that you are worthy? How can you know, how can you believe in every fibre of your being, that you are deserving? And that you deserve good food? That you deserve care in other areas of your life, in other types of work? In other places you visit?

All sorts of things, like there are so many people who, especially now, in so many things in 2025, where you'd think we had gone past all the hate, all the maligning of already marginalised communities, and just show them the love that they and everyone else deserve.

Thinking for yourself, this Bealtaine and beyond, how can you show yourself more love? How can you show others more love? How can you accept more love? How can you know, even when you feel at your smelliest, that you are worthy and deserving of others’ love?

And it might be that you let them attend to your smelly parts, and that you begin to think, oh, OK, if you haven't already watched Penelope, and if it's still on Netflix when you’re watching or listening to this, please watch it.

It was one of my favourite films for decades, and I re-watched it recently, and it definitely stands up. Again, the key is self-love. I don't want to give much more away but let me know how you get on, I love hearing from you.

And for Sole to Soul Circle members, your deeper dive bonus content this week will be a simple ritual you can do to heal your hurting heart, both over Bealtaine and throughout the coming year.

It's really a symbolic healing, and it's really powerful, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you.

And this episode, like all episodes so far, has been produced by me, your host Eve Menezes Cunningham. Thank you very much for listening, I love sharing these with you, I love hearing from you, and you can, if you haven't already, rate, review, subscribe, share, comment, like, if you think of anyone who would benefit from this content, please send them a link, or tell them where they can find it on Spotify, Apple, everywhere else, Substack, and YouTube.

And I just really want to know what is that smelliest, smelliest, Smelly Cat part of yourself? You can email me, eve at selfcarecoaching.net, or you can comment on any of the platforms that I'm sharing this on. If you were to think what does that Inner Smelly Cat need? Just keep asking yourself, what does that Smelly Cat need? It might need a bit of a bath, it might need some fresh air, it might need some sunshine, it might need some time in the company of other cats, it might need sleep, I mean, my goodness, sleep always makes me better company, it might need food, but knowing that you and everyone else are worthy of love, and I hope that with this time of year, having such wonderful, loving energy, that you can afford that to yourself and others in your life.

With that, am sending enormous love to you and yours, and I look forward to sharing more next week!