“Perfection is overrated. Competition makes us common. The game is over. You are here to be unique. You are here to be you. Enjoy the freedom of that.” In Episode 14 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus on not just accepting, but embracing, our quirks and flaw and idiosyncracies and wounds and weirdness. When shame […]

The post Week 13: Embracing Your Valuable Flaws [Loveable 014] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Grace isn’t just acceptance of the status quo. Grace contains the status quo—all of our struggle and pain and mess—and embraces us and values us anyway. Grace demands that nothing be changed for love and connection to happen, and that kind of love has power.”  In Episode 13 of The Loveable Podcast, we talk about […]

The post Week 12: The Voice of Grace [Loveable 013] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Maybe growing up and growing healthy is as simple as discerning which voices to allow in, and learning how to keep the rest of the voices out.” In last week’s episode, we began to focus on the voice of shame all of us hear on the inside of us. Now, in this twelfth episode of […]

The post Week 11: Choosing Which Voices to Listen to Around You [Loveable 012] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“There is a place inside of you where a better voice is telling a better story about you. Let the next chapter of your story be about listening for that voice.” In Episode 11 of The Loveable Podcast, we define shame, describe how it can be recognized in our experience, and explore how the concept of story […]

The post Week 10: Why Shame Is the Beginning of Your Story (Not the End of It) [Loveable 011] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“Embracing your worthiness is up to you and you alone—we cannot truly receive love until we have embraced that we are worthy of love. However, we all need someone to walk with us as we do so. We don’t depend upon this person for our sense of worth, but we can lean upon them when […]

The post Week 9: What to Do When Your Heart Feels Like a Jungle [Loveable 010] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

Emotional healing and spiritual growth are not about eliminating our pain; they are about approaching our pain. Rather than moving away from our pain, we learn how to move toward it, enduring it, learning from it, transforming it, and eventually moving through it, to where we find our true self. In Episode 9 of The […]

The post Week 8: The Small Gate and Narrow Road Back to Your True Self [Loveable 009] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“This is the promise of your pain: to relate to it properly, you must learn how to observe it, and as you learn to observe it, you begin, for the first time, to fully inhabit the soul within you that is doing the observing. This week, begin to inhabit your soul once again. Welcome home.”  […]

The post Week 7: You Are Not Your Thoughts (You Are the Observer of Your Thoughts) [Loveable 008] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

“You already are what you are becoming. You don’t build what you are; you chip away at what you are not. We are, each of us, like blocks of wood, and becoming our true self is the gradual process of carving away the excess and steadily becoming more and more the shape of what we […]

The post Week 6: Unbecoming Who You Are Not [Loveable 007] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

What is the only thing worse than not getting what you want? Getting what you want. Because after you get what you want, you will probably realize it wasn’t the hoped-for solution to all of your problems. And then what? In Episode 6 of The Loveable Podcast, we talk about our search for a solution […]

The post Week 5: Letting Go of the Solution to All of Your Problems [Loveable 006] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

What if all our efforts to improve ourselves are actually keeping us stuck, because, sometimes, self-help is just cleverly disguised self-rejection? And what if, sometimes, self-acceptance is the most helpful, most transformative thing of all? Welcome to Episode 5 of The Loveable Podcast, in which we read and discuss Week 4 of Loveable’s companion book,  […]

The post Week 4: Self-Acceptance Is the Foundation of All Self-Improvement [Loveable 005] appeared first on Dr. Kelly Flanagan.