I have been listening to Glennon Doyle every day at her morning meeting. It’s incredibly powerful stuff and I am so grateful for her lessons every day.
This week she is talking about not abandoning ourselves (which is a favourite topic of mine) and she invited us to look at what our inner homes look like. Who are we on the inside? As I share about design psychology, I often mention the reflection of our outside environments to our inner ones and how we can learn about ourselves by looking at both.
Her topic this week had me inspired to consider what makes a healthy ‘inner’ home and how I would go about constructing one. Just as we would our external homes, we would choose materials and contractors that provided good foundations. We would want quality stuff to build our home. So, what does that look like internally when we want to build a sturdy, stable inner home that we can always return to. Here’s a few ways I came up with.
5 ways to create a healthy inner home:
Keep your word to yourself.
My clients often ask how they can build self-esteem and self-worth after years of not having any and lifetimes of not being taught how. One of the first exercises I give them is to keep their word to themselves. Starting with one small thing a day. Make a promise to yourself and keep it. This practice is so powerful not in the actual task you complete, but in the honour and respect you create for yourself when you keep your word. Most often, we keep our word and hold ourselves accountable for other people but not ourselves. When we do this, we put others before ourselves and we let ourselves down, we abandon ourselves. By keeping our word consistently to ourselves especially when no one is watching, we start to build a real foundation of self-love and respect.
Feel your feelings.
Emotional maturity means that we can experience and express the entire spectrum of human emotions in a healthy way. We are not supposed to feel one way all the time. Emotions are energy in motion, meaning they hold charge and energy that cannot stay in your body. Emotions live in our bodies not our heads so if we don’t feel and express them, they bottle up. Our bodies are like containers that hold this energy and if we don’t empty out our containers in a safe and healthy way, they overflow like our kitchen garbage and then we leak. If we allow ourselves to experience our emotions without incorporating thought, they will just move through us like they are supposed to. As soon as we interrupt the process with thought (judgement mostly), we start the process all over again. Learning how to process our emotions just as they are and without judgment is key to emotional health and stability.
Meet yourself.
You are in there. You. Not the programmed, conditioned, who you were told to be you. But the actual YOU. Find yourself. Meet yourself. Date yourself. We often know who we were told to be, who we are expected to be, but how much of that did we choose for ourselves? As adults now, we can decide what we like and what we don’t, what we believe and what we don’t, what we stand for and what we don’t. My clients often tell me that they don’t know who they are, yet when I ask them who they aren’t, they can tell me a lot. Sometimes we have to start with who we aren’t, to find out who we are. Just because you may not know your favourite colour or your favourite food, doesn’t mean you don’t know who you are. Start with what you know and build from there. Decide who you are for yourself, not who you’ve been told to be.
Faith in self vs trust in others.
This is a big concept but one my counselling teacher shared with me and one I will never forget. We often want to trust others to do the right thing to keep us safe. “If I can just trust him, I won’t get hurt”. This way of placing our ‘okay-ness’ in someone else’s hands can be tricky. In some sense, it is a way to control or change another person. We want to alter their behaviour to ensure our emotional well-being. This concept of faith in self vs trust in others offers us the empowering perspective that we actually are in charge of our emotional well-being and as long as we have faith in ourselves, what others do or don’t do, doesn’t really matter. From this perspective, we can choose to work on building our faith in ourselves to take care of ourselves no matter what, instead of putting our energy on something or someone that we may or may not be able to control. Just leaving this here for you to try on.
Hold space and grace.
Here’s another area where we are willing to show up better for others but deny ourselves that same space and grace. These are tough times and if you are choosing to use this time for personal development and healing, there will be times when it might be hard or doesn’t feel so good. Have space for that and allow yourself some grace. Our bodies cannot differentiate between emotional pain and physical pain so if you are exhausted after a session with your counsellor, it may feel to your physical body like you have just run a marathon. Have space for this, rest and take care of yourself. True unconditional love for others means we have unconditional love for ourselves first because we can’t give what we don’t have. Same goes for respect, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, space and grace. Once we offer those things to ourselves first, we can then offer them to others and be of service in a way that doesn’t leave us feeling empty, resentful and worst of all, abandoned. Hold space and grace for yourself just as you do others. Work from the inside out.
Often, we get caught up in our external worlds that we forget about our internal ones. We get overwhelmed by our outside homes that we ignore our inside ones. Yesterday’s meeting with Glennon was a nice reminder that we need to build strong, healthy inside homes too.
Thanks, Ms. G. Check her out, she is good stuff.
Live well,
Cher
