Make a commitment to yourself to live at your highest, shine at your brightest, love at your deepest and create from the most sincere part of your being. I have realized to accomplish this is to have deep compassion for yourself. That way, you’re truly able to live from the inside out.

My therapist recommended the book on the last slide to me. I think is because she noticed that I had an unhealthy habit of over-extending myself without taking myself into consideration.

I feel like we’ve grown up being conditioned to “not be selfish”, “put others first”, “give of yourself” and we’ve taken that to mean, “don’t think of yourself at all”. Not many of us have actively been taught to spend time with ourselves, get to know ourselves, what do we really like?

Not what society wants us to like. What don’t we really like? Not what we’ve been conditioned to enjoy/endure.

One of my favorite quotes from the book which was attributed to someone else is, “Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”.

Suffering, simply put is wallowing in pain and we have suffered because we’ve not extended compassion to ourselves in our moments of pain. We’ve not been taught HOW to process our pain.

One of the rings this book encourages us to do is to talk to ourselves in the voice of the wisest person/friend that we know.

E.g “Toyosi, I know you’re hurting but it’s for a short while, it will pass. Remember something similar to this happened before and you’re not feeling that pain anymore so don’t wallow in this for too long. Take the time you need but get up and move quickly. Don’t stay down”.

Words create and many times, we want the creative words to come from other people but sometimes it’s ok for these words to come from us to us. There’s healing power in the words we speak over ourselves.

Anyway, I’ll be sending my invoice for this therapy session that we’ve just had!!! But jokes aside I recommend this book Self-Compassion by @neffselfcompassion