Episode Title: Steps to Radical Acceptance: Observe Your Reality
Hosted by: Wysteria Edwards BA, Ed.
Episode Overview
In today's discussion, Wysteria Edwards discusses the transformative practice of radical acceptance and its first crucial step: observation. In our fast-paced world, it's easy to get caught up in trying to fix and control everything, but sometimes, we must simply observe and accept our reality to find peace.
Key Segments and Takeaways
Introduction to Radical Acceptance
Understanding Radical Acceptance: Embracing the present moment as it is without trying to change it.
Importance of Observation: Developing the skill of observing our reality helps us cultivate inner strength and peace.
Practical Applications
Observation in Daily Life: Tips for integrating observation into your routine to better handle stress and emotional responses.
Re-parenting Yourself: Learning to be kind and soothing to interrupt automatic stress responses.
Mindfulness Meditation: Practical advice on using mindfulness to become aware of bodily sensations.
Ready to take the first step towards radical acceptance?
Episode Title: Steps to Radical Acceptance: Observe Your Reality
Hosted by: Wysteria Edwards BA, Ed.
Episode Overview
In today's discussion, Wysteria Edwards discusses the transformative practice of radical acceptance and its first crucial step: observation. In our fast-paced world, it's easy to get caught up in trying to fix and control everything, but sometimes, we must simply observe and accept our reality to find peace.
Key Segments and Takeaways
Introduction to Radical Acceptance
Understanding Radical Acceptance: Embracing the present moment as it is without trying to change it.
Importance of Observation: Developing the skill of observing our reality helps us cultivate inner strength and peace.
Practical Applications
Observation in Daily Life: Tips for integrating observation into your routine to better handle stress and emotional responses.
Re-parenting Yourself: Learning to be kind and soothing to interrupt automatic stress responses.
Mindfulness Meditation: Practical advice on using mindfulness to become aware of bodily sensations.
Ready to take the first step towards radical acceptance?
Welcome to the Simple and Deep podcast, where we delve into attachment stories and intentional living. I'm your host, Wysteria Edwards, and I'm thrilled to have you here with me today. We'll be exploring the depths of all of these topics together, sharing insights and unlocking the power hidden within your story. Let's get started. Today's episode. We're going to embark on a journey to explore the transformative power of radical acceptance. This is a foundational piece of one of the ways that we learn to engage our story, but we do it with tenderness and self-compassion, especially when there have been so many times where we have had people fail us or we feel as though we've fallen short. What is radical acceptance? First and foremost, it is not just letting people off the hook or just turning the other cheek, but it's really the act of acknowledging the true reality of a situation, without resistance or judgment, because when we go into those places of resistance or judgment, we're automatically going to be stuck in places that are full of limiting beliefs and cognitive distortions about the way that the world works. So it means that we're saying out loud and to ourselves yes, this is happening right now and I choose to engage with it fully. I'm not going to disassociate from it. I'm not going to numb it, I'm not going to do anything but state exactly what is happening. These are things like understanding that we cannot change what is already occurred, but we can choose how we're going to respond and react to it. It's not about fighting against what exists, but instead leaning into it with curiosity and openness.
Wysteria Edwards:
In our fast-paced and often chaotic world, it's easy to get caught up in the constant attempt to fix and control everything in our lives. However, the reality is that we can't always change our circumstances. We may have just gotten fired from a job or had someone we love betray us. We may have participated in something that we now regret. We may have said something that we cannot take back. That is a fact. It is reality. It helps us to cultivate a sense of inner strength when we're able to look at the present moment, as is radical. Acceptance allows us to let go of perpetual struggles and find peace in the present moment. Fred Rogers spoke frequently about looking and listening carefully, leaning in and staying a little bit longer to find some truth in what we're seeing in the reality of the situation. It's easy with young children to focus on just their behaviors, but what I've learned over time is that if I stay a little bit longer and remain curious, open without judging, and just sit with it. Often that is when the revelation comes of what they need. How do we develop the skill of radical acceptance? It starts with observation. That's going to be the first step. We're going to go through 12 steps in the series for radical acceptance, but the first one is to observe, and one of the best ways that we can observe is to think about where we feel something in our bodies.
Wysteria Edwards:
Many of us with insecure attachment left the process of understanding what our body was doing a long time ago. Especially if you were to take our quiz and you come out as an avoidantly attached person. That part of you was turned off to keep yourself safe because you learned at a young age that emotions and sensations were not going to help you survive. And that is a trauma response in a lot of ways. And in that freeze response, sometimes we'll have inability to move when something happens. Our gaze will be wide, we'll find ourselves holding our breath. We will be isolating ourselves. We will feel a numbing sensation. We will not have a lot of words to express how we're feeling. You might feel as if things have slowed down quite a bit. That is all a sign that your body is experiencing some type of trauma or some type of moment that you need to actually engage. When that happens, you need to lean in instead of away, which is absolutely counterintuitive to what your body is going to want to do to feel safe. This is something that my husband is courageously engaging in his own story because of the fact that he was raised to be an avoidant, and when you're an avoidant, you're not looking to run into the flaming building, you're trying to find a way to get out, and so when I'm dysregulated and needing his support, it's like he's being asked to come into a room where they're firing bullets at him, and so it feels absolutely against everything that you feel like you should do.
Wysteria Edwards:
One of the things I want you to do first is to think of yourself like a scientist. You're going to be able to look and realize that there are troubled and struggling parts within yourself when you're experiencing big emotions. It is like a formula Our brain takes in information and it's going to go to our nervous system first, and our nervous system helps our body to interpret what is going on, and it will automatically go into some type of stance towards something that it believes is dangerous. So it might tell us to freeze, it might tell us to run, it might tell us to fight, it might tell us to be really, really, really nice and give everybody what they want so we don't get hurt. But it's going to do something and those are called neural pathways ways that our brain has got from one thing to another and those things have connected through neural networks in our brain like a superhighway, and so we don't even think about those automatic responses. They happen, and if we were not taught how to emotionally regulate because someone came alongside us at a young age, those are going to be things that happen automatically, regardless of the fact that we are not in danger. So perhaps at one point a saber-toothed tiger was coming at us to destroy us, but now it's just a mother-in-law or a possible situation that we're going to react as if the saber-toothed tiger is coming at us because we have not learned where it is that we need to stop that process and give ourself a little bit of kindness, soothing and reparenting.
Wysteria Edwards:
The first step would be to observe, and one of the best ways to do this is to practice mindfulness meditation. It really is about becoming aware of your body. My kindergartners have this great video on YouTube about the body scan and they love it. They love it because they get to think about themselves, they get to think about where they're feeling tension in their bodies and they get a moment to just relax and ease into the next part of the day. And it starts with pretending that there's a laser beam coming from the tops of their heads and it works its way down the body and they just become aware if their tummy is growling, if they have tightness in their chest, can they feel the sensation of their socks inside their shoes? Can they feel tightness in their chest? Can they feel the sensation of their socks inside their shoes? Can they feel any tension in their cheeks or is there some heaviness because they're tired?
Wysteria Edwards:
We often do not think what is going on in our world is affecting our bodies, and sensations give us reactions and feelings. Our nervous system is telling us things way before we're actually feeling the emotion or the sensation, and one of the things that I learned the most after I started healing my broken attachment was I needed to become really, really curious about what was going on and when. Big emotions showed up. If you think about energy being in motion is emotion. It's communicating to us, it's telling us something and often it's telling us where we need to heal.
Wysteria Edwards:
As you sit and take a few moments each day to be quiet and to focus on your breath and observe the thoughts that you have, without labeling them good or bad that's the judging part. It will help you to start to process how you can go about healing it, and one of the best things we can do is just to acknowledge and name it. Name that it's there. I am feeling sad, I am feeling heavy, I am feeling harassed. I am feeling sad, I am feeling heavy, I am feeling harassed, I am feeling tired, I am feeling scared, I am feeling lethargic. Being able to label it with words If you don't have the vocabulary, we have a great resource of a feelings wheel that you can download for free that I will link in the show notes.
Wysteria Edwards:
That would be a wonderful tool for you to have right there beside you so that you can think about where you're feeling it in your body and what it could possibly be labeled as. And you might not be able to label it right away, but the more that you examine it and allow it to be there. Recognize that you can have more than one feeling at a time, so you can feel tired and also elated. Or you can have more than one feeling at a time, so you can feel tired and also elated. Or you can feel sad but also excited for the next chapter of something. But the first thing we have to do is just acknowledge it and name it, and a great way to do that is to use some type of journaling, because journaling is going to activate the parts in your brain that you need to have activated. So writing down those thoughts, maybe asking yourself questions about that thought why is it here? What does it have to teach me? So this practice of journaling, it's just another antidote of ways that we can be present and observe and name the things that we're feeling.
Wysteria Edwards:
I once felt really frustrated and impatient when I was stuck in traffic, for instance, and so, instead of succumbing to all of the rage that I felt, I started practicing where I felt it in my body and asking it questions about why it was there, and it ended up being the root of shame that I was going to be late and that people couldn't count on me. That is a deeper revelation that people couldn't count on me. That is a deeper revelation. But until we acknowledge that that sensation is even there, it's trying to connect with us and trying to teach us something. So, somatically, our bodies react to stress and heartache through those bodily sensations.
Wysteria Edwards:
I want you to consider this equation the event plus sensations that your body feels or takes in is going to equal your reactions, meaning your feelings and behaviors, and those behaviors and reactions are often learned and conditioned through our nervous system. For instance, as a small child, you would be told don't touch the hot stove. It's hot, it will hurt you. But what happens? Child usually will go up and test it and we're like, why are they testing me? But the problem is that you can hear something and someone can tell you it, but until you experience it, you're not going to really understand it, and so that is what your body is trying to protect you from. Is that you have experienced something before. But the problem is is that experience is not matching the new situation, and so oftentimes our reactions and our behaviors are going to not match. They're going to be huge or underreactive, and so it's not going to make a lot of sense to the people that we're trying to communicate to, because it's an old wound.
Wysteria Edwards:
Remember this, friends if you have a like low frequency, feeling like anger, shame, rage, guilt, that is going to be an enormous indicator to you that it is a childhood wound that you need to repair and you're going to need to start to be really curious about it, because those wounds keep us locked in place. I am still unpacking things and I recognize that those wounds of not being enough and failing are so entrenched in our brains that we are going to have to dig ourselves out of those places and create new neural pathways. Those new neural pathways repair your brain and it is possible. That is good news. Whatever we needed to do to stay alive and get our needs met or to keep love worked for us at one point, so it makes sense. It makes sense that those things are what we would automatically go to. But do they still make sense in an adult body? Do they still make sense when you can meet your own needs now, where you don't have to suffer abuse or neglect or any other forms of emotional or physical violence? No, but we have to teach ourselves that we are safe, and one of those ways is to communicate with yourself in a meditative way, in a place where you can be quiet and really go in and attune to the places that your little girl needed when she was younger.
Wysteria Edwards:
Our story continues on. Let me give you some more examples. When we feel anxious, our chest may tighten, our breathing becomes shallow. When we experience sadness, we might feel a weight in our stomach or, obviously, tears in our eyes. When something triggers our anger, we might clench our jaw or tense up our shoulders. And by learning to observe these physical sensations without any judgment, we can choose to respond differently instead of reacting impulsively. This helps us navigate those difficult situations with more compassion and self-awareness, and self-awareness is the first step in engaging who you are and your story. When we talk about that, it's simple indeed. Engaging your story is going back into your story, and we talk about that at Simple and Deep. Engaging your story is going back into your story and mining the places where we want to stay hidden, the shadows of things that have hurt us, our harm and our heartache, because we're bringing it out into the light. One so that we can see that a lot of people had many of these same things happen to them. It connects us as a human race, but also that is where our power is. That is where God redeems things, that is where things are healed and that is where other people are set free.
Wysteria Edwards:
A physical sensation in our body can connect to cognitive distortions, such as catastrophizing when we predict that the worst possible outcome is going to happen. When we experience sadness, we may also feel that weight in our stomach, but then we might attribute it to a limiting belief of I'm not good enough, see, I'm not even lovable. We confirm it when we see something that triggers our anger. We might also go into a cognitive distortion of black and white thinking, where everything is all good or all bad. One of the counselors I spoke to once said well, wistie didn't suck about it. So my question to you is what didn't suck as you observe a situation? You observe a situation Using all of our feelings, without using judgment, is really the best way to unearth what needs to be healed. In the show notes, you're also going to be able to download an empty feelings wheel. You'll have the major feelings there, and then I want you to think about what possible body sensations do you recognize in yourself when you experience those feelings? Some of you might have an empty wheel for a while because you won't have thought about it and you're going to have to wait until that moment kind of seizes or presents itself and then you're going to have to write some of those feelings in.
Wysteria Edwards:
My husband had always told me that he felt anger in his jaw and it made no sense to me until recently when I started waking up with tons of tension in my jaw. I listened to a vocal coach and she talked about doing this deep massage with your fingers and you wouldn't believe the knots that I found in my cheeks from holding tension in my jaw. I've also been doing a lot of chiropractor appointments, acupuncture, and it's phenomenal to me how our body is communicating to us if we just listen to it. Now it's not going to be an automatic thing for you if you're used to denying how you feel or ignoring those signs because they're inconvenient or you've just never tuned into them. So be aware that your body is wanting to tell you things that it needs to say, but you have to slow yourself down and allow yourself to listen. Radical acceptance is the greatest gift you can give yourself to free you from anxiety, from depression, from self-loathing, cognitive distortions and to release you into a place where you can understand yourself better.
Wysteria Edwards:
I'm excited to take this journey with you because I know how this has set me free in the last few weeks, even where the things that were keeping me up or the things that I constantly played over and over and over in my mind, I didn't find myself looking for the reason why they happened. I just said they happened, now what. And as you go back through your story, I want you to do the same thing. It mattered, it happened, now what. Because that's the beginning of the journey. I am so thrilled that you brought me along on your journey.
Wysteria Edwards:
If you would like to know more about Simple and Deep, please check out the links in the bio and also share with your friends and other people that you believe that would really benefit from this, and remember to download all of the free accessories that we're putting in the show notes and to reach out with your feedback if there's things that you want to hear more about on this podcast. Until then, take care of yourself, because you are important. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Simple and Deep Podcast. I hope that you enjoyed our conversation and found it enlightening and empowering. Remember, by understanding attachment, engaging your story. Until next time, take care of yourself because you are important. Thank you.
