Hello and welcome to Find Your Way, the podcast. I’m your host Gena McLean, author of the book Find Your Way and writer under the name Seeker and Sage. It’s a joy to be bringing this content to you, and my hope is that it finds its way into your mind and heart, nourishing you and supporting you as you find your way.  

Chapter 5. 

Love yourself through the process. 

You don’t have to wait until you are feeling better, happier, stronger, past the pain or through the change. 

You need loving now, so love yourself through the process. 

Permission to be. 

Where you are right now on the journey, what you’re experiencing and what you’re feeling is to be acknowledged and accepted. No apologies. There’s no need to justify or explain being you exactly as you are. 

Why? Because to validate our experience and our feelings is what initiates the compassion we need during tough times. And because every time you deny your experience and invalidate your true feelings, you abandon yourself. 

Whatever we are going through right now – the upset, the disruption, the difficulty, the pain – will not disappear just because we’ve dismissed it or downplayed its impact. 

You matter. Your feelings matter. Your needs matter. Your experience matters. What you want matters. And there’s only one person you need permission from to be who you are, where you are. That person is you. 

To let yourself be human is the greatest gift you can give yourself, especially during upheaval and uncertainty. The acceptance that comes from the permission you give yourself to be as you are and where you are has the capacity to help and heal. 

Seeing and accepting the despair, the pain, the anguish, the struggle – that deep recognition and acceptance of our self, our situation and our suffering – exactly as it is, opens the door to us, finding the strength to carry on. 

Give yourself the permission you need to be who you are, where you are, with all the fears, tears, hopes and struggles you’re feeling right now. 

It’s the most potent form of self love you can give and receive. 

May I give myself permission to be who I am? 

As many of you already know from listening to the podcast every entry in this book is extremely personal and comes from my own lived experience. And I am someone who has abandoned and denied myself for so many years. So I know how painful it is to do that, and I know what it does to hamper my own life and what I want for myself. So this is a really, really important message in terms of loving ourselves where we are exactly as we are and validation. 

I, throughout this book, am encouraging everyone to validate themselves. 

And what’s been really beautiful already to have come from this book, is the number of people that have bought this book either directly from me or from Organise My, Bendigo, but the number of people that have said to me in a message, I have a friend who’s really struggling – I’d like to buy the book for them, I have a family member who suffers with chronic pain like you do –

I would like to give them your book, I think it will help them. 

So in terms of validation, it’s just the most beautiful form of validation for me to see and experience that people see this book, read this book and want to give it to someone else who’s suffering I just think that’s so beautiful and thank you to all those people who are so compassionate to think of someone else that could benefit from this book and from my own journey. 

So yeah, I want people to be validated and what I’m saying here though, so besides, the giving this gift to someone else, the gift that you give yourself is when you validate yourself exactly where you are by giving yourself permission to be who you are with where you’re at and how you feel. It is the most potent form of self love, it really is. To let yourself be where you’re at, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to try and change the situation or get the help that you need or anything like that. It is just purely accepting yourself as you are with all your fears and doubts and tears as I say, and hopes and dreams everything, at once, with love. 

Another entry I’d like to read from this chapter is on page 130 and it’s called Speak with care. 

And it really goes hand in hand with the message I’ve just given about giving ourselves permission to be who we are, where we are. 

Speak with care. 

We all speak to ourselves about all sorts of things. 

There’s a commentary running almost non-stop as the mind goes about naming, analyzing, reflecting, correcting, judging, preferring, accepting – whenever it wants about whoever it pleases, ourselves included. 

Many comments may go unnoticed, but they do not pass through without harm. 

The thoughts you choose and the voice you use have a huge effect, not just on those around you, but on you too!

Your emotional state, your sense of self esteem and confidence, your belief in yourself and the choices you make, are all affected by the way you speak to yourself about yourself. 

When we find ourselves under pressure or struggling with change, our self talk can go off, criticising, blaming, complaining and shaming us for our feelings and our actions. It’ll use anything we have or haven’t done against us. And it hurts. We suffer and our ability to cope suffers. 

But if we are to make it through this journey consciously, compassionately, connected and empowered, we must become aware of the voice we speak with and listen to. 

It matters how you speak to yourself about yourself. And it matters how you speak to yourself about the situation you’re in. 

It matters because it affects your self-esteem, your well being and whether you can make it through this change in one piece. It matters because you matter, and because this journey is your life. It deserves your wholehearted support, acceptance, and love. 

It’s time to start speaking to yourself like you matter. Because you do. 

May I be aware of my voice and use it with care to support me on this journey. 

Now I’m just going to pick out a couple of sentences to focus on from that reading. 

This is really strong for me and maybe it is for you too. 

It matters how you speak to yourself about yourself. And it matters how you speak to yourself about the situation you’re in. 

So, no matter where you are at and what you’re going through, no amount of blaming and shaming talk is going to help you get through. It will just make you feel worse and feel stuck. 

So if you’re not already aware of how you speak to yourself about yourself, maybe it’s a good time to start noticing. And like I’ve said before, you start to notice and when you catch yourself saying something harmful to yourself or nasty or negative, you don’t then go on a rant against yourself even further – you lovingly and compassionately, consciously realize, wait a minute that was pretty harsh – what I just said to myself, and you catch yourself, and then you just do your absolute best to not do it anymore. You can also apologize to yourself. And you can also try saying something really affirming and encouraging and supportive. Like you know what, you’re actually doing the best you can do, or this is really tough no wonder you’re having a hard time. 

And look, you know what? There’s no point pretending that we don’t talk to ourselves about ourselves and there’s no point pretending we don’t talk to ourselves about other people and about experiences and about life and the world we inhabit, there is just no point, because we all do do it. So better that we just accept that we do it and then start looking at how we do it and how it affects us. 

That’s what I’d like you to start practicing. And if you notice that it’s affecting you in a negative way, then you start speaking to yourself like you matter, as I say, because you do matter. 

And supportive self talk and loving self talk and encouraging self talk is going to help you get through whatever you’re going through a whole lot better than the nasty, harsh, cracking the whip kind of talk. 

So as always, I hope that these two readings and my discussion about them will bring something up for you that helps you to apply them to your life and to your days. 

And this chapter love yourself through the process it is chapter five of the five chapters and it could well be the most important chapter in this book. It takes us a while, some of us, to get to that point. It’s taken me or what? 40 years or something to get to the point of realizing that it’s up to me to love myself and accept myself where I am and there’s a whole lot better way to to get through than to disown who I am, neglect who I am, deny who I am, pretend I’m someone I’m not, wish I was different. 

So it is a big chapter and it’s worth reading every entry so if you haven’t already helped yourself to this book, then maybe now is the time. 

I will do one more episode after this one, I’ll just wrap things up with a conclusion and I hope that you’ll join me for that too. 

Thank you for being here. 

Thank you. 

It’s an honor to have you with me.