It took me 10 years of running to eventually realize that working out wasn’t about punishing myself into being a better person. Instead it’s something I set aside time for not just because I love/hate it, but because it makes me personally a better version of myself. Instead of trying to beat myself into becoming a harder worker, I’ve found that I am better, faster, stronger the more I’m willing to nurture, nourish and support myself.
Read moreVC Resources: Accepting Anger
“Anger is just the distortion of an unmet need”- Marshall Rosenberg’s famous maxim is meant to remind us of the cost associated with using violence to meet our needs. Violence can come in the form of resistance, avoidance, aggression, coercion and even verbal and physical violence and abuse. While anger has its role to play in our lives it’s effectiveness as a form of inter- and intra- personal motivation grafts an unnecessary layer of violence onto a need-meeting strategy that has simply been distorted. It clouds our judgement and often makes the complex constructs of trust, gratitude and ultimately acceptance too slippery to get a hold of.
Read moreThe Shadow Self
Over the past century psychology has found a lot of different ways to talk about self-acceptance. One of the oldest is certainly one of the most enigmatic, as Carl Jung’s notions of the shadow-self have continued to influence modern thinking more then 100 years after their introduction. What these mysterious metaphors can teach us about our love, life and sex remains as dark as the ideas behind them. This week Andy Lane returns to the show to talk shadows and sex and to help us understand how to accept each other and ourselves.
Read moreMaking Soulmates
Of all the silly ideas our culture and religious past may have left vestigial in our minds soul mates should be one of the easiest to brush aside right? Of course the reason many of these ideas are so insidious is their ability to convince us that they don’t exist so yes Virginia, there is black and white thinking in relationships. Relationship coach and Everyone’s Autonomous Atheist Marie D’Elephant joins Rudy Bee and I in exploring this deep-seated fiction and finding a spectrum of color in the people we love, plus your calls!
Read moreVC Resources: Radical Acceptance
You may see the equation of suffering= pain x resistance as the distillation of thousands of years of buddhist philosophy or as the concentration of modern psychology, in either case this intuitive idea leads to a logical conclusion contrary to instinct- you don’t have to fight pain. Acceptance, compassion and trust may seem like noble ideals but by putting our self-preservation energy into the right places we can harness our instincts towards adaptive strategies that free us from scrupulous ideas of fairness or intractable feelings of malaise and bring us genuine relief. The resources below explore self-compassion and radical acceptance in the hopes of offering comfort and peace.
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