It's here, as requested...
I made a short ebook and self-awareness exercise for helping you uncover what's causing your compulsive habits, entitled, “What’s Under There?”
It will work with any repetitive habit that you might have, from online shopping, working excessively, to repeated pornography consumption, and more.
The workbook works for a simple reason: it's hard to decipher what emotion are influencing our behaviors, it's hard to write our emotions down, to think about them, to face what's true.
I'm excited to let you know that it's now available for free, for a limited time, and you can find it right here.
It's a book, but also an exercise, full of 8 questions that will help you analyze any compulsive behavior that you want to further understand and overcome.
Thanks for checking it out.
I look forward to hearing what you think.
6 months of change, growth, and seeing differently
Take a look back at a summary of our first 180 days on this blog and newsletter, and catch up on what I believe are the 12 most important things that we've learned since the beginning of January:
1) The power that resides in half a second of self-awareness.
2) Why trauma isn’t what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you.
3) Why boredom is so uncomfortable and painful.
4) What it means when you’re triggered or tempted to compulsively do something that you will regret.
5) Why the absence of love during our childhood leaves wounds and pains that follow us into adulthood.
6) How routines build up and break us into the life we dream.
7) Why it is that when pain is all you feel, pain becomes your world.
8) What it means to have empathy for yourself.
9) Why our brain subconsciously avoids pain, fear, complex problems, and chooses to seek the easy route without our intentional intervention.
11) The difference between being compulsive and self-aware.
12) What the voice of shame sounds like.
Falling into self-compassion
The difficulty of practicing self-compassion is that it requires you to believe that you're deserving of unconditional love when you don't feel, think, or believe that you deserve it.
In order to fully receive self-compassion, you have to believe that you're worthy of it. And to believe that you're worthy of self-love and compassion (when you know that you are an imperfect being) requires faith that what God says about you is truer than your experiences and reality. And the difficulty of faith...
Is that it requires letting go of everything that gives you comfort and safety.
(Your sense of control, power, reason, wit, intellect... pride.)
So we grow in self-compassion not by intellectual reasoning or mental strength, but by our ability to repeatedly give up and fall into love.
For falling is like faith, in that it isn't a display of intelligence, it's a matter of trust and the ability to let go mentally and spiritually into love.
So you can think and ponder and debate for years your worthiness of love... but, if self-compassion truly is your goal, eventually, you will just have to give in and close your eyes, step out onto the edge of your fear...
and fall.
Is there such a thing as vulnerability hangover?
All vulnerability hangover is, is an immense amount of shame and fear projecting itself upon you after you shared your heart beyond what feels safe.
In order to reach vulnerability hangover, you had to choose to be emotionally exposed and vulnerable... so, you ignored shame once.
Best to just keep ignoring him again.
The science behind the question, “How does your heart feel?”
The human heart is able to do far more than pump blood.
Science shows that the human heart is also made up of a second brain composed of 40,000 neurons. And these neurons physically make up what doctors call the "heart-brain”, which is a second brain that is able to sense, learn, memorize, and feel apart from the brain in our head.
It collects information.
It processes thoughts.
It holds memories and emotions and makes decisions and...
It even talks to you through thoughts.
So if you ever feel like your physical heart is sad, in pain, angry, or anxious, OR that it's in misalignment or hindering your brain functionality, it's scientifically possible that it is.
So the questions of "do you feel connected to your heart?" or "how does your heart feel emotionally?" isn’t just a therapeutic question, it's scientific too.