Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life

Read Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life for Free Online

Book: Read Tiny Buddha's Guide to Loving Yourself: 40 Ways to Transform Your Inner Critic and Your Life for Free Online
Authors: Lori Deschene
power away from the negative emotions, my unchangeable traumatic past, I was better able to find joy in the present.
    How did I do this? First, I made a soul collage, a board for the life of my dreams. I pasted onto the poster magazine images that depicted things I see as myself and want for myself. It became a beautiful visual guide for what matters to me beyond the superficial. This board reminds me to honor who I am in essence, who I was before anything bad happened to me, before I believed anything was wrong with me. This board provides me with a path of beauty through the scars.
    Secondly, I found the book The Why Café by John P. Strelecky. In it, Strelecky encourages readers to pinpoint their PFE (purpose for existence). While reading, I realized beauty is my PFE. My purpose is to make whatever I can beautiful. Not beautiful in the superficial sense, but beautiful in the smile of the heart and soul sense. So far it's working.
    Sometimes all it takes for your life to change is a shift in perspective. One solitary action, one solitary word, and everything is different. Take a moment now to smile. Do you feel it in your muscles? In your skin? In your toes? Where do you feel happiness?
    When bad things happen we don't instinctively feel happy and beautiful, but we don't need to despair because life gets ugly sometimes. Joy and beauty are everywhere, in everything, in every one of us—no matter how we look, and no matter how we may hurt temporarily. Grace is beauty in motion, and we can create it by choosing to smile—to recognize that we're strong, despite our insecurities, and that the world is an amazing place, despite its tragedies.
    We may hurt, but we will heal—and there is beauty in our scars.
Top 4 Tips About Moving Beyond Your Childhood Pain
    1. Tell empowering stories of healing in the present instead of sad stories of hurting from the past .
    When you live in the story of how you were hurt, you define yourself by your pain, and you essentially pick up where others left off in mistreating you. It's hurtful and crippling to rehash these events over and over again (though it can be helpful in a therapeutic setting). When you find yourself dwelling on an old story, tell yourself that you're creating a new one—a story of forgiving and loving yourself in action. Try to understand whoever hurt you, and recognize that their actions were probably caused by their own pain. Then proactively choose to do something to take care of yourself in the way you wanted to be taken care of years ago.
    2. Challenge the limiting beliefs that make you feel bad about yourself .
    You may be holding on to all kinds of limiting, inaccurate beliefs about your worth, your potential, and what you deserve. Realize these are not facts—you formed these beliefs based on difficult experiences and years of misguided thinking, and you can change your life by challenging these beliefs and forminghealthier ones. When you start thinking the old belief, look for evidence to support the opposite one. It's there—proof of your intrinsic value is in your choices, your actions, and your daily life. You just have to start recognizing all the good you do.
    3. Shine a spotlight on your shame and douse it with empathy .
    When people abuse us, disrespect us, silence us, or disregard our feelings or needs, we often internalize that and feel shame, as if we deserved to be hurt because we were unworthy, bad, or flawed. We then feel the need to hide ourselves to avoid the pain of being seen, but hiding just creates more pain. It's not your fault that you feel shame—it's a natural response to the way you were treated—but it is your responsibility to heal it. Researcher Brené Brown wrote that shame requires secrecy, silence, and judgment to grow exponentially, and that it can't survive when doused with empathy. Offer yourself that empathy by choosing not to judge yourself for what other people did to you or what you did in response; and let someone else

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