I remember in the early days of work with my first therapist, telling her that I felt flat. It was hard to feel much of anything deeply, except sadness and fear.

She introduced EMDR, partly as a way of helping me make contact with what was happening in my body around certain traumatic memories.

I felt nada. Zilch.

The implications of that weren’t clear to me at the time. But now I know I was completely disconnected from my body.

I was living in my head; inside a “mental control tower,” as my teacher Tara Brach likes to call it.

Disconnection = Self-Protection

I’d suggest most of us live with some level of disconnection from our bodies. We eat without tasting. Rest without recovering. We move through our days from the neck up and consider it normal.

Then, there’s trauma—which can cut us off from our bodies completely.

When what’s happening in the body feels like too much, whether everyday overwhelm or the aftermath of deeply painful experiences, our brain naturally starts to muffle inputs from the body.

It’s an act of self-protection. We tune out what feels threatening so we can stay functional in our daily lives.

That’s why I felt flat.

Emotions begin in the body. Disconnecting from it keeps us safe. But it also cuts us off from access to the aliveness of feelings.

It was hard for me to feel things like joy, excitement and awe.

Even my fear, anger and sadness showed up in the form of anxious thoughts, not embodied emotions.

Beginning the Journey

The EMDR didn’t help. Several years of talk therapy gave me a supportive space to understand the weight of what I’d been through.

But I still operated largely from my mental control tower.

As I’ve written about before, it took a full-on mental and physical breakdown during the pandemic to wake me up to all that my body was carrying and start me on a trajectory of true healing.

Psychedelic-assisted somatic therapy was a critical first step to opening up access to my body. (I’ll write more about this one day. I promise.)

But in the months leading up to my first psychedelic journey, I’d already made what turned out to be a critical leap.

I discovered Vipassana or Insight meditation, and particularly mindfulness of sensations.

Stories vs. Sensations

Our bodies speak to us in the form of sensations.

Most of us think we experience our bodies directly. But much of the time, we’re actually experiencing thoughts about our bodies.

Instead of the raw sensory data our bodies give us, we live inside interpretations, labels, predictions, or stories layered on top of it.

“Something is wrong.” “I can’t handle this.” “I’m in danger.” “This means I’m broken.” “This will get worse.” 🙋🏻‍♂️

What’s actually going on inside is much simpler (though no less difficult to be with): tightness, pressure, heat, fluttering, heaviness, buzzing, or holding our breath.

Scientists call the ability to sense our inner physical experience interoception. It’s how we understand bodily signals like hunger, heartbeat, breathing, tension, and emotional activation before we can write any story about them.

This system does more than report data; it reflects our internal state. For example, when we’re stuck in fight or flight, interoceptive signals can get amplified and biased toward threat detection—even when there’s no clear and present danger.

That’s why some people can be simultaneously disconnected from their body and flooded by it. We can have a racing heart, shallow breath and tense muscles, but have no idea how to make any sense of it. (As I see it, this is at the core of what we call anxiety.)

So, the challenge isn’t just about getting back into the body. It’s about learning how to relate to bodily experience without getting overwhelmed or cut off by it.

How to Find Your Way

Mindfulness of sensations invites us to practice awareness of our interoception.

When we sit down to practice and begin to pay attention to our anchor, one of the things that can most easily and forcefully pull us away is bodily discomfort: an aching back, squeeze in the belly, pressure in the chest, tension in the shoulders.

Insight practice invites us to let our attention shift from the breath or our chosen anchor to the sensation that’s pulling us away.

By shifting our awareness to the sensation, we get to learn about it. What is this sensation really like? Is it fixed, or does it shift from moment to moment? When we pay attention to it, does it ease or get more intense?

Sometimes, practicing awareness and curiosity can reduce the sensation’s intensity and create space for us to return to the anchor.

In some cases, the sensation will persist or get even more intense. When this happens, we can invite kindness.

That might be a generalized kindness towards ourselves as we sit with this uncomfortable experience. For example, saying something inwardly like: “This is hard. Can I be gentle with myself right now?” or “I don’t have to fix this to be OK.”

Or you might choose a more somatic, embodied approach, such as placing a hand on the area of discomfort or hugging yourself. Self-touch can activate some of the same soothing neural pathways as touch from another person.

The Long Road Home

I say this with the caveat that practicing mindfulness of sensations can be hard.

(If you’ve experienced trauma or feel very disconnected from or flooded by bodily sensations, I strongly encourage having professional support as you begin your journey.)

Learning to come into the body after being disconnected for much of our lives takes a lot of patience, dedication, and care.

For me, my early experiences of coming into my body happened on my first psychedelic journey.

They were extremely intense, as I encountered a lot of fear, sadness and anger that had been locked up within me. I was lucky to have an experienced and supportive guide to hold me through the early days of that process.

My experiences during practice were much more manageable, but still took commitment.

I’d set my intention to allow my anchor to fade into the background and to place my awareness on the perpetual knot in my solar plexus.

Early on, it was only a matter of seconds, and I’d catch myself lost in thought, distracting myself from an experience that was quite difficult to be with.

Over time, though, through many repetitions of this process, the seconds turned to minutes. It became easier to stay present with my inner experience for longer periods.

I like to think of this process as befriending my inner life.

It opened up a whole world of experiences that just weren’t possible before: embodied joy, excitement, and aliveness. Being connected to my emotions in a way that lets me navigate life more calmly and responsively. Tapping deeply into my intuition, which I believe lives inside our sensory experience.

Descartes Got It Wrong

A striking piece of research suggests that the speed of human thought is about 10 bits per second, while our sensory systems gather data at roughly a billion bits per second.

And while our minds appear to think just one thought at a time, our sensory systems process thousands of physiological inputs simultaneously.

Most of this happens outside conscious awareness.

Descartes would have us believe that the mind is all-powerful. But the body is far more than a passive vessel for thought. It’s continuously processing, regulating and responding in ways that shape what we experience as consciousness.

When we learn to listen inwardly to the sensations, signals and raw data behind the story, we’re tapping into something much richer than anything the mental control tower alone might offer.

So, coming into relationship with the body doesn’t just change how we feel. It changes what we can know, and how deeply we can know it.

For me, it opened up a whole world that I didn’t even know I’d been locked out of. With care, commitment and the right supports, it might do the same for you.

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What does it look like to finally trust yourself after a lifetime of relentless self-doubt?

In my experience, it’s rarely loud or sudden. It shows up softly, in small steps.

For me, one of those small steps was this newsletter.

Starting it was easy. The hard part is sticking to it, showing up every week with something to say, and working with the critical voice in my head that questions whether it’s worth anyone’s time.

That voice has a lot of material to work with:

“Who are you to write about this? Someone else has already said it better. Another story about me? This topic is tired. It’s too personal. It’s not personal enough. ”

Meet the Shapeshifter

The thing is, the inner critic is a shapeshifter.

Sometimes it shows up as a relentless taskmaster, berating us for every error to try to keep us from repeating it.

Other times, it’s more of a gatekeeper, doing damage control to try and keep us from embarrassing ourselves.

It can be so convincing that it’s hard to argue with it, which is why it helps to stop the inner argument altogether and start coming into relationship with this part—by listening.

One way to get curious about the inner critic is to ask yourself a question like: Does this critical voice speak in generalities, or is it more specific?

Its answers are often vague and general. It doesn’t point to the work. It points at you: “This isn’t good enough. You’re not good enough. Why bother?” We might dub this the “shadow” inner critic.

A more constructive version of the critic shows up as discernment. It’s usually more specific: “This paragraph isn’t landing. This idea needs more development.”

The latter is useful inner feedback. The former is a destructive internal narrative dressed up as feedback.

The more we let that story run unchallenged, the more we internalize the idea that we can’t trust ourselves; that our ideas need to hit an impossibly high standard before they can he shared with the world.

The cost of that is higher than it seems.

The Cost of Kowtowing to the Critic

I feel a lot of regret when I look back over my life and think about all the great ideas that I talked myself out of; the myriad pieces of writing and projects I bailed on early on because I decided nobody would care.

Not only were they missed opportunities, but each false start just helped reinforce the neural pathway in my brain that said my voice doesn’t matter.

When I look back on these regrets, I do so with self-compassion. My younger self could not help but be caught in the grip of the shadow inner critic.

(It also feels important to note here that some of my false starts were less about an inner critical voice and more about undiagnosed ADHD. My brain chemistry made it hard to stick with something once the novelty wore off, especially when tedious work came into the picture, and shinier sources of dopamine pulled me elsewhere. I see this as yet another opportunity for self-compassion, not self-condemnation.)

Working With the Critic, Not Against It

The way out of this cycle doesn’t involve silencing the critic. That’s not possible, and it’s not the goal.

It’s about learning to distinguish between which version is speaking. Is it discernment, pointing at something specific I can improve? Or is this a shadowy narrative that’s trying to shut the whole thing down before it even gets a chance?

Understanding the difference has changed how I show up here. In fact, it’s the thing that lets me show up at all.

Some weeks, I publish something and feel completely sure about it. Other times, I’m hitting send while the critic is still in full effect.

Both are acts of self-trust because believing in yourself isn’t about the absence of doubt. It’s about deciding to move forward anyway—even if things are imperfect—one small step at a time.

Moving Forward Anyway

If you’ve read this far, what I’ve shared is likely landing. You might be someone who’s ready to go deeper with this work.

I’ve been working on something new and battling the gatekeeping voice the whole way. I’m almost ready to share it. More next week.

With care,

Heron

90 seconds.

According to neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, that’s about how long an emotion lasts in the body.

We tend to think emotions live in our heads. But they’re actually physiological events.

Something happens, we get triggered, and a cascade of chemicals moves through our bodies, urging us to react.

That chemical wave breaks in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee.

So, why can anger, shame, fear, or sadness seem to last for hours, days or even years?

It’s because the mind often keeps retriggering them through rumination, storytelling, resistance, and rehearsal. We replay the event, argue with it, justify it, and relive it. Each time, the body gets another emotional chemical injection.

Those 90 seconds, after the trigger and before the spiral, are a critical window. It’s the space where we can choose how to respond—instead of reacting habitually.

It’s a concept I knew intellectually for some time. But on a seven-day silent meditation retreat, I got to experience that space directly and know what it means to pause and create space for a different choice to emerge.

The Pattern I Inherited

It was the tail end of the pandemic, and the retreat happened online. The teachers instructed us that if we were attending from a location where silence wasn’t possible, we should practice mindful speech.

Since I was doing the retreat at home with two children under 10 around, true silence wasn’t possible. They’d never understand why Daddy suddenly stopped talking to them.

So I set an intention: I’d only speak if they spoke to me, or if I had something urgent to say. If I spoke, I would do so calmly and kindly.

At the time, I was deep in my work on shaking a longstanding pattern of yelling at my kids.

It’s something I inherited from my father, who often yelled at and intimidated me.

By this point, I’d learned that beneath the angry response was anxiety founded on a desperate need for control whenever things felt chaotic or unpredictable.

And what’s more unpredictable than a couple of wilful, free-spirited kids?

Most of my reactive parenting followed the same script: An event would happen, often something small; fear would surface unconsciously, and before I even realized what was happening, it would erupt in an angry reaction.

I carried so much shame about that pattern. Changing it was a main motivation behind my healing work.

Reacting to a Bag of Oranges

The retreat intention forced me to really consider every response before making it. Was a response necessary here? And if so, how could I respond mindfully?

One moment particularly stands out.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, watching my six-year-old walk out of the pantry holding a bag of oranges. He loves fruit and could demolish that bag of mandarins in one sitting.

A big part of the retreat for me was practicing mindfulness of the body intensively for the first time. So when I saw him coming towards me, sack in hand, I immediately noticed my bodily reaction.

I felt the tightening in my gut, the sense of urgency in my throat, the impulse to control the situation before orange peels were littered all over the living room.

On another day, I would have reacted by raising my voice and maybe snatching the sack away if he ignored me.

But on this day, because of the commitment I’d made during the retreat, I managed to pause.

In that pause, I could see the reaction arising before it took over.

The Power to Choose

A popular idea inspired by the work of psychologist Dr. Viktor Frankl is this: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

As I see it, our freedom lies in the 90 seconds between the event that triggers the emotion and our reaction to it.

Can we pause long enough to notice what’s happening inside and respond constructively? Or will we react habitually?

Freedom lives in the former. And I imagine most people reading this would choose the pause.

But pausing isn’t always easy.

The physical sensations underlying emotions like fear, anger and sadness can feel unbearable: tightness in the chest, heat in the face, a racing heart, a knot in the stomach.

These are all signs of an agitated nervous system urging us to escape, suppress or react.

Awareness Creates the Space

This is where mindfulness comes in.

I don’t mean the app-based, productivity hack kind of mindfulness.

I mean the often difficult, deeply imperfect practice of sitting with things just as they are—especially when they are uncomfortable.

Mindfulness, at its core, involves bringing awareness to our present-moment experience with the intention not to judge, resist, cling to, or try to escape it.

It’s about learning to notice what’s happening in the body and trying to stay with it long enough to understand it, even when our every instinct is pushing us to act out our habitual reactions.

When we notice that knot in the stomach, can we stick with it long enough to learn from it? Oh yes, that knot means fear is present.

Can we notice the heat in the chest or throat in response to the fear? Oh yes, anger is here. It wants to protect me from the source of the fear.

The noticing itself creates the space. And in the space, we can choose a different response.

A Different Response

As I sat there in the kitchen, watching my son with the oranges, I practiced mindfulness.

I noticed the fear present and the familiar impulse to respond with anger. I managed to pause long enough to respond differently.

Standing up from the table, I walked over to him and quietly told him he couldn’t have the whole bag of oranges.

I took out a couple and handed them to him, then gently took the rest and put them up on a high shelf where he couldn’t reach them.

That was it. No yelling. No intimidation. No escalation.

As I remember it, he just wandered off to play with his sister.

But for me, there was an inner shift.

I experienced the space between the stimulus and response clearly enough to choose something other than the pattern I inherited.

I got a glimpse of a different way of relating: both to my children and myself. One that’s kinder, gentler and freer.

It’s taken years of practice, and there’ve been a lot of mistakes made along the way. But over time, it’s become my new default.

When I’m stressed or otherwise poorly resourced, I still slip back into my old yelly ways.

But even when that does happen, it has less of an edge, and I’m able to return to a regulated state much more quickly.

Self-compassion helps with the latter. It lets me know that I’m a human working with a nervous system imprint that I didn’t choose, and I’m always doing the best I can at any given moment.

But the black flies were out and had other ideas.

I went out to a favourite spot near my home. There was a beautiful waterfall, towering old trees and a gently flowing brook.

But minutes after I set out to start recording, they found me. Buzzing around my head, occasionally alighting on me in hopes of a meal.

I swatted at them as they intruded on my recording session, feeling annoyed and disappointed.

Thoughts, during meditation, can be a bit like those black flies. They show up out of nowhere, buzz around in our heads, distracting and often annoying us during a time we set aside for calmness and care.

Sometimes, like the black flies, the thoughts can bite. Other times, they’re more like gnats or houseflies; they bug us, but they don’t sting.

No matter the type of thought, paying attention to its nature can turn what might otherwise feel like an annoyance into an opportunity for insight.

When we notice we’ve drifted off into thought, we can practice noting. That involves letting our anchor (the object of our meditation) fade into the background and placing our awareness on the thoughts.

By inquiring in this way, we can start to learn our habits of mind.

The more familiar we become with those habits, the easier it will be to start working with them. To guide our minds and lives in more skilful ways, both on and off the cushion. I hope this practice is of benefit!

If you do this practice and feel inspired, I’d love to hear about your experience. What was this practice like for you? What did you notice about your thought patterns?

Send me a message or leave a comment to share!

It took just one word for me to forever change the way I speak: about.

When I first moved to British Columbia from Newfoundland, I landed in a journalism school class where I was the only person from east of Alberta.

A couple of classmates took to gently teasing me about being a “Newfie.” I specifically remember them calling out the way I pronounced the word: “a-boot.”

I was accustomed to this kind of antagonism, and I’d move to the other side of the country partly to get away from it.

So I did what many of us do when we find ourselves in a situation where our differences make us stand out in uncomfortable ways.

I tried to fit in.

Fitting in is a survival strategy.

Fitting in means changing or hiding parts of ourselves to meet others’ expectations and gain acceptance.

In other words, we edit ourselves.

Editing might look like:

• Laughing at a joke you didn’t find funny.

• Agreeing in a meeting, then realizing you signed up for the assignment from hell.

• Changing how you speak depending on who’s in the room.

Most people can relate to this because social adaptation is a hard-wired evolutionary default.

And, like so many of our behaviours, it’s designed to keep us safe.

For most of human history, we lived in small, close-knit groups. Being accepted ensured access to food and protection.

Being excluded could mean death.

So, survival of the fittest for humans meant being highly attuned to social cues and quickly adjusting our behaviour to match the group’s.

In other words, we took a master class in reading and mirroring others.

When editing becomes erasure

On its face, fitting in acts like a kind of social glue. It helps us connect, cooperate, and avoid unnecessary conflict.

But it gets problematic when it costs us our sense of self.

For the average person, fitting might involve constantly making small adaptations: softening opinions, reading the room, or going along with things that don’t feel good.

These changes may seem minor, but over time, they can separate us from who we truly are.

For some people, fitting in can be less of a social habit and more like a full-time job.

We edit ourselves in significant ways by anticipating others’ needs, adjusting our behaviour to fit and trying to avoid drawing attention to ourselves at all costs.

This kind of self-editing is often rooted in early experiences: family-of-origin dynamics, bullying, social exclusion or life in environments where being yourself didn’t feel safe.

Over time, chronic self-editing can become self-abandonment.

The costs of self-abandonment

We edit ourselves to meet others’ expectations because it works. At first.

We might be accepted, included, or praised for being flexible, agreeable, or easygoing.

But over time, it can disconnect us from ourselves.

People respond to the version of us we present for their approval, not our authentic selves. We end up performing instead of truly connecting.

The costs of self-abandonment tend to live in the background:

• You rehearse every interaction so much that you feel drained afterward.

• You adapt so much and so often that you lose track of what feels natural.

• You feel resentment build as you continually bend to keep the peace.

Over time, we also might completely lose touch with parts of ourselves that are really important and make us who we are.

Nothing feels lonelier than being accepted for a version of yourself you don’t recognize and maybe never wanted to be.

A version of this happened to me when I made the decision (whether conscious or not) to edit out my East Coast accent.

I started talking like everyone around me. I dropped my Newfoundland colloquialisms in favour of local expressions. I adopted “a-bowt.”

Looking back, it was like squeezing into a shoe that was just a bit too small and pretending it felt right.

Belonging: The freedom to be yourself

Then I discovered the concept of belonging. (Thanks to , and her book You Belong.)

Unlike fitting in, belonging happens when we feel accepted and appreciated for just being who we are—no major edits required.

It means no constant monitoring. We can disagree. Be weird. Be quiet. Be intense. Tell Dad jokes with abandon. Stop rehearsing every sentence before speaking.

We can show up—however we naturally are in the moment—and still feel safe and connected with both ourselves and those around us.

Belonging isn’t about being liked. It’s about being known and still accepted.

Speaking from experience, belonging can feel intensely liberating.

If fitting in is like wearing a tight shoe, belonging feels spacious and comfortable—like wearing a sandal custom-moulded for your foot.

And it can be a little scary at the outset.

Realizing you’re being seen can feel really risky when you’re used to habitually hiding.

The way I got going with this, and how I introduce it to clients, is: Start slowing down and noticing natural moments of belonging in your life.

For some, sources of belonging might be easy to find. Others might need to dig deep.

If you’re in the second group, it can help to start noticing where even small amounts of that feeling show up. It might be in a close relationship, a shared identity or cultural space, a creative or intellectual community, or a group with shared values.

Belonging might also show up in nature, or moments when you simply feel at home in your body.

It’s also possible you might not feel belonging anywhere, and that’s OK. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong.

If belonging seems out of reach right now, you might start by noticing when even a small sense of it shows up. Over time, that awareness can become a point of entry.

Alongside that, it can help to start gentle therapeutic work on boundaries, identity rebuilding and attachment repair.

Healthy adaptation vs. self-erasure

To be clear, belonging isn’t about never adapting yourself. We do this constantly, often without thinking about it.

We speak differently with friends than with our bosses. We might act differently around our parents than our partners.

Most of this isn’t a problem. It’s part of how we connect, communicate and move through different social spaces. As mentioned above, we do this for good reasons.

The difference rests on whether the adaptation feels expressive or erasing.

Healthy relationships require flexibility, tact, compromise and growth. But they don’t ask you to become a different person to keep the connection.

Belonging doesn’t mean showing up exactly the same everywhere. It means you don’t have to abandon parts of your core self to be accepted.

Finding my way back

I didn’t realize how much I’d been editing out until I got married and had kids.

My wife would point out that when I talked to my parents back home on video calls, my accent would come back. My young kids got disoriented when Daddy was doing “Newfoundland talk.”

It was painful to realize how disconnected with that part of myself I’d become.

Since that realization, I’ve worked to reclaim what I can of my native dialect. I also try to celebrate what’s become a blend of dialects that is uniquely my own.

But I still live with the sense of having lost part of myself that I’ll never truly get back.

Editing was a survival strategy. And, despite the costs, it was a smart move at the time.

These days, I try to notice when speaking feels natural and I’m not monitoring myself as much. It happens more often now that I’m back on the East Coast.

When the feeling of ease comes up, I practice pausing to notice how it feels in my body.

I still make major edits sometimes. The difference is, now I’m aware of them. And that awareness is how I keep finding my way back.

As someone with a chronically busy mind, practicing mindfulness never came easily.

The second I’d sit down to meditate, a mental laundry list would show up: replaying conversations, worries (lots of those), to-dos, and more.

It was the opposite of presence. I was lost in a torrent of mental detritus.

Sitting with the thoughts was hard enough. Feeling like a failure often made practice unbearable.

Two teachings changed everything for me:

1.) Thinking is OK. Returning is the practice.

Getting lost in thought isn’t a failure. Thinking is normal. It doesn’t matter how many times the mind wanders; what matters is coming back.

2.) Thoughts ≠ truth. They’re mostly noise.

Most thoughts are recycled predictions my brain has run a thousand times. I don’t have to believe them.

Grounding in these ideas made practicing mindfulness bearable enough to stick with it.

But the teaching that changed the game was noting.

A simple way to work with distraction

Noting involves noticing where the mind drifts when it becomes distracted and inwardly labeling the experience.

Here’s the basic instruction:

1. You notice an inner experience coming up (like a thought, emotion, or sensation)

2. You gently label it with whatever word arises naturally. (“thinking,” “worrying,” “itching,” “hearing,” “planning.”)

3. When the experience subsides, you kindly return to your anchor (usually breath or other bodily sensation)

Noting creates space between you and the experience; you observe it instead of getting carried away.

It can act as an antidote to overthinking, supporting calm and concentration for those with busy minds.

But, as I see it, noting’s true superpower is its ability to reveal the mind’s habitual patterns.

Discovering our “Top Ten Tunes”

The mind gets distracted by our present-moment sensory experience: an ache, a dog barking, or the sudden waft of fresh-baked bread.

Consider these the low-hanging fruit in mindfulness practice. They’re short-lived and fairly easy to notice. They can pull us away, but not for long.

The real grist in the meditation mill is thoughts, emotions, and urges.

They’re tricky because they can linger for a long time, be repetitive, pull us into stories, and feel very…true.

This is where noting becomes a superpower, because it’s about seeing where your mind goes, not just that it’s drifted.

The mind has habitual tracks it likes to play over and over. My teacher, Jack Kornfield, calls them our “Top Ten Tunes.”

Here’s what I’ve learned through years of noting practice:

• I often start by reviewing the past: remembering my day, regretting a mistake, or replaying a difficult or happy moment. (Here I might gently note: “remembering, regretting, replaying.”

• I might get some space for present-moment awareness before drifting into the future: imagining next week, planning the next day, or worrying about an upcoming speaking engagement. (“Imagining, planning, worrying.”)

Seeing the patterns changes everything

The more I notice where my mind goes, the more familiar I get with its patterns.

That familiarity helps me catch myself sooner, before I get pulled into a drawn-out story or thought loop.

I can see my thoughts as repetitive mental constructs and choose not to believe them. They’re “real, but not true.”

In doing that, thoughts tend to lose their power.

Sometimes they dissolve into stillness for a while. Or they might stick around, but the volume is turned way down.

This helps steady the mind and work with difficult material in practice. But noting really pays off when you’re stuck in the mess and muck of everyday life.

Beneath the thoughts

What’s really going on under the hood with all these thoughts?

When you start paying closer attention, you notice that the repetitive thoughts and stories the mind spins are tied to underlying emotions: fear, anger, sadness, disgust, or even joy.

Despite what we tend to believe, emotions don’t show up as abstract ideas. They come from the body: a tightness in the chest, a knot in the belly, or a twitching eye.

Emotions are signals from your system that something matters right now.

But often, we miss them completely.

Instead of feeling the sensation directly, the mind starts telling stories. The emotion gets translated into a thought that’s fast, automatic, and convincing.

Thoughts seem to come out of nowhere and can carry us away into stories that feel very real.

These emotion-fuelled thought patterns have a lot of power over us. They decide how we react, often in ways that are unhelpful or downright harmful to our well-being.

Cutting through the noise

Noting can take the wind out of their sails.

When we start noticing our thought patterns, we can begin connecting them to the underlying emotions.

Since emotions live in the body, we can begin paying attention to the physical cues: tightness, pressure, tingling.

Developing awareness of these sensations lets us meet our experience closer to the source, before we spin out into stories.

After half a decade of noting practice, many of the patterns that once pushed me around have started to lose their bluster.

Noting doesn’t always make the noise go away. I still sit, at times, in that same torrent of mental detritus.

But I’m less like a flailing branch and more like a boulder: steady in the current, able to watch it all pass by.

The patterns are still there. But when I see them clearly, they have far less hold on me.

For most of my life, my brain was a threat-detection machine constantly scanning for danger.

All it took was a delayed reply, a strange look, or a small mistake—and I was bracing for impact.

Then I’d spend hours, days, or even weeks dwelling on the difficult things that happened.

Looking back, I have such compassion for my younger self because I understand all the pain and uncertainty that shaped him.

I also know I wasn’t alone.

Humans have what’s called a negativity bias, an inbuilt tendency to focus on negative experiences and swipe right on positive ones.

Mine was just turned up way louder than average.

Wired for an unpredictable wilderness

The negativity bias is part of evolutionary wiring that helped our species survive.

If you were out in the forest and heard something in the bushes, you would assume it’s a threat and not just the wind. That’s because if you guessed wrong, you might not get a second chance.

(You can read about my own misadventures with this in About That Time I Wrestled a Bear.)

Your brain doesn’t just default to detecting threats; it remembers them. It just takes one bad experience to tag that place, person, or situation as “proceed with caution.”

We’re wired for life in an unpredictable wilderness where assuming the worst-case scenario kept us alive.

The thing is, most of us don’t live in a world where we need to dodge predators anymore. We’re answering emails and shouting at Siri.

But the negativity bias persists.

It causes us to focus on and orient towards difficult experiences—past and present.

I’ve spent a long time unpacking my past and, in the process, realized that most memories of certain aspects of my life are negative.

I can have a day full of many good moments, and still end up fixating on one small piece of negative feedback.

This is the negativity bias in action.

Enter Positive Neuroplasticity

The good news is, your brain can change.

You can train your mind to orient towards the good by practicing positive neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is your brain’s ability to rewire itself over time. The more often certain thoughts, feelings, and reactions happen together, the stronger those pathways get.

Whatever you habitually think, feel, or do ends up getting wired in as your brain’s default setting.

When you dwell on the negative, you reinforce that bias.

Positive neuroplasticity disrupts the pattern.

It starts with paying attention to the positive moments in your day.

(Mindfulness helps here, because it trains your brain to be more aware of your present-moment experience.)

It might be a moment of calm, feeling appreciated, a small win, or even just a sense that “everything is OK right now.”

Our minds tend to gloss over these experiences pretty quickly. This practice is about slowing down long enough for them to actually register.

Here’s the practice (it takes ~30-60 seconds):

• Notice something good

• Stay with it for 10-20 seconds

• Feel it in your body

• Invite it to get more vivid or meaningful

• Let it sink in, becoming part of you.

Repeat this as often as you can each day, whenever you have a positive experience.

As clinical psychologist and mindfulness teacher, Rick Hanson puts it:

It’s not “positive thinking.”

Positive neuroplasticity isn’t the same as positive thinking.

Positive thinking is about deliberately choosing optimism over pessimism. That can be helpful, but it often slips into toxic positivity where we overlook what’s actually true.

That can lead to denial, internal conflict, and challenges in solving real problems.

Positive neuroplasticity is about repeatedly noticing and taking in beneficial experiences so your brain gradually rewires itself to orient towards them.

As Rick Hanson says, it’s about going from “state to trait.”

I learned about positive neuroplasticity from Dr. Hanson a few years ago during my mindfulness teacher training program.

Integrating it into my life and practice has led to some meaningful change. I worry way less, and I’m not constantly scanning for what might go wrong around every corner.

It’s also helped me be more present to the small, joyful moments in my life—ones I used to miss completely when I was stuck in survival mode.

I often use this simple practice with my counselling and coaching clients who are stuck in cycles of worry or self-criticism.

What would it be like to try this today?

The next time something good happens, even the tiniest thing, practice the pause.

Stay with it for a few seconds longer than you normally would.

Let it land.

It might not feel like much in the moment. But over time, these small moments add up and start to shift how you relate to your life.

It never feels like enough.

So this year, I wanted to give more. I created a guided meditation to help you calm your nervous system and feel your connection to the Earth more directly.

The anchor for this practice is simple: the sensation of your feet on the ground, and the points where your body meets what’s beneath you. You’re invited to imagine roots extending deep into the Earth, drawing in nourishment, and offering your care back in return.

Being on video isn’t easy for me. There’s a kind of vulnerability in being seen that can make me freeze, even when I know I have something valuable to offer.

But here I am. The Earth means that much to me.

I started recording this at my desk, but life interrupted, and I had to head home to my kids before finishing.

When I arrived, it was a brisk, bright spring day, and the small patch of forest on our land was calling me.

So I grabbed my phone, a tripod, and a frisky dog, and went outside.

Recording there, amid the trees, beside a burbling brook, with crows cawing overhead, felt entirely different. I was calmer and more connected. It was like the practice, and the place had aligned to produce something I could not have done without the forest’s collaboration.

I left with a deeper connection to that little grove and a new sense of how I want to create these offerings going forward.

If you can, find a quiet place for yourself to listen. Even better if it’s somewhere in nature.

I hope this practice is of benefit.

With care,

Heron

P.S. If you enjoy this practice, you can subscribe at befriendingyourself.org, and learn more about me at heronpayne.ca!

Get the Guided Meditation Here

Self-care and self-love can look like many things.

For me, it looks like sitting down and doing nothing—on purpose.

I’ve had a daily meditation practice for more than half a decade. I see it as an act of showing up for myself and taking care of my nervous system.

When I first started, I often had to force myself onto the cushion. Now it’s a non-negotiable part of my day. My practice helps keep me stable and grounded amidst whatever metaphorical storms might blow through my life or the world.

When I practice, my breath becomes an anchor to the present moment—a place I return each time I drift off into thinking or distraction.

But the breath is just one potential anchor. It works well for many folks, but not for all.

For some, paying attention to the breath is uncomfortable or upsetting.

For others, there may be a tendency to control the breath rather than allow it to be natural, as instructed.

You might also want to experiment with other anchors to see how they feel and how they affect your practice.

With that in mind, I decided to create this guided meditation on Anchoring to the Present moment.

It invites you to explore different anchors in your sensory experience, such as your feet on the ground, your sense of touch, and the sounds you hear.

When you find an anchor that resonates, this meditation gently guides you to rest your attention there and to return to it again and again when you drift into thoughts or distractions.

If the mind is busy with thoughts or struggling with difficult experiences, you’re invited to bring kindness in the midst.

That’s the fundamental practice of anchoring to the present moment.

I hope this practice is of benefit.

If you’re new to my email list, welcome to Befriending Yourself. I’m really glad you’re here. This Substack newsletter is a space where we explore self-compassion and the deeper inner work that supports it. This post is a little re-introduction to what it’s all about and where it’s heading.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a post on here. Life got extremely full, and writing got shifted way down on the priority list. I’m choosing to treat this as a moment for self-compassion, and I’m grateful that so many of you are still here.

While I might not have been writing much for the past few months, I’ve done plenty of reflecting on Befriending Yourself: what it is, where it’s going, and how it can best serve current and future readers.

One thing became quite clear to me: this newsletter needs to be about more than self-compassion. That’s because, for many people, try as they might, self-compassion just isn’t accessible in the present moment.

There are too many things that block it, or other steps or practices that need to be put into place before it becomes possible to start exercising the inner kindness muscle.

The Inner Work that Makes Self-Compassion Possible

So moving forward, Befriending Yourself will still include self-compassion, and we’ll also explore other inner work that makes self-compassion possible in the first place.

Things like:

Mindfulness — learning how to notice what’s happening inside us without immediately trying to change it.

Nervous system regulation — understanding how our bodies respond to stress, and how to support ourselves when we feel overwhelmed or shut down.

Boundaries — recognizing what protects our energy, time, and well-being.

Curiosity — approaching all our thoughts, feelings, and reactions with interest instead of judgment.

Relating to patterns — seeing the habits and strategies we’ve developed, and relating to them with respect rather than frustration.

To paraphrase the Dalai Lama, compassion only becomes possible when we can connect with suffering—whether another’s or our own.

So, practicing self-compassion starts with turning toward pain. Only when we can recognize our struggles and tolerate them long enough to learn what we need, can we meet ourselves with kindness and care.

Wherever you happen to be starting from today, I’m glad you’re here for where we’re heading next.

With care,

Heron

My healing journey started on a beautiful early spring day, high in the snowy mountains of southeastern BC.

We were nearing the top of our climb after our first snowboard run when my legs faltered. My mouth felt like sandpaper, and every ounce of energy evaporated. It took all I had in me just to haul myself back to the car.

My body, already stressed from a history of trauma and chronic illness, had finally said “enough.” In the weeks to come, it went into full-scale revolt. My mind followed shortly after, as I spiralled into severe anxiety and depression.

What I didn’t know then was that this breakdown would become my catalyst for real change.

Looking back, it had been brewing for a while. The COVID-19 pandemic had me locked down and living in constant fear of the virus. A few months earlier, I’d suddenly lost my high-stress tech job. Turning 40 had me primed for a midlife crisis, which added more fuel to the fire.

This wasn’t my first rodeo with a mental health crisis. But in the past, I was single. When things went south in my psyche, the impact landed largely on me.

This time around, it was agonizing to watch it affect my kids. To see how it ripped at loose seams in my marriage.

When I finally got my feet back under me, I vowed it would be the last time I went through something like this.

I was ready for transformation. But up to this point, it had been hard to come by.

The safety of the familiar

Looking back, I’m not surprised it took such a difficult experience to set the stage for change.

Even if we’re highly motivated and working hard to shift unhelpful habits, patterns, and trauma responses, it can be hard to do.

That’s because, along with effort and perseverance, change requires a hefty dollop of courage.

Transformation involves questioning and shifting our identity—who we believe ourselves to be. Even if said identity is painful, it gives us a sense of safety. So, while we crave a new way of being, we instinctively cling to what feels stable.

So change is like stepping off a solid but uncomfortable cliff ledge into an unknown but beckoning void.

What’s more, the prospect of even considering stepping into that unknown can be scary.

When we try to form new habits or ways of being, it’s natural to hope we’ll succeed. That hope involves a risk that we’ll fail. The prospect of failure can feel so crushing that it keeps us from even peeking over the edge.

So, our resistance isn’t a reflection of our laziness, weakness, or other perceived failings. It’s a built-in protection mechanism.

My first tries at real change

My growth process started about half a decade before that day in the mountains, soon after my wife and I had our first child.

Anxiety and mood challenges were lifelong companions. But my coping strategies helped me survive long enough to reproduce.

But then I saw how my moods and behaviour were impacting our sweet two-year-old girl.

I was often edgy and reactive. I struggled to find joy in the places it was most available to me. I wasn’t present or able to be the father and partner I wanted to be.

The only tool in my belt to deal with it was to escape on risky or exhausting adventures (see above). They helped in the short term but weren’t sustainable.

I knew there had to be a better way. So I went to see a therapist for the first time.

My therapy journey lasted several years and was helpful. It gave me a safe relational space to explore my trauma story and have it received with empathy. It also helped me understand the origins of my struggles. And I got some tools to help mitigate their impacts on my life.

I gained some perspective and made some tweaks to my life that took the edge off my suffering.

But the real change I needed—the deep, cycle-breaking healing—seemed impossible.

Standing on the edge of transformation

I know how hard it can be to long for change that feels unachievable. And the suffering of trying and failing.

We start a diet, only to find ourselves huddled in the corner with a bucket of ice cream and a spoon after a tough day.

That commitment to exercising more? We can’t quite get there and feel self-loathing when we spend the afternoon binge-watching Netflix.

Leaving the therapist’s office, we feel like a million bucks, only to stumble back into the same painful pattern several hours later.

We feel motivated. We try our best to persevere. We can see the edge of that ledge. We might inch closer to it. But we keep retreating to our safe place again.

So, this begs the question: How can we make true change happen?

Spoiler Alert: Real change doesn’t come from trying harder. It starts with safety.

The paradox of change

Carl Rogers, founder of Person-Centered Therapy, famously described the paradox of change when he said: “When I accept myself as I am, then I can change.”

Self-acceptance involves learning to see ourselves clearly and not rejecting what we see. We can only grow when we feel unconditionally accepted. This lets us drop our defenses and opens the door to transformation.

When we consider this from the perspective of protection and safety, it makes perfect sense.

Self-acceptance tells our most-defended parts that they don’t need to fear. We see them and accept them for who they are. That safety helps them soften and become more open to the prospect of change.

Learning to accept ourselves opens us up to the possibility of making that leap into the unknown. It lets us stand up, walk to the edge of that ledge, and peer over it to see what’s beyond.

Self-compassion gives us wings

If change involves a leap into the unknown, self-compassion gives us wings. It let us soar into that future we’ve dreamed of for so long.

Self-acceptance says, “I see myself clearly and I won’t reject what I see.” Self-compassion takes it a step further with, “I’ve got my own back—no matter what.”

It lets us know that whatever happens, we’ll meet ourselves with kindness rather than condemnation.

This imbues us with the resilience we need to make the difficult journey from present state to future self.

We can stand at the precipice of change with the knowledge that when we make that leap—no matter what foul weather blows through on our journey—we can stay aloft.

When my real healing started

When things fell apart during the pandemic, I got pushed to the edge of my ledge.

The pain of staying the same was finally greater than the discomfort of transformation.

I was ready for true change.

My radical inner shift started with a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction workshop. It was a different approach to meditation than I’d ever experienced before that opened the door to developing a regular mindfulness practice.

Through MBSR, I discovered Insight Meditation. The Insight teachings showed me a new way of relating to my inner life—my thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.

It’s also where I learned the practice of self-compassion; of meeting that inner experience with deep kindness when things are difficult.

In discovering and doing these practices, I planted the seeds of true change.

I could see my inner experience clearly, without judging or rejecting it. If what I experienced was painful or difficult, instead of pushing it down or acting it out, I could meet it with kindness.

In other words, I learned to accept myself and have my own back. No matter what.

Many other humans, practices, and medicines helped me heal. But mindfulness and self-compassion were the threads that bound it all together.

Someone to walk beside you

When I truly changed, I could feel the positive impact it made on my life. Then I started noticing more comfortable ledges in my life—and actively leaping into the unknown in search of more growth.

Looking over those ledges can still be scary. It’s a strange mix of fear and limitless potential.

I stand at the precipice, notice my breath, and remember that what’s beyond the edge is a new way of being in the world that feels better: More safety in my body. Greater authenticity. The ability to truly share what’s in my heart and on my mind.

That’s what self-compassion has given me: The steadiness to stay when it’s uncomfortable. The courage to leap when I’m ready. And the trust that even if I stumble, I’ll meet myself with kindness, brush off the dust and keep moving forward on my path.

And, when things feel really uncomfortable and I’m hesitant to shift, I have people I can reach out to for support. Self-kindness tells me I don’t have to go it alone.

If you’re standing at your own ledge—tired of repeating old patterns, ready for lasting change—you don’t have to leap alone.

I now walk beside change seekers as they learn to listen inwardly, soften resistance, and find their footing in the unknown.

If this resonates, you can learn more at embodymind.co, or reach out at info@embodymind.co

It was sitting beside a crackling fire on the first night of a solo backpacking trip in Washington’s High Cascade Mountains, when I heard a rustling in the old-growth cedar forest.

Before I set out, the park ranger warned me in his western drawl to watch out for ‘bars’ (bears). Fresh from Atlantic Canada, where bears are timid and rarely seen, I immediately felt uneasy.

I’d weathered many nights alone in Newfoundland’s woods and even survived a close encounter with a startled moose. But here, solo, far from home and deep in an unfamiliar wilderness, things were different.

My mind was already on high alert for danger. So, when I heard that sound in the woods, I decided it was a grizzly that wanted to make an evening meal out of me.

I sat by the fire for hours with my buck knife stuck in the ground, bear spray in hand, shining a powerful flashlight into the dense forest. My mouth soured by adrenaline, ready to fight or flee. I screamed at the sound repeating from the unknown until my throat was sore.

Even in the midst of it, as I sat there raging and terrified, part of me knew there wasn’t actually a bear out there.

Despite this inner knowing, I was so stuck in the anxious “bear’s about to eat me” story that I couldn’t see any other possibilities.

The storytelling mind

I’m here writing these words. So, clearly I lived to tell the story. But, believe it or not, there was a ferocious bear in the forest with me that night.

It was my wild storytelling mind, and it had complete control over me.

Stories are powerful things. They can capture our attention and take us away from the present moment into the most fantastical places.

And, our minds are amazing at telling them.

The challenge, as you can see from my story above, is that the stories our minds concoct are often—at best—not helpful. They can even be harmful.

They can pull us into narratives that have no basis in reality. They can take us away from the joy, beauty, and connection of being here in the present moment.

For example, you might pause for a moment and imagine that you’re riding through the sky on the back of a dragon. Feel the wind in your face and taste the scorched, sulfurous air of your pet dragon’s fiery breath.

The human mind can conjure up such images easily. But that doesn’t make them true. Our other, more mundane thoughts often have as little to do with reality as riding a dragon.

Thanks to this habit of mind, instead of savouring fresh mountain air, a crackling fire, and the kiss of sunlight fading on the bark of ancient cedars—I was stuck in a painful and totally unreal mental narrative.

Seeing the waterfall

As I’ve mentioned before, for a long time I hated my anxiety and the ways it limited my life. So, I was brutally hard on myself after my “bear encounter.”

Looking back on my journal from that night, several other stories lived inside the bear narrative: “I’m a coward.” “My stupid mind is going to ruin yet another trip.”

Little did I know how normal a human experience I was having in that moment.

Our minds are thought-generating machines. They produce thoughts like the heart beats or the lungs breathe.

(Add some trauma to the picture, as in my case, and that thinking machine can get kicked into overdrive. It spews out endless worst-case scenarios and doomsday predictions.)

My initial glimpse into the thinking mind’s true nature came about a year after that night in the Cascades, when I did my first meditation retreat.

At this point, I’d never even tried meditation before. So, doing five days’ worth of intensive Vipassana meditation at a Thai Forest monastery was a dive into the deep end befitting a 25-year-old hellbent on testing his mettle.

The retreat turned out to be torturous. Even when I sat in the safe and serene monastic environment, that wild animal mind was still with me. When I tried to get quiet in meditation, my brain kept playing thoughts of all kinds like a skipping record. This went on for hours each day.

I came away from the retreat feeling stressed and like the whole thing was a flop.

Little did I know at the time how important an insight I had gained: The mind’s nature is to think and make up stories.

My teacher, Jack Kornfield, calls this experience “seeing the waterfall.” It’s as if we live inside a powerful torrent of thoughts. We’re so inundated by the deluge that we can’t see beyond it.

My first experience with mindfulness meditation gave me a glimpse of the waterfall— just enough to be able to acknowledge its presence.

Thoughts are REAL but not TRUE

In the years following that retreat, I continued practicing meditation. I read books, took some training, and maintained a sporadic practice. But it was hard.

Every time I meditated, my mind reeled with thoughts and kept repeating the same old stories. That made it hard, which discouraged me from practicing. So the cycle perpetuated itself.

In retrospect, I was missing a key piece of instruction.

At the time, I thought the goal of meditation was to stop my thoughts. So, when I not only couldn’t stop thinking, but often drifted into scary stories, I felt like a failure. That added a layer of shame on top of an already difficult experience.

The learning that changed everything for me and helped me finally establish a regular meditation practice is quite simple—but profound:

“Thoughts are real, but not true.”

So, along with thinking being a normal human experience, we also don’t have to believe what our thoughts are telling us. In fact, science has indicated that we should be skeptical about our thinking.

A study by Dr. Michael Gazzinga in the 1960s showed that the left side of the brain’s job is to make up explanations and reasons to help make sense of our experience. But the left brain is essentially an interpreter of reality, and Gazzinga found that it often gets things totally wrong.

So, I reiterate: Don’t believe your thoughts. Even the ones that say you should trust them.

The two learnings above were transformational for me. I could sit in meditation and not stress about the fact that I was thinking, nor the content of the thoughts.

Instead, I could practice seeing what’s present and noticing it without judgement. It was incredibly freeing. It opened the doors to a consistent and fruitful mindfulness meditation practice that’s helped transform my life.

Seeing behind the waterfall.

Back to that night in the High Cascades. Eventually, I ran out of wood, and the fire died down. My mind calmed along with it.

I had finally let go of the story that there was a wild animal in the forest waiting to get me.

I got up to douse the embers and head off to bed, exhausted. But, without the light from the fire, I noticed that the sky above me was brilliantly clear and filled with countless stars.

So I sat, propped up against a rock, for who knows how long, staring and marvelling at the mystery of the night sky. Then I took the fly off my tent, crawled into my sleeping bag, and continued to gaze upward as I drifted into a deep sleep.

That night sky is the perfect metaphor for what I now know exists behind our waterfall of endless thinking and storytelling. It’s a vast, wide-open space full of endless potential and unfathomable beauty.

It’s always there. But we seldom see it because it’s blocked by the thoughts and stories that cloud our minds.

Mindfulness practice lets us step outside that waterfall and get some distance, so we can see the world around us with more clarity and calm.

It’s definitely made my mind a much easier place to be. The old stories are still there. But they don’t show up as much or have the same power they once did.

I still spend entire meditations with my mind in planning, remembering, or [insert type of thought] mode. But I’m ok with that. Compassion tells me it’s a normal human experience, and I can be kind to myself in the midst of it.

As I write, the air outside my home is choked with wildfire smoke. There’s a huge blaze burning out of control not far away. It’s barely rained for months. The leaves have withered and dropped off many trees, giving the world an eerily autumnal look.

Where we used to live in the British Columbia Interior, this was…well, a normal day in August. Every summer involved drought and thick smoke from several nearby wildfires.

A key reason we moved our family to Nova Scotia was to avoid living with the effects of having these fiery symbols of the ecological crisis in our backyard. The wet Maritime climate was a big draw.

Yet, here I am again. Confronted with the trappings of human-caused climate change and environmental degradation.

Sitting with the grief. In tune with the deep sadness of a struggling natural world. Living with a nervous system tuned to a low level of fear that I might need to flee a fire at any time.

Then comes the inclination toward guilt. As a member of an overpopulated, overconsuming, and traumatized species, I contribute to this situation. At times, that guilt might even edge into the realm of shame. Am I a bad person because I’m not doing more to reduce my ecological footprint?

Sometimes anger accompanies the guilt and shame. Anger at myself for how I’m complicit in this situation. Or at governments, billionaires, people of certain political beliefs, and others who feel worthy of blame for their role in getting us here.

(Note: This systemic anger can be healthy when it inspires advocacy for change. But when it becomes entrenched as a narrative that pits one group of people against another, or a person against themselves, then it becomes part of the problem.)

What I’ve learned is that guilt, shame, and anger can be present. There are no bad emotions. But I don’t have to buy into the stories they tell me. Particularly, the stories these feelings can conjure about my failures as a human.

Self-compassion is the antidote to these narratives. When self-compassion is present, it makes compassion for others possible. And that can be part of the solution to this whole mess. A change that inspires a different way forward.

With that said, I’d like to share some perspectives that help me maintain self-compassion and stay resilient as I move through this burning world.

Save the Earth because you love it.

When asked for his advice on how people should address the great ecological challenges of our time, the poet and godfather of environmentalism, Gary Snyder said:

“Don’t feel guilty. If you want to save (the Earth), don’t save it out of guilt, don’t save it out of fear, don’t save it out of anger. The guilt, the fear, and the anger are what have created our human problems. If you want to save it, save it because you love it. That’s the force that makes a difference.”

The love Snyder speaks about includes love for ourselves.

If we move through life laden with anger or sadness toward ourselves, that energy shapes the way we hold others and see the world around us.

Shame, guilt, and anger are incredibly uncomfortable emotions in the body. Without the skills or knowledge on how to hold these feelings with tenderness, our default (whether conscious or not) is to inflict our pain on other beings.

When we turn against ourselves, that inner conflict rarely stays contained. Most often, it spills out into the world around us. Onto the people we love—in the form of harsh words, subtle judgment, or passive aggressiveness.

Interpersonal conflict ripples outward. Into families, communities, and entire countries. Self-criticism is the seed for blame and division. It creates cycles of fear and hostility that lead to larger conflicts.

So, self-kindness is a radical act of peace-making that can disrupt this pattern of collective suffering.

We are the Earth.

Another perspective that helps me hold compassion for myself amidst the difficult things I witness is this:

I am not separate from the Earth. I am part of the Earth.

If I’m part of the Earth, I’m damaging my larger body. I am the Earth inflicting pain upon itself.

We, the Earth—in all our fragile and powerful beauty—are suffering right now. It’s as if we have an autoimmune illness inflicted by eons of collective trauma. It’s finally getting the best of us.

Collective trauma happens when emotional and psychological wounding gets shared through groups, communities, and entire generations. It sticks in the cultural memory and gets passed on in the form of stories, habitual behaviours, and particularly through our bodies. It shapes how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and the Earth as a whole.

If you knew a loved one who had suffered horrible trauma and was struggling with severe illness as a result, how would you want to relate to them? With kindness and care? Or with anger and guilt?

I believe, for most of us, the former would be the case.

So, the question I ask is: Can we, the Earth, see our suffering clearly and learn to relate to ourselves with compassion as we navigate these difficult times?

It isn’t our fault.

This point is based on a deep reading of scientific and humanistic perspectives about the human condition.

But it solidified for me recently during my second reading of Yuval Noah-Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Harari argues that humans rose to the top of the food chain too quickly, thanks to our advanced cognitive abilities and capacity to cooperate in large numbers. We climbed the ladder too fast, and other species couldn't keep up.

I recently explained it to a friend like this: Let’s assume a tiger starts out as a harmless herbivore. Then, an event requires it to hunt prey for survival.

Over tens of thousands of years, the cat evolves sharp claws and teeth, agility, and other traits to become a skilled hunter. While our cat's evolving, its prey are developing traits to help them avoid becoming tiger food.

For humans, our big brains and social intelligence let us skip many evolutionary steps. We didn’t need to evolve traits to become successful hunters. We could create weapons. We could work together at scale when hunting.

No matter the size or ferocity of the animal, it didn’t stand a chance against a group of savvy, well-armed humans.

So, I propose: What’s happening to the Earth and how we treat ourselves and each other—isn’t our fault. We’re living out the legacy of a huge evolutionary fluke.

Meeting our “Paleolithic emotions” with compassion

The thing is, we haven’t evolved much since we were running around with spears chasing mammoths and giant sloths.

Now, we have nuclear weapons, AI robots, ruthless logging machines, and factories spewing pollution into the environment to make said technologies.

The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

The beauty of the human species, though, is that we have the ability (and I would say a do-or-die need) to intentionally evolve beyond these limitations.

One way to do that is through practicing self-compassion. By learning to see our difficult “Paleolithic emotions” clearly and offering ourselves care in the midst of our struggles, we lessen the amount of suffering in the world.

Mindfulness and self-compassion are tools that can help us make this much-needed evolutionary leap.

When we learn to meet our own suffering with kindness, it’s easier to meet others’ struggles with care. Maybe then we will be able to come together and use our social and cognitive superpowers to right the ship and create a sustainable future for humanity.

Listen to Reclaiming Power Through Self-Compassion on Inner Light Here ☝️

In one of my favourite stand-up comedy bits, Jerry Seinfeld points out that people’s number one fear is public speaking. In second place? Death. So if you’re at a funeral, you’re better off being in the casket than giving the eulogy.

As with many, public speaking’s always been hard for me. When I was younger, my self-consciousness was often overwhelming.

I'd feel confident in the value of what I had to share. But when it came time to step to the front of the room and all eyes were on me, the pressure would make me second-guess myself. I'd stumble over my words and even blank out. At its worst, I could hardly distinguish faces in the room or even recall afterward what I’d said.

Over time, I've gotten more comfortable being in front of an audience. That happened through training in facilitation and practicing by teaching small groups on topics I'm confident with, like photography and meditation.

But public speaking remains a growth edge for me.

So, when my coach suggested podcasts as another way to share my voice, I felt more than a little nervous. I mean, on its face, it’s a dialogue between two people—which is my sweet spot. But that dialogue gets broadcast to many people.

That said, I also love conversations, especially on topics I’m passionate about. So I went for it. After all, during my past life as a journalist, radio reporters had interviewed me about stories I'd covered. So, why not give it a try?

Of course, when I sat down at the mic, that old nervousness was there. It was a voice-only interview, and the lack of a face to connect with made it harder. Also, having facilitated hundreds of conversations myself, I found that the dialogue didn’t flow very naturally.

I stumbled around with my words and made a couple of awkward pauses to process before responding to some questions and prompts. This helped me discover areas where I need to level up my knowledge, or stories that could be smoother.

Overall, though, I think it went reasonably well for a first attempt. Some moments in there felt pretty golden. I was clear, articulate and passionate.

But it was, undeniably, an imperfect interview. And, I’m OK with that.

It was my first try. I learned by doing and discovered some growth opportunities. I did my best and walked away with insights that will serve me in the future.

Feel free to give it a listen and drop me any thoughts you might have in the comments!

Listen to Reclaiming Power Through Self-Compassion on Inner Light Here ☝️

Anxiety followed me throughout my life. From the shy kid who kept to himself during primary school lunch breaks. To the middle-aged man stuck in a full-blown nervous breakdown.

It kept me from doing things I wanted to do. It left me feeling trapped inside myself, unable to share my authenticity. I felt deeply defective because of it. Layering self-criticism on top only compounded and amplified it.

I’ll always remember the first time I truly felt compassion for the anxious part of me. When I stopped hating it and learned to give it the love it always needed.

It was on a seven-day retreat, a prerequisite for my Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program.

In a dialogue with fellow practitioners, I shared that I had made friends with my anxiety. But later, while doing walking meditation in a park near my house, I realized that statement wasn’t true.

My anxiety wasn’t a friend. It was more like an old buddy from high school with whom I no longer had much in common. But he needed a place to stay. So I let him sleep on my couch. He left his stuff everywhere, snored loudly, and had other bad habits that disrupted my life.

In other words, he was something I’d learned to put up with. I’d managed to get him out of my head. But now he was like a fire that lived in my belly and twisted it into knots daily.

As the retreat went on, I spent time getting to know my anxiety better—mainly through visualization. First, the guy on the couch turned into a person in a Velcro suit, leaping at a wall and sticking to it. It was sticky, with barbs that clung to me.

Slowly and sweetly, as I stayed with that image over days, the Velcro caricature morphed into a small child. A terrified kid who needed embracing to feel safe.

So I wrapped my arms around myself and held that child. As I did so, my whole body felt a tremendous sense of ease. Tears ran down my cheeks. I let them be there.

This was my first experience with embodied self-compassion. And it was transformational.

The Body Keeps the Score

Self-compassion, as it’s commonly practiced, is mind-oriented.

Self-compassion, like the popular Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, tends to focus on how we view and interpret our struggles. We work to change those thoughts. We try to shift our inner dialogue from self-criticism to a more supportive view.

Instead of framing mistakes as evidence of personal failure, we train ourselves to see them as part of the shared human experience. Something everyone encounters at times.

Don’t get me wrong. This kind of work is invaluable and a critical starting point. It can help us recognize and accept our imperfections without being consumed by shame and avoidance in the process.

The challenge with this cognitive approach is that it can leave people with self-compassion as an abstract idea. Something understood in the mind, not experienced in the body.

That’s where embodied self-compassion comes in. It turns kind thoughts and self-compassionate responses into physical realities felt in the body as a sense of ease, opening, or release.

While the mind may seem all-powerful, the body keeps the score (as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s book reminds us). It’s where we encode our deepest memories and where our greatest potential for transformation lives.

To feel self-compassion in the body is to know and own that sensation for life.

Getting to Know and Tolerate the Embodied Critic

Practicing embodied self-compassion starts with learning to notice how the body responds to self-criticism.

Harsh inner dialogue never lives in the mind. We might believe it does, often because we’ve lost touch with our bodies due to the discomfort of these sensations.

But whether we’re aware of it or not, when those mean words run through our mind, our body responds in kind. It could be a clenched jaw. A tight chest. A stomach in knots. Clenched fingers or toes.

These sensations are the body’s way of letting us know there’s something that needs our attention.

Embodied self-compassion teaches us that these sensations, even if they feel unpleasant, shouldn't be ignored or pushed away. The work is to learn to tolerate them. Then to embrace them and show them the care they so badly need.

So we pause long enough to feel the tension, heat, heaviness—whatever sensation is present—without trying to suppress or fix it.

We set an intention to allow the sensation to be present for as long as we’re able. This isn’t about passive resignation. It's a way of granting the experience the dignity of being felt instead of sending it into exile.

Planting the Seeds of Transformation

The process of noticing how the inner critic shows up in the body, and permitting it to be there without judgment or suppression, can take time.

Your personal history plays a big role in this. If you’ve faced trauma, it could take weeks, months, or longer to find the inner permission and stability to be with your experiences. (Going slow here is critical. Rushing ahead can be overwhelming and counterproductive.)

While it might feel like a heavy lift, the results can be profound. When we can be with the sensations for longer periods, we've got the opportunity to learn from them.

We can learn why they’re here and what they need to feel safe. Then, we can offer ourselves what we need to heal. This creates fertile ground for transformation.

(If you're feeling called to do this work, having a supportive coach who's been there is invaluable for navigating this process. I know it was for me. )

In Part II, we’ll explore the final two stages of this process: getting curious about the embodied inner critic and discovering how to care for it.

For a long time, practicing meditation was painful. Not because my knees or back hurt. But because my inner experience could be excruciating.

I believed I had to get my thoughts to stop, or I wasn’t doing it right. As someone with anxiety and a hectic mind, I always felt I was failing. I’d get carried away by whatever was going on in my mind. I’d sit with repetitive thoughts and scary emotions that wouldn’t go away.

That alone made it hard enough to maintain a practice. But seeing these inner experiences as failures injected a subtle shame.

Sitting down and confronting what was going on in my mind was hard. Adding in that shame made it torturous.

Then, two hyphenated words changed everything.

Self-compassion.

They helped me create a steady and transformative meditation practice. They revolutionized my inner life.

The Two Wings of Transformation

That shift started when I discovered Insight Meditation practice.

Also known as Vipassana, Insight practice is built on two foundational elements:

1. Noticing what’s happening in the body and mind right now, with an intention not to judge the experience.

2. Meeting tough moments—like recurring thoughts, strong feelings, and uncomfortable bodily sensations—with curiosity and kindness.

The first part, clear seeing, was transformative in and of itself. It taught me it’s OK to think and have big feelings when meditating. It’s better than OK. These experiences aren’t distractions. They’re teachers. Whatever comes up can reveal truths about our life and inner world.

But, as noted above, what we see when we slow down and pay attention can be hard.

“The practice of meditation, or coming into presence, is described as having two wings. The wing of mindfulness allows us to see what is actually happening in the present moment without judgement. The other wing is heartfulness or love — holding what we see with tenderness and compassion.” — Tara Brach

That’s where compassion comes in. When we open to the truth of our experience, self-compassion helps us meet whatever arises with warmth and curiosity, instead of resistance or judgement.

Self-compassion reminds us that:

• Pain is part of being human.

• Our mind’s interpretation of our inner life is just one story.

• We can hold our experience and ourselves with care.

Without compassion, mindfulness can feel detached or clinical. Compassion without mindfulness can be overwhelming or difficult due to reactive responses. Together, they create a powerful team.

As my teacher, Tara Brach, shares in the quote above, mindfulness and compassion are like two wings of a great bird. Combined, they can inspire healing, insight, and transformation—allowing us to fly free.

Exploring My Inner World

As I started practicing the art of allowing—letting whatever I was experiencing be there without judging it, pushing it away, or clinging to it—things got real. Quick.

I noticed the familiar narratives attached to repetitive thoughts. Doubting. Planning. Remembering. Imagining. Worrying.

Then came the emotions. Anger. Sadness. Fear. Shame.

Eventually, I began coming into my body. I started noticing the difficult sensations I’d long ago cut myself off from when I made the unconscious decision that this body stuff was just too much. The implicit belief that I needed to live in my head—or “mental control tower,” as Tara Brach calls it—to keep myself safe.

As I brought awareness to all this, I developed a detailed map of my inner landscape. The stories I told myself. The unhelpful thoughts that would swirl around. How to know what I was feeling from one moment to the next. And the massive amounts of information available from my body that I had disconnected from for so long.

A New, Compassionate Inner Relationship

But, without self-compassion, none of that would have been possible.

When the repetitive thought tape won’t stop playing. When painful emotions keep punching me in the gut. Or when the ache of that inner tension won’t go away. I can meet my experience with kindness. With empathy. With understanding.

It might sound like saying inwardly: “This is so hard right now. Hang in there. You can do this.”

It could mean putting a hand on the place that’s hurting or the chest that’s pounding. Or giving myself a big hug.

Or acknowledging that these thoughts, emotions, or sensations are here for a reason. Usually, they’re trying to keep me safe. They’re protectors. So I can thank them for being here. But gently remind them that, in this moment, I don’t need them. They can relax.

After practicing this nearly every day for four years, it feels safe to say that I’ve developed a new, much healthier relationship with my inner life.

Repetitive thoughts are fewer. When they appear, I know how to meet them.

Difficult emotions still arise. But I have tools to work with them.

And uncomfortable bodily sensations, boy, are they still showing up. But now I can meet them with tenderness—and in doing so, they often ease.

The dynamic duo of mindfulness and self-compassion has transformed my life. They hold that same potential for anyone willing to put in the work. Could that be you?

Personal writing. This thing I’m doing right now. It was tough for so long.

I used to be a journalist who could write with the best of them—when the editor gave me an assignment to write about someone else.

I’d occasionally write an editorial or execute an article idea I concocted myself.

But I have vastly more fragments of unfinished pieces floating in the cloud that have never seen the light of day.

Looking back, it was because I never had confidence in my ideas. I’d start into them with gusto and then bail on them soon enough because I thought they were no good.

I guess I decided it was safer to quit before I failed publicly.

The fact that I’m now here, turning this idea into reality and freely sharing it (and myself) with the world is the result of practicing self-compassion.

Without the ability to see my past suffering and meet it with kindness and a recognition of common humanity. To notice those typos and not-so-polished posts. To be OK with grammatically incorrect sentences. I would not be here, writing these words. Trusting that this idea is something worth sharing with you.

I needed to build a solid foundation of self-compassion.

I share this as an example of how being kind to ourselves is the foundation of true inner strength. As Dr. Neff says above, it gives us the courage to see ourselves clearly and act anyway.

First Off: Self-Compassion Isn’t Soft. It’s Strategic.

Self-compassion isn’t about ignoring flaws or sugarcoating failure. It’s the opposite.

It’s about seeing yourself clearly and choosing to stay with what you see.

It’s the quiet strength to say:

“Yes, I fell short. And yes, I’m still worthy.” “This is hard. And I’m doing my best.” “That didn’t go as planned. I still belong here.”

What I’ve found is this: When I stop attacking myself for being imperfect, I get better. Not softer. Stronger. More resilient. More courageous. Less avoidant.

I stop bailing on ideas. On myself. And I stay in the room.

The Ubiquitous Myth of Strength

In our culture, especially in professional settings, “strength” is often viewed as pushing through pain, outperforming everyone, and hiding anything that smells like weakness.

But relentless self-criticism doesn’t make us better. It makes us smaller. It keeps us locked in cycles of shame, burnout, and paralysis.

True inner strength isn’t built by berating ourselves. It’s built by supporting ourselves, particularly when the going gets tough.

This shift isn’t just personal. It’s also showing up in leadership circles, entrepreneurial spaces, and boardrooms.

The Leadership of Self-Compassion.

To be honest, I’ve never been a corporate leader in the traditional sense. I’ve been a lower-mid-level manager in tech startups who struggled to climb the ladder due to my inability at the time to show self-leadership. (Thanks in part to the fact that I struggled with self-compassion.)

But I did have the chance to work in an environment steeped in leadership development alongside many skilled leaders. So I know a thing or two about what it takes to be an effective leader. And, I believe strongly that self-compassion is a critical trait for anyone aspiring towards a leadership role.

Take, as evidence, these two leadership success stories built on a foundation of self-compassion.

Jerry Colonna – The Executive Coach Who Listens Inward

A former venture capitalist turned leadership coach, Jerry Colonna works with some of the world's highest-performing CEOs.

His signature approach is radical self-inquiry. It's the practice of turning inward with honesty and compassion.

Colonna teaches that without self-compassion, even the smartest leaders become brittle. Defensive. Fearful. But with it, they become adaptable, grounded, and truly present.

Janice Marturano – The Corporate VP Who Chose Stillness

Janice Marturano, a former vice president at General Mills, found herself navigating immense pressure during a corporate merger. At the same time, she was grieving the loss of both parents. Her response wasn’t to push harder. It was to slow down.

She attended a mindfulness retreat, where she began to learn what it meant to meet herself with care. That experience led her to found the Institute for Mindful Leadership, bringing compassionate awareness into the corporate world.

So What Does This Look Like for the Rest of Us?

You don’t need to be a CEO or a meditation teacher to practice self-compassion. You just need to start noticing how you speak to yourself when things get tough.

It might look like:

• Practicing being present with the critic and getting curious instead of being avoidant

• Taking a breath before launching into self-blame

• Saying, “That makes sense,” instead of, “What’s wrong with me?”

• Allowing yourself to rest without having to earn it

• Letting something be imperfect and still be enough.

It might look like writing a piece that’s not polished, not perfect, and hitting “publish” anyway. Trusting that your goodness will come through brighter and stronger than any potential flaws.

The Courage to Stay With Yourself

Kristin Neff says that “self-compassion is the foundation of courage.” I’ve found that to be true. Without it, I would’ve walked away from this page long before it reached your eyes.

Self-compassion gives us the stability to stay. Stay in the process. Stay with the discomfort. Stay with our goals long enough to see them through.

It gives us the strength to stay with ourselves amidst any storm—even when our impulse is to abandon ship.

To me, that's the most courageous thing of all.

As I was working on Part II of the Inner Critic’s Origin Story series, there was no way to avoid reflecting on my parenting successes and failures.

In my heart, I know that I’m an outstanding parent. I am doing my best to help raise healthy, happy, and securely attached kids.

But doing that hasn’t been easy. It’s involved a lot of deep, inner work to overcome my own traumas and attachment injuries. I made MANY mistakes along the way and continue to mess up on the regular.

As I wrote about how kids sponge up the emotional tone of their environment, take on everything as their fault, and use that to shape their sense of self, I couldn’t help but cringe.

I inherited my father’s volatility. His habit of yelling when he got dysregulated. His anxiety.

When I had kids of my own, it started to come out of me. It was as if I became a different person. It was scary and I didn’t like it.

I judged myself endlessly and harshly each time I inflicted it on my kids. This wasn’t the kind of parent I wanted to be.

The Unspoken Weight of Parenthood

Parenting is often described as some of the most meaningful work we’ll ever do. But for many, it’s also the most exhausting, confusing, and emotionally charged.

What most people don’t know when they have kids is that raising children is only one part of the game. They may also have to raise themselves in the process.

Parenting brings us face-to-face with our dysregulated nervous systems. Our relational wounds. Our unmet needs. And often, with a fierce and persistent inner critic that whispers (or sometimes shouts) You’re doing it wrong!

The Myth of the Perfect Parent

The dominant culture sells an impossible picture of parenthood. Ever-present. Always patient. Screen-free. Snack ready. Emotionally fluent.

We’re led to believe that if we read the right books, follow the right experts, and buy the right stuff, we’ll raise healthy, happy, securely attached kids.

If that’s not working out, the unspoken message is. It’s our fault. We’re failing.

But, we can’t self-criticize our way into being more loving parents. That strategy collapses under the weight of real human experience.

The Inner Critic in the Parenting Role

If there’s anything that can make our inner critic get stronger, it’s parenting.

It says things like:

• “You’re too impatient.”

• “You just did what your mother/father used to do.

• “You should know better.”

If your inner critic is strong, it might even say you're worthless for yelling at your kid because they spilled spaghetti all over the white rug as you’re frantically trying to get out the door for soccer practice.

This happens because many of us are parenting from our own places that were never fully or properly parented. Survival strategies we developed in childhood—like people-pleasing, hypervigilance, or suppressed emotions—shaped our nervous systems.

In stressful life moments, the critic rushes in to protect us. To ensure we don’t mess up the love we have. So we don’t get rejected and kicked out of the group.

But as with all survival strategies, what once helped us cope may be hurting us and our kids in the present.

In a job as tough as parenting. Amidst a society that demands too much. Perhaps the most radical act we can undertake is to offer ourselves compassion as parents.

What Self-Compassionate Parenting Looks Like

Contrary to popular belief, self-compassion isn’t indulgence.

It’s not saying, “It’s fine that I yelled.” It’s saying, “That was hard. I lost my cool. And I’m still worthy of love.”

It makes room for repair. For softness. For caring for the scared part of us that still believes we’re only lovable if we get it all right.

Here are some examples of self-compassionate parenting:

• Taking a breath before reacting, and saying inwardly: “This is hard, for both of us.”

• Modeling humility by apologizing to your child when you mess up.

• Talking to yourself like you would a good friend: “You’re tired. You’re trying your best. That moment doesn’t define you.”

Breaking the Inheritance of Shame

Every generation hands down something to the next: habits, beliefs, emotional patterns. But, if we’re lucky, we get to decide what we pass on.

Practicing self-compassion as a parent isn’t just for you. It’s for your children, too. Because how you treat yourself becomes part of their emotional blueprint.

When they see you honour your limits. When you take responsibility with grace. Or soften towards yourself in hard moments. They learn how to do the same.

A Closing Note from an Imperfect Parent

It took me many years of therapy and doing the deep somatic work of reprogramming my nervous system to curb the habit of yelling at my kids.

That work also included a lot of self-compassion. The cumulative shame I lived with from all the years of mistakes was a huge weight on my shoulders.

I had to own that I was acting out an old nervous system imprint. I was reenacting a pattern that wasn’t mine to begin with. It wasn’t my fault. And I was trying my best to be a good parent in any given moment.

And, when life gets stressful, I still yell sometimes. I still don’t like it. I still regret it afterwards.

But now, I can meet myself with compassion in the present moment. “This is hard right now.” “I’m doing my best.” “I can reset and start over.” I can deeply feel that self-compassion in my body. It makes everything easier.

It also helps keep the shame from accumulating. But most importantly, it lets me bounce back quicker, and I can return to being the loving, responsive parent I know I really am.

In Part I, we explored how shame evolved to protect us. In Part II, how childhood shaped the critic’s voice.

Now, in Part III, we ask: how does it show up in adulthood, and what can we do about it?

Most of us try to silence the inner critic. But what if we didn’t try to fight it? What if we tried to understand it?

Speaking in groups has always been hard for me.

Sometimes it was a work meeting with an awkward moment. Or a presentation where I fumbled an answer. I’d replay the event over and over like a bad highlight reel—obsessing about what I said and how I came across.

Sometimes I lost sleep. I’d walk around in a bad mood, snapping at my family. Sometimes it even affected my focus at work. I cringe a little now at how much energy I spent navigating those states.

But beneath that emotional spiral was a physical reality. My nervous system had gone into threat mode. To my brain, it wasn’t just a meeting or a question. It was a moment of potential rejection.

The inner critic stepped in afterwards to protect me by trying to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Its number one goal is to preserve my sense of belonging. My safety.

The Inner Critic Is Trying to Help

No one wakes up hoping to be mean to themselves. But the inner critic doesn’t see it as cruelty. It sees self-judgement as useful.

It says things like: “That was embarrassing. Don’t do that again.” “You need to fix this before anyone notices.” “Why can’t you get it right?”

It’s harsh. But beneath the harshness is fear. Fear of rejection. Of failure. Of not being good enough.

The critic's job is to protect you from pain. But it tends to use the wrong tools. It reaches for a sledgehammer when a paintbrush would do.

Its logic is simple: If I judge myself first, no one else can hurt me worse.

A Different Approach: Relating to the Critic with Compassion

The critic’s job is exhausting.

If it believed you could be safe without its vigilance, it would gladly lay down its torch and rest.

Helping it get to a place of rest is long-term work that starts with knowing the critic intimately and offering it compassion.

But in the short term, you can start learning to change how you relate to it. The goal isn’t to silence the critic or exile it—it’s to stop letting it run the show.

Here are a few ways to start:

1. Practice noticing when the critic shows up. Pay gentle attention to the moment it arises. What is it saying? What emotions are present? Where do you feel it in your body? Sometimes, the act of naming it starts to shift the relationship.

2. Allow the experience without pushing or clinging.

Instead of arguing with the critic or surrendering to it, try letting it be there without resistance.

Breathe. Notice the urge to fix or flee, and gently stay with the feeling. Let it come and go like a wave.

(Mindfulness practice can help us observe inner experience with kindness and without attachment.)

3. Respond like you would to a friend in distress. If someone you loved were feeling this way, what would you say? What tone would you use? What gesture would you offer?

Now, try offering the same care to yourself. You don’t need to fully believe it yet. Just practice turning toward yourself with kindness in this difficult moment. See what happens inside.

Compassion Doesn’t Mean Agreement

To be clear, compassion isn’t the same as agreement. It’s not saying, “You’re right. I’m terrible.”

It’s saying: “I see you’re scared right now. It’s okay to feel this. But I’m no longer going to punish myself to feel safe. I’m going to meet you with kindness.”

When we meet shame with curiosity, and fear with care—even for just a moment—we start unlearning the belief that harshness is the only growth path.

Self-compassion isn’t weakness. It’s nervous system regulation. It’s healing. It’s leadership.

Final Thoughts

The inner critic won’t vanish overnight. It’s been with you a long time. It knows its role well.

But every time you meet it with understanding instead of attack, you change the script.

And over time, the critic can stop shouting so loudly. Eventually, it becomes a whisper.

Because when safety is no longer tied to self-rejection, that part of you finally gets to rest.

In Part I, we explored how shame evolved as a survival strategy. In Part II, we look at how the inner critic takes shape in childhood as the brain’s way of making sense of difficult early experiences. By adulthood, many of us carry an inner voice that critiques, doubts, and holds us back.

My father was an unpredictable man.

Sometimes he’d show up in good spirits, laughing and joking. Other times, he’d come home in a foul mood, filled with anger and volatility.

The unpredictability was tough, because I never knew which parent I’d get. But the bad moods were harder because, no matter the cause of his funk, I’d feel worried it was me.

As an extremely sensitive kid, I was like a tension thermometer. I'd be unconsciously scanning his face, adjusting my behaviour to try and meet his needs in an attempt to quell the yelling.

Looking back, it was exhausting. But it worked. It helped me get through those times.

But that kind of hypervigilance didn’t turn off just because I grew up. It turned into a shame-based internal monitoring system that fuelled self-judgement and inner criticism.

The Developing Brain and the Need for Connection

In early childhood, our brains are proverbial sponges that soak in everything. They’re also 100 percent dependent on caregivers for survival and regulation.

We continue to depend on our caregivers for emotional and nervous system regulation to some extent until our brains fully mature at around 30 years old.

From birth, humans are wired to seek connection. Along with food and shelter, we rely on caregivers for emotional safety. We’re designed to attune closely to their verbal and non-verbal communications. Every smile, frown, hug, or sigh is a relational language that we learn to interpret.

The challenge is that young children don’t have the cognitive tools to make meaning from what they observe. So, when a parent is preoccupied, angry, or distant, a child doesn’t think, “Dad is stressed from work.” They resort to “Something is wrong with me.”

While far from true, this instinct to self-blame is the child’s attempt to stay in connection. Believing that the caregiver is good and they are the problem is safer than the alternative—being alone in a chaotic world.

Mirror Neurons, Absorption, and Identity

Mirror neurons are cells in the human brain that let us empathize and learn by imitation. They’re particularly active in childhood, when they help us absorb the emotional tone of our environment and shape our sense of self.

This means that, over time, children internalize what adults say, but more importantly, how they say it. The tone of a parent’s voice is what lands first with kids, not just the words they use.

So, a parent’s chronic disappointment can become a child’s inner shame. A teacher’s irritation might show up later as harsh self-talk. A caregiver’s unspoken anxiety can turn into our own.

Even the most well-intentioned parents can contribute to this. Saying things like "Don't do that," "Be a good girl," or "You're too sensitive," to try and correct unwanted behaviours is common. Kids' brains tend to take statements like these and write scripts for self-judgement. That is, unless they're balanced with attuned reassurance.

(Stressed parents, take note: I've made my share of these kinds of mistakes with my kids. There is no perfection in parenting. It's about realizing when we messed up and doing the repair work—with our kids and ourselves. Parents need self-compassion too!)

How Shame Becomes a Self-State

In a perfect world, carers meet kids' painful emotional experiences with comfort, reflection, or understanding.

Reactions like criticism, dismissal, or silence just don’t compute for kids. These experiences are so confusing that they can’t be integrated as resolved memories. So they get stored as unfinished business and stick around like emotional residue.

In these moments, children develop “self-states,” or patterns of feeling and behaviour tied to specific situations. Some of these states are warm and connected. Those forged from criticism or fear can feel anxious, small, or invisible.

Without support, the anxious self-states start to dominate. Over time, they blend into the self-concept and shape how we see ourselves and define our self-worth.

Misattribution and Meaning-Making

One of the most heartbreaking facts of childhood development is this: children assume everything is their fault.

When a parent is emotionally unavailable, the child doesn’t ask, “Why is my caregiver struggling?” They ask, “What did I do wrong?”

Again, this is a survival strategy. Blaming ourselves helps preserve the attachment to those we depend on and gives us the illusion of control.

But as we grow up, that narrative sticks. The inner critic becomes the voice of that misinterpreted past.

To be clear, understanding how the inner critic develops isn’t about blaming parents or ourselves. It’s about naming how human and normal it is to internalize what we couldn’t understand.

When we look back with curiosity instead of judgment, we can create the conditions for something new—self-compassion.

Re-writing the script with self-compassion

That old voice. The one that tells me to tread carefully, watch my tone, or brace for someone’s mood. It still shows up sometimes.

But through practicing self-compassion, I can meet it with curiosity. I can see clearly that this is an old, learned pattern, not a personal flaw.

The instinct to self-blame is still there. But I know I don’t have to believe it. I can see myself as a scared, confused kid who didn’t get what he needed. And I have the tools to offer it to myself in the present moment.

Next: How to Recognize—and Soothe the Inner Critic in the Present Moment

In Part III, we’ll explore how to recognize when the inner critic shows up in adulthood. And how to begin relating to it differently—with boundaries, curiosity, and care.