EPISODE 33: [MINDFULNESS] EMBRACE WHAT MAKES YOU SPECIAL & DIFFERENT
SHOW NOTES
We’re all special in our own ways, but it's a matter of how we integrate our quirks and differences into our lives – regardless of what anyone else thinks – that can impact our levels of contentment and satisfaction. If you're struggling with insecurities or something you're feeling super self-conscious about, a trait of yours you haven't been able to get over, here's a mindfulness practice to help you embrace the idea that you are "perfectly imperfect."
Let's learn to love ourselves a little more.
Listen to Victoria Jane’s interview about Human Design
Listen to Anna Yen’s interview about shame around having a special needs child
My upcoming Simon & Schuster book about Tibetan Rites
Pam Grout’s Thank & Grow Rich book
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei, and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Like may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today.
I hope that wherever you are in the world, as you're listening to this episode of the podcast, that you are well, you are safe, you are taking good care of yourself and that you are receiving love.
Today's mindfulness episode is inspired by this week's theme of removing guilt and shame, especially when it comes to being able to embrace differences, to really celebrate them and to start navigating the difference between extrinsic external motivators and influences. And intrinsic motivators. So whatever we are driven and personally programmed to pursue, if you haven't checked out the human design episode with Victoria, Jane, I highly encourage you to listen to it.
It's a wonderful way to start learning how you can live more in the design of how you personally were built. You uniquely you, and to live in less hustle and more flow. If you want to listen to it. It's episode 26. This episode is also inspired by the fact that in April of this last year, I started at a radical gratitude WhatsApp group.
So I really wanted to be in that frequency of joy and blessings and finding the good, even when everything around us seemed to be super challenging. So I added a bunch of my friends to a WhatsApp group, and then I would text everyone every day. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you'll probably recognize that I'm a super nerd who loves to learn.
I'm constantly a sensory seeker wanting to explore and dive into new things. So because of that, I would share every day, an insight, a quote, a reflection, and then I would share my gratitudes and encourage everybody to do the same. If you listened to this week's interview with Anna Yen, you would have heard how challenging it was to make a decision to move forward with giving birth to her second daughter who has special needs and has down syndrome.
When everyone around her, including the medical practitioner she was seeing in Taiwan were telling her, it's not a great idea to have this baby. You've got to think of the greater good. So sometimes it can be really challenging in the midst of all that to find the good things. I recently completed a manuscript about Tibetan rights with Simon and Schuster.
And because of that, I studied a lot about Tibetan Buddhism. So one of the things that causes us a lot of grief in our lives is that we sometimes think things should look a certain way. And when we experience something differently or it doesn't meet our expectations, that contrast between what we wanted or what we expected and what we're actually going through is where a lot of the pain and the suffering comes in.
So I'll share with you a little clip of what I texted to the radical gratitude group in April of 2020. Doesn't Instagram. Just make you feel like if your life doesn't look like it belongs in one of those squares or nine photo grids, then something's wrong. It's not, you probably have spirits or angels around you right now who are looking after you, but you can't see them because you've been trained.
Like we all have to look with our five senses instead of our five D senses. In the book think and grow rich by Pam grout. She shares a story about Lorna Byrne. Who's a mystic and Lorna says miracles happen all the time. People just fail to notice them. And I'll read to you from the screenshots that I sent to the group from the book, think and grow rich by Pam grout about Lorna Byrne about this mystic, because it's a lot about seeing things differently and really embracing our differences and the things that people might have thought were a problem or a challenge either for someone else or for you could actually be your greatest blessing.
Lorna burns stared at walls. Played with imaginary friends acted different than other kids. Her family was told she was retarded by the time she was 14, she was pulled out of school. She was diagnosed dyslexic. So her dirt, poor Irish family saw no reason to continue buying school books and clothes for their quote unquote retarded daughter.
As it turns out, Lorna Byrne was actually a lot smarter than the rest of us. She sees things. The rest of us, miss miraculous things, beautiful things. It wasn't walls. She was staring at. She was listening to angels who forbade her from revealing their presence. Not yet. They said her parents, the angels clearly instructed would commit her to an institution.
If she told them the angels had other plans for her life to this day, she sees these beings. As clearly as we see our children texting their classmates on cell phones, there are my teachers and friends. She says. One of her many quote unquote imaginary friends was her brother, Christopher who had died before Lorna was even born.
It wasn't until she was 15 that she found out that the rest of her family caught up in the limited physical plane believed Christopher had left the planet when he was 10 weeks old, their strict adherence to conventional reality precluded their, seeing Christopher, the angels, and many things that to Lorna are an everyday experience.
Lauren is he spirals of light, sparkly, colors, and waves of energy that the rest of us miss, because we've been trained to block out all atypical information. She often sees dark energy. For example, in people experiencing illness in their bodies, the chapter goes on to describe all of these mystical things that had happened in her life and that these angels, which is the language that she used because she was raised Catholic and it was aligned to her religious beliefs would continually show her all of these experiences that kept coming true.
And then she goes on to say that at last count, this diminutive soft-spoken uneducated Irish woman has written four books. She's gone on to appear on BBC and the economist. And at gatherings all over the world, the author met her in London at a hay house conference. And Pam grout continues and closes the chapter by saying, even though I write about miracles and magic, I tend to scratch my head when people claim to hang out 24 seven with angels.
But Lorna is the real deal. I tell you Lorena's story, not to convince you to seek out an angel reading, but so you'll start to unravel your own strict beliefs about what is, and isn't possible. Lorena says all babies see angels and spirits, but by the time they learn to speak their first words they have learned what is quote unquote real and what is not.
It is only when we begin to conform to the strict paradigms of our culture that we lose touch with the magical world that surrounds us. If you listen to Monday and Wednesdays episodes and you'll have heard how much magic there is in really being around people who the general population might see as different.
But the truth is we're all a little bit different. We all have quirks and nuances that define us or. Are our tendencies and other people might not understand that, but they can be both a blessing and a curse depending on how we view it. So the remainder of today's episode is going to be a breathwork practice in learning to accept those differences of us and everyone else around us.
Being a homogenous group might feel safe in the beginning, but it really doesn't give us an opportunity to celebrate all the things that we were put on this planet to bring to life. All of the unique conversations, all of our humor, all of our random habits, just anything that makes us different and colorful and beautiful and bold, even in our vulnerabilities and the things that we might feel insecure about.
So, if you can, wherever you are, let's get comfortable. Maybe this is the first time today that you've given yourself a moment of pause. Maybe you're listening while you're driving or while you're walking. And if you are, feel free to bring this into a moving meditation, but just see if you can bring more presence and awareness to where you are right now.
Your personal space, your physical space, and maybe also checking in with where you are your life. And I taught yoga. I used to say that so often we're praying for things, asking for things, trying to manifest, and then we're just continually hustling and moving forward and just going, going, going. So all of those things that we asked for might not have a chance to catch up with us over constantly running forward.
And being able to take a moment to pause gives those blessings and those requests and opportunity to catch up with us as well as the fact that because we're always looking forward and what's ahead, we sometimes forget that we have been granted the things that we have asked for, and just taking a moment to pause, gives us an opportunity to reflect, to see if that's happened and share gratitude.
If it has. To be thankful to the universe, to source, to spirit, to whatever you define as this higher force and energy around us to show that we are appreciative. And in that frequency, in that joy, allowing more of that goodness to come in. So see if you can connect to your breath and notice where it is in your body.
Notice if you feel it may be stuck in your throat. In your upper chest in your ribs, in your belly, or maybe it's just feeling really stagnant right now. So I invite you to start to deepen your inhalation balanced by your exhalation. I've noticed that for me, even when someone starts talking about the breath, I immediately start to slow down.
I start to feel my inhalations a bit more and feel my exhalations a bit more. And in that time also feels like it starts to slow down. I remember what's important. I remember that stress can be conjured up and it can also be released.
See what happens when you start to connect to your own breath? Let that be a thread that you start weaving into all of the upcoming moments.
And now if you are human, there is probably something in your life or maybe about your personality or even about your physical body that you feel a little bit insecure about. That you may not prefer that may be different. So taking a moment to conjure what that is for some, it will be very easy to figure out what that trait is or whatever it is for you.
And for some, it might take a moment, but we are perfectly imperfect. So we all have something that we grapple with that we work through. What is that for you?
So I want you to imagine that that thing is something you can hold in your hands
and see if you can imagine that you are cupping your hands together and you're placing that trait or whatever it might be for you in the Palm of your hands. And you're holding it gently.
And it's kind of floating and hovering in the Palm of your hands. And then from here, as you continue to weave that breath in and out, you can begin to start to look at it from a different angle. So maybe because it's floating in your hands, you can walk around it in a 360 degree fashion. Or maybe you imagine that it is moving in the Palm of your hand, twirling around.
So you see a different angle. However, it works for you. That gives you an opportunity to create a little bit of distance. And just to see it with a new perspective, a new lens.
And what do you notice here when you just move a little bit to a new view?
Okay. And we've experienced this in our lives, probably when we are in our homes, lying on the ground, looking up at the ceiling, finding a spot. You don't normally see it's always been there, but we just haven't noticed it before. Or you always sit in the same seat and then one day you sit in a different one, same room, same space, different view.
We're doing this without judgment. So there is no right and wrong it's information. It's learning how to be with whatever this is in a new way.
If it feels a little bit heavy, a little bit dense, or even a little stressful refocus on your breath, deepen your inhalation, deepen your exhalation.
What do you notice? What do you have, sir?
Is there potentially a golden thread, a gift, a blessing that maybe you did not notice before, because you were focused on what was wrong rather than a, what was right.
you may have heard before the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi that the imperfections are actually what makes something beautiful. If there is a crack, it is repaired with gold and that gold lining becomes part of the beauty of the piece.
So with this element trait, whatever it is that you've placed in the Palm of your hands, what is that?
Maybe it teaches us to be more compassionate. Maybe it teaches us to be more patient or more kind. Maybe it teaches us that our expectations don't have to be so high or that joy exists in the simplest of things.
Maybe it just reminds us of our shared humanity and how we are connected to everyone else, because we all share the same trait,
whatever it is for you. See, if you can just take a moment for gratitude, which can be really hard if this is something that you've been insecure about for a very long time, that it's felt like a struggle, but can you be ready to be ready to take one step closer to seeing it differently to embracing it more as a blessing than anything else, or just seeing the value that it's offering you?
and if you've moved around, taking a walk around or allowed this object or trait to move around your hands, coming back to where it feels like it's your center,
thanking yourself for showing up for this practice being open, curious.
And then just letting it naturally dissipate taking one more full breath in,
and you can pause here. If you want to continue to follow your own breath for a few more cycles or move into a quiet meditation where you can gently float your eyes open coming back into the space, back into this room. Or if you were moving during this time and just coming back to the present moment,
when you're ready, just prepare to move throughout the rest of your day. Thank you so much for joining me in this mindfulness practice. I hope that you enjoy it. I'm always looking for wonderful feedback. Yes. I'm also open to constructive criticism or suggestions on future topics. So if any of that is something that you want to share, please do email.
Hello@fcksavingface.com again. That's “fck” without the “u.” Have a wonderful day and I will see you next week.
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