EPISODE 39: [MINDFULNESS] PEOPLE WERE PUT IN YOUR LIFE FOR A REASON
SHOW NOTES
Everything is an act of love or a call for love. Today’s mindfulness practice is designed to help you heal your relationships. It could be the relationship that you have with your parents, the ones who set the model of what a relationship you thought had to look like. Or, maybe it’s with a partner, someone that you either are currently with, or you are no longer with. Or, even a friendship or a colleague. Sometimes having these interpersonal relationships can be very challenging, especially if we've not learned how to communicate effectively what it is that we're feeling, what it is that our needs are in order to get those needs met, and then how to also effectively listen. How can you learn to fully embrace what it is that you want and need? How can you heal your relationships? Listen to today’s mindfulness practice today to explore the answers to those questions.
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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.
For those of you keeping track, I am still getting over this cold that I caught in the sequoias when I went camping with my daughter a couple of weekends ago. So it has been lingering, hence the way that my voice sounds over the last few recordings, I am actually going to go get a COVID test tomorrow. I'm doing a photo shoot in LA this weekend, which is going to be super fun, turning it into a whole weekend.
And in order to participate, I will need to produce negative COVID results. So there's that. I hope that you've gotten a lot out of this week. I know that when I was talking to Christopher Vo, who is the licensed marriage and family therapist that I interviewed on Wednesday, I walked away with a lot of great insights.
I love being able to feature him as a voice and this whole month really featuring more Asian American male voices. I think that they're a highly underrepresented audience. And, you know, to encourage all of us, to express how we feel to be vulnerable, to be strong and brave in being in living authentically.
I think that Christopher does such a great job of expressing how to do that in relationships and how to do that for ourselves. If you haven't listened to the interview, then I highly encourage you to go check out episode 38. Also on Monday's episode, episode 37, in which I talk about my own relationship and realizing that I needed to get divorced.
There are definitely things I didn't share. In fact, I actually drafted up a whole version of that episode and I read it to a friend of mine. Who's also a mom and she happens to be a lawyer. And I just wanted her to give me some perspective as to whether or not to share some of these inner most details, because once it's out there, it's out there, it's something that I learned as a writer way back when that when you publish on the internet, there's really no way to take it back.
So while we try to write and show up and be as conscious as possible with all the wisdom and the insights that we have in this moment here right now, Fully understanding that in the future, we will be a different iteration of who we are now and are we going to be okay with whatever we have out there?
So I really loved the fact that she helped to advocate for, you know, my daughter's privacy because she is part of my life. But in my telling my story, I'm also telling parts of her story and whether or not. She would want to have that out there as she grew up and became an adult or just, you know, the inner workings of my marriage.
So if those are some of the things that you are curious about and you want to learn more about, then I highly encourage you to go to the Patrion page and support this podcast. And then you'll have access to ask me anything sessions. So if there's something in all of these episodes that you've really wanted to ask more about, which as I've gotten feedback from different listeners, that is absolutely something that's happened is people have told me, wait, I need to learn more about this.
I need to know more about this. I have a question about this. So if that's you and you want to ask those questions to me in real time, then go check out patrion.com forward slash fuck saving face. That's fuck without the “u,” and you will have an opportunity to do that. For today's mindfulness practice. I wanted to offer something that you could use when you are feeling very challenged in the relationships that you're in, and these can be any sort of relationship.
So it could be the relationship that you have with your parents. You know, maybe they were the ones who set the model of what a relationship you thought had to look like. Or maybe it is with a partner, someone that you either are currently with, or you are no longer with, or even a friendship or a colleague.
Maybe having these interpersonal relationships can be very challenging and it can be especially. So if we've not learned how to communicate effectively, what it is that we're feeling, what it is that our needs are in order to get those needs met and then how to also effectively listen. So to hear when other people are communicating to us, because remember what Christopher said is that we all have these love languages.
And we are usually expressing in the way that we would like to be received in the way that we would like to receive that love. But that's not the way that it works in all of the different relationships. And within each one of the five love languages, there are different expressions of that. So how can you learn to fully embrace what it is that you want and need?
And then also honor and respect somebody else's needs and wants or whatever that is. This actually came up recently in a conversation that I had with my daughter, where she's talking to me about a school friend and how this friend at school really wants to be her best friend. And while my daughter really enjoys spending time with this person, she said, she felt like a lot of pressure where she felt that she couldn't really do other things that this friend really wanted her to pay attention to her first and foremost and only.
And so my daughter and I talked about that and we talked about. You know, it's not your job to have to manage other people's feelings. Everybody can have their own feelings and everybody's responsible for them. So it's not her job to help hold all of that. Remember she's six. But it is her responsibility to make sure that she's not purposely out there hurting someone else's feelings, but that in a healthy friendship, she can express and convey what it is that she feels wants and needs in, you know, very respectful, gentle approaches, especially knowing that she called her friend delicate in being able to handle things.
So she wanted to really not her, her friend's feelings. And so it's really interesting that at the age of six, she's already learning how to navigate this. And so I'm hoping that through my experiences, and then also just holding space for her to grow into her own learnings, that she has the opportunity to start to navigate these social emotional dynamics.
Ideally for me, I'm hoping that I set her up differently than the way that I was set up. But again, we only approach it with the wisdom that we have here and now, and then as we grow and evolve, we'll have more wisdom. So we're all just doing the best that we can. And I hope that today's mindfulness practice gives you an opportunity to understand that when I was learning yoga, I realized that everyone is showing up with this asking for love.
And we're either doing it in a refined, you know, mature kind of way. Or we're not. And so everything is either an act of love or a call for love. So if we can remember that even in the most challenging situations, even if people say the wrong things to you or hurt your feelings, if we can kind of take a step back and have that bigger overarching view, that everything is either an act of love or a call for love.
So asking for help. Then perhaps we can approach everything with a bit more compassion and a bit more empathy. I'm not saying you allow people to walk all over you. I definitely have had to learn how to have healthy boundaries and I'm still learning how to do that. And sometimes having a healthy boundary is saying no that's enough or, you know, something that I remember reading maybe a decade and a half ago, is that a bully when they show up, they're actually hoping that someone will stop them, that someone will challenge them so that they can stop engaging in this behavior that they somewhere in themselves know is wrong.
That the way that they're acting out is not aligned to the greatest good. And this practice of what I'm going to share with you today really helped me in the midst of just beginning to embark on the official movement forward of my divorce when we were still living in Taiwan. It was an opportunity for me to take all of the hurt that I felt all of the anger, although the frustration and transmute it in a way so that I could manage it because regardless of whatever's happening around us, I can't control any of those external circumstances, but I can control my feelings and how I choose to respond.
So I hope this practice today will offer that to you, whatever it is that you're going through. Okay. So wherever you are, see if you can find a space to be still, and you may have seen in yoga magazines, people sitting there with their legs crossed and their fingers and mudras resting on their laps, but you don't need to do that.
And you can just find, whatever's going to encourage you to have the most spaciousness for observation and reflection and mindfulness. So wherever you are, see if you can start to relax the muscles in your face and in your body, and you might even want to do a scan from the top of your head all the way down to your toes.
A lot of times we may not even be realizing that we're holding tension in our bodies and we're holding on. Sometimes that holding on is because we want to feel like we're in control. Sometimes the feeling on is because we're afraid to let go sometimes it's because we're not sure what's going to happen.
And the unknown can be really scary. So there's this anticipation of the other shoe dropping
wherever you are. Let's see if you can start to connect to your breath and with every inhale, bringing in new life force energy. And with every exhale, just softening a little bit more softening your edges,
softening the grip metaphorically, and literally, can you find more ease in your being.
Continue to connect to your breath. And if your eyes are not yet closed and it feels safe to do so, then I encourage you to close your eyes. Just let your lids rest, bring the outward, seeing inward.
so I believe that life is an upward moving spiral and we're moving to greater wisdom, greater self-mastery. And because it's a spiral, then there may be certain life events or circumstances or experiences that seem to repeat themselves. They feel very familiar. There are these lessons that we're destined to learn, but because it's a spiral, it's not quite the same as before.
So even if you find yourself treading the same path you're learning and you're growing and you're taking that previously acquired wisdom and applying it to this current situation that may again, feel similar. But so long as we keep walking away with new insights. So long as we find what that golden nugget is that we are meant to learn, then the experience continues to change until perhaps we've learned the lesson and we don't need to cross this path anymore.
So take a moment and breathe and reflect. If there is an experience like that in your life right now. And because this whole week has been about relationships, perhaps this is a relationship dynamic that seems very familiar to you. So whether that's in an intimate partnership in your dating life, in the relationship with your parents or with your children or your relationship with yourself first and foremost, what is that for you?
If anything feels really heavy and take a big breath in and say it out, you can use your breath as a tool to bring you back to center, bring you back to a sense of safety and security to find your footing and your grounding.
So when I was practicing yoga and studying Mary spiritual texts, I remember coming across this idea that we are all star family and within our families, we have these constellations and that the people that we encounter and experience our opportunities to learn and grow. And that before we ever arrived on this planet, that we had made an agreement with each other as souls that we would show up with each other in the ways that we do in the roles that we play as opportunities to continue to elevate us, to continue to encourage growth, to continue to advance ourselves as souls.
So they, soul contracts were made before we ever arrived. And that learning was very helpful for me because I used to have so many challenges with my parents wondering why they showed up the way that they did wondering why they invoked different experiences of trauma or abuse. And knowing that I didn't want to demonize them.
Then in fact, I truly believe that my parents were trying the best that they could with the tools that they had and also with the own journeys that they had to endure and experience with their parents and then their parents before them.
So thinking that we made these agreements before we arrived, that they would show up and be my parents to help create me into the person that I needed to be the strong, resilient, intelligent, creative soul, who can really read people who is different and unique. But in order to celebrate that really had to push through different templates of what was set forth for me, that was acceptable.
And wasn't to learn how to communicate in ways that I can be heard and that I can hear others, all of that in order for that to happen, they had to show up in the ways that they did. And it lent a lot of compassion because they sign up for pretty hard tasks. They sign up to go through their own variations of depression, mental health challenges, relationship, dynamics, successes, and failures.
And for me, looking at them, they sign up for pretty hard arduous rules to show up as the parents that I needed to have to become the person that I am now. If they had shown up differently, would I be the same person now? Probably not. Would I had an easier experience growing up? Probably so, but the fact that we may be so contracts allow me to have a bit more freedom, understanding, compassion, and empathy for them.
And for me that I chose this path as well that I chose to have. The experiences that I did growing up to mold me into the person that I am.
And then when it came to my marriage, I distinctly remember standing on the sidewalk in baito and having this awareness of the fact that my ex-husband my then husband signed up with me as a sole contract to bring our daughter into this world. And also to show up in the ways that he did to challenge me, to show me the areas where I needed to grow, to show me how to find my voice and my power.
And then in my estimation, in my eyes, I don't believe he signed up for a very easy experience as well.
So then I had more compassion and empathy. That that is the role that we agreed to before arriving here and what a sacrifice that was for him and for my parents to offer me the gifts of being that I have. Now,
if this storyline works for you, then I encourage you to try it on. If it doesn't work for you, that's perfectly. Okay. You can let it on go and just continue coming back to your breath, letting your breath thread, a deeper awareness, a nonjudgmental space for whatever it is that you're going through. Again, in the future, I may have a different perspective.
But from what I learned when I was becoming a yoga teacher from this understanding of an upward moving spiral and the family constellations that we are a part of this storyline worked for me at the time that I needed it the most. Does it mean that I still don't experience challenges? No. I still experience them.
I'm imperfect and I'm learning.
And I think as long as there is that curiosity and willingness there, then there will always be opportunities to pivot to make right. What went wrong to make, uh, men reconciliations or full stops so that we have the freedom to keep moving forward with the lives that we were meant to create. For ourselves in the healthiest way possible mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually.
And for all of those who we love
So when you're ready, if there's anything else that your higher self, your soul, your infinite self wants to communicate with you take a few moments before the close of practice today to hear that insight. Voice
silence is what you need. Then just continue to come back to your breath, threading your practice with your inhalation and your exhalation.
and before we close today's practice, just taking a moment to bring hands to heart center and thank yourself for showing up in all the ways that you do. I've said it before, but you have made it through every single one of the hardest moments of your life up until now. And you have also created so many opportunities to find joy, to find peace, to find safety.
Every moment is an opportunity to write a new story.
for today. If it feels comfortable, perhaps give yourself an opportunity to do the opposite of what you might normally do to change up the patterns and behaviors and thoughts by doing something slightly different, very different, and see how that feels. See how it feels to get out of the repetition of what, you know, leaning a little bit more into the unknown.
When you're ready, take one more big, deep breath in
inside all out.
Two more rounds of breath in say it out.
One more deep breath in and deep breath out.
And gently float your eyes open coming back into this room, back into this moment. I wish you a beautiful weekend and I will see you next week for more stories.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you liked what you heard and know someone in your life who might also benefit from hearing this episode, please feel free to share it with them. Also, if you'd like to support our show, you can make a one-time donation fcksavingface.com. Or, you can make a recurring donation at patreon.com/fcksavingface. That's “fck” without the “u.” Subscribe today to stay tuned for all future episodes.
