The Most Important Practice to Integrate Healing

Are you an absent self-parent? Are you abandoning yourself? Are you an orphan when it comes to self-parenting? In this video we're going to talk about the fundamental importance of self-parenting and how practicing self-parenting can transform your life. You know there's a lot of different tools we can use when we're healing and we're working on ourselves. We can do meditation, we can do grounding exercises, we can do journaling, talk therapy. There's so many different things we can try. Inquiry, things like this. But when it comes to sort of the practical aspect of well how do I sort of take this healing or these insights I'm getting and then apply it to my life? How do I start living this? This is what I think self-parenting is about. Self-parenting is so important because it's about being attuned to yourself. Which is really one of the things so many of us didn't really get in childhood was to have an adult nearby who was keenly attuned to our needs. To be not just about basic survival needs but attuned to the inner life of the child. Quite often there's an indifference about that. So therefore we sort of get the attitude or the philosophy of the inner world is kind of irrelevant. So what we train ourselves to do in this thing called self-parenting is to become attuned to the inner world. And really I don't mean anything mysterious by that at all. I mean basically what are your needs? What do you need? What do you want emotionally? What are your emotional needs? Now the reason we need attunement to be paying attention to that is that your needs are not really these one-time deal thing where you meet them and you're done. And even the method by which you meet them or the way you meet them is not here's the way I do it and that's that. Knowing what the needs are because the needs can change and how to meet them is something that requires ongoing attention or attunement. And that requires time you know. It's a big big investment. So I'm definitely I'm advocating for self-parenting here to become more self-attuned. But I'm not going to say it's easy. It requires work. It requires time. It's not difficult but it does require a real commitment to it. It's like I'm going to start sitting down some reflective time to myself to really sit with what my needs are. Where are my disappointments? Okay there's a disappointment that's reflecting an unmet need I have. Well how can I change my approach? How can I structure my lifestyle so that I am beginning to get those needs met? And you know the reason we have such kind of resistance to doing that is exactly what I just mentioned before. It's the daily disappointments of life. Unmet needs are painful and they can feel like small disappointments. Sometimes people would say it's like a death by a thousand cuts. Just life is full of all these little disappointments. Sometimes life can be full of things like distractions or things get complicated and therefore that gets in the way of meeting your needs. But you know at the end of the day when you come home or at any point in your day whenever you would would tend to do reflection it's like do I really want to sit down and really pay attention to the disappointment that I have that I've been carrying for the last week, month? Well maybe it's just a little and hopefully things will get better by themselves. But things probably aren't going to get better by themselves. Things absolutely can get better through this attunement and the thing about it is you will find solutions if you go in and sit and be reflective and pay attention to your emotional needs and ask questions like how can I do better meeting this need for myself? How can I be more compassionate to myself? How can I prioritize myself? How can I have better boundaries with my own personal productivity maybe and people in my life? These are the type of things we start to question and ask when we're doing this self parenting. So it is possible and it does work but you will have to overcome that okay look I'm going to have to sit down with this this negative feeling that I have to begin with and that's the natural resistance that is always there with this self parenting. Self parenting is something that is a lifelong process. Attunement isn't a one-time thing. Attunement is an ongoing practice. It never ends. It never ends. As long as you have emotional needs there will be a need for this attunement and you'll have emotional needs only as long as you're alive. So it really is a lifelong thing but it can be a joyous thing and the beauty of it is also that there's this accumulative sort of compound interest effect through the practice of ongoing attunement or self parenting. You get little insights. That little insight that you get about oh that's something I could give myself or there's a boundary I could put in place that's something I could do a little bit differently. Those little tweaks you know made in the present a few months from now can have this huge huge impact on your life and you know you do this as a daily habit and you're getting lots of these little insights and you're tweaking things and you're beginning to see change take place. I want to finish this video today with this idea and it's you know the biggest block to self-attunement and self-parenting. People aren't usually aware that they're carrying it but it's this belief and the belief is this it's a belief that I'm not really worth the time. Now people will tell themselves all sorts of things like oh I'm too busy or something came up which is not true. Like I'm talking about a practice that might take 15 minutes a day or something you know regularly regularly attuning to ourselves but really what's happening and there's that resistance to it yeah there's that disappointment and there's those negative feelings but there's also this belief running in the background I'm not really worth the effort to sit down and attune to. So start to realize that's if you're having that resistance to it at all that belief is probably there and it's not true. It's just a lie that you interjected somewhere in your in your past history. You can start to say look okay it's probably there and sit with some inquiry in that question it and look at the precise opposite I am absolutely worth the time to attune to and this will work this will work you know it it can't but work because you will gain insights through paying attention focused attention to yourself. It's that cliche that the the answers are within you know seek within yourself seek not without outside yourself and you know some of those cliches are true and this one is very true. So guys I'm going to leave it there but just a final sort of statement about the importance of this. I would really really encourage you to set up a practice if you're doing meditation or you're doing various different things for yourself keep doing those but just incorporate this sitting and reflecting on what your needs are and you'll find that as you do it regularly and and consistently you'll get these these little insights you'll almost get to the point where if you miss a day of doing this you're thinking kind of wonder what insight I could have picked up there today that would have changed my life so see every day as an opportunity to get deeper insights about yourself guys I hope that's useful and as always thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye for now