The One You Feed - Sonya Renee Taylor on Radical Self Love

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

Sonya Renee Taylor is a former national and international poetry slam champion, author, educator, and activist. She is also the founder of The Body Is Not An Apology, which is a digital media and education company promoting radical self-love and body empowerment as the foundational tool for social justice and global transformation.In this episode, Sonya and Eric discuss radical self-love: what it is, why we struggle to practice it, and the pathways to cultivate it so that we become the highest version of ourselvesBut wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Sonya Renee Taylor and I Discuss Radical Self Love and …Her book, The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self LoveNatural Intelligence says that we come here already wired to become the highest version of ourselvesHow she defines our “body” and how to uncover our issues which are the result of damaging societal messagesHow we can heal our issues with our bodyHow to remove the obstructions that tell us we’re not enough, clearing the way to radical self-loveThe role of inquiry and insight on the path to radical self-loveThat even after profound insights, it can take a while for us to live these harmful conditionings out of our systemThe three “peaces”The metaphor of the acorn and the oak treeThe four pillars of practiceThe collective nature of this journeySonya Renee Taylor Links:Sonya’s WebsiteInstagramFacebookTwitterSkillshare is an online learning community that helps you get better on your creative journey. They have thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Sign up via www.skillshare.com/feed and you’ll get a FREE one-month trial of Skillshare premium membership.Feals: Premium CBD delivered to your doorstep to help you manage stress, anxiety, pain, and sleeplessness. Feals CBD is food-grade and every batch is tested so you know you are getting a truly premium grade product. Get 50% off your first order with free shipping by becoming a member at www.feals.com/wolfIf you enjoyed this conversation with Sonya Renee Taylor, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Perfecting Self Love with Scott StabileSelf Compassion with Kristin NeffSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is this thought I'm having giving me access to peace, power, joy, ease, or pleasure in my life? No. Then why am I invested in thinking it? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other

people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sonia Renee Taylor, a former national and international poetry slam champion, author, educator, and activist. Sonia is also the founder of The Body Is Not An Apology, which is a digital media and education company promoting radical self-love and body empowerment as the foundational tool for social justice and global transformation. Today, Sonia and Eric discuss her book, The Body is Not an Apology, The Power of Radical Self-Love. Hi, Sonia. Welcome to the show.

Hi. Thanks so much for having me, Eric. It is a real pleasure to have you on. We are going to be discussing your book, The Body is Not an Apology, The Power of Radical Self-Love. But before we start with that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her grandson, and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandmother, and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Thank you. I think one of the things that made me most excited about coming on your podcast was this parable, which I find so powerful. And for me, I think my work really centers on what is the relationship between the one we feed as individuals and the one we feed as a collective. I believe that we are innately good. We come here with the good wolf. We come here with the wolf that is

inherently connected to kindness and love, compassion, connection. And I think that we are immediately birthed into a world that's like, hey, here's this other wolf. And it's the one we've been feeding for a long time. And so we expect you to feed it too. And then through that process, we become split. But I don't think we start off split. I think we become split as a result of the conditions of our world, the conditions of our families, the conditions of our own sort of encounters with lack or not enoughness. And then that becomes the wolf we feed. Yeah, I love that. You talk in your book early on about a concept of natural intelligence, which I think speaks a little bit to what you're saying

here. Could you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by natural intelligence? Yeah, so one, I don't want to take credit for a term that is not mine. I was speaking in the book about a quote that I had heard from author Marianne Williamson, who was comparing this idea of natural intelligence to an oak tree. And that an acorn doesn't have to state that it intends to become an oak tree, right? That it is imbued with all the mechanisms cellularly that it needs to become its highest version of itself. That's natural intelligence. to become its highest version of itself. That's natural intelligence, that we come here already wired for the highest versions of ourselves, or the good wolf, if we're going to compare to that parable. And then the work is not about like, how do I become the good wolf? The work is,

how do I identify all of the things that are obstructing the goodwill from flourishing into the fullness of its being? What's in the obstruction of that acorn, right? If that acorn falls from a tree and lands on concrete, then it will not be able to do its job. But if that acorn falls from the tree and lands in fertile soil, it will. And so how do we create the conditions of fertile soil so that that which is already cellularly within us can come to its fullest fruition? Yeah, I love that idea. I practice Zen Buddhism, and we talk about this all the time in Zen. You know, it's just your original nature.

If you just, when you strip everything else away, it's what naturally emerges. And it's always right here. It's always right here. Exactly. Exactly. And we all have so many different names for it. And in my work, I call that radical self-love. But there are all kinds of terms.

Miriam Williamson calls it natural intelligence. Buddhism calls it Zen. We have all of these terms for it. But it really does speak to what is innately in us that wants to become manifest in the world. Yeah. And I want to return to this idea of radical self-love, the term that you use. But before we do that, why don't we start with the title of the book, which is The Body is Not an Apology. Share with us the story of where that idea is birthed from, because I think it's pretty powerful as a story in and of itself.

And I think it's pretty central to everything that's going to come after it as we talk. Totally. So I've had many iterations of lives. I feel like I've lived many lives in this lifetime. And one of those iterations was as a professional performance poet, traveled around the world competing in poetry slams. And I happened to be in a poetry slam in Knoxville, Tennessee, getting ready to compete with a group of folks, a team, friends of mine from Washington, D.C. And I was in the room with one of my friends having a conversation. And we were having, you know, I'm a Scorpio. And so I'm notorious for having really deep conversations, whether you want to be having them or not. It's just kind of my nature. And so I'm having this intense conversation with my teammate

and she is sharing with me that she is afraid that she might have an unintended pregnancy. She's not sure yet. And we start to sort of unfold this conversation and it becomes clear to me that the person she thinks she might be pregnant by is just kind of a casual partner sometimes and not anyone she's particularly invested in. And I am also, as a result of perhaps the Scorpio placement, as well as one of my former lives as a sexuality health educator. I'm a person who will get in your business from a place of love is the way I think about it. Like, I'm going to ask you some uncomfortable questions, never from judgment, but always from a, here are the things that I would explore in this. Have you explored this? You know?

So I asked my friend why she was having unprotected sex with his casual partner. She wasn't all that into since we know how babies happen. And my friend, you know, answered me. I like to say that three things were present in this conversation that created what I like to think of as like a transformative portal, this opening where all of a sudden life got rearranged. And I think that those three things were radical honesty, radical vulnerability, and radical empathy. I asked a radically honest question, but I asked it from a radically empathetic place. I understood. And she responded to me in radical honesty and radical vulnerability. And my friend had cerebral palsy and she said that, you know, her disability made it difficult already for her to be sexual. And so she didn't feel entitled to ask this person to use a condom. And when she said that, the words came through me. They were not

of me. It was like, oh, this is coming from someplace else for this moment. And I said to her, your body is not an apology. It's not something you offer to people to say sorry for my disability. And when I said that, something stuck that wasn't just for her. It was immediately for me too. It was like, oh, there are all these ways that I too have given myself away as an apology. I'm sorry for my blackness. I'm sorry for my woman-ness. I'm sorry for my loudness. I'm sorry for my fatness. I'm sorry for my depression. So there are all these things I'm sorry for. And there was this moment where it was like, oh, what if there isn't anything to apologize for? And so I said it and I was like, damn, that was really poetic.

I'm going to have to do something with that. And so I decided I was going to write a poem because I was a poet. And so I wrote this poem called The Body is Not an Apology. And I began performing it. And about six to eight months after I'd written the poem, I had this selfie in my phone that I'd been hiding. I really felt fabulous in it and delicious and beautiful and had been afraid to share it. And so someone one night in February of 2011 shared a photo of a plus-sized model on my Facebook page, and she was fabulous. And I Googled her, and she had on the same exact kind of outfit that I had on. And I had this moment where I was like, oh, this person is being very unapologetic in their body.

And they're being paid for it, right? Somebody paid her money to put her juicy thighs on the Internet without shame. And here I am hiding this photo where I feel beautiful, but I feel like I'm not supposed to. I'm going to share it. And I asked people, because I'm always recruiting other people to do the things that I'm scared of with me. And so I asked-

Good strategy. Yeah. It's totally my life strategy. It's been working. And so I was like, share a photo where you feel powerful and embodied in your body. And the next morning, 30 people had tagged me in photos. I was like, this is awesome. Like maybe we just need a space where we're allowed to like, where we have permission to be unapologetic in our bodies. So I'm going to make a Facebook page. And since I have this poem called the body is not an apology, I guess I'll call the Facebook page The Body is Not an Apology. And we started with 30 people. And then we have, you know, 300 and then 3000 and 30,000 and writers and then a company and then a book deal. And then it has transformed my life.

sharing that story. And maybe there's some people when they hear that story, they don't have a interior feeling of knowing like, oh my God, that's me. But I certainly do. And I'm a straight white male, right? You know, as I read this book, it was so clear to me that I don't know that you can grow up in this culture and not have body issues, unless you're nearly perfect. And even then, I think it's just so much a part of everything. Absolutely. And I think, you know, if we think you don't have body issues, then you're probably defining body way too narrowly, which is what I usually experience. People are like, I don't have any issues with my body. And then I'm like, you know, what were the messages that your father told you about your manhood when you were a child? And you're like, Oh, I'm not allowed to cry. What do you mean? No, do where do tears come from friend? They come from your body, right? Like, so part of it is about

really expanding and understanding when I say body, what I'm talking about is all of the ways in which we do life in this corporal vessel and all of the relationships that we've been told about that, the relationships with our identity, with gender, our relationship with size, our relationship with race, our relationship with age, our relationship with ability, our relationship with mental health, all of those things are the body. And so when I say the body is not an apology, I'm not just talking about, do you like what size jeans you're wearing? I'm saying, what are the messages that we have been told about our humanity based on

these physical vessels? And how has that stifled the ability for that acorn to become the oak tree? How is that squashing our natural intelligence? How is that feeding the wolf we don't want fed? Yeah, I think that is really well said. And as you go through that list, you know, one of those is aging. So even if somehow you get to a certain age where you're like, I've always felt great about how I look in my body, you're like, well, but just hang on, how I look in my body, you're like, well, but just hang on because it's coming. It's coming with age. Although as somebody who is just the upper side of 50, I will say that in addition,

one of the great things that age has brought is time to heal some of those things so that I don't have the same fears and challenges around it I had as a child. And that's really what I would like to maybe spend our time on is what can people do to heal the issues they have around their body, around their self-image, around all these different things. And I thought maybe we would start with first saying, you know, you talk about that what we want is radical self-love. And I'd like to contrast that with terms like self-esteem and self-confidence as a starting place to sort of say that that's not really what we're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. So I opened the book by being like, here's what you're not going to get if you're reading this book. You're not going to get help with your self-esteem and your self-confidence. And the reason that I say that is one, because both of those things are very conditional

experiences. How you feel about yourself, how your confidence is situated varies from day to day, depending on what's going on. Did I get the promotion that I thought I was going to get? Right. I feel great going into the meeting. I come out feeling like, man, this never works for me. And then I'm in my story about how I'm not good enough. Confidence shot for the day. Self-esteem, this like, I feel important or good or fabulous. I often give the example of like, I put on a fly outfit. I'm like, yes, fabulous. And I go outside and no one gives me a compliment on my outfit that day. I'm like, wait a minute. And I go outside and no one gives me a compliment on my outfit that day. I'm like, wait a minute, maybe I'm not as cute as I thought I was.

I'm going to have to wear this again, right? And so these things that are conditional and externalized and change with the weather, right? And again, radical self-love is not fickle in that way. It's not conditional. It's not determined by whether or not it is externally validated by the outside world. The same way an acorn doesn't become a fig tree because somebody outside said, you look better as a fig tree. Right? It is wired inside of itself to be an oak tree. We are wired inside of ourselves to have radical self-love. And when I talk about it, I'm talking about that inherent state of enoughness that we arrived here with, that unconditional certainty that we were amazing. I think I've said this on every single talk I've ever done is you've never seen a self-loathing toddler. Because I think it's an important marker for us to remember that there is a point through which we passed where we were embodied in our enoughness and then something shifted. And so if we recognize that we came here embodied in our enoughness, then the question isn't like, oh, did it leave? No. I mean, just

from a physics standpoint, it couldn't leave. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred. Then it's still there. It's just doing something different. What is it doing different? It's being usurped by the messages of our external world that say that we're not enough and that profit off of us really deeply believing that we're not enough. And so radical self-love is different from those things because it is already there. It is the foundation. And then the other thing I think is really important for me about why it's not self-esteem and self-confidence is because I love folks and I love what I do. And I actually want people to have good self-esteem and self-confidence, but I would not devote the amount of time and effort that I spend in my life tending to people's

individual self-esteem and self-confidence. I don't get anything out of that. What I do get something out of is recognizing that there is a society that is rooted in our messages about who is good enough and who is not good enough. And that as much as we internalize those messages, we reinforce that system of not enoughness for other bodies. So the body that you are judging yourself against about whether or not you are enough is someone else's body, which means you are in the way of them being able to be in the fullness of their radical self-love. As long as we believe that certain bodies, that white bodies are more valuable than black bodies

on a structural level, then I, as a black woman, am always going to be in a harder road towards accessing my radical self-love. As long as we believe that neurotypical bodies are more valuable than neuroatypical bodies or, you know, bodies that we say don't have mental health issues. As long as we believe that, I have a harder road to radical self-love. Wake up to this system that we've all been indoctrinated in, and we get out of our own way, and then we get out of each other's way so that we can all grow into the highest versions of ourselves. That's why it's radical self-love. Right. And you talk a lot in the book about, I'm paraphrasing, but there's a real two-way street or a mutuality about this, right? It's by learning to both love myself and love others. Those things, they mutually reinforce or what's the opposite of reinforce, tear down, right? The more that I learn to love me, the more I'm able to love you. And the more I'm able to love you, the more I'm able to love me. It's a good thing versus the more I judge

myself, the more I judge you. The more I judge you, I end up judging myself. These things play off each other. Absolutely. I mean, we're all in an interdependent relationship. And so, you know, we go into these, often this kind of work, you know, that people often lump my work into like personal development work. And I, you know, I can see why they do that, except I'm very clear that I do social justice work. I'm just very clear that society is made up of people. And so people have to change in order for society to change. And so inside of this story in our current society is the story of individualism, that it's all about, I can change, and then I change by myself, and then my life improves. As if our lives are not intertwined with one another, as if we are not dependent on each other in a host of ways. And so

as I divest from this system that says that I am not enough, I become aware of all the other people it has said is not enough. And if I believe that that system is lying to me, then that system must be lying about all those other bodies too. And the only way for me to actually be able to live in my radical self-love without obstruction in the world is to remove all of the obstructions that tell us that we're not enough, not just the ones that impact me. Because eventually another one will pop up that will be obstructing your lane again. And so we actually are tied to each other in this journey of really living into the full possibility of radical self-love for ourselves and in the world. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You say that moving from body shame to radical self-love is a road of inquiry and insight.

Say a little bit about those two words, inquiry and insight. What is it we need to do? We got to ask ourselves questions. We have to be willing to explore that which is unexplored in us. So much of the experience of body shame, so much of the experience of body-based oppression exists because we don't ask questions about it. We don't ask questions about our own thoughts. They operate on autopilot inside of us. You know, I often give the example of you go to a dressing room and you're trying on some jeans and they don't fit. And the immediate thought is that there's something wrong with your body. The immediate

thought is, oh my gosh, I've gained a new year. Then we're in this cycle of self-judgment about our bodies, right? That happens probably a billion times a day around the world with very little inquiry into the story that lives behind it. The story about why I judge my body rather than being like, why y'all don't make these jeans in more expansive sizes, right? Immediately, I take on the ownership of fault. There are all of these ways in which our ideas and beliefs about our bodies just go un-interrogated. And so inside the book, I talk about in order to really begin this journey of radical self-love, you have to engage in what I call a thinking, doing, being process. The first thing

is that we actually have to become aware of our thoughts. Oh, here's this self-deprecating judgmental thought I think every single day about myself. Then at this point, I don't even ask myself about it. It just runs on autopilot. What happens when I raise that to consciousness? What happens when I ask myself questions about it? Well, who told me that I'm supposed to believe that? Who told me that this is true? Why do I believe what they said? Why am I applying that into my life?

One of my favorite questions is, does this give me access to peace, power, joy, ease, or pleasure in my life? Is this thought I'm having giving me access to peace, power, joy, ease, or pleasure in my life? No. Then why am I invested in thinking it? Oh, let's get into that. Because each time you do that, some new insight shows up. That's where the insight comes up. It's like, I had an inquiry and then it was like, oh, right, because that's what my mother used to say to me. And so I'm actually just talking to myself in the voice of my mother. Oh, that's what that is. Okay. Well, now that it's at consciousness, I actually have a choice about how I move forward. Once we raise the thing to consciousness, then we are at choice about how we engage it. And so from that point, I can say, what would an

opposite action that did give me access to peace, power, joy, pleasure, ease look like? Okay, can I take that action today? Just today. And each time we do that repetition, that thinking, raising a thing to consciousness, choosing a new action, raising a thing to consciousness, choosing new action, the repetition of that creates a new way of being. All of a sudden, we stop being in the practice of it, and it just is how we show up. So now that self-deprecating thought that I used to think all the time just doesn't show up, or it's so low now that it doesn't impact how I move. And now when I see it, I recognize it.

I'm like, that's not even my voice. Ciao, boo, be quiet. And then I go on about my life, right? And so that's a process of inquiry and insight that we have to engage in if we're going to take this journey back to removing those obstructions that are in front of our radical self-love. I love that loop there of thinking, taking a different action, finding our way into a new way of being. thinking, taking a different action, finding our way into a new way of being. It reminds me of what happens in recovery from addiction, right? Is the thoughts are there, I must have drugs, right? And

but I take a different action. I examine those thoughts. Why am I thinking that what's happening? I take a different action. And over time, I live my way into a new way of being where those thoughts don't have so much power. There's a great line in the introduction to your book. I cannot pronounce the woman who wrote it. Could you pronounce her name for me? Yes, Ijeoma Oluo. Thank you. She has a line in there basically that an epiphany doesn't undo a lifetime of conditioning. And I love that idea that like, we can can have these insights and yet it takes a while to live these things out of our system. So I think that process of insight and inquiry is really powerful.

Let's talk about the three pieces. And when we say piece, we mean like peace as in the, you know, the peace sign, not pieces of pizza. Although we could mean that because pizza is good too. But talk about the three. It's definitely radical self-love. Yes, absolutely. Let's talk about the three pieces. Yeah. So again, I talk about like, what are the foundational things that we've got to kind of grapple with when we decide we want to take this journey? So if the thinking,

doing, being is about like, how do I begin to live a radical self-love process? How do I stay on the road? This is about how do I even get on the road? In order to get on the road, there are three things we have to make peace with. The first thing we have to make peace with is not understanding. We live in a world that says you should know everything. And if you don't know everything, something's wrong with you. Everything should be Google-able, right? And so there's this relationship to the instant access of knowledge that forgets the reality of the mystery of humanity and that forgets the reality of lived experience that you can't know because it's not your journey. As soon as we just give up needing to understand everything, we have a different kind of expansiveness. Some things just are because they are. Oh, wow.

Oh, that feels really uncomfortable. And it stops me from having to feel like I actually can control the whole world because I can't. I can't control everything. And if I get that there are things I just don't understand, it creates some access around there. Because once we recognize that we don't understand everything, then we have the ability to make peace with difference. And making peace with difference is about saying, right, there are things in this world that are

just different than me. And we have so long equated difference with danger, difference with bad, difference with not belonging, that it has created a world where we desire to homogenize ourselves. But it's totally unrealistic and impossible. Right. It's actually not possible to be homogenous as human beings and that we don't expect that in any other part of the natural world. I did not see your dog and be like, chihuahuas, why are all dogs not Airedales? Right? I've never looked at a St. Bernard and been like, you you know, rose bushes. There is natural diversity in the world that we value and need and see as beautiful. And then when we bring it to humans, we're like, nope, we don't want that diversity. Totally. Right? Yep. And so the invitation to make peace with difference, which again starts with making peace with not understanding, it's like, oh, there's beauty in this thing I don't know anything about that's totally different than me, but brings new insight,

that brings new perspective, that brings new possibility. How do I let that in? Because once we do all of those things, then that helps us get to the third piece, which is making peace with our own bodies. Because if I can accept that there are things I don't understand, and I can accept that difference is an innate and absolutely valuable part of human diversity, then I can accept it in myself. Then I can say, oh, here are the ways that I am different, that my body is different than the stories that have been told about what a body should look like. Here are the ways in which my brain operates differently than what I've been told about what a body should look like. And how do I meet that without judgment? How do I meet

that without making myself bad or wrong? Because if I can meet that without making myself bad or wrong, I am opening the door to return to a radical self-love way of being. You talk about radical love being a process of de-indoctrination, you know, that we look unflinchingly at our current set of beliefs about ourselves and the world and explore them. What are some of these beliefs about ourselves in the world that we need to let go of? Yeah. So I think there are some that are very universal. And then I think there are some that are particular depending on the body that you inhabit in the world, right? But some of those things, I really do believe like if we start with whatever story is attached to it, I'm not enough

or I'm too much. And whatever it is that wherever that road takes you, right? I'm not pretty enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not rich enough. I'm not whatever the enough is. That is the first place to look for, oh, where have I been indoctrinated? Because the story of enough is just not true, right? Like the acorn is enough to become an oak tree. You didn't have to do nothing to it.

It is enough. It came here enough. And that's true for us too. So the question is, where is this story not enoughness impacting my life? And wherever that not enoughness is, it's a place of indoctrination. It is a place where you've been told that. Because if it's not true, then it means we got it from someplace that isn't us. Then I can start being in my investigation, in my inquiry, where is this message coming from? I think that's a great idea. Let's take the stories of not enough and follow that. Where I think this gets hard is that a lot of the not enough is because there's something we want that's out in the world that we feel like I'm not enough to get. For me,

right, growing up as a boy, when you're a young man, to be too skinny is just as bad as being too big, right? You're just a little wimp, right? You're scrawny. And so my thing was, no woman, no girl is ever going to like me. There's a broad, I'm not enough, but that I'm not enough ends in a very specific thing. I'm not enough to be loved by somebody that I would be interested in, right? And those things seem crazy real when you're stuck in them. Absolutely. They absolutely seem crazy real. That's why the work is to be in the confrontation of it, right? Like that the work of radical self-love is to choose to go slay the dragon under your bed. The thing that seems really real, the premise that I am proposing, and this is the foundation of whether or not you take the

journey or you don't, right? Is the premise I'm proposing is it's not real. It is not real that being skinny makes you unlovable, no matter how much it feels, no matter how real it feels. And it does feel real. And we do live in a society that will reinforce that belief. Absolutely. And what I assure you is it isn't real. And the only way to really know that is to go and test it out. And so the invitation that I give to people to this work is, look, you're living in this construct right now and it already sucks. Right? Like it already sucks. It sucks thinking that you're not good enough.

It sucks thinking that you're never going to be loved. It sucks. And so if it's going to suck anyway, if it's going to be hard anyway, if it's going to be hard, be hard and test the thing that is likely to get you closer to your own freedom. If I'm going to do hard, I'd rather do hard in service toward my own freedom. And I think this is something they talk about in recovery, too. Like recovery isn't easy. Right. Right. But it's like, what do I get? What might I get if I just trust that it's possible?

That's the invitation of this book. Can you just maybe try the experiment and see where it takes you? Yeah, and I think that's really powerful because the belief starts with just take your whatever. I'm not X enough to be loved. And we then believe that. X enough to be loved. And we then believe that. And so then we start acting that way in all sorts of ways that make it really likely that we're going to prove our theory true. Exactly. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And again, like I said, we live in a world that's happy to validate that for us. We are very, very profitable inside of that belief. We're very

manipulable inside of that belief. And so it's going to have to take some daring. And I think, you know, various people in the world are offering like the, you don't have to sort out the fact that isn't true yet. You just have to be willing to try a new thing and see, right? Like I'm going to hold the belief that it isn't true. That I wrote a whole book to tell you it isn't true. Now just play with it and see. Right? Yep.

That's the invitation. That's the invitation. There's four pillars of practice. So we've talked about how to even get on the journey. We talked about this thinking, doing, and being process. And then there are four pillars of practice that I thought we could talk about because I think if we hit those four, we cover a lot of ground of various points I'd like to hit. So let's start with what the four pillars of practice are. These will not be in order. I'm going to say them and then I'll order them later.

Collected compassion, unapologetic action. I'll give them to you. Mind matters and taking out the toxic. Taking out the toxic. Thank you. And we just said them backwards. So the very first one is taking out the toxic. And so first, just to explain why I have such a hard time remembering my own pillars, is when I wrote the book, I wrote 10 tools to radical self-love. And these were, what are the practical applications that we can do every single day that help us practice, build this radical self-love muscle, live into this.

And after I wrote them, I realized that they each fell under a category. And I was like, oh, well, this helps people understand the sort of like subheading of these categories. And so I always forget the subheadings, but I remember the tools. So anyway, taking out the toxic, it's really about first, if we're inside of this thinking, doing, being paradigm. And remember, all of these things are like scaffolding of a building, right? I got to build this layer and then I build this layer, right? So we've built the layer. We understand that in order to take this journey, we've got to be in a thinking, doing, being process. Here's your first thinking project, taking out the toxic. Where am I on a regular basis taking in messages that reinforce my belief that I'm not enough,

that reinforce my belief that I need to be in comparison to assign my own worth and value, that reinforce my idea that somehow I'm deficient and failing? Where is that message coming from? And how do I turn it down? How do I find the volume knob on that and turn it down? Some of that is literally the stuff we pay for. We're in a grocery store picking up a rag magazine that's going to tell us all the ways in which we need to do this, that, and the other to be desirable. And the thing we need to buy to be desirable and why haven't we become desirable yet, and maybe if we did this particular thing, then we'll be desirable. And we just gave somebody $10 to deface us in the pages of their magazine, right? And so where am I taking in those messages? Where am I watching things that

reinforce the message that somehow I'm not smart enough, not capable enough, not beautiful, whatever that is? And how do I start raising that to consciousness and then removing some of that? And then also, where am I reinforcing that message inside of my own relationship with myself? of my own relationship with myself? Where do I notice that I just immediately go to shame, to body shaming myself, to talking disparagingly about myself? You know, I saw a meme one time that said, if you talk to a friend the way that you talk to yourself, how long would y'all stay friends? Right? And I was like, absolutely. Absolutely. And so how do we begin to say, oh, how do I, how do I have a more loving? I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

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Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dialogue with myself, and where is the toxic way in which I'm relating to myself? And then how do I do a fast of that? And maybe that's just for one day, I'm turning off every time I hear something that is trying to sell me a reason I'm deficient, I just cut it off. How many times that I have to cut off the radio? How many times that I have to turn off the TV? How many times that I have to get off the social media platform? Right?

So many. And once again, once you raise that to consciousness, you're like, Oh, this is what I've been doing to myself. Yeah, totally. I often joke that I generally don't watch TV because I feel so susceptible to it. Just show me one beer commercial with a lot of beautiful people and I go, it's not that I even want, it doesn't make me want a beer. It just makes me go, why is my life not like that? And boom, instant. I have noticed how susceptible in certain mind states I am to that kind of stuff or can be.

And the truth of the matter is like, it works. That's why they do it. Yeah. Like if the beer commercial thought you weren't going to be susceptible, it would not be dumping millions of dollars into advertising in that way. That's right. It knows it works. And so we have to become as consciously aware of how it works as the advertisers.

Yes. Right. That's the work. So that's the taking out the toxic. How do we become aware of what it is, the messages that we're being fed? And then how do we start auditing that so that we can consciously decrease it? Number two is mind matters. Yes. And so if we've done this thing to say, all right, I'm going to take out all this trash that I've been dumping in my ears and eyeballs every day. Now that that space is clear, I've created some room. What do I want

to put in it? What am I trying to cultivate in that space? Because like any tilled patch of grass, if you let it go long enough, weeds will pop up, right? And so my matter says, all right, now that I've done that, what do I consciously want to begin replacing it with? And, you know, in the book, I begin talking about meditation and meditation's power to really begin to create space and shift our neural pathways to actually get us to start thinking differently. If we're talking about how do we get to that being part of the thinking, doing, being process, meditation is one of those powerful ways to get us to the being part by sitting and practicing, letting that clutter that comes in our brains leave us. And then what

do we want to put in that space? It also is about challenging some of the paradigms that that toxic in that space. It also is about challenging some of the paradigms that that toxic thinking has had us in. So where am I stuck in binary thinking? Where am I stuck inside of things are either good or bad? I'm awful or I'm an angel. I'm a villain or I'm a hero. I am a victim or I'm a survivor, you know, or a perpetrator, right? We're all inside of these really binary ways of thinking that limit the scope of our full humanity. How do we start to challenge those when they come up? How do we see that and then offer ourself a more expansive version of our own humanity so that we have a wider field to play in as we explore leaving these toxic messages behind

and beginning to learn how to hear our own radical self-love voice? That's the mind matters part. Excellent. Unapologetic action is next. So if we've taken out the toxic, we've seen the things we've been dumping in that aren't good for us, and we've started planting some new seeds, right? Now it's time to do something, right? Now we're in the doing part. We've dealt with the mind. We've dealt with the thinking. What's the doing? What are the actions that I can take every day? How do I become reconnected to my own body? How do I reclaim joy in this vessel that I've gotten so many messages that's deficient? I talk about in the book being a kid and when you're a child and the teacher rang the bell for recess. I don't know

about you, but I like grew wings in kindergarten. I grew wings and I flew outside. That's how fast I needed to get outside and play. And there was a joy to going and moving and being embodied. And then somehow we were stripped of that joy and it became drudgery. Moving our bodies became punishment. Moving our bodies became the thing that we paid 24 hour fitness, $20 a month to never do because we never feel like going, right? Like it became, it became this really tense, visceral, antagonistic relationship. And so what would it look like to reclaim joy in my body? What would it look like to reclaim pleasure in my body? What would it look like to reclaim connection in my

body? And how do I take action to do that on a daily basis? How do I replace those old activities of self-deprecation with things that actually bring me a lot of joy. And so basically all of these things, these tools, I created a workbook where people can actually practice putting them in place, doing them on a daily basis. And so inside of the workbook, it give us an assignment to rediscover the games that brought us the most joy as kids. Like when's the last time you played red light, green light? When is the last time you played hide and go seek with a bunch of adults? Go outside. And so there's this invitation to return to our site of joy, to reclaim that for ourselves. And so in unapologetic action, that's what we're asking. The other piece inside of unapologetic action is about now that we recognize the stories we've

been telling ourselves about how deficient we are, the stories that reinforce the larger societal indoctrinations. Now that we recognize those things, how do we create a new story? How do I literally tell myself a different story than the story I've been telling myself historically? And, you know, again, inside the workbook, I give us the opportunity to actually practice writing a new story, to take that thing that was the most shameful, that I had the most judgment about myself,

the story of being the skinny boy who was never gonna be loved. How do I turn that story around in a literal way and write myself an ending that is more aligned with my truth? And then how do I practice the living into that? Right? And so as we exercise these muscles, we create the conditions for radical self-love, not to feel like a distant thing, but to feel up close to us, like a thing we can practice and live

into on a daily basis. Yeah, I love that. There's so many good things in there. I mean, I think about stories, and I've talked about this on the podcast so many times, we're making them up. So if we're making them up, why on earth would we not choose ones to, back to your earlier question, like, is this belief or this thing giving me more peace, joy, ease, power? If my stories aren't doing that, once we sort of really look at it and go, oh, I'm making meaning out of it. I'm the one that's creating all this. Why not? Why not? If I'm going to write a story, I might as well write the one where it's a happy ending. That's right. Might as well. That's right. And then the last one, and this one I know is really important to the whole picture, which is why I wanted to make sure we got to it, is collective compassion. Talk about this one.

Yeah. So, you know, I say in the book, like you could do everything. You could do all the things I said. You could do all the tools. If you don't do these last two tools, you're going to struggle in this journey. You're going to find yourself like on a side of a steep hill that's mud trying to climb up. Collective compassion is one, that this is not an individual journey, which I said at the beginning of our conversation, that this is not about individualism, that this is about interdependence. And the truth of the matter is you have an entire societal infrastructure of systems and organizations and edifices that are designed to keep you not feeling enough, that are designed to make sure that you don't actually think that you can affect change in

your own life or in the world. They are intentionally created as such. So if you think you're going to just do battle with that juggernaut by yourself, you're going to be sadly mistaken. It's going to be very, very difficult, near impossible to be able to maintain any kind of sense of power against that. And so we need each other in this. We have to be in a collective experience where we are battling those voices, not just me up against the machine, but us against it, right? And so the more that you find your people, the more that you find the people who are in alignment with the journey that you're interested in taking, far easier the journey becomes. So much more doable and sustainable the journey becomes. And so collective compassion requires us to find community

and to do this work in community. Again, because our liberation is tied up together. Our radical self-love journey is tied up together. And then the last piece, and this is tool number 10, final tool, the most important thing you're gonna do. If you do everything and you fail to really live into this, you will find yourself back in this old paradigm. And that is give yourself some grace that we actually have to recognize that this is not a journey of perfection. And as soon as we're

inside of a conversation of perfection, we're outside of a conversation of radical self-love. As soon as you are judging yourself because you got it wrong. See, I always get it wrong. I did a workshop one time and the participant called it meta shame. Shame for having shame. I'm like, that's too much, y'all. That's too much. And I feel bad for feeling bad. And now I feel bad. It's a lot. And so what I invite us to do is say, of course, I'm imperfect in this journey. Yeah. That is one of the actual beautiful parts of my humanity is that I'm imperfect, that I'm going to get it wrong, that I get to experiment and mess up and try again. That is part of the journey.

I tell people all the time I run an entire organization. That is part of the journey. I tell people all the time, I run an entire organization. I've dedicated the last decade of my life to nothing but radical self-love. And there are days I do not feel very loving about myself. I don't feel that. And the work of radical self-love is, can I love the Sonia that doesn't feel loving toward herself until Sonia loves herself again? I love you, Sonia, that feels not enough. I love you, Sonia, that't feel loving toward herself until Sonia loves herself again. I love you,

Sonia, that feels not enough. I love you, Sonia, that got it wrong. I love you, Sonia, that don't feel like loving me. And the more that I open up to that experience of love, of loving the imperfect version of me, the more I return myself to the stasis of love, to love as the foundation of how I'm moving through life. There's so many things in what you said there that if we can interrupt that cycle, that metashame cycle, it's so important. Because what we end up doing is we go, okay, I'm going to be on a journey of radical self-love and I'm not doing it good enough.

And so wherever we can interrupt that cycle is so good. And then that last piece about the collective compassion and that grace for ourselves is, again, it's that reciprocal cycle we talked about earlier. The more that I have grace for myself, the more I can offer you grace. And the more I offer you grace, the more I have for myself. And so it really is that interdependence that we talked about. And being on this journey alone is, like you said, it's too hard. Yeah, it's just not sustainable. And I think if nothing else, what we can be looking at in this world right now is we need things that are sustainable. Yeah, we're running out of a lot of stuff here. We might be figuring out what what makes this journey possible for the

long run. And that's together. Yeah, amen. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I have really enjoyed this conversation. I loved the book. There are a ton of stories in the book I would have loved to get to, which we didn't. But we'll have links in the show notes to your book. People can find you online. And I hope people check you out because it was a really great book. And I've really enjoyed this.

Awesome. Thanks so much. I really appreciate this. Awesome. Thanks so much. I really appreciate you inviting me. Thanks so much. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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