Hold Yourself With Radical Love - by Catherine Liggett

COURSE

Hold Yourself With Radical Love

With Catherine Liggett

In quiet moments alone with ourselves, many of us feel anxious, insecure, and afraid of the feelings that lie just below the surface of our awareness. Running from ourselves, we numb away the pain and keep busy, propelled by a ruthless inner judge. But this disconnection comes at a great cost. We lose touch with our souls and feel estranged from the very things we most deeply desire, such as true connection, innate belonging, and unconditional love. This course is a portal into a deeper relationship with yourself and an invitation into a visceral, felt sense of love. A love that you can access at any time to hold yourself steady even in the midst of great struggle. A love that is radical, because it illuminates and nurtures precisely the places within you that you most want to avoid, to fix, to deny, and to numb away. Over 10 sessions, you’ll gently investigate your relationship with yourself and practice invaluable skills to transform your inner judge into a loving inner guide. You’ll learn the F.A.C.E. method, Catherine’s powerful four-step process that teaches you exactly how to meet every edge within yourself with radical love, leaving you with tools to last a lifetime. F.A.C.E. (Feel, Amplify, Connect, Embrace) begins with body awareness and concludes with deeply compassionate self-witnessing. The four steps are as follows: With Feel, we become still and identify body sensations and emotions associated with the difficult feeling. Next, Amplify invites us to expand those sensations according to what feels safe enough, in order to release habitual bracing against the feelings. Connect then asks our innermost wisdom to reveal an early time in our lives when we felt something similar and visualize ourselves at that age (it need not be a memory). Finally, with Embrace, we imagine ourselves as a deeply loving empathic witness and we meet the needs of our young self on their terms. Like all Catherine’s work, this course is gentle, trauma-informed, and anti-oppressive, viewing our personal healing as an aspect of collective liberation. Most of the 10 sessions include both shared wisdom and a brief but potent guided journey, with the intention of completing one lesson per day. Two full-length guided F.A.C.E. practices are also included in the lessons. Catherine looks forward to connecting with you as you grow into radical love for yourself--exactly as you are. Meditation music by Jamiel Conlon (lessons 1-6, 8, 10) and Christopher Lloyd Clarke (lessons 7 and 9). ***Disclaimer: This course contains invitations to gently intensify uncomfortable emotions and body sensations. If you have a history of anxiety, panic, PTSD, or other conditions, please have trusted professional support available.


Meet your Teacher

Catherine Liggett is a holistic mental health coach and a passionate teacher of radical love, helping people face their darkest inner landscapes with transformational care. Her work combines her own intimate lived experience with inner child healing, trauma repair, ancient wisdom, and social justice. Catherine hosts the Tender Revolution podcast and teaches online courses. She lives with her family on Duwamish and Coast Salish land, also known as Seattle.

read more

10 Days

11.4k students

4.9 stars

22 min / day

Anxiety

English


Lesson 1

Uncovering The Love That We Are

In this lesson, we learn how to gently discern our armor from our essence. Our armor is the collection of traits that we developed as a young child in order to receive what we considered love and approval in our family and culture of origin. As we mature, we form an inner judge to keep our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors within this socially acceptable box. The cost of identifying with our armor is great, for it obscures the full spectrum of our aliveness, prevents us from receiving love from others, and disconnects us from the love that is our own essence.

read more

Lesson 2

From Control to Care

Now that we have identified our inner judge and the armor that has kept us safe, we open to what is possible beyond this lens of controlling ourselves. In this lesson, you'll learn how to cultivate a new and deeply loving attitude toward your inner experience. In a guided journey, you'll practice making the powerful shift from control to care of the things you most wish to change about yourself.

read more

Lesson 3

The Anchor of Safety

In this lesson, we learn how to identify and attune to an anchor of safety within our embodied felt senses. By creating this lifeline of deep care for ourselves, we can approach our inner explorations with a powerful gentleness that restores the nervous system. Because the work of FACE can bring difficult emotions or memories to the surface, it is essential to first create a refuge to which we can return at any point in the process.

read more

Lesson 4

Introduction to FACE

This lesson describes the FACE process, which is how we bring the conscious and subconscious minds into agreement using the power of radical love. Through FACE (Feel, Amplify, Connect, and Embrace), we identify the wounded subconscious parts of ourselves that drive our control strategies, and show these parts the radical love that they need. At the end of the lesson is an invitation to respond to two journal prompts.

read more

Lesson 5

The First Part of FACE: Feel and Amplify

In this lesson, we demystify and practice the first two steps of FACE: Feel and Amplify. These steps invite us into an embodied memory of a present-day situation that we wish to explore through FACE, feeling and opening into the body sensations and emotions that are present in that specific moment. Because we live in a culture driven by the avoidance of uncomfortable emotions and body sensations, this initial part of FACE can be quite challenging, and also holds profound rewards.

read more

Lesson 6

The Second Part of FACE: Connect and Embrace

This lesson is a deep dive into the second two steps of FACE: Connect and Embrace. This part of FACE opens a portal to our embodied intuition where we encounter and heal an early experience in our lives that lies at the root of a present-day struggle. In becoming the radically loving Empathic Witness to the neglected pain of our young self, we unfreeze and repair old defensive strategies that have become roadblocks in our adult lives.

read more

Lesson 7

FACE Practice 1: Healing the Roots

This lesson is our first full-length FACE practice. In this gentle and powerful meditation, we begin by invoking a recent trigger, compulsion, or behavior that we wish to heal at the roots. Moving through the four steps of FACE (Feel, Amplify, Connect, and Embrace), we uncover the hidden origins of this behavior and hold the younger version of ourselves with radical love.

read more

Lesson 8

Discerning Inner Guide From Wounded Child

Now that you've experienced the FACE practice and its components, you may have noticed some roadblocks in the process. In this lesson, Catherine describes two common places where we may become stuck, both arising out of an over-identification with the wounded child, as opposed to the Inner Guide. As a way to get unstuck, Catherine guides you in a short and highly effective practice, "The Couch Exercise," which gently and powerfully places us back in the seat of the radically loving, resourced adult.

read more

Lesson 9

FACE Practice 2: Softening Barriers to Love

In this second full-length FACE practice, we embody the Rumi quote, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it, and embrace them." We begin with a recent memory of bracing against love, and move through the four steps of FACE to soften towards the wounded part of ourselves that is the root of our armor.

read more

Lesson 10

Radical Love Embodied

In our final lesson, we review what we've learned thus far and expand the impact of radical love into our embodied lived experience, which includes far more than our individual selves. By opening our eyes to the vast interconnectedness of life, we realize that by holding ourselves with radical love, we cannot help but create a more compassionate world. As we rest in the truth of interdependence, we release the heavy burdens of individualism and discover true belonging.

read more