How To Attract Your People - Insight Timer Live

We all long for relationships and communities that uplift and nourish us, yet actually finding these connections is one of life's greatest challenges. In this talk and intimate practice, Catherine shares how we overcome old patterns and call in healthy relationships. Trauma-informed & anti-oppressive. Meditation music by Jamiel Conlon.

Transcript

Welcome everybody to How to Attract Your People.

Thank you for the recommendation,

Johanna,

Of this topic,

And I'm glad it resonated.

This is a really natural follow-up talk from the talk we did last time,

Which is Unshakeable Self-Worth.

Maybe you were there last time or maybe you can go back after this and listen to that,

But they have interlocking pieces that are going to make a lot of sense,

And I'm going to be mentioning quite a few of the same themes in this talk as I did for Unshakeable Self-Worth.

Just take a moment as we open and think about if you could be surrounded by your people,

Who are those people?

Right now in this state,

Without really thinking that much about it,

Who are your people?

What do they feel like to be around?

How do you feel in the presence of your people?

Take a breath and maybe you'll close your eyes and just go inward for one minute here and bask in the feeling of what it might be like to be surrounded by your people and what your heart feels like.

Take some breaths.

Then whenever you're ready,

You can come out of that state or maybe you just want to hang out there.

But I'd love to hear in the chat,

What does your heart feel like around your people,

Whatever those people might be?

So you're all saying,

I know I'm loved,

But I know everyone in my group is loved.

Yeah,

Accepted and loved,

Serene,

Calm,

Peaceful,

Joy,

Light,

And capable,

Understood,

And safe.

It feels light.

Yeah.

Happier and safe,

Unconditionally loved,

Alive,

Bright,

Joy,

Bone deep peace and acceptance.

Yeah.

So I'm really seeing a lot of light,

A lot of joy,

Not defensive,

You're seen,

You're accepted.

Deb says,

When you're a gay woman in the USA right now,

Safety seems to come up a lot for me.

Yeah,

Of course.

Yeah,

Safety,

Safety with your people.

Isn't it sad that I made this live?

What I mean is,

Isn't it sad that we have to work on this to attract our people,

That it's not given from the time that we were born?

This is only something that happens in an individualist society that we seek out our people,

That they're not given around us.

How did we get to this place?

How did we get to this place of being surrounded by people but terribly lonely?

Surrounded by people but terribly lonely.

There's a reason why solitary confinement is torture for humans.

When I was teaching yoga in inpatient psychiatric hospitals here in the Seattle area,

Which I did for two years,

A lot of the residents talk about solitary.

He's not in class today,

He's in solitary.

That was the worst place you could go in the psych hospital was solitary confinement.

I know they have that in jails as well.

Isn't it funny that we have this value,

Especially in the United States of individualism,

Of being exceptional,

Of being apart from other people.

But at the same time,

That's one of the worst kinds of torture for a person is to be exceptional and apart,

Taken away from the group.

Modern life has this dissonance that's innate to it.

We want to be exceptional,

We want to be seen as apart and different,

But yet it's torture for us.

How did we get here?

Because humans did not live like this for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

We didn't live as individuals.

What happened was colonialism happened.

I've talked a lot about this in other talks.

But what colonialism did is it separated us from the land,

And it separated us from tribe.

I'm fast-forwarding through a lot of complex history.

But just for simplicity's sake,

What happened was individual families and individuals,

Like families as in nuclear families.

First of all,

Nuclear families became a thing in Europe.

They were not a thing before that.

But nuclear families became a thing,

And then those families and individuals became disconnected and decoupled from land,

And land was where tribes lived.

White people went all over the world colonizing the world and all of the brutality that went with that.

But we arrived here,

As I speak for my white ancestors,

We arrived on this continent as separate,

As isolated units.

Do you see first of all that initial step of decoupling from land?

We were no longer connected to land.

We were no longer connected to the tribe or group that lived and was dependent on that land.

Isolated unit,

Boom,

Colonialism.

This is of course,

You have this in your ancestry,

If you have white ancestors.

You have a different kind of forest isolation if your ancestors are not white.

So just know that your history is going to be unique here.

So that's the first layer of disconnection from land,

And second layer from our tribe.

Something curious happens when you get a bunch of individual units living together,

Trying to live together.

I'm thinking about the colonial United States,

Is that what happens is conformity becomes important.

Because you come from different places and different tribes,

You have to start living together by a kind of artificial set of rules and artificial enforced ways of being.

So are you following me here?

So conformity paradoxically is a result of living in isolated units together.

I know this is complex and it's layered.

So most of you know that I'm a student of the work of Maledoma and Sibon Fusome,

Elders,

Now ancestors from the Dagra people of West Africa.

And they write a lot about the West and indigenous African life because they lived in both places.

And what I learned from specifically a book by Maledoma Some is that conformity doesn't exist in indigenous culture.

Right?

It's just different.

There's not the same kind of external enforced ways of being.

On the other hand,

There is,

Or rather there is exaltation of an individual who is born and their own uniqueness.

Because here's the thing.

When you are not born into a tribe,

You don't have innate worth and innate belonging.

So part of the reason that conformity is part of isolated units living together is that conformity is how we prove our worth to each other.

Does that make sense?

Conformity is how we prove that we're worthy of acceptance to each other.

When you're born into an indigenous tribe,

According to Maledoma,

You are worthy.

You know,

And I talked about this in the unshakable self-worth talk.

You have innate worthiness.

You have innate belonging.

And to the Western mind,

The temptation is to think,

Oh,

Well,

That means that you have to be the same as everybody else and you're not free.

Actually,

The opposite is true.

Because you have innate belonging,

You can be seen for exactly who you are because you don't need to contort yourself in order to prove that you belong.

So if you have innate belonging and worth,

You can be seen for exactly who you are and your own unique gifts because you don't have to contort yourself to prove that you belong.

You don't have to carve out parts of yourself that don't fit the mold of conformity of proving your worth to other people.

Yeah.

And I shared last time that in the Dagura tribe,

Before a baby's born,

The elders of the village perform a ritual with the pregnant mother where they have her lie down and spread sacred ash around her.

And they facilitate a ritual where the pregnant mother channels the voice of the unborn child.

And the unborn child gives their name.

And their name describes their own unique gift to the world that they're here to bring,

Why they're incarnating,

The reason,

Their sole purpose.

And so even before a baby's born,

The community knows the gift that's being brought with this soul.

And that uniqueness is celebrated.

And that gift is mentored,

Encouraged,

Seen,

Appreciated.

And that person's uniqueness is appreciated because of that innate belonging.

Just take a breath into that.

What would it be like if you came into this world like that?

In stark contrast to that,

What happens when we're born into a nuclear isolated family without the spiritual and community context of an indigenous community is that we're born.

And because our nuclear family is always going to be stressed,

Because we never evolved to do the work of a village with one or two people.

Parents are always stressed.

And they're never able to give the attention that a child needs.

We start to carve ourselves away in order to be convenient.

And we lose connection to our gift.

It's never seen.

And so who we really are,

Our uniqueness,

Our individuality,

Is most often something that we discover in mid-adulthood through trial and error and through a whole lot of healing work,

Through a whole lot of uncovering of our shadows,

Taking away the armor,

Loving ourselves so that our armoring dissolves.

And we can see what's at our core because that core has been obfuscated through conformity,

Through shame,

Because part of conformity,

Part of what we do to get love and approval from our stressed out traumatized parents is we have this idea that because we're not getting what we need,

Because we're not getting the quality of loving,

Focused attention that any human being needs,

Because we're not getting that quality of loving attention and that unconditional acceptance,

That there's something terribly wrong with us.

And that's where shame comes in.

And every child who's born into our world today imprints shame upon themselves.

It's just the way it is.

Even if you had amazing parents,

Just by virtue of our way of life,

No set of parents can be as present as a child needs.

And I say this in full grief,

Knowing that I,

Living in a nuclear family,

Am also not able to be what my toddler needs.

I mean,

Parenting was never meant to be this hard because we didn't evolve to just do this with one other person.

There's a reason it's so hard.

It was never meant to be this way.

You know?

We are born,

And we're born with this innate expectation written into our bones,

Written into our DNA.

Because humans have evolved for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years to live in communities,

We expect to be held by many hands.

We expect to be seen by many eyes and by many different expressions of masculine feminine,

Not just one or two.

You know?

We expect this,

And that is the root of so much of our innate feeling of emptiness and loneliness and loss that we never were met in the way that our bodies evolved to be met by many.

Melodoma says there's two basic needs of humans.

One is to know what your gift is,

The gift that your soul carries,

To know what that is.

And it might be multiple things,

You know?

But to know what your gift is and to give it.

And then the second wing is to have your gift received and acknowledged by a community.

So the two needs that humans have are to know and share our gift and to have it acknowledged and received by community.

And when we can't do that,

When we're blocked in either one of those needs,

We feel this terrible loneliness,

Terrible emptiness.

Yeah.

And let me give you an example from my own life here about my gift.

Because it's funny that most of us have a sense of what our gift is when we look at our childhood,

When we look at what brought us joy,

When we look at who we were innately at that time.

So when I was a child,

I cried a lot and for reasons that other people didn't understand.

And I would cry when people did things like make small talk.

I would cry.

There was one incident at a family reunion.

And I think I was,

I don't know,

10,

11,

Something like that.

Family reunion out in Minnesota.

And we were surrounded.

I was kind of surrounded by all these relatives.

And they didn't know each other very well.

And so there was a lot of kind of pretending going on and a lot of big smiles.

And I just burst into tears.

I just plain old burst into tears.

I didn't know why.

Nobody knew why.

And my mom was befuddled.

My mom was pretty much just befuddled by my sensitivity and helpless,

Didn't know what to do with it.

But it's only in retrospect that I know that I was already built for my gift.

I'm kind of this unit that's built to detect shadow.

What I was feeling is the unfelt pain.

And that was overwhelming to my system.

I'm this finely tuned instrument that detects unfelt pain and that's deeply impacted by it.

And then as I've matured and thought about it more and seen more and more examples of just how I work in the world,

I've found that I can describe my gift as transformative vulnerability.

That actually one thing I was doing with crying,

It wasn't just that I was feeling the unfelt pain,

But it was that I am vulnerable.

I express emotion.

And that gives permission to everybody else to express their vulnerability,

Transformative vulnerability.

And that's one way to describe my gift too.

And interestingly and perhaps tragically,

By some machinations of the universe,

We seem to be born into families that are kind of built to conceal this gift from us or to have us bury it so that we discover it as buried treasure later in life.

And what I mean by that is,

I'll give you an example.

So here I am with this gift of transformative vulnerability.

And I have a dad who's undiagnosed on the spectrum and very depressed.

And how that looks for him is very,

Very shut down,

Very rigid,

In rigid routines,

And the opposite of vulnerable.

And there was an incident when I was a teenager where I remember my mom was gone.

I was sitting at a table with my dad,

Very,

Very tense.

It was always very,

Very,

Very tense around him.

And I was trying to explain something to him,

I think about feelings or something.

And he interrupted me very loudly.

And he said,

Talk,

Talk,

Talk.

All you do is talk.

And I was shut down.

I got up.

I left silently.

And I took a walk on the street and just cried because I just had to get out of there.

And guess what one of my gifts is today?

Talking.

I talk.

And I help people heal that way,

Right?

And so it's like part of the story of my gift has to do with healing the way it was blocked by my family,

Right?

So coming back to how we attract our people,

We attract our people by living our gift.

That's how we attract our people.

And so often,

Our gifts are so shrouded in shame that this is quite a lot of work.

And it takes quite a lot of courage to know what our gifts are and then to have the courage to overcome shame and express them to other people in the world.

And Valerie,

You say,

It could have gone the other way.

It could have silenced you,

But it didn't.

Yeah,

It silenced me for many years.

It silenced me because I was in academia for many years trying to prove my worth by being smart.

Or as my decolonialism teacher,

Dr.

Rosales-Messa,

Would say,

I was trying to prove myself through my ability to collude with the colonial capitalist paradigm by being what we call smart.

Yeah,

So I did silence myself for years,

But there was always a core of me that knew,

Right?

There was part of me that knew that this is where my greatest fulfillment was.

So the loneliest people,

The loneliest people tend to be those who were most silenced as kids,

Who could not be vulnerable,

Who could not show your authentic emotions,

Who could not say no,

Who could not have boundaries.

These tend to be the loneliest adults.

And so it's going to be very difficult for you,

If you grew up in this way,

To find your authentic people because how you learn to show up is through a false self,

Through a persona that's kind of like a puppet of yourself or a mask.

That's how you learn to get approval and that isn't the real you.

It's not the vulnerable you.

And we do this very unconsciously.

And then we wonder why we're lonely,

Right?

Because we're showing up like this puppet,

Like this persona of ourselves.

So of course,

We don't have people around us who resonate with our soul and who see our gifts because we're not showing up to be seen.

Does that make sense?

Yeah,

Hillary says,

I was told to calm down,

Control myself,

And close my legs as a little girl.

Yeah,

That would make for a very lonely adult,

Hillary.

Calm down,

Control yourself,

Close your legs.

Yeah.

So then,

Of course,

You're showing up in that way,

In that closed way,

And you're going to attract people,

Or I guess you did attract people,

Who honestly would take advantage of that,

Right?

There are plenty of people with their own layers of wounding,

Like people with narcissism who are very attracted to people who are closed and small and who don't speak up for their needs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's the number one reason,

Is that we don't,

We were taught it wasn't safe to be ourselves,

In other words,

To be vulnerable,

Because being vulnerable does mean being ourselves.

And so we're not attracting people who resonate with our true self with that vulnerability.

And the second reason that we tend to be lonely and get into relationship dysfunction is because the wounded child in us is selecting the people in our life and not the vulnerable,

True,

Authentic adult.

In other words,

We're trauma bonding with people instead of forging secure adult connections with people.

Because sometimes,

And this is where it gets layered and complex,

Sometimes the people who we think are our people are not actually our people.

They're the people who a wounded part of ourself feels resonance with.

So before I met my husband,

Carlos,

I dated a whole string of guys who were very emotionally absent.

And I thought I had this imprint that like attractive,

Sexy guy was someone who was contemplative and intellectual and read,

Emotionally distant,

Introverted like me.

And I thought that's who my type was.

And that's who I kept getting attracted to over and over again.

And then I found myself in the end of 2015,

Beginning of 2016,

I found myself single,

Unusually single,

And kind of looking around and being like,

Crap,

I can't trust myself.

I really hit rock bottom.

I can't trust myself to find a partner.

I'm not capable of it.

And just like that early step in a 12 step program where you admit your powerlessness,

I am powerless over this substance.

I am powerless over this behavior.

I cannot control it myself.

I give it up.

I did that.

I did that with my ability to choose relationships for myself.

I basically said,

I can't do it.

I'm 30.

I don't know,

I was like 31 at the time.

I can't do it.

And then something magical happened.

When we give up control,

When we stop trying,

Magic happens.

When we stop trying,

Magic happens.

I gave up control,

And I just was browsing the internet.

And I found this TED Talk from a relationship psychologist.

And she was saying,

Because I was googling,

I can't choose the right partner.

And this talk was about how you're right.

We can't trust ourselves to choose the right partner after a certain number of dates.

Let's say after about the third day,

You're hormonally invested in this person.

And you're scrambled,

And you have other patterns at work that are doing the decision making.

And it's hard to choose the right partner.

So what this relationship psychologist said was,

What you do is you have a trusted friend or family member meet this individual,

This potential partner,

Before the third date.

And then they give you their authentic opinion of the person.

And you have to listen to them.

And so that's what I did is I just I said,

OK,

I will really listen to the opinions of other people.

And I'll stop going it alone.

I'll stop trusting myself to choose people.

So I was going and doing my thing and dancing.

I'm a partner dancer,

A tango dancer.

And I was doing a lot of dancing back then before kids.

And I saw this guy named Carlos,

Who's a dancer in the community.

And he's a tango teacher.

He's like a big shot.

He used to teach internationally,

You know,

Argentine tango.

And I thought,

Meh.

I'm sure he's full of himself.

He's this loud guy.

And he's like big extrovert,

Loud,

Kind of like a jock.

I think he was a football player in high school.

That's what he was doing.

He was doing in high school,

That's whatever.

I was not interested in him at all.

He did not fit the pattern at all of what I had in mind as an attractive partner.

But then a couple people,

A couple of our mutual friends independently came to me.

And they said,

Catherine,

Have you ever thought about going on a date with Carlos?

Because I think you two would actually be a great match.

And then another person said to me,

You know,

You and Carlos are really looking for the same thing.

You both want a family.

And I think you'd have a lot of fun together.

I was like,

With that guy?

No.

He's just kind of loud.

And he's kind of boring to me.

So I really wasn't attracted to my future husband at first at all.

And then by the grace of the universe and several synchronicities later that kind of put us together.

And then,

Of course,

I listened to the universe.

I was like,

OK,

So these two mutual friends told me this.

And that TED Talk told me to listen to other people.

And then the universe is kind of smushing us together.

So I guess,

OK,

Maybe I'll try talking to this guy.

And it took a couple times,

Like it took a couple of kind of get-togethers or coffees or dates before I realized that,

Whoa,

He's actually really healthy.

He's actually really mature.

And that's what wasn't fitting into my programming.

And I've told this to several other girlfriends,

Too,

And they've agreed that a lot of the times when we have a trauma history,

Which I'm sure all of you do in your own way,

When we have a trauma history,

We're going to find healthy people boring at first.

They will feel boring to us because we're used to this to love or attraction being a kind of roller coaster of intensity.

And this also goes with a little bit if you have anxious attachment.

You're used to this push and pull with other people.

And a healthy functional partnership doesn't have that or has it very little.

And so just take a breath into that.

Do you relate to that?

Do you relate to identifying sexiness or attractiveness with push and pull?

And by the way,

This can go for friendships as well.

This isn't just romantic partnerships.

And I was sharing this story with a friend of mine who's younger than me who's in her 20s and is in that phase of her life and is having fun and dating.

And she came to me like,

Catherine,

Why do I keep choosing these unavailable guys?

And I told her this,

Too.

I said,

You know,

Open your eyes to the people around you who might seem boring.

And just take the advice that you might just talk to them more.

Just try.

Try talking to them and really try.

Go on a couple of coffee dates with them and see what happens.

You know?

Try the boring people.

Sarah says,

I'm not attracted to mature men at all,

Right?

Yeah.

Johanna says,

Not necessarily boring,

But just too nice.

Yeah.

So LK,

What do I mean by healthy?

I mean healthy as in secure attachment and healthy as in you both can have yourselves and the other person at the same time.

In other words,

Non-codependent.

Non-codependent.

There is no rescuing happening.

There's no trying to fix or change the other person.

You both respect yourselves as unique,

Whole individuals.

And Amy says,

What mature man would love me back?

And that is a good transition to what I want to mention next is that,

Yes,

The right people,

Whether that's friendships or romantic partnerships,

Can feel boring to us or too nice.

And also,

And I say this from personal excruciating experience,

Being really seen and loved by somebody is really painful sometimes.

If you've grown up with this idea that love means rejection or love means pain,

Actually receiving love is very,

Very hard.

And many of us unconsciously would rather continue this fight and this cycle of,

Oh,

I can't find the same person than to actually sit there and be seen and loved for your whole self without exception.

So just take a breath into that.

And Amy says,

Old souls have it tough to find true and deep love.

I read something about it once and from my own experience.

Yeah.

And also,

I wanted to throw in the caveat that old souls and people with mother wounds often are expecting unconditional love from another person.

And unconditional love is not a reality in adulthood.

Unconditional love only exists from parent to child.

And if you're curious about this,

I suggest the book,

How to Be an Adult by David Rico,

R-I-C-H-O.

It is,

Yeah,

It's an excruciating fact of reality that unconditional love does not exist between adults.

Yeah.

We get it from ourselves.

We learn to be our own source of unconditional loving acceptance.

And once we can do that,

And I don't mean perfectly and I don't mean all the time,

Right,

Once we have some practice with that of being able to turn toward ourselves with unconditional love,

And you can do any of my shadow work meditations to practice that,

Then we start to attract people who are healthy.

Once we have practice with that,

We start to attract people who can love us because it's like we're developing love resilience.

We're developing practice of being loved and feeling loved.

And so when someone comes who can actually love us,

We can handle it.

Does that make sense?

Love resilience.

But we always have to practice it inside first.

And I also want to throw in the caveat that sometimes when we're really on this healing path and really loving ourselves,

We can meet somebody who is an old repetition of the pattern and we can think we've failed.

But actually,

It's just an opportunity to see ourselves again and be like,

OK,

That's what that is.

That's the old pattern.

And the difference is that I'm aware of it now.

And I know I'm worth so much more than that.

I was talking to my young friend about this very same thing.

She's like,

I've been doing so much work.

Why do I attract this guy?

And then I said,

Listen to how you're talking about it.

You are not the same person.

And you know what?

She cut it off so much faster than she would have before.

So it was not a failure at all.

It was just an opportunity to see her strength and her love resilience and her worthiness.

Yeah.

So let's just do a very brief practice here.

And I'm going to invite you to imagine yourself in front.

Imagine yourself in a stripped down vulnerable version of you.

And imagine somebody,

And it might be an imaginary person,

But just somebody who loves and accepts you for exactly who you are without trying to change you.

And we're just going to sit and bask in the presence of that energy.

And we're going to notice any resistance that comes up in you and just say yes to it.

Just see it like,

Yes,

You're there.

I hear you.

Because when we say yes to resistance,

It paradoxically dissolves,

If that makes sense.

So we're just going to experiment.

Think of this as an experiment of love resilience that will help you attract your people.

So if you'd like to participate just for a few minutes here and find your comfortable seat,

Notice that your body has weight here and is supported.

If it feels right,

You can close your eyes and feel that your heart is open in this place.

You are being your vulnerable self.

Maybe you can imagine yourself sharing your gift or expressing a vulnerable emotion.

Just feel what it is in this moment.

Feel in your body what it's like to show up as your vulnerable self.

Amplify this energy and this feeling in your body.

And now imagine that across from you at a comfortable distance is somebody,

Either a friend or a romantic partner,

An imaginary person or a known person,

Somebody who truly loves and accepts all of what you are.

Feel that they are looking right at you with a smile on their face.

And take some breaths here.

And if grief comes up,

You can feel it.

And if grief comes up,

Simply say yes to that too and place your hand on your heart and continue saying yes to it and receiving this love.

Know that even with your grief,

This person is still looking at you with so much love and smiling at you.

Can you let in any more of this love?

And most importantly,

Do you notice any walls or other resistance that are coming up in you?

And when you notice those,

Just say yes and continue receiving yes to the anxiety,

For example,

And continue receiving,

Knowing that this person is also loving you in your anxiety.

I love you in this grief.

I love you in this anxiety.

I love you even in your feeling of wanting to pull away from me.

Taking a few more breaths here.

Can you receive any more fully?

Can you receive this love in your body,

From your body,

Fully inhabiting your body?

A few more breaths here.

Knowing that this is an imprint,

An experiment that you can come back to at any time,

It's a beautiful way to practice love and resilience and attune yourself to the vibration that will inevitably attract your people to you.

So lengthening your inhales with so much gratitude for this loving presence you've conjured up here.

Come on back to the moment and open the eyes if they were closed.

Looking around your space,

Maybe moving a little bit and noticing how your body feels right now,

How your heart feels.

Know that we've only been doing this,

You were there for like seven minutes,

And notice what an impact that may have had on you.

Sarah says,

I feel like I'm going to explode with joy and I'm on fire.

Yes.

Now,

Sarah,

Your job is to develop joy resilience too by practicing this incrementally,

Right?

Like,

Can you hold even more joy?

Can you expand it even more?

Can you hold even more joy?

Can you hold even more joy?

Can you hold even more joy?

Can you hold even more joy?

Can you expand it even more and be present with it?

Beautiful practice and challenging.

Ginger says,

Oh my gosh,

Much harder than anticipated.

Yeah.

Johanna says,

Shaken.

Yeah.

So isn't this amazing when we actually directly encounter the love that our mind thinks we want,

But our body often has great resistance to actually receiving.

And it's our bodies that are sending the vibrations into the universe of who to attract.

You know,

It's our bodies.

So if you feel shaken or challenged by this,

Know that this might be a beautiful practice for you to bring that love into your own body,

To show up in your body more and more receiving love.

And you'll find that it gets easier and easier with time and with repetition.

And Becca says,

Expansion to consider who's already in my life that love me unconditionally and I have not realized it.

Yeah.

And isn't that amazing to realize that there might already be people in your life who do,

And you just might not have been tuned to see that.

You know,

We're often so blinded by our ideas of what love looks like that we can't see it when it's in front of us.

We can't feel it when it's in front of us.

Yeah.

Naomi says,

I was crying then felt shame,

Then open to the love.

I cried more then,

Then opened more love and stopped crying and softened and now feel calmer.

Yeah.

So this is also my practice,

By the way.

So my personal spiritual practice every morning is devotional.

I have my candle,

You know,

I address my helpers,

My guides and Mother Earth and thank them.

And what I do is I basically just grieve.

I show up,

I just show up present to my body as it is and allow emotions to flow through me.

And most days I'm crying quite a lot in my morning practice.

And what I say to myself is I love you in this grief.

I love you right here.

I love you in these tears.

I love you in this shame.

And if I'm trying to control myself,

Which I do often,

I'll say,

I love you in this control.

I love you.

And I just,

That is my personal everyday practice is usually just showing up,

Opening myself,

Grieving and whatever needs to move through me,

I just say,

I love you for this,

For whatever this feeling is.

So Amy says,

I'm terrified to be loved.

I think because I'm so afraid of being rejected in my vulnerability and imperfections.

Absolutely,

Of course you are because that's how you experienced being human as a child,

Is being rejected for being yourself.

So of course that's your imprint.

So perhaps you can say,

I love you for having that idea.

Like I love you for the challenge of being loved.

I love you in this challenge.

And paradoxically that's how we heal.

Yeah,

And Sergei says,

I feel like I become more whole and loved when you can love your bad sides,

It gives you an opportunity to receive more love.

Yeah,

So this is shadow work,

Right?

This is my definition of shadow work.

And remember that like shadow are just the parts of ourselves who have been in the shadow of love,

Who have not been loved.

Our shadow aspects are what we might call our bad aspects,

Which I don't use that word,

Right?

I don't believe we have aspects that are bad or good,

But the parts of ourselves that were rejected when we were young are put into our shadow.

And when we can love those,

That's how we do our shadow work and that's how we become whole.

And then when we show up as our whole self,

That's when we attract our people.

Yeah,

Jameel says,

Loving all that we are is a powerful and difficult practice,

But so important.

Yeah,

Jameel says,

Can we love if we act in toxic ways sometimes?

I'm trying to stop acting out of my hurt.

I want to do better and it happens with close family.

Yeah,

So yes,

Absolutely.

Like so you can love yourself for whatever is at the root of that toxic acting out.

So we all harm people,

Right?

This is part of maturity is realizing that we do inevitably harm others,

Whether it's our personal relationships or through our collusion with systems of oppression or through unconscious patterns that we have,

You know,

Like we all have,

We all harm,

We all actively harm other people and that's part of becoming a mature adult.

And so what you do with this practice is you identify what's at the root of that impulse to harm and then love that.

So like I was working with my therapist,

A lot of my juicy stories come from this.

I was working with my therapist on like some biases or prejudices that I have that come from my own control of my own body,

You know,

And she says,

What she told me is like,

Well,

Catherine,

You learn that this is how you have to show up to be loved and can you love that part of yourself that just needs love and that learn that that's how you get connection is you show up thin,

You show up,

You know,

This way or that way or perfect,

You know,

Whatever.

Can you love that part of yourself?

So always at the root of why we harm is part of us wants love and is trying to get it in the only way that we know how.

And so yes,

You can love that child part of you,

That wounded child part of you just like this,

Yeah.

And Johanna says,

I feel when you embrace your shadows completely,

You practically become invincible.

We can't be harmed by anyone if we unconditionally love ourselves.

Yeah,

It's true,

Yeah.

And I mean,

You will always feel pain,

Right?

It's part of being human.

You will experience,

You know,

Pain from others,

But you'll find that you recover a lot faster,

You know?

So the difference when we're on this healing path and when we get enough reps in,

The difference is that we don't,

It's not that we don't feel pain anymore.

It's not that we don't have the traumatic memories anymore.

It's that we're not hooked by them anymore.

They don't control us anymore.

Does that make sense?

So you'll find that,

Yeah,

You might,

You might feel hurt by another person.

You might attract a destructive person,

But you know what?

You're going to recover a whole lot faster and it's not going to ruin your life.

It's not going to shake you to your core like it would before,

Yeah.

So yeah,

I certainly think of shadow work as the path of invincibility.

It's certainly the path of courage and I call it becoming bold.

The path of becoming bold,

Yeah.

Yeah,

Kim says,

I've been alone so long now.

I've just gotten used to it.

The thought of dating again freaks me out.

It seems easier to be alone and work out my wounds,

Yeah.

Yeah,

So I would,

Kim,

I would just be with that part of yourself that wants to be alone right now.

And if it feels right,

You can slowly experiment with a practice like we did today to let in love,

To let in love from this imaginary other,

Which is really a part of you,

You know.

And as you do that,

You might find yourself softening to yourself and wanting connection from others,

Yeah.

And J.

M.

M.

Says,

Healing time is bittersweet when we're not with others.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

Because we are relational beings,

We're always in some relationship.

It's just what it means to be human,

Right?

We are relational beings.

Unfortunately,

In hyper individualized society,

Our options for how to be in relation are extremely and painfully limited,

You know.

I know that a lot of people have found a lot of connection in 12 step programs,

A lot of connection in like I have,

Like in dance communities,

In artistic communities,

Which of course,

Like with COVID have been really cut back,

But I think they're starting to come back.

You know,

We're starting to meet up with others again.

So opening to others is a necessity of being a human being,

But we can't force ourselves,

Right?

It has to happen on our own time.

But sometimes we have this idea that I have to heal myself before I get into relationship and that's backwards in a way,

Because to a certain extent,

That's true.

Like,

You know,

It's good to get the reps in and to practice loving yourself so that you can have love resilience in a relationship,

But healing is never a destination and we always need others to complete our healing process.

Like,

Does that make sense?

Like relationships are where we do deeper levels of healing.

Yeah,

And we cannot force ourselves to be in relationship.

So thank you everybody so much for being here today with me.

Thanks for your donations.

That's a great way to communicate if this was helpful for you and you can always donate on my profile later too,

Or after the live is over,

There's a little button to donate.

Thank you to all of you for bringing your hearts today.

This is such a vulnerable thing to practice and such a difficult thing to recognize about ourselves,

Right,

That actually receiving the love from people who our mind thinks that we want in our lives is actually quite challenging and it can be quite humbling.

So thank you for your vulnerability today and I will see you in the shadow work group here on Insight Timer.

So if you wanna connect between lives,

That's our meeting place.

It's just called shadow work and I'm the admin for it.

I wish each and every one of you an absolutely beautiful day and weekend and I will see you again probably in a couple weeks from now.

Take care everybody.

Reviews

So beautiful, really love your teaching & talking Catherine! ❤️ I was also in academia, then quit. Now still on the path of knowing what my gift is and sharing it (although it's definitely along the lines of tenderness and vulnerability, listening and presence)...

It’s always a surprise for me to listen to someone like you and relate to everything you say. My gift as a child was to see the beauty in nature, in flowers, my mom’s garden, my dad’s animals at the farm, my sisters’ beauty in the way they dressed, did their hair. Within the conformity I grew up in all those things were labelled as feminine. I was a boy, I was not supposed to feel beauty. Today I share the gift of beauty through my artwork and the gallery I own. I live in the midst of wonderful nature, heaven on earth. And I also still have to do shadow work. Love resilience I need to practice and your guidance today was magical. Experiencing receiving love from my future soul mate without the fear of being abandoned for loving too much. Being loved by someone who accepts me the way I am. Being able to recognize more rapidly the famous avoidant attachment I usually connect with and seeking a more secure attachment even though at first it may sound boring. 😂
Thank you for what you do, for sharing your gift with me this morning. 🙏

Thank you so much for this insight and for the work you do. Feels less lonely to be a part of this healing community ❤️

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟your talks are so helpful Catherine 🙏thank you for all you do for us

Catherine is gold. She is kind and wise and her practices are touching my life and helping me heal.

Absolutely beautiful. I mostly liked the guided meditation part. To imagine that someone loves you exactly how you are. I need to practice this much more. Thank you. ♥️

I appreciate this so much!! This is my 2nd time listening not including being present for the live talk. I always receive something new and helpful. The love resistance practice is so powerful! Thank you, Catherine! ❤️🌹

Thank you. Very helpful.

Beautiful and necessary, thank you!🥰

Insightful and reassuring. Thank you for sharing your gift.

Catherine's live events are captivatingly inspirational and lovingly inclusive. She talks to you. Some teachers just talk past you; they could learn a thing or two from her.💚🌻

Amazing as usual Equal parts information and healing. Ty bless you Catherine 💗🙏🏻💗

As always, so interesting and insightful.
Thank you🙏