Dr. Nicole LePera

If we notice that habit...

awareness, now we can start to create boundaries or separation, right?

Acknowledging that we are different.

We can feel for someone, right?

Attune, like we began the conversation, but we don't maybe have to take over responsibility.

Like a lot of us people pleasers, appeasers, and caretakers immediately do.

So with awareness, right?

That's a brain area where we're not super stressed, where old reactions and identities and roles are going to take over.

Again, we're noticing that that also happens in our mind.

We're narrating our life.

We're kind of inserting old beliefs in new circumstances, even where they don't apply.

And then we can make those new choices, whether it's simply just refocusing our attention away from something that's unhelpful in our mind, or again, refocusing our attention to our body, asking our body what we need in that moment, and then making those choices, shifting how we're then relating to someone else.

And what a powerful question for those of us who never were considered, were asked, who maybe had very well-intentioned parents who...

wanted to give us what we needed, but we don't yet know.

So I want to kind of make it clear here, two things that you very wisely said, age aside, we don't go from 100 to zero.

It really is a smaller kind of movement, right?

We don't go from completely overwhelmed to peace and zen, right?

We shift slowly.

We downshift through small, consistent actions.

I can even make a case that the farther, the more we move out of our kind of comfortable, habitual behaviors, right?