Nicole LePera

A couple moments later, sometimes a couple hours later, it's a completely different perspective.

I'm like, well, it's really not that big of a deal now, right?

And that's a prime example of our body calmed down enough

to have a different experience of what happened.

The event didn't change, right?

You still said the thing, did the thing that I didn't like, but my relationship to it did.

And the only thing that shifted, the biggest thing that shifted was my body is calmer.

I can now have a different perspective of what happened, a different response that I want to then initiate the next time.

But again,

All of that happens when we begin to look at not only our general lifestyle and maybe the choices that we're making that are unknowingly contributing to a consistent amount of stress, but we're also kind of looking at the moments where we're likely to react and we're preparing ourselves before that moment.

I want to acknowledge too, it's not just parents because school systems, teachers, I mean, these moments and developmental times are so impressionable.

There is so many outside, you know, voices that do get directed our way that then get absorbed as who we eventually believe ourself to be and then how we talk to ourself.

And I also want to connect with

behaviors and what is modeled.

Because the ability to respect and love and show up in self-care is not just modeled by how we're talked to, but by how not only we're treated, but by how we're watching the adults around us treat themselves.

So we can become very disrespectful and critical of ourselves, sometimes because of these voices that are very critically spoken to us, shamefully spoken to us, but also because we're

Maybe no one showed up to care for us.

In childhood, we don't have the maturity to zoom out, to understand everything that we're talking about from a very compassionate lens.

Of all the reasons why my parent was limited in the way that they are, we will land on a very self-focused reason.

We become the reason why someone did not show up to physically care for us, why someone might have abused us sexually or physically or neglected us entirely.