Loving Yourself in Difficult Times

<p>•  In all of us, there is those good qualities and characteristics, and then there's also those qualities and characteristics that maybe we sometimes don't totally love about ourselves. Maybe there are some things that we wish that we didn't act upon, maybe there are some things that we wish we could change about ourselves. So we're going to be talking about that today and kind of what that means, and how to just really love and appreciate yourself or where you are, what you've been through and how that can dramatically change your life.  (3:13)</p><p>•  I think giving yourself permission to just be... Like we talked about with Natalie a few weeks ago, perfectly imperfect. Just give yourself permission not to have to be perfect, and just know that sometimes when contrast comes up in our lives, maybe there's a person that's really triggering us and maybe sometimes we respond the right way and sometimes we act out and we don't. To just learn to not beat up on ourselves, but to learn , Okay, I can still love myself, or I can take from this... What do I need to learn? What do I need to do in this situation? How can I grow? And something I've come to realize is, everybody in our life is like a mirror of what's really going on within us, and when we get triggered by somebody, it's actually something within us that we need to look at, that we need to recognize that we need to heal that, we need to have compassion for.   (6:46)</p><p>•  When I was young, I was bullied a little bit, just for my looks and gaining some weight... I don't know, I mean, I was just not treated very kind. I took a lot of the things, I didn't know how to respond. I didn't know what to say when people would laugh or make fun of me, or say things that would make me feel sad, I would just be quiet. I didn't know how to respond. So fast forward until my teenage years, I was taking that and taking that and taking that in, I didn't really know a healthy way to express those emotions, so I suppressed them. and fast forward to my young adult life, whe