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Anyhoo, one of the Dollops pinged a few pithy reflections and fascinating questions back to me and prompted gears to turn within my snow bound little brain.

The Dollop in question

How Can I Trust Myself Enough to Choose the Path of Self-Kindness?

Self-nurturing is a caramelized topping over a trust brulee. You’ve got to have the trust or you are just left with burnt sugar. Mistrust of past decisions and mistakes can make it easy to believe that burnt sugar is good enough for you. But it isn’t.

Today’s Intention: Exploring the link between self-trust and self-kindness, even if just for a moment.

And Now for The Fascinating Question

Christine wrote:

This one is very thought provoking and complex, Jen. It is so germane to the issues I am struggling with today. I would really appreciate a little elaboration on it – especially the sentence about mistrust of past decisions and whether burnt sugar is good enough. Thanks so much! I adore you, too!”

Adoration right back at you, Christine. Thanks for the berry, berry good question. Here’s what I think I meant (I say think because there is certainly no right answer):

If we nurture ourselves, without being connected to self-kindness, we end up not nurturing ourselves.

Huh?

Without self-kindness, we lack a connection to ourselves and we often end up settling for less than what would truly, really, honest-to-goodness fill us up, soften us, warm us, inspire us. We may settle for what I call shadow comforts or my friend Molly Gordon calls phantom comforts – which just means something that masquerades as self-nurturing, makes us feel less us, less centered, instead of more.

Either way, we end up feeling brittle and frustrated and restless, even cheated.

Why does this happen?

It happens because we aren’t trusting what we really want. We aren’t trusting our instincts, our desires, “the soft animal of our bodies” and that lack of trust is breed and fed by self-judgment, by beating ourselves up for being human (i.e.  highly imperfect and prone to mis-steps and strange detours that, at the time, seemed oh so brilliant).

When we beat ourselves up, we reinforce the idea we’re not to be trusted and we don’t deserve to listen to what we really want.

We move away from our own wisdom, our own desires, from true self-nurturing and toward burnt sugar.

Beating ourselves up leads us away from learning and thus away from trusting our desires and away from the ability to see and choose our own paths

But when we can connect with a bit of self-kindness, a wink or two of self-mercy

We begin to touch into self-trust. We can feel safe enough to take a few moments to discern what we really want, moment-by-moment.

We begin to let life lead us instead of us trying to force life to do what we want.

We develop a level of trust in our instincts and desires, that, while far from perfectly reliable, is deeply affirming and renewing. Truly richly comforting.

Then the whole idea that burnt sugar is good enough for you

- the idea that pleasure is having the cake (or buying the purse or calling the man who broke your heart again or indulging in another three hours of on-line Scrabble) begins to fall away and you experience, with your body and your heart, what truly comforts you, what helps you to be a creator of your own life.

Or as Jill Badonsky says in her utterly delightful new book, The Awe-Manac,

make compassion a hobby. The non-linear practice of moving forward two tiny steps and side ways one stumble is okay. In the long run, this will get you further than the other schemes that 85 percent of give up on because we didn’t do it perfectly or because it was too much too soon”

I await your comments, which are always, incredibly insightful.

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