Self love, laughter & our inner critic
If you’ve been through any kind of spiritual awakening or self love breakthrough yourself, then you know the importance of a sense of humour. When we start to really feel into life, we feel the rough with the smooth, and you need a good laugh sometimes to get you through! Am I right?
Recently I’ve had the pleasure of spending some time with comedian Mia Lux. A few weeks back I met up with her in New York. She joined me for the first episode of the second season of my podcast, Liberate Your Authentic Self, where we talked about comedy as a medium for awakening.
Then I had the pleasure of joining her for an episode of her new venture, The Conscious-ish Show, which was so much fun to record. In an intimate studio setting, we got to talk all things self-love and resilience, including where that inner critic voice we all have comes from.
Mia asked me why we are so mean to ourselves, and if the negative self-talk is there from early childhood.
The latter has a clear answer – and that’s a no. But the reasons why the negative self-talk begins in the first place… well that’s a longer story!
It often begins with the things that we pick up from the world around us while we are young, impressionable, and forming our beliefs about the world. If as a child you were criticized, about anything at all, never mind how innocent that may have seemed to your critic – your young mind may have taken that on board as something to remember.
It all comes down to survival. Humans are wired to live in communities – there is safety in numbers, and the ultimate threat to our ‘caveman brain’ is for us to be left out in the cold with no members of out tribe to have our backs. So of course, as our brain is also a threat-detection device, it is always looking to keep us from being excluded by our tribe.
We worry about whether our peers like us, if our family approves of us, and if we are worthy enough to stay safely in our community. So when a member of our tribe criticizes us, we give that common more weight that it often deserves. The inner critic voice in our head is an echo of these concerns – “If you do ‘x’ then ‘person y’ won’t like you anymore.”
As an adult, we can begin to recognize when our inner critic is trying to run the show, and we can step in with a reality check and some positive self-talk. This is actually one of the Top 10 Traits of Highly Resilient People – lot’s more on that coming up including a book, a challenge, and in 2020, a documentary film too!
For now, please do enjoy my episode of The Conscious-ish Show. I hope Mia and I give you some laughs, as laughter is also really good for your wellbeing and vitality.
If you could use a resilience boost this December, then check out our 30 Days of Resilience Challenge on Instagram, and head here for the free resilience downloads!