😍 How to do Self-Empathy for MS

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SUMMARY 

Jen talks about self empathy is about acknowledging your feelings of anger, frustration, grief, worry, and so on when you are newly diagnosed with MS or have been living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) for a long time.

😍 How to do Self-Empathy for MS 

If you are just tuning in for the first time, this video series is about the messy house that we have in our heads and how to tame it as human beings living with MS.

We have lots of layers of messiness in our lives. We can tame our minds like a lion.

What I want to share with you in the messiness, the rawness and the realness of MS is the concept of self-empathy. This is something I teach and talk about a lot. I learned self-empathy from two amazing mentors, Sarah Payton and Eric Bowers. I went to a series of workshops over 12 months to learn about this technique as well as others.

In fact, at the time, I was in the first few years of my MS diagnosis.

I felt crazy at the beginning of my diagnosis, as some of you might attest to for yourself. Did it ever feel like a swamp that you just couldn’t get out of? Like a big mucky mess.

Before joining this study group, I was pushing away my thoughts and feelings as many people do.

Pushing them away as far as we can because there's pain. But that actually doesn't work. It just makes things messier. Bigger.

One concept I learned many years earlier from a coach, Andrew Barbara Starkey, is that the closer that we move towards fear, the smaller it gets. Feelings are one of the only things that gets smaller as we move towards them.

When we can embrace our feelings, when we can get in there and get cozy with acknowledging our feelings, it actually soothes the brain. It makes life less messy.

When I was diagnosed, I had a hard time accepting the fact that I was living with MS. I went into major denial about it, and this caused me a lot of suffering, pain and fear.

Can you relate?

Because of the suffering, I went to a counselor and she helped me to get in touch with my feelings so I could move towards acceptance. I did this through allowing myself to feel my feelings by feeling the grief and sadness at my core. It was after counselling, I started to study and train in doing self-empathy work.

I'll give you a quick way to get started on applying self-empathy to your own life.

When you are feeling whatever that feeling is, for example: fear, anger, frustration, hopelessness, aggravation, betrayal, disappointment, or defeat - Gosh, there's so many different emotions that can arise. This is just a few.

You start by acknowledging the feeling. I'll give you a scaled down example of the process for today:

1. I'm feeling frustrated because my throat's a little scratchy. It's impacting my video shoot.

2. I'll sit with the feeling of frustration for a few moments by taking a deep breath and acknowledging it.

3. Welcome the frustration in. That's it. Just welcoming the feeling, by breathing into it and allow the feeling to be there.

I know this process may sound counterintuitive. Test it out and let me know how it goes. It's a practice. It's something you can't just do once.

In fact, there was a time when I forgot to do self-empathy.

So for many years now, I’ll sit at my meditation alter and I’ll go through each feeling that arises and acknowledge them one by one. Welcome fear, welcome disappointment, welcome anger. I’ll breathe into each feeling and allow it to be there.

It's that simple.

I invite you to give self-empathy a try too.

About Jen

I'm Jen DeTracey and I'm the founder of Women Thriving with MS. I helps women go from Surviving with MS, to Striving with MS to Thriving with MS. I do that through coaching our, online programs the YouTube channel, Facebook group that's free and membership and so much more.

Jen's been living with multiple sclerosis for over 12 years. She went through this process of surviving with MS to striving MS to thriving MS. She is a guide, coach and teacher who helps you move forward on your journey from surviving to thriving with MS.

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