Awakening Your True Self into 2021 [Episode #539]

Today’s solocast topic is: Awakening Your True Self into 2021

As we launch into the new year, many of us are focused on specific resolutions or goals for 2021. Sometimes, in setting these resolutions, we lose sight of who we are. We forget our true self, even causing us to feel like we’re not enough.

That’s why today’s solocast episode is dedicated to Awakening Your True Self Into 2021. This episode is all about loving yourself for who you are! Yes, changing your thoughts, your old beliefs and the stories you tell yourself can be hard to do. But once you break through and overcome the feeling of not being good enough, you can own your true self and radiate light!

Today I’m sharing tips for awakening and owning your true self, as you radiate light and love into the world. Nothing is more beautiful than authenticity and approaching wellness in our holistic way, especially with our Four Cornerstones. When we are whole, we are healthy, we are energetic, we are our most truly beautiful because we shine with the light and the radiance from within and from our energy, and we are also our most powerful.

Topics Covered In Awakening Your True Self into 2021

#1. My tips for awakening your true self in the new year as they relate to Food, Body, Emotional Well-Being and Spiritual Growth

#2. How your New Year’s dieting and weight loss goals might be negative affecting your psychology

#3. What (free!) techniques you can start today to increase your self-awareness and self-confidence

#4. How you can incorporate mental practices to awaken your true self and boost your authenticity

I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!

There are lots of ways to share your responses or questions about the podcast:

• Comment below
• Connect on Twitter: @_kimberlysnyder
• Follow the conversation on my Instagram
• Comment on my Facebook Page
• Ask a question: mysolluna.com/askkimberly

Be sure to Subscribe to the Podcast and follow me on Soundcloud, so you never miss an episode!

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

You may be really intrigued by podcasts, but you may just know how to listen or subscribe. It’s very easy, I promise! To listen to more than one episode, and to have it all in a handier way, on your phone or tablet, it’s way better to subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Want to know what to expect from other episodes of the “Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder”? My passion is to inspire and empower you to be your most authentic and beautiful self. We offer interviews with top experts, my personal philosophies and experiences, as well as answers to community-based questions around topics such as health, beauty, nutrition, yoga, spirituality and personal growth.

The intention of the Feel Good Podcast is to well…help you really Feel Good in your body, mind and spirit! Feeling Good means feeling peaceful, energized, whole, uniquely beautiful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of your perfectly imperfect life. This podcast is as informative and full of practical tips and take-aways as it is inspirational. I am here to support you in being your very best! I have so much love and gratitude for you. Thank you for tuning in and being part of the community :).

LEAVE A REVIEW ON ITUNES

Listeners really respect the views of other listeners, so your response helps people find good material they are interested in! If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends and give us a rating or review. Many thanks in advance.

[❤️ FAN OF THE WEEK]

[RESOURCES]

• SBO Probiotics
• Detoxy
• Digestive Enzymes  
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• FREE Gift: 7-Day Meditation Series (DIGITAL COURSE)
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• Be a part of the community Join the Feel Good Circle
• Kimberly Snyder’s Books
• Four Cornerstone FREE Guide: Text the word GUIDE to +1-855-741-0602
• Additional resources in transcript

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• 5 Signs of Spiritual Awakening
• How to Easefully Increase Spirituality into Your Life
• Why Being Present Matters
• Boosting Your Mindset During Difficult Times

Additional Resources:

• Thine Own Self: True self concept accessibility and meaning in life
• Helpful or harmful? The comparative value of self-weighing and calorie counting versus intuitive eating on the eating disorder symptomology of college students
• How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing
• Letting Go of Self: The Creation of the Nonattachment to Self Scale
• Goal Setting Is Linked to Higher Achievement
• Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness
• Self Talk as a regulatory mechanism – How you do it matters
• From Mental Power to Muscle Power – gaining strength by using the mind

Powered and Distributed by: PodcastOne

Moshi Sleep: Download the Moshi app on App Store or Google Play Store and get access to a 1 week free trial of Moshi Premium.
Feel Good Digestive Enzymes: Use code: welcome15 for 15% off

Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:01 Hi, Beauty, and happy, happy New Year. I am so excited to be here with you sitting over on the other side into 2021. I am so excited for all of us to have an amazing year and to really start to step into our truth, into our power, and into actualizing all of our heartfelt connected dreams this year. So, sending you a huge virtual hug, no matter where you may be. I love you and happy, happy New Year.

Kimberly: 00:39 Today, our solocast, I wanted to do a solocast and speak to you directly, one-on-one, for our first solocast for 2021. Our topic this week is Awakening Your True Self into 2021. In today’s solocast, I have some really interesting research and studies that really just back up our philosophy and the way that we approach wellness in our holistic way, and especially with our Four Cornerstones, which are food, body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth, which to me is the most important way that we can really nourish ourselves and to elevate ourselves is to treat ourselves as whole. When we are whole, we are healthy, we are energetic, we are our most truly beautiful because we shine with the light and the radiance from within and from our energy, and we are also our most powerful.

Fan of the Week

Kimberly: 01:47 So before we get into our topic, I want to give a quick shout out to our Fan of the Weeek. Her name is KyraS14, and she writes amazing woman who empowers. She writes, “I absolutely love listening to Kimberly. She is real and gives you the facts. She knows how to help you without making you feel judged because we are all on different parts of our journeys. Having a degree in nutrition, I fully recommend Kimberly if you need help in your plant-based or losing weight journey as well. Also, I read all of her books and they are so helpful if you want more information. Thank you, Kimberly. Sending you love.”

Leave a Review and Subscribe on Itunes

Kimberly: 02:26 Thank you so much, KyraS14 for your beautiful review and also for your beautiful soul being part of our community. I am so grateful for you and thank you, thank you again, just for taking the time to write a review. Beauties, for your chance to also be our fan of the week and for me to read your beautiful words, please just take a moment or two out of your day and please leave a review for us over on iTunes, which is very easy and relatively fast. You could do a one sentence review and free, and it’s just a great way to support the show energetically and to help other beauties, like yourself, find the show. So I thank you right from my heart in advance for taking the moment and the time to do that. While you’re over there, please be sure to subscribe to our show. That way, you don’t miss out on any of these solocasts, interview podcasts, or Q&A podcasts.

Solocast

Kimberly: 03:26 So, there is a interesting study and all of these studies, of course, are over in our show notes over at mysolluna.com, but I want to kick it off from the study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It talks about a number of philosophical and psychological theories suggesting the true self and authenticity are important contributors to enhancing wellbeing, increasing levels of self-esteem and meaning in life. So I think that there was such introspection that happened for all of us in 2020 because so much was ripped away and changed and shifted, and we had to go inward to try to make sense of what was going on in our outward changing world. As we go along, this idea of connecting with ourselves is so huge.

Kimberly: 04:24 Also, if you’re interested, we have just launched our brand new Solluna Circle. I can’t wait to give it a quick shout out right here because I was just recording material for it as well. The theme this month is manifesting success, and it’s all about how success is not this outward thing, that is about how much money we have or how many followers you have or how skinny you are, all these things what society tells us as success. For all of us that have hit those numbers and still are like, “Oh, well, that wasn’t it. I’m still searching. I’m still not totally happy. I’m still anxious,” we realized that this idea of connecting with yourself, with your truth gives you so much satisfaction and meaning and purpose.

Kimberly: 05:17 From that deep connection, then you start to create from there. You start to create out in the world, whether it’s in your job and the way that you take care of your family, the way that you conduct yourself in the world, the way that you create your friendships, the way that you do your hobbies, whatever it is, you’re creating from this connected place. It’s disconnection that makes us feel stressed out and it’s disconnection that makes us confused about what to eat and what to put into our bodies and what diet to follow and how to exercise and if we’re in the right relationship. So the more connected we are, we grow in confidence and we grow in peace and we grow in our abilities to manifest because we’re living in our aligned truth and we waste far less energy.

Awakening Your True Self with Cornerstone #1: Food

Kimberly: 06:07 So let’s go further into this topic now by cornerstone. So again, our cornerstones are food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. When we’re talking about awakening your true self, we want to fire up all parts of ourselves because what happens is if we ignore one cornerstone or two, let’s say we ignore our emotions, our emotional mental health, then we often obsess over one or the others. We obsess over our bodies, or we obsess over our food, and there’s only so far those physical cornerstones take us. They are important. All the cornerstones are important, but we need to take this really holistic approach to get the most incredible results, the most incredible feelings of explosive joy and peace, and things start falling into place.

Kimberly: 07:02 The reason I speak about this so passionately is because that’s been the journey that I have found for myself. I used to obsess about food. I used to obsess about my body. When I started taking this approach and treating myself as a whole person, things just started happening and they started to become easier and easier. So every book that I wrote became increasingly easier to write, and goals, let’s say intention started to become easier to create. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t hard work involved in focus, but there just is less confusion and less wasted energy and less turning outside of ourselves. The wisdom starts to rise up inside of you, and it’s very powerful.

Kimberly: 07:56 So our first cornerstone is food. I just want to point out this 2018 study, which again, I will link to in the show notes, where researchers found that calorie counting and self-weighing was associated with an increased risk of eating disorders, while intuitive eating led to favorable eating habits. So this study went on to talk about things popular New Year’s rituals, fad dieting, weight loss goals. They actually hinder your wellness and they negatively impact your mental health. So we’ve been talking about this for a long time in our community, and I just want to highlight that numbers are just one indication and they’re very finite and they’re very, very rigid and we are not rigid beings. We are dynamic beings. And so, when we just focus on plain numbers, we tend to miss out and we tend to suffer more and we tend to use more energy than we need to.

Kimberly: 09:02 What I mean by that is the rigidity of, “I have to weigh a certain amount by the certain date,” where does that lead us? That leads us to just focusing on the number instead of nourishment and the feelings in our body and joyful cooking and joyful eating. When I dropped that myself, it was amazing how my body changed. I did drop the excess weight and I dropped the bloat. There was different factors of course, but I also was able to just never, ever have to go back to it. So even though the outside world maybe buzzing about new fad diets and buzzing about how people are just slashing calories to lose weight, you don’t have to buy into that. The way to awaken yourself from a food perspective is to start tuning into your intuition, start asking yourself, “What does my body need right now? Is it a hot soup? Is it a sweet potato? Do I need to make myself a Power Protein Smoothie?” and to start really tuning into your body.

Kimberly: 10:16 We have a whole support system of hundreds, maybe thousands at this point, but definitely hundreds of recipes that are full of fiber and they’re filling. I promise you, if you really start to fill up with fiber and you start to tune into your body and you start to drop all the numbers and weighing yourself all the time, everything will start to fall into place because feelings, emotions, feeling fit, feeling energized in your body, feeling stronger are far greater motivators than just the rigidity of finite numbers that are constricting and often lead to shame and guilt and all these things, which drag your energy down and can impair digestion, by the way, as well. So just this year, think about awakening to your true self food-wise, which is you are so far beyond numbers. When you think about everything in your life being beyond numbers, beyond limited timeframes and ages and calories and all this stuff, you just open up all this energy for yourself, and it’s a tremendously powerful way to awaken to the truth and the true power that you are.

Awakening Your True Self with Cornerstone #2: Body

Kimberly: 11:33 All right. Second cornerstone is body. A study from the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and the Human Neuroscience Journal found that deep breathing has a powerful impact on your central nervous system and psychological status, something yoga has always said. But they go on to conclude that deep breathing techniques allowed the subjects in this study to have better control over the biological reactions to external stimuli, increased feelings of relaxation and comfort, and reducing symptoms of anxiety, depression, anger, and confusion. So breath work pranayama, working with this deeper than the breath, it’s working with the life force, but we can say that breathing is part of pranayama, part of one of the limbs of yoga. I’ll say one of the most important limbs, but it’s a tangible limb that I think leads us to the deeper and deeper and deeper aspects of yoga.

Kimberly: 12:36 When we work with the breath, we start to tune in. As this study is saying in scientific terms, but from yoga terms, we’re pulling all our energy from the senses that are always flowing out if we let them. Looking at the news, looking on social media, smelling, tasting, touching, outward, all the stimuli, everything is out here. And so what it means is that we need to direct some of that energy back into our bodies if we are to get the most wisdom possible from our bodies, if we are to be able to listen to our own intuition, which will lead us to the path of our greatest creations and our greatest manifestations and our decisions, “How do I want to exercise? What does my body need today? How can I best take care of myself?”

Kimberly: 13:25 So breathing, embodied breathing is very important. We have different breathing exercises that are part of our meditations over on the site. Every month in our circle, we have a different meditation technique that I create for you. My voice sounds a little bit more subtle today. I just recorded the meditation a little bit ago for our circle this month, and it’s a good one. But just simply this idea of connecting with your breath is something that I’d like you to really consider this year in meditation, but also in your daily life. You can put a sticky note on your desk, breathe. My long term client, Drew Barrymore, has breathe as a tattoo on her wrist, and I remember when she got it.

Kimberly: 14:24 And so, however you want the reminder to be, just mini pauses throughout the day to tune in, breathe down into your belly and put your hands on your belly and you can feel the breath coming all the way down, down, down, down into your belly, into your body, into your core, and that will help you center yourself and that will help you come from a deeper place, a more aligned place of making decisions, a more aligned place of finding clarity for those daily decisions. So use the breath, use it daily, connect with your breath, and you will start to see a much deeper connection with your overall self and your overall intuition.

Awakening Your True Self with Cornerstone #3: Emotional Wellbeing

Kimberly: 15:08 Our third cornerstone is emotional wellbeing. So I have a couple of studies that I want to highlight, and then we discuss. The first comes from a 2018 study, published in Frontiers in Psychology. It found that individuals who practice letting go of negative psychological thoughts and feelings or more successful in relating to their “self” and were aligned with higher levels of wellbeing and adaptive functioning. So negative psychological thoughts sounds a lot to me like forgiveness. Forgiveness is in there. Forgiveness is a very important part of awakening because forgiveness is very heavy and forgiveness drags us down.

Kimberly: 16:00 If we don’t forgive, there’s these energies, these resentments, these parts of us that actually block our energy on all levels. They block our joy. They block us from connecting to others. They block us from digesting. They block us. They create reactions so that our nervous system gets stimulated again, which leads to disruptions in our endocrine system and also our immune system. So, we want to let go. We want to forgive not only others, but we want to forgive ourselves. We mess up. It’s okay. Everybody messes up. So the more we can just practice this idea of forgiveness for small and bigger things, we will start to feel a lightness and we will start to benefit more and more.

Kimberly: 16:47 The next study comes from an NPR interview with neuroscientists, Dr. Branch Coslett. He was discussing this idea that 60,000 thoughts cross your mind every day, and most of which are habitual, repetitive thoughts. So he was speaking in this interview about the importance of silencing the inner critic. Imagine, 60,000 thoughts. Imagine how many thousands of thoughts, if you have this inner critic telling you you’re not good enough, that you’re fat, that you’re not smart enough, you lack this, you lack that, imagine how powerfully bad that is. Imagine how it’s like cutting off your foot. You’re handicapping yourself.

Kimberly: 17:35 The body responds to the mind as well. The body definitely tends to take on auto suggestions for the mind. So the body will start to sculpt to these ideas, whether it’s in the form of holding onto more fat or if it’s even psychologically, not even trying for that idea or that project because you don’t feel like you’re good enough, or just shutting down in so many different ways and shutting down your body, which of course we don’t want. So watch your inner thoughts, pay attention to what you’re saying to yourself. When you start to distance yourself from your thoughts, instead of identifying with them, you can start to pay more attention, and then you start to notice. And then the next step after that is dropping the ones that don’t serve you anymore.

Kimberly: 18:24 It can take practice. I started to notice how much I would say to myself, “Oh my God, your thighs are so fat. You’re so gross. You’re so fat.” I wasn’t aware really what I was saying for a while. I said it very casually, but then I started to tune into what I was saying. And then I started to still say it, but then I was like, “Ooh, I shouldn’t say that anymore.” The awareness was growing. And then eventually, I just stopped saying it. So awareness shines the light of truth and awareness is very important. So just start to be aware of what you are saying to yourself mentally, the things that no one hears you say, and the things that you probably would say to nobody else, and just start really paying attention.

Kimberly: 19:07 The next study comes from psychologist, Gail Matthews, who founded a 2015 study that when people wrote down their goals and intentions, they were 33% more successful in reaching them than those who just mentally noted them. So emotionally, when we connect with ourselves, we are meant to express. We are meant to create. Putting things down on paper is such a powerful way of starting to put our energy out into the world. We’re starting to create outward from our hearts, in our center, and then we put it out. If we don’t, we start to bottle up. If we start to ignore or we get so busy that we don’t really follow our passions, we start to feel stagnant. We start to feel repressed and suppressed, and none of this is healthy for ourselves. Of course, none of it helps us to really actualize and awaken our true self.

Kimberly: 20:04 So, write down your feelings and your dreams and your goals. Keep your journal around, keep it handy, keep it close to you as I do. I actually carry my journal around with me from room to room because I get inspiration and ideas all the time. It’s not linear. I don’t think inspiration works in linear ways. We can’t just sit down and say, “Okay, I’m going to have my best ideas right now in the next five minutes.” So, it is important that we allow the space for spontaneous inspiration to arise and to respect it and to note it. And so, writing it down can be really powerful and really wonderful practice to focus on this year for you.

Awakening Your True Self with Cornerstone #4: Spiritual Growth

Kimberly: 20:51 So our fourth cornerstone is spiritual growth. The first study I want to point out is from the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Psychologists have found that meditation can affect brainwaves in a way that increases self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence. This is something that’s merging more and more, this idea of studying meditation and what it’s doing to our brain. What I love about that is it gives us a concrete idea of how powerful meditation can be. So I actually did a couple of neurofeedback trainings a couple of years ago. When our brainwaves start to become more coherent, we find that we feel more peaceful and we feel aligned and everything just tends to work so much better. We were not self-doubting ourselves when our brainwaves aren’t erratic and all over the place.

Kimberly: 21:51 So spiritually, this idea of really stepping into your meditation practice, deepening it, honoring it, placing as much importance on it as you would on drinking your GGS, for instance, is going to help the flow of your whole life. It’s going to help you connect to yourself. It’s going to give you that space for not doing into just breathing into the beingness of you, which is where your true power comes from anyway. The next study I wanted to point out is a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where researchers found that by calling ourselves by our own names and using affirmations can help us like ourselves and our bodies more and even make us more successful, allowing us to chase our dreams.

Kimberly: 22:40 So this is interesting, our own names using affirmations. So I guess it would be like, “Kimberly is aligned today. Kimberly is going to create the best meditation for the community today.” They sound silly to you, maybe it doesn’t. If it resonates, I say use it, because why not? Whatever tools work for you were meant to use, and connecting in with ourself, connecting in with our confidence, which comes from our deepest place within us is only going to benefit us as we step into the year. So try it, try doing affirmations, try using your name and see what happens.

Kimberly: 23:28 Then the last study I want to mention comes from the Neuropsychological Journal. Researchers found that visualization techniques can improve your physical and mental performance, increase states of flow, and enhance motivation, confidence, and self-efficacy. So I find that the best time to visualize is after meditation. So you center yourself, you breathe. Then again, we have free guided meditations for you over at mysolluna.com, as well as in the circle. After you meditate, you’re just in this space where you’ve disconnected your senses so you’re very tuned in. This is a wonderful place to visualize your dreams, to visualize how you want to feel, visualize in detail, visualize in clarity and imagery.

Kimberly: 24:19 So again, this just reinforces to me this idea that numbers are never the most powerful place to focus, but rather the feelings and the images and the pictures and these visualizations can really help move you forward. I think it’s important to have some free space to just play around and to see what feels good to you in a visualizing state. And then the parts that start to really resonate, connected to your heart and light up your passions, those are the ones that you can go back to and keep visualizing over and over again, and start to reinforce them and start to draw them forward towards you in your life as actualized reality. So play with visualize. Visualization as well is another powerful tool to carry you into 2021.

In Closing

Kimberly: 25:06 So there you have it, food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. I hope that one or a few of these tips resonated for you in each of these cornerstones, in each of our four cornerstones. I highly recommend that you choose at least one step. How small it is is of no concern. It could be little baby steps, which really start to add up, but spread them over the cornerstones versus just going full in with the food. That way, you have a holistic approach, which will buoy you up more and more because it’s reinforcing this wholeness within you. If you go full force in food and you say, “Oh, well, in a couple of months, then I’ll try meditating,” then I think we just continue to foster imbalance versus again, just from the get-go, even if it’s small steps, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to take up so much of your time, but we are reinforcing wholeness.

Kimberly: 26:04 We are reinforcing our truth. We are reinforcing our power and it’s a really, really wonderful way to awaken your amazing, amazing self in 2021. You are unique. You are so special and powerful, and I love you. I am so grateful that we are connected here again. I want to reiterate how just thrilled I am for the upcoming year and all the things that we have in store and just all the different ways that we can continue to connect and to connect deeper and deeper. So I send you so much love, and I will see you back here on Thursday for our next community Q&A. Till then, take care, so much love, and happy, happy New Year.