Pretty Spiritual Podcast

Believe in Yourself

How to Build Self Confidence 

This week your spiritual besties are taking on the topic of self confidence. Whether you’re overly confident or tend toward lack of confidence, we hope you’ll join in. If you’re anything like us, you might vacillate wildly between the two. Or better yet, feel like both at once. Are you the most amazing piece of dumpster trash in the whole world? Or an egomaniac with an inferiority complex? Yay, you’re amongst friends!

We’ll start episode 33 by sharing about the ways we used to try to get self confidence from outside ourselves. While it’s a natural place to turn for good feelings, we also found that it’s not a reliable one. Ultimately, trying to get good feelings about ourselves from the outside-in left each of us feeling worthless and thinking thoughts like, “I’m not good enough.”

Even though it seems like we’re all born with natural confidence, we forget what we’re truly capable of. This happens because of our early relationships with caregivers, difficult life experiences, and feedback from the people or society around us. 

If this sounds familiar, you might have a persistent internal voice that tries to undermine your confidence. Or maybe you struggle with a pervasive feeling that you’re just not enough. What can we do when our life experiences have gotten in the way of our natural belief in ourselves and our innate belonging?

Learn To Believe in Yourself

Let’s reclaim our real selves and learn to treat self confidence like the inside job it really is. We’re learning to meet these feelings of inferiority with powerful spiritual tools. Want to learn how to believe in yourself and tap into your inner strength? These tools are for you.

We’ll share the ways we’re building the kind of self confidence that comes from within ourselves. Do you need some help learning how to like yourself and the person you are today? We’ll talk about how acting with courage and integrity allows us to trust ourselves, take more risks, and feel safe even when we mess up. We’ll focus on how taking responsibility for ourselves means we are building an intimate and trustworthy relationship with our insides.

It turns out there’s a link between self confidence and humility. We agree with people when they say that humility isn’t thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less. Living from the inside out means we’re connected to our internal guidance systems. When we spend time inside our own bodies, use tools like meditation and self-awareness to get to know ourselves, and practice believing that we can trust ourselves, the results are incredible. What if believing in yourself is just the absence of negative thoughts about yourself? Join as we practice getting to know who we really are inside and loving the person that we’ve found!

We’re always looking for more tools, so please reach out and share yours with us. What’s helping you with believing in yourself and trusting your inherent goodness? Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Insight Timer, Google Play, Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean, and Stitcher (or our Contact page) and share your feelings, thoughts, and anything else.

Attitude of Gratitude

Happiness Is A Choice… Wait, What?

This week your spiritual besties are talking about what it’s like to choose an… attitude of gratitude. Did you just vomit a little bit in your mouth and have to swallow it? Don’t worry, we can relate. If talk of gratefulness still makes you a little queasy, we made episode 32 just for you!

If you’re struggling with being grateful, we have definitely been there. What happens when we’re resisting this attitude? Often we’re judging what’s here or grasping after something we think could change how we feel. 

That’s why we’re so curious about what is here when gratitude is not? And how can we prime our hearts for gratitude when they feel totally shut down? That’s right, friends. This is an honest and human account of how to choose a positive attitude when it feels like the last house on the block. 

So, what is gratitude, really? Maybe it doesn’t have to feel cloying or inauthentic. How does that happen? We can search our own hearts and minds for something we can genuinely appreciate. To choose happiness doesn’t mean we pretend we’re not in pain when we are; it means that we look for what gifts might be inside the pain. 

How To Be Grateful

That’s why we think it’s so important to talk about how to seek gratitude when it feels really far away. We’ll share how our thinking and attitudes have changed based on gratitude practice. When we act as if happiness is a choice and we keep choosing it, we’ll find a tool to sustain us through real life.

Wondering how to practice gratitude in a way that feels authentic? We love how perspective-shifting can open up our hearts to being grateful for what’s here right now.  We’ll share all of our favorite tools, including writing gratitude lists, exploring our values and intentions, and watching the way our perspective changes when we make friends with what’s here right now.

It’s work to choose gratitude and it’s okay to not be happy about that! Perhaps we can look for the places in our life where we’re being stretched emotionally, spiritually, and physically as a means of spiritual growth. 

Come join the fun! Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Insight Timer, Google Play, Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean, and Stitcher (or our Contact page) and share your feelings, thoughts, and anything else.

Releasing Unrealistic Expectations

Let Go Of Those Painfully High Expectations

Are you someone who has really high expectations of yourself and others? We can totes relate. But what happens when people don’t live up to them? If you’re anything like us (and if you’re reading this, we’re starting to suspect you are), the answer is suffering. That’s why this episode is all about noticing and releasing unrealistic ideas about how we think life should be going.

They say that happiness is reality minus expectations. But the truth is that most of us don’t even realize we have them until we’re experiencing resentment or disappointment when they’ve gone unrealized. It’s not wrong to have expectations. They’re a natural part of being human. But how can we engage with our assumptions about how life should be so that we can all suffer a little bit less? 

In episode 31 we look at what it’s like to notice and relinquish our unrealistic expectations about ourselves, our relationships, and our lives. Join us as we learn how expectation management can help us soften into the here and now.

Are relationship expectations causing friction with people you love? We know what it’s like. That’s why we’ll share tools that help us let go of our personal agendas so we can open our hearts up to what’s right in front of us. We’ll let you know how we deal with disappointment and resentment, which are common responses to unmet expectations. Plus, we’ll get into the direct physical and emotional experience of what this process feels like in the moment.

Come join the fun! Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Insight Timer, Google Play, Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean, and Stitcher (or our Contact page) and share your feelings, thoughts, and anything else.

Trust the Process

What Does It Mean To Be Spiritual? This week’s episode is about what spirituality looks like when life just shows up. Instead of our usual episode routine, we're letting go into the moment and just sharing where each of us is on our spiritual path right now. In other words? We're going to relax and trust the process of spiritual growth and development. 

So, what does that actually look like? We'll fill you in on the places we are struggling and how we draw on the strength of our spiritual community to keep trying. We're opening up about what it's like to just be human beings (and hopefully giving you guys permission to do that, too!)  

Annie shares her grief at pet loss after putting a dog down and the struggles she's having with her jaw. She also teaches us her favorite prayer: the St Francis Prayer. And the best part? You don't need to be religious to make this prayer your new spiritual tool! 

Lindsay talks about how spiritual encouragement and the power of example help her be loving and present with herself and others. Plus, she tells us about her CrossFit coffee spiritual awakening! 

And Ella shares about her chronic illness grief cycle and the ways she's been self soothing with food. She'll also talk about what it looks like to practice non-attachment to feelings and staying present in her own body, especially when she doesn't want to. 

Even though each of us has her own individual healing work, we draw on spiritual tools and principles to find our way through with courage, compassion, and maybe even a sense of humor! Come join the fun.

Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Insight Timer, Google Play, Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean, and Stitcher (or our Contact page) and share your feelings, thoughts, and anything else.

Healing Codependent Behavior

This time your spiritual best friends are talking about misguided emotional dependency. It’s a word we’ve all heard before, so what does codependent mean? And more importantly, how do we notice this pattern and shift it in our lives?

Wondering, what is codependency? Here are a couple of definitions we like: your mood, happiness, and identity are defined by the person you’re interacting with or you sacrifice your own needs to try to meet the needs of others. While this pattern can apply to a partner-specific dynamic, like in relationship addiction, today we’re looking at it as a broad set of attitudes and behaviors.

In case you’re not sure this topic applies to you, here are some signs of codependent relationships: difficulty making decisions, difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty communicating, valuing the approval of others over your own, not knowing what you like, and fear of people. 

Struggling with codependent behavior? We want to share how spiritual tools can help us get to know and trust ourselves. While there’s no immediate fix to this learned behavior, we’ve got a bunch of tools to help us get to know and meet our own needs and wants. 

Wondering how to overcome codependency? We’ll share how pause, prayer, and compassionate inquiry can help us take really good care of our own lives. We also love the idea of dating ourselves! We’ll talk about fun experiments to get to know yourself with care and curiosity, the same way you’d get to know a date. Let’s can use self-awareness to show up for the most important relationship— the one with ourselves.

Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Insight Timer, Google Play, Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean, and Stitcher (or our Contact page) and share your feelings, thoughts, and tools.

How to Overcome Fear

What Causes Fear?

 Today we’re talking about how to overcome fear. To start, what is fear? We’ll borrow this definition: an unpleasant, often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. How does it look different in our minds and bodies? How do our bodies respond physically to threats? And what do we add in terms of mental anxiety, past trauma, and learned behaviors?

We’ll start by looking at what causes us to feel afraid. Since it’s a natural and necessary experience, we want to use it as the wise and appropriate indicator it is. In balanced nervous systems, we have the ability to draw on appropriate responses to being afraid. These are things like fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and fatigue. But if we’ve been traumatized and have a history of living in fear, we may get stuck in disordered coping patterns.

That’s why we’ll dive into fear of the future, fear of change, and the way trauma and PTSD can manifest as feeling scared (and believing these feelings represent the truth.) Even though feeling afraid is a subjective event, we hope our accounts can help you walk through your own experiences with spiritual support.

Want to learn more about overcoming fear? Come join the party as we share tools that help us relate wisely and kindly to what scares us. We’ll look at how writing down a fears list can help us shift our perspective, as well as breath work that allows us to settle our bodies during difficult moments. Plus, we’ll share how saying a prayer for fear can help us wake up the deep source of compassion that lives inside our hearts. 

Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Insight Timer, Google Play, Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean, and Stitcher (or our Contact page) and share your feelings, thoughts, and tools.

Overcoming Procrastination

This time, we’re taking a nice, long look at avoidance behavior and tools for overcoming procrastination. Rather put off listening to this episode until later? We get it!

So, what is procrastination? James Clear defines it as “the act of delaying or postponing a task or set of tasks” and calls it “the force that prevents you from following through on what you set out to do.” No matter our personal flavor, we all relate to this phenomenon.

And, come on, avoidant coping makes sense. If there’s something uncomfortable to do, our brains think we can avoid the discomfort by just avoiding the thing. The problem? Our mounting anxiety, plus the lingering sense that we’re not safe and can’t trust ourselves. And then there are the mental gymnastics involved in avoidance and the fatigue that goes along with them.

So, why do we procrastinate? In episode 27, we’ll open up about our histories of avoidant coping. Yes, this includes how we procrastinate around work, financial responsibility, and, our personal fave, that deep soul work. Um, can we please just do it later?

Are you struggling with this behavior? Wondering, why do I procrastinate? Let’s look at how to overcome procrastination with spiritual tools. And hey, it’s okay if how to not procrastinate at all seems like too tall an order. Just for today, we can work at overcoming procrastination with the help of spiritual principles.

We’ll share how transparency and accountability can help us get into action. Plus, we’ll look at action inertia and how building positive habits can support us in our daily lives. And, yeah, we’ll even address that deep soul work by looking at underlying fears and core beliefs.

Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Insight Timer, Google Play, Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean, and Stitcher (or our Contact page) and share your experience!

Looking at Phones

Get Off Your Phones

 This week, we’re looking at cell phone addiction (or dependency?). What’s happening for us when we’re watching TV while scrolling through our phones and generally not wanting to be present in actual reality? 

We all know the feeling of picking up our phones to perform a discrete task and then remembering, as we put them down half an hour later, that we forgot to do that thing. We all know what it feels like to get sucked in when we’re looking at phones. Where does this screen addiction come and how is it impacting our lives? 

Our shared technology addiction literally changes the functioning of our brains. Did you know that just having your phone in plain view diminishes human intelligence and cognitive functioning? Omg.  

Many of us seek outwardly to fulfill our inner needs when we’re tired, empty, bored, or under-resourced. Or best yet, when we deserve it. 

We think a healthier, happier relationship with phones is possible. And we’re going to look at what it takes to get off your phone and into the middle of your life. What spiritual tools can help with phone or computer addiction? And how can we come into contact with whatever's underneath the phone craving so we can actually address our true needs?

Let’s start with compassion! We’ll talk about how to use the phone urges to shift our attention to present moment awareness and creativity. We’ve got some really practical suggestions for how to break up with your phone (at least for this moment). Plus we’ll share about the deeper, inner life that needs attention when we’re angling to check out or dissociate.

Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Insight Timer, Google Play, Spotify, Soundcloud, Podbean, and Stitcher (or our Contact page) and share what it's like for you!

Healthy Boundaries

How to Set Boundaries

 This time your spiritual bffs are talking boundaries. First off, what are boundaries? Why do we need to talk about them? And how could something so uncomfortable actually help take care of us? 

First, we’ll talk about how we started learning to communicate needs. We’ll focus on how to set boundaries, especially when we feel the pull of urgency and expectations. Then, we’ll look at examples of what verbal boundaries can sound like. Plus, we’ll talk about what it feels like to start taking care of ourselves with clear and direct communication. (Spoiler alert: it can feel really icky at first!)

But is all this discomfort worth it? We think so. Why? Because when we take care of ourselves, we get to be free from resentment, anger, and victimization. This allows us to love not only ourselves but others as well. Asking for respect in a relationship means that we get the freedom to let others have their experience without needing to be afraid of what that looks like.

Are you struggling with setting boundaries? Getting ready to have one of those hard conversations with someone who’s got you on the emotional hook? Want to learn how to take care of yourself with boundaries in relationships? Come join the party as we share our different perspectives and solutions.  

It’s finally time to talk tools! What tools can we use when we’re feeling the squeeze and discomfort of saying no, ending a relationship, or defining our participation in a relationship? We’ll share the spiritual tools that allow us to take really great care of our sweet selves with emotional boundaries. As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this process.

Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Insight Timer and tell us what it’s like for you!

Trust Yourself

Not quite sure how to trust yourself? Does the phrase, ‘trust yourself,’ seem laughable or downright dangerous? We feel ya. Many of us don’t know how to hear our gut feeling or tap into our innate intuitiveness. As a result, we spend years shoving that quiet heart whisper down and attempting to drown it out with cell phone obsession, spending money, food, substances, and straight up avoidance.

In this episode, your spiritual best friends dive into the ever-elusive topic of spiritual intuition, how to trust yourself, and how to listen to your gut. We provide real time examples of what intuitive thinking looks like (or doesn’t!) in our lives. We talk about the spiritual tools and principles we are experimenting with to help us better hear our innermost truth.

If you’re someone who is used to ruling your world with your head, and not your heart, learning new ways to connect your body and your mind can feel daunting. Again, we can relate! That’s because all three of us have spent years tamping down our intuitive thinking in any manner of ways–from drinking to avoidance to outright denial.

What would life be like if we softened into our experience and made space for what our instincts were telling us? What is intuition and is it even possible to trust this gentle inner guidance? As we talk about our own experiences we also share our tools for connecting with intuition that range from clunky practice (a la baby giraffe legs) to quiet moments of meditation and reflection. Join us, as we investigate what it means to trust ourselves and our tender adventures along the way. As always, we would love to hear from you about your experiences with intuition.