Laura Thomas shares her personal story of transformation through grief, starting with the unexpected loss of her brother to suicide.

In this episode of the NEW You, Network for Empowering Women podcast, Christy Belz interviews Laura Thomas, a multi-talented writer and author of “THE MAGIC OF WELL-BEING.” Laura discusses topics such as self-love, grief, creativity, and magic. She is also a TEDx speaker and holds roles as an editor and ghostwriter at Next Level Story.

In the interview, Laura addresses the difficulties of coping with grief and emphasizes the significance of expressing and processing emotions. She underscores the therapeutic potential of storytelling in aiding others on their healing paths. Laura advocates for self-compassion and gentle self-care, encouraging listeners to embrace new perspectives and approaches. Additionally, she delves into her roles as a writer, editor, and writing coach, expressing her dedication to assisting individuals in sharing their own narratives.

Come along with us as we delve into the profound impact of self-love and compassion, and uncover how Laura’s experiences can provide inspiration and encouragement on your individual path to personal development.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

  • The importance of storytelling and community in the process of healing and finding wholeness.
  • The importance of self-compassion and gentleness in navigating grief and life’s challenges.
  • Everyone’s journey is unique and worthy of exploration.
  •  Laura’s book, “The Magic of Wellbeing: A Modern Guide to Lasting Happiness,” offers daily reminders and inspiration for finding happiness and wisdom in everyday life.
  • The role of creativity in processing grief and finding healing.
  • The value of sharing our stories and the impact it can have on others.
  • The importance of self-acceptance and forgiveness in personal growth.

Visit Laura Thomas’ social media pages
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurathomaswrites/
Websites: https://www.laurathomaswrites.com/ and https://www.nextlevelstory.com/

Learn more about Christy Belz Social Communications:
Website: https://christybelz.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChristyBelzCoach/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christybelzcoach/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christybelz

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:07 Christy: Welcome to NEW You, Network for Empowering Women Podcast. I’m your host, Christy Belz. Enjoy our array of talented, open-hearted guests and their willingness and courage to share their stories of second chances, life-changing choices, and new perspectives. We’re here to uplift and empower you and your journey. 

00:00:40 Christy: So when I was young, I had a lot of self-doubt. I had a lot going on in my home life and it made me feel really uncertain about the world and my place in it. And I have to say my next guest really brings to light how the story and how really those feelings of insecurity and those feelings of not feeling good enough, a lot of times based on what happens in our family of origin can be transmuted, that we have the opportunity even in the most challenging things in life to be able to grow through them, to expand our awareness and our self-love and our compassion for ourselves and eventually for others in the world. I just can’t wait for you to meet Laura Thomas in her story. I just can’t wait for you to meet Laura Thomas in her story of grief turning into more love and self-compassion for herself and for others in the world.

00:01:39 Christy: Welcome to New You podcast. I am so delighted today to have Laura Thomas with me. But before we start, we always give ourselves permission to pause. We’re just giving ourselves this moment to take a deep breath. I’ll close your eyes if you’re comfortable and just allow. It’s so beautiful just to pause. And we know we women have to give ourselves permission because we forget. Permission to pause.

00:02:13 Christy: I am so excited Laura Thomas is with me today. Not only is Laura Thomas just a beautiful remarkable woman and a new mama, which I’m so excited for her, but she also is then on the TEDx stage with us, sharing her personal story, which we’re gonna reflect on. And she also contributed to my book with her story from the TED Talk. Oh, and by the way, she co-wrote and basically helped me create the book. And so kudos to Laura Thomas for her great gifts and her translation of my craziness into word. And yes, so gosh, welcome Laura Thomas.

00:02:53 Laura: Thank you, Christy. And don’t worry, very minimal craziness.

00:02:58 Christy: Yeah, right. You’re being very kind there. Oh gosh, well, we know the power of stories. You write them. We curate them, we power the story. It’s so important. So I’d really love to just take this part of this time for us to hear your story. Share a little bit about what brought you here to this time today.

00:03:24 Laura: Absolutely. My story really circles around the transformation through grief. And it was a doorway that I didn’t know I would walk through at some point in my life, certainly not as a young adult. And it has revealed so much to me about what’s important in life. And I think it has directed my life in ways I didn’t know that I needed. So it all started for me when I was a young adult. I was a senior in college. And at that point in my life, I really struggled with a lot of insecurity, a lot of self-hatred. I wasn’t a very happy person on the inside. And nobody on the outside would have known that.

00:04:05 Laura: I was social, I had great grades, I was a dutiful daughter. Dutiful daughter. You talk about Christy, absolutely, what a great term. And I looked very successful, but inside I really struggled with my relationship with myself. And to be honest, I didn’t know that that was something that could be different. I thought I was destined to always be unhappy and to always feel somewhat of a victim to life, that I was somehow broken and others got to have self-love and I didn’t.

00:04:35 Laura: And all of this for me changed in the most unexpected way. And it was through the tragedy of losing my brother. When I was a senior, I got a call from my dad one night when I was working at a restaurant as a back waiter, who’s the person who like sweeps the crumbs off the table at a fancy restaurant. And my whole world changed with that phone call. My dad told me that my brother had had a suicide attempt and he was alive in critical care in the hospital New York.

00:05:05 Laura: And my relationship with my brother was very unusual. He was three years older than me and he was essentially my gravity in the world. In a place where I felt a constant sense of being off balance, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, not feeling comfortable with myself. He made me feel grounded. And it’s interesting because we weren’t necessarily best friends but we had this really special dynamic where I felt anchored through him. And he was the one person who made me believe I was worthy of love. And so to hear this news was of course, both devastating, but also extremely unexpected. In my world, my brother was the person who always knew who he was. He didn’t question his place in the world the way that I did. And he made it feel like that was a possibility for me.

00:05:56 Laura: So he seemed untouchable. And what unfolded was a series of difficult and confusing events. My brother lived in New York and so he was in the ICU and my parents ended up actually moving out to New York to be with him. He was in a coma for three months and when he finally woke up, the story unfolded that he had had a psychotic break before he had his first suicide attempt. And just to let anybody know, if this is triggering for you, I’ll just share a brief detail. So please take a moment to take care of yourself. His first suicide attempt was he jumped from a 14 story building and he lived. And he had very few injuries from it. It was the most miraculous sort of series of events.

00:06:44 Laura: And we couldn’t quite make sense of it. My dad thought maybe he’d been caught by angels, maybe he has another purpose here. And so we were all very, even though devastated, maybe hopeful that there was something here that there was-

00:06:56 Christy: It was kind of a miracle, wasn’t it? Seemingly there was a miracle in that. Who jumps off a 14 story building and basically comes out unscathed.

00:07:04 Laura: Exactly, and the doctors basically said, they’re like, nobody survives a six story height, and here it was really significant. And when he woke up, the narrative that we had been crafting was challenged. Scott had had a psychotic break and he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. And he had this delusion of aliens taking over the world which had led him to jump. And so it was this, not only the grief of him being in critical care, us not being sure if he was going to survive at times, that he got pneumonia in the hospital, there are always ups and downs when you have somebody in a critical situation.

00:07:40 Laura: But it was this grief of having a living being who was no longer the brother I knew. And that was really hard to figure out how to integrate. I think we don’t often talk about grief, but we at least understand the grief of somebody dying. We don’t always understand the grief of somebody being alive and in a situation that we have a hard time metabolizing and integrating and understanding. And so what ended up happening is over the series of eight months, he healed to a miraculous level.

00:08:10 Laura: He was able to walk again, but he was never the same person. And ultimately, he did end up taking his life in a psych ward under high suicide watch. He managed to evade the protocols in place that were meant to keep him safe, and he took his life. And this whole experience for me, I feel like during that time, all I could do was just be in survival mode. And try to get through traveling back and forth. I was fortunate enough to be able to be traveling to see God. I was still finishing out my senior year in Wisconsin. And so I had been at this place where I felt like I was poised to take on the world as a senior. And I was gonna launch into the world and I was gonna start this career and you have this whole life. And everything came crashing down and I couldn’t relate to my friends. I felt extremely isolated. It felt like life had no meaning and no purpose all of a sudden.

00:09:03 Laura: I was terrified that at any moment anything could happen to anybody, because this really came out of the blue.

00:09:10 Christy: Right. So disorienting.

00:09:11 Laura: Incredibly disorienting.

00:09:14 Christy: So disorienting. I interviewed Sally Spencer-Thomas yesterday, I think I told you this, and she’s the renowned leader around suicide and suicide ideology, etc. And she was explaining, so let’s go back and listen to this audience, please. She was talking about this push-pull, right? So, there’s a going towards when somebody dies, they have cancer, there’s like, there’s this compassionate going towards, but because suicide is so number one, so sudden and unexpected, right? And it’s usually horrific, you know, how people tend to take their lives. And she said, so that is a going away mechanism. And so that’s what makes it so disorienting because you’re feeling like you’re supposed to go towards it because, you know, he died. And it’s so disorienting that you don’t nobody knows how to handle it, you know?

00:10:01 Laura: Yeah. That’s a beautiful way to think about it. And I feel like that happens both internally and then at the larger community level, that the people around you have a hard time knowing how to relate and how to show up. We always do when there is grief, we feel pretty unequipped to meet that moment for others. But when it is suicide, it’s particularly vulnerable and sensitive. And there’s that heightened sense of feeling like, I don’t know what to say, but also as the individual going through it as a family member, you have that heightened feeling of, I don’t know what’s acceptable to feel here. Am I allowed to feel angry at him for doing this? Am I allowed to feel any relief that he went from a state of extreme suffering to one where he wasn’t anymore, he made a choice? Where is his autonomy in that? Where was our role for protecting him?

00:10:50 Laura: There are a lot of really challenging questions that even now, years later, this happened in 2011, it can be sensitive to bring those things up to people because it can elicit such an extreme reaction. And so for me, I found that after Scott died, I had this long journey of really rediscovering life through his death. And that for me and my journey and my story, Scott was an integral part of that. And it began, as you say, that usually there is a horrific.

00:11:21 Laura: A series of events when there’s suicide. And for a while I couldn’t remember who the Scott was before the person who woke up from his coma. And I had to rediscover my brother. And through that, I rediscovered myself and I’ve developed this passion for finding ways to talk about grief, hold space for grief through art. And for me, that took the form of a one woman performance that I wrote and performed and toured with, where I performed the embodied story of my grief and of losing Scott. Scott was a theater major at NYU, so I felt like that was my way of reconnecting with him. Then it was also my way of connecting with community because after the performance, I hosted a discussion that invited this group of usually strangers to share and talk about what came up for them during the performance if they wanted to.

00:12:17 Laura: It was not obligatory. And what emerged from that was just beautiful in terms of being able to witness other people in their personal experience that maybe had never seen the light of day and certainly had never felt like it had a safe place to land. And through that, I felt like as a community for one evening, we could all take a moment to just realize the normalcy and something that feels so abnormal and so scary, and to make space in our hearts for what can be really hard to integrate.

00:12:49 Christy: Yeah, beautiful. I think your story is remarkable. I remember reviewing your application when you applied for the TEDx talk. And we talked, I remember being on the selection committee and being, I’m like, this is so creative. Like this expression of grief, particularly around this issue of suicide was just remarkable. And then for the listeners, please go to Laura’s TED Talk on YouTube. We’ll put it in the show notes and watch her do a bit of her performance. It’s beautiful and profound. I also love, we talked about earlier this power of the story and how important this is. It’s the sharing, it’s why I wrote the book. You and I talked a lot about this, that I wanted to share my personal story, not because I was proud of it, not because I thought it, but I wanted to do it from a place of being vulnerable so that other people could read my experience.

00:13:39 Christy: And then 11 other women who so bravely took the TED stage shared their experiences. Because if one or two people read that book and they see themselves in our stories, I get chills. That’s freaking amazing. Like it is really remarkable and it’s game changing for individuals. And I’m sure your one woman show, those people that were blessed to spend that night with you had to have been changed just by the experience of that’s beautiful.

00:14:05 Laura: I think that’s so true that storytelling does have that power to help us go deeper into our own lives, especially those really vulnerable edges that we have a hard time approaching because storytelling inherently is a relational act. You don’t do it alone. And even if it’s as simple as sitting down to read a book, you have company, you have a container, you have somebody who in whatever gentle way, which I think you do so well, Christy, will hold your hand in that moment as they share their story.

00:14:33 Laura: And through the lens of somebody else, sometimes it helps us tap a little bit more deeply into what we want and yearn to tap into, which is essentially a desire for wholeness. We want to be able to work with these parts that feel broken to find a sense of wholeness.

00:14:50 Christy: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I’ve been doing some new work. You know, I’m always exploring new modalities and stuff. And I started playing with some internal family systems. Don’t you love that? I mean, that is to me, it’s so cool. And I feel like I’ve been doing it for years in my practice, like helping people reintegrate parts of themselves. But Robert Shorts was just amazing. And I was listening to an audio. What was that book called? Anyway, he talks about the basement children, right? Because when we disassociate and we hit challenging parts in our lives, those parts of us are still there, but they hide, right? And we shut them down. We’re like, I’m not going there. Nope, you stay down there, right?

00:15:29 Laura: Absolutely. Grief being one of those that like, I love internal family systems and just even the the basis of somebody explaining to me, you know, you essentially have a family living inside of you and you have the people who like to manage your life and you like, you have the people who respond to emergency situations or firefighters and you also have these wounded vulnerable ones. And that, and an individual level and a societal level is grief, we relegate it to the shadows, we put it in a place where we feel like it could be contained when the only way to move grief is through grief.

00:16:04 Laura: And even though that can be scary, the ultimate lesson that I have learned that I’ve find is so important is we can’t do this alone. We shouldn’t do this alone. We weren’t designed to do this alone. And to find those spaces where we can connect with others. However that looks, again, it could be as simple as a book. It could be a group. It could be a performance. Some form of community in those dark places is so essential.

00:16:29 Christy: Yeah, beautiful. You’re the one you’ve been waiting for, is the book I was listening to, Robert Short’s Internal Family Systems. All right, love, we have to take a quick break here. So we’ll be right back with Laura Thomas.

00:16:49 Christy: Hey, it’s Christy Belz. Many of the people you meet on my podcast have participated in my course called UPROOT. This 15-week course takes you through my transformational process of understanding your roots, what’s down there in the dirt you’re not looking at. Reviewing your path and collecting the tools for life success, I would love to help you on your journey. Learn more about the UPROOT course, take my quiz and see where you might be stuck down there in the dirt, and explore my transformational retreat opportunities at christybelz.com/uproot. 

00:17:33 Christy: Welcome back, Laura. Oh my gosh, you’ve just opened my brain. I feel like it’s going, like it’s expanding all over the place. Like where can we go next? Yeah, you know, grief, I think grief is so complex and I don’t think people really know how to deal with it. You know, and I’ve done a lot of research and tried to find supports and tried to write blogs and all those things. But you know, it’s such a personal experience and it’s different for everyone, right? So I just think maybe in the honoring that when somebody has lost somebody, whether it’s to suicide or, you know, cancer or whatever, right, that there’s a place of honoring and great compassion for the experience because we can’t judge people on how they go through it.

00:18:19 Laura: Oh my goodness. Yes. And I’m not coming at this as a mental health professional or something. I’m coming at this as an artist. And so I find that grief to me has this palpable feeling of being a bit wild. We are afraid to grieve because we’re afraid we’ll never come back. That suddenly we will be irrevocably broken. We will go down that well of sadness and we will never come back. There is a sense of it being uncontained. And so as an artist, I tend to think of all right, so what are some of the mediums that allow for the wild expression of humanity? And that can look so different for many different people. That could be going on a walk outside and feeling the expansive horizon around you or the majesty of ancient trees. There’s a wild feeling to that. It could be jumping in the pool and feeling yourself be.

00:19:08 Laura: It could be writing your story and allowing it to splash all over the page as messy as you want, but to find those ways that allow you to be unrefined and not perfect and not together. And as you say, Christy, to not judge each other’s experiences. And ultimately, I have found that the best companion for my grief is a sense of like a gentle hand on my heart. I have to be so, so gentle with myself. And even though my brother died in 2011, I am amazed and stunned always by the ways in which grief continues to show up in my life. And I don’t always expect it. Even now, I don’t always know to name it as grief. But when I start to feel not like myself or down or like I’m continuing to process because it is a lifelong process, the best thing I can do for myself is to give myself so much grace and so much gentleness and to know that there’s no timeline here.

00:20:07 Laura: There’s no right way to grieve and there’s nothing that comes up that is wrong. There are things that need support and need help at times. Certainly, again, we’re not supposed to do this alone, but to not shame ourselves in our experience of grief.

00:20:22 Christy: Yeah. I love that you said you’ve really worked with your grief through your creativity. And I always ask my guests for little nuggets. And I love what you wrote, Laura, about your expression and helping people share their stories like following your own dream to become a writer and helping others tell their story and how that helped you in your process. We share a little bit about that.

00:20:45 Laura: Yes. So to come back to this sort of early life experience of self-hatred and really struggling with my relationship with myself, I’ve done a lot of work since Scott died to find my way forward in this world because I felt like I had to. I almost felt like I was at a crossroads when he died. I could either go down this road of despair and continuing to have a subtly abusive relationship with myself, or I could honor Scott’s life and the gifts that he gave me by learning to love myself and reclaiming a new relationship. And part of that came from working with my own story.

00:21:25 Laura: I started writing my memoir just a couple of months after Scott died. And that was my way of splashing all my emotions onto the page. And I’m still working on it. It’s been the longest book in the history of writing books. That’s not true, but it feels that way sometimes. And what I’ve found is that for myself, the more that I work with it, the more that the story metabolizes and the more compassion I have for myself and the more I’m able to cultivate some of those qualities of self-love, for me, this has been my journey because I see the girl on the page who went through this and I can’t help but love her and yarn for her to be well. And so my story has been working on it, writing it has been transformational. And in doing that, it has led me to this passion for helping others tell their stories. Because when somebody comes to me and they say, I want to write a book, they have all of the regular Rolodex of insecurities, but I don’t know if anybody will care. I don’t know if it’s important. I don’t know if I really have anything to say.

00:22:25 Laura: And I always want to bring them back to that initial spark. There was something in you that yearns to tell your story, not for anybody else, but for you. Your soul is calling you to walk this journey and you won’t be the same person at the end of it as you are at the start.

00:22:42 Christy: So true.

00:22:43 Laura: Whoever that person is at the end, they’re calling to you from your future and they’re saying, hey, I need you to do this thing that feels hard and scary, but cross that bridge because the new you, Christy, the new you is on the other side. You deal with fear and freaking do it anyway.

00:23:01 Christy: Just go for it. Oh my God.

00:23:02 Laura: We need you to be your full self. I have a real passion for that and what I love about my work, both as a writer, a ghost writer and an editor supporting people in their books is supporting them through that emotional journey. That the book will be a reward at the end. I hope that everybody feels proud of their story and to have it in print. But I hope that they feel more proud of the journey that they took to get there and who they became in the process.

00:23:31 Christy: Yeah, it’s so true. I grew so much through that process of writing it, you know, and I went through different iterations of it and I just have to call out to you again what a gift you are. Because I feel like once my book was, once you entered the world and the energy of the book, the book really went to the direction that I wanted it to go. And that’s really, you know, just the gift of stories, the gift of women, the gifts of the shit that happens to us in life and the falling down and the getting back up and the, you know, the losses and the identities. I mean, there’s so much about our experiences that we don’t really talk about, right? We don’t talk a lot about them until we do.

00:24:13 Laura: Until we do. And I loved that you always had that orientation with your book and it’s in every page of, how can I offer this back to the world? How can this experience that happened to me and is personal, actually, maybe it’s not about me at all. Maybe it’s there for somebody else. And then also I loved how there was always humor. You’ve done such a beautiful job of bringing humor to some really difficult life experiences.

00:24:36 Christy: I think I’m funny.

00:24:39 Laura: I think we have to, if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry.

00:24:42 Christy: It’s so true. It’s such a release, isn’t it? Just to let yourself laugh and not take ourselves so seriously. All of us have self-doubts. All of us have that internal voice that is like, you’re not good enough. We talk about that in the book. But there’s some point where we just have to be able to laugh at it and really be aware of it. And then recognizing that it’s just a part as they would say in internal family systems, just a part.

00:25:11 Laura: One of the biggest lessons I think I have learned in terms of my relationship to myself is realizing that I don’t have to believe a thought, that just because I think it doesn’t make it true.

00:25:22 Christy: It’s so true.

00:25:22 Laura: Revolutionary when I learned that. I thought that my mental landscape was truth, was my world. But when I realized that that’s malleable and I can work with it, it opens up the opportunity for so much. And then I don’t have to shame myself for the thoughts. I can maybe giggle at them or say to them, I appreciate you surfacing right now, but I don’t actually need you right now. And it just transforms everything.

00:25:46 Christy: That does. Yeah. I think you, I can’t remember which cohort you went through the uproot course, but you know, a lot of the techniques I use in my course, work is really about helping people get out of the identification with the intellect is who they are and start expanding the consciousness and the awareness into the greater awareness place. There’s so much more information and data out here. And really that ability to witness a thought is so powerful. And once you do it once, then you know, you can do it right. And then you, you’re like, oh, I thought it doesn’t have to be true for me right now. I can make a different choice here.

00:26:20 Laura: There was one exercise that I’ll always remember that you led us through an UPROOT. And it was, I think it was more around emotions, but thoughts and emotions are so hand in hand. And it had to do with feeling an emotion and then just letting it expand and take up as much space and go to the universe if it needs to and how it could just diffuse through the body. And even something as scary as grief.

00:26:43 Laura: Sometimes, not always, but sometimes released through those kind of helpful visualizations. So yeah, some of the tools that you share are so like practical to use in everyday life.

00:25:54 Christy: Yeah, yeah. And we did a really good job in the book, I think of providing a tool at the end of every chapter so that there are tangible things that people can take away and use these tools to be able to shift their awareness and their being, right? And who they are and the ability to stay present to the feelings, right? Even if they suck. When you learn you can do that, then you know you can do it. It becomes easier and easier. It’s never fun, but easier.

00:27:23 Laura: Yes. It’s funny how we tend to forget that we are beings with a body. We’re so cerebral and I am a huge culprit of this. I’m very intellectual words and books and stories, but so much of it is being processed in our bodies as well. And I loved that about so many of the exercises that you shared is that they were body centered and they helped kind of get it out of the realm of thinking. For me, I found I can’t think myself out of grief. I can’t think myself out of my experiences with depression, but I can feel into them.

00:27:57 Laura: And through that, things start to shift. And that’s usually where we feel a little unstable or afraid of the body. So when we have practices that help us reconnect to our bodies and build a new kind of foundation there, it really helps. For me, it has.

00:28:13 Christy: Yeah, yeah. Dealing in the different levels of our body and our energy flow, for me, changed the trajectory of my practice. Because as a social worker, we did a lot of talk therapy, right? And we did some experiential stuff, but it wasn’t until I really started to see the other layers of where people are stuck and started moving my practice in that direction that I feel like I make the most impact, right? Supporting people through that body work, through the energy work, through the, right? It’s powerful. Speaking of powerful, oh my gosh, you are such a wise, beautiful light and soul on the planet. And I’m wondering if you have some nuggets that you would share on the New You Network. Right? For helping people understand how to be more powerful, more authentic.

00:28:59 Laura: Absolutely. Certainly. I’ll have a couple of nuggets from just my personal life, but I’ll offer them in hopes that they might serve someone. One is, again, the sense of building a gentle relationship with self. That serves me through everything I experience. You mentioned that I’m a new mom. I’ve got a six-week-old. I have never felt so novice at something as I have at motherhood. And there’s nothing like having a crying baby who’s got a poopy diaper and poo explosion. And you’re in public and you’re trying to figure all these things out that it’s easy to get so hard on ourselves and to think that we’re supposed to have things figured out. And whether it’s new motherhood or just life, these expectations, these comparisons that crop up can really be toxic.

00:29:47 Laura: And I am constantly reminding myself to be far more gentle than I think I need to be and to bring forgiveness into my personal practice that of course I’m going to make mistakes. I tell my son who’s pre-verbal, of course, that we’re just doing our best and there’s this trial and error, but that means that there’s a lot of error. And in the air, there’s gonna be pain and there’s gonna be discomfort. And that’s the same with anything that you do, if you’re striking out and pursuing your dream, if you’re upleveling in your career, if you’re pursuing a romantic relationship, there is going to be trial and error. And with that, a lot of discomfort. So anything that you can do to bring a sense of gentleness, forgiveness to yourself. And at the core of that, I think is as a foundational friendliness. You want to be friendly to yourself the way that you would to a newborn or to a best friend. Because you deserve the same kind of love and nourishment and care that you would offer to your most beloved people in your life.

00:30:47 Christy: So beautiful. Reminds me of Kristin Neff’s work, the self-compassion work, right? Yes. So recognizing that we all suffer. We all fall down as I talk about in my book, right? We all f up. Whatever. It’s like that happens. But universally, that happens to everybody. We’re not the only one that makes those colossal mistakes as we talk about, right? We’re not the only ones. Everybody falls down, everybody. And it has to be that best friend, that nurture, the mom would tuck into her baby, kind of love and compassion that we bring back to ourselves as a way to really, you know what it is? You know what self-compassion really is and what you’re talking about? It’s the antidote to shame, right? So if you’re living in a place that there’s something wrong with me, right? Like I totally screwed that up. And then you internalize that, like there’s something wrong with me, right? Self-compassion will take you out of the shame core. Yes. And I think you’re so wise, Laura. I love the way you communicated it.

00:31:49 Laura: And I just wanna add too that I know for some people that hearing something like that feels inaccessible. It’s easy to feel like I did. Well, other people get to have that, but that’s not in the cards for me. And what I would just encourage and what was helpful for me is setting aside sort of your long-term perspective of if you’re worthy of this or not, and just allow yourself to experiment right now. What if I didn’t have that thought right now? Not for my whole life, you know, maybe I will decide that I am unworthy of love, but what if I just played and just tried this in this small tiny experiment of the next five minutes? What if I decided to believe that I was worthy of love?

00:32:31 Laura: That I was worthy of forgiveness, that I can be friendly to myself and just see what happens. Don’t put a whole lot of stock in it. It is a muscle. That’s what I learned. Self-love is a muscle. Especially if you feel like you weren’t raised with that or you didn’t have that innate sense of worthiness. Practice, try. Try setting aside your beliefs and open yourself up to possibility and you might surprise yourself.

00:32:56 Christy: So true. You’re so awesome. Hey, Laura, tell everybody how they can learn more about you, get access to your book. She’s a beautiful writer. I’m forgetting, what is the book that you wrote that I said I just absolutely loved?

00:33:09 Laura: I know. I’m so delighted by your feedback. My first book is called The Magic of Well-Being: A Modern Guide to Lasting Happiness. And it was my attempt to take one aspect of this work that’s been very meaningful for me is actually Zen Buddhism. I sort of have found a teacher and integrated a lot of the lessons, but it’s not always accessible. Not everybody wants to go on meditation retreats, and yet there’s so much wisdom at the heart of it. So I wanted to ask, how can I take some of this wisdom that shows up in a lot of different traditions and put it into these just very small little snippets, almost like daily reminders, inspiration, and somebody could pick it up, read a page or two, maybe shift a little bit of their heart and what’s storming there, and set it at down and just meet the rest of their day.

00:33:53 Laura: So that’s the magic of well-being. I am still working on my memoir, my forthcoming memoir that I’m hoping to launch within the next year. And then in terms of my work as an editor, a writing coach, a ghostwriter, you can find me at Next Level Story. That’s my business. I’m also at laurathomaswrites.com. That’s where my personal work is. I’m around and I love helping people. And my last little nugget would just be, if you ever feel the urge to tell your story, please do it. Please find who’s on the other side of that bridge and find support. It could be anybody who’s gonna be in your court, but we’re all gonna need that in the inevitable valleys of working on our story.

00:34:37 Christy: Amen, sister. Amen. Oh my God. You guys know why I love this woman so much. I feel like I have to pinch myself to getting to do these podcasts. Cause I get to revisit people I love, I admire. And I, as you know, just love, adore, admire, respect you so much. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here, stepping away from little baby. I’ve got to meet him soon. Anyhow, I love you, my friend. Thank you so much.

00:35:06 Laura: Love you too. Thank you. Take care.

00:35:11 Christy: It is my joy to showcase the voices, choices, and stories of women and the messy details of life’s journey. As you’ve experienced, my guests are thriving with purpose and authenticity, but that does not mean that their life is easy and without challenges. I’ve dedicated my life to you and your journey. Thank you for listening to NEW You, Network for Empowering Women Podcast. Please subscribe and learn more at christybelz.com/newpodcast.