The Power of Self Love and Self Worth: Shamans Cave

We grew up in a collective that basically tried to control us. Those of you listening to our show are aware of how we are not supported in shining our full light and being as creative as possible.

But in the times we live in feelings of self-love and self-worth are necessary to heal and to be in service to the planet and the rest of life.

Join Renee Baribeau and Sandra Ingerman for this passionate talk on the power of self-love and self-worth including tools to transform your feelings about your own self.

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#selflove #selfworth #passion

Transcript

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (00:00):

Think what I, hello everyone, and welcome to the Shamans Cave. I'm Renee Baribeau, the practical shaman.

Sandra Ingerman (00:08):

Hi everyone. I'm Sandra Engerman and welcome to the Shamans Cave.

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (00:14):

Well, today we have a really important topic and before we record these every few weeks and we record a couple at a time, and so we always have to catch up because our topic today is about loving self-care. And I think one of the things in my love and self-care practices, the time that I get to sit and share with you and have our little catch up and because it's just such a good reflection and a reminder of am I taking care of myself and how do I take care of myself? And certainly watching you how you take care of yourself, it just brings us to what we're going to talk about today.

Sandra Ingerman (00:54):

That's right. Yeah. It's a great topic. It's a topic that's really, really up in the collective, and I've been talking about it for so many months, possibly years since the pandemic started, and it's amazing how much pushback I've gotten on it from the shamanic community in that everybody understands rationally that we have to love ourselves and we have to have self-worth in order to heal, in order to be able to create the way that we want to create in order to do the things that we want to do. But we grew up in a culture that tried to, that successfully made us feel bad about ourselves so that we wouldn't go out there and try to shine and take over things and be too great.

(01:57):

And that goes along with self-worth. We were beaten down. Some people were beaten down physically, most of us were beaten down mentally. But freedom to create and to love yourself and self-worth, that hasn't been a topic that has come up until recently and so many people were abused that this whole topic of I love myself, I really love myself, is tough. And so I don't want to take up all the time. I just want to share. Well, I'll share it later. We'll go on the exercise I give people to get over this I'll share later. In the meantime, we'll talk about just the importance of what it means to really love yourself and care for yourself and why so many people feel disempowered right now and afraid to stand up and speak. There's a lot of reasons for what we're seeing in the collective right now.

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (03:07):

Children should be seen and not heard.

(03:12):

That was a big one. Or when I was boisterous as I was to stop showing off and stop, I shouldn't be so Renee. I guess I was probably a handful and probably didn't know what to do with the likes of me. This has been a year for me about really turning inward and seeing what I really love and what I love about myself. And also I say that because what keeps me from the light of my own love. This morning I do a weekly work with the Swami, and I'm not so into the dogma, but I've been really, I love the teachings and I love the breath work, but this morning she was talking about guilt.

(04:04):

Guilt. And I bring that up because then we're going to talk about self-love, and it's like you, when you're carrying around a garbage bag full of guilt, how can you love yourself? And the topic came out of the blue for me and she said, think of the 10 most things that you're still guilty about. And boom, they just started popping into my head, wow, how I'm still, I think that I'm so awake, and yet I'm still carrying around feeling bad that I didn't go to my mother's side when she had surgery years ago, or that I didn't use a friend for a real estate transaction. And these are just little like pariah that no wait at us when we're least expecting it. And you have to be super vigilant with what he's still carrying,

Sandra Ingerman (05:02):

Right? Absolutely. Yeah. I think we had a show a while back and where we talked about staying present and I talked about how ISIS had come to me in a journey and explained to me that the reason I'm not healing is because my past is pushing into my present and there's too much of my past that I'm carrying. And she said to me, I don't care how bad things were for you, I really don't care. She said, you have to just shut the door. You have to, and you have to deal with your present. And I think I said this on one of our that she comes to me and she goes, what are you feeling right now? And I tell her, and she said, no, that was five seconds ago. I want to know what you're feeling right now, second this second. And what I'm finding is that the deepest issues that I have been blind to and so unaware of for 71 years are coming up because I'm asking myself, what are you feeling this second?

(06:32):

And when something comes up that's so dismembering and so traumatic for me, I don't have to attach it to anything. I can just work with what I'm feeling right at this exact moment and transmuted and start to clear it. And all of a sudden there's this huge weight that got lifted off of me without having to go back and attach why this feeling is coming up and where did it come from in the past. It's been a really, really interesting process because I'm working the deepest on my past that I ever have in my life by staying in the second.

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (07:25):

I like that a lot. And I think that's why she meant just then it was just pick one because it doesn't really matter. It's like the energy of the guilt or the energy of the shame or the energy of the disappointment or whatever it is that lives so thoroughly in our present. And I love that I'm going to start doing that because I'm not one who likes to spend time in the feelings. I have a friend I'm staying with and she'll say, well, how are you feeling about that? And I'll go right on into the explanation, the story behind it. It's just like, and then I start to get mad, I guess when somebody asks me how I'm feeling, I get angry. Maybe that's it. I don't have that association. Feelings aren't something that I feel comfortable to be with, so I just move forward.

Sandra Ingerman (08:27):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's really interesting what we do, but the issue that's coming up for people right now, a lot of people are sick with mysterious things, including myself and many others. And so I'm deep into talking to that population of people. And there's, everybody just says it when I ask, do you love yourself? And how much do you feel your self worth about healing and being creative and doing what you want in the world? And people say, I just don't know how to love myself. A post came up, I think on the shamans cave the other day of a guy saying, I have no idea. I have no idea what that means to love myself. And so the exercise that I've been given, and I will keep doing this exercise because it's incredibly powerful and I'm doing it a lot because I'm still trying to heal myself, is either do a journey or if you don't journey, I know a lot of you don't do direct revelation and journey.

(09:50):

You can put on some music and do a guided, just a meditation with some nice music that takes you into a journey, space and journey to source God the goddess. If you have a particular goddess, a particular figure that you really love, ask them. I talked to source myself, although I work with isis, ask how much love went into my creation, how much love went into my creation. I started teaching that in medicine for the Earth in 1990. And I remember being in a country in Europe, I don't want to say which best medicine for the earth workshop I ever did, because in this country, people just laugh. All we did was laugh Ireland. Yes. Was it? Yeah,

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (10:55):

I've been to Ireland for a shamanic retreat. It was great.

Sandra Ingerman (10:59):

Yeah. So anyways, somebody in the workshop had really been abused, really been abused, and she had a terrible image of herself. This one journey changed her entire life, her entire life. I mean, she wrote to me about it forever. Her life opened up. She all of a sudden could let go of the trauma of her past and how badly she was abused and just empowered herself and took over. And that was a long time ago. So I've been teaching this journey ever since. And to be able to actually, no, because we teach this in the spiritual traditions all the time as above, so below as within, so without, we have the same power of the spirits. We are a spirit. We just happen to put on clothing for this lifetime to play a role and to get a teaching and to get a learning. But when you really see, when you experience not see, and it's not a mental experience, you really feel sourced within you. And you can also see that as your own soul because our own soul tells us what it wants, what its destiny is in this lifetime, what to do while we're here and when to leave.

(12:31):

All of a sudden you wake up to, my God, I took on all this stuff from the collective, and who am I? I'm a really good person. I do love myself. And that's a scary thing to say in this culture because people take it as you're being too egoic. But if you look at the tragedies that we're dealing with today, are we looking at people who love themselves, who are creating so many issues for so many? So is that a healing for our time, for our climate, for wars, for everything, learning how to love ourselves and having self-worth,

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (13:18):

You're taking me back to a time when I was 30 years old and I don't know where this exercise came from, and I did it religiously. I went in the bathroom with a candle, I stood in front of the mirror and I would say, I love you, Renee. And I would say it a hundred times, and my face would transpose between ugly Crohn's to beautiful princesses and to distortions. And through all of those changes and all of those transformations of my face, I would continue to say, I love you exactly as you are. I love you. And back in those times, there wasn't all of the other techniques and tools. So a lot of times, I'll go back to the things that really worked back then, and I did that, and I also, I would fill up yellow legal pads of positive affirmations because I didn't even know where I didn't love myself.

(14:23):

And what you were saying is that's the key is sometimes when you are staying in the present and ISIS says, what are you feeling right now? Because everything else is not love. You know what I mean? There's this love and then there's not love and it's become way more simple. But so if you're just starting out and you need a technique, I will tell people, get out of legal pad and write it out. I'm holding complete exactly as I am. I must've written it 10,000 times until I finally started to crack the surface of what wasn't that love for me. And then hopefully we can do what happened this morning when she says, well, where are you holding guilt? Well, that's not love either, but it doesn't take a hundred pages of a legal pad anymore. It just says, wow, isn't this cunning and baffling and so insidious? And there's so many reflections out there of what is not love. Today. I had a Facebook post about the speaker that I have coming for the Emerging Themes conference in April, and people are like, hostile. How can somebody transgender be a reverend? She's going to burn in hell. I mean, just there's so many reflections of us projections at us that aren't love that it's even more important for me today to say, I don't need to engage that I'm okay and I'm feeling all right, and I'm in this space of love.

Sandra Ingerman (16:06):

Right? Yeah, no,

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (16:12):

I know. Is it sad?

Sandra Ingerman (16:14):

It's so sad. But if you look at this kind of behavior, what you see is people who don't love themselves and not to love themselves, and so they don't love anybody else. So much of what I'm just going to stick right now with America, so much of what we're seeing in controversies going on violence and separation going on is people actually saying the words, I don't love myself, and I'm going to project it on every single human on the planet, and I'm going to act out against every single human on the planet. So yeah, it's a really big issue for me. I don't do this a lot, but I think it's brilliant, Renee, what you brought up with the candle and standing in front of the mirror back in the 1980s when I was basically this far from homeless and no food to eat, and somebody gave me a really tiny book called The Magic of Believing, and it was a really old book that different movie stars back in the really old days.

(17:38):

I can't even remember the name of the author, I'm sorry. But he had a lot of mirror work where you would write things down, you would read it, looking at your eyes in the mirror. And so recently I just decided to play with it a little bit, but not the way he was doing it. I wasn't writing things down on cards and reading it to myself. I was standing in the mirror and saying, this is what I want to do. And I was looking at my eyes and if my eyes looked dead, I got, this is not what I want to do. But if I looked in the mirror and my eyes lit up, all this light coming out of it, that's a yes. My body, yes,

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (18:29):

I get that. Last week I got this email from somebody I hadn't heard from because she hadn't sent an email in 10 years, said, I'm going to walk the Camino and my eyes and my coup. That's what Hank used to call it, your coup. It was like I wrote her back. I said, I'm in, and you better get some hotel rooms. We're going to bring some friends. And it was even, there was no second thought. There was no doubting it, there wasn't. How much does this cost? It was just like my spirit says we needed an adventure and you answered our call. So what are your strong yeses? Because that you said, when you look in the mirror, I want to do this. And it was like, yes. Yeah.

Sandra Ingerman (19:21):

And look for where there's dead. And to go back to the show, it's very interesting. Go to the mirror and look in the mirror and say the words, I love myself and I feel that I'm worthy of the best in life. And see what your eyes do if your eyes are dead or it's like, no, your eyes aren't with you. Your eyes are one place and your words are saying another thing. Then start to do the deeper work. Start to do, working with writing positive affirmations. Do some kind of journey to the creative forces of the universe and actually get in your body kinesthetically how much love went into your creation. I

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (20:18):

Love that. I'm going to do that this afternoon when I go walk, take my wind walk, I'm going to find out how much love went in.

Sandra Ingerman (20:25):

Yeah, don't forget that the creative put apart a seed in you of that love. Don't forget that.

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (20:36):

I love that. I think that's great. I think it's a great stopping point. And somebody was telling me this week, they really loved our show because we weren't always selling everything and things like that. But we do want you to subscribe to us. We do want you to buy Saundra's new book. If you feel called to come walk the Camino with me. Reach out. And I've been seeing this question a lot lately. Can I get all the questions and all the answers I need from my higher source? Well, the truth is, if you're in that divine love all the time, maybe, but the rest of us, which is probably 99% of us, have our egos that get in the way and we need teachers. And that might mean paying a teacher who has done a little bit more work than you who might be shining just a tad brighter. But I'm not recommending to go get all of your answers from Spirit and think that teachers are a waste of money and all of that, because if they were, Sandra and I wouldn't teach workshops.

Sandra Ingerman (21:47):

Right? Yeah. When you look at some of the posts on Facebook, it's so clear that people don't even have an idea of what shamanism is, but they're listening to other comments of people who have no idea of what shaman is. So it's

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (22:07):

No idea. Family.

Sandra Ingerman (22:08):

It's really interesting to watch how Shamanism is being passed down because nobody really has an idea of what it is except for people who did the work, went through the initiations. And so before we end, I do want to say that my book, walking Through Darkness and Nature, pace, path to Navigate Suffering Loss is now out. It went into its second printing after one week of being out. I'm getting so many emails of You're talking to me, you're talking to me, and it's about the hard times though, and how to get through 'em. So I hope you'll check it out if you feel called to do that,

Renee Baribeau, The Practical Shaman (23:04):

Right. Well, we'll talk to you all soon and we will see you at the Shamans Cave and pass us along. Why don't you hit this week? What a better way of giving is to share it with somebody else who might need a little bit of self-love. So hit the share button, hit the subscribe, and we'll see you soon.