Ep 164: Compassionate Observer

What does it really mean to become the compassionate observer of your own mind?

In this episode, we explore the practice of stepping back and watching your thinking instead of becoming consumed by it. Because here’s the truth most of us forget: you are not your thoughts, and you are not your feelings.

But when we first begin noticing our thinking, many of us run into a new problem. We judge it. We see a thought and immediately think, Nope. That’s a bad thought. I can’t think that. I can’t be the kind of person who thinks that. So we push it down.

We do the same with feelings like resentment, anger, or jealousy. We shove them underground. And when we do that, those thoughts and feelings don’t go away—they just move into the subconscious where they start running the show.

So today we talk about a different approach: learning to observe your thoughts and emotions with curiosity instead of judgment, so they feel safe enough to reveal themselves. Because when we can truly see what’s happening in our minds, that’s when real change becomes possible.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• What it means to become the compassionate observer of your thoughts and emotions
• Why suppressing thoughts and feelings actually gives them more power over you
• The “watch the thinker” practice and how it helps you separate yourself from your thoughts
• Why the subconscious “elephant” always wins when we try to control ourselves through judgment
• How creating safety and compassion toward your own mind allows hidden patterns to surface
• Real examples of how compassionate observation reveals patterns like over-responsibility, fawning responses, or shrinking in moments of leadership
• Why curiosity—not criticism—is the key to seeing what’s actually holding you back
• How practicing compassion with yourself naturally increases compassion for others
• Why releasing self-judgment makes you more confident, more present, and more magnetic in your relationships

When we practice compassionate observation, something surprising happens.

We stop judging ourselves—and when that happens, we stop assuming everyone else is judging us too. Instead of walking into a room wondering “Do they like me?” we walk in thinking “There you are.”

We become more present.
More open.
More connected.

And ironically, that’s when confidence and magnetism start to grow.

All of this begins with one simple practice: watching your mind with compassion.

So today, your job is simple. Notice your thoughts. Don’t judge them—just acknowledge them. Let your emotions move through you. And from that place of awareness, choose the thoughts that move you toward the life you want.

Little by little, that’s how your moxie grows.

How to connect with Marie:

• On the Web | The Local Bloom
• Instagram: @the.bloom.coach
• All Things Marie on LinkTree

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Transcript

Welcome And Missed Episodes

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Hello everybody. Welcome to episode number 164 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. Okay, y'all, I don't know if you've noticed, but I have missed a couple episodes lately. I haven't missed any episodes in like three years, and then I missed two in the past like two months or something. And so I'm coming clean. I'm coming clean with you. And there's two reasons why I missed these two podcasts. One is that the Moxie kicked off, and I am doing so much cool stuff. I have this investor person partner that I'm working with that's wonderful, and the Moxie mastermind kicked off, and we are doing so much good stuff. And uh I we are planning the first retreat in the first weekend of May. So fun. It's gonna be for the Moxie mastermind participants, but also there are gonna be open spots for people who are not in the Moxie that want to come join. So reach out to me. It's in San Diego and it's just a couple days. Super affordable. Like gourmet food, yoga coaching, but like light coaching and connection and just like support and so much good stuff. Hiking, depending on where we're at. So little um maybe paddleboarding and stuff. So all of that is happening, and Love and Moxie is the masterclass on relationships that is out, and it is starting next week. So if you're interested in that, let me know. You can still sign up. And the first class is February 13th, which is a Friday. All of that is happening, and so just lots going on, but that is not the only reason that I missed two podcast episodes. Do you want to know the other reason? It's because I'm sharing my podcast equipment with my husband. And if you really want to know why this podcast sounds so good, it's because I stole his musical equipment. And really, the like dirty, dirty secret that is now public after this episode is that I bought him a gift years ago called an Apollo twin. And it's like a mixing soundboard for musicians. But he wasn't making a lot of music at the time, so he wasn't really using it. So I commandeered it for my podcasting. And also I've been using his like high-end, high-quality microphone. But recently, his so Max used to be in a pretty famous band called No Motive, and the lead singer of his band, who's an honorary uncle in our family and one of Max's best friends, has been staying in our house and they've been recording again, which is so exciting. They're recording a bunch of new music, and this is like the best thing ever. But also, I'll come out to record my podcast and my music equipment is gone, y'all. So there's my excuse. Please forgive me. But he did say that he wants me to sing backup vocals on a song, which is big deal. Can you believe it? Do you think I'll do a good job? I'm really excited about singing backup vocals. We'll see how I do. I will, you will definitely hear from me if I do it. We'll tell you all about it. So that's what I've been up to. And then today's podcast episode is coming by request, because we have been doing, um, we've been having people joining the Bloom Room, doing amazing coaching in there, lots of good coaching and connection time in that community. And so, as people new people join, we've been, you know, having all these topics. And one of them was being the compassionate observer of your mind. And we did great coaching on that this week. And then I had a couple people say, Do you have a podcast episode? I want to review this content. I want to get really good at this. So, this is for y'all being the compassionate observer. I can't really believe that I haven't made an episode about this before because it's like so fundamental to having a brain and doing work with neuroplasticity, having this. I mean, it is the thing that we're doing with all of it, but you can thank the bloom room folks for uh asking for this. So, what does it mean to be the compassionate observer? To watch the thinker. Well, let's review some core tenets here that you are not your thoughts. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. And if you are a human being like me, you forget that all day long. We have thoughts all day and we conflate ourselves with them, and we think that we are our thoughts, but you are not our thoughts. You are not your thoughts. And you know, another thing that is true is you are not your feelings. We can all think of a time when we merged with a feeling where we like just became our anger or our sadness or our frustration or our loneliness and forgot that we're actually a compassionate observer of the feelings that run through us. We actually are not our feelings. We're experiencing our feelings. We are not our thoughts, we are experiencing our thoughts rolling through our head. But we do, we forget those things. Another thing that is true, another tenet of what I teach is that just because you think something, it doesn't make it true. We have all kinds of thoughts. We have all kinds of oppositional thoughts. Just that in itself tells us that they're not all true, right? I'm a horrible person, I'm a wonderful person. Um, you know, we change thoughts really quickly. The last episode um before the one that I that I just recorded the interview with my business partner. There was one about staying in your model. And that one was all about how we can be thinking in one way, and then all of a sudden someone offers us a different way to think and we get consumed by it. We kind of get overtaken by somebody else's thinking, and all of a sudden we're like, wait, I felt so great a minute before. Why do I feel horrible now? It's because we're jumping into somebody else's model, right? So there's not one true way to think. There's lots of different ways to think, and we forget that we have all of these thoughts, and we get to choose the ones that we want, the ones that are most helpful to us. So we can begin to just watch our thinking, but for a lot of people, that's when we start to get into trouble. We start to see thoughts that are running through our head, and we just think we see them, and we're like, Nope. That is an ugly thought. I can't think that. I can't be the type of person who thinks that. Ew. Ew. So we shove it down. We shove the thought down. We pretend we didn't see it. And it hides from us. And the same thing happens with feelings. Like resentment or like ugly, nasty anger. We start feeling it and we're like, I can't do that. I'm not okay with feeling resentment. So we shove it down. And again, when we shove it down, like a beach ball, it just gets bigger. And like a beach ball being pushed underwater, it just gets a bit bigger and builds pressure and eventually kind of explodes out of us in some way, whether that's because we get sick or it actually literally, we have a freakout, you know, it comes out in some way. When we do that, the feeling, the thought, has way more control over us when we push it down. It goes underground and controls us from there, from the subconscious. I've talked before about this concept by Betty Price called the elephant and the writer. I love this description of the subconscious. I've read so many of them, and this is my favorite. Where the subconscious, the 95% of our mind that we're not aware is happening, is the elephant, this giant strong beast. And there's a saddle on the elephant, and then our conscious mind is the little writer who's riding around on top. And the conscious mind thinks it's in charge, it's holding the reins and it thinks it's driving. But like a lot of the time, the conscious mind and the unconscious mind want to go in different directions. We want to feel better than we do about something. We wanna take action on something, a new habit that's healthier, and we just keep not doing it. When the elephant and the writer want to go in different directions, guess who's gonna win? The little tiny guy with a couple pieces of leather that are like the reins? No, it's the elephant. The elephant is way stronger and it's gonna take our little conscious mind with it wherever it wants to go. So all those underground thoughts that we're pushing under when we don't want to see them, we have to make those thoughts safe enough. We have to make an environment that's safe enough so that they'll show themselves to us. We have to watch the thinker know that we are not our thoughts. We're just experiencing our thoughts, we're observing our thoughts, and we can do it without judgment. We can be the compassionate observer of how we think, how we feel, how we act. And all of those things, a lot of those things are automatic, even how we act. We act out of subconscious bias a lot of the time. We act out of automatic programming from our old thoughts and feelings. It's not our choice a lot of the time, but it is our responsibility how we act. So if we want to change it, we have to first know it's there. And we can only know it's there if we're soft and gentle enough with ourselves for it to come out of hiding. Because our thoughts will only show themselves to us if we are gentle with them. Like, have you ever seen a kid of Kai? Everybody has, I'm sure, that's like they want to tell you something that they did, but they have this look on their face that's like, Am I gonna get in trouble? And they're only gonna come clean and be honest about what happened if they think they're not gonna get in trouble, right? You see it on their face, they're like testing the wire. They're like, Am I gonna get yelled at? Am I gonna get in trouble? If they feel like they won't, that's when they'll come clean and say, Oh, I did it. So we got to create trust with them for them to be able to speak honestly with us as adults, right? We gotta have them know we all make mistakes. I made mistakes. It's safe to talk to me. There's like cause and effect, and there's consequences to actions, but like, you're not bad. I love you no matter what. And then they'll be like, oh, she loves me no matter what. She got my back. She makes mistakes too. I can tell her. We have to do the same thing with our brain. That's the only way it will show itself to us. And once it does show itself to us, we have all the choice. We're gonna have about every circumstance, we're gonna have a bunch of different thoughts most of the time. So we might have something that we're worried about that we're thinking about. I was just coaching someone on this today. And she was saying, you know, I think I have like five or six different thoughts about it. And I'm like so distracted by all of them. And then I'm thinking about all of them, and I'm like, which one is true? This one or this one or this one or this one. And then we paused and I said, Hey, stop right there. None of them are true. The fact that so many different ways of looking at the same circumstance exist tells you none of them are true, right? They are all optional. And we forget that it's totally normal to have a whole bunch of thoughts about something. Having a human brain means we're gonna have a whole bunch of thoughts about things, and there's nothing wrong with that. Like when I was coaching her, I was like, there's nothing that has gone wrong here. You just forgot what to do with your thoughts. Because if you have five thoughts, you just check them all out. You're like, I feel worried about this. I'm having this thought that this guy's gonna be mad. I have this thought that I don't know if I should re out reach out to him directly. I have this thought that I should reach out to him directly. I have, you know, whatever the thoughts are, they're like a whole bunch of different thoughts. And you just look at all of them, like a kid choosing a go-kart, and they're like, Do I want the blue one or the green one or the yellow one or the red one? Which one do I want? Or like bumper cars or something, right? You get to choose the one you want that's most gonna be helpful to you. It's gonna be most helpful to you. So once you see them all and stop judging them and running away from them and stop forgetting that they're not true, they're just thoughts passing through your brain like clouds. They mean nothing about you, they're just thoughts. Then you can check them all out and decide which one you want. But you have to create a compassionate, observing mind in order for them to show themselves to you. And it will impact everything in your life. This is why I'm coaching on it all the time. It impacts our businesses, it impacts our ability to travel and have adventures, it impacts our relationships, it impacts our finances, definitely impacts our well-being in the day-to-day, our productivity, all of it. I had one client who we had to have him see that whenever something goes wrong in work or in his personal relationships, he takes all the blame. And we were like, I was like, you know what? I noticed you always take all the blame. No matter how off someone else's behavior is, you're like, I did it. I'm like, where did that come from? Can we be so soft and gentle and just be playful and be like, huh? What's going on there? No judgment. No judgment. Nobody's gonna get in trouble. I'm sure it's happening for a good reason. Because, like, we are really good at meeting our needs as human beings. We just meet them in ways that are not very helpful sometimes. So once we can see what need we're meeting, we can be like, oh, okay. I'm gonna meet that need in a different way. So the need that we saw was that when he takes all the blame, then like there's no one to be mad at anymore because he's just saying he's sorry. And then they can move on to the fun stuff. He's like, I can just have fun, because if I'm just like the one to blame all the time, then we could just move on and have great experiences. And it's always been like that since I was a kid. And it was just so good to see that with laughter and no judgment and just curiosity and just you know, being charmed by the things our brains do, because it wasn't very helpful for him, but it had been working for him for a long time. In some ways, in other ways, it really was not working. And so once we created like this safe atmosphere, he could see it. There was another client who was fawning. Do you know fawning when you like people please to the max where it's a it's a trauma response? It's like fight, flight, freeze, fawn. That's there's other ones, flock and stuff. But fawn is when you know, if somebody's angry and upset, this person would just be really, really nice to them and like cook them a cake, do everything they could for them. And I I talk to a lot of students who can relate to this, I can relate to parts of it. And when we started to see it, and we were gentle enough, created a compassionate observing space that was gentle enough to be like, why am I doing that? Then all of a sudden, that student, that client can like choose whether or not to do it because it's safe. All right, so many examples of this with my clients. But I just want to say when we let ourselves practice compassionate observation, we let ourselves see all of ourselves. And then and only then we can change. So I like to think of this like me and you just sitting on the couch looking at your brain. I tell my clients this all the time. I'm never gonna confuse you with the wacky stuff your brain does. Our brains are bananas, they're like really old wiring. And like, I'm not gonna judge you for it. Our brains are wild. You're amazing. But you're sitting on the couch next to me, totally valuable and amazing. We're looking at your brain, your brain's doing funny stuff. So can you do that with yourself? That's compassionate observation. You know, it's just like watching what the brain does and getting curious and being soft too. It's not always just funny. It's also like, hey, our brains are like taking care of us and having our backs by telling us negative things about ourselves sometimes. It's not helpful, but the intention is good. So the tool I want to just suggest is when you see yourself kind of going into that spot where something's going on and you're acting funny, not in a way that you don't really like when you're frustrated and snapping and taking it out on people. You can just check in with yourself and say, What's going on? What's going on, love? Tell me. Tell me everything. What is it? Like you would talk to a kid when a kid's having a tantrum. Do the same thing with your beautiful brain, and then your brain will show itself to you. But you gotta listen without judgment. That is when we'll see the things that are really holding us back. The reason our business isn't successful, our relationships keep struggling, or why we can't make it a priority to focus on the project we really want to. Just whatever the thing is that's holding you back, when you can watch yourself without judgment, just with curiosity, you'll see what model you're in. You're you'll see what's going on. So when we practice this with ourselves, we can do it more easily with the people around us. We're not judging ourselves, so we stop projecting judgment onto other people. And if you just notice this about yourself, you might see it. Have you ever judged people for being late and then had a circumstance that made you late, like um having kids? And then all of a sudden you just lose the judgment because you weren't judging yourself for being late anymore, because you're like, oh, I get it. I get why people are late now. Whether I'm laughing about having kids because that's mine. But if you don't have kids, just like whatever it is, you know, you move, you live farther away, or for whatever reason, you're not sleeping as well. Or just like in general, I notice getting older, you start understanding how your body's gonna change. And the most important thing is being there for your people and not your career or your looks or anything else, but like being in the moment and loving it. And when you feel that way about life and you're not holding on so tight, you have more softness and compassion with the people around you too. So, like, just in that same way that when we have something that we soften with with ourselves, we soften with other people, it's the same with our thoughts. When we can be compassionate and less judgmental inside our own head, then we become compassionate and less judgmental with the people around us. And ironically, when we are softer with ourselves, we become much more magnetic and more confident. Believe me, I promise you, I am about to record a podcast on imposter syndrome, and this is like the core of it. It's amazing. We stop thinking about ourselves so much because we're not judging ourselves. So we're not assuming other people are judging us. And then we walk into a room and we're like, there you are, instead of walking in and being like, here I am. Do you like me? I hope you like me. I hope you approve of me, everyone. In our heads. We aren't so hard on ourselves, so we have this focus out on the people around us and the world around us because we got nothing to prove. We're okay with ourselves and we're not judging ourselves, so we don't feel self-conscious. And the result of that is that we're magnetic. We are present with people. We ask them questions. They feel seen, we're open and aware and awake because we're not so focused on what other people might not like about us. And this is what the world needs: more women who are living in their moxie like that. More people who are awake and out in the world, not beating themselves up in their own head. So when you stop judging yourself, you stop looking for approval. So you start giving approval. You start giving the people around you reasons to feel amazing. You start being more warm and having the certainty and knowing that you belong, and it creates space for other people to feel seen and valued. All of that starts up when we open up compassion with ourselves. Can you believe it? All you gotta do is be nicer to yourself? What? All this time we thought if we were hard on ourselves, it would keep us in line. Help us be successful or likable, help us measure up. It's the opposite. Can you believe it? In my classes, I teach about so many of these things, beliefs that we've been socialized to believe that are actually 100% upside down, and the opposite is true. There are so many of them. Blows my mind. Someday I just need to do a podcast on opposites. All the opposite things that we've been trained are true and the that are just not. But this is a big one. So your job is to practice being the compassionate observer today, right now. Can you do it? Can you be so soft? See all those thoughts, don't judge them, just acknowledge them. Just create space in your head. Hey, what's going on for me? What's this all about? Why am I acting like this? I wonder. What's going on, love? Then you pick the one, the thought, that's most helpful to you once you see them all. Like choosing a bumper car, the color you like. Once you see all the thoughts and you realize they're optional, you choose one. When you see all the emotions, you're not judging them, they run through you. And you'll notice your confidence rising, you becoming more magnetic, you feeling more at ease, and you'll just watch as you grow your moxie little by little every single day. That's what I've got for you this week, my friends, and I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.