Reverse, Reset, Restore
This is for all of us who have been wounded by our own (and others) judgements and expectations, who have listened to those inner voices and believed the lies we've sold ourselves and for those who truly want to love and honour who you were always meant to be. If you've struggled with self-acceptance, poor body image and a belief system that is no longer serving you (if it ever did!), then this podcast is your reminder that you're not alone and you can choose to make changes - from your health and wellbeing, to your thoughts and the way you move in the world.
Reverse, Reset, Restore
5 Life Lessons in Self-Compassion: The Legacy of Kristen Guest
This is a deeply personal episode of Reverse, Reset, Restore as I navigate the profound pain of loss and the inescapable nature of grief. Through the lens of my own experiences losing a dear friend this past week, I wanna talk about the resilience that blooms in the face of chronic health struggles and finding joy even in the most of impossible odds.
My friend, Kristen Guest, found remarkable joy and strength in her journey, despite her life-long health battles. Through her life, she taught us the irreplaceable value of self-compassion and well-being. Her legacy urges us to cherish every fleeting moment and embrace life wholeheartedly. I want to honour that tenacious spirit. I want to honour her.
So this episode, is a bit of a departure from the usual. We're gonna delve into the indelible impact of Krissy's life and the values she held dear—Wisdom, Wellness, and Worth with 5 lessons Krissy shared about her own life. Her amazing resilience built strong foundations within her even though life had handed her uneven surfaces. Her wisdom, her joy, and her absolute servant heart, that she shared so generously with countless people , serves as an inspiration for us each to plant seeds of positivity in ourselves and in others. I honor her memory by reflecting on her powerful words about finding strength, inner peace, and self-love amidst struggles.
We end this episode with her heartfelt message on the importance of self-love, and a poignant reminder to amplify our love for others by first loving ourselves.
RIP Kristen Guest. July 6, 2024.
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Welcome to Reverse, reset. Restore the show where we explore the incredible connection between our mind and body. Change comes from within. This episode is same but different. This episode is same but different. I'm going to keep it somewhat brief and, unlike a lot of my episodes where I have notes and scripts and lots of things to keep me on track, I'm not going to do that quite the same here, at least not for the first part I'm just going to speak from the heart, because my heart is hurting this week. I'm talking death and grief. So if that's not something that you can hear right now, I totally get it, and I understand if you need to skip this episode, but I need to talk about it. So, if you stick with me, thank you for holding space for me to share, because it's been one of those weeks where it it just sucked.
Speaker 1:I lost a dear friend this week. She was someone who knew all about living with chronic, sometimes debilitating pain, and yet she powered through what feels like the impossible. What feels like the impossible, somebody whose body was always on the attack, who faced so many, too many obstacles and odds against her that most of us will never face in our lives. This loss feels heightened to me, I think, because it comes so close to another date that holds a lot of significance for me personally. This past week also marks six years since one of my best friends left this world on her own terms, and that is another, entirely different type of grief. It sinks into your soul, binding itself to blood and bone and sinew A death where I couldn't save her. None of us could. I especially couldn't, because at the time I was struggling to save myself. So it's been a hard week of remembrance and fresh loss and reminders that this is very much a part of life, that grief is one of those inescapable life experiences. You know. It gets you reflecting on your own mortality and gives us a chance to kind of really re-examine our lives, the moments that pass us all too soon, and I've been thinking a lot about my two dear friends and me and our differences. You know we were different ages and cultures and had different life experiences and different chronic health conditions, and yet we were all facing internal battles with our health and our self-worth internal battles with our health and our self-worth. I suspect that there's something that almost the entire world's population can kind of relate to. So many of us find ourselves caught in this relentless pursuit of an ideal you know this concept of being perfect that keeps us locked in a cycle of dissatisfaction and discontent with our own bodies as they are right now or how we think they should be. Meanwhile, as John Lennon so aptly put it, life is what happens when we are busy making other plans.
Speaker 1:Today I want to talk about Chris, or rather, I want to give an opportunity of sorts for Chris to talk to you through me. I had been talking to my friend Chris a while back about having her guest on the show. I wanted to have her discuss her lifelong chronic pain and health conditions and what inspired her or kept her as one of the most joyful people I know. Despite all her challenges, she remained optimistic and fiercely enthusiastic for life. She was launching a career as a joy coach, although she was, in my opinion, already a joy coach just by her very nature. She could have curled up and hidden herself away in the misery of her pain and no one would have blamed her. And yeah, there were times that she did, because sometimes that is the reality of living with chronic health conditions and pain that's just persistent. That's all we can do to survive is just to curl away and wait for the pain to run its course for a moment. And yet, despite the fatigue, the daily pain, the bone and tissue being eaten away by disease, despite all of that, my dear Chris always found the courage and the strength to want to pour into other people's lives, and that's such a rare thing. Most people, when they're hurting, they just strike out of the world, not Chris. She understood the healing that can come from connecting to other people, especially those who are also suffering. She chose, even in the midst of her pain, to be joyful, to be blessed and find gratefulness, and that is very inspiring. Sadly, our conversations for this podcast will never happen, at least not in the way that we had hoped, so I want to give my friend Chrissy the moments we planned for her to have on this podcast.
Speaker 1:I've chosen five of her posts that I feel have a central thing. In each of them there is a hope and a belief that, no matter what the situation, no matter how tough it feels and insurmountable the odds against us may appear, that we can overcome these terrible things with self-compassion and joy. Each post emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting and nurturing ourself, despite any societal pressures or personal limitations, and past struggles and even pain. The reoccurring message is to prioritize one's well-being, reclaim self-worth and approach yourself with kindness and compassion, and that's something that so speaks to my own heart and my own hope. That's why I do this podcast, because I want you to fall madly deeply in love with your beautiful life for every moment that you have left of it, because one day it'll be gone. So I've got five posts. I've titled each one, but other than that, here is my friend Kristen Kristen Guest in her own words.
Speaker 1:Number one imperfection and societal cycles. Let's be real for a second, y'all. Nothing is ever perfect. Perfect is a word that may have been invented in good faith and with good intention and yet continues to be used by the sector of society that actually seeks to keep us down. Have you ever thought about the cycles created by capitalistic systems in the Western world? Healthcare is not about healing. It's a business. The sicker we get, the more healthcare is needed. So what do we do? Let the cycle continue? Nah, first of all, you start, pick a direction and move through it. Breaking the cycle doesn't mean completely jumping out, but it does mean taking one step, putting your foot down on the new section of your journey and making that part of your work until it's time to take the next step. We don't always have to live inside the box. Color inside the lines. You get to decide not only how you want to feel, but what you want to do about this desire.
Speaker 1:Number two values of wisdom, wellness and worth. Since I was little, I have soaked up all the knowledge I could get into my brain at one time. Implementing the best ideas for me can be a struggle when haunted by the physical and mental limitations of illness. So how have I actually made things work with joy and a smile for so long, living by three of my biggest values wisdom, wellness and worth? Wisdom is, in and of itself, the implementation and living out of what you know to be true the best aspects of life and what it brings. Wellness is how I define wealth and vice versa. What you have and need works its way from inside out. The world is well when we are. The world is well when we are. Worth is all about you and what you bring to your own table. We see worth as an outside job, at times allowing other people to tell us what we are worth or that we hold worth. This is all about taking that power back that we gave away in the first place and facing the trauma that led us to throw it away. The reclaim is part of my implementation and, honey, your worth is ready to be reclaimed. In all this I find joy from heaven and on earth. There is so much more to life than illness and wisdom. Wellness and worth can allow us to claim it all.
Speaker 1:Number three redefining wealth. Are you wealthy or sick? For the full possibility of wealth, a deep focus on wellness is required. Many believe that wealth is all about how much money you have and or are perceived to have in the current moment. Well, an original definition of wealth, the condition of well-being. Full credit to coach at Seek Wisdom PCW for teaching me this. What does that mean? The first and most important investment you can make is the one into your wellness Mental, physical, spiritual environment, all of it.
Speaker 1:I cannot say I'm the richest woman in the world financially, yet question mark, exclamation point. And yet I am rich because of my perception and what I'm currently devoting my life to my well-being. At first, this can come off as overly self-centered and uncaring. Yet that's just a degrading, thoughtless, hegemonic initiative that makes us think devoting time to ourselves is uncaring and ruthless. In fact, my life's mission has been the care and concern for others in the world, before I took more of an interest in my own well-being. That ended up being fulfilled to my detriment Many gifts brought with limited funds, energy spent volunteering before big surgeries, working during periods of grief. I did a lot of things for others that made me sick, not because of the other person, but because of my inability to say no, or even later, like ever. These past few years since getting out of a year-long hospital stint have been incredibly eye-opening. I've been able to see the value in myself and how much more I will be able to give by being there sometimes and not other times. So I'm starting really and truly starting this wealth journey by focusing on my wellness.
Speaker 1:Number four letting go of shame. Not too long ago, coach at Seek Wisdom, pcw told us to make a hashtag willing to lose list, and I definitely started my rolling list. I've decided to share with you the biggest item on that list shame. A shame around not being healed or fully able to do all the things like a normal human, but still wanting to guide others to their best health and persona. The shame needs to be shared because I am further along in my journey than I ever thought I'd be, and that is something to celebrate and value as I open up for others. The depression and grieving in old life is not linked to the need to stay where I was parentheses anymore because that place was a stuck place. I refuse to remain stuck. I exude joy, I enjoy, I am joy, I'm out here living it.
Speaker 1:Number five discipline and fatigue. Are you undisciplined or are you simply tired? Tired of having to follow all the treatment plans, tired of the meds and the orders and the tests and and I've watched YouTube countless times looking for something new about how to truly be disciplined and consistent in all that I do At this point it's simply a form of distracting entertainment. I'm not saying one can't be disciplined in something. What I am saying is that everything is not going to become consistent at one time. When I allow my neurodivergence and fatigue to become a deterrent from success instead of a creativity producer, I lose not only the will to continue a project but the belief I once had in myself to be able to do pretty much anything. At one point. The fatigue, for me, meant I simply had to push harder, think harder, go harder, serve harder. Harder is hard. As I continue to grow and evolve, I notice how the simple route isn't always the easiest route. It hasn't been easy to allow myself to detach quantity of value from my worth. It hasn't been easy to create one consistent practice instead of trying to do everything at once in the name of faster accomplishments. The fact that this is all so simple taking care of self, devoting time to wellness, etc. Doesn't mean it's not hard.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sticking around and allowing me to honor my beautiful friend with some reminders of the beautiful, messy, painful, challenging, heartbreaking and blessing we call life. These are her thoughts and her truths over the last few months. My hope is that they may be seeds that travel far and wide, planting into the earth of open hearts. May they grow and flourish and their roots travel deep. I hope that you find comfort and inspiration and hope and joy in Chris's message and, most of all, the courage to practice self-compassion, just as she has encouraged me and inspired me for the past 17 years of our friendship. As we move forward in our own lives, let's remember that the journey to wellness is personal and unique, and sometimes the outcomes are painful and not what we would hope for.
Speaker 1:Chrissy's death has left me feeling reeling in a lot of ways. Things happen to us that can either shake the ground or make the foundations. Chrissy chose to create beautiful, incredible foundations on uneven surfaces of what any of us could look at and go. That was an unfair hand. I hope that your takeaway, as it is for me, is to think of the three values that Chrissy had Wisdom, wellness and worth. I know that those three things are going to be a sticking point in my mind for quite some time. How can I apply wisdom, wellness and worth even in the hard moments of my life, even in the chronic pain and debilitating days where nothing feels good or right or easy?
Speaker 1:I love this woman.
Speaker 1:I'm incredibly thankful for the memories.
Speaker 1:I'm grateful that she chose to share some of these truths on social media so that we could document them, that I could share them, because I feel like we all have seeds within us that can be deeply planted in the hearts of other people.
Speaker 1:If you've stuck around for this whole episode and to hear Chrissy's beautiful words with my voice, I really want to thank you and if you need any assistance, I'm going to put some books and some organizations in the show notes that could offer further support and information on grief and bereavement and chronic illness. You know how I always sign off with some quote from somebody, and it seems very fitting to sign off this episode with a quote from Chris herself, and this is the very last post that she shared on social media, and I'm not going to read the whole thing, I'm just going to read the last sentence because I think it's pretty amazing. Every single struggle, as painful and exhausting as it may be, is a blessing towards my strength and, ultimately, inner power, peace and love, loving myself so I can love you harder. Thank you.