#49 - Vulnerability & Forgiveness
Hey, hey ladies. Welcome to episode number 49. You guys,the next take is episode number 50. That's so big. I can't believe I've done this for 50 straight weeks. That's a big commitment. I am proud of myself and probably you guys for listening and committing to learning and growing and stretching yourselves. That's so important. All right. So, first off, before we get started with today's episode, we're going to talk about some happy stuff because I turn 40 this week on Thursday. So this episode airs on Wednesday. They'll be my last official day of being 39 years old. And I'm moving into my 40th year, my fourth decade on this planet. And I'm so excited. I know some people don't like the aging process, but I feel like I just keep getting better. I keep figuring out things and life keeps getting more enjoyable. And there is momentum right now. That I feel within my body and around me. And I'm so excited for what the next decade is going to bring. I'm so excited for what we're going to create. I'm so excited for the possibilities and the learning and the opportunities and all of it. bring it on. Anyway this past weekend, uh, one of my most amazing clients who has become one of my most amazing friends. Uh, called me up and she's like, Hey. What are we doing for your 40th birthday? And I hadn't really planned on anything. Like I knew my birthday was coming up, but I knew I didn't want to do like a weekend in Vegas or anything like that, get involved, a ton of planning. There's enough planning happening in my life right now. With my business and bringing in employees and planning competition prep, trips and all of that stuff. I didn't want to. I have to put a lot of effort into it. Anyway, big shouts out to Ms. Carrie Jones, because she very last minute, very quickly put together the most amazing day. There were about a dozen of us that got together in the middle of the afternoon and Whistler on Sunday, it was like 30 degrees outside. You guys, it was beautiful. And she has this big floating dock that has a motor on it. And we had like a day party that rivaled Vegas day parties. We floated around on this dock and listened to the most amazing music. Danced. I danced my ass off. And we played twister. You guys, I brought extreme twisters because twister is one of my favorite. It's one of my favorite games. it shakes things up or acquires some energy. It's hilarious. Anyway, We had so much fun. We stayed out there until pretty much sunset. Like the sun was going down over the mountains and things were starting to get a little chilly. We came in, we got reset. And then we went out and we had a really nice dinner and we went to a couple of different pubs and we got to, I just got to hang out with my girls and the women in my life right now, are the best women. There was no drama, there was no insecurity, there was no one judging anyone else. We were all in bikinis dancing around, right? Some of the girls are in comp prep and have abs some of us are not in comp prep and do not have abs me inclement. And, uh, it was just like women loving on women all day. And I needed that. It filled my cup, it overflowed my cup. It sent me into my week, just so full of gratitude. And just so much more cemented in what I'm creating in the world right now, bringing these kinds of women together in Lady Sculpt, giving them a purpose and a growth path to create the lives they want and giving them the tools to do that with mindset, macro nutrition, and muscle development, and empowering them to not just live lives they love, but live in a body they love as well, it's creating impact and that makes my purpose, just so much stronger. I'm so much more determined to make it Uh, reality. It's already a reality, but I just want it to grow now. And I just want to make sure that we keep creating room and space and tools for women to do this, to come together, to do this, to support each other so hard and do this because women supporting women and women loving on women. Can only lead to good things. All right. Rant over. For all of you who made it out on Sunday. I love you. You're my favorite for those of you who couldn't make it out, who don't live in BC, who weren't able to make it on super short notice. I love you guys too. I love all of you. I love all my listeners. All right. You guys.
Now we're going to get into episode number 49, vulnerability and forgiveness. I kept this episode to last on purpose. This is the last episode in the vulnerability series and the reason that I waited is because I'm not quite there yet. I, um, I was really hoping that throughout the last 10 weeks throughout all of the work I've been doing on trauma and emotion and acceptance and feeling it in my body and releasing it out of my body and processing it and all of it. I was really hoping that by the time I got to this episode, I would have come to a place where I was ready for forgiveness. And I've been working really hard on it over the last couple of weeks. And I recognize that I'm just not, I'm just not there a hundred percent yet. What that means to you guys is it doesn't. It doesn't mean that I'm full of anger and hate and resentment and all the things. It just means that I'm not quite ready to shift the emotion. I've always been someone that I feel is good at forgiving. I feel like if someone. Says something or does me wrong. I'm really good at just letting it slip off my back and not letting it mean. You know, a whole heap of stuff about me, right. I have a good sense of self. I've gotten good at having my own back in those situations. What I do notice is, I give people the opportunity to mess up and if they do. I just, you know, keep them out a little bit of a distance after that point and I give them the opportunity to work their way back in, or if they mess up again, you know, I put them at a further distance and that's just kind of, I think that's human nature. Right. But I do recognize that there is this one area in my life. And you, I mean, I've talked to you guys so much about it in the last 10 episodes where with my biological mom and just how she chose to handle my truth and our communication while I was younger. I thought I'd gotten to a place where I was at the point of acceptance. I really got to a place where I know I love her. I love that she brought me into this world. I think she's a phenomenal human being. She strives so hard to be good and nice and do the right thing. And I have a lot of respect for what she's been through. But I haven't quite got to a place yet where I can forgive her for the hurt she caused me. And what I've learned so much over the last. A few months, especially, and I think I knew this before, but me not forgiving her is hurting me. It's not hurting her. It's hurting me. And meet keeping her at an arm's distance. She's a part of my life in a very small way on purpose. Because I don't trust her with my emotional. Health to think about my feelings when she does things. And I think that's okay. That's a boundary that I've created in my life, but I recognize that not doing the work on forgiveness is causing me pain, undue suffering. Still, 40 years later. I really wanted to do an episode on forgiveness because I think so many of us don't realize that forgiving somebody else for what they've done. Isn't about them. It's not about being okay with what they've done. It's not about letting them walk all over. You are letting them do it again. Right. Forgiveness can come with a boundary. But what it is about is allowing yourself the release of those hurt feelings of that blame, of that anger and that resentment, it's moving past that. In the book that I was talking about a couple of episodes ago in vulnerability and trauma, becoming the one. It has a fantastic chapter on forgiveness. You guys, I've read it twice already and I'm planning to read it again. And there's just a couple of quotes that I want to share with you. So one of the things it says in this book that really stood out to me, I highlighted it twice. Two different colors. It says the path to forgiveness can be scary because it means that we inevitably will have to feel all our hurt and sadness rather than shielding ourselves behind anger and blame. And I think, for me, that's one of the reasons why I haven't stepped truly into forgiveness yet with this situation is because my brain and body have done everything they can to keep me from feeling the hurt inside. She goes on to say in her book, she says, well, righteous anger is necessary and vital to our grief process. We can't stay in that energy forever without the final stages of softening returning to our hearts and embodying forgiveness. We remain locked in our story and this suffering never ends. This is something that I have done a ton of work on. I've done a ton of work on really making sure that my story, how I talk about my past and how I talk about my adoption and my upbringing it's from a place of empowerment. And because I went through that, I am who I am and because I had to learn to be independent and have my own back and be stronger. I am the way I am because I've had to go back and do all that self development work, dive into my trauma and have the courage and the will to bring it to the surface and process it. I get to be a compassionate, strong leader. So I know I'm almost there. Is there anyone with me? I know I have a lot of clients and I meet a lot of women, especially a lot of adoptees. If there's any adoptees out there listening to this. It is really easy to get caught up in blaming our adopted parents or our biological parents for our traits because our character traits, so many of them come from a place of trauma, especially when that trauma is inset from infant age or younger. We don't even know what our pre-trauma self looks like we don't even know. What that was because the trauma happened at such a young age. So it's hard to know which personality traits are ours and which were created as a survival mechanism. So, I’ve become very good at talking about my story, my name, my history. What I've been through from a place of empowerment and growth. And sometimes it feels like I'm putting some, you know, tinted rose colored glasses on over it. I try not to blame or create pity, the last thing I want is for someone to be like, oh, I'm so sorry. You had to go through that. And I'm not like that, it's not that. The energy I want to create. I want people to be like, wow. It's amazing that you've been through that and are where you are now. Right. It's amazing that you've had that experience. I don't know if you guys have this, but I look at some of the biggest public speakers in the world and some of the celebrities and people who have achieved great things and have these crazy hard back stories and went through incredible abuse as young people reading Oprah's book just opened my eyes up and sometimes I look at those stories and I'm like, no wonder those people are where they are. They had to create so much strength and so much resilience in the overcoming of that. And I'm not surprised that they rose to greatness. And I look at my life and I'm like, maybe I needed more to overcome because it was like aside from my little adoption story. You know, my life was pretty good. But I then also recognize that the more I dig into it, the adoption story isn't little, it's a huge part of who I am. It's a huge overcoming for me. for me, it's my mountain. And maybe your mountain doesn't feel important or it doesn't feel big. Maybe you didn't have trauma. Maybe you don't feel like there's anything to overcome and you're just coasting and you haven't built that resilience yet. And I just want to let you know. That being human, includes trauma. You may not recognize it. It may not be as highlighted in your history. But you showing up and chasing your goals and growing yourself and working on personal development creates resilience, creates courage creates strength. And I feel like that is part of the human experience. That is part of what makes us great. All right. Fricking. All right. Tangent.
There's one more quote I want to read from this book, if you are struggling with forgiveness. I highly recommend you go out and buy Becoming The One. The chapter on forgiveness alone will make the purchase worth it. The rest of the book is bonus. There's so much goodness in this book, you guys, I want to buy everyone. I know a copy of this book. Um, so the last quote I want to give you is , think of the process of forgiveness and acceptance, like serving them an eviction notice, as long as we hold onto our resentment and replay past events in our mind. We're not free. This quote really showed me that I have worked to do because I do still have thoughts and I do still have moments of charged energy where I notice that, I'm angry or resenting or avoiding or making something small means so much more than it needs to because I haven't done the work on acceptance and forgiveness yet. In this chapter, Sheleana writes about what forgiveness and acceptance doesn't mean. And I love that she actually included these in the chapter and what forgiveness and acceptance does mean. It really helped me to see the boundary. And the difference between the two is that this book is so well written. You guys, I feel like this is just an advertisement for this book, but it's not. I feel like anyone who's struggling in relationships. Anyone who doesn't feel like they've got a good relationship with themselves? Anyone who has any kind of post-trauma needs to read this book. You will thank me for it. We're actually going to do a book club in LSM in 2023. And this is one of the first books I have on my list for that. In this chapter, she also has eight stages of forgiveness. I'm not going to read through them. You have to buy the book to get this. And then she has a forgiveness ritual which I'm so excited to do so. I'm at a place right now where I'm really working on moving into acceptance and forgiveness. And I know that there is action I need to take on this. I've done a lot of thought work on it. I've done a lot of studying of what it looks like, but there's some physical body movement and actions that I need to take to make it real, and I might need to take those actions multiple times before I can really settle in a place of being able to say,I forgive you. Even just saying those words out loud thinking of my biological mom. It makes my chest tight. So like there's emotion there. And that is a sign to me that I'm, I'm not quite there yet.
I think that when it comes to big forgiveness like this, when it comes to our lives, work and dealing with like, for anyone who has been traumatized or abused or hurt in a deep, deep way by somebody that they love. I think that it's okay to give ourselves compassion and hold space for ourselves and allow it to take as long as it takes. I feel like forgiveness is kind of like grief in that way. Where it's unique for each of us. And some little things like a friend for getting my birthday or forgetting that we had a date set up, those things are easy to forgive. But forgiving somebody when you've held resentment and anger for many, many years about something and let it really shape you, I do feel like it's something that I can't rush. I need to keep working on it. And I used to think of carrying it around. One of my coaches that I've worked with a long time ago said Lylas, what if it just always hurts a little bit. Like, what if it's something that you never arrive at a place where it feels better. What happened was shitty and you are validated to feel how you feel. And so what if you just carried it around like a heavy purse? And that actually helped me take my anger and my resentment and all of my feelings and keep moving forward. So it allowed me to not come to a place of forgiveness yet, but still keep progressing. Not let it hold me back or keep me stuck. It was fantastic advice at the time. But I am at a place now where I'm ready to stop carrying the heavy purse. I'm ready to not have it be my burden anymore. And that's what happens when we hold on to the past trauma and don't work on forgiveness and acceptance. It's us that carries around the burden of it. The person who hurt us, they have their own work to do. And that's on them. They may not even know they heard us. They may not have thought twice about it. and we might feel like that's unfair and us feeling angry and resentful and, you know, not being nice to them or not calling them or not, you know, not communicating. That's our way of like, showing them And hurting them back, but we have no control over how they feel, what they think, what their path is, we can only control our own. And what I know is, is that if we can work towards forgiveness for ourselves. We have the opportunity to put down that heavy purse. We have the opportunity to say, yup, that happened. And it sucked, and this is how I grew from it. And this is the experience I felt from it. And all of those feelings were validated and I cannot change how I felt about that. However, I can release myself from reliving that over and over again. Right. Every time I think of her every time I think of one of those experiences I had as a little girl where I tried to stay my truth and was turned down. I can go back and love that little girl. That inner child work is so important when it comes to forgiveness, because I can do that work. And then I don't need to go back and replay that once I've, I've done that work. That can just become part of it. My story can be more focused on the good things. I'm working towards putting down the heavy purse, but I have a feeling what that's going to look like is taking out one little stone at a time. And it might take the next 40 years to do that. And I'm okay with it. It's part of why we're here. It's part of what the human experience is all about.
But I do know that if you are somebody that carries resentfulness or anger, or if you have people in your life that have hurt you. And you're still hurting from it. If you notice that past experiences still cause you pain. This is your work to do because our past can not hurt us now. Unless we're having thoughts that hurt us now. Things that happen to us, physical things, emotional things, verbal things that happened to us in the past, can only hurt us now, if we're thinking thoughts that cause our own pain. Other people can not hurt our feelings, only our thoughts about other people's actions can hurt our feelings.
And when I remind myself of that, It reminds me that the only reason I am still hurt is because I'm thinking thoughts that are hurting my own feelings. And that is a hundred percent my work to do, which gives me back a hundred percent of my own power because I can do the work. It doesn't require anyone else to apologize or step up or change. It just requires men to process. And listen, and be in awareness with myself.
All right, my friends. So with this episode, I'm not going to give you three steps or, you know, the way to do this because I'm still trying to figure it out too. But if you want to work on this, if you want to know more, if you want to work towards forgiveness and acceptance for anything in your life. Again, I'm going to highly recommend that you jump onto the Amazons and you search Becoming The One by Sheleana Aiyana. And I'm going to spell that for you. It's Sheleana Aiyana and she's the founder of rising women, a fantastic female empowerment community. I highly recommend that you search it out. Do the work know, we're all doing it together. Yo. It's part of it. It doesn't end. You never arrive at a place where you don't have to do personal development work, you guys. It's part of our human experience. And as long as we're having this human experience, we want to be growing and striving and learning about ourselves and up leveling. So. In conclusion for the vulnerability series. You guys, I hope that this series has helped you feel more connected to me.
I hope that it's helped you, go a little bit deeper with yourself. There are so many more topics I could have talked about in the vulnerability series. I actually just recorded this podcast that I was like, I should have done one on boundaries. Just talking about boundaries in this episode. So we might run another series of vulnerabilities, but I'm going to wait a little bit. I'm ready to get back to some raw positive, macro nutrition, muscle development stuff that doesn't super involve emotion. Let's just get back into the tools and the how and let's take some action. All right. So I want you to keep this series in your back pocket. And if you're having a day. Where do you need someone to dive in the pool with you? And be vulnerable, or you need someone to talk to you about anxiety or shame or your ego or whatever is getting in your way at the moment. You have these episodes, you can come back to them over and over and over again. And know that I am in this with you. And I'm here, if you need someone to talk to. All right.
All right, ladies, I will see you next week for episode number 50, I will be a year older. This is my last episode in my thirties, you guys. Ladies, I almost forgot. Transformation registration is open for September. What is this? You ask. Go to lylasleona.com I'm going to put the link in the show notes, click on transform on the top right corner of the menu. And you can read all about my 16 week transformation program. This is my signature weight loss program, but we go so much deeper than weight loss. This program combines mindset, macro nutrition, education, and muscle development. To help you transform your body for life. I like to promote this program as the last weight loss program you will ever need. This is a lifestyle changing program. We deep dive into a lot of the topics I talk about in this podcast, including self-love future self visioning, generating emotion on purpose, learning how to process negative emotions, emotional eating people, pleasing people, old habits, how to create new neural pathways, how to create new routines, how to feed yourself for your goals and I teach you how to do it. I do not create nutrition plans for you guys. I teach you how to do it. I'm teaching you how to fish, teaching you how to listen to your body and give it what it needs and how to get your brain out of your own way so that you can do these things. All right. So if you want to register, you can jump over to lylasleona.com, you can sign up there. You can pay for it all upfront and get a nice big discount or you can do monthly installments totally up to you. We start Monday, September 5th, registration closes at the end of August and I've only opened up 10 spots. I've got a really busy fall. And so I'm going to keep this group really small. So if you want in, go save your seat now. I'll see you guys next week.
