Help Me Be Me

This one’s for planet earth. We all have an internal self portrait –and that is created by the way we feel about who we are. There are SOOOOO many factors that control how we feel about ourselves – and what we perceive as our flaws. And that’s why BD is such a big problem: it looks and acts like “normal” self-image concerns. It walks and talks like vanity. And, yet, it destroys the average person’s happiness in so many ways across a lifetime, unchecked. Your self-image is a distorted hallucination – one heavily affected by your fears, vulnerabilities, your brain chemicals, and the way you integrate information from the world around you. AND when it comes to how we view our flaws, it has no connection to how the world views you or your actual physical appearance. That’s one reason this is such a powerful and rising problem is because it’s a kind of suffering that’s veiled as “normal.” An every-growing percentage of the population is dissatisfied with some or many traits of their physical appearance. When every

This is for people who are aware of when old issues are entering their present and they know they don’t want that to be happening. Our old memories operate like a trigger/pattern system. Think of it as a pinball machine called “My Pain Game” and it makes the shape of your brain with all sorts of memories that you allow to define who you are, what is allowed to affect you and what you focus on and feel. You have that little pinball that lies latent but when it’s triggered – it shoots around your brain and activates different zones of pre-set actions. Those zones are things like, “ There are two little paddles you get to control at the base of this game. Your emotionally driven reaction depends on where you choose to hit this ball. If you hit it hard, it shoots into “pain and drama.” When you don’t hit it at all, it drops off the board. The point being – you are the one who keeps the ball in play. So when it goes into a certain area, it activates new triggers that are not controlled by you. Those little “hot sp

Jealousy, or a perception of your insecurities come to life. How does it sneak into your mind? Your darkest thoughts in your most fearful voice begin scratching at your feelings, dragging you down and causing you to act as your lowest self. You assume you are less than and life is against you somehow. You're either not enough, or something else outside of you is not enough. What is this emotional state? Your lowest form of self, the self that is motivated by fear and hate, put in a threatened defensive position. Think of it as You minus your awareness of what is good and loving in this world. This low emotional self is also called your irrational self. Most of jealousy acts as a hallucination. It does not show you reality it shows you insecure self-loathing reality: in that world, no one likes you and all the fears you have about yourself are true. For many of us it is clear that we are in an emotionally charged, irrational state – however, we cannot stop ourselves from wanting to “solve” for the perceived in

For when you can’t stop feeling worried or obsessed with what is threatening your stability in life – a stress response based on past traumas or recent ones, for that matter. In this episode, ‘survival mode’ is the term we are giving a pervasive sense of fear and stress and anxiety over issues that are not a real threat, though they are experienced in hypotheticals. Survival mode drives people to obsessively think about painful things: things past, things to come, analyzing and solving endlessly. In other words – like the worst version of brain overdrive you can imagine and all the time. It’s so powerful that it takes over your life. This can come in varying degrees – from intolerable writhing panic to manageable but potent worry. Regardless, it’s always something that keeps you outside of your life – unable to truly engage and enjoy it as you see others do. Living in survival mode, you want to run and you don’t know where. This one is for Heather! I heart you girl – hope this helps the teensiest bit. For mor

This is for anyone who has conflicts with someone they care about who wants to figure out ways to get out of those conflicts fast and productively. It’s about our emotional baggage – specifically the unmet needs from our childhood, and how those block us from being able to see and receive the love from people in our life currently. I will focus on how to get out of conflicts and pain and move into happiness and get more of what you want. How to better love others and better encourage love back. It’s a set of tools to stay out of blaming and resenting and let go of what you think they should do. So that you can empower yourself to get to more of what you DO want – which is shared affection and happiness. Hi friends! I’ve been away for a bit because I got hitched! It was awesome and wonderful. And now I’m back! I will do the usual 3 parts: The What, The Why, The How – the tools. And to be clear – this is about all relationships that involve conflicts between the needs of others and your own. About relationships

This episode is about noticing negative thought patterns when they’re happening. What are negative thoughts? Bad habits. They’re not You – they’re the voice of a bad computer framework operating through you being fed by a chemical addition. You are now used to the chemical results of this thinking, so your brain wants to repeat it. They are the trained in ways of being – basically muscle memory but in your brain. So based on old experiences, just like a river wants to flow down the lowest path, so do your thoughts follow existing trained in currents. The more often you have these thoughts – the stronger the habit becomes. In other words, you have trained in the path of the river with repetition. As a result of that – you now perceive and look for this thought habit in your everyday life – like if you’re thinking of mean people who hate you, you will see mean people who hate you. Because it’s your mindset now. Plus, now that you are looking for this thing, you find it – so negative thinking becomes self-fulfil

This is for a person who filled out my survey – I don’t know your name, but this is for you! I hope it helps. You asked how to break out of the vicious cycle of a narcissistic relationship. Because it can be extremely terrifying and painful and feel much like a hostage situation. The reason is that if you are in a relationship with a narcissist – you know how ruthless and dark their punishing can be. It also goes deep into your heart strings, puppeting you around like a raw nerve. In other words – they are master controllers and know exactly what to do to make you do what they want. And also they are WILLING to do it, at all costs. This episode is 3 parts – the what, they why, the tools. I will also provide a download for you on my site in case you are in a bad place and need to get a map out of this. For more check out Teaspoonofhappy.com and enter the headspace contest to win a year of free meditation!! Smile lovely friends - and look for the blog version of this post in the next week on Teaspoon. Learn mor

What is a slashie? A creative person who knows that their day job isn't their real job: a busboy/actor; waitress/screenwriter/photographer; singer/production designer/legal secretary. Your slash is your professional makeup. In other words, most of us - if we are honest with ourselves. Because a creative thinker is many things, today if you are a slashie you are forging a new path in a wide open sea of opportunity, but you likely haven’t solved for that single, money-making passion just yet. But that’s a good thing – unlike how it might feel to a slashie – this stage is part of the process. Slashies are a growing percentage of the workforce because careers nowadays don’t have “work experience.” A creator can build a new app/community/business overnight and because of that, new job definitions are being invented every day. Thanks to equal opportunity of the internet, it’s like a claim-jumper era for creatives with a desire to build something new. It can be hard to choose a new career or even entertain the idea

Emotional Eating in this episode translates as negative soothing habits around food that relate to specific emotional states. So, depending on your dynamic, that could mean binging, constant eating in an unconscious state, or feelings of powerlessness with a complete lack of control that feels similar to being possessed or out of body. If you’re not an emotional eater, if you have pretty much any negative emotional-soothing habits, you will likely get something out of this podcast. It’s about how we have grown patterns of soothing – and also a few tools for objectively tackling them at the root. Food is often a metaphor for how we deal with fear. And pain. We either soothe we run we lash out we deny. In Buddhism, they call these psychological types out as the grasping/fear type, the rejecting/anger type, or the denial/adrift type. So depending on your type, you will react to stress in a predictable set of ways if you have grown used to coping with specific bad habits. For example – with food. There are 3 part

This is a little power-up episode about creating more joy-filled and memorable moments in your life. Happiness is a thought-habit that for many of us, requires constant maintenance and deliberate focus. Though there are many reasons to feel grateful for our life – they’re all around us all the time - in order to be capable of feeling that value, we need contrast. Contrast meaning the complimentary opposite of gratitude and appreciation: pain or difficult striving. In other words, a constant state of awareness of value (happiness) often arrives from a true understanding of its absence (pain). Without that contrast, it’s easy for life to get stuck in a middle array of emotions – a permanent state of “so-so” or “okay.” When you live in this state for long enough, powerful emotions like gratitude and happiness are assigned to a set of general milestones (birthdays, weddings, getting a promotion etc) but outside of that it can be frustrating to find a true sense of joy. The real kind – that moves you to tears, or

This is about the value of stepping back from your preoccupations to do more nothing. Busyness is a cultural habit that is also an addiction. Physiologically as well as on a level of personal identity. Are you one of those people who is sooo busy and you can’t tell where the time is going? When you see someone and they ask how you are – do you find yourself inclined to say, “I am soooo busy.” It’s a state we can all relate to. It’s also often a boast hidden in a complaint. Culturally we have all agreed to take on this state of life – thanks to texting and smart phones and email and social media. They are making you mentally connected to all people and obligations and stores and humans simultaneously. Hence- the empty private time with yourself, alone is gone! The biggest downside of the busyness pattern is you trade your life, day by day, to this insecurity. It can happen without you noticing, quite simply because your not present. You are caught up in your busy thoughts. So that’s what today’s podcast is abo

Hi peeps! This is a power-up episode to create one small positive change in yourself starting today. I want you to look at one thing in your life that you can and will change for the better. Because it's all about upkeep and the trajectory as a whole. What can you do today that will take no effort at all? Let's tackle that together - because you would be amazed at how easy change is when you don't feel the affects one tiny bit. It's spring, y'all! Let's do some soul cleaning! For more of my writing and to sponsor me head to http://www.teaspoonofhappy.com I heart you all! Smile! xo Sarah-May B. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, This is my personal list of what to look for when choosing a therapist, plus a few basic tactics to attack the task. Take what helps and leave the rest! It’s an amazing and important gift to give yourself and it’s more worth it than anything you will spend money on for the rest of your life – quite simply, because it will change your life – everything about it and everyone in it – for the better. I send you my love and positivity – and if you have time, please please leave me a review on iTunes – it’s super important to me and I love to read them. And if you haven’t already, please enter the contest to win a year of Headspace! If you are listening to this in the months of April to June 2015. Enter here: http://www.teaspoonofhappy.com/headspace-contest For the blog version check out http://www.teaspoonofhappy.com later this week! xo! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is for anyone who is currently romantically involved with someone who is not treating you well and you are taking it, and it hurts. You know it’s not right but you can’t seem to leave it for some reason. This situation betrays your foundational values, and in staying in it, you betray yourself and what’s important to you. What do you want for your future? Because you get to decide what’s important to you. That’s what this episode is about. Are you tolerating and accepting less than what you want from another? Are you giving more and receiving less? Are you operating on less than a trustworthy bond? Are you dating someone who won’t commit to you or maybe they don’t want the same things you want but you’re still hanging around “just because you don’t have anything better at the moment.” Maybe you are in a committed relationship but you want more – you want better – you want this to go to the next stage: moving in, getting married, or just better treatment – but this person is “complicated” and it’s not how

Hi loves, this is to use anytime this week or this month – it’s a little tool for regaining control of the wheel of your person, in the face of enduring places, people or situations that are not to your liking. It’s called “Happy Place.” The situation, though it sucks and tests your tolerance and ability to pursue what you want despite this situation – is NOT helped by your succumbing to focusing on the pain and unhappiness. Anger is toxic to your body so you are not only hurting your physical health, you are actively causing yourself MORE agony by focusing on it while it’s happening. Often we have an unconscious habit of savoring the sheer magnitude of annoyances in our life and relishing our increased stress or fatigue or the level of idiocy around ourselves. That unconscious savoring is your worst enemy. Is taking time to acknowledge what it is you don’t like and you might not even notice you’re celebrating it again and again because it’s a habit. So now’s the podcast power up to make note of it! The stupi

What is self work? It’s acknowledging something in yourself that needs to be addressed for the sake of growing. It’s what you decide to do when you look at your life and decide you’re not so stoked to be where you are. It’s a moment of clarity – or fed-up-ness with the conditions of yourself and your inability to do anything about them – maybe you’ve been stuck in a pattern you want to break, or you looked up one day and realized you aren’t where you thought you’d be and time is flying by. Most importantly, self-work is the beginning of your life in many ways. It’s the moment you become aware that you have the power to create the self you want to be, in every shape and form – and because that is such an epic and wonderful thing – you make the decision to act on that information by taking steps in an educated direction toward doing that work. And what a profoundly exciting move that is. In my opinion, it’s the best decision you could ever make in your life. I gotta admit, this post made me a bit choked up. I h

Personal Lily-pads: A Self-Esteem Building Exercise Around Priorities Hi peeps, this is an exercise for you to use to improve your personal alignment with your priorities and simultaneously boost self-esteem. It’s actually a process used to heal in any injury in the body – you strengthen the muscles around the area that has been injured in order to give it the time and support to heal. For example, when you hurt your shoulder, you might be told by doctors to strengthen the muscles around it. The same goes for your personality. The more of yourself that you dedicate to diverse passions and strengths, the stronger you become and the more confident you feel. It’s also how you can heal yourself the most quickly. When it comes to a painful loss of a part of your definitions of self, your other passions and roles can grow bigger and help support you in the place of what is gone. So if you are looking to become more stable and confident, this is a self-esteem building exercise for you – and I HIGHLY recommend you do

Your relationship with your parents can be attached to a lot of big feelings of hurt or anger because it’s such a major relationship in your life! Your parents! So if you are struggling with your relationship to them it can be emotionally overwhelming to say the least. So this is a podcast for when you end up getting hurt by your parents so you cut them out of your life in some degree to protect yourself. Maybe you hide things from them because you know they won’t be able to understand, or you try desperately to get their approval and they never give it no matter what. OR maybe you try to keep a balance but always getting burned in the end by something thoughtless they do to you. Or maybe you’ve cut them out of your life altogether because it’s just too painful. So if any of this sounds familiar, this is a podcast for you. Because this is one of the most relevant relationships of your life, it can have a really powerful affect on your emotions and your understanding of your very self. This one’s for Ken – tha

Okay, yes, this is a melodramatic title but it’s because this is a big deal and it’s causing millions of people to suffer from a whole slew of different side effects. Maybe you’ve felt it – anxiety, worry, a lack of focus. You feel hollow and nothing seems to quench it. You get a little retail therapy because you’re kind of just “meh” about life, just unfulfilled. It’s a modern condition that robs many across the globe of their happiness, inner peace, and keeps them trapped in helpless inaction. What I am explaining is a false identity of “self” that manifests from the dominance of our thoughts. Thoughts that appear to us as the voice of our soul – that dictate how we are feeling, what we want, what we need, what we’re worried about – what we should be doing. And often, all at once. Our thoughts often won’t shut up regardless of how hard we try to soothe and distract. They also mislead us into thinking we can find happiness and relief if we just follow their orders. But this is what this episode is about. The

Has it ever happened to you – that you do something nice for someone else and they don’t respond and so part of you is worried they didn’t like it, but then you start to get mad, because you are thinking – they should have appreciated that gesture! And how could they?! So uncaring. Wow – they are really a jerk, after all. Or, maybe there’s someone in your workplace who gave you a dirty look – and you can’t figure out why, did they hear something? Do they really just dislike you? And if so, why? You didn’t do anything to them. Maybe you try to be nice and they don’t acknowledge you at all and now you just feel uncomfortable. The tension makes you feel nervous and distracted because you are nice! AND didn’t do anything wrong! If this sounds like you and you do everything in your power to talk yourself out of it, but still can’t seem to soothe the obsessive thoughts of everything from worry to hate to insecurity and self-doubt, then this is a podcast for you! It’s got some information about why this happens plus