For part one of this series, “Your own personal wilderness survival map,” click here.
For part two of this series, “Changing the way you THINK,” click here.
For part three of this series, “Change your thoughts, change your life,” click here.
For part four of this series, “Befriending the wilderness within,” click here.
Hello + happy Tuesday!
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“We need love in our hearts so we don’t perpetuate a cycle of anger and hate, but we need fierceness so that we don’t let things continue on their current harmful path.”
Kristin Neff
In March of 2022, I spent my birthday participating in a week-long personal development retreat called The Hoffman Process. I scraped together the not-insignificant tuition from savings, a partial scholarship, and dipping into an ongoing education fund from my former employer, and on March 12th I drove up to the gorgeous retreat grounds, turned in my phone, threw the name-tag lanyard over my head, and settled into my dorm room, full of curiosity, expectation, hope, and, as is my tendency, a fair amount of skepticism.
It was an incredibly influential experience, and I’ve mentioned to a few of you that I sincerely don’t believe I would have taken the leap to go all in with SELF MADE if not for the support I found within myself out of the tools I gained from the process. We learned and practiced many things over the course of the week, but the one that had the most profound impact and that I turn to just about every day (hello, consistency over perfection) was a meditation called a Quadrinity Check (some of you will recognize this because recently often offer it as our opening meditation on calls).
In this meditation, you connect to four different aspects of yourself (hence the “quad” in “quadrinity): your physical body; your emotional self; your intellect; and your spiritual self (you can experience it here if you’re curious). Today, as we continue our foray into self-compassion, I’m going to hone in on one element of this meditation to help me explain what I mean when I talk about incorporating a sense of FEROCITY into a practice that, at least to my mind, often feels very soft and squishy.
👐🏾 Gather around, y’all. We’re inviting our “spiritual selves” to the table.
First, a word on language. If the idea of a “spiritual self” makes you gag, here are a few other suggestions you might try on:
Higher self
Intuition
Gut feeling
The teacher within
“The one who knows”
Best-self version
Sage self
What you call this aspect of yourself is less important than being able to connect to the idea, and eventually a felt sense, of the part of you that is driven by your best interests. I think of this part of me as the part that calls to me in the middle of the night, the voice of anxiety that is often a signal from my higher self that something is not right, or has swung too far out of balance. This is the part of me that turns away from the comfort zone of a culture whose rules promise to keep me safe, but in reality are keeping me small, and toward a path of bravery into the wild and glorious unknown. This is the part of me I see when I close my eyes and visualize the absolute best version of myself—strong, fortified, up to something meaningful, caring and being cared for by people I love, full of purpose and able to access joy on a regular basis.
Most of you come into healing, or a self-development practice, with a murky-at-best relationship to this part of yourself. You’re not even sure who you are, what you like, what you want. You’ve been missing out on life’s messy reality, engaging instead with a neverending game of cat-and-mouse with magical thinking and perfectionism. You’ve been anesthetizing yourself, ceding your precious agency to external forces, outdated stories, oppressive systems, and harmful social conditioning.
And then you have a line-in-the-sand moment. The work of turning and facing your life begins. You put routines, rituals, habits in place. You tend to your creature body. You set boundaries, shore up leaky peripheries. You cause less and less harm. You question everything, including the inner voices that would seek to maintain the status quo—you know the ones, they’re full of shame, loathing, and disgust—and inside of this questioning, a channel opens, a force calling you forward into aliveness and possibility. Slowly, slowly, and then all at once, you are more awake than ever, and everything is urgent.
That force calling you forward? That is your “higher-self.” And I believe that creating a relationship with this force—and an ongoing, highly attuned, forever conversation—is just as important as any routines, habits, and point-to-able practices you might be up to out in the world.
Unlike the items in your toolkit that shift, evolve, and change over time, a relationship to your higher self is the deep, sustaining waters of an ancient, meandering river. It’s your job to listen to the river, to give over to its bends and eddies, and to trust that it’s safe to step into the current and away from the shore.
For so long I believed, like so many of us, that there was something wrong with me, and that I was at my core a terrible person. I needed tender self-compassion to learn how to be kind to myself, to connect to my innate goodness, and to believe myself just as worthy as anyone else of love, of expressing my needs and desires.
FIERCE self-compassion is what I call upon to protect this tender part of myself at all costs. Taking up space, standing up for myself, saying “no” and asserting my needs and preferences are all ways that I practice FIERCE self compassion. It is what protects me, and allows me to stay fortified in myself so that I can thus stay engaged in the world.
Once you learn to do these things for yourself, you can begin to do them outside of yourself. You stand up for yourself, you begin to stand up for others. You stay engaged because you are no longer minimizing your needs. You know who you are, for you are in alignment with your higher self, and your behavior flows from this knowing.
You can trust yourself.
In general, I believe gentle is the answer. Learning how to care for yourself with compassion, forgiveness and patience rather than self-flagellation is how you create sustainable change. And. In scenarios in which you know you are vulnerable, or when injustice is afoot, or you are being mistreated, you must learn to become fiercely, unapologetically protective.
I think about my teenage self, who so badly needed someone to help her learn how to human, who instead learned to cope by enacting behavior that worked at first, but then eventually took her sideways. FIERCE compassion is the recognition that I am the adult now. I can offer myself now what I needed then. Who I am now is a lion protecting that most precious part of myself, the part that is reaching, yearning, blooming toward a different way.
I had to practice becoming fierce. I am still figuring this out! And I am holding up this pursuit as the sun, as my forever north star.
This week, I’m inviting you to connect to your own higher self, that righteous part of you who knows what is right and what is wrong. The part that believes wholeheartedly in truth and beauty, that says fuck you to injustice, and arbitrary rules and systems that keep people sick and hurting. The part that doesn’t hesitate to throw itself into chaos and drama for causes it believes in. The part that believes that healing and transformation and a world that works for all of us is possible in our lifetimes.
You must keep the channel open. You must be discerning of anything that seeks to stifle, confuse, or muddle the channel. Many of you, in your discomfort, will try to manage the perceived discomfort of the people around you. This is not your job. Your job is to manage your own precious self. To get to the other side in your own gorgeously imperfect way. To honor this new, confusing, and beautiful identity in a way that has you feel more good than not as you move through your days. To keep your word to the person who matters just as much as everyone else—yourself.
Kirstin Neff offers the following infographic to show the differences between tender and FIERCE compassion:
Though I appreciate the description of FIERCE compassion as akin to a mama bear protecting her cubs, I see it as my higher-self protecting my boots-on-the-ground self, the me who is out here living inside the messiness of humanity. Would love to hear what is resonating for you, or if any additional images or metaphors are coming through for you…
And though I’m hesitant to describe concepts like this on the gender binary, here’s another image I appreciated that approaches this from an energetic perspective:
Here are some ways you can start noodling around on HOW to start practicing FIERCE self-compassion on a day-to-day basis. These suggestions are lower stakes, meaning, they’re pretty safe to get going. Consider them the training ground inside of which you build the ferocity muscles:
Saying no (if this is a tough one, when someone makes a request for you, practice saying, “let me get back to you.”).
Having boundaries (Nedra Glover Tawwab wrote an excellent book on boundaries and her Instagram account is a wealth of free information and resources).
Discerning your needs, and then practicing speaking them into the world (recognizing that our needs aren’t more important than anyone else’s, but they aren’t less important, either). If this is hard for you, practice having preferences (“no I do NOT want pepperoni on my pizza!”).
Establish some type of contemplative practice, to give space and voice to your higher self. This could be meditation! It could be journaling! It could be long walks with no technology! It could be reading or painting or some other quiet creative pursuit! It could be laying on the ground and staring at the ceiling!
What would you add? I don’t have all the answers! Would love to hear what the noodling sparks for you.
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SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
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Thank you.
Wonderful. Just what I needed today.
This week I wrote about my higher self as well. I can feel her calling me forward and I admit to feeling petrified of the unknown. Thank you for the reminder that it's our job to listen