Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. Have you ever wondered what people mean when they say doing the inner work? Have you wondered what the path is to becoming truly resourced from within? This is a topic that's really up for us in Bright Line Eating® these days and especially this week, and I'm going to tell you why. I have a new book coming out in April. It's called, "Maintain," and it's all about the art of maintaining weight loss long term.
There are three main identity shifts that are necessary to be someone who's capable of not just losing weight but then keeping it off for a lifetime. The first identity shift is to become devoted. Devoted to your program, devoted to your plan, not someone who's dieting, but someone who's devoted. The second identity shift is becoming resourced, someone who's not needing to turn to food to cope anymore, and not just to cope, but to celebrate, to grieve, to mourn, to deal with a boring afternoon, to deal with emotions, all of those things. The third identity shift is becoming liberated. Someone who is freed up from the food and the weight struggle and focused on living their Brightest life.
In this vlog, I want to focus on that second identity shift, becoming resourced, which means essentially doing our inner work. What do people mean when they say, do your inner work, or I'm doing my inner work? I've been thinking about that a lot. I've been doing my inner work for 30 years, probably longer than that. I first went to therapy in sixth grade. Not kidding. I was not a well-adjusted kid. I had some challenges. I needed someone to talk to, and I started seeing a Jungian analyst in sixth grade, and it was very helpful. I got a lot out of it. That's one form of doing inner work, is finding a therapist and doing some form of therapy.
Another form of inner work is doing what we call shadow work. This is looking at examining, and maybe reclaiming, doing some work with understanding, practicing self-compassion around the shadow parts of ourselves, which are the parts that we may deny or not want to acknowledge or repress or suppress somehow shadow work.
Another kind of doing the inner work is meditating. I've done a lot of that. I've had a 30 minutes every morning meditation practice now for 22 years. It's absolutely the center of my being. Then there's also mindfulness work. Now, you can do them together. You can practice mindfulness while you're meditating, but you can also practice mindfulness while you're not meditating. You can practice mindfulness while you're doing the dishes or driving down the road or shooting a vlog or watching a vlog. Anytime we're attending to the present moment and what it looks like feels like to be right here, right now, that's mindfulness.
A form of inner work that I've gotten a lot out of is working with my inner child. Wounded inner child work. Very, very powerful. Actually, I did some of that work yesterday. I found I was feeling addictive, and underneath that I found a wounded 14-year-old girl who was lonely, who was feeling isolated socially, who was feeling angry and hurt and confused and lost, and I did some work with that 14-year-old girl and helped her release her emotions and helped her see my life today and helped her to know that I'm there for her. It's kind of like re-parenting a young one. Often wounded inner child work works with children inside that are way younger than that, but I field a lot of those in our children too.
There's another kind of inner work, which is emotional work. Tara Brach is excellent at this. The idea is learning to sit with emotions and really feel into them, let them flow through kind of relating to them like a weather system and realizing that if you just stay present with the emotional experience itself, it usually dissipates within a minute or two. They're very fast moving storms, these emotions. So, emotional experiencing is another type of inner work.
Another form is learning to address and acknowledge and overcome limiting beliefs or barriers that we put on ourselves. Oh my gosh, when I first got clean and sober, I was so afraid of success. I was a little afraid of failure, but I was more afraid of success, and I was doing things to sabotage myself because I was afraid of succeeding. When I realized that barrier, that limitation that I was putting on myself, it was very empowering. We all have all kinds of limiting beliefs that we put on ourselves. You might have a limiting belief around your ability to stay Bright or your ability to lose weight or your ability to be in a relationship, or, oh, whatever. There are so many forms that can take. That's another one.
A tool that I've found very helpful in doing inner work is journaling prompts and just writing about using a powerful inquiry prompt, a powerful question to get writing, and that's a great form of inner work. There's also values work, really looking at what are my values? What do I believe, what do I stand for? What do I care about most? And then aligning oneself to that more fully. We just did that work in Bright Line Eating?. We're actually right at the tail end of doing that work. I think the values piece is done. We needed to look at our values again as a company, and we can do it as individuals, we can do it in a marriage, we can do it in a company. Values work is really powerful.
Another form of inner work that I've been doing a lot lately is somatic experiencing and releasing work. This is where you go into your body and often you find places that are stuck or tight, maybe places that hurt and you figure out what's going on there. I mean, it's not really a figuring out, it's more of a feeling into and a releasing. Sometimes I've gotten clarity about things, trauma, emotions that are stuck in certain parts of my body. For example, I've talked in the vlog a lot in the past about how my twins were born weighing one pound and spent four months in the NICU, and there was a 4% chance that they would both survive and be healthy. A lot of the pain around my motherhood journey and around that time is lodged in my left hip and I can feel it there and I can do certain twists and cry and release and release that pain. That's a powerful form of inner work.
Of course, around here in Bright Line Eating, we talk a lot about Parts Work or Internal Family Systems work, and that's an amazing form of inner work where you conceive of yourself as not just one being with one unified mind, but rather as a constellation of Parts of yourself that might feel and think quite differently about things. Parts of us that judge other Parts for the way they think about things, and a Part that wants the cookie, a Part that doesn't want the cookie. Like the Food Indulger and the Food Controller. It's really interesting to look at the different Parts of us and see how they might orient differently to life.
About four years ago, I dove into forgiveness work at a different level. I had a dynamic with someone that I didn't know that I'd ever be able to let go of to be honest. And I have completely. Learning how to forgive. What the anatomy of a resentment really is. There are three parts of it, and learning how to overcome those three parts, learning how to transcend learning, how to forgive, to let go of oneself of others, just really learning how to release and detach really powerful work. That body of work, Dr. Fred Luskin is who I follow in terms of that work.
Another form of inner work is when things are hard or swirling in our minds, attuning to the stories we're telling ourselves about it and rewriting the stories sometimes. Sometimes we're in a victim story about things and learning how to turn that around and craft a transformation narrative about it. A victory story instead of a victim story. Learning to ask ourselves, am I making up a story about this? Is this the most empowered way to see this situation? Is this true? Can I know that it's true? Do I believe this? Byron Katie's work is amazing about this. Ways of really looking at our minds and our thoughts and examining our beliefs, choosing them, and seeing the stories that we're telling ourselves about things.
Another form of inner work is visioning work. Imagining the life you want for yourself, crafting a life for yourself, looking at what really matters to you and what you want to aspire to in life. Thinking about what holds the most meaning for you and what you intend to move toward in life, what you want to create in life. Sometimes we don't know, and that's all right, that's all right. But asking the question is interesting, and we might be surprised about what comes up when we ask ourselves the question for real, for real. Then we might encounter a limiting belief. We can start to blend these forms of inner work.
Another interesting one is intuition. Work, learning how to sharpen and hone our sense of the still small voice deep inside. This can go hand in hand with spiritual work, coming to understand our belief in a higher power, our sense of the divine guardian, angel work, connecting with forces outside of ourselves and our relationship with those forces. Religious work or spiritual work, God work, higher power work, all of that is very, very rich and fascinating.
Finally, there's alignment work around relationships. Am I in integrity? Do I owe amends? Have I harmed someone? Have I done wrong? Have I hurt someone? Am I in alignment with my commitments with my values? Do I need to do something different to true up? That's a really interesting process and taking a fairly regular inventory around stuff like that is really, really helpful.
That's a lot. I mean, that's just a little of what I've come up with of some of the things that I've engaged with over the last 30, 40 years of doing inner work. It's been a lot and there's so much good stuff out there. Ever since I started leading the Bright Line Eating movement 11 years ago, I knew that eventually I would want to teach a course in doing the inner work. I, as a psychology professor, taught a lot of courses that touched on a lot of these topics in the psychology of eating, in the psychology of interpersonal relationships, and in positive psychology. In those three courses, I taught a lot about this stuff. Actually, in an indirect way in my courses on cognitive science and the brain and cognitive sciences, we didn't really talk about it as inner work, but we talked a lot about how the mind and the brain work to do things like shape our attention, craft our stories, shape our beliefs, cognitive biases, the way memory plays, tricks on us, those types of things, and that more brain-based and cognitive-based perspective has really informed how I think of the inner work as a cognitive scientist, fundamentally as a neuroscientist, and I have just known that I would want to teach a course on this, but I've been busy. It's been a lot these last 11 years, not the least of which is that when my kiddos, when I started Bright Line Eating, my kiddos were six, six, and three years old, or five, five and two, depending on when you count the start date of Bright Line Eating. And now today they're 17, 17 and 14. So, I've been raising these beautiful girls all this time and primarily focused on helping people lose their excess weight and transition to Maintenance and live there free and empowered and embodied and thriving. But the piece of becoming resourced is more and more up for me, and I think up for a lot of people in our community.
This week I'm offering some free webinars on finding inner peace, the power of becoming resourced, and it's all about this inner work topic. It's all about some of the frameworks that I've liked the most, a little bit about the neuroscience that I've learned, because if you understand a bit about cognitive science and neuroscience, you can use that understanding to actually turbocharge the way your brain changes when you engage in the inner work. It doesn't take much, but when you hear about it, you'll go, oh, that's all I have to do. Then suddenly you get results that are way accelerated for just knowing these little tricks, these little hacks, so I'm going to teach you that.
You can get a link to register for...these webinars are free. You can get a link down below this video to register. I'm offering a course called, "The Resourced Self." And one person who attends each webinar live will get a free enrollment in that course. So, that's pretty cool. We're giving away free enrollment in the course to one lucky winner. We're going to actually spin a wheel, like you get to enter your name. It's not bad odds because only people who attend live and stay to the end will get even to enter. So, the odds are actually not bad. You might want to be there, and I just encourage you to think about where you're at on the path of doing your inner work, and are you a student on the path?
For me, that has been the number one orientation that has allowed me to keep this weight off my body for 22 years, is being someone who keeps engaging with the work, who doesn't rest on her laurels. I just stay active with the work. Life always throws curve balls, life gets lifey. It's just what it does. Over time, I've become more and more adept at surfing the waves at dodging and ducking with the snowballs that get thrown at my head with coming back to center when I feel off with looking at a messy situation and figuring out how to navigate it with the tools that I've been describing today. I feel so privileged and honored to get to select my very, very favorite tools and practices and experiences and pass them on to you because I've been meaningfully engaged in this for a long, long time, and I've taught it in many, many different ways. It's just an exciting thing to get to teach you a little bit about what I've experienced with the inner work and becoming resourced.
If you've wondered what people mean when they talk about doing inner work, I hope this vlog helps fill in the gaps a little bit on that nebulous-seeming concept of doing inner work. I hope you'll join me on the webinar. I hope you'll look out in your email if you're on the Bright Line Eating email list, because I also have a Masterclass that is running all week just for this week that I created, and it's got some of those nuggets of my favorite frameworks and that neuroscience I was describing that can turbocharge your results and so forth. Just tune in this week and consider joining me in The Resourced Self. It's going to be an incredible eight-week deep dive into the best of the best of finding peace within and becoming resourced. That's the weekly vlog. Click below to register for that free webinar, and I'll see you next week.
