The Resourced Self Masterclass

Do you ever feel like life is pulling you in a million directions and no matter how hard you try, you can't seem to catch your balance? Do you ever fall prey to overeating, overworking, over pleasing, zoning out on screens, procrastination, anxiety, or rumination? I used to feel like that all the time. My emotions ruled me. They were so strong, I felt tortured by them. I would fall into these loops of procrastination where I had so much to do, it felt like, and I couldn't seem to get off the couch and stop watching TV or staring at screens and do the things I knew I needed to do. It felt like I lived in a swirl of drama and chaos. My life felt unmanageable. Even after I got clean and sober, for so long I felt like I was my own worst enemy. I just couldn't seem to be on my own side in life. It felt like life was running me instead of me running my life.

That's not how I live today. Today, I have deep inner peace. I might notice that I'm procrastinating a bit on something, for sure, and I know right away what tools to use so I can get on top of that project or issue without falling behind. My life feels structured and manageable. My relationships are in harmony. I have a lot of fun and I truly, deeply love myself today. "Okay, Susan, good for you." You might be thinking, "Yeah, I get it. You have it all figured out, but that's not helping me right now." I get it. When I was struggling, I didn't want to hear about anyone else who was thriving either, except that sometimes I would notice these people who seemed really grounded and peaceful and they really showed up for the people in their lives and they seemed so comfortable with themselves. I thought they were fundamentally different from me. I thought they were sort of born put together. But then what happened was I got launched on a path, a path of doing my inner work.

It was about 31 years ago, and everything changed for me. Years later, I was a professor teaching other people how to do their inner work in the psychology department at various colleges and universities around the world. And then, I started teaching people how to transform from the inside out online. In this masterclass, I'm going to teach you the essentials of what that path looks like.

First of all, what does it mean to be resourced? Well, think of it like being a tree with really deep roots. It means having a calm nervous system with the ability to regulate your emotions. It means clarity of thought and more ease with decision making. It means trusting yourself to handle whatever life brings. It's a deep well of inner peace and groundedness. There is actually one secret to becoming deeply resourced, and I'm going to start this masterclass by just sharing it with you. The secret is embark on a path of personal growth, of doing your inner work, and just stay on that path one day at a time. What will happen, and it won't happen overnight, but it won't really take that long either, is that learning new tools, learning new skills, learning new practices will start to accumulate, and the old patterns of hairiness and stress and reactivity will start to ease up. And before you know it, the balance will be different and you'll keep investing one day at a time, long into the future and become more and more grounded and resourced.

I use this term, "inner work," all the time. What do I mean by that? What does it mean to do your inner work? Well, in short, I like to think of it as a little cycle. It usually starts with some form of discomfort and that discomfort brings some awareness. Then I have learned how to challenge myself and examine what's really going on, and that leads to some form of change. And then I tootle along, I live my life, and before I know it, I'm feeling a little discomfort and the cycle starts again. What's important about that is it creates an upward spiral of growth. The moments of discomfort are being put to use to become a more flourishing, more effective, more graceful, more responsive person, as opposed to using moments of discomfort to numb, to hide, to react, to bury, to stay in angst. Doing inner work is a way of using what life throws at you to become ever more resilient.

Now, I'm not here to blow smoke at you. It's not like there's a magic wand you can wave and magically you're transformed, but I have found that there are processes, systems, experiences that you can engage with that will radically accelerate the process. I personally spent decades in talk therapy and while I have always found it genuinely helpful to have someone listen to me and hold space for me, I have not generally found that that alone is one of the accelerators that really transforms me in a short period of time.

So, what really works? Well, every system or process that's one of these incredible accelerators typically has at its foundation a three-step process. First, it helps you get a new awareness or a new way of seeing things, and then it leads you to have a new level of deep radical acceptance about where you are around it. And then the third step is it helps you take action in a new kind of way. This is where the magic really happens. There's some sort of process or system for taking new actions and that's what changes your life. What really turbocharges the three As of awareness, acceptance, and action is when they're couched in a framework, a system that really moves the needle.

There are certain traditions, philosophies and teachers that I've been exposed to over the years and they've come up with such frameworks, things like the 12 steps, internal family systems, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, Byron Katie's The Work, Rick Hanson's Positive Neuroplasticity, Fred Luskin's forgiveness process, Stephen Cartman's drama triangle, Melody Beattie's work on overcoming codependency. I could so go on because there are so many more. These are just some of the systems and frameworks that have informed my journey for the last 30 years. And I get that that might sound like a lot and super overwhelming and frankly way too much, but 30 years is a long time and everybody who stays on the path is going to have their own eclectic amalgam of experiences. For example, Bright Line Eating® might be part of the modalities that inform your journey on your path. I think the point is that to be a student of this way of life means falling in love with being on the path. Basically, what I'm inviting you to consider, if you haven't already, is that if you step on this path of being someone who does their inner work, it's an incredibly rewarding orientation toward life. It never ends, but you are the nonstop beneficiary of this new way of living life and your life will get better and more fulfilling and your wellsprings of being resourced will increase and increase and increase for the rest of your days.

For me, that shift happened when I was about one year clean and sober. Up to that point, I'd been too scared to really look at myself in life. I felt like I had a barrel of monkeys inside and it was screeching all the time. The feeling I had was that it was infinitely wide and infinitely deep and infinitely tall and they were wild and crazy and there was no way to ever wrangle my perspective to encompass it all. It just felt like I was so broken, so traumatized, so emotional, so reactive. I felt like I wasn't ever going to be able to venture into the territory of awareness because I would never transition into acceptance. It just felt too scary. But I embarked in my first contained effort at inner work and I picked up a flashlight, and I looked and through a process that someone led me through, I met the barrel of monkeys, and it was big and they were screeching, but it was about yay wide and yay deep and yay tall. The point is it was finite. I finally just felt the fullness of it.

Over the years, I feel like that barrel of monkeys are now like strange uncles or something that come to Thanksgiving dinner with their bad manners and I just laugh at them. I know them really well now. They're my challenges and they're finite and sometimes kind of a new one crops up, but mostly I've made friends with a lot of them and none of them seem that scary anymore. So, I kept doing my inner work and it got a lot less scary.

Many, many years later, I learned that I could actually turbocharge or accelerate the inner work on my own using two key faculties that I already possess, and you do too. You want to know what they are? Attention and emotion. So, the way it works is that our brain wires in that sort of amazing neuroplasticity way. Our brains are changing all the time, but some things change our brains more than others. If something very emotional happens, that emotion signals to the brain that something of great import has just taken place and the brain changes extra because of the emotional nature of that experience. This is why flashbulb memories are created. People remember the day that the president was shot decades ago, or the day that nine eleven happened. The emotion of the experience wires it into our brain, but also paying attention to something is required, right? Things are happening in our environment all the time and they're not rewiring our brain. 

I had my first experience of this once. I'd gotten a great massage, an otherworldly massage, and I was lying there on the massage table and before she just walked out the door, she took a moment and she guided me through a 10-second moment of inviting me to lie there and feel my body in its relaxed state, to attend to it, to feel how wonderful it was to be supple and soft and plaint and utterly, utterly relaxed. She brought my emotion and my attention into that moment, and she told me to burn it into my brain. That was maybe 20 years ago. I am still able to remember that feeling and to relax. Years later, I became a mama and my first pregnancy was fraught. My twins were born micro preemies weighing just one pound and they spent four months in the NICU, and I didn't have a lot of experiences, here and there I would have experiences, but not a lot of getting to hold them. And so, three and a half years later when our final daughter Maya was born and she was full term and I got to hold her as a little baby, a one, a two, a three month old baby in my arms, I have a few instances that I remember where I brought attention and emotion into the nursery with us when I had her in my arms and her sweet baby cheek and forehead up against my face, breathing into her and feeling her fall asleep in my arms. I knew how precious that moment was and I let it sear into my brain and my brain changed forever. I can recall what that feels like to this very day.

Dr. Rick Hanson talks a lot about this in his work. He calls it positive neuroplasticity. It's the upward spiral of how we can create more joy, more resilience, more peace, more wellness, more flourishing, more calm, more groundedness, more clarity, all of these things just by attending intentionally and linking emotion with that attention and taking moments that are positive and accelerating the impact that they have on our brain. I know that you have a lot of experiences from your own life that you can remember, right? Think back to a moment of beauty or joy or peace that you've experienced that got burned into your mind, into your soul, into your brain. And now think about the moments that you experience that you might be letting pass by, these moments that are more precious than you think, when you are feeling calm, when you do sink into a moment of refuge, whether it's in a shower or a warm bath or making a fresh cup of coffee or just clicking in your seatbelt and embarking on a drive, on a familiar road where you feel grounded, in control. These are the moments that we can infuse, we can turbocharge with attention and linking them with the memory, the awareness of the refuge that we have right then and create an upward spiral of positive experience.

The real key here is that it takes support, and you know this instinctively, right? You're watching this masterclass and you've learned some frameworks, you've learned a little bit of a new skill here and there and you might use it, you might use it once or twice or five times, but six months from now, what are the odds that you're actually incorporating this into your life? It's not that likely, right? That's the reality of it. These things are fleeting and they don't change us long term unless there's more support to the structure of how we learn it and practice it. That's why I myself, over the last 30 years, have always intuitively known that I wouldn't really change as a person unless I put myself intentionally in a structured container for doing the inner work led by an expert, led by a guide, with a group of people so that over a series of weeks, I was going to be doing some inner work, learning a new system, learning some practices, getting some new tools and being guided to practice them and incorporate them. That is how I have changed over the last three plus decades.

Now, I've been leading Bright Line Eating for over a decade and we teach human transformation in Bright Line Eating, a human transformation around weight loss and food freedom. But there's another kind of human transformation, the kind that turns you into someone who doesn't need to use food addictively in the first place, who doesn't need to overeat or overwork or stay in a zone of over busyness and reactivity or a zone of trying to rush in and control and save the people around us or a zone of procrastination and hiding from ourselves and what's real, a zone of turning to screens and to just self-flagellation or nonproductive activities or behaviors, rumination, someone who is free from that type of inner and outer experience. And I realized that I love that work so much and I've been engaged with it in different ways, especially as a psychology professor at colleges and universities around the world for 16 years and now in my work in Bright Line Eating and as an experiencer and practitioner leading workshops around the world, I've been looking forward to this moment for so many years, the moment when I could tell you that I am offering a course on becoming resourced, on doing your inner work, and I am inviting you to join me.

It's called The Resourced Self, and it's starting soon in mid-September, and it's going to be running until early November, ending in plenty of time to get you launched over the holidays. It's an eight-week course and I've selected the most powerful systems and modalities I've ever encountered to teach you over those eight weeks. So let me tell you a little bit about this experience.

In week one, we're going to start by helping you get grounded in your authentic self so that you have the inner resources, the strength, the courage and the refuge deep inside, both to face life in general as calm and clear as possible and also so that you're equipped for the journey of this course. In week two, we're going to cover the topic of procrastination and avoidance, and I'm going to teach you specific mindset tools and practices so that you always will know how to overcome it so that you can live your most engaged and thriving life. In week three, we're going to learn how to turn expectations into serenity. What I mean is, you know how sometimes we have really high expectations of life, of a situation, of a person, and we keep feeling let down or disappointed or judgmental. It's not doing what we think it should or performing how we wish it would. Our serenity is disturbed. I'm going to teach you how to get over that challenge and we're going to foster the concept of enough, finding the place inside of us that is enough so that we can feel deeply peaceful and serene no matter what life circumstances are around us. In week four, we're going to visit the topic of detachment or letting go. I was privileged when I was young, like a teenager, 15 years old in the city of San Francisco to be taught by the great, the famous yoga teacher, Judith Lasater.  She used to say in her yoga classes, "Remember everyone, half of life is letting go." It's not for nothing that the book, The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins became an international phenomenon the minute it hit bookshelves, and that's because we all need practice with this idea of letting go. And then in week five, I'm going to be teaching you about the Cartman drama triangle and about how this model of relationships holds the key to explaining and illuminating the deeper reasons behind every relationship that feels stuck or unhealthy or challenging or sticky or produces residue or discomfort or yeah, just yuck, either present day or past. I'll be teaching you a reframe on it so you can be empowered to create the relationships you truly want in life. In week six, I'm going to be teaching you a forgiveness process that I learned about four years ago that completely changed my life.

I used this process to get free from a sticky relationship situation in my family dynamic that I thought I would never, ever, ever get free of. And truly today, I never think about it. I'm utterly free. You can use this process for forgiveness, but also to free yourself from anything you ruminate on. I don't know if you've ever thought deeply about the word resentment, re-sentment, re-sentir. It means to re-feel, and it has to do with experiencing again and again, either as a feeling or a though, something that happened in the past. Now, if someone kicks us in the stomach and we feel something right now, that's fair. If we're still thinking about that and feeling that in a week, a month, a year, five years, that's now on us. This process is the key to letting go of things that have happened in the past so that they're not like rocks that we're carrying in backpacks around tying us down and weighing us down in life, and we finally break free of them.

In week seven, we're going to explore our inner critic, and I guess I should say inner critics because a lot of us have many of them. A lot of us spend a lot of time trying not to have them, trying to make them stop talking to us the way they do. But the reality is that every thought that comes into our mind is helpful. It's data in some way, shape or form. And we're going to learn how to examine the data of what's happening in our mind with more curiosity and openness and learn how to experience what's happening in our mind in a way that benefits us, in a way that enables us to develop true inner self-love and self-support and self-compassion so that we can be our best friend on this journey of life.

Then in week eight, because so many of us give and give and give to others in our lives and often spread ourselves too thin and feel like we give to others at the expense of ourselves, we're going to be talking about codependency, boundaries, and healthy relationships so that we can really fold in everything we've gotten thus far in the course to translate it into being our best selves, both for ourselves and in every single relationship in our lives, because truly it just takes one person in a relationship dynamic for the whole relationship to change.

Here's how the course is going to work. It's going to be delivered in a weekly module, which means a set of short to medium videos that you can watch at your own pace and your own convenience throughout the week. This is just like Boot Camp or other courses you may have experienced from Bright Line Eating, like Reboot Rezoom™, but I'm not going to just be talking at you. You're going to be engaged with doing the work all the way through. These will be experiences of practices, some science, me explaining a framework, and then you getting to work hands-on with a journal, with a guided experience or meditation. I'm going to teach you a skill, a tool, a practice, give you time right there to use it, to reflect. But right after the video, you're going to then do that work, the writing, the practice, whatever I'm guiding you to do. The video will just end, or you can pause it and engage with the work right then and there. You will also have access to a Circle with your peers and skilled coaches to support you in doing the work together to learn from others' experiences and gain different perspectives. Each week our coaches will hold a coaching call in case you have questions or need coaching or support around the content of the course. Now, note, this isn't for Bright Line Eating questions, it's for this coursework specifically. Finally, each week there will be an hour long Zoom meeting with breakout sessions. These are optional, but a lot of people love them. You'll meet people and get to discuss the work you're doing and go deeper with a group of peers. People find them so powerful. In terms of the time commitment, two hours per week will be plenty to watch the videos and practice what you're learning. Then if you want to attend the coaching call or the breakout session, those would each be an additional hour. 

What is the investment for this once in a lifetime experience? Well, I was thinking about that and I was reflecting on what I've folded into the course, which is literally 30 years of on the ground practical experience. I've probably spent $10,000 and then some accumulating the experience and the wisdom and the frameworks and structures that I've selected the best of to put into this course and lots of live workshops and things like that. For this course, this is going to be a $597 investment. If you're a current Bright Lifer™ with an active membership, you will get a discount, and it will be $497 for you. Now, if you took The Resourced Self last year, even though it was a totally different format, you will get a discount as well and it will be $397 if you want to engage with the work again this time around. And I just have to say, I greatly recommend that. For decades, I enrolled in structured courses to work the 12 steps about 17 times in a row, and each time I got new stuff and so much out of it. Okay. Now, if you're a five-year member, this course is included in your membership and you can just register for it in the hub. You'll see a button down below to click, and when you click there, you'll be taken to a page with four buttons, and you'll just select what applies to you. Of course, you can select Afterpay when you're checking out if you want to break it into small payments. 

What's really exciting in terms of access, although this is an experience meant to be lived through and soaked into your being right now, we're going to give you access to this course until March 30th, 2027, which literally means you could go through the course materials three times in a row back to back. You will have plenty of time to absorb everything.

Who is this course for? Well, remember what I said at the beginning of this masterclass about falling in love with being on the path? The amazing thing about work like this is a course like this is for you if you are literally brand new to doing inner work, if this is your first experience and you're quaking in your boots, but you're feeling called to step onto the path for the first time. It's also for you if you have been on the path already for 70 years, because what happens is when we're on the path, every time we meet a new experience of doing the work, whether it's a meditation session or a round through the 12 steps or a Parts Work session with an experienced practitioner, any one of a hundred other ways of sitting in an intentional way to do inner work, we're different than the person we were who might have done something similar years ago. The practitioner who's leading us might be different, the container might be different, and what's up for us is different, which means what we hear, what we notice, what we remember, what we attend to, what we internalize is going to be entirely different.

This course is going to meet you where you're at and help you transform and grow from here. So, if you did The Resourced Self in the past, it's super clear this version of the course is different and you are different, so the experience will be magically new. Do not spend another day, another month, another year feeling constantly anxious, stressed, reactive, feeling like life is running you instead of you running your life, relying on coping strategies that feel old and tired, like overeating, overworking, overthinking, trying to control others or circumstances, struggling with making decisions, constantly second guessing yourself, or living in a state of burnout from giving to others without replenishing yourself. What's the number one thing that people in the Bright Line Eating community say that they most want out of a course like this? The number one thing: peace. It's what we want more than anything else. And there is a path to deep inner peace. It's the path of taking the leap and becoming resourced.

Maybe you already know you're ready, but maybe you have some hesitations. Maybe you're thinking, "Thanks for all that great information, Dr. Thompson. I'm going to just pick these nuggets out of this masterclass you just gave me and go implement." What I want to say is we can do that for a little while, but it just doesn't stick, does it? And why? For a lot of common reasons, right? Because of the pull of old familiar habits, trying to do it alone, and the lack of a clear path and a guiding supportive community. That is exactly why I created The Resourced Self. This course is 30 years in the making, and really for the last 11 years, since I've been guiding the Bright Line Eating community on a food and weight-loss journey, I've been watching. I've been secretly taking the things that I know work so well, and I've been storing them in my pockets, and I've been waiting to share them with you. So, if you feel called, if you know it's time, if you're already on the path or you are trusting me to take that step onto the path, take my hand. Be with us as we do this together. Join me in the resourced self. Click the button that applies to you down below and I will see you on the inside.