Episode Details

Bealtaine is a festival of fertility, love and lust and this year, we're braving the parts of ourselves we find hardest to love...

Full transcript

Thinking again about who you love but this time bringing it more to yourself and thinking about all the different parts of yourself and the parts of yourself you find it easier to love and harder to love.

What parts do you appreciate about yourself and what parts do you find more challenging if love feels too strong? And I want you, if you're familiar with Friends, to remember Phoebe's famous song about that poor smelly, smelly cat. Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, what are they feeding you? Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, it's not your fault. They won't take you to the vet, you're probably not their favourite pet. Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, it's not your fault.

Welcome to episode 56 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast.

Thanks for joining me. I'm your host and producer Eve Menezes Cunningham and this week we're celebrating the Irish Celtic Festival of Bealtaine, also known as Beltane. It's a festival, part of the Celtic Wheel of the Year, of fertility, love and lust.

And for the purposes of this week's podcast and the Sole to Soul Circle membership, we're focusing on love.

The love we have for ourselves and for others can, of course, be really challenging with trauma histories and with ADHD and with rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD). It can be really challenging to feel love and really easy to feel rejection.

The more we can have that awareness around our styles of interpreting the world, the stories we're telling ourselves about what actions mean and being able to love ourselves enough to speak up for ourselves and love our loved ones enough to speak with as much love as possible but expressing our needs and wants.

It can all be really fraught and tense and also so joyful and it's such a lovely time of year with the lambs and the leaves and the flowers and the growth in all directions, that sense of thinking about what you love and the way your love life is, whether you're single, whether you're attached, how you would like it to be, thinking about your ideal love relationships, your ideal in terms of how much time you would be able to spend with your loved ones, thinking about what you already value in terms of your love life and others in your life you love and who love you.

And also using it as an opportunity to do a bit of a love audit and think about where things might be missing, where you can amp up that self-love.

Inner child work is always really powerful, really needed because the more we attend to those wounded parts of ourselves, the less likely we are to project them outwards, the more able we are to hold ourselves and therefore to communicate in a more loving, compassionate way. So lots to be thinking about.

I hope you've got a diary or pen and paper ready so you can pause things, make notes, maybe pause the episode, come back to it.

Starting by thinking about all the things and all the people we love. Maybe pause here and just make a note of all the things you love, things you love to do, things like inanimate things, other things, parts of the world like places, people, animals, whatever springs to mind when you think about what do you love, just let yourself make a list of all the things you love.

We're going to come back to it later and I'm going to remind you again that like all the episodes, this offering is to help you gently explore ways in which you can amp up the love for yourself and for your higher case S Self and for others.

Thinking again about who you love, but this time bringing it more to yourself and thinking about all the different parts of yourself and the parts of yourself you find it easier to love and harder to love.

What parts do you appreciate about yourself and what parts do you find more challenging if love feels too strong? And I want you, i