Hello hello! Today's podcast episode is on the topic of rejection, which came up
for me this week. I'm feeling rejected and tender and making an effort to take
some lessons from this. So when you grow up with five siblings, there's a limited
amount of time and attention that your parents can afford each and every one of
you. So we were all, it seems, in a competition for love, attention, affection,
validation from our parents, right? Which means in our adult relationships, and I
can't speak for my brothers and sisters in their experience of this, but for me,
it meant that in my adult relationships, I've always needed a lot of love and
encouragement and validation, and probably led to some some co-dependent
issues for me and my relationships. I am now 36 years old and here's what I've
learned from, you know, I'm gonna say a lifetime of rejection, but that sounds a
little bit, well as me and overdramatic. I've lived a life full of love and
acceptance and tenderness and joy, and I've also lived a life full of
rejection, like every other human on this planet. So what helps me through the pain
of rejection, and this is not necessarily a rejection in relationship, it could be a
rejection, you know, from a job. I've been fired from my fair share of
jobs, and that's another type of rejection that is, you know, is painful,
right? It's something we have to kind of lead ourselves through and move
ourselves through. The rejection of kind of not getting a job or being fired from
a job for my high school students who are applying to universities and getting
rejected from universities, and then of course I'd argue the most painful kind
of rejection is relational rejection when you have someone that you consider your
best friend in high school one day, give you a call and decide that she doesn't
want to be friends anymore. And that was a couple of weeks before prom,
yeah, before we graduated. So yeah, that was certainly a painful rejection,
especially after, you know, after going through high school and middle school and
elementary school with a lot of difficulty making friendships and
holding friendships and finding friends and learning how to make friends. That
was particularly painful for me. Yeah, she dropped me like a hot potato, and then I,
you know, I saw her at prom with her friends and her group of chosen
friends that I was excluded from. So yeah, I have a lot of stories about that kind
of rejection from my school years and probably the earliest rejection you can
experience is rejection from your parents, and that doesn't come from
necessarily something as extreme as like, oh my parents abandoned me or
neglected me, although it can sometimes, but just like not receiving the love,
care, tenderness, affection that you need from, you know, the first people in your
life who are meant to take care of you in all these ways. Unfortunately, not
everybody has the capacity to offer the kind of care that you need. So in dealing
with rejection over the years, what I've learned is something that gives me a
great comfort, especially now in the midst of my most recent rejection, which I
can talk about in a couple minutes, but really I keep reminding myself that
rejection is divine redirection. I really believe that everything happens for a
reason. The good, the bad, the ugly, all of it is here to help us grow, to teach
us, to bring us into a new level of expansion and knowing ourselves if we're
open to the lesson. So if you're able to witness your pain and be with your pain
and offer yourself the tenderness and love that we so often need from others,
we can move through rejection or navigate it with a little bit more
direction, I suppose. I'm not gonna say it'll be easier, although it could.
Rejection is tricky because it brings up all sorts of things like shame and you
know, you want to blame yourself, you ask yourself like, what did I do wrong? What's
wrong with me? When in fact a rejection, even just hearing a no over the last year
of my relationship with no has been evolving too because as I'm able to look
rejection in the face, even something as simple as hearing a no, as I allow
myself to be more willing to hear a no, it makes me braver. It makes me more
willing to ask for the things that I want regardless if I get a yes or a no,
and I'm practicing out of saying no to myself preemptively so that someone else
won't say no to me. Yeah, I love this topic because I think rejection is
something that we all struggle with to some degree and it really cuts you
to the core and so we either shut down our feelings of, you know, rejection or
despair or shame or self-loathing. We either try to shut it down and move on,
deny that we feel any of this hurt or like we just kind of end up in a
pity party kind of space and you know what, sometimes you need a moment for a
pity party and that's okay but having the awareness of self to be like, okay,
I've had my pity party, I'm ready to move beyond this kind of using our
mindfulness tools to just be present with the emotions, be present with the
feeling, is powerful stuff, it's really powerful stuff and yeah, so let's just
kind of take a moment and close our eyes, find a comfortable seat and tune into
the breath, just notice your breath without having to fix it or change it in
any kind of way, just notice the quality of your breath. As you're settling in,
you can slowly start to invite a deeper breath into the belly and feel the belly
expand as it fills with air.
Notice the contraction as you exhale
and as you begin following your inhale and your exhale, bring your attention to
your emotional state in this moment. What's the most prominent feeling for you
in this moment? You can label the feeling, ease, joy, sorrow, anger, whatever that
feeling is, name the feeling
and notice where the feeling sits in the body. What is your physiological
experience of this emotion? Perhaps it's attention in the throat, perhaps it's an
expansive feeling, maybe it's in the head, in the mind space, perhaps it's in the
butt pit of your belly, right at your seat. When you find where the emotion sits, sit,
sit, notice it, observe it, breathe into it, take a deep breath in, let it go.
Notice where that emotion sits and give it space.
Let it dissolve or expand, let it move, let it swirl, let it constrict, allow it to
do anything it wants to do and give it your tender attention and care.
Be with the emotion, take a deep breath in, let it go.
You can be here as long as you like and when you're ready, gently open the eyes,
notice the space around you and offer yourself some love and gratitude for
taking care of yourself today. You're doing a great job.