Break the Cycle: Why Self-Love Is the Core of Inner Work (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #615

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast, and this is another snippet of wisdom where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Let's dive right in.

[Rohene Bouajram]
I think self-love is the core of inner work. And so I really appreciate that you're raising it to the surface of our conversation. And I want to share why I believe that that's the case.

I'll come back to a question that you had asked me early in terms of intergenerational trauma. I come from a strong matriarchal line of incredible, strong women of color, my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and I can truly say I've been loved by them. Now, the love has been, I would say, shared and expressed in different ways.

So I wasn't always hugged as much as maybe others were hugged. I wasn't always told, I love you, in the same way that others are told that they are loved. But I knew that the way that they were offering their love was their way of loving me.

And so as part of my journey of inner work and discovery, I've had to really wrestle with, because I've been so focused on being perfect, what I was being taught by these incredible women was that if you're perfect, you will be accepted. And if you're not perfect, you will not be accepted. And I think that that message shines through for not only a lot of women of color, but likely many other people.

And if we think about the generations that have come before us who have lived through centuries of war, the Great Depression, in some cases, civil and liberation, these were people who went through some really significant, traumatizing, horrific catastrophes. And when I look at now the generation that I'm sort of right now at, and I think of future generations, this is where inner work becomes crucial, because I have made a choice to break that cycle. And when you are making that choice to break that cycle, it's a hard one.

It's a hard, it's a hard decision. Yeah, and I think, Aggie, you know this, right? Right.

And so every day for me is this tension between the default mode that generationally is within my body, both from a DNA perspective, because we do hold the DNA of our ancestors, as well as the conditioning. So the tension between that and the tension of this new ideology, new worldview, new paradigm that I am still kind of like figuring my way into. And I have to constantly be loving to myself to remind myself that every day I'm not going to be perfect.

I will get it right, and sometimes I'll get it wrong. But that I commit that every day is going to be an opportunity to break that cycle. And the more that many of us around the world, and I really believe that this is a global opportunity for each and every one of us to do the inner work, to heal, to confront the unconventional truths within us, and to choose a different way of being, that that will have a ripple effect not only on our leadership, on our workplaces, on our relationships, but it will also have a ripple effect on the next generation. And then that will have a ripple effect on the next generation, and so forth. And that is what happens when you make the choice to be the first to do your inner work within your family.

And so it's a scary choice, but it's one that will have just insurmountable rewards, not just for us, but for many to come.

[Agi Keramidas]
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