Heal Old Wounds by Inviting Love In

(cursor clicks) (calm chiming music) Headspace Studios. (calm ethereal music) Hi, everyone, I'm Jeffrey Marsh, host of "Inner Voice with Jeffrey Marsh," me! and I'm your guest host for this week. Welcome to "Radio Headspace" and to Thursday. Today's episode is about what it means to treat yourself with the gentleness you've always deserved and how that practice can help you heal. So, I'm a visibly LGBTQ, I'm a visibly queer person on the internet in 2025, and so I've heard every single and seen every single kind of evil, awful, terrible comment that anyone could ever say to me. And I don't know if anyone can relate, but when I was a child and when I was, you know, a teen and a young adult, I was so thoroughly programmed to hate my guts that I said to myself things that are meaner than anyone in internet comments could ever say to me, which is why I'm committed to never treating myself like that again, and that's what today's episode is about. There's a very special time in my life when I transitioned, almost on a dime, to treating myself better and to choosing myself as my own family into building better relationships. After a particularly horrible breakup, I was depressed. We had a tumultuous, awful, terrible relationship, and he was mean among other things. And so, I decided to do what anybody would do. You know, it was about 20 years ago, and, you know, I was a relatively young person in my 20s, and I went back into the Buddhist monastery with all of my depression, all of my terribleness, all of my grief. And I realized, or we could say, if I'm being very poetic and very, very spiritual about it, life told me, "Listen, Jeffrey, you have bad taste." (Jeffrey laughs) "You in picking relationships, you've been trained to have very bad taste. So, your next romantic relationship, I'm gonna choose for you." So, I went outta that stay at the monastery and went back to, you know, the outside world and sat in meditation and I realized, "Oh, I'm going to let life pick the next person. I'm gonna get on the dating apps." There actually weren't apps yet. I'm gonna get on dating websites, the dot coms, the dot EarthLink dot nets of the dating world, and I am going to let life choose this person. I saw it all in front of me, I'm gonna make a list of the 10 things I need in a healthy relationship. And if anybody that I meet on one of the websites has seven of the 10, they get three dates. That's just what occurred to me at the time to do. And so, I met the beautiful love of my life, my current husband, whose name Jeff. we're Jeff and Jeffrey 'cause we're cute. I met him and he had all 10. And my inner conditioning hated him, tried to get rid of him...