How Self-Kindness Builds True Resilience

(air whooshes) (mouse clicks) (bright gentle music) Headspace Studios. (bright gentle music fades) (gentle music) Hi, everyone. I'm Jeffrey Marsh, your guest host this week. Welcome to "Radio Headspace" and to Monday morning. (gentle music) I would like to thank "Radio Headspace" for having me and providing this platform for all of you. I have studied Zen Buddhism for over 25 years. I'm a bestselling author. Oprah endorsed my first book, and I am the host of my own podcast called "Inner Voice." This week, we're exploring what resilience really means and how it might have more to do with kindness and connection than with, quote, unquote, "toughing it out." (gentle music) Today, I wanna talk to you about authenticity as a practice of resilience. For me, that means learning to live openly and kindly in my non-binary truth. I'll share how choosing to be myself fully ended up being the strongest thing I could ever do. (gentle music) When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, nobody really got me. I mean, as a non-binary human, but also as a beautiful, rainbow, artistic child. There was always a disconnect between who I was inside and what people conceived of me outside, which I think is a metaphor for almost everybody. We are the bright, shining, beautiful child, and we have to get, quote, unquote, "socialized" into thinking we have to be what everybody else wants. And for me, that was an incredibly difficult process because, as I like to tell younger LGBTQ activists, I'm old, and that means that back then, we didn't use the word non-binary. I didn't have role models to be inspired by, and staying true to myself became a personal passion. (gentle music) (birds chirping) Everybody constantly told me, "You're too queer. You're too LGBTQ. You're too rainbow." So I was told that my entire life, and I took those outside voices and made them inside voices. So now we're talking about the voices of self-hate. And I constantly had a tape playing, "You're too queer. You're too much for people. You're too loud. You're too, too, too." And that got desperate. The suffering got so big, and I got so thoroughly desperate, that I did something drastic. I moved into a Buddhist monastery. (gentle music) When I was early on in my training at the monastery, I had a night that will stay with me for the rest of my life. On the monastery property, we stayed alone in these little cabins called hermitages, and I was in my little hermitage, and the voices were saying something familiar, "You shouldn't be here. Nobody likes you. You're never gonna get what you want. You don't deserve love." I don't have to delineate everything those voices say, but they were really, really pushing me toward patterns that were quite dark. And it was, shocker, 3:00 in the morning. (Jeffrey laughs) Those voices like to visit at 3:00 in the morning. And so I was in this cabin all...