In college I had a friend who, whenever I was relaying something challenging in my life, she would say, “Don’t worry. It’s all good!” And then she’d glide away on her rollerblades with a big smile on her face. I loved that damned girl, and I know she had good intentions, but when she said that it would totally piss me off and I’d want to shake her and be like, “It is NOT ALL GOOD!”

Spiritual bypassing is a tendency to use spiritual ideas, explanations, and practices to sidestep or avoid complex psychological experiences.

So many of us – myself included – have had the wrong idea of what will truly set us free.

On some level we know it’s not things like paying off the debt, finding your soul mate, being location independent, losing the weight, finding the perfect job…(ask me how I know).

But we forget this and we think, well sh*t, maybe it IS all that stuff. Or maybe it IS about that once you have kids. Or get older.

One time, years ago at a super fancy dinner, I made an entire room of rich people UNBELIEVABLY uncomfortable. The beginning of the dinner was great. Until…

For so many people that I’ve worked with, at the root of whatever is going on in terms of suffering, there is also this sense of not being forgivable or unlovable. That something is just intrinsically not OK with them.

Yet the ability to forgive – others and ourselves – that’s where the freedom to really begin to love and live fully begins.

Today we’re talking about gossip and mindful speech. Gossip may at first seem to be something others do – but not “us.” However, it’s more prevalent than you might think. Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Pabongka Rinpoche, says, “Idle gossip is the best way to waste our human lives.” Kind of a serious stateent, right? So I thought it might be worth spending some time on.

As a first-generation Filipinx-American, I was raised to believe that when things get hard, you push through, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get tough and work harder. So when I first heard of self-compassion, I thought it was just for people that didn’t know what “real” suffering was like.