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I hope you are enjoying the Wellness Spells series so far.

I would like to talk about our inner dialogue this week. Have you ever had a moment where an unexpected thought crept into your inner dialogue and surprised you? After seeing a photo of myself recently in the height of my dancing years in high school when I was thin and toned, I found myself inadvertently thinking, “I should focus more on weight loss and less on health.” When I realized this thought passed through my mind, I was stunned. I’m a huge advocate of health. Furthermore, I’m in a healthy weight range, have good blood pressure, good sugar levels, eat well, and exercise regularly. There is no problem with my weight, but in that moment, I perceived a problem.

Now, I’m not someone who ordinarily thinks things like this about weight, but I think that made it all the more shocking. I would be willing to bet that a lot of us -and especially women- have a thought that slips into our minds like this from time to time. It’s just a sign of how pervasive this kind of rhetoric is in our society that even with the best of intentions, it still creeps in.

This week, I would invite you to take close notice of the things you tell yourself. Are you practicing self-kindness? Does this kindness extend to your innermost thoughts? Or are some thoughts intruding that are unkind? You spend more time with yourself than you do with anyone else, so you might as well try to be a good friend to yourself. Would you want to be around someone who is unkind to you? Who tells you that you need to lose weight when you are healthy? Or that you have done a poor job at what you do? Or that you should try much harder when you are already trying? We don’t often think about the things we tell ourselves, but they can be harmful, especially if we don’t acknowledge them and let them have their way, so to speak.

I don’t know about you, but I try not to be around people who say things like that and treat me that way. And yet, if I’m being honest, I sometimes find myself being that kind of friend to me. I’m guessing I’m not alone in this (ahem, perfectionists of the world, I’m looking at you). There is a big difference between encouraging ourselves to grow and improve and being hard on ourselves. It takes a very conscious awareness of our own inner dialogue to be able to improve our own self-talk.

So, if you haven’t done this before, I invite you to listen to the inner dialogue you tell yourself and make sure you are being a good friend to the most central person in your life: you.

Today’s Wellness Spell is:

Be your own friend.

Have you ever caught yourself thinking something unkind about you?