This is a very special podcast for me as I welcome my oldest daughter, Chelsea Markel, onto the show! It is with great pleasure and pride that we sat together to explore the concept of Radical Self-Love and why it’s an ESSENTIAL part of a conscious, sustainable, and meaningful Pivot. We dive into what’s at the core of all Pivots, which is forgiveness, letting go, and self love. You’ll learn powerful new rituals and practices for cultivating a deep sense of self-love and appreciation, and are invited to join our discussion around how vital this conversation is (and has always been), not just for ourselves, but for our communities and the world! This is an episode you simply cannot miss. EnJOY!
Meet Chelsea Markel – Entrepreneur | Self-Love Coach + Mentor | Marketing + Branding Consultant | Fitness Instructor | Life Lover! Chelsea is fiercely passionate about helping women activate their divine brilliance and self-expression. She has worked with hundreds of clients all over the world on discovering their unique voice and mission in their relationships, businesses and health. Her passion and vision for your self-discovery will launch you into your highest capacity to experience bliss, sensuality and a deep sense of self-love.
Chelsea is also the co-founder of the Women’s Radical Self-Love Challenge, a 22-day exploration into Self LOVE, Meditation and Feminine Expression. I couldn’t be more proud of the work that she is doing to guide and empower women of all ages to discover themselves, get more in tune with their body, mind, and soul, and stand in their power in all aspects of their lives. To learn more about the Self-Love Challenge, visit here.
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Radical Self-Loving: A Vital Conversation
I am so jazzed up to be here with you and to be with a special guest. I have with the amazing, impeccable, beautiful, brilliant, spectacular, loving goddess, Chelsea Markel. Chelsea, welcome to The Conscious PIVOT.
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. It’s been a process in the making. We’ve been building a masterpiece all these years, and now we get to share it.
When I look at you, I look at our masterpiece. Randi, my wife, and I, we met in college and fell in love and then got out of college and started doing life. I was coming home from law school, I was first year students, so 1L as they’re called, and I was sitting on a bench outside of our apartment building, because we were living in this little tiny one-bedroom apartment in Bayside, Queens in Windsor Park. I’m sitting on the bench and our dog, Maggie, is there. I was playing the guitar and I’m not a good guitar player, but I was just out there trying to chill out because law school was a mind meld. It was melting my brain, all the reading, the cases, and getting trapped by these law professors that all they wanted to do is embarrass somebody but not for without good reason.
They want to embarrass you so they could teach a point. I was frequently that person that became the butt of the point. As I’m sitting outside just trying to chill out, your mom, Randi, comes walking up and she’s got this funny look on her face. She says to me, “I have some news.” I was like, “What?” She goes, “We’re expecting.” I’m like, “What? What are we expecting?” I think I’m 26 years old or something at the time. We were expecting you, this amazing being, this masterpiece of a human being that showed up in our lives. I didn’t intend to tell that story. You inspired me to share that, and now it’s captured.
Thank you.
Will you describe a little bit about the surroundings that we’re in as we are about to set off on this Conscious PIVOT Podcast?
We’re in a circle of palm trees and flowers and hummingbirds. It’s very green and lush and there’s orange, pink, red, and blue sky. We’re from New Jersey originally, so the fact that it’s February and we’re sitting outside in paradise, we’re both super grateful for that small thing of the fact that it should be winter, yet it feels like summer. It’s absolutely incredible. This is the perfect place to be inspired, share from the heart, and connect.
I’m taking it into myself and taking some nice conscious breaths, some deep breaths. It’s a pinch-me moment. We’re in a beautiful spot and that’s no accident. We lived in New Jersey for seventeen years. Before that, I lived in New York. New York is beautiful and the snow is beautiful and the cold is beautiful and the environment that you’re in can be beautiful. We didn’t need to move to California to have a beautiful environment. What we’re going to talk about on The Conscious PIVOT is about internal environment.
The physical environment is key and for us, we decided we wanted to change our physical environment. We did want to leave the East Coast and move to the West Coast. We did want to be surrounded by palm trees, hummingbirds, birds of paradise, and other beautiful flowers in the middle of winter. That’s what we wanted and so we set out to do that. The universe is magical and miraculous in that way, so it will accommodate.
I love what you usually say from stage, which is that you take yourself wherever you go. We could have stayed in New Jersey or in the East Coast and stuck it out through the gnarly winters, but we wanted to be out here and we still took ourselves here. Our inside environment only changed because we changed.
That’s a big deal because I’m actually working with somebody now. I’m coaching a gentleman that is wanting to make some big changes in his life. He also lives out here in California and he’s from the East Coast. What he did was, and I’m not saying he, alone, because I’ve done this too, but he took his ways of being. He took his habits, his ways of doing things, and he moved them from New Jersey right out here to California. That’s a big deal because your physical environment will never be what you want it to be.
Meeting your physical environment is only as good as your non-physical environment. Your external environment is only as strong, as lovely, and as beautiful as your internal environment. The internal creates the external, the inner creates the outer. That’s the way it is in nature. I’m reminded of it all the time.In the Bible, it says, “As a man and a woman thinketh in their heart, so shall they be.” It’s the inner, the outer. It’s what we know. We reap what we sow.
It’s all of that cause and effect that is so important because it’s universal law. It’s the thing that helps us to be able to have what we want when we know what the rules of the game or how would you play a game, and game is a game. I use this word because life is the greatest game ever played, but how would you play the game of life or any game? How’d you play a game if you didn’t actually know what the rules of the game are? It would be a pointless, fruitless thing and it would be frustrating. That’s where we do meet a lot of people, a lot of our friends, and students because we’re lacking in a greater understanding of the rules of the game. The game becomes frustrating.
Radical Self-Loving: Pivoting is not a plan, it’s a process.
When it comes to consciously pivoting, you are a perfect guest in this area because you have managed for a very long time, really modeled how you manage your mind, how you manage the internal, the “little voice”, as Blair Singer calls it, inside your head. I’d love to know about that. I’d like to talk about pivoting from the mindset that’s prevailing, which is a mindset where people are constantly their voices yakking at them all the time. What it’s yakking at them about is often a very critical sounding voice. It’s critical, it’s condemning, it’s judgmental, and that voice where people are constantly facing conditional love, meaning they don’t love themselves fully and unconditionally. What I mean by that is when they behave, when they do the things that make them feel good, like they’re good with their money, they’re good in their relationships, they’re good with their diet or in their health, they go to the gym than they love themselves.
They love themselves and when they don’t do the things that they want to do or that they think they “should be doing”, they withhold love from themselves. They beat themselves up mercilessly and that’s something that I battle every day. It’s that old mindset and that old mentality of wanting to beat myself up when I’m not behaving or when I think I should be doing something different or doing something better. That’s an everyday kind of awareness and practice. Would you share a little bit about your mindset, how you approach the day, and how you have pivoted your own way of thinking and being so that you are where you are at the moment?
I’m reminded of the quote that you say about how, “Pivoting is not a plan, it’s a process.” Self-love is not a plan, it’s a process. It’s not even a daily ritual. It’s a minute-to-minute, second-to-second ritual and really choosing, “Will I love myself or will I not love myself?” Those are basically the two paths that I see and they’re very different. They feel very different and you can’t be in the middle of them where it’s like, “I kind of love myself.”You’re either going down the path of being in love with yourself or you’re going down the other path where your roommate, with a very critical, mean bully that happens to be your own voice, which is feeling traumatized. Think of when we were all little kids on the playground. I remember being in elementary school and having that experience. That’s pretty shocking. It’s elementary.
I started off this process a long time ago working with kids in school, teenagers that were being bullied, and that’s where I started when I was sixteen. I was working with young girls and boys who were being bullied and working with them on their self-confidence, which is very connected to self-love. That’s where it started for me in working with others, and then over time, I have consistently and relentlessly chosen the path of self-loving. That means second-to-second, as the little voice says negative and critical things, I’ll say, “Thank you for sharing. You really love me. You really want to protect me. That’s amazing. Thank you.”
Then I create a new thought on the path that we described of self-love. That’s this process that I’m going through all day long, which like is relentless. It’s not a, you wake up in the morning and you choose to love yourself and then you get into your car and you spill your coffee on yourself and you go, “I’m an idiot. Why would I do that?”It’s the moment-to-moment choosing and the relentless radical as I’ve been thinking of it most recently. Radical self-love that if we’re thinking about the bigger picture and not just being selfish, we deserve it and we need it to thrive as human beings, but the world right now needs us to be radically self-loving. I don’t think there’s been a time in history that it’s been more important for people to take responsibility for doing their healing and saying ‘yes’, that they’re going to love themselves and forgive and release the past. Now is the time. There is no reason to wait. I feel how important that is right now.
[Tweet “You have to be loving and generous loving from an overflowing cup.”]
We could have made that argument a year ago, five years ago, because there’s never been a time when it wasn’t the most important thing to be self-loving. We’ve lived in war from the beginning of time. It’s been with us forever. Our mission, the mission of our company and what your mom and I have really gotten clear about, is our commitment to peace, to creating peace. To me, I look and try to re-engineer, look at the engineering of something and say, “Where did that all begin? Where does that start? Where does war start?”
War starts in between our hearts. That’s where war begins. It begins with us. It begins in our own heart space. Loving yourself, making that so important and a non-negotiable thing is vital, because if we can’t stop war within ourselves, how on earth do we expect that we’d ever stop war between people? That’s easy. All that is a projection and a reflection of what people are doing to themselves, how they treat themselves, how they think about themselves.
It’s an ego dropping too. If you can imagine almost two people are holding an apple and they’re looking at each other, standing across facing one another, and then they both pretend that the apple is the ego. At the same time, they just drop it on the floor and laugh. That’s what I picture could happen. Like in a beautiful dream fantasy world, that’s what it would be if everyone just dropped their apple, they’d drop their ego and we’re like, “I’m done with that.” The world would be a much more peaceful place because it’s not fighting to be right or fighting to be the person on top.
If we trace back roots, and I’m not pretending that I have answers here, but to me, these are questions I’ve considered and I’ve gotten some good information. One of those things is that the root of this is scarcity, at the root of this is fear. You’re holding onto your apple, we hold on to our ego as a part of the mechanism to keep us safe. This is learned behavior. It’s what have we learned from the moment we’re born. In the world we live in, there feels like scarcity. We’ve been trained to believe that there’s only so much and you better get your piece of the pie before somebody else does. If you don’t get your piece of the pie, if you don’t go after a piece of the pie while you’re without your pie, now you starve. Remember at the root of everything is this survival mechanism, this internal programming to stay alive long enough to continue the species.
I’ve heard a lot of people saying recently is that, you know, they’re giving their love. They’re so generous in their loving with other people with their spouse or their kids are in their business. Loving the people that are around them so fiercely yet they are not coming home inside their own body and loving themselves. Why is that? A lot of people feel like, “I don’t have any energy or love to give myself. I’ve given it all away.” How beautiful would it be if you shifted and pivoted to the idea that there are equal parts you can love that generously to all the people in your community and in your family and then also have that much love times ten for yourself.
Because if you’re loving and giving from a half full or even for most people an empty cup, that is not sustainable loving. You have to be loving and generous loving from an overflowing cup. From my experience, and it’s my belief, that our cup overflows when we are in that constant, relentless state of self-loving and self-forgiveness because anytime we’re loving ourselves that’s fiercely, we’re forgiving all the things that we’ve done that we believe are unlovable or that make us not deserving.
[Tweet “Radical self-love, we deserve it and we need it to thrive as human beings, but the world right now needs us to be radically self-loving.”]
Randi and I were in Los Cabos, Mexico with the TLC groups, the Transformational Leadership Council, which is with Jack Canfield. We had Lynne Twist and John Gray and the amazing people that are part of that mastermind, that community. We retreat together for ten days a year, so we go away five days twice in two different beautiful locations. I want to say that these are people that had been doing this work. They’ve been working on these subjects, some of them 50 years, without dating anybody, but a longtime, dating back EST and Werner Erhard and others that have pioneered the human potential industry, these are still the subjects that are being discussed.
Lynne Twist was with us and she was talking about the soul of money. This very topic was one that Randi and I got to discuss with folks because we were talking aboutour pivot in relationships, which are the seven pillars to creating a most lasting, sustainable, resilient, loving relationship. We taught those seven pillars to this group of amazing people, thought leaders and folks. We’re talking about relationships with other people, but it all starts with loving yourself first.
The first pillar is love thyself. As Shakespeare said, “To thine own self, be true.”The root of things is that people do not feel worthy often and do not feel deserving, so they give and give because that’s what they’ve been programmed, whether it’s through their religion or other beliefs. They say, “Give, and give,” but you say, “Tough to give from a half empty cup or from a cup that’s more than half empty.”It’s key because then you’re able to live from that overflow, from that place of sustenance, that place of abundance. It’s like giving and it’s still even with all the giving, it’s still flowing over into the saucer.
What’s beautiful there is that as the Course in Miracles talks about, this giving and receiving, the relationship between giving and receiving is such a symbiotic one. It’s two sides of the same coin. It’s like a 50/50 proposition and yet people put so much of their focus on the giving and then they can feel empty. One of the small distinctions that has really changed my life is this idea that as we give, we also need to receive because as we receive, so shall we give. That’s the way the cycle works. As we give so shall we receive, as we receive so shall we give. If you’re having trouble receiving, it clogs up the works.
From others and from yourself I would say too, if you’re having trouble receiving love from yourself, even more importantly, sometimes.
It’s the first love. When you and I were talking about what we would be inspired to chat about on this podcast, one of the things we said was the foundational part of our work. What’s it say?
“I love my life, and I love myself.”
To declare, “I love my life,” is to declare self-love. Our ritual is to do that every morning when we wake up, because it’s a way to begin the day, to create the day. Chapter 30 of A Course in Miracles, which is the new beginning, is all about what are the systems, what’s the ritual, what’s the practice that you employ to create the day that you want? I was flying overseas, and I was on a United flight. In the little bathroom soap dispenser, it said right on there, “Your slate is as clean as you allow it to be.” I cried. I never told this to anybody. I’m in there sobbing at 40,000 feet. I’m still so connected to spirit when I’m on a plane. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling, but feeling that way and here I am in this bathroom and it’s this eighteen-hour flight, I’m in there for like a half hour just allowing what was flowing. It blew me away.
It’s connected because each morning, when you’re talking about rituals, to wake up, you do your, “I love my life,” practice. If that resonates with you and by making the conscious choice to love yourself fiercely and generously throughout the whole day, you can say that out loud or just inside your own body, that is saying ‘yes’ to giving yourself a clean slate because you’re not saying, “I love myself a little, but I was such a jerk yesterday, so I’m not going to you take care of myself today. I don’t deserve it.” Instead it’s going, “I’m going to be so fierce in loving myself today that I’m cleaning my slate. How clear can my slate be?” They’re so connected.
We would love it if you would repeat these words and say, “My slate is clean as I allow it to be.” I’m going to put my hand on my heart when I say this one. My slate is clean as I allow it to be. I think this is fundamentally true for me and I’m assuming that it’s true for everybody. Is that true for you, Chelsea?
Yes, definitely.
Oftentimes our inner critic is so rough because again, the love we give ourselves is the love we give the world. That’s that part of Course in Miracles. The love that we withhold from ourselves is the love we withhold from the world, which is why the peace that we won’t have ourselves or that we deny ourselves is the peace that we deny the world and why our world is at war. If every single person would simply just unconditionally and relentlessly pursue their own peace, our world would be peaceful. It would instantly become peaceful because that’s exactly what everybody would be reflecting in the world.
Radical Self-Loving: When you’re coming from a space of self-love and you’re filling your cup and you’re taking care of yourself, you become this mega attractor in whatever you love to do.
There’s no way to be peaceful and have war, it doesn’t work like that. It’s certainly not in that same moment, it’s impossible. Beginning your day with self-love, committing to it unconditionally throughout the day. Just because we’re a jerk yesterday doesn’t mean that you need to be punished now. Twenty years ago, you made a big mistake. Think of all the things that as humans we do wrong. We make mistakes. We say the wrong thing. We make a bad choice. How long? Are you done suffering for it? What did you write in that chapter you wrote? Are you right? Are you still suffering for something that you’re not willing to forgive? Are you done punishing yourself?
People punish themselves for mistakes they’ve made, which means I’m not willing to love that about myself, which means I’m not available to love my partner as much as I really would like to, or I’m not available to love my business as much as it needs to be a creative force in the world. As the world’s becoming more competitive, in order for us to withstand that and grow, expand, and be more competitive from the inside out, that’s what’s required is to be able to come fresh every day with a clean slate, with fresh energy, not energy that’s like lingering from twenty years ago where you’re presenting yourself as this amazing person, but inside you feel like a fraud. People pick up on that. I pick up on that instantly.
People can detect and feel it. They can feel that shadow. On the flip side, when you’re coming from a space of self-love and you’re filling your cup and you’re taking care of yourself, you become this mega attractor in your business, in your relationships, in whatever you love to do. People look at you and they’re like, “Did you go on vacation? Did you cut your hair?” They’re trying to figure out what’s different about you, but you know that it’s the internal environment that you’re taking care of and that shows on the outside. All areas of our lives thrive even more when we’re being responsible and loving ourselves deeply. And that is a choice.
As Buckminster Fuller said long ago, “Environment is stronger than wills.”The will to want to be successful, the will to want to be prosperous and to be happy and to be healthy and all the things that we all want, and everybody wants, the will is great. It’s great to have the will, but the will isn’t enough. That’s what Bucky Fuller was saying, that the environment is stronger than the will. You must have the environment. What we’re talking about in this episode of the Conscious Pivot is your internal environment.
Chelsea, this has been magnificent. Because you’ve inspired this declaration, I would love it if while you’re listening to this, if this resonates and this make sense to you, that you put your hand on your heart and you say, “I let go of punishing myself for whatever it is.” It could be from ten minutes ago or ten years ago, and it could be something that you did or didn’t do, but ultimately letting go is so vital. That’s one of the very first chapters in Pivot is in clearing your windshield and creating clarity. The second chapter is about the importance of being able to let go of the stuff that we hold onto, that energetically makes us slow. It slows us down and it impedes the creative flow.
What’s the moving towards declaration then?
You can create a declaration that you want and that’s when you let go of something. Chelsea, thank you for that, when you let go of something, it’s universal law. There’s never a vacuum. It’s always filled. What do we want to replace that thing that we let go and so we’re going to let go of punishing ourselves? What do we learn to replace it with? Do you have anything that comes to your mind?
I’m committed to loving myself radically and fiercely. Something with some real good, like powerful energy?
We’re talking about self-love and that’s what this podcast is about. Pivoting our consciousness so that we actually love ourselves. I know for me, it’s my declaration to begin the day. I start by saying, “I love my life.” That does not mean that my life is perfect, or I don’t have challenges or that I’m not pivoting in other areas. I’ve got all that stuff going on and its rich soil every day to be tilling, instill. We want to love ourselves first. I love myself first. I love my life. I love myself fiercely, radically, unconditionally relentlessly.
This has been The Conscious PIVOT on Pivot Radio and I look forward to you checking out some of the additional podcasts going on in our social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can always go to AdamMarkel.com to get fresh blogs and perspective on what’s going on in the world. We wish you everything that your heart desires. We absolutely do love you and I appreciate that you are a part and you be part of this amazing, expanding, conscious community. Ciao for now.
Thanks again for listening. I hope you’ll share this podcast and comment on it at my blog at AdamMarkel.com/Blog. I’d love to hear your comments, your questions and topics of interest for upcoming podcasts. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. Follow us on social media if you haven’t already. Ciao for now.
