The episode everyone loves—affectionately nicknamed ‘The Pink Bunny’—is back: ‘Three Steps to Soothe the Brutal Inner Critic.’
As A Call For Love celebrates two incredible years, host Linda Orsini reflects on the journey—from a microphone and a dream to creating a space where self-love transforms lives.
In this encore, we revisit one of the most powerful tools for lasting change: mindfulness self-compassion. It’s not about bubble baths or feel-good affirmations—it’s about silencing that harsh inner voice and learning to treat yourself with kindness.
Get ready for practical strategies to shift your mindset, release guilt, and step into a life filled with confidence and peace.
Let’s make self-love your superpower!
About Linda:
Have you ever battled overwhelming anxiety, fear, self-limiting beliefs, soul fatigue or stress? It can leave you feeling so lonely and helpless. We’ve all been taught how to be courageous when we face physical threats but when it comes to matters of the heart and soul we are often left to learn, "the hard way."
As a school teacher for over 30+ years, struggling with these very issues, my doctor suggested anti-anxiety medication but that didn't resonate with me so I sought the healing arts. I expanding my teaching skills and became a yoga, meditation, mindfulness, reiki and sound healer to step into my power and own my impact.
A Call for Love will teach you how to find the courage to hold space for your fears and tears. To learn how to love and respect yourself and others more deeply.
My mission is to guide you on your journey. I believe we can help transform the world around us by choosing love. If you don’t love yourself, how can you love anyone else? Join a call for love.
Website - Global Wellness Education
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Welcome to A Call for Love. It is the 2 year
anniversary. I am so grateful to all the
listeners who have been joining in for 2 years. I can
hardly believe it. And if you're new to A Call for Love,
then my heart is full of gratitude to you for joining in here
because A Call for Love is about shifting,
shifting a perspective. And shifting a perspective is actually a
miracle, and you can create a miracle in your life. Because if you are
in the place of fear, stress, anxiety, anger,
jealousy, resentment, any of those negative emotions
is under the umbrella of fear. And love, the highest
vibration with joy, is your higher self. It's the
path of flow. And if you want to shift from those
2, then it's a call for love, and that's the
meaning behind A Call for Love. And I have to
say that I am so grateful that A Call for Love came into my
life because, if you haven't heard the story,
I was initially going to call this podcast 2 years ago
now, Salt Lamp Meditations.
And if you can see behind me, there are salt lamps. I love
salt lamps, but the name of a podcast, Salt Lamp
Meditations, I do not think it would have been anywhere
near what A Call for Love brings to you, the listener, and to
me, the provider of this journey. And I thank you.
I thank you for being here present. Now on this 2
years that I have dove into this podcast, showing
up to try to be the best I can
be in order to support others because we are
all walking each other home, I would like to say the
top listened to of all time episodes was
episode number 4, 3 steps to soothe the
brutal inner critic. And what does that tell you? It means
that we are all suffering from
that brutal chatter, chatter, chatter in our minds
about ourselves, that inner critic. And you know what I say?
Give the monkey a banana. If it wants to
complain, if your mind wants to chatter all these
illusionary, judgmental thoughts about
yourself, then give it something else. And I say give
it self compassion. Self compassion is
my largest tool in my toolbox of wellness
to guide me to living more peacefully
and more in my light. And I invite you to listen to
this episode, 3 steps to soothe the brutal inner critic,
as an encore episode and really relive my
experience. I tell this journey through a story that
happens at the holidays, wearing my beautiful,
warm, cozy pink bunny jacket, but
not quite appropriate for, like, a black
tie holiday event. And so I guide you through this
journey. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you for
being here with me at this time and wishing
you so much love and light. Let's get started.
Welcome. I'm so happy you're here. Today, I wanna share with you
a practice that's really close to my heart, and it's called
mindfulness self compassion. If you are into mindfulness,
you will have come across this concept. As a yoga
teacher and mindfulness guide, I really
encounter many people. And throughout the practices, I just
notice how hard everyone is on themselves. We are
just so critical of ourselves. We're so hard
on ourselves. And if we actually wrote out our
thoughts on paper and how we talk to ourselves, if we
were to use those same words, we would never ever have
any friends if we use those words on others.
Our self talk, our inner critic can be just
absolutely brutal. So I always encourage
ourselves and others to really be mindful, to
really offer ourselves self compassion. And
I had a neighbor, Liz, who's so sweet. She said to me, well, she
didn't really understand what self compassion was. She thought,
well, does that mean feeling sorry for yourself? And I said,
thank you for offering that question up to me because
it just goes to show me that I have a clear concept of what self
compassion is, but not everyone else does. So I would like
to really place this into a practical example.
Just before the holidays, I was invited to a beautiful
evening of music and meditation through frequency
and vibration with Cynthia Konopka. And
she had hosted it at her condo building. And
in her invitation, which was very beautiful, it said,
come for this beautiful evening. She's a violinist
and vocal singer. She says, come for this beautiful
evening. You can have pictures around the tree.
And also during meditation, you may get a little cool, so
feel free to bring a blanket. And if you know
anything about me, whenever I hear cold
and blanket, I think cozy. Because my whole
objective in life is to be cozy. I just like being comfortable.
It's just who I am. So when I heard that, I took it upon
myself to ignore the prospect of
picture taking in front of a tree, and I decided to wear
my new pink bunny outfit. And when I say pink
bunny, it's I love yoga attire. And I had bought
a really pretty, cozy warm pink jacket.
So I call it my pink bunny. So I took it
upon myself to wear that to the occasion. I parked. I
walked into the building, and I was
like, oh, this is really, really beautiful.
And I walked further down the hall and I opened the
room to where Cynthia was offering the event.
And it was absolutely stunning, and it was gorgeous.
And my jaw dropped because all around
me were people, women beautifully dressed
in gorgeous gowns, very well
prepared for a beautiful evening. And I, in
my pink bunny outfit, was absolutely
horrified. I know it's not a big problem in in all the
problems that are going on in the world, but what it did to my self
esteem was a big problem. So
I looked around and I
didn't know what to do. I kinda looked down at myself
and I thought, wow. Linda, you really messed
that up. You did not dress appropriately for
this. But because I had just arrived
and the event was beginning very soon, I couldn't really
turn back, and I didn't wanna turn back. I was really looking forward to the
evening. I really beat myself up because I was
not dressed appropriately nor prepared for this beautiful
event. This is where mindfulness,
self compassion really came into play.
I had to dig deep and say to myself,
Linda, are you gonna be miserable? Are
you gonna bring this occasion and the
glorious event around you? Are you gonna allow it to bring yourself down?
And I didn't want it to because I'm a very positive and upbeat
person. So I thought, you know, I can overcome this. I will just
grin and bear it. I will allow my joy to supersede
how I look. And I proceeded in the evening, but it was
really clear that I was not prepared
for the evening for what it deserved, actually. It was
a really beautiful evening and quite eloquent,
and I felt very self conscious. So this
is the components of mindfulness, self compassion,
which is founded on Kristin Neff's work.
And there are 3 principles. They do not have to go in
any particular order, but these are the three core values
of mindfulness self compassion. And the first one is a sense of presence.
It's a sense of mindfulness. So it's
tapping into what your thoughts, emotions, and your
sensations are feeling without resistance or
avoidance. So it's really being present to everything that's going on within
you. And because I was so unhappy with
myself and feeling so self conscious, as I
said before, I wanted to really label all my
feelings. So I decided not only was I all those,
but I also felt foolish. I felt really
actually humiliated and even mortified to a certain
extent. With naming these
emotions, I love what my other sister says. She says name
it to claim it. And I felt like naming and
labeling these emotions will just allow me
to soften into the mindfulness of them.
So I feel self conscious. So I feel
embarrassed. These are my feelings. What am I gonna do
with them? In mindfulness, we can often
blow the situation out of proportion, which was what I was
doing. My ruminating thoughts, which
often whenever we ruminate our thoughts, it narrows our focus and
exaggerates our experience. So my ruminating thoughts
were like, how could you do this? You knew that when they said
pictures in front of a tree, it could mean that you wanted to dress a
little better. You knew this, Linda, and you did
not act upon it. You chose to focus on what you wanted,
and hence, this is where you are right now. And I was going through all
these ruminating thoughts. Now this was what I was wearing.
But for you, you might find another circumstance that you can relate
to in another area of your life where you're in
an event or at a place where you feel embarrassed for
whatever reason. And this is what I was going
through. Everyone else was laughing and having a great
time. No one else seemed to notice or even care about me except
myself. So I acknowledged that I was feeling bad about
myself. And then I love this next core practice of
mindfulness, self compassion, and that is self kindness.
You know, I knew what I was feeling. It was probably
it was absolutely blowing out out of proportion. So I
wanted to offer myself loving kindness. So
instead of attacking and berating myself for being inadequate,
I decided that I was going to comfort myself, my
bruised ego, and to soothe myself with loving kindness.
My mother, who has since passed, she always
was such an advocate of lipstick. And I realized, wow,
I didn't put any lipstick on. I have lipstick in my purse. Why don't
I sneak to the ladies room? I'll put some lipstick on.
It always made my mom feel better, so it'll make me feel
better. So off I went. I applied my lipstick
and I chuckled. Actually, when I looked in the mirror, I just thought of my
mom and that really warmed my heart. So it really softened the edges
of what I was experiencing at the moment.
In any case, I went back to the party. And, of course,
because I had this new outlook, I was starting to really
enjoy myself and I could let it go. But
then we started walking around and we started
mingling more and I started feeling self conscious
again. And the last component is
common humanity. So I had to remind myself
that everyone makes mistakes and dressing inadequately
for the occasion is not the end of the world. There's much
more impressing issues going on in the world than how I was
dressing. And I felt kinda shallow that I was so concerned
about this. But it was just and this is the thing. This is what I
was going through. I was judging myself. I was going back like a
ping pong ball. Why feeling that like this? It's so
shallow to think like this, but then feeling out of place and feeling self
conscious. So I was really ying yanging back and
forth in this mindset. When I had to tell
myself that feeling embarrassed at the end of the day
is is the least concern I should be really worrying
about because no one else is really gonna remember
or care. I am not my body.
I am the soul within my body. It's not what I'm wearing on
the outside. It's the vibration that's resonating
from from within me. So I began
to really concentrate on being
loving, kind, and feeling part of
this experience together. Because
when I recognize that other people may make
mistakes, I can forgive myself. Wow.
Is that ever hard to forgive yourself? I'm
not sure which is easier, forgiving others or forgiving
yourself. That is definitely another topic I will
dive into on another episode because I think
that's just something worth reflecting upon. But in this case,
I decided that with these three components of being
mindful to all my emotions, really offering
myself loving kindness and comfort and soothing myself, and
reminding myself that everyone makes mistakes. It's really
not the end of the world. I was able to move forward
and I actually had such a beautiful evening. The women
were just so invigorating and uplifting.
My dear friend, Maggie Habida from Photography A
Boutique, she says to me she's a beautiful photographer. And in
fact, she has done all the pictures in my website
and on my podcast. She says to me, oh, Linda.
So you look like the pink bunny. Let's take some photos. And we she took
some just some beautiful photos because she has such a big heart.
And it was just such a beautiful evening. Not only was it
a beautiful evening to be in such beautiful
vibration with other women, but it really
was an experience for me. I
went from happy to sad, from embarrassed
to okay, to joyful to
self critical. I was always going back and forth. And I
thought, well, this is just a really safe
place to practice mindfulness self compassion
among women who are going to support me and love
me no matter what. It was a really beautiful learning
experience, but it really gave me an opportunity to put
into practice what I preach, which is not
always easy because I did chuckle a couple times thinking, if
I was across from my friend who's telling me this story,
what advice would I give her? And you're probably
thinking of how you comfort your friends, how you
comfort people who you care about. The challenge
here or the mindfulness practice here is can
you offer those same words of loving kindness,
compassion, and support to yourself
as you do to others. And my friend and
neighbor, Liz, and that's what I told her. Mindfulness,
self compassion is really being the kind
of human being that is
loving, kind, and supportive to others
as to yourself. Because when we fill our
cup up, we have more to offer others. When we
practice self love, we can be more
kind and loving to others. And that's what a call for love
is. This whole example
is a call for self love, which
could be even more challenging than loving others.
As you move forward, are you going to remember
when you are berating yourself or very critical
of yourself to practice self love.
It's a call for self love by
practicing mindfulness self compassion.
Reach out to me. Let me know examples and stories that have
happened to you. And I support you and I
love you on your journey as I learn
and always continue to remind myself to be grounded
in self love. From my heart to yours,