Mind, Body, and Soul - An interview with Ashleah Nelson.
On self-compassion, what self-care really means, and why your relationship with your body is one of the most important relationships you can nurture.
Hello friends,
This month’s newsletter is late because of the unpredictable nature of life. I made a big life move last weekend and was consumed both physically and emotionally that I didn’t have the time I thought I would need to put the letter together. If you were waiting for this, I apologize for the delay. However, I am happy to inform you that this month’s letter is so worth the wait.
Last month, I spoke with Ashleah Nelson. Ashleah is a wellness coach who uses mindfulness and movement to work with her clients. I initially reached out to Ashleah to talk about self-esteem, tools for building that up, and what that looks like for Black women.
In response, Ashleah, very kindly, shared that her work focuses more on nurturing self-compassion, which she called self-esteem’s big cousin. She described self-compassion as a way of relating to ourselves compassionately regardless of success and failure. “I like to think of self-compassion as the pep talk the coach gives after losing a match or the thank you speech after a win lol,” she wrote me. And while I was already excited to talk with her, my excitement grew after our exchange. I wanted to ask her about how we reframe compassion and truly caring for ourselves as a strength and a necessity, which it is.
I enjoyed talking to Ashleah because the work she does helping others build compassion for themselves is true soul work and the generosity and care she brings to it shines through.
I hope you enjoy reading.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity
Can you introduce your work? What would you say is the core of your work?
The core of my work is getting people to uncover their true selves and connect with that, and love on that version of themselves. That true authentic [version], and be comfortable with that person. And really start to love and grow and know that person.
How do you work with your clients to get to that place?
The work, the method, is really mindfulness and movement. And so what I do in my wellness coaching is about connecting Black women and femmes to their intuition, by learning to prioritize themselves and taking care of themselves and starting to see that care is sacred. I also do movement, my coaching is combined with it, but I offer movement separately as well. That is a weight-neutral approach to really give people space to just be present with their bodies. It is simply about being with your body in movement, paying attention to your breath, being curious about yourself, and taking that information and taking it into the outside world.
I really like what you said about intuition. And I remember seeing your Instagram name knowfullwell. co and thinking, what does it have to do with intuition? My understanding was that it had to do with understanding yourself fully. And can you tell me exactly where intuition plays a part in your work?
Intuition is that core, it’s that knowing. It’s subtle though. So, to do that, you have to be comfortable with yourself, you have to know yourself, you have to be able to connect. And a good place to start with intuition is through the body, because it's giving us these physical cues, it's giving us the sensations it's giving us these experiences that we can tap into. And then from there, it's like, “oh, that's what that was” when I'm engaging with other people [or] when I'm making big decisions. So it's really starting to learn it on a personal level so that you can start to apply it to other areas of your life.
And this might be a “woo woo” question, but I’m wondering what it feels like when you know something is intuition versus anxiety? How do you know what the difference is and what are some of the things that you would say, are preventing us from fully trusting our own intuition?
Intuition is easy. And we like to make things hard. Intuition doesn’t feel like [a] struggle, intuition doesn’t feel like fear in a sense. Or [even] with fear, it’s about getting clear on is this my ego? Which is understanding your motives, right? I think a good place to look at that is [asking], '“what am I trying to prove?” And if you're trying to prove something, it is more than likely ego, right? Because your intuition is really heart-centred, it’s guided by love, it really is a knowing of what's best for you, versus what you think is best for you. So that's where the real challenge is, [in] separating that this is really what's best for me at my core, and will allow me to expand or will allow me to grow versus this is what I think is best for me.
Initially, I wanted to talk about self-esteem, but you reframed things for me. To me, self-esteem, like the building of some kind of armour [to protect oneself] sounds more like struggle and self-compassion sounds a little more like ease. Can you share with me again the difference between self-esteem and self-compassion?
So, self-esteem is really like our own personal evaluation of our self-worth, and so this is like a combination of confidence, our understanding of our competence, the idea of what we feel that we should deserve, but also like how much we like ourselves. You know, because when you feel shitty about yourself, self-esteem is low, right? So these two are connected, whereas self-compassion is really just this way of relating to yourself and your humanity over the different versions of you and the different phases of you. You're going to shift and you're going to change and if you're still holding those same standards for yourself or measures of yourself and you simply can no longer meet them for whatever reason, your self-esteem may be lower. Self-compassion is always being present with who you are in that moment and giving yourself the care and the love that you need, relating to yourself with kindness, especially through failure, especially the errors and F ups.
What stood out for me is that it seems like sometimes we kind of deny ourselves ease [because of] the idea that being tough on yourself and being difficult on yourself is more likely to yield results. So what would you tell someone who [is asking], am I more difficult to achieve the goal I want to? Or do I sit with myself and allow myself ease?
You know, it’s hard to see it in the moment. You have to make it a practice and you learn how to motivate yourself in different ways. So, with self-compassion, now I can connect to creativity, I can connect to joy. Now, I can actually just concentrate on what this task is, instead of just being worried about like, “oh my god, am I going to fail?” “What [would] people say about what I'm producing?” It's easier for us to think about how you treat babies, if a little kid fell down and they were trying to ride a bike, we don't yell at them “get up, you’re never gonna be able to do this, you’re trash.” We encourage them, we say “that's okay, you can just try again, you might get hurt, but I'll be here for you.” And that's essentially what self-compassion is for yourself. One of the biggest things to be able to learn how to practice self-compassion is your support system. And honestly, this means that you're going to have to find a new support system, as people start to see it in practice. You have to build the support system around it, because [there] is going to be a push back, and then you fall back into that mode.
How do you build confidence through self-compassion?
Honestly, it just comes naturally because you feel so much better about yourself and you expand. The metrics become expanded, like what becomes your best or what becomes that level of acceptable expands to include more. So, maybe it's no longer based off of a specific income but that I'm really proud of the work that I produced, and maybe it's not how many clients you get if you're entrepreneur, it becomes “look at the transformation that they had by working with me.” We need to feel good about ourselves, so self-esteem is important, but with self-compassion, you have a more stable, more grounded, and wider option of what you use to kind of relate to your sense of self.
The reframing from self-esteem to self-compassion is so important. Are there other ideas about who we “should be" or how we "should live" that you encourage people to reframe or think differently about?
Our body, number one. We take out so much on our body, and this relationship of trying to control it because that’s what self-esteem comes down to a lot of times. If we’re feeling low in other areas, we try to exert it [somewhere else] because we’re just trying to feel good about ourselves. So I think the body is one, because it changes so much. And we do have this false sense [that] we have more control over its outward appearance than we do with food or exercise. And so that gives us a distraction from really just like being present with the body and building a relationship with it, which is really a big part of my work, especially in my group coaching. It’s reframing the relationship with the body to one of self-compassion. I think, also what happens is, with the body specifically we externalize ourselves from it because it hurts too much to really focus on what's going on and what we're feeling. So, think about the way when you're not feeling good about the body that you talk about it. Like it's not you, like it’s not your body. So, it’s shifting that — and this is not false positivity, self-compassion requires honesty. [For example,] “I'm not feeling the best about my body right now. But I'm working on that relationship.” And some things that we might do is use touch, compassionate touch, compassionate words, through affirmations, acts of care, and self-love. It's exactly what you would do for somebody else who you were trying to comfort who you were trying to care for, but giving that to yourself. You are in a relationship with your body, and so are the things that you're doing healthy? and I don't mean like healthy nutrition. I mean, like a healthy relationship. Is the way you talk to your body healthy? Is the way you treat it [and] view it [healthy]?
I think sometimes we think an unhealthy relationship with our body plays out by restricting ourselves or trying to lose [excessive] weight. But in your experience, how can an unhealthy relationship with one's body play out in other ways that we might not even realize? [And] why is it so important to have that healthy, compassionate, loving relationship with your body? I can imagine it’s not just physical?
It's not [just] physical, it's the interconnection of our mind, our body, and our spirit. So what I was talking about initially with intuition, and one of the ways that we feel it is the actual physical, sensational experience, and when you are fighting something you can't tune into what [your body] is telling you. You don't care for something in the same way when you are trying to control it, that is not care. It's anything to feed the ego. We keep re-emphasizing ways to live within our ego, to live within resistance, and to live within struggle versus this being more of a natural relationship of when I provide you care, I'm elevating this relationship to something where I can be connected, where my body can serve me where I can serve it. And you just feel better, you can connect to care in a way that is actually intended for you specifically, versus oh, my body needs to look this way — but that might not be what your body needs.
Can you talk about the difference between the best version of you and the truest/freest version of you?
For me, best feels like meeting those external standards of success. Of what you should have and what things should look like. I think of it as this performance for everybody else, and I think that’s what is celebrated, especially for Black women. I think that we are starting to expand it more, but what we celebrate are degrees, the CEOs, and everybody at the top. Going back to our trauma where Black women aren’t really shown appreciation and shown love for things outside of our labor, and in order to get that we feel we need to show up a certain way, look a certain way be a certain way, [and] have all of these things without ever really connecting to “what is it that I actually want and what would actually make me happy?” So, the freest version of ourselves is being able to connect with legit happiness, like what are the things that I value? What do I want for myself and how can I build that? I honestly think this whole “best version” is just kind of a misguided way for us to get to what we think is the road to us actually just being happy.
If someone were to say, I want to go on this journey of self-compassion, what are some of the things that you would share that people can just start to do immediately to start to reframe how they think about themselves?
Important, especially for Black people and other marginalized populations, is to define a compassionate relationship, and to define what a healthy relationship is. Because we are from cultures that motivate through fear, they motivate through trying to be the best. And not to say that that is the common thing in our culture, but there are some things that when people come from a marginalized background, even connection to one another, is not as simple as, I'll just be kind or just love one another. So, I think what is super important is sitting down and writing out what does it mean to be compassionate? What is love? What is kindness? So that you will always have something to refer back to and to just check in with yourself to make sure that this is meeting that standard of compassion. I think a good way to check where you are being driven by esteem is to check, what am I trying to prove? whether it be to yourself or other people because that’s a place of healing.
Since the pandemic, there’s been this explosion of platitudes about self-care and what that looks like. I’m curious about how you think self-care has been communicated, [what it entails] and how it can be communicated better.
That's hard. I think self-care has gotten kind of lost in the infographics and turning it into tasks when really self-care is a relationship with yourself. I think it is reframing that and thinking, how do I want to feel about myself? Self-care has been turned into a checklist, a task of “all right, I did the bubble bath, I did the gratitude,” without actually connecting to what is this doing for me? What do I need? How is this like providing pleasure? Or fulfillment?
This might be my misinterpretation, but it sounds to me like the road to building self-compassion involves a lot of re-parenting yourself almost?
Yeah, I definitely think so. And I love that you brought it up in that concept. It is really just giving yourself the things that you need now, that you couldn't at the time, and knowing that it is the highest level of care. You don't get no better than loving on yourself.
they (w)rote.
For Catapult, Dorothy Bendel writes about reclaiming and maintaining your joy after dealing with abuse.
For Teen Vogue, Deanna Schwartz writes about how toxic diet culture is passed from moms to daughters,
Lauren Kane interviews writer Kendra Allen about Procrastination, Pressure, and Poetry for the Paris Review.
For the Republic, Oreoluwa George-Taylor writes captivatingly about weight and all the things we associate with it.
For the New Yorker, Doreen St. Felix wrote about Whitney Houston and that voice.
(w)rite back.
Tell me one way you’re going to practice self-compassion this month. Leave a comment below or send me an email