Hi everyone, this is Kristin Maxwell, and you’re listening to Your SuperPowered Mind. In this show, we take a look at our guests’ transformational journeys so you can learn tools and tricks for how to transform your own life.
Our guest today is Joie Cheng, and we’re going to be talking about how to improve self-esteem. Joie is the queen of transformational book publishing. She is a publishing coach, an author, speaker, mentor, healer, and in addition to that, a yoga teacher. She is the founder of Illuminate Your Self-Love, and also the best-selling author of her book, The Naked Truth: A Woman’s Journey to Self-Love.
Joie, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thanks, Kristin. Thank you so much for having me on your show.
I love to have you and have this opportunity to talk to you.
My first question is, what super power did you uncover as a result of mastering your mind?
I have something that I call a mind Jedi.
Well, I have something that I call a mind Jedi, like a super ninja mind Jedi trick. What I discovered is that I can take a belief that is a limiting belief and I can turn it into an empowering belief. So that is one of my super powers.
Wow, that is truly an amazing super power. For those of you who are maybe not as familiar with how limiting beliefs stop us from being what we want, that’s great. So tell me, how do you do that?
For example, I had realized that there were a couple beliefs that I had had that were limiting myself, that were basically putting conditions on my own happiness. I had a belief that if I got married, I’d be happier, and I had a belief that if I was single, I’d be miserable. So I just said, “How do I know that being married is going to make me happier? I’m sure there’s a lot of people who are married that are unhappy. How do I know that being single is going to make me miserable? What if being single was the best thing that I ever did?”
So just by flipping those beliefs, it created space for a different possibility.
Wow. That’s great. So, how do you remember to keep staying in that empowering belief? Did you have a process that you followed with that?
Not really, to be honest. I mean, just by asking those questions, it really shifted the energy around it for me and gave me the courage. I was actually in an abusive relationship for four and a half years, when I realized that I had those beliefs and so I finally, it gave me the courage to finally end that relationship for good and realize that I needed to learn to love myself. I really didn’t know that I didn’t love myself until I was in that relationship, and it made me realize that I needed that.
Wow. That’s really powerful. So what did you change as the result of being able to flip your limiting beliefs? What changed about your life or how you live life now?
Yeah, well, another thing that really attributed to that was my spirituality, was the understanding that I believe that we are not just human beings having a spiritual experience, that we’re really spiritual beings having a human experience. The understanding that we are not our thoughts, our thoughts are mostly, if not all, conditioned beliefs, things that have been passed down to us through society, through culture, through our family. So they’re not even our own, and they’re not true. The truth of who we are is that we are divine and perfect, but we’re also human, so that’s why we have doubts. But that understanding really helped me also with my mind, because it was helping me to not attach to those thoughts. A lot of times, we experience suffering because we attach to those thoughts that we have that we’re not good enough, and our fears and our limiting beliefs and our doubts about ourselves. But that’s really not the truth, so when we can see it and be the observer of it rather than becoming attached to it, then that’s when we have power.
Right. How did you learn to, or what was the process of learning to even observe your thoughts? Because I think so many of us go through just living life without even recognizing that these thoughts are maybe even separate from us. How did that come about?
Meditation was a big part of that for me. So just becoming aware, doing a mindfulness practice. I did a 30 day mindfulness practice where I just would sit and be silent and just notice a thought. And instead of, you know, sometimes we might have this idea that we want to not have any thoughts, we’ve got to meditate so we just don’t have thoughts. Even the people that are most experienced meditators that meditate hours a day, or years, they say that the longest they can go without a thought is, I don’t know, maybe eight, ten seconds. It’s not very much. It’s really not, or maybe even less than that. So that’s not really, probably, a goal that you should have when it comes to meditation, because it’s pretty unrealistic to have no thoughts ever in your mind.
I would just imagine literally these thoughts like clouds, just passing through the sky.
It’s more about awareness, it’s about coming back, when you notice you have a thought, it’s going, “Okay.” One of the things that I do is I just notice it as a cloud in the sky that’s passing by. And you’re just like, “Okay, so I’m just noticing that thought,” and that’s where the observer comes in then, we are not attaching to it. Rather than, “Oh, I don’t think I can do this thing that I’m afraid to do. What if this happens?” And then you start spiraling down and following that sort of rabbit hole, versus, “Oh, okay, so I’m noticing that there’s some fear, I’ve got this thought,” and then just … If you’re a visual person, I’m a visual person, so I would just imagine literally these thoughts like clouds, just passing through the sky.
That’s great. Have you been meditating for a long time?
Yeah, I mean, I can’t say that I have consistently been perfect at meditating for the whole time, but I’ve kind of gone in and out with it. Yeah, I’d say, I don’t remember exactly when I got introduced to meditation, but probably at least six years ago.
Wow. Well, you know what, we’re going to have to take a quick break, but when we do come back, I want to hear a little bit more about your story and of your book because I know that is the, talking about how you got yourself out of deep depression and increased your self-esteem. So I’d love to get some more idea of how exactly you did that and what listeners maybe could do.
Before we go, how can people learn more about you?
You can go to my website, which is joiecheng.com.
That’s great. Thank you so much. We’ll be back in a minute.
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