My guest this week is Shelly Tygielski, author of the recent book, Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World (affiliate link). Shelly is doing some really remarkable things, though she insists that anyone can do the things she does if we’re just willing to show up as ourselves and take some risks. What she’s doing is even more remarkable when you hear about the illness that she’s had to deal with for the past twenty years or so. But then again, our struggles often make us who we are, and lead us to places we hadn’t imagined, as Shelly as I discuss. I also enjoyed talking with her about how mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can work together.

Other topics we explored included:

• The interesting tensions in Shelly’s work
• What it means to show up
• The intimate connection between self-care and service
• Physical illness as a downstream effect of untended emotional health
• Shelly’s experience of waking up blind
• The diagnoses of uveitis and ankylosing spondylitis
• Finding gifts in our suffering
• The benefits of meditation (including the body scan) for self-awareness
• The genuineness I found in Shelly’s book
• The life-changing organization Shelly created called Pandemic of Love
• Shelly’s intention to present no barriers to entry to her work
• Asking “What if…?” versus “Why not?”
• Cultivating compassion and coming from a place of love
• Shelly’s journal for deconstruction and creating a new default mode
• Shifting the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves
• Addressing the unconscious conditioning that has shaped us
• “I have enough. I do enough. I am enough.”
• Integrating mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy
• Getting quiet in order to observe the mind

Shelly Tygielski is the author of Sit Down to Rise Up and founder of the global grassroots mutual aid organization Pandemic of Love.

Her work has been featured by over 100 media outlets, including CNN Heroes, The Kelly Clarkson Show, CBS This Morning, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

She’s a trauma-informed mindfulness teacher and a Garrison Institute Fellow, and she has been called one of the “12 Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement” by Mindful.org.

Shelly teaches self-care and resilience at organizations around the world.

Visit her online at her website and follow her on Instagram.