Welcome

Welcome home, cojourners. I'm glad you're here for another episode. I'm Dr. Tema, licensed psychologist,

ordained minister, and sacred artists here to facilitate your journey back home to yourself.

And we want to start this week's episode, as we often do with a reading.

This week, our reading is from my book, Reclaim Yourself, the Homecoming Workbook, Reclaim Yourself.

And it reads from the introduction.

To come home to yourself is to make the radical decision

to choose your authentic self daily. To come home to yourself is to welcome breath, song,

dance, laughter, tears, truth, into your life perpetually. I am so glad you are ready

to stop pretending, contorting, and disguising yourself. The invisible, emotional, and

spiritual labor of self-erasure is expensive. It costs you time,

integrity, health, and purpose. You are deserving of an authentic life. Some people automatically get to show up in truth. They are told

to take up space and make their voices heard, while others are pressured into silenced invisibility.

I invite you to resist that programming. I invite you to break the chains that have caused you to

live a marginal life with hidden wings and leashed dreams. In this season, may you become unleashed unconfined and uncompromised you are worthy of a full abundant life which means you get to show up in truth and freedom. You get to show up in truth and freedom. Yes,

I am excited that each of us are reclaiming our lives so we can live authentically and abundantly. And on today's

episode, we want to focus on resisting manipulation. Don't take the bait. Resisting manipulation, don't take the bait. And so this saying around taking the bait

is often used as people think about fishing, this notion that people will dangle something on a

hook to try to get you in so that they can

then destroy or humiliate or embarrass or break your spirit. And so we do not want to give time,

energy, effort in responding to people who are attempting to manipulate us.

And so I want to give you a number of strategies so that you can hold on to the truth of yourself, so that you can live in freedom

...