This is feminist wellness and I'm your host, nurse practitioner, functional medicine expert and life coach Victoria Albina. I'll be full heart. Welcome my love. Let's get started.

Hello hello my love. I hope this finds you doing so well. I myself am on the mend, but I bet you can hear in my voice that I got a cold.

I've had four days of negative at-home COVID tests and a negative PCR.

And thank goodness it's just a cold.

And it's been such a strange and fascinating experience because I haven't had a cold, you know, since a pandemic ago.

And it's just fascinating, right?

Like it used to make sense that I was on the subway every day, I was in buildings full of people, elevators full of people,

restaurants, etc, etc. And I've been super duper cautious and wear double masks inside and

whatever. Life happens, right? Sometimes. inside and whatever life happens right sometimes you get a cold and as the fatigue

set in this week and as I cancel calls and put off projects one of the things that I was very aware of and frankly fascinated by was the

negative self-talk that came marching on in like a perfectionist Mardi Gras band, throwing baubles of self-doubt and shiny plastic

necklaces of self-recrimination and self-judgment at me. Thoughts that sounded like,

I should be able to work through this. I should be able to focus for at least a few hours a day

Vek what is wrong with you why can't you just focus as I say, I remember that I mostly wear clear glasses and six different times today I took them off and put them down somewhere and then couldn't find them because I didn't have my glasses on to help me find my clear glasses I had taken off and lost like in my very small kitchen.

And yet, that inner critic was so loud.

And it was a moment where I got to remember to practice what I preach,

allowing and holding non-judgmental space for challenging feelings and inner conversations,

for that mean gremlin of a voice that comes out when we aren't meeting our own perfectionist

thought fantasies about what we should be able to accomplish,

change, think, feel, do in a given moment. My thoughts from that inner critic part were not kind, my darling.

And the difference between now and in the time before thought work and somatics is that I was,

mostly, able to stay in the place of being my own watcher, to recognize my unkind thoughts as the thoughts of my inner critic, and to use our tools to honor that part, and to also let them know that I'm not

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