Fenixâ PepTalk
I know you think I make you happy cause of my cute prancing. But my key to happiness is kindness. The reason people fall in love with me, is cause I tickle their kindness bone.
Special needs animals have been put on the planet to show us all that EXTRA kindness and caring MAKES US HAPPIER!
But itâs not just kindness to others, itâs also kindness to yourself. Thatâs often where you humans fall down. Youâre great at being kind to me, but youâve got a ways to go when it comes to being kind and compassionate to yourself.
So are you with me?! Letâs focus in on kindness this week, and make ourselves, and the world around us, a happy happy place.
Love đŸ #YourHappyCoach, Fenix xoxo

Kindness for Yourself First: A Science-Backed Strategy for Happiness
STRATEGY âą Welcoming Our Inner Child
Our inner child is the part of us that contains all of our emotions and memories from childhood. No matter how wonderful your childhood was, or wasnât, there will have been moments that you werenât able to fully reconcile and make peace with inside of yourself, and so we learn how to suppress and then repress emotion.
Learning how to welcome our upset feelings, like we would welcome a small upset child into our arms, is key for emotional health and our ongoing healing.
Through welcoming our negative emotions, we can begin to heal the wounds from our childhood and learn to cope with difficult situations in a healthy way. When we ignore our emotions, they can fester and grow into more significant problems, affecting our mental and physical health.
When we can truly begin to welcome our hurt feelings like we would welcome a small child into the room, we begin to use our emotions, even the most challenging ones, as the energy-for-motion that they are. We begin to use that energy to show up for ourselves in powerful, positive ways, rather than to hold ourselves down.
Iâm with you. Let me know if you have questions. I love you. ZoĂ«

References [1] [2]
[1] Kuchar, A. L., Neff, K. D. & Mosewich, A. D. (2023). Resilience and Enhancement in Sport, Exercise, & Training (RESET): A Brief Self-Compassion Intervention with NCAA Student Athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise.
[2] Miyagawa, Y. & Neff, K. D. (2023). How self-compassion operates within individuals: An examination of latent profiles of state self-compassion in the U.S. and Japan.
Inner Child Healing: A Step-by-Step Guide for Neurological Rewiring
If youâre still readingâŠwow! đł Great Job! It means that youâre an incredibly courageous being for leaning into Inner Child Healing. So many people run when they hear anything to do with feeling, healing or their inner child. It also means you must be ready, to truly rewire some past patterns! So you can get ready for lighter, happier and healthier days ahead!!!
This guide works BEST when you are feeling strong feelings you donât want to feel. And even better yet, when you are feeling IRRATIONAL strong feelings. For example your friend hasnât texted you back yet, and you feel abandoned. Or your husband did something trivial and you feel rage. Unfortunately very few of us were guided to allow and feel our emotions, so for most of us this is going to feel weird and also a little pathetic. Weâve been taught feeling anything other than tough and together, is weak and pathetic. But we now have so much Science that proves we ALL feel the full range of negative emotions (sad, sacred, disappointed, super angry) unless youâre a psycho- or socio- path. And we are starting to show that suppressing and repressing emotion not only keeps us stuck in the immature patterns we created as children, but also creates disease in the body.
So dive in. Yep itâs going to feel awkward. And yep it will take practice to truly feel second nature. But itâs the number 1 skill I wish every human knew. And this IS the number 1 skill that makes huge changes for my clients.
- First, do your best to identify what it is that youâre feeling. Yep, your mind will consistently try to rationalize your way out of this deep dive, but just keep letting go of thinking, analyzing and figuring something out⊠and close your eyes, and feel whatever youâre feeling IN YOUR BODY. Yep you feel inside your body, not in your head. So keep letting go of thinking, and get in your body and just be aware of the strongest feeling you have. Are you sad? Are you angry? Are you sacred? Are you feeling small and alone? Are you feeling overwhelmed and anxious? Are you feeling disgusted and furious?
- Ok once you have identified the strongest emotion, youâre going to feel where you feel it the most, and then make up a color, texture and movement for it. Yep, make it up. Is your sadness dark blue and slick and slimy and swirling around in your stomach? Is your anger like boiling red fiery daggers coming out your eyes?
- Keep becoming aware of the ways that you may be resisting completely accepting, allowing and making space for your feelings. Acknowledge the resistance, and keep welcoming and feeling your strongest emotion.
- Now itâs time to allow this strong emotion to morph into your inner child. Just imagine, or allow a memory to come present, of when you felt this way when you were younger. Let yourself see your inner child at whatever age feels present.
- Now let your inner child have a voice. They might want to share out-loud, or write it down. They might want to paint it, dance it, scream it or punch the bed. (It is important that you donât project or put any of these feelings on another living being. Itâs ok to punch the bed, or to scream in a place that wonât inflinct on someone else.) If you need encouragement, you can tell your inner child: âI want to receive whatever you want to share. Thereâs nothing you could do that would mean I would judge you or love you less. You can express absolutely any emotion right now. I see you. I hear you. I love you.â
- So now, while youâre aware of your inner child feelings within, also be aware that you are still your big, bold, brave heart. Your loving heart is always holding, listening and loving your feelings. You might not be that aware of it, because weâve all been trained to pay more attention to our heads, NOT our hearts. But your heart is always silently with you, loving you, supporting you. And now is the time to let your big brave heart flood your inner child with loving, understanding and compassion.
- You can share words of loving and compassion with your inner child if you choose. (Make sure they arenât words of correction or action. Often we do want to tell ourselves: you can do it, you can change, you are beautiful, you are successful, but thatâs not what your inner child needs to hear right now. Rewiring past patterns requires that our inner child knows that they are loved, worthy and safe, no matter if they can or canât do it, no matter if they feel beautiful or not, no matter what! NO MATTER WHAT! When we tell our inner child, youâre not ugly you ARE beautiful - our inner child hears itâs not ok to be ugly. When we tell our inner child, you can do it! - our inner child hears itâs not ok to not do it. Of course YES the truth is that everyone is beautiful and we can ALL do it, but if you want to clear this pattern, this small inner child needs to receive compassion and UNCONDITIONAL loving. Thatâs the kind of loving that says: no matter what you do, or donât do, I love you. Even if you fail and fall down for the rest of your life - you are loved just because you are inherently worthy of being loved.
- Keep expressing your feelings from your inner child, and then expressing your loving from your heart, until you feel a smile, you feel Lighter, you feel better. When this shift has taken place, exchange a huge hug: between your heart and your inner child to complete this weird and wonderful interaction.
- Great job! Thatâs it! Celebrate yourself. Thank yourself. Appreciate yourself as fully as you can. If that includes giving yourself a treat or a reward! Please do!
Pro Tip đ And if you really want to rewire this pattern: complete with Statements of Self-Forgiveness. Thatâs the Allowing.Loveâą email coaching guide this coming week.
From Dr. Zoë
Really understanding the power of inner child work is what I believe helped me heal my pattern of unrequited love, so that I could go from being obsessed about men that did not even think about me, to being in love with one of the kindest, most connected and most inspirational men Iâve ever met, who adores me.
So many of my clients undergo dramatic changes when they start to understand that âfeelingâ their emotions, is not about following them, and they certainly donât define or describe who we are. Who we are is our Big, Brave, Bold Hearts. Thatâs the Love that we are.
And, if weâre human, we DO have feelings or emotions - that are just energy in motion. Just energies that move through the body if weâll let them. The problem is that so many of us were taught NOT to feel our big emotions when we were little, and in order to stop the feeling, we also judged that we must be wrong, or not enough, or somehow less for having them. And so these negative beliefs, judgments and energetic blocks get stuck and in the body, and can create disease. Gabor MatĂ©âs recent book The Myth of Normal gives abundant research and case studies of the diseases that result when we repress and supress emotion.
Of course this blog post is just scratching the surface, as this is a nuanced and deep topic. But the actual heart of healing and neurological rewiring is actually quite simple. Rewiring our limiting patterns is the result of our conditioned selves receiving unconditional love. Every one of our negative patterns, our addictions, our self-doubt, or playing small, our misbeliefs about ourselves and our life: is the result of a misunderstanding that weâre not lovable if we donât achieve some condition in life. And some of these misunderstandings are passed down generationally and unconsciously.
The truth that we are all here to awaken to, is that we are all worthy of Love, no matter what.
Fenix has struck a cord with millions, because his challenges connect us all to our own courage and compassion. His ability to keep going, to fall down so many times but keep going until heâs figured out how to get around like a prancing pony⊠just connects us to that part within us. That part that is our heart, our Soul, our Life Force.
We love Fenix, because that spark of unimaginable overcoming and wonderfulness lives in each of us.
But we canât unleash that huge courage and power within, until we have compassion for our darkness, for our differences, for all our dimensions.
And we love dogs, because they teach us love and compassion. They show us, time and time again, that if you want to be happy, practice compassion.
I hope this simple inner child dialogue serves you well.
Please do reach out with any questions or requests you have.
I love you,
ZoĂ« đ€
