Episode 27: You Were Never Broken: How Self-Judgment Hijacks You (And How to Stop It) - Entreé

entrees Dec 22, 2025

→ Don’t forget to try the RAISE meditation – Dessert!

If you’ve ever judged yourself harshly and wondered, “What’s wrong with me?”—your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s helping you.

In this episode of Relish, Alyssia Sheikh unpacks the hidden cost of self-judgment—and why it often becomes the realsource of suffering. Drawing from mindfulness, neuroscience, and lived experience, she explains how judgment is the brain’s attempt to protect you from pain, rejection, or shame—but ends up hijacking your nervous system instead.

You’ll learn how judgment differs from shame, why “shoulds” are micro-judgments, and how self-criticism activates threat circuitry that shuts down your capacity to respond. Alyssia shares a powerful personal story, a somatic hand-based exercise to feel judgment in the body, and introduces her R.A.I.S.E. Method—an embodied alternative to fixing that helps you meet yourself with curiosity and compassion.

This episode is paired with a dessert meditation guiding you through the full R.A.I.S.E. practice so you can experience the shift—not just understand it.

✨ In this episode, you’ll learn:
• Why self-judgment is a survival strategy—not a personal flaw
• How judgment grows out of shame and reinforces it
• What the “second arrow” is and how we fire it at ourselves
• How judgment hijacks the nervous system and blocks choice
• Why mindfulness isn’t about fixing—but about relating differently
• The R.A.I.S.E. Method: Recognize, Allow, Inquire, Soften, Embody

💭 Reflection:
What if the part of you you’ve been trying to fix isn’t broken—but hurting?

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