Healing, Self-Love & Starting Over with Jonathan Aslay

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Bent Not Broken. Heartbreak and trauma may feel like the end of your story, but here it's the beginning of a bold new chapter. I'm your host, Coach Deborah Griffiths, and this is the space where women rise, rebuild, and rediscover their purpose. Remember this truth. You are bet, not broken. Today's guest is Jonathan Asley, one of America's leading midlife self-love and life coaches. After the heartbreaking loss of his 19-year-old son Connor, Jonathan was propelled into a deep inner journey that reshaped his understanding of love, healing, and emotional well-being. What he discovered is powerful. So many people searching for relationships aren't struggling with dating. They're struggling with self-worth, self-regard with self-love. Jonathan is now on a mission to help men and women build that foundation within themselves. His book, What the Heck is Self-Love Anyway, offers spiritual insights with real-world practices to reconnect with your heart and rewrite your emotional story. Welcome, Jonathan.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Thanks for having me on, Deborah. I'm honored.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

I really appreciate it. Let's get going.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Your journey into self-love was born from some deep grief. How did losing Connor reshape your understanding of love and the way we show up for ourselves?

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. As you ask that question, I'm really reflecting back to what happened about 2007, like 10, 12 years earlier, when I was going through a divorce. Why I'm bringing this up is because at the time I was going through a divorce, I lost my high-end corporate job and I got wiped out in the market crash of 2008. So my identity was pummeled. I mean, literally, my identity of who I thought I was was shattered, but I didn't have the profession anymore. I didn't have the marriage anymore. I didn't have the money anymore. And it left me in a state of absolute emotional chaos. My way of solving that for years was drugs, alcohol, and I had an addiction to online dating. And I was in a period of my life where for years I went to bed wishing I didn't wake up. I was in the pit of despair. And as I was crawling myself out of the pit of despair, this addiction I had for online dating turned into a profession for me, which gave me purpose. And through that period of time, I began basically reparenting myself, rewiring myself, that sort of thing, through personal development, self-help, spiritual work. And why it was important for me to share that piece before I share the piece about my son is that a lot of people experience just what I've experienced. They've gone through divorce, they've gone through financial shifts, they've lost their professional life. And whether you're a man or woman, this is an emotionally devastating experience, and particularly divorce, because it's the unraveling of the tapestry of your life with another human being. So, so as I'm beginning, for lack of a better word, reparenting myself through personal development, self-help, spiritual work, and therapy. Let me not discount therapy because that was part of my journey too. By the time my son passed away, I built emotional scaffolding to navigate this. I want to differentiate between the crash in my identity and certainly the loss of my son, which was profound in many ways. But because I had built the emotional scaffolding, it didn't take me down the path of drugs, alcohol, you know, addictions, that sort of thing to numb the pain I was preparing for another chapter in my life. And and Deborah, what was happening right at the time he passed, I'd been blogging about self-love. Like, you know, self-love means this, self-mum means this. And so when he passed, I think it's important that I share with everybody during his eulogy, I stopped in the middle of it as I'm sharing the story about his life. I said, Look, everybody who loved him, hundreds of people in the room, I said, you know, we could grieve with suffering or we could grieve with love. And so I actually began a journey of doing podcasts called Grieving with Love. How can we grieve this experience in the most heart-centered way? And that's when the book began being birthed, talking about self-love, grieving with love, understanding that life isn't permanent and things can change on a dime. Even a relationship can change, your professional life can change, your money can change. And love, I know this sounds corny to a lot of people, but love is actually such a rooted place to be that for me, it gave me the groundwork to navigate some really heavy duty stuff in my life. And that's what I'm a mission on to encourage this. And I know before you have your next question, I just want to say this to everybody that's listening. I know the term self-love gets thrown around a lot. Okay. So just to make it simple, I think of self-love as self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-reliance, self-discipline, all these juicy self-words wrapped in love, recognizing that we all have an emotional six-year-old inside of us. And that's what self-love is nurturing that little emotional six-year-old inside of us, saying, I've got your back. It's going to be okay. No matter how bad it gets, it's going to be okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

What an incredible journey you've been on. And thank you for sharing all of that. I have kind of a question, a little bit in a different tone. With spirituality, and I was brought up as a cradle Catholic and went to parochial school and you know, all girls Catholic High School, really rigid. I'm very thankful for my faith because it's grounded me and helped me through my challenges. But there's some things along the way that got a little misconstrued. And one of them, I think, is self-love. We're taught, you know, do unto others as you have them do unto you. And it's all about humility and being humble, kind of like if you love yourself and you know, be that ego part of us. How do we separate the ego from self-love? Or can we?

SPEAKER_00 7:12

God, that's such a great question to unpack. We could spend hours on that one, which I really think is juicy. So, and and what I'm about to say is most likely a judgment. It's a projection on my part. I could be wrong. But the way I look at organized religion, it's very fear-based and trying to shift our behavior through fear, which isn't love. Ego gravitates to that because the ego is dancing between emotional self-protection and its needs, wants, and desires. Love is a frequency. I look at love as a frequency. It's vibrating at, and this sounds like a judgment, even saying a higher or lower frequency. I mean, that's a comparison, but I just want to say that it vibrates at a more harmonic frequency. Ego to me vibrates on a more agitated frequency, in my interpretation. So the difference between like a tuning fork, tuning a guitar, you know, if you strum a guitar that's out of tune, it's going to go like this. But when it's tuned, it's like that's the way I view it. So the ego's in this dance of trying to protect the emotional six-year-old inside of us at the same time wanting to be in harmony. Unfortunately, organized religion doesn't really focus on being in harmony. It's trying to manage the tuning of the instrument. And so, you know, God, I feel like I've made this statement like it's a ramble, but I'm hoping that you can see the pony in the shit on what I just said.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

I do. And it makes perfect sense. Many of the concepts, you know, you're learning. I was a child myself, six, seven, eight years old. You have a very limited understanding of who God is. I mean, they try to teach you, but you have a very limited understanding, and it's more or less the rules of how we should be behaving. Well, foundation of some values and ethics and things like that. But I think along the way, some things get misconstrued. For me, in defining self-love, that was one area I found got a bit misconstrued in an area that I'm working on.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

So I want to piggyback on this because you brought up God. And, you know, in my interpretation of God, God just represents our higher self, a divine self within ourselves, connected with everybody else's divine self. And I look at that as universal energy, source energy, and God. The way I look at religion, and I might be offending those that feel this way, the way religion looks at it is God is separate from what I just described. It's outside, this controlling factor, like a parent. I don't look at our connection to universal energy, a source energy, spirit, and our divine self is anything but a frequency of love. And all things are love within the eyes of source, so to speak. But again, I might have offended people because I might shatter their perceptions around this, but this is just how I interpret it.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

No, I understand that. You say the biggest obstacle in dating isn't compatibility, it's a lack of self-worth. What are the signs someone is dating from a wounded place?

SPEAKER_00 10:44

I can think back, I was operating from a place of pain and wanting someone else to take the pain away. A lot of people operate from a premise of I need you to love me so I can feel good about myself. In other words, seeking validation from others. And the the, you know, to the extent that I say compatibility, I mean, compatibility is incredibly important. More importantly, a lot of people subscribe to chemistry equals relationship success. And boy, is that further from the truth. Chemistry works like a broken clock. It's right twice a day. Chemistry. What really cements beautiful, juicy, delicious, healthy, happy relationships is a relationship built on a foundation of friendship with physical connection. If you're operating from a wounded place, a place of needing validation from someone else, it's not that you can't be in a relationship with anyone, but you're gonna be you're gonna be in a relationship based on expectations. And boy, is it hard to manage expectations from two different souls because you're not coming from a place of agreements or acceptance, you're coming from a place of need, and that usually breaks apart later on down the road.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

How does self-love shift the way we create and maintain healthy relationships?

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Well, that's a great question. I love that because our individual sovereignty is one of the elements of self-love. In other words, we are sovereign beings. And the minute we interact with someone else, they're a sovereign being. It's like two separate nations, each has their own way of doing things. I'll think of France and Spain, you know. Do they, you know, which I do believe they border one another. You know, two separate nations have their own way of doing things, and and self-love is recognizing that you don't have to compromise the way you do, you don't have to sacrifice the way you do something versus somebody else. It's how you come to agreements with one another, how you come to treaties with one another from that sovereign being. And that's what self-love is. It's not giving away your power. Self-love is about self-worth, self-regard, self-esteem, all those juicy words. And and in romance, and I the only reason why I preface romantic relationships, because nothing triggers our shit more than romantic love. I mean, you know, like dating and relationships. Family members can trigger a lot of our stuff too. So relationships trigger our stuff. Okay. And so it's it's recognizing that that trigger is an opportunity for self-awareness. I forgot to mention self-awareness in those words. Self-awareness is, you know, what are my fears, my insecurities, my negative patterns, my limiting beliefs, my judgments for others, how my actions reflect. And it's being able to look inward from an examine life instead of a life of blame, which a lot of humans, like here in the United States, we are suckling on the nipple of victim consciousness. It's always someone else's fault. And self-love is about self-responsibility, self-awareness, that sovereign state. So hope I answered your question there.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

For someone who has spent years people pleasing or losing themselves in love, where do they even begin?

SPEAKER_00 14:24

I was just having this conversation with my beloved. Where do we begin? Where do we start? You know, like and and and I was just sharing how my coaching practice is kind of like we start in the middle and then we figure it out. I literally was saying this a few hours ago. What I teach in my private coaching for men and women who are seeking romantic life partnership-based relationships. I teach discernment. Choosing from the head. Now it doesn't mean that the heart involved, there's the head, the heart, but keep the hormones at bay for a little bit. I just heard that head, heart, and hormones from Laurel House, a relationship coach. So I have to give her credit for what I just shared. So that's a starting point. Most people's starting point is usually a gigantic humbling event. Like I went through divorce, financial crisis, I had a major humbling event, some people losing a child. There's a humbling event that starts the path. That's normally what happens. Humbling event starts the path. This is the whole hero's journey, Joseph Campbell, that sort of thing. A humbling event. Now, where do we go? Well, first we go to seek relief from pain. Now, again, I did drugs and alcohol, not the best of choices, but it numbed the pain. I'm a big proponent of therapy, personal development, self-help, spiritual work, just to start to navigate the emotional pain, like what I talked about in the beginning of my story. Seek help navigating the pain and begin the emotional scaffolding through a self-examined life. I want everyone to write that down. A self-examined life means recognizing that you are literally responsible for everything that's happened in your life, not a victim. Okay. Now, granted, we all had shit our parents did to us, okay? They didn't mean to do it. Most parents didn't mean to screw you up. Some way more than others, some in a horrific way. I'm not diminishing the amount of pain and hurt for those horrific experiences, but the garden variety messups, our parents didn't mean it. Okay. Taking ownership of that and certainly be in a state of forgiveness would be a great place to lean into, forgiving our parents and examining how our lives are shaped by the scripts our mom and dads or our, you know, the people in our lives, those school teachers and everything. These are all the scripts that carry. And by the way, to make it really simple for everyone, our scripts, the stories, is like computer programming. To write a computer programming, you have to do something known as code. The first line of code, the second line of code, the third line of code, the hundredth line of code, the billionth line of code. There's so much code.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:26

That's what those scripts represent. When there's a glitch in the system, it's usually you got to go back to the code to figure out where that glitch occurred. That's what a self-examined life does. It takes personal responsibility, particularly in the area of triggers. Triggers, ouch, something ouch happens. Instead of blaming someone else, okay, how was I a contributor to that? How do I take responsibility? That would be a place to start, you know. And I know I rattled off a mountain of stuff there, but I hope you can parse the pony in the poop, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

I love that about the self-examination. Do you give any kind of exercises or show people how they can begin to do these self-examinations?

SPEAKER_00 18:13

That's a great question. In my book, The Self-Love, The Journey of Personal Development, Self-Help, and Spiritual Work. Each chapter is a self-examination. For example, chapter one, speak your truth, do it from a kind place. Okay, do it from a kind place. Speak your truth. Now, your truth is merely what you're feeling. It's not the truth, it's just your truth. Another chapter is don't let anyone f with your qi. In other words, you know, someone else's perceptions of you is their projection. It's not who you are. And for example, chapter nine, which I talk about a lot in my coaching practice, if it's sincere and from the heart, you can't say the wrong thing to the right person. You can't do the wrong thing to the right person if you're coming from a sincere place. Particularly women who I coach, they're always afraid to speak their truth because the guys, their fear is it's going to cause someone to run away. When you speak from your heart and someone runs away, they did you a service.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Very true. What are the most misunderstood ideas about self-love, especially for midlife adults starting over?

SPEAKER_00 19:27

I've been thinking about this. And what gets my goat is sometimes thinking of self-care as self-love, manicures, pedicures, massages, all those self-care kind of things. And certainly that's an element of self-love, but if you're doing that to bypass the inner work, I think the true work of self-love is a self-examine life and doing the work to heal and to forgive. I spend an hour a day at this, every day. You have to be willing to invest in yourself. Again, outside of manicures, pedicures, massages, several of those things tend to be female-oriented. I mean, there's certainly male things as well. Even, believe it or not, exercise sometimes bypasses our emotional state. Exercise is great, but it can cause us to numb pain. I think one of the elements of self-love is facing your pain, your emotions, and allowing yourself to feel it and instead of bypassing it, which so much of even the the coaching industry teaches is a bypass method instead of really leaning into your pain and and and allowing it to run through you. That's an that's an element of self-love.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

I totally agree. I have a tendency of being busy, sometimes too busy, you know, to if there's something that I think I should be doing or I know I need to be facing, but I'm not quite ready, I just find other things to do, to not carve out that time to face that issue that I need to address.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

You know, it's interesting. This might be of interest to your audience. There's a meditation practice called vipassana, where you go to a retreat center for 10 to 14 days and you're in silence for 10 to 14 days. They're all over the country and they're free. And what's interesting about so no cell phones, no talking, nothing but your feelings. Nothing but your feelings.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

If you're in a and I did kind of a quasi one recently, and no phones for a week, no interaction with technology, none of that. Out in the wilderness. I was with people though, and there was communication going on. When you eliminate all of that and you're just by yourself. First off, it's excruciatingly painful. The first 48 hours is excruciatingly painful. It's meant to be painful. Imagine being by ourselves in silence in an environment where there are other people. But it's ironic, there's kind of a, I don't know if it's an irony or not, that that's painful, but we live with ourselves every day. It should be embraced in a state of joy. What people say after going through a 10 to 14 day experience, it's like their whole being just changed. Just changed. And and I noticed when I was in that retreat for five days with no technology, when I got back to the real world, all the noise and that frequency I talked about just is like this. I just wanted to interject that suggestion.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

No, that's good. I think we do look the noise. There's so much noise. Busy is what got me there.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

Like busy is a way to distract from who we are. And like the the I believe the whole purpose of life is to embrace who we are, every single juicy, delicious feeling, and share that with others. You know, it's funny. This morning my beloved and I were having a conversation and I was starting to reflect on a childhood experience, and I just started bawling. And she just looked at me and she said, God, I love you. And I'm like, what? And she goes, God, you feel deeply. She goes, that's so juicy, you know, not because I'm a man, just because I'm feeling this is what I mean on here on the planet to encourage. That's another element to self-love, to feel all those juicy feelings, not from a place of fear, but from a place of reverence, from a place of joy, from a place of love. And as we do this more and more, what ends up happening is our frequency begins to be in harmony. And guess what? Your body starts to reverse its age. We start looking younger. I mean, literally, we have the capacity to do all of that. You know, if you ever saw a picture of, I was thinking of President Jimmy Carter. They showed a picture of him before he became president four years later, and he aged 20 years in a four-year period. Imagine you could reverse it if we dive into an element of loving ourselves and loving others.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Many listeners have survived emotional abuse, gaslighting, or divorce. How does trauma interfere with our ability to love ourselves?

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Well, it's kind of what I was just talking about that frequency trauma causes agitation, fear, self-doubt, you know, lack of self-worth, lack of self-regard, lack of self-discipline. It's what takes away from self, the trauma. But I think trauma was here to wake us up to self-love. Like I think a trigger is meant to wake us up to love ourselves. And some people who have had the most horrific trauma, it's the invitation for a deep dive into loving oneself. And we're so caught up in the performance of life, paying our bills, you know, working, paying our bills, survival. And then most people, what they do to circumvent that is they choose luxury things instead of self-examination. Some of the happiest people on the planet have little or no wealth, little or no belongings. But here in the United States, we substituted commercialism as a way to gaslight the pain we're feeling. And I'm all in favor of luxury, by the way. It's okay. But coming from a not dependent place, but from an actualized place.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

It reminds me, there's a quote in the Bible about money being the root of all evil. And it's been misconstrued. It's not really about money being the root of evil, it's about the love of money, is where the evil is. And when we go down that path of focusing on the money and the possessions and not taking time to have that self-examination, as you as you say it, and come to a point of where where we need, why are we going after possessions when something inside us needs to be healed?

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Yeah. And I want to share this with everyone. Imagine replacing the word money with the word appreciation. Like we look at money as appreciation. There's this smartphone I'm holding, and I use appreciation for the trade for that. And somebody goes to work and there's a paycheck. That's appreciation. If we reframe the idea of money to the concept of appreciation, it's just an exchange of appreciation. Love that. And really embrace it. Look at your paycheck and go, God, I'm so blessed. Look at it from a place of appreciation. And every time you hand money someone, just go, God, I'm so grateful. I can be in a state of appreciation. And non-attachment, man, even if you started to do that from this conversation, it's a self-love practice. I promise you, life will start feeling a little bit better when we operate from that vantage point.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

It all goes back to also gratitude. You're talking about appreciation. You know, we get a paycheck. Yes, we worked for the paycheck, but to get the paycheck and be appreciated that we're getting a paycheck, we should be actually thankful and take that second, like, thank you, before we go on to the next.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

I'm entitled where I deserve it, just be in a state of gratitude. The happiest people I know swim in gratitude. And this is again for those who've suffered, I am not here to suggest you don't have a right to feel a certain way, but I'm also inviting all of you to work on self-love, forgiveness, healing, and start adopting this.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

Your life will get better. You talk about self-love as a daily practice. What does that look like for you, especially on hard days?

SPEAKER_00 28:14

It's interesting because I spend easily an hour a day in reflectiveness. That includes guided meditation, journaling, sharing myself with my partner, and allowing myself to feel feelings and not to suppress them. This morning I was feeling a little agitated. There's a big decision happening in my life, and I could visibly feel the frequency within myself. My natural reaction is to try to numb the pain through, you know, a lot of, you know, like forgiveness exercise, something like that. Well, first, I said thank you for the feeling. I said, come back to gratitude. The universe, God, spirit, I'm feeling something. Be in gratitude for it. Feel the feeling as hard as I could feel it. Take it to the highest level, even if it was hurting. Be in gratitude, remembering that part of all this experience of life is an illusion. Not discounting the reality for people, but it's just made up in my head. This feeling was just the thoughts creating feelings. I can change those thoughts to shift those feelings. Returning back to gratitude and coming up with a reframing exercise. And I was just grateful for the experience. That's just one of many things I do. Being of service to others is a tremendous practice for me, being like really making a difference in people's lives. I have a timer that goes off on my phone every hour on the hour. And the first thing I remind myself is I'm here to make a difference in the world. I literally do this every hour on the hour. I just remind myself that I'm here to make a difference. And this is that's a little practice, a little tool people could adopt. You know, I have an app on my phone that's all pre-recorded in my voice, affirmations that I listen to, you know, usually a couple, three or four times a week. I listen to my own affirmations in a meditative state. There's so many things we can do. And yet things take priority. It's so sad how everything takes priority over ourselves. You know, our kids, our work, everything takes priority. The biggest priority in your life is you. It's like one of the things I talk about in my book. Self-love, when the flight attendant on an airplane says, in the case of cabin pressure change, if you're traveling with small oxygen masks will drop, if you're traveling with small children, put the mask on yourself first. That's what self-love is. And boy, do we have a propensity, the people pleasers, the martyrs, the enablers, and everything, we do it for everybody else. And then we complain, please forgive me when I say we, but I'm guilty of this too. We blame everyone else when personal responsibility start with you. That's what this is all about.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Where can our listeners get your book and learn more about you?

SPEAKER_00 31:26

Well, Deborah, thank you so much for allowing me to go a little in the granular with these questions. I really enjoy and I appreciate your interviewing style. My name is Jonathan Asley. Put it in Google. The first thing that will come up is my YouTube channel. I have a couple hundred thousand followers. If you're into relationship stuff, watch my videos if you want. The next thing will come up is my website. The third thing that will come up is my social media, and the fourth thing will be my book on Amazon. What the heck is self-loving? You can go to any one of those portals. If you found me here, write a message. Go to my website, write a letter, say I met you on Bent Not Broken, and I'll personally respond to you as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:05

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for this great conversation today. I really appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

Likewise, thanks.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Thank you for listening to today's episode of Bent Not Broken. I hope that this episode reminded you that even through life's toughest moments, you are bent, not broken. If this message inspired you, please share, rate, review, and subscribe, as it helps us reach more women who are ready to rise and rebuild. And until next time, keep living bold and walking in your purpose.