Seeds to Sprout: You Get to be Messy

Mini-episode to help you ponder fear, death and living life intentionally.

Interesting in the course about fear that I mentioned in the episode? Send me a message with your name, e-mail and the message "Overcome Fear" and I'll send you the link.

Interested in healing and transforming your relationship to self and others?

• Book a Relationship Coaching Consultation

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is another Mini episode. Some thoughts, some seeds to sprout, shall I say, because I've been doing quite a bit of thinking this morning and I wanted to share my thoughts in case they would be helpful to whoever is listening to this. And it's essentially that I've been thinking about how I've been showing up publicly, both within the podcast, but also on social media because it's interesting. I didn't have a public social media presence before starting this podcast. So it's been a little bit of a journey for me, and it's actually been a self-development journey on its own. It's given me the opportunity to really think about things that I had probably thought and reflected on before, but I didn't quite have the opportunity to dive into it as deeply as when I'm recording a podcast episode or when I'm recording a reel, because it just brings out this different element. And with that, I just really want to highlight why that really reminds me and hopefully reminds you that healing and growth is an ongoing journey because different life circumstances are always going to bring about something. And if it causes some type of emotion, some type of feeling, some type of fear, that is what's signaling to you about something deeper. It's just providing an understanding at a deeper level of something already living within you, something going on with you, something that your body and your soul is trying to tell you. And when I record podcast episodes, when I record reels, for instance, I've noticed that I'm so in my head and I have a lot of fear of being misunderstood, of saying the wrong thing, of not being inclusive. And that actually brings up quite a bit of fear within me. And to some extent, it doesn't fully paralyze me, but it paralyzes my most authentic self because I'm so caught up in my head trying to say the right thing, trying to have the right message. And even right now, I'm catching myself saying that. So that's what I mean by the things that you do when you challenge yourself are opportunities for you to actually know yourself deeper and to not be paralyzed by that fear, because fear can be this scary emotion. But if you allow it to, it can actually give you a better picture of what's going on in your own chakalaka and use that as a signal and also use it as a motivator. So I'm actually taking a program that's diving into fear, and I want to share some things with you all because ah, my brain has just been clicking this morning. But let me pull this up. So the course that I'm taking is by James Arthur Ray, and this is someone that my brother has actually worked with, and he's passed away by now, but he has these recorded courses, and it's about understanding, overcoming, and utilizing fear. So within the course, he really emphasized this idea of not needing fear to go away, but to actually learn to use it. And he talks about these five core fears that we have as humans, with the first one, probably the biggest one, being the fear of death, which just makes a lot of sense to me because even within my own healing journey through therapy and through other courses, when you think about the nervous system being activated, we literally call it your survival response. So when you go into a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, that's literally known as the survival response. So if your survival response is kicking in, then you obviously, some part of you, even if it's at a subconscious or unconscious level, is afraid of dying because you want to survive. That's evolutionarily speaking, probably what connects all of us living species together, is that we want to continue living to pass on our genes. So it makes sense that we want to survive and that we would have the fear of death because of that. So that fear really made sense to me. But he also tied in some Toltic wisdom around when you've conquered the fear of death, you have no more enemies. And that just really stood out to me because in college, I remember there was actually this professor that meditated on the concept of death. And he would literally lay out on the grass and he would practice dying. And I have a feeling that he himself was diving into a lot of these philosophical and spiritual concepts. And I guess the way that my brain is connecting all of this is taking this wisdom that we have the fear of death and then connecting that even to our understanding of evolution and our understanding of psychology, right? When we have this fear response, when we're triggered by something, when we're activated by something, our nervous system gets dysregulated and it goes into a state of survival. So that fight, flight, freeze, fawn response, we have all of that playing out. And so the next question is well, with that information, what do you do with the fear? Going back to utilizing the fear, right? So you utilize that fear of death by remembering that every day and every moment can be your last. And if that's the case, then what do you want to do with your day? And what do you want to do within this moment? What do you want to be experiencing? And I think that that's very much in alignment with this podcast because this podcast is about living intentionally and intentionally creating the life that you want. And death is something that I've thought about because I never put it together as nicely, but it's something that I would come back to with if I died this year, what do I want to be dedicating my life to? What type of work do I want to be doing? And that has kind of guided my professional life and my career life with what exactly do I want to be supporting, but really taking the moment to actually think about this more deeply and really remember because I think we all know this and we put this back on the back burner. But the way to live intentionally, to live a more joyous and purposeful and fulfilling life is to actually remember that death can be right around the corner, not in a morbid way, but in a that's just reality way. And so going back to what I was sharing earlier around me thinking about putting on this mask and putting on almost a performance for who I think I should be within this podcast and who I should be within social media, of how that is all tied back to fear. And if I could just remember in the moments when I am recording or when I am wanting to share something, that that fear is really just tied back to the fear of death. And I could instead focus on what is the message that I want to share with you all, because that's why I started the podcast. So I could share my life lessons with you so that hopefully it helps you live life more intentionally and helps you heal when you're in the thick of your healing journey. If I remember that purpose and come back to it again and again whenever I feel a little bit paralyzed, or whenever I feel that performance or that mask coming up again, then I think the more and more that I do that, the more I'm going to be able to be my authentic self. And that's something that I've been really, really working towards, especially since leaving my nine to five, because I didn't leave my nine to five to live a life with another layer of performance and a superficial life, really. I I purposely left my nine to five because I was burnt out and I had to do a lot of healing. And I also recognized that there were other things that were calling to me, and it was time for me to do those. And so I set the intention to live life more meaningfully, and I didn't know what that fully meant, but I figured that I was gonna figure it out day by day, week by week, and that things would unfold. So, with that, as I've done the podcast and as I've promoted the podcast, it's interesting how that's kind of coming full circle. Where even though I set out to be living life intentionally and authentically, I still have a little bit of those blocks that are coming up for me about how I'm showing up when I'm recording a podcast episode or a reel where I'm trying to have the right message, I'm trying to share the right thing. And then that's serving as a mirror for me about where I still have fear. So this course has been very timely. And I don't know if that's all making sense to you all, but I think I'm gonna really just publish this episode to really just highlight to you that you can be messy, you can figure things out as you go and set some type of intention for how you want to live your life and take it one step at a time. Even in this episode, if you could see that my thoughts are kind of just jumping around, that's okay. And that's part of figuring things out. And I think the second thing that I hope that you take away from my rambling session is one of the things that I took away from my own reflections. And that is that you can use your fear and you can use it by remembering that every moment and every day can be your last. And so, what do you want to leave behind? What do you want to experience in the moment? And for me, that's reminding you to live your life intentionally because I think that we're gonna have a better world if everyone does their own inner healing and if everyone lives their most satisfying and fulfilling life, because I understand systemic issues and I have a public health background, and I understand how policies shape our communities and shape our environment. But at the same time, we are part of that ecosystem. We are part of the collective that either supports or doesn't support certain policies that either supports or doesn't support elected officials that are passing those policies, that supports or doesn't support businesses with our money. We are part of the ecosystem. So in order to create change in the world, we need to be living life more intentionally and doing the things that we care about and creating the change that we want to see. And then that's why this podcast is so important for me. Because I want you to remember that yes, systemic issues exist, but the system doesn't exist without the collection of people that make it up. And so I want you to remember how much power you have. And when you get together with like-minded people or you invite people that have a different way of viewing the world to have those conversations with you, that's what's going to change the world. And that's what's going to help us address the environmental issues, the racism issues, the access to healthcare, all of these big things that we think about, they start with you. They start with us. They start with hope. Hope that change is possible. So I'll leave you with those seeds to sprout and you get to decide how you want to water and nurture those seeds. Okay, that's it. Bye.