Latest / #BeMoreLobster / What's It All About

Transcript

What's It All About · #BeMoreLobster

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to this very first episode of the Seeking Simplicity Podcast, a space that is honouring and valuing a conversation and connection over information and instruction.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I tried to create a way to explain to you what it was all about, and really I came off short.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I ran over the chat GBT, I asked you a bit of advice based on all the information I've put in over the last year or so, and here's what she came up with.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Simplicity is a podcast for women navigating life transitions with midlife, pre-menopause, empty nesting, reinvention, identity shifts, and the beautiful uncertainty of change.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Through soulful conversations, somatic practices, and thought-provoking insights, we explore how to release the pressure to constantly do or be more.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is your space to slow down, reconnect with yourself, and embrace the power of simplicity.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes the answers we seek come when we stop searching.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: I like that description.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure that this podcast will evolve as it goes along.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I just want to take five, ten minutes to introduce myself and kind of like the process behind this podcast because I'm not new to podcasting.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a couple of podcasts in the past.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: The last one was called the Your Rich Life Podcast.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I closed that down after losing my dad.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and feeling like I wasn't in a space that I wanted to keep having these conversations.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I was going through my own.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about working with women, navigating the seasons and cycles of life.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't know it at the time.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It took me quite a while to be able to look back and see that I was in my own very challenging season.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back now, the power of hindsight, I can see that this particular season started around about the same time as the pandemic.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: I put my racing heartbeat down to the anxiety of everything that was going on, and that could still be true.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: However, I suspect that that was probably the start of my perimenopause journey.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Along that journey, also, we were dealing with my dad's uh cancer, and halfway through the sort of pandemic, we found out that the cancer was no longer treatable, and he was put on sort of long-term palliative care.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: The last six months of that journey were nothing short of horrific, from the care that he received in hospital, just to watching somebody that you love, you know, go through that journey and dealing with the things going on in your head, um, not just as an adult, but hearing your inner child talking about all that.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'll do another post on that because it was really, it was really life-changing.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Losing my dad definitely was something that changed my life forever.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, along with that, I had, oh, I have a daughter that really struggles with her mental health, and it had kind of reached a big climax at that point, which led to me asking her to leave living in our home.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we moved house, and all these things kind of like they went one into the other, into the other.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: When we finally moved into our new home, it felt like I kind of just hit the floor.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And being somebody who'd always classed herself as kind of a very determined uh person, very A-type, so always in action, never scared to do something, always taking a risk, always going out there, doing the next thing, like bang, bang, bang, all the time.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: I found myself just struggling to get out of bed.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I felt I had no purpose.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was still navigating grief, which I didn't really understand.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't understand that there was a PTSD element uh associated with my grief.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I felt just completely and utterly lost.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: For the first time, perhaps in my entire life, I made the decision that I couldn't force myself out of this, I couldn't give myself a timeline to get out, and actually I didn't want to.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was willing to let go of so many of the things that I had been constricted by in my life, but also gave me momentum.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And for somebody like that, for somebody like me who'd always been on the go, decision-making, action taking, to just learn to slow down and to stop was without doubt the hardest thing I've ever done.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Harder than any action that I've ever taken because there was so much head talk associated with what it meant about me that I couldn't carry on at the pace that I was carrying on at.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: I no longer felt that sense of ambition and I didn't want to strive for anything.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really want anything for quite a while.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to be left alone.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a really short story.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, we'd be here all day.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe, and as we go through, of course, I will touch on more of that, but I just wanted to kind of give an intro about kind of like the before and after.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what this journey has taught me over the last, I'm gonna say three years, it may be a little even a little bit longer than that.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's some major things that have that have really come home to me that have helped bring me to the space I'm in now where I feel literally like a completely different person.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: As I'm recording this particular episode, it is the spring equinox.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And according to the astrological stuff, we've got a something called a Netune Kazimi, I think it's called.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it just basically means this is a super hugely powerful day for us to think about what we want, where we want to go, what we want to let go of, what we want to manifest, who we want to be.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm drawing a complete blank because right now I'm just enjoying being in this space.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm enjoying being here, doing this podcast, letting myself do things that I love, and just reconnecting with my inner voice, with my somatic experience.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't need to be putting all these plans in place right now, but I that's just a side note.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also approaching 50.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: So the launch of this podcast is actually on my 50th birthday.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a huge, it's a huge year for me.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I feel like I'm a big believer in serendipity, and I don't believe that I've been through all of this to find myself here at this time in my life on this amazing day, with the March being such a hugely powerful astrological month for no reason.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: So what I learned through this space was that for many of us, slowing down and stopping is harder than it is to keep going.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've learned that I that I was chasing a lot of things that didn't really, I'm gonna say belong to me in the sense that they weren't really my dreams and they they weren't really my visions.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was just that I found myself in a community of people where we were all striving for the same thing.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of just hopped on a bandwagon.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's been a pattern that I can see my whole life, where in order to feel like I fitted in totally unconsciously, I would I would start to you know copy, emulate what other people were doing and never really question it for myself.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Other things that I found along the way was that I have become so distanced from so many things that brought me joy, thinking that there was more joy in the achievement, in the attainment of the next thing, of the next goal.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I look back now and I'm like, I just whilst I gained, don't get me wrong, I gained so much joy and had so many amazing experiences and did so much traveling, I would never change it.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's only been with those experiences that I now have that contrast, that context to say, but in that I lost this, and now I'm reclaiming that back.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've learned that you know, we literally change as people, our identities change, and we often don't realize that as women that we're going through all the these almost constant identity shifts.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you think about who we are when we're when we're younger, we're in that kind of like maiden archetype, and then we meet somebody and we maybe have children and we change again and we become a partner and we change again, and job roles change us, motherhood changes us, menopause changes us, becoming, you know, losing a parent, losing a child.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: It all these things change fundamentally who we are, and yet we keep navigating our life as the same person and wonder why we sometimes feel like you know, we're we're we're getting dorced under our faces, we're walking through cobwebs, things just feel tough.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't a podcast that says, you know, we don't have to do those hard things anymore, because I think that's just the nature of life, but it is about how do we reconnect with that joy, how do we give ourselves permission to slow down?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: How do we find out what it is that we really, really want?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: How do we find out who we truly are?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: How do we have the courage and the clarity to create a life on our terms of what makes us happy without feeling that need or that draw to compare and then to despair because actually, am I doing the right thing?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Should I be doing that other thing?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I've found a huge amount of peace in navigating this journey.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And don't get me wrong, it's been turbulent.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: There has been a lot of head talk, there's been a lot of conversations with my friends who have who are fellow coaches who have helped coach me through this.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's been a lot of retreating, there's been a lot of time on my own where I couldn't want to be around people, not even my best friends, like my husband was my safe space, even my my my wonderful mother, my darling twin sister, my children.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: There were times when I just needed my husband or I just needed to be on my own.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a journey where I had to be willing to challenge my thoughts from a different capacity, not to up-level them, but to actually listen to them.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Is this what I need?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Or am I just playing out an old pattern?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Do I want this?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Or am I just not tapping into myself?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why am I doing these things?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was really just such an internal journey.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I came to the conclusion, I started using a couple of things that really helped me.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So when things were really bad, and when I was on the floor, and when it was just a struggle to get out of bed every day, my first step to recovering, is that the right word?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just use it for now.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: My first step from recovering was that was asking myself, like literally in the moment, what do I need, or what can I grant myself or gift myself now that's gonna make me make me feel a bit better, that's gonna get me out of bed, that's gonna make me feel less shitty than I do now.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like it wasn't even about reaching for joy or happiness, I just wanted to feel less shitty.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I listened to there was lots of gardening, there was lots of decorating, there was lots of baking.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's also a huge amount of, like I say, retreating, sleeping, not doing very much at all, just being, which was completely alien to me.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Once I kind of like got past that, which took quite a long time, other questions that I started sort of like leaning into was this is a big one for me.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Have I made a this this decision or a decision like this before more than once?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Did it work out for me?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: If not, why am I choosing it again?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when I started to identify patterns that I had, patterns that had served me at some point in my life, but were now no longer serving me.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: They were keeping me in limitation, limited thoughts, limited outcomes, a limited experience and expression of my own life.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that was something that I completely wanted to break free from.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: That was a game-changing question for me.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I just kept doing that, and I just kept following things that I like doing, and I had to just keep releasing the other nagging voice.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: But Louise, you know, you're you're not running your business anymore and you're not earning any money and you don't know where you're going and you've got no goals.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like I had to just keep releasing, releasing, releasing them as much as I could.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: I started to kind of look at my health a little bit more, I started to look at my happiness.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's fast forward to December 2023.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was in California at a business conference type thing and uh met my amazing, wonderful fellow witchy friend and coach, Tracy Tatty, over there.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: My husband actually came with me as well.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And after the conference, we took ourselves to, I think you pronounce it Vasalia, I'm not quite sure, but this beautiful Airbnb on the outskirts of, you know, further out from the main part of California, wherever we were.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we had literally my dream Airbnb.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I walked in and I squealed because it's at the beginning of December, and it was like walking in to a cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie, which I'm telling you, like I watched them all.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I love them, I love the way they make me feel.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: I walked in and it was like there were lights everywhere, and there was a crackling fire, and there was like a gingerbread cookie ingredient thing, and a the most amazing coffee station, and a massive kitchen, and a tree house, and it was sunny, but it was outstanding, and it was the some of the best five days I spent, you know, with with amazing, wonderful people.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I just remember talking to Tracy one day, like, I think I'm ready to start doing something, but I want it to be something that I want to do for myself, and I think I want to start a book club.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time, I think I called it becoming, I think that was the first the first name for it.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I put up my first post out with this huge picture of um a Redwood that we'd just seen earlier, and people just started commenting on it, and you know, I just there was 10 people, 20 people, 30 people, and I think I had about 50 people sign up to join the the free book club.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: This has now been going since then.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I launched it in January 24.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's still going, it's still relatively small.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's about 80 people in the Facebook group.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: We have very small calls, but I'm still doing it because it's for me and because I love it, and I love the connection, I love the conversation, and I love the ladies that show up for it.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't ever see myself not doing it, but who knows?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: It is now called the Seeking Simplicity Book Club.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what's lovely is it's led with conversation and connection and community first.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes we don't even talk about the book, we're just chewing the cud about things that have happened through the week, or somebody I offer somebody a little bit of coaching, or it's just it's just freeing, it's just not having those restrictions and rules and and and rules around me.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: I can just do what I like.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you are I will put a link in.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Please come join us for that because it is it is much less fun, and that's why I started to step back in to I guess I'm not gonna say the life that I had because it's very, very different, but I started to step back into business and I started stepping into doing things for me.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: It still looks very different.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm actually um doing more volunteering now, and I'm doing far less work, I'm working with far less people, and I'm still at a place where I am not forcing myself to create.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: I am following my intuition, I'm listening to my somatic wisdom, I'm I run somatic retreats currently and do some work with that.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it's I have spent 15 years working to myself, always feeling that place I had to create something new, share something new, sell something new, and I'm just so over it at the moment.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that is a very whistle stop tour of where I've come from and where I am currently.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to invite all of you on this journey with me because the biggest thing that I've been able to sit back and take from it now that I'm in a much more emotionally stable and emotionally happy, peaceful space, which honestly, there were times over the last three years that I thought I would never find that again.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like I say, I I just I know this might sound really silly, I just didn't have any idea how painful it would be to lose my dad.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yeah, so we'll leave that run for another time.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: But looking back, and I've done this a lot for recently, is I'm so grateful for all the wisdom.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so grateful that I feel like I'm stepping into my my inner wise woman.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like the word crone, but you know, use what you like.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I feel more peace now than I've ever felt in my entire life.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I feel more connected with myself, I feel like I'm back in my body, I feel regulated, and it just feels wonderful.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: I will and I want these conversations to be a space for you to access that, to give yourself permission for that, to maybe shift perspective about what it is that you want in life or the things that you've got, are they what you want?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Any any conversation we're here for, as long as it revolves around seeking simplicity, a place to feel inspired, to feel motivated, most importantly, to feel seen, heard, and understood without judgment.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the podcast is going to revolve with us together.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's going to be me doing my own podcast, just talking to you like this.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: There are going to be conversations with other people.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, in the first few episodes, I'm bringing back two incredible conversations that I had on my last podcast.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: They were just so amazing and so valuable that I wanted to bring them into this podcast.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: So please make sure you subscribe.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: It would mean a lot if you subscribed.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And please, in these in these first new days, share away.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's share with our women, let's share with our friends, let's share their community, and build something that means something.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Build something that's going to make a difference for people at a fundamental level, where they don't feel like they have to do more or be more, they can actually start to release things so they can live their highest expression of their own life, of their own selves, and have their uniquely defined experience of life because ultimately life's a very short ride.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about you, but I'm in a season in my life now where I'm here to enjoy every single second of it.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being with me on this very first episode of the Seeking Simplicity podcast.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: I hope very much that you stick around.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Take care, and I'll speak to you in the next episode.