Eps 251: Solo Show on Gratitude and Finding Acceptance

Transcription

Casey O'Roarty 0:05
Kay, hello, hello, hello, hello, welcome to joyful courage, a conscious parenting podcast and conscious humaning Podcast. I am your host, Casey overrti, I am a positive discipline trainer and parent coach, so grateful to show up each and every week for you here on the podcast, I am walking the parenting path and the humaning path right next to you with my own two teenagers and wonderful husband who teach me each and every day, what it takes to step into personal growth and being my declared best self, it's not always easy to do. You will find tips and tools and inspiration. Hopefully you'll be entertained as you listen in on the show I am so, grateful to have you enjoy.

Hello, hello, hello. So happy to be here. So happy to be talking to all of you right now. So as I record this, it is the Tuesday

before Thanksgiving, and I spent most of the day taking my husband to Seattle for a follow up appointment to see his doctor. I have been in a deep, creative work zone.

My kids are amazing, and we've played more board games in the last two weeks than we've probably played in the last two years. And there's just a lot. There's a lot going on, and there's a lot to be grateful for on this week of Thanksgiving here in the States. And so shocker, I'm gonna talk about gratitude today, yes, yes, yes. And I'm gonna start with some gratitude. I want to Well, first of all, I want to say thank you, and I love you to all of my joyful courage patrons. Typically, when I record a solo show, I do it over livestream, and they join me. But tonight, I just couldn't get it together this week to make that happen yesterday. So I'm on my own tonight, but I want my patrons to know that I am missing them, and I apologize for not being able to live stream with you. We'll have to make up for it. Some how so loving my Patreon community, and if you're wondering what's a patron, patrons are people who value the content of this show so much that they contribute a little monthly financial support to joyful courage every month, some of my patrons give $1 a month. Some are on the $5 tier, and others are on the $10 tier. And with that contribution, again, they get access to the solo show live streams. And I do a monthly facilitated call for everyone, where we all get on Zoom, and it's just a special little place where we all feel really snuggly and close. And I offer community support, and it's just an awesome way to be in the exchange of value with joyful courage. So love you patrons. Thank you. Thank you. Also. Big thanks to everyone who went through the seven days of joyful courage live program. So it's funny, I'm recording this on Tuesday, which was day one, and this is gonna come out on Monday, which is day seven. But yesterday, Monday, the 23rd I was just feeling like I wanted to throw something out there and really kind of drum up some connection inside of the community. So I decided to put together really quick the seven days of joyful courage. And what it was is

seven days of me showing up on Facebook Live and on Instagram, TV Live, leading a grounding and guiding everyone who shows up through the experience of bringing more intention to the upcoming holiday season. And the cool thing when you do programs like this and film them live and all that stuff is the videos will live on they live on you. You can check this out if you missed it, you can check out seven days of joyful courage by heading over to the joyful courage page on Instagram or on Facebook and finding those live videos super exciting. And finally, just really the last couple of weeks inside of both the live in love with joyful courage community, as well as the joyful courage for parents of teens, community, there's just been some really special support, celebration, connecting. I'm just always so honored to hold a space for all of you, and by the way that you show up in the space, so just feeling really grateful for you and how you show up for me and the community.

Okay, so content gratitude, right? I said I was going to talk about gratitude. I am talking about gratitude week of Thanksgiving again, us friends, I know it's not the same Thanksgiving that it's been in previous years. We are moving through some tough times. I have had multiple conversations with many friends who are really struggling right now for a variety of reasons, and one friend in particular shared very candidly and openly with me recently just about what she's going through with past experiences and past relationships, and I could just feel and experience the hurt and the resentment, and, you know, I Very gently reminded her that she is the amazing person that she is because of her choice to grow through what she's been through. And I think that that's something to be really grateful for. When we have really tough experiences, we have an opportunity when and when we choose into healing from those tough experiences. We are molding and developing who we are in that process. And you know, I just if life is really easy and really happy go lucky. You know, I'm not really sure or convinced that there's a lot of personal growth happening, and it isn't because, oh well, if you have a really easy life, you don't need personal growth. I think that's a load of crap. I think we all are here on this planet, in these bodies, to be in personal growth, and so some of us are handed a heavy dose of opportunity to heal and to grow, and what happens When we shift into gratitude for that. I'm not saying gratitude for the people that hurt us. I'm not saying gratitude for the adversity that we live with that is unjust or unfair. I'm saying what happens when we turn our lens inward and we recognize there is something here for me and I am grateful that I get to grow, shed, evolve inside of this experience, right? I also have some clients that I've been working with, and often this comes up when I work with new clients where, you know, we have a list of things that are, are bothersome, that aren't working in our family and the expectation. And I go there too, it's like, okay, how do we solve Okay, how are we going to solve these problems? But when we start peeling back the layers and we start to see what the actual problems are, right? Because we think we know what the problem is, but so much of the time, the biggest problem that we're struggling with is a lack of skills around self regulation. Our kids us, right? How many of you out there are like, I don't want to yell anymore, I don't want to be grumpy, I don't want to be mean? That's a self regulation thing, right? And I think even in our worst moments, there is reason to be grateful, because one awareness, which can be a double edged sword, right? Like there's a reason that there's the saying ignorance is bliss, but awareness is something to celebrate. Right, right, when we know we could do better, we're one step ahead of the people who just are flying by the seat of their pants. So celebrating awareness around I could do better, and celebrating the opportunity, and you guys have heard me say this before, celebrating the opportunity to model what it looks like, to model what it looks like to take personal responsibility of your behavior and to model what it looks like to say, You know what? The next time I feel like that, I'm going to try something different. I'm going to help myself so that we can solve problems in a more respectful way, gratitude, right? Gratitude. And I mean, this is coming from a girl who a girl, I am not a girl. This is coming from a woman who you know probably is moving through the biggest challenge, the biggest opportunity that I've ever had, to practice gratitude, presence, surrender, acceptance. You guys know it's not about covid. Covid is its own special layer to this, but our family, you know, is going through some huge transformation right now, and my transformation isn't better or worse or easier or harder than whatever you're going through. It's mine. I'm living with it. I'm living through it, right? And it's weird, but on so many levels, I'm grateful for it, because I didn't know what it would be like to go through a crisis like this, until I got to go through a crisis like this and practice my skills and recognize how strong my kids are, and know how deep my love is for my husband. So like gratitude, man, it's just really a powerful way of being. It's a powerful way to embody the life that we're living. And this week, just today, I listened to armchair expert. Do you guys listen to that podcast? I kind of love it. Dax Shepard, armchair expert. He had jewel, the singer on who, I mean, everybody loves Jules. She's an amazing songwriter and a beautiful singer, and, oh my gosh, turns out there is so much more to jewel than any of us ever knew, or maybe you knew, but I definitely didn't know. I mean, she has her own story of deep trauma and poverty and like her life, just her memoir of you know, childhood into young adulthood is unreal. But then the conversation started turning to the work that she does with youth and her own work and her own practice of mindfulness, which she calls conscious presence, and she shares a couple things on the podcast that are just like jewel. We should be best friends. How can I get jewel on here? I don't know anybody have any connections to jewel. Let's bring her on the podcast. One of the things that she said that I loved and brought me to tears, was, and I'm going to butcher it, because I I don't know exactly how she said it, but basically she said, You know, it's not what happens to you, but how you allow it to change you that matters. How you allow it to change you, right? And there's things that happen to us in life that change us into fear, towards fear, being bitter, being resentful. And there are those very same things can change us if we allow it into being grateful and strong, right? And encouraged. So I just, and I've heard, I mean, not what happens to you, but how you respond to it that matters. I've heard that, but the way that she said, how you allow it to change you, that was really powerful, and it may have had something to do that I with that. I was listening to it with my husband, and, of course, I was thinking to myself, like, what do you think about that, babe, my sweet, stoic doesn't talk about much husband. You know, it just really moved me. It really moved me. And listen everyone we are in a ginormous opportunity for responding to life in a new way. We are getting daily downloads for how we can allow life to change us.

Covid, 19, politics. Uh, whatever your personal struggle is, I don't, I can't. I've got multiple friends who are, you know, whose relationships have fallen apart, and friends that are single parents that are struggling in the quarantine, and, you know, other friends that it's financial struggles, and friends that are health care workers, nurses. I mean, it's just we all have our personal struggles, right? I had this great conversation with my super awesome soul sister, Jeanette. Shout out to Jeanette. She is brilliant everyone. If you want to check her out, you can find her at Jeanette nielsen.com she is someone who I learned so much about myself through being in relationship with her, because, God, for the last 15 years that we've known each other, she's always pushed me to be a better version of myself, to be more curious. Her work is really around healing her own trauma, and I mean, so much more than that, but she's a maker, and she has a business called make to mend, where she is just a crafty lady. And anyway, we were talking, and, you know, the topic came up of, like, Oh my gosh. When is it over? When are we, like, done? Like, okay, we've done all this work, you know, when do we get to be the gurus? When do we get to be the ones that are like, okay, great. Now I can kind of ride through life. And I was cracking up as we were exchanging thoughts about this, because, right? I mean, parenting is a great place to it's like ripe for discouragement, because we bump up against the same challenges again and again and again, right? Like just today, got home from being in Seattle really glad. The kids made dinner for themselves, but all the dishes were everywhere and the sink was full, and I was just like, you guys, here we are again, right? So we get discouraged when we find ourselves in front of the same challenges, but if we're doing our work, then we aren't the same person every time we meet those challenges. So something Jeanette said that really landed with me was we forget that personal growth isn't linear, it's cyclical, right? And she described it as a spiral, and those same challenges exist on the spiral, but as we're moving through the spiral, we get to respond differently when we bump up against those challenges, right? So rather than losing my mind and being super annoyed and super resentful when I got home tonight, I felt it. I felt like the really you guys, and it was just like, hey, come and do this. Take care of this. I gave some orders, not gonna lie, but what I didn't do was layer on top of the, you know, why can't you just do that? Well, I might have done a little bit of that, if I'm being honest, but it was a much less intense interaction with mom as I kind of worked through my own self regulation around like, why wouldn't you guys just take care of this before we got home? Right? So I was on a different part of the spiral as I bumped up against that challenge. Each time we're confronted by a challenge, we have an opportunity to respond in a new way, a more conscious way life likes to make us practice right and so over and over and over again, we get to practice being present, being mindful. And I'm just so grateful for that reframe that she gave me. Love you, Jeanette, around the and the visual of the cycle, because I think that's so important.

As we move into December, you know, there's going to be a lot of things that show up that are going to be out of our control, that are going to trigger us, that are going to kind of tilt us off of our that center point that we want to maintain and we want to hold. We want to be patient, we want to be calm, we want to be loving, we want to be connected. And then somebody's a big jerk to us, and then we're like, why do you gotta be such a jerk? Right? Things happen in our external environment that knock us off of our internal, our in, I want to say our internal pedestal, but that's not really it our internal meditation cushion. That's what we'll call it. We get knocked off that internal meditation cushion, and where we land is in those. Those old shoot from the hip patterns. So starting helping ourselves by recognizing, oh, I just, I just fell off the meditation cushion. Get back on, find that center and interact with whatever it is in your external environment that is calling for you to be on another spot in the spiral. Does that make sense? I feel like it does. I feel like you get me. You know you get me. Yeah. So here we go. Last month, 2020, full of opportunities. And I told you about the joyful courage seven, or the seven days of joyful courage already. So I'm not going to mention that again, but you can check it out. If you go back and you can do it, you don't have to be live. It'll be there in the internets for you to check out. And it will. It's exactly this is what it's designed to do, is move you further along on the spiral, right? Because you know, those opportunities and those challenges are going to keep coming. I'm really excited for December on the podcast, because both of my children have agreed to come on as guests. So be excited about that. I'm going to Canvas the community to find out what you want to know from them. So my son is a 15 year old high school freshman boy, and any questions you have about that experience, or how he experiences me, whatever up for grabs, I'm going to reach out and ask you to support me in creating the outline. And again, my daughter, who will be 18 in January, has had her own special experience, is going to come on as well. So and I want to know, what are your questions for her? Yay. It's both exciting and terrifying, because I am not going to censor them. I'm going to encourage them to be as candid as I and transparent as I and as vulnerable as they want to be in sharing with you their experience of being teenagers right here, right now. So looking forward to that in December. Really excited for all that is to come again, check your email and check the social media for call outs to be a part of the beta group. I don't have a link right now, but I will have one in the email that you get today. So check your email if you're not on my email list, go to joyful courage.com/join. And you can join us. All right, my friends, thank you so much for listening. You music. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening. I am so grateful that I get to show up here for you every week and share my thoughts and guests and solo shows, all the things, as you heard me mention during this week's show, I really encourage you to check out the Patreon community. It is a powerful way of giving back to the podcast that gives you so much I am in love with putting this show together for you, and every little bit of support helps you. Can join the Patreon community for as little as $1 for $5 for $10 you get to decide what you can give, and in return, you get the podcast, but you also get perks like live streams and group calls and discount on coaching. So there's good things happening in the Patreon community. Go check it out now. Www dot P, A, T, R, E, O n.com/joyful, courage. Also, if you love today's show or any of the other shows, or just love the show in general, please head over to Apple podcasts and leave a five star review. Let other people know why you keep tuning into the show. This helps the show with visibility and reach and lets other people know that this is a super legit place to come and hang out. Thank you so much. Have a beautiful week. Don't forget. Find your breath. Let yourself travel into your body, find the balcony seat and trust that everything's gonna be okay. Big. Love