Ep #31: Giving Yourself All You Require

You, standing on the brink there, don’t pretend you are content drinking from a glass just because everyone else around you sips neatly from their thimbles. Dive in. Lose yourself in me. Tiny poem from the big water.

That’s the poem I wrote when I was going through a time when I’d come to the realization that I wasn’t so much blocked as I was struggling with realizing I wanted so much more and so much more it seemed than people around me were able to thrive with. And this caused me guilt and caused me shame and caused me fear of feeling that I thought I was superior or special or would just be different.

And different from people I longed to be connected with and that I loved. And writing that poem was really healing to me because I had this imagery of this big water, this holy water, this holy ocean speaking to me, and giving me permission, telling me that it’s my nature to be like this fish, this mermaid, this amphibious animal that wants to fly and swim in this deep water and be nourished by it. And this is something now, of course, I see in so many of my clients. So if this resonates with you, I think you’re really going to love the topic of today’s podcast.

You are listening to The Art School Podcast; a show for artists and creatives who want to become the next greatest version of themselves. Learn how to cultivate an extraordinary way of being and take the mystery out of making money, and the struggle out of making art. Here is your host, master certified life coach, artist, and former lawyer, Leah Badertscher.

Hello, hello all of you beautiful creative geniuses. And open up just a little bit more and drink that in. Open up your mind, your body, and spirit to drink that in. While your mind says that’s not true, she’s not talking to me, she couldn’t possibly be talking to me, just ask yourself maybe you’re wrong about that. Maybe Leah’s right. Maybe I’m wrong about that.

Maybe I’m hearing that because that’s exactly the message that I needed to hear from the outside because it’s the message that’s the mirror to what I know has been speaking to me my entire life, a message maybe I knew once and forgot, and then it’s a special kind of recognition and remembering when you hear it from the outside in, and maybe from someone who hasn’t even met you yet in person, or in body.

But I like to think our souls are all out here chatting and I’m getting a lot of affirmation of that belief, which is how I started this podcast because to tell you the truth, it was a little different for me the medium – I’ve mentioned this before. Coaching to me feels effortless, and part of that might be because I feel like I’ve been doing it my whole life and only getting better and better at it the more that I’ve now done this overtly or explicitly as my career because I love the – to me it’s not an idea. It’s a truth that when someone finds me, we’ve already been connected, that I don’t believe anybody comes to me by just random, meaningless encounter.

I believe in coincidence and synchronicity and I believe that every encounter is a holy encounter. And so, sometimes the way I picture this is the way I’ll say, read people or the scenario or understand the situation, what goes on for me is with this imagery. That there are two lines of information that approach you when you encounter someone new, and one line is like their personality and their social self, the way they usually present themselves to the world and the way they usually present themselves to other people and even the way they understand and know themselves to be.

And this other line can sometimes be different from that because this other line is just the deep truth of who they are. It contains all their potential and it contains their deepest wisdom and information about their highest self. And so, sometimes these two lines match up. A lot of times though, they’re not yet for – I meet people on their journey or they’re in the process of matching up more and more.

So when I’m talking to someone, I’m thinking of, you know, on some level, this deeper information about ourselves has already been communicated and so even when I’m talking to a personality, I understand that sometimes you say things and people aren’t in a place to hear it, but it might stay with that deeper part of themselves, and there will be even times when I think gosh, my one line, my social self feels like maybe I didn’t do well in that encounter, but I trust that it was a whole encounter meant to be what it was meant to be and I’m astounded by the number of times people come back and might say sometimes years later, you know what, that was really meaningful to be because.

And so again it brings me back to this podcast because when I started, I thought well, this is different because I’m not talking to one person in person or over the phone or over email or ever Zoom. So I just chose to believe that I was already connected and in communication with the people that are meant to hear this, and I just want to share with you how amazing it is that the increase in the spike, like the exponential spike in emails I’ve received from you that affirmed that, that say you feel like I’m making this just for you, and I believe I am.

And I believe there’s so many of us moving through this same space at the same time, and or you’ll say there are certain words or phrases that are exactly what you needed to hear. So I never could have planned that with my small mind, but I do believe that connecting to a bigger intention and aligning with what wants to happen allows for that to happen.

And so it was the same thing with the poem that I shared at the intro. The tiny poem from the big water. I realized how much of my own nature I was holding myself back from because it felt like high maintenance. It felt like me being even spiritually high maintenance, that I require and desire and love to spend so much time in the energy of the miraculous and the magical.

And to be sure, I am also someone who loves to marry both worlds, and I don’t even really think of them as separate worlds, but sometimes I do think where we are in our evolution now, it does feel like you have to bridge the spiritual world and the physical world, and I think that is not a completely accurate or true way of describing what’s going on, but it’s more like a tool for us to understand how to navigate our evolution, of our personal selves and our creative selves and our physical selves going forward.

So I love both the material and the spiritual because I think it’s all the same. So that’s why I love talking about things mystical and I love talking about helping people meet their money goals. I love talking about creativity as this divine source, and I love talking about the nuts and bolts of managing your mind and your thoughts so that you are a clear channel for your creativity and you get the work done, and you make the paintings, you write the book, you write the songs, you get the gigs, you are as out there and successful and a broad a spectrum as that means to you as you want to believe, and that you don’t hold yourself back from these things that you want and these things that nourish you.

So that is really the core message of this podcast today because I’ve been having so many conversations, not just with people I haven’t yet spoken with in what I was saying before about being connected to you already, even if we haven’t met. But now that more and more of you are writing to me and I’m having discovery consults with you, and also what’s happening within the sessions with my existing private clients is that one obstacle to our growth is a resistance to giving ourselves what we really need and the degree to which we need it.

So I know I talked about this in last week’s podcast but clearly, I need to revisit it and be even stronger with that message, and I think it’s what a lot of you need to hear right now. I was having a conversation with someone this week who I love dearly, who was sharing with me that they are going through a period of depression. Clinical depression.

And it got me thinking because she said, you know what, I don’t want to take medication. And side note, I have nothing against medication. I think all the ways that occur to you that you can heal yourself and become stronger and more resilient and thrive, you should explore and you should go for. Knock on all the doors.

So whether for you, you trust your heart and that means medication and that means getting a fengshui consult and that means acupuncture and that means massage and that means doing your creative work and that means meditation and that means yoga, and that means taking your vitamins and getting vitamin D, having more meaningful social encounters, do all of the things. Dive into the deep water and don’t hold yourself back because of this talk about you can’t allow yourself that.

Because this friend was saying you know, I don’t want – she doesn’t, and I respect that preference too and trust her to trust herself. She doesn’t want to take medication but she said, “But I’m doing all these other things like therapy and exercise and eating well and it’s just not working.” And I have a little back knowledge about the situation so what I said to her was yes, but the doses that you’re giving yourself of those things are just a fraction of what you really need to restore true vitality to yourself, to facilitate a deep and full healing.

So it’s just like if you were to take medication, you wouldn’t lick the Prozac. But I think too often that’s what we do when we are healing ourselves through these other modalities is we just lick the Prozac. We give ourselves a little bit. We go to one yoga class that’s an hour and why don’t I – that was great, but now I don’t feel better. When really, we need to keep going.

So that’s something I feel like is a message we can’t hear often enough, and I have that message all over the place because it’s like a kaleidoscope. It means many different things in many different areas at different times. Just keep going. So if you start to do something and it feels like it’s working and then you’re like well, but it didn’t work enough, maybe you haven’t given yourself enough.

So maybe you need to consider am I the person that the big water was talking to in the poem? Am I standing on the brink and putting my toe in the water or just dipping my glass into the water and drinking from that? When what I really want to do is just strip off all my clothes and dive in naked and swim in it. But am I holding myself back because I think who am I to swim in this deep holy water and take it in when everybody else seems to be okay just sipping neatly from their thimbles.

But here’s the thing; you are on your journey. Not theirs. And also, I talk to plenty of people who appear to be doing fine, sipping neatly from their thimbles, and they also are desiring to go skinny-dipping in the deep holy water. So you might be actually, by holding yourself back, energetically not being an example for another person.

But that’s not on you. You take responsibility for yourself, and if it’s your desire to swim and to take it in, then go for that. And the places where you still feel resistance, you can tell yourself I feel resistance, I’m curious about it, I’m willing to explore that, and I’m willing to be willing to let that go. So you know, you start to wade in a little bit more and a little bit more, and the thing is the more you do that, you don’t have to take your resistance down in one fell swoop. But the more you allow yourself a little bit more of that holy water, a little bit more, then the more it heals you.

So whatever that holy water is for you, the more you allow yourself to give it to yourself in increasingly greater doses, the more it works on you from the inside and you don’t have to use so much willpower and so much cerebral force to overcome this resistance that can come from a lifetime of conditioning, from voices that tell you it’s indulgent, it’s shameful, that make you feel guilty, that make you say who are you.

And so I also want to say trust is such a vital aspect of what’s going on here because the great invitation in this scenario if this is you and you’re resisting giving yourself what you know, what your heart, your gut, your intuition is telling you would help you heal, trust yourself. The more you trust, the greater traction you’ll get, and the invitation here too is can you trust yourself and the voices that tell you this is what you need before you get evidence that it’s actually going to work and “pay off?”

Because I can tell you that it’s worked for me, that it is paying off in the ways that other people would recognize. I make more money, I am so much in a stronger place mentally, emotionally, creatively, relationally, in my career, in my marriage, in all of my relationships. I am so much more empowered. And I have evidence that other people can see now to show for that.

But it began at a time when I didn’t and I just had the gift of not having that external evidence because in the gift in that is, I knew I began to feel better because of things I was doing internally. I could feel myself changed without any reason for explaining that change. I couldn’t have explained it to someone else why I was better and why I was more myself than ever. I knew I was.

It wasn’t pinned to any external thing and therefore I knew it can’t be taken away. And that’s the gift, and that also can feel like a risk to give yourself that, what you’re longing for, and it can feel like a risk to acknowledge that your true nature is one where you want to swim in the deep and you don’t want to stand on the brink.

I’ve heard so many times this past week because I’m driving a rental car that has awesome satellite radio, which now I have to have, and listening to the Garth Brooks channel because I love that every once in a while he talks about his writing process or he plays other artists that he likes and he talks about why he likes them.

And so I’ve heard multiple times this last week Standing Outside the Fire, which I take as a meaningful synchronicity and sign when he says life is not tried, it is merely survived when you’re standing outside the fire because maybe that’s a second poem for me. Sometimes getting to that big water can require us to walk through this internal fire first but I do believe that our soul, our spirit, something, a greater higher intelligence in us draws us to that, which we need, and it draws us to that which heals us.

I also just had an email this week from somebody who said they were going through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way book and that they loved the first four weeks, and then they got to the fifth week and they’re like, stuck. Just feeling stuck. And so one of the prompts in the book was to accept freebies from the universe. So he Googled something like that, The Artist’s Way and accepting freebies and put it into the Google, and out came one of my podcast episodes talking about how I offer free discovery consults.

And while I haven’t talked to him yet, I know for sure I can help him and I also am just amazed and choose to be in awe of a process that guides someone like that, that their soul is longing for something. A higher part of them is longing for something and leads them to that, which they really need. Also, I want to make sure I emphasize that you don’t have to be full out depressed to benefit from this – whatever you want to call it. A pep talk, or this coaching from me.

That all along, every stage along your creative evolution, even if you’re not depressed, even if you’re not in the slightest but you’re doing okay and you want to do better, look at the ways in which you’re still holding yourself back from something that’s calling to you. So a prompt that my clients love is what is my soul craving? And there are awesome stories of what people did with that and how they answered that, but ask yourself. What is my soul craving?

I know I’ve asked you that before on this podcast but don’t wait to do it when you’re feeling exhausted and you’re feeling burnt out. Ask yourself along every stage because that, again is a place where people can get hung up and slow their roll without even realizing they’re doing it. Like, I’m fine, I look around and actually, I’m better than fine. I’m doing great compared to what most people are doing from around me so I should just be able to continue to do well and better based on what I’m giving myself so far.

But something in you wants to experience more of the world, wants to light up areas of your consciousness for you that you haven’t even yet seen, wants to help you have revelations and epiphanies and new relationships and experiences that just continue to blow your mind at what the world, the universe is able to offer you, and to blow your mind about what you are able to offer the world, and that that ever unfolding, ever flourishing, growing, that can be a beautiful, generous standard, and you don’t have to be miserly with yourself.

Consider too the thought that for me – and I’ve been depressed years ago when I was in law school. I was so deeply depressed and spent a lot of time contemplating why that was then and understanding it now and I’ve had a lot of conversation with people that are depressed. And while this is not a clinical diagnosis, and again, I wouldn’t substitute what I’m about to say here for anything your healthcare provider has told you or anything your heart and gut tell you, but for me, my experience was that the opposite of depression wasn’t happiness.

And that my depression really wasn’t so much about pure sadness. The opposite of depression for me was empowerment and it was agency, and it was reclaiming and stepping back into my creative authority and following through and trusting on first my intuitions and trusting my heart and trusting my gut and trusting my soul, and trusting that there is a benevolent intelligent force guiding me, and then following through on that.

Giving myself back the agency to follow through on that and questioning every single time that seemed to be denied. Questioning every single time my empowerment, my agency, my creative authority, my heart and soul were seemingly being denied and bringing it back every single time to the fact that I’m not going to allow myself to be told no when it comes to living my truth. I’m not going to take no as an answer from anyone. There are no gatekeepers, and I’m especially not going to tell myself no because ultimately, that makes you the greatest creative force in your life.

I want to read you this passage from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron that speaks to this topic. “All too often, we become blocked and blame it on our lack of money. This is never an authentic the block. The actual block is our feeling of constriction. Our sense of powerlessness. Art requires us to empower ourselves with choice. At the most basic level, this means choosing to do self-care.”

And again, this brings me back to the poem at the beginning. Swimming in that big water, that big holy water to me, that’s self-care. You have to know what actually works for you. Rosé on a patio and spa treatments, they can be nice. I’ve loved those things at different times, but I also know that it’s taken some self-coaching and exploration for me to figure out what really does nourish me and then it changes with seasons.

And it’s required that I develop an even more intimate relationship with myself and stay in constant conversation with myself and let listening be a part of that. Listening to not just my thoughts about what the world has told me I should need or should not need, but listening to my heart and listening to my soul and my intuition and trusting that.

And from that place, I’ve learned I need to do all the things, sometimes they’re very analytical and pragmatic things like going to law school or working with the coach that is more yang energy, more masculine and strategic and business and marketing, and other times, that’s been the yang and really giving myself immersive experiences in meditation and giving myself plenty of outdoor time every day and plenty of exercise and plenty of journaling, all the creative and spiritual things that I also love and those kinds of relationships.

But then I knock on all the doors that I’m drawn to and trust that I deserve it. So that would be my suggestion for you. Trust first the knowing that brings you to those doors, even if you don’t understand it. Remember this quote from Blaise Pascal. “The heart has reasons, which reason knows not.” So knock on all those doors that the heart brings you to, and if they don’t open, open them yourself and don’t take no for an answer.

And second, trust and do the work to know that you deserve it and trust that it’s leading you to maybe an even greater healing or even greater results or experiences than you could imagine, and don’t just lick the Prozac, but strip your clothes off and dive into that big deep holy water.

So this brings me to the part of the podcast where I want you to do more than just listen. I want you to lean in and really work with me. Take this information and make it transformational. So today, I’m sharing with you a variation on a Julia Cameron exercise from The Artist’s Way. It’s her exercise that she calls forbidden joys.

This is going to bring you a greater awareness of where you’re holding yourself back, where you’re standing on the brink of what could really take your life to the next level, whether that’s your healing, your creativity, your finances, and just sort of blow open your mind about what is actually possible for you. This too, I want to say, if you already think you’re a big dreamer and big visionary, don’t skip this because sometimes it’s us big dreamers and big visionaries who are like – we’re the ones drinking from our glass and we think we’re swimming in the big water but we’re still in this relativism sort of space, where we’re like, well, I’m doing a lot more than it seems like, but we’re not yet.

And this forbidden joys exercise will bring that to the surface. So the prompts I like for this are that you do this in your journal, you write this down, you don’t just think about it but you write it down. So here are the prompts to complete.

What I want to but can’t is… and then write at least 10 things. And if you have more, keep going, but really get to at least 10.  Second, if I could wave a magic wand, I would… and then again, at least 10 things.

So now here is how Julia prescribes this exercise in The Artist’s Way. She writes, “One of the favorite tricks of blocked creatives is saying no to ourselves. It is astonishing the number of small ways we discover to be mean and miserly with ourselves. When I say this to my students, they very often protest that this is not true.” That’s been my experience too as a coach, by the way, “That they are very good to themselves. Then I ask them to do this exercise; list 10 things you love and would love to do but are not allowed to do.

Your list might look like this; go dancing, carry a sketchbook, roller skate, buy cowboy boots, streak your hair blonde, go on vacation, take flying lessons, move to a bigger place, direct a play, take life-drawing class.” Then she writes, “Very often, the mere act of writing out your list of forbidden joys breaks down your barriers to doing them. Post your list somewhere highly visible.”

So again, don’t just think this is a good exercise and not do it. This is part of dwelling in the energy of the magical and the miraculous is listening, allowing that to shift your energy, but then pulling that energy into your own physical environment through your own body, through your own hand, by writing it down and then posting that up somewhere so that it becomes this energetic vision board that you can no longer ignore but that draws you out into that deep water that’s really going to nourish you and heal you.

Thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Art School Podcast. I hope that you enjoy these episodes. And it’s my greatest intention that these are like that big water, for those of you that re out there listening. And it’s my intention to make them every increasingly so. And if you want even more of a deep dive and even more of this big water energy, that’s also my greatest intention in my coaching work, whether private coaching or whether through The Art School.

And there are a variety of ways to swim with us, because I have some people who, where they are right now, they want to swim towards this big beautiful ambitious and audacious goal and I love that because, again, I love marrying, having that sacred twin intention of the big dream that calls you to be everything that you came to this world to be and that you have that material human satisfaction of creating that with your own two hands, with your brilliant mind and spirit and contributing that to the world.

So if that sounds like you then something like private coaching, the open class of The Art School or the masterclass especially of The Art School would be a great fit. I have other people who are in the stage of needing to receive and receive and receive right now and chill out a little bit on overdoing and over-committing.

And that’s why this program is so nourishing too, whether that’s private coaching or whether that’s the open class of The Art School because I’ve received some questions about, well, what if I can’t complete the coursework in The Art School. And that tells me that I need to do a better job of explaining what all the opportunities are.

Because if what you need is to be nourished and cared for and in a space where you bring your beautiful creative energy but you also receive everyone else’s and you receive all the benefits of coaching and inspiration and the high, high level of creative positive energy that flows through a coaching session, that flows through The Art School, then you are able to do that and just plug in and receive and you are not going to have to complete homework assignments on time because I’m not about busywork.

I’m about meeting people where they are. And one of my superpowers as a coach has always been, I know that everybody has an in. so if you come to me and you are willing to trust yourself, even just a little bit in the beginning and you’re willing to trust me, even just open up a little bit in the beginning, then we can start that process of trading up your thimble for a glass and then trading up that glass for a gallon bucket and then, you know, starting to wade out into that big water that heals you.

There’s so much emphasis, I know, in the world on doing and that has its own beautiful place. And I also find and have designed The Art School and I also approach coaching from a way of, if what someone is needing is to be refueled, revived, restored, then what they’re needing is to be nourished and to be reconnected to their true nature and to have an opportunity to pay sacred and high-quality attention to themselves and to have others see that as well, then that is also then where they need to be.

And by not skipping that stage of staying connected to a high energy, whether that’s through private coaching or through a community, and staying connected and familiar with their dreams and their true selves, that that is the foundational work, that is also the energetic groundwork and fuel for the action that will come later and the audacious goals and massive action that will come later.

But don’t skip over the part where you’re laying the energetic foundation and you are giving yourself not just a little bit of what you need, but everything of what you need. So in short, when people think about The Art School, I don’t want them to think, “It’s going to take so much from me.”

No, that’s not the way that it’s set up at all. I’ve set it up and also how I approach coaching is it is something for you. It is something to nourish you. It is something you come back to and you look forward to because you know, I’m going to find my center. I’m going to feel restored. I’m going to feel uplifted. I’m going to feel revitalized; I’m going to feel even better than when I went in and increasingly more so, my baseline is just going to be lifted. It’s not going to take form me or my life but it’s going to give so much.

So if that sounds good to you and you want to talk particularly about how it might look given your situation and where you are and what your goals and dreams and hopes and challenges are right now, I have discovery consults, a limited number of discovery consults and you can email me to sign up for those at leah@leahcb.com, with discovery consult in the subject line.

Ii also have the summer workshop series going on right now, three remaining workshops in June, July, and August. They’re included if you enroll in the fall Art School, or they’re $247 per workshop. And until July 15^th, there is an awesome early bird rate of The Art School fall 2019. So if you register by July 15^th, you’ll get the best rate ever for The Art School and you’ll also automatically be enrolled in the July workshop and the August workshop.

So, if your soul has been dropping breadcrumbs, leading you to greater healing and a true sense of wholeness, to greater creativity, to a way to accomplish your goals and dreams, that elevates all of your life and doesn’t come at the expense of other things you love dearly or your quality of life, if something in your has been saying, what I really need now is something that combines the spiritual, the creative, the material, those big audacious ambitious goals and also the quiet space and the depth and mysticism even I need, but that also satisfies my need to remain grounded and centered and with my feet on the ground, then I think you would really love this space and I’d love to talk with you to see if it’s the right fit for you and if this is the doorway that your soul, your higher self, has been leading you to.

Now for the closing inspiration of this episode. Like I mentioned earlier, do not lick the Prozac, my friends. Instead, heed this poem sent to you from the big water. One more time, tiny poem from the big water, and from me.

You, standing on the brink there, don’t pretend you are content drinking from a glass just because everyone else around you sips neatly from their thimbles. Dive in. Lose yourself in me.

Have a beautiful week, everyone I love you, and I will talk to you next time. Bye-bye.