Ep #187: How to Bring Wisdom to the Surface

Sometimes you come across those moments, those one-liners, those tidbits of wisdom disguised actually as tidbits when actually they’re very profound that shift everything. Those experiences where nothing changes, but somehow your mind definitely changed, your perspective changes. And then the whole world opens up and is new again.

I have just such a mindset shift. It’s more than a mindset shift. It’s an energetic shift. It’s a game-changer to offer you today. And couched in the context of a personal story. I’m going to share a story of something that has been incredible challenging for me over the last year, and which I really struggled with and caused me a lot of despair and heartache with.

And recently, just today actually, felt the clouds part and felt more hope and promise and momentum and traction and healing than I have felt around this in a long time. So I immediately saw this same wisdom at work in other places in my life and thought this is something that I obviously have to share with all of you. I hope it is the medicine for you that it has been for me. Enjoy this episode.

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 there everyone and welcome back to another episode of The Art School Podcast. I have what I hope is a medicinal elixir kind of podcast for you today. Hopefully not only a balm for your soul, also more than a pinch of magic. Something that re-energizes you and brings the same kind of renewal energy into your life that it has to mine.

And I think we could all use this kind of medicine and balm in spades these days. I mean, bring it in in the back of a two-ton truck is how I like to see it and just dump it in my backyard. Speaking of that, that’s something else that has really been medicinal for me these days. Being outside, gardening, there are so many metaphors there, I’ve got umpteen million podcasts about gardening.

And also, I have this just desire to post nothing but flowers to my Instagram account and trees and more flowers. It just feels good. It feels healing. It feels aligned with Fill Life with Beauty. So if all of a sudden you’re following me on Instagram and you’re like, “Wow, does Leah now have a flower farm and she’s no longer doing art, no longer coaching?” Probably not that.

Probably not to that extreme, although I have never before until the last year, I kind of have flower farm fantasies if I’m being honest. Also, I know how much work it is to be a farmer, so growing up on a farm, I do have romantic, nostalgic feelings about being a farmer.

There’s plenty to be romantic and nostalgic about, and then there’s just plenty of the brutal, dirty, smelly, hard truth too. So I balance it all out. Anyway, that being said, the gardening is not completely irrelevant to this podcast. This is for me, one of my ways of answering that question, what is my now? What’s mine to do? How do I fill life with beauty? What actually speaks to me? What actually feels like bliss to me, even when it feels irrational?

Maybe sometimes especially when it feels irrational, and how can I serve that desire for beauty? How can I serve that desire to fill life with beauty? And one way is though gardening, through planting tens of thousands this year of zinnias, not to mention other flowers. And probably posting unnecessary amounts of said flowers to Instagram.

So all that is to say again, don’t judge your own responses to what’s mine to do, what’s my stitch to offer, what’s my response to how I fill life with beauty, to how I offer healing. And so there’s that. That’s not actually the core content of this episode though.

The core content of this episode, there’s a question, there’s a set of questions at the heart of this. But first, the story. So just today, I was visiting with one of my clients, one of my Art School Mastermind clients, and she is an alum and she is a superstar, and she’s so brilliant.

And she has been on this podcast before. Dr. Kathleen Berg. So as you may have heard me mention, I had knee surgery this year in January. Really, this has been coming for over 10 years now. I tore my ACL back right after my 11-year-old was born when I was playing basketball. Never healed correctly.

And I went through another pregnancy, I won’t give you all the gory details. There were all these complications along the way. And throw into the mix the fact that I had fractured vertebrae in my lower back in a fall in high school and throw that into the mix with pregnancies and injuries, and the last 10 years I’ve just never felt physically optimal or solid.

And as I was telling Dr. Berg, Kathy, today, it’s one of those things where you make do. And I did have surgery, I did do rehabilitation, I did do physical therapy. I have continued, for a while there I was still teaching yoga and Pilates. I no longer do that but I keep up a healthy movement, exercise, meditation, breathwork, nutrition practice way of life. And it still quite hasn’t gotten to the root of things.

And I have looked for practitioners in my area, I found some really excellent people to help me to a certain point. And still though, I was getting to a point where I was actually very sad and grieving actually, the loss of such a great amount of mobility and loss of the way I’m used to living and moving in the world, and how much movement is a part of my creative process, my spiritual process, my mental and emotional, physical health.

It was no small deal for me, and at the same time, I think sometimes I’m like, it’s maybe the double-edged sword of endurance athlete mentality. I can put up with a lot. And then sometimes realize too late that I’m tolerating too much. So that’s been part of my own evolution, and there’s always more to learn there. Always a work in progress.

And so Kathy though, even though she lives in her beautiful clinic with her amazing practitioners, her integrative health clinic is in Boise, I was like, oh my gosh, I sure wish I could get in to see you and your colleagues. And so while I haven’t done that yet, we did then do the next best thing and set up a Zoom call, so that’s what our visit was about was I got to be on the receiving end of her brilliance and expertise and questions that really got to the heart of what I was experiencing.

It was only an hour. It felt so healing just to actually be heard and then feeling like what I was saying about my experience was making sense to someone else in a way where they could say things back to me that offered a way forward.

And there were so many things that she said that I was like, oh my gosh, if this was the only thing that came out of this session, it would have been worth it. But there were dozens of those things. And one of the things, well, there’s a few things that I wanted to offer you that came through that call that are a great metaphor.

You don’t have to be dealing with a physical challenge but it’s a great metaphor for anywhere was at one point, she said to me, “You know, your body is intelligent. Your body has a wisdom. It knows what it’s doing.” And I felt something click inside of me.

Because even though I know those words, I believe those words, having someone else, her that I trust and know outside of me, say that back to me helped me connect with it at a way that already feels healing, that already renews my energy, makes a connection in my brain that I maybe hadn’t realized, where I didn’t have a connection.

It made me realize where I was holding out hope more than I thought. It made me realize where I’ve been thinking, “Maybe this is it, maybe this is as good as it gets and I’m just going to have to put up with this.” It instead made me realize, no, my body is wise, my body knows what it’s doing, it’s intelligent.

So I wanted to offer that because for you, again, it might not be a physical thing. I hope it’s not a physical thing. But if it is, use that. But also, in other areas of your life, where it feels like you are working and working, but somehow something’s not working, you just know you haven’t quite gotten to the root of why things aren’t working, you feel like you are in this place where you want to believe you can improve, you can grow.

You want to believe there’s more potential in you for life than you’re currently experiencing, but maybe you’ve been pulling back your expectations and settling without even really thinking, realizing consciously that you are.

So if that’s the case, I want to say to you, your spirit, your creativity, that dream, that goal that has chosen you, it has an intelligence. It has a wisdom. It knows what it’s doing. And now you’re in conversation with it. Just like now I’m in conversation better with my own body, ironically, vis a vis being able to talk to someone like Kathy, like Dr. Berg.

So many times, again, doing this healing with in community, whether you’re healing your body, whether you are healing creatively, healing financially, having someone outside of yourself who listens deeply and well, and who is an expert at tying these patterns together, who knows something about the systems of how this energy moves, particularly like Kathy does, through the nervous system, through the joints, the ligaments, through the muscles, through the tissue, the fascia, who is intimately familiar with the intelligence of the body, having a conversation with someone like that and then even if they tell you what you’ve already suspected to be true, it can help make a connection that makes a tremendous difference and gets you moving forward again, gets you unstuck, helps you feel like, oh, there is a pathway and I am on it, and I can see now that destination and that it is achievable for me.

So there is a wisdom in whatever desire it is that you have, there is a wisdom. It has an intelligence, it knows what it’s doing. And you can work to align with that.

And the second thing that I wanted to share of the multitude of amazing, beautiful things that flowed so effortlessly from Kathy during this session was at one point, well, it was towards the end, and she said, “You’ve been through a lot the last 10 years physically and I’m really sorry that you’ve had the time that you have had, the difficulty, the challenges you’ve had not feeling physically the way you would love to feel, the way you had been used to feeling for 10 years.”

And again, just being seen and having someone else acknowledge that, I know what the last 10 years have been, and yet, I knew it at a different level in the way that she said it and reflected back to me, and in such a way where I felt not at all like I was poor me, or pity party, or that she was pitying me. But in a way again that felt seen and known and held, and already, that felt healing. That felt like validation and acknowledgement.

And it also made me think, “Oh yes, think of the shift that has been so profound for you Leah in other areas of your life.” It made me realize something I hadn’t been aware of that I had been really looking at my physical circumstances and challenges through a lens, even an unconscious lens of, oh gosh, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I figure this out? Why isn’t my body working for me?

But when she said first, what I shared before about how your body has wisdom, your body has intelligence, your body knows what it’s doing, that already spoke to this unconscious thought, program that had been on loop about what’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with my body? This thought that had already created a separation, had already unallied me, unaligned me from cooperating with my body.

When she phrased it that way, I realized I had that orientation. I realized, obviously, that is not useful. That’s not supportive in any other area of my life. And then she said, “A lot has happened for you, to you, in the last 10 years.” And then that pieced together something else. Like yes, that again has been a profound shift for me and an insight in other areas.

And this is what I want to offer for all of you, this is how I want to bring it back around to you and any place where you might be currently unaware or it’s in your blind spot where you’re unintentionally thinking, approaching things, having a mindset of what’s wrong with you.

And instead, you can look at it as a lot has happened. A lot has happened with me, a lot has happened to me, and understanding that can help me not only acknowledge it, which is important, it can also help me get to the root cause so that I can move forward, so that I can know what’s going on, understand what’s going on, and then address it in a very effective way.

So I have heard this – I can’t remember the first place that I heard this. But it was from Oprah and she was talking about any time we are healing, any time we’re trying to create something and we’re stuck, the question that we often ask ourselves is, what’s wrong with me?

But instead, the more powerful, the healing, the transformative, the creative question to ask ourselves is, what has happened to me? What has happened to me? And you can tell already, I mean, Oprah’s nobody’s victim. And I hope you’ve gotten the gist of this podcast by now that I’m here for all the emotions, and I for sure have my times for sure.

Have my times, an Achilles heel of pity parties and victimhood. It is part of my messy, imperfect human self. And I’m going to continue to love on myself for that. And at the same time, I think you can understand from the context of this conversation, when you first realize, okay, where have I been unconsciously or consciously approaching this with a mindset of what’s wrong with me, and can I see how that is unallying myself to myself?

Whether it’s being unallied and separated, and then at odds with, almost an adversarial position with, a distrust of, a fear of oneself, one’s body, one’s creativity, or the dreams, the visions, the creativity that want to flow through you, that feel like they even have a separate life from you and you’re the vessel.

Versus when we move from asking what’s wrong with me to what has happened to me, where maybe have I been going through things that create this – I caught myself because I was going to say misalignment, that have created this misalignment with my body is out of whack.

But that’s not actually – I see this differently after talking with Kathy. The way my body has been trying to help me is not always pleasant or pain-free. But she’s like, it is your body being intelligent, this is explaining – I won’t go into detail. Some things to do with nerves, where she was explaining what she thinks is at play behind some of these symptoms and challenges I’ve been having resonated with me 100%.

Explained it to me in a way that no one else has been able to touch or even approach before, which is such a relief and so life-giving. And it also made me look at my body’s response and healing approach a different way. I saw it as, okay, this is painful for me but now I understand what my body is trying to do. It makes total sense.

And it put me in a place of amazement, utter awe and deep, profound appreciation, a renewed, even maybe deeper than ever sense of appreciation for the wisdom and the intelligence in my body.

And so looking at that, through that lens, at anything that is currently “seems misaligned” or out of whack in your life, and instead, be like, how is this actually the intelligence of my spirit, the wisdom of me, of my inner genius, of the creativity that wants to come through me?

How is this actually wisdom at work? How can I see this as intelligence at work? Rather than seeing it as something that’s a problem for you, or that something that’s gone wrong, or something that’s not intelligent and needs to be “fixed,” this I think is so exciting.

Being aware of those places where consciously or unconsciously, we have a mindset about what’s wrong with me, that I can’t do this, that this isn’t working for me, and switching it instead to what has happened to me, and then how has the grand, the magnificent wisdom, intelligence of my body, of my spirit, of creativity, how is that now working still in my favor?

How does it make utter sense that something so intelligent and wise that knows what it’s doing is now manifesting in ways that, yes, are getting my attention? That yes, are asking me to take a closer look? And can I trust this whole process, can I trust the intelligence in this process? And that will enable you take a deeper look and open yourself up for other possibilities and other explanations.

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, coach with me. Again, this may sound repetitive, but this is the part where you really apply it, you really think about what it means for you.

Are there places where you have been filtering the way you look at a situation through the lens of what’s wrong with me? Through the lens of assuming that there was a lack of intelligence at play and that something needed to be fixed.

You could be doing this consciously or unconsciously. And then what happens when instead, you begin to see it differently by asking a different question? Instead of what’s wrong with you, asking yourself the compassionate question of what has happened? What has happened in my life? What’s happened to me? What’s been happening around me that would explain, that could contribute to this? What has happened?

And then if you think of any place in your life that matters greatly to you and you are feeling either a wee bit of frustration or distress, or a lot of it, a great deal of angst or heartache around it, have you examined whether your general mindset, whether your general energy towards it is one of distrust, of fear, of lack of belief that there is intelligence, that there is wisdom?

And does it change? Does this area in which you have any amount of distress or heartache or frustration, does it change when you view it through the assumption that, you know what, there is wisdom here, there is intelligence here, this system knows what it’s doing, my body has wisdom, is intelligent, my body knows what it’s doing, my body knows how to heal?

This book that I want to write, it has wisdom, this book has a design, an intelligent design of its own. It knows what it’s doing. I just need to sit down and write or speak, take any kind of dictation how it wants to be delivered. This vision I have of being a painter who’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars, that definitely and for sure is a vision with an intelligence, with a design, with a wisdom behind it. Do I trust that?

What happens within me when I contemplate and consider that it knows what it’s doing? And then I can ask myself, it knows what it’s doing, then I can relax and next know what’s mine to do.

Thank you for listening to another episode of The Art School Podcast. If you have enjoyed this podcast and these episodes, the best way to pay it forward is by sharing, by sharing far and wide, by helping me reach more people and grow this movement of empowered capital-C creatives, and to grow this community of healers, of visionaries, poets, and artists.

All of you people with one foot in the imaginal world, and one foot in this world, who are moving the world forward. And if you want to be up close and personal in a community of this kind of creative powerhouse badassery in and out every week, if you want to live and breathe this kind of elevated conversation and energy and transformation, if this is the year when you’re like, you know what, I’m taking any of that unlived potential in me and I’m expressing it, this is the year I write the book, this is the year I find the agent, this is the year I have the solo show, this is the year I break six figures, this is the year I break seven figures, if that and any other dream you hold dear.

I mean, one of my dreams for the Art School, one of my visions is that it’s this PEGOT community that we have in our illuminary alumni presence, people who go on to win Pulitzers, Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, Tonys, and even greater than the symbol, than that symbol, than that award, they know in their heart of hearts that’s the level of fulfilled potential at which they are expressing and living.

They know that that’s a mere reflection of the fact that they have become the artist they were meant to be, the person they were meant to be, truly fully alive, living the life they were meant to live. If any of that speaks to you, that desire has a wisdom and intelligence.

And one of the ways that you can investigate following through on that is by applying to the Art School Mastermind. Our next cohort kicks off mid-July. It’s a small, intimate, high-touch, close-knit, dynamic, mystical, magical, brilliant, affluent community dedicated to your biggest, boldest dreams, and to see in the fullest expression of your potential in a way that truly fulfills you and makes you feel alive not only at the destination, but in the process of becoming.

If that calls to you, again, I would love to have you apply. If you have any questions, please email us, support@leahcb.com. So to close today, I wanted to share just a couple – I guess they’re behind-the-scenes sort of thoughts about other reasons I wanted to share a personal story that also deals with a physical story on this podcast.

Because my approach is a very holistic approach that as a person, as an artist, this is about the whole of you. And so I’ve always been very curious about these injuries for me, like where there were manifestations of blocked energy in my psyche, whether they were ways that they were external manifestations of any kind of inner conflict in my psyche, which I for sure can see back to when I tore my ACL, I just had my second baby, I had another toddler, I was growing my coaching business, my art was beginning to take off, I just wanted to go.

I wanted to fly, I wanted to soar. And I also wanted to nest, I wanted to be with these babies. And I think too, I had a lot more fear than I really wanted to acknowledge at the time. I also was lonely. So I tore my ACL playing basketball because I was trying to make friends with kindred people.

And I was playing with women who played D1 basketball. They were 10 years younger than I am. And a lot more athletic. And so I look back and I have a lot of compassion for understanding why that happened and recognizing these places where one part of my spirit was like, let’s go, and another part was like, no, not ready, can’t do it for whatever reason.

And so all of that to say for you, to take this very compassionate approach and a very curious approach. What’s going on with me and what are all of the ways that I can heal? I know some clients that are new to me, when they are new to me are sometimes surprised by the level of depth and nuance in the comprehensive, holistic approach.

And I just think there’s no other way. The whole of you is the whole of you. Could take a drop out of the ocean and it’s still the ocean, right? So we look at all things. And I wanted to offer that in case there’s a place in your life where you have been looking at it strictly as, well, this is my business, and so therefore it’s unrelated to what’s going on with me emotionally, or these are my finances so it really has nothing to do with what’s happening with me physically, or vice versa.

This is what’s happening with me physically, therefore it’s not impacting my finances. Taking a comprehensive look at things is so empowering. And it’s one of the reasons too why I was so drawn to working with Dr. Kathy Berg is because she is a practitioner of integrative health. She owns an integrative health clinic.

Her worldview is a comprehensive, holistic one. And here is the other thing that’s so important and that we have in common that’s founded on an assumption of innate intelligence and wisdom. So for her, approaching health from this place, approaching wellbeing from this place.

And for me, also approaching the health of a creative, the health of a psyche, the health of financials from this place, assuming the wisdom and intelligence, that starts the conversation in a completely different place. And so I wanted to offer that to you because I speak a lot about developing a conversation with yourself and with your creativity.

And so how does that conversation change if you begin from a place that is very comprehensive, and also rests on a solid foundation and assumption of intelligence and wisdom and a system that knows what it’s doing?

I have a sense that if you’re listening to this podcast, at least to a certain degree, you are on board with this kind of worldview. That yes, if you feel like you have a book within you, a movie, a next-level, this other life that is so much more accurate, authentic expression of you, trust that.

Trust that and then follow through on being the steward of that. Just like I’m hearing the wisdom from my body, following through on things like I’m signing up for a session with Kathy, I’m signing up for a session with other people, now I know I really want to go to Boise and work with Kathy and her team in person for a whole week.

You can do that, it’s like a destination place for integrative health and healing. So it is not only about listening and trusting that intelligence. It is also again, about allying with that, realigning with it if need be, if you’ve become separate with it, so you can serve it, so you can support it, so you can follow through on that.

But the followthrough, the creativity, the work that is required becomes so much more fun and you cut the resistance, you cut the drag when you come from a place of knowing that there is intelligence here and that it knows what it’s doing. Have a beautiful week everyone, thank you so much for being here, and I look forward to talking with you next time.