Three Things We Dive Into In This Episode:
Why feeling the depths of negative emotions is essential for feeling the depths of positive emotions
How your life can change in an instant through chance encounters, quicker than you could have ever imagined
How to practice self-compassion while also "snapping yourself out" of ruminating and widening your perspective on life
📘Resources
Listen to Caitie’s previous episode with Diana Davis:
Sign up for Caitie’s nutrition coaching program and community, Whole, Full, and Alive, and get a FREE 20 Minute Discovery Call!
📌Episode Highlights
[03:23] Caitie’s Final Costa Rica Hike
Caitie and her friend, Diana Davis, recently went on a trip to Costa Rica.
Caitie serendipitously met a guide on the trip, who gave them a tour of the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica and became a friend who she plans to visit.
The last part of the tour was a hike.
Halfway into the hike, a sudden, torrential downpour began. Caitie didn't run; they all stood and let the rain fall.
Caitie remembers feeling alive and liberated while standing in the rain and letting it pour.
[08:53] Feeling Alive Is Not Just About Feeling Good
The first thing that popped into Caitie’s head was the day after her breakup.
She was on the floor of her New York City apartment at two o'clock in the morning, filled with grief and pain.
Caitie realized that both moments — the hike in the rain and the day after her breakup — were both moments of beauty and aliveness.
Moments of sadness and moments of electrifying gratitude both make her feel alive.
Caitie: “If I didn't feel the depth of the pain and the loss that I was feeling on that day in March, I might not have been able to feel the depth of gratitude and just full pure aliveness that I was feeling in the jungle in Costa Rica.” - Click Here To Tweet This
[14:58] Feel the Depths of Your Emotions
It is vital to feel the depths of every emotion, even the bad ones.
You will not feel the full depth of positive emotions if you do not access their negative counterparts.
Feel your emotions fully enough so that they can release.
Do not let the emotional clutter build up within you.
[16:25] How the Costa Rica Trip Came to Be
After her breakup, Caitie had to reschedule most of her clients because she doesn't believe in showing up for clients without a full battery except for one.
The client recently got home from her trip to Costa Rica and said the whole trip reminded her of Caitie.
She said Costa Ricans are happy, love life, do yoga, and have balance in their mental health, which reminded her of Caitie.
Unfortunately, Costa Rica was not on Caitie’s list of places to visit.
However, she learned that Diana was also traveling after her own breakup. Caitie decided to invite her on a trip to Costa Rica based on the client's recommendation.
[20:17] You’ll Never Know Your Impact on People
Caitie: “If we all could only know and recognize the impact that we might be having on people that we could never even suspect, we'd all be so much happier.” - Click Here To Tweet This
If you're having difficulty tapping into a sense of wholeness, take a moment and think about the people you might be positively influencing or inspiring.
There may be someone you have inspired who will never let you know.
It can be someone you passed by in the grocery store or interacted with for five seconds at the coffee shop.
You might even have an impact on people you never met.
Caitie did not know she had that impact on her client.
[22:37] You’ll Never Know Someone’s Experience
Never assume how someone is experiencing you or the moment.
Everyone is looking through their lens, filters, and perception of things.
Some people put up a tough exterior, but are still deeply affected by the situation even if they don't show it.
You might be leaving an impact on someone without even trying.
[25:58] You’ll Never Know Who’s About to Enter Your Life
You have not yet met all the people you are going to love.
Do not assume your circle will be the same five years from now.
You can make beautiful, unexpected connections if you are open to them.
Just like how Caitie had no idea she would run into the guide in Costa Rica who would become a friend and leave an impact on her.
Even Caitie's friendship with Diana was serendipitous; it's one of her cherished relationships now.
[26:04] Sprinkle Self Compassion
Caitie reflects on another moment during her trip when she found herself reminiscing about how she fixated over a former dating situation that did not work — while swimming in a beautiful waterfall.
Caitie realized she needed to stop dwelling on the situations in which she had done nothing wrong and focus on the opportunities ahead.
But when you are nudging yourself to widen your perspective, make sure you also have some self-compassion. It can’t all be about “tough love” and snapping yourself out of it.
[29:39] Let Yourself Fully Feel
Consider that you might be dwelling on things that do not matter because you haven't allowed yourself to feel the emotions attached to them.
Let yourself sit with your difficult emotions. Widen your perspective, feel alive, and release them.
Caitie: “Let yourself feel it. Validate your feelings. You're a human being; you're supposed to be feeling things. That's what being alive is.” - Click Here To Tweet This
Shake yourself awake to a new and wider perspective.
Do not forget self-compassion.
Widen your perspective to the beautiful things around you: in your home, the people who are still showing up for you, and what your body allows you to do.
[31:56] Caitie’s Processing Prompts
In what ways have you not let yourself be fully alive?
Have you been avoiding some areas in the spectrum of aliveness?
[33:00] Caitie’s Actionable Experiment
Go into new places with the perspective that one of these new people might become one of the most important people in your life.
How would you show up and move through that room differently?
About Caitie
Caitie Corradino MS, RDN, CDN, RYT, CPT, is the founder and lead counselor of Full Soul Nutrition. She is a registered Dietitian-Nutritionist, a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, a certified fitness and yoga instructor, an eating disorder recovery coach, and a Reiki practitioner. She is passionate about providing counseling services that are truly integrative and heal the whole person.
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Transcript
Caitie Corradino: Being alive, feeling alive is not feeling happy and grateful all the time. Feeling alive is feeling at all. Feeling alive is feeling. Welcome to Whole, Full and Alive, a podcast exploring the art and science of falling in love with your life, with your story and with who you truly are underneath your titles, your resume, your relationship status, and your bank account.
I'm Caitie Corradino, a registered dietician nutritionist, certified fitness and yoga instructor, eating disorder recovery coach, Reiki healer, and founder of Full Soul Nutrition, but underneath my titles and resume, a big fan of kitchen dance breaks, early mornings, all things chocolate truffles, world traveling and serendipity. I'm here to share no bullshit stories and actionable tools to help you feel unshakably worthy.
You have everything you need within you to feel whole, full and alive right here, right now. Let's get into it. Hi, welcome back to another episode of Whole, Full and Alive. I have not even remotely begun to speak about what I want to talk about today, and I'm already feeling a little bit emotional. I'm here for a solo episode today. Before I start, I just want to say if this is the first episode you're tuning into, thanks so much for being here.
I'm so grateful that we got connected in some way. If this is not your first episode, welcome back. Thanks so much for returning. On today's show, I want to return to the thing that I say at the beginning of every episode, the thing that you hear in the intro every time you press play on one of these episodes. You hear me say you have everything you need within you to feel whole, full and alive, and I truly believe that.
I really want everyone who walks away from listening to one of these episodes to feel like they have uncovered something new within them, something they didn't realize they had before that they can tap into to feel whole, to feel full, to feel more alive and really, really actually alive, not this like pseudo aliveness that we see so much in our world today. I'm coming off of an incredible trip to Costa Rica.
You might have noticed that I recorded the previous two episodes before this from Costa Rica. It was an incredibly wonderful experience. It was a really beautiful trip. In today's episode, I want to share some reflections from the time I spent in Costa Rica, because I'm feeling really called to, and I feel like it connects so much, so deeply back to the mission of this podcast.
So I guess I want to start by sharing this experience I had on my last day in Costa Rica. I was on a hike with the friend that I went to Costa Rica with who was on the last episode, Diana, and with a new friend that I had made very serendipitously one day while we were in the coastal town of Puerto Viejo. I really needed a bathroom, and the water was shut off in the entire town.
Because the water was shut off, none of the restaurant owners wanted to let me use their bathroom because of course, I was not going to be able to flush it after I used it. It was an emergency. I really had to pee. I just had some of the most amazing espresso I've ever had in my entire life. The coffee in Costa Rica was incredible, but that's that I really needed to use the bathroom, and so it's kind of just like looking around for someone who would maybe let me use their toilet just to take a pee without flushing it.
I came upon this little kind of hole in the wall tourist hub where this guy was sitting in a desk, offering tours throughout the Caribbean coast. I went up to him and I was like, hey, you have a bathroom associated with this little shack, and he was like, I don't normally let people use my bathroom. I was like I really need to use it, just whatever went back and forth kind of schmooze him a little bit.
He eventually ended up letting me use the bathroom. When I came back out, he was like, oh, maybe you could give me your Instagram handle in exchange for me letting you use the bathroom like he was flirting with me a little bit. Then, we just started talking a little bit, and I was like, you know what, actually, I think I can do something better.
Maybe I can book a tour with you in exchange for you letting me use your bathroom, and turns out that he's an awesome guy who offers the most authentic and customized and incredibly beautiful tours throughout the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, ended up booking a tour with him. Diana and I ended up spending the entire next day with him. He is a member of the indigenous community in Costa Rica, the Bribri tribe.
He showed us his community, taught us how to make cacao, showed us all the spiritual practices and meditation teepees and all of the plants that they grow and use and the ways they make their lifestyle more sustainable and live off of the land. He took us in the National Park. He took us to all these places that we wouldn't have gone to otherwise to see monkeys and sloths and all kinds of things.
At the end of the day, the last thing we did was go on a hike. So now we're back. We're on the hike, and he's trying to take us to this viewpoint. Out of nowhere, it kind of just starts torrential downpour raining, which actually hadn't happened the entire time we were in Costa Rica. I know that we were in Costa Rica during the rainy season, but we were in the driest part of Costa Rica during the rainy season.
The Caribbean coast stays relatively dry, despite the entire rest of the country kind of becoming more rainy during the month of September. So we were lucky to be there because on this hike on our last day with our new friend was the first time that we actually had experienced any sort of rain, but, boy, did we experience rain. We were on a hike climbing up a hill, and I was actually barefoot, because I was told that it was going to be a little bit of a shorter walk than it actually ended up being and it was like right off the beach.
Like we were on the beach, and then we kind of veered off to just go up this little hill. I thought it was just like a kind of a walk to a viewpoint but actually ended up being a hike that I did barefoot. So downpour raining, I'm barefoot in the middle of the jungle, the rainforest in Costa Rica, and we all just kind of stand there and let the rain fall at us. It was an incredibly liberating feeling to just stand there and just be like, okay, it's pouring rain.
We're not going to run from this. We're not going to try to cover up our bodies with whatever we can. We're not going to turn around and run back to a car because guess what, we didn't have one. We actually took kayaks to this beach. We're just gonna keep doing the hike in the pouring rain and get soaked through our clothes, and so the three of us are just standing there.
I'm standing there with my old friend Diana, who I just feel so palpably connected to in so many wonderful ways. She is really one of the most special people in my life. With this new friend, who I serendipitously met the day before and decided to book a tour with, he actually ended up becoming a great friend, amazing person. We talked about so many wonderful things that day. I felt so incredibly alive. I felt so alive.
In that moment, for some reason, the first thing that popped into my head was a memory about six months earlier, less than six months earlier, in March, the day after I had broken up with my long term boyfriend. I was on the floor of my New York City apartment at two o'clock in the morning, just filled with so much grief, so much pain. Not only because I had just lost my partner and my best friend, but also because I knew that I was going to be leaving New York.
I knew that that breakup was the last permission slip that I needed to finally leave Manhattan after 10 years and it was official in that moment that I was going to step away and start a new life. I knew it was coming and I was already starting to grieve my life in Manhattan as it was for the 10 years prior. I was grieving the loss of my partner, and I was just so overwhelmed and flooded with emotions, and I couldn't sleep.
I could not sleep, and I was in so much anguish that I had to call my dad that night at three o'clock in the morning. I had to wake him up from his sleep, because I just didn't know what else to do. I was so overcome with pain, and my dad, God bless him. Definitely, we'll probably should talk about him on another episode, but we have a very special relationship. He had to talk me through a yoga nidra style meditation until I fell asleep.
He heard me fall asleep on the phone and then hung up. Asterix, my dad knows yoga nidra, and stuff like that, and is able to talk me through things like that on the phone. But anyway, I was standing in the rain forest feeling so alive, feeling the water just fall on my skin, just letting myself get soaked through my clothes and just feeling fully alive. The first memory that came to me was that night when I had to call my dad at 27 years old to be able to fall asleep because I was just filled with so much pain.
At first I was like, oh, is this a “look how far I've come” moment? Is this moment where I'm like, wow, I've come so far since March of this year where I was crying about my boyfriend and afraid to leave New York and grieving the loss of that life, and now, I'm here in Costa Rica with my amazing friends. Then, I thought, no, that's actually not what this is at all. This is just another moment where I feel as alive as I felt in that moment when I was grieving on my bedroom floor.
Those were just both moments where I felt the same level of aliveness. Even though in one instance, I was standing in the jungle in Costa Rica in the rainforest with monkeys around me, new friends and on an adventure and feeling just like fully grateful and electrified. In the other moment, I was feeling pain and grief and unable to sleep and overwhelmed. I was so alive in both moments, and both those moments are so important to feeling alive.
Even though, one moment was full of sadness, and the other moment was full of electrifying gratitude. Those are both important parts of being alive. If I didn't feel the depth of the pain and the loss that I was feeling on that day in March, I might not have been able to feel the depth of gratitude and just full pure aliveness that I was feeling in the jungle in Costa Rica. It made me think back to what so many beautiful guests on this podcast have said already, which is that being alive, feeling alive is not feeling happy and grateful all the time.
Feeling alive is feeling at all. Feeling alive is feeling. I'm finding myself getting emotional right now. I'm a little afraid to publish this episode. I'm gonna do it anyway. So I guess that's been a big learning or just remembering for me this year is that feeling alive is feeling. There are so many reasons why it's important for us to feel the depths of every emotion, even the bad ones.
The first reason, like I've already said is because feeling the depths of the negative emotions or the less favorable emotions, is what allows you to feel the full depth of the positive emotions when you can access them. Another reason why it's so important to feel the full depth of the negative emotions, when they arise, is so that you can release them. Can you be with those negative emotions long enough for them to be released and to leave so that you have space to keep experiencing life?
You're not just letting this emotional clutter build up within you. I guess that's what I feel like, again, I've learned or remembered this year, is that any emotional clutter that builds up inside of me always inevitably gets the best of me. If I don't allow myself to feel the depths of the things that suck, the things that really suck to feel, then I don't feel like I get to access the more favorable experiences, the more favorable emotions and the sense of aliveness and adventure that I felt when I was in Costa Rica.
I'm so grateful that my trip to Costa Rica was this reminder to let myself just keep really being in it all, in all of it, the good, the bad, the ugly, the painful, the messy. I'm also grateful that I've had so many other experiences this year that have allowed me to just really be in it all, such as when I discovered somatic breathwork earlier this year, and I'm going to have another episode just totally on somatic breathwork and how that helped me to really feel the depths of my emotions and release them.
But yeah, this trip to Costa Rica, let me pull over and stay here for a moment. I think I also feel really called to share how Diana and I ended up in Costa Rica in the first place. So I'm having chills trying to tell the story. So the day after that horrible night of just like grief and letting go that I experienced where my dad had to talk me to sleep, I had to see just one client the next day.
I had managed to reschedule a lot of my clients, because I don't believe in showing up for clients when I don't feel like I have a full battery. However, there was this one client that I couldn't reschedule with, because it had been so long since I had seen her. She's a very busy client, and there's just a lot of layers to it. So I was like, okay, I think I can pull it together and see this one client.
So I got on the call with her, and she's a client that I had been working with for about two years. When I started working with her, she was very deep in her eating disorder. At this point, in March of this year, she was doing so, so well, and we really were just checking in for a check in to make sure that things were continuing to go well, and to just stay connected. That's important to me to stay connected with clients for spot check ins and things and just make sure that they know I'm still here, so we were checking in.
She gets on the call immediately, and goes, Cait, I just got back from Costa Rica. She’s a teenage client, by the way. She's super cute. I was like, that's amazing. Like, how was it? She was like, it was amazing, and what I want to tell you is that while I was there, I was thinking of you. I was thinking of you the whole time, and how touching to think that the client was thinking about me while they're on vacation, first of all.
I was like, why are you thinking of me? She said, everyone there was just so happy, and they love life. They do yoga, and they're just very balanced and into mental health. I just thought everyone here is just like Caitie. This client had never fully expressed anything like that to me before. This is not like an ass kissing client. This was a client who we had a long road together.
Her recovery was a journey, and to hear her express that meant so much in that moment. I was like, wow, like, thank you so much for saying that, that means a lot to me. Maybe I have to travel to Costa Rica sometime. She was like, yes, you have to go, promise me you're gonna go. I was like, well, I actually just decided last night that I'm gonna give up my lease here in New York, and I'm gonna travel around for a while and see all of you virtually.
She was like, of course, of course, you're doing that. Like, it just seems like something you would do. Like, I love that. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna add Costa Rica on my list, and so, whatever time goes by and I booked my trips. I'm traveling to Denver and Montana and San Diego and Portugal and Italy, and all these places. Costa Rica never really made it on the list actually, just because logistically where I was going.
I was like, I'm not going to go to Central America. But then, my friend Diana ended up breaking up with her partner and started traveling around as well. At one point, Diana was like, we should do a trip together. We're both doing the same thing right now and who knows how long we're both going to be living this lifestyle. It's definitely not going to happen forever. Let's do a trip together, and so at that point, I was like, alright, I've got an idea.
Let's go to Costa Rica. I had a client who recommended it. Yeah, that's how Diana and I ended up going there, and so that's how I ended up in Costa Rica. I guess another learning that I want to share on this episode, another thing I kind of remembered through this whole experience that I want to share on this episode is that you've never know. First of all, you never know what impact you're having on someone.
I didn't know that that client was going to go on a trip to Costa Rica, and be thinking of me while she was there. That's so beautiful. I had no idea that I had that impact on that client. As a dietitian who treats eating disorders, I don't get a whole lot of feedback from clients, and that's okay. I accept that part of my job. But very often, my clients are so challenged by me, because I have to nudge them to eat and rewrite their thoughts about food and their relationship with food and their relationship with their bodies and let go of the pursuit of weight loss.
So sometimes, I'm the bad cop in my clients’ life for a little bit, and that's okay. I see the beauty in that, but I don't really get a whole lot of feedback from them. So I sometimes don't know what impact I'm having on them, and to hear that beautiful piece of feedback from that client, just in terms of the way she sees me, just reminded me that if we all could only, just know, and recognize the impact that we might be having on people that we could never even suspect, we'd all be so much happier.
It's so important to remember that you might be having an impact on people that you might never even meet. You might be having an impact on someone that you see in passing in the grocery store or in the coffee shop for five seconds. You just never know. If you're having a hard time tapping into a sense of wholeness, please just take a moment and close your eyes and think about all the people that you might be positively influencing or inspiring.
There's someone out there that you have inspired, and they might never tell you. But you can just sit there and know that there's someone out there that you've inspired. Someone out there might be thinking of you while they're on vacation or while they're visiting a new place or whatever. I guess another sub lesson within that one, too, is you never know the experience someone's having.
Don't assume that you know how someone is experiencing you. Especially for myself, as a counselor, I always have to remember that. Like, I'm not going to assume I know what experience someone is having in the nutrition counseling session. They might be putting up a really tough front, and they might be fighting with me. They might be not expressing any glimmer of inspiration from the session, but they might come away weeks later from that session being profoundly impacted by it, or they might be profoundly impacted by it in the moment and unsure how to express it.
Or there might be something more subconscious going on that they're never really able to recognize that the nutrition counseling session was something that helps them change, but it's okay because it did. You just don't know what experience someone is having. Everyone's looking through their own lens, their own filters, their own perceptions of things. You might be really having an impact on someone without even trying.
You might be giving someone an incredible experience without even trying. I want to share two more, two more learnings, two more things I remembered while I was in Costa Rica. The third thing is also related to people and serendipity, and that's like, you never know who's about to enter your life. You never know who is about to enter your life. You have not yet met all the people that you are going to love.
You have not yet met all the people who are going to love the shit out of you. The most happenstance encounter can change your life in a matter of three minutes. It's something I have to remind myself now as I've been back from Costa Rica for 48 hours and kind of pretty much sitting in my apartment alone in Denver. A lot of my friends who live here are out of town this week and I've been spending a little bit more time in solitude and alone and I'm like, oh, am I never gonna meet someone.
But I went and schmooze this guy into using his bathroom and he ended up becoming a great friend and I'm gonna go back to Costa Rica and see him and it's like, you just never know. You never know, and Diana, my friend that I was traveling with, I mean, she's so serendipitously entered my life. I mean, she's from Colorado, and then she ended up in New York City after a divorce.
She came to my fitness class, and then she became my photographer. Then, we started bumping into each other networking events, and we just stayed connected in so many like serendipitous ways. Now, she's such a beautiful friend to me, and such an important person in my life. So many of my favorite people, and so many of the most important people in my life just came into my life through like a rando 15 second encounter.
Just don't assume that you know who your circle is going to be in five years from now. Things can change so rapidly, so quickly, and beautiful connections can be made in the most unexpected ways if you're open to them. I really, truly, firmly believe that, stay open, stay open. Then the final thing, well, there's so much that I learned and remembered in Costa Rica, but the last thing I want to share for today is just another profound moment that I had.
One day, Diana and I went to this waterfall, and we were swimming in the waterfall. There were butterflies around us, and it was so peaceful and incredible. We're sitting there just watching the waterfall fall and looking around at the butterflies, and I found myself for half a second kind of ruminating on something. Okay, I'll tell you what it was. I was ruminating on this weird dating situation that I had since breaking up with my partner in March.
I've been open to dating people. I haven't been pushing for it, but I've been open and I ended up seeing someone for a minute. Something a little weird happened towards the end, he kind of flipped a switch, and he just wasn't the person for me. I found myself sitting there ruminating on it for a second like, ah, why couldn't he just or why couldn't I just or maybe this, and I looked up with a waterfall and I was like, who am I to be sitting here ruminating on this situation in which I didn't do anything wrong.
It just didn't work out, and who am I to be sitting here pining for this random guy who I didn't know a few weeks ago, I didn't even know he existed a few weeks ago, when God has put so many beautiful things in the world and so many beautiful friends in my life. There's so much in front of me, so many opportunities. There's so many different ways life can go and life can work out and life can change.
Who am I to be sitting here ruminating on that when there's butterflies and a waterfall in front of me? What the heck, Caitie? I noticed that perspective come in immediately and felt a little bit of relief from it, and then also realized, okay, that's not enough. I can't just slap myself into a new perspective. I can't just be like, Caitie, you're being self righteous right now. What the heck?
Why are you sitting there on a throne of self righteousness just being like, I like should have had this thing, workout and blah, blah, even though you're in Costa Rica in the jungle with your friends, and it's amazing. I also needed a little sprinkle of self compassion. So I sat there, and I thought, okay, yes, first of all, who am I to be ruminating on the situation that wasn't even that big of a deal.
There's a million more situations just like it that can enter my life at any given moment. Also, I've been hurt this year. I've been hurt a lot in my life. I'm a human being, and I deserve to allow myself to feel this. Perhaps the only reason I'm ruminating on it and thinking about it is because I haven't let myself fully feel it. So I guess it's kind of full circle, coming back to the beginning of the episode.
I just decided to let myself fully feel something about that situation that I was ruminating on, felt it, felt a little pang. It was mostly anger that I felt because it wasn't like my heart was broken. It wasn't that long of a relationship. It was just like a little bit like of a frustration situation. I just let myself get angry for a second. I felt it. I sat in it. I felt my body get kind of hot for a minute. I was like, what a jerk.
Whatever, I'm not gonna go too much into it but I let myself feel anger, and then I've sat with it long enough for it to release, and let my perspective widen. So I guess the lesson there is please don't forget to widen your perspective. Please slap yourself awake when you find yourself ruminating on something that doesn't really matter that much.
Also, if you're ruminating on something that doesn't really matter that much, it might be that you haven't really let yourself feel it all the way, or validate your feelings around it even if it's like an insignificant thing, like this little situation from my Denver dating diaries. Let yourself feel it, validate your feelings. You're a human being. You're supposed to be feeling things. That's what being alive is, so what I said at the beginning of the episode, which had a totally different tone to it than we're at right now.
But yeah, let yourself feel and then widen your perspective, widen your perspective. Even if you can't go to Costa Rica, I understand that there's a certain level of privilege that allowed me to be able to go work from Costa Rica, because I work a flexible job where I can see people from anywhere.
Even if you can't travel at this moment for some reason, widen your perspective to the beautiful things that are around you in your home, the people who are still showing up for you, the people who have shown up for you, the experiences you have had, how good that candle on your desk smells, how healthy your body is, what your body allows you to do. There are so many ways to widen your perspective, but you can also shake yourself awake by just going outside and being in a new environment.
Allow yourself to bust your perspective wide open. Don't forget the self compassion step. Allow yourself to feel and also shake yourself awake, new perspective, wider perspective. So it's a little bit of a stream of consciousness episodes, so I'd love your feedback on it. But as I'm wrapping up here, as always, I want to give you a processing prompt and an actionable experiment that you can run in your life just to see what happens.
So a processing prompt, remember, you can do this in a journal, or you can vent about it out loud to a friend or a therapist or yourself, or you can write about it a note in your phone or a napkin or whatever, process. There's not one way it has to look. But the prompt is in what ways have you not let yourself be fully alive? Have you been avoiding some area of the spectrum of aliveness? In what ways did you block your aliveness?
Maybe by not feeling something fully or voiding, feeling something, avoiding leaning into a certain situation. Or did you, at some point, not let yourself feel the full range of joy about something or pride about something, accomplishment about something? Yeah, where are you not letting yourself be fully alive?
The actionable experiment for this week is when you walk into a new setting, maybe it's a coffee shop, maybe at some a grocery store, or a public setting, or a party where you don't know everybody, can you go in with the perspective that one of these new people in this room might become one of the most important people in your life? How would you move through that room differently?
If you remembered that one of the people in that room might become one of the most important people in your life? Would you more fearlessly walk up to someone and be like, hey, can I join you in your group? Would you walk up to someone nd be like, I really like your shoes? Would you walk up to someone and be like, what are you drinking? If you kept that perspective open, how might that change the way you show up in a room?
Run an experiment there. All right. So I'm gonna wrap up here. I hope that wherever you are, you can take a nice, deep, deep, deep breath and let yourself feel alive today. Let yourself be alive today. If there's anything that you're seeking to share, this episode inspired something for you, go share it with someone or share it with me. I want to hear from you. I want to hear what this episode sparked for you.
If you really enjoyed this episode or enjoying the show, it helps me out so much if you leave a five star rating and or review on Apple podcasts or a rating on Spotify. If you share the show with someone else that you think might benefit from hearing these words, I so deeply appreciate the way the show has been shared so far. I don't take it for granted that I've managed to keep a weekly podcast going and there's a little community of people who listen and I don't take any of you for granted for a singular second.
So please don't hesitate to reach out to me and tell me what you want to hear more of, less of, what topics you want to hear covered. Do you want to be a guest on the show? Reach out to me. All right, I'm gonna close it up here. Now, I'm actually going to close it up. Take care of yourself. We'll see you next week.
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