S4E4: Paying Attention

I'm so glad I followed the nudge to grab the mic for this one, even if I was in my jammies! Before recording, I set the intention for a revelatory episode -- for both myself and the listener -- and then I let go of any ideas I had about how that was going to happen. 

At the prompting of my spirit guides, I talk about anorexia, the Air Force, and my cancelled wedding in this episode. I realize this makes me sound like a drama llama! But I bet you'd be surprised about where we land. :)

I'd love to hear what this episode brought up for you! And if you're interested in creating space to learn from and connect with other women and their stories, I hope you'll join our free community call Second Sundays. 

Love,

Cecilia

moderndaymirror.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Good morning and welcome to this impromptu podcast. It's not that I didn't care enough to get prepared. It's that I felt this surge of creative energy and these aha moments moving through me. And I thought that it'd be interesting in real time to try to capture and share this with you. I am still in my pajama top. Actually, it's my mom's pajama top because I swung by my parents' house uh yesterday evening and had a bowl of bousolette for dinner, and I was wearing a stark white button-up t-shirt. So I decided to take that off and I was like, mom, do you have a shirt for me? So I ended up bringing it home with me so that I could wash it. And we are, this is this is where we're at this morning. I have had some really rich experiences this last week that I'm so excited to talk about and share with you because it feels like they have opened many doors for me. The first of which was I experienced a meditation that allowed me to experience, oh gosh, words are gonna fail me in this moment. I was invited to connect to a sparkle of gratitude inside of me, which sounds kind of pie in the sky, right? What does that even feel like? But because I was in this meditative state and because I set the intention to experience this sparkle, I didn't have to worry about it making sense in my human mind. And I just allowed my body and my energy to lean in. It was a warm fuzzy that grew from my heart space out through my limbs and even beyond me. This sparkle transformed itself into authentic joy. And I had never experienced joy for no other reason than the fact that I am a being of light. I was made from and by the Creator. When we think of joy, we usually think of it as a responsive reflex. You experience joy because, oh, the sun feels so good on your skin, or because you found that funny TikTok, or because you love watching your children play in the yard. To experience joy for no other reason than it is who you are at your essence was a mind-blowing experience. And it happened in the middle of the day, sitting here on this very couch in my living room. In that same meditation, I also got to experience my energy focus itself in a very concentrated way. I believe in the Buddhist practice, it's called a single point of focus meditation. Correct me if I'm mistaken here. And this you might be thinking, okay, what's the big deal? Like you focus, but I had actually never experienced my energy that way. I kind of like move through life experiencing myself as this like ocean of energy, right? And oh, I might bop. Oh, this is exciting, you know, this interests me over here. I'm gonna go explore this. And oh, now this is pulling my energy. Okay, I'm gonna float on over here. I don't have much experience creating a single point of concentration and saying, I'm going to focus all my energy to this. Oh, my spirit team is chiming in here. They're actually reminding me that I have done this before, but in unhelpful ways. Um, I'll share with you that when I decided to enter the Air Force at 19, I was not within the weight requirements. I was overweight. And many people would not have guessed that by looking at me. I don't know the physiology. You know, there's we say, oh, I'm just big boned, or oh, I'm just more. I've experienced it in the babies in our family. Some of them are their babies of the same size and they feel light as a feather, and others feel like sacks of flour. And I was a sack of flour. So I have always weighed more than I quote unquote looked. And I was overweight. So I decided, you know what, I really want to join the Air Force. So I had done all of the prerequisites, and all I needed the last step was to pass my physical, which included, you know, being weighed on the scale. And I did focus my energy on that one goal. Oh my gosh, it's been so long. I can, you know, it's uh they're reminding me of another time I've done this too in my in my physical um endeavors. Okay, so I when I was trying to join the military, I was basically anorexic and my sweet family. Oh, it painted them so much to watch me go through this. I would get on the treadmill in my parents' garage and I would walk. It started out as walking. I would walk five miles every morning and five miles every night, just watching TV while I walked. And to eat, I would allow myself a handful of these puffy Quaker rice crackers. They were like little chips. I mean, they were caramel-flavored, were the ones that I liked. And sometimes that's all I would eat. Other days I would allow myself a bite or two of my mom's homemade cooking, but I was so focused on this goal that everything else kind of fell to the wayside. And it didn't even feel like a chore. I remember it didn't even feel like a chore to get out there in that hot garage. I've done this another time when I my I was previously engaged and our wedding was called off about five minutes or five minutes, felt like five minutes, five months prior to the day we were supposed to get married. And I just wanted to lose myself, essentially. The pain that I was experiencing in the aftermath was so deep that I wanted to escape from it. And so I again, in this very like physical way, focused all of my energy in the gym. I was meal prepping, I was um working out. I was doing two days. I would work out in the morning at 5:30, I would work out after work as well. I would do my where I was working out was a TRX studio, which is a fabulous workout, by the way, if anybody is listening and hasn't tried it. So I would work out at the TRX studio where we would do like group circuit training. And then afterward, I would head to 24-hour fitness and I would get on the stair climber, the rotating stair climber for about 45 minutes. And that is how intensely I have focused my energy. But what's really interesting is that these, these, the results of this didn't stick because those things weren't actually what I really wanted. What I wanted when I was 19 and trying to join the Air Force, or, you know, did join the Air Force, what I really wanted was to experience a different version of myself. The version that wasn't responsible for my three younger siblings and wasn't responsible for, you know, making decisions that helped to ease the fears of my parents who were themselves very young parents and on their own from a very early age. You know, they just didn't want history to repeat itself. And so I wanted to be free from these, from other people's energy and expectations. That's what I really wanted. And similarly, after my fiance and I split, I also wanted to experience a different version of myself. I wanted to experience a love that did not require that I watered myself down. So now spirit is bringing to my attention this opportunity to try this again, this focused energy for something I really want. You know, when I was a student at Sac City College, after I separated from the Air Force and I came back home, I took a class called The Psychology of Creativity. And in that class, the curriculum was based on a book called The Artist's Way. Funnily enough, as a side note, I took that class and I bought that textbook. And I don't know why I kept it for decades because we dabbled in maybe a couple of chapters throughout the class, never revisited it, but something told me not to throw it out. And I'm actually not that big of a hoarder. And wouldn't you know? Uh, it was going viral on TikTok a year or two ago. And I'm like, I think I have that book. And I dug through my boxes and I did have it, and it was incredibly helpful to establishing a morning pages routine, which is the act of like dumping out all of these initial thoughts that you have in the morning when you wake up. That's a quick tangent. So in this class, we did an exercise, and I'm not gonna remember the details, I just remember how it made me feel. We were asked to illustrate some part of our interior experience. And I remember this was related to fear. And I remember that I drew a tree, and then on the page, we were asked to, I think it was like create a representation of our biggest fear, and mine was and continues to be that I am too afraid to ask for or to reach for what I really want because I don't want to be denied, so I just don't reach. I just don't ask. And so it's really no surprise. It's really no surprise that I have not focused my energy in that way in such a long time. I don't know if I've ever focused my energy that way towards something that I really want and not towards something that I was conditioned to want, or something to just distract myself. So this felt like a really potent realization this week, and it's still continuing to unfurl in my life and in my thoughts. I also had an opportunity to advocate for an experience I wanted to share with someone that I love very deeply in my life. And this wasn't the most comfortable experience on either end, on the person, you know, hearing me and on my half, like asking for this. And it made me like I flashed back to being a kid and feeling like I was asking for too much. There have been several points in my life since then, and in any setting, right? Teachers, friends, classmates, mentors, parents. In my youth, it was very much with my parents. I have always asked people to meet me in this emotionally vulnerable state, place, not state. And it's not it's not that I just meet someone and I expect to have access to the entirety of their inner world and their deepest, darkest fears and insecurities. That's not what I'm talking about. It's it's really the way that I have learned to connect more deeply to myself is by listening to other people's experiences. And this has been received as a very difficult ask on some people's end. I remember with my parents, I just wanted them to be honest about how they were feeling with me. And I could tell that they weren't. And it wasn't insidious. They weren't doing it because they were mean-spirited or irresponsible parents on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. It's because they loved us so deeply and cared so much about how our young bodies and minds were internalizing what it is that they were exposing us to. So they did the best they knew in that moment and they shielded us from a lot of it. But because I've always noticed these intuitive tendencies, even in my youth, I've always understood things and known things that I don't have any reason to, right? Or there's really no quote unquote proof to point to this, but I knew it in my heart. And so it felt like the equivalent of gaslighting. It felt like someone was literally, you know, telling me, oh, those flowers behind you, they're not pink. Those aren't pink flowers on the screen. They might, you might think that they're red even, but and it's like, no, I'm seeing them. I'm seeing them right now. They're pink. And so it was a very um, it felt like it disconnected me from myself. It created this gap between how much I believed I could trust myself. I continue to extend these invitations to the people that I care about in my life, even when it's uncomfortable. And oh my goodness, what result on the other end of that? The connection and the shared respect and and devotion, even like devotion to our shared experience. It's a beautiful thing to watch. And I also am not gonna front, like it always turns out that way, because it doesn't, it doesn't. And that's I respect, I respect other people's journey and timing, or at least I'm learning to. But I'm not going to stop asking for that anymore. And so this week it felt like I showed up for my inner child in the request, right? And saying, hey, I would really love for us to experience this together. And she showed up, she was like, Oh, oh, we're uncomfortable. This feels scary. What if you get denied? Does that mean that the, you know, you don't really have the relationship you think you have with this person? Spiral, spiral, spiral. And I acknowledged her and I held her and I reminded her that we're safe. We're safe either way, and that we do not ask for what we need because we expect that need will be met. That's not the point. I've ingested stories this week that have allowed me to experience myself more clearly, and it's helping me get more clarity around what it is that I meant to bring into the world, which is a feeling that I've carried with me for a really long time. But not all humans speak the language of energy, and words are really helpful to our understanding and to our ability to be able to find our communities. And a realization that I stumbled on this week is that for all of the beauty that the divine has to offer us, it will never be able to offer the shared experience of being human. And I think that's by design, because we're not meant to come here to earth to have uh an angelic experience, we're here to have a human experience, and so this gap in what spirit is able to add to our lives that's intentional and it's intended to be filled with the help of our neighbors because it's not just for our own soul's growth and understanding, it's so that we bring one another along on this journey. So your blind spot, it can fit perfectly inside of another person's story to reveal itself. So it's no longer a blind spot. And why that is important is because when you're no longer blind to what is limiting in your life, then you get choice. That's when you get to choose differently, and that's when you get to unlock a life that feels good and relationships that feel fulfilling, and all of the abundance that is waiting to come into your life if you just let go of your ideas about how that's supposed to happen.