March 26, 2024 • 33 mins
On this week’s episode of the Write Your Story podcast, I’m sharing a vulnerable story that I’ve never shared before. This is a story about leaving an important part of myself behind—how I realized she was gone, how I went back to find her, and how I am integrating her into my life now so I can live the fullest, most authentic, version of myself today. I hope this story brings you some solidarity and even inspiration to track down the lost parts of yourself you’ve lost. If you resonate, come tell me about it over on Instagram, @allyfallon
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, pulled them back
together with the word to write all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You got the.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Words and said, don't you think it's time to let
them out and write them down and cover what it's
all about and write.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Your story.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Write you, write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and today on the show,
I want to tell you a story that I haven't
told before. I really haven't told this story to anyone before.
I mean kind of literally, I haven't told it to
anyone before. It's a little out there. Maybe it's not
as weird as I'm making it up to be in
my brain, but because I haven't vocalized this story before,
(00:52):
I'm not totally sure how it's going to come out.
I've been thinking about it a lot, and I feel
really called to share it with you today, so I
know I want to do that, but I haven't verbalized it.
I haven't even written this story before, and so I'm
so grateful for you being here, for you listening, and
for your grace as I try to just get this out.
It may not be the most smooth episode I've ever recorded,
(01:14):
but for whatever reason, it feels really important to share.
So I'm going to share it with you just like
we're sitting down to lunch or sitting down a coffee
or something, and I'm going to pretend that you're sitting
across the table from me, and I'm going to pretend
that I'm holding my favorite chi which I'm not holding,
but I pretend like I am, and I'm just gonna
tell you this story like we're just friends and we're
hanging out. Part of why I'm gonna do this is
(01:34):
because this is the power of storytelling. The most beautiful
things that happen when we tell stories are when we
just authentically share from our life experience with another person
as a way of connecting and saying, hey, you're not crazy,
you're not alone, You're not the only one who's experienced this.
And I have a feeling that a lot of you
are really going to resonate with what I have to
share today, and so I'm excited to get to share
(01:56):
this story with you for the very first time. If
you listen to the episode I recorded a couple of
weeks ago with my friend Elizabeth Bennett. Elizabeth, by the way,
is an energy kinesiology expert, an energy healer. I guess
she uses energy kinesiology as a way to listen to
the body and understand and hear the story that the
(02:18):
body is trying to tell. So the whole point of
that episode was maybe your body is telling a different
story than you would tell. Like if you were to
sit down in a therapist's office or sit down across
from a friend and tell them a story, you would
tell the story one way, But what if your body
would tell the story another way. Our bodies are infinitely
wise and intuitive, and sometimes our bodies have access to
(02:38):
information that our conscious minds don't actually have access to,
and so listening to the body can be an amazing
way to go even deeper with your story. And that's
why I wanted to have Elizabeth on the show. I
met Elizabeth and I told part of this story on
the show with her. But when I met her, I
met her because I had been intuitively looking for someone
(03:00):
who could do some energy work with me that was
beyond your typical Western medicine, Like I had this sense
that there was some stuff going on in my body.
If you've been around here a while, you know. I
had a kidney surgery while I was pregnant with Charlie.
That was in twenty twenty one. I had some kidney
issues at a stint put in, and then the stint removed.
I had kidney issues after pregnancy. I've had some weird
(03:23):
phantom pains in my kidney since then, and so I
have had an MRI, I've had a cat scan, I've
had all the things done, I've had my kidneys tested.
Everything looks normal, and yet I'm still having this weird
phantom pain. So because of that, I was like on
the lookout for someone who could do some energy work
with me, just to see if there was something a
little bit deeper going on that the Western doctors weren't catching.
(03:47):
So I was already intuitively on the lookout for this,
and I had stumbled across a few options along the way,
Like I was in a coffee shop and found a
card of this energy healer and followed the link on
the card to her website and whatever, and I was
just like, oh, not really feeling the connection. There. A
couple of different instances like that had taken place where
(04:09):
I would stumble across someone's Instagram page, I would be like, no,
it doesn't really feel totally right. And so I was
just sort of open and waiting for this person to
come into my life who I felt connected to. And
when I found Elizabeth. I found her because my friend
Ruthie Lindsay, who I have also interviewed on the show,
(04:30):
she shared about Elizabeth and her work on her Instagram.
She had had Elizabeth come and talk to her substat group.
They recorded an interview. She shared part of the interview
on Instagram, and I was telling Elizabeth when I sat
down with her. When I saw this short clip of
her interview, it was like instant resonance. I was like
(04:50):
immediately drawn to her. It took me about forty five
seconds from the time I heard her talk to the
time that I made it on her website and booked
an appointment with her, because there was just an instant resonance.
It was like I knew this was the person that
I had been looking for. So I booked an appointment
with her. I ended up in her office and I
was telling her about the things that have gone on
(05:11):
with my kidneys. She was asking about any other shocks
or traumas that have happened, and I told her about
my childbirth experience with my daughter. The entire experience was
a very dramatic I tried to avoid using the word traumatic,
but in some ways it was traumatic. It was a
completely unexpected unfolding of events that happened with my daughter,
(05:32):
and there were certain parts of it that were a
little traumatic anyway. So I shared that with her and
then she just said, you know, well, let's talk to
your body and see what your body wants to show us.
So what that looks like in practicality is muscle testing.
If you've never had muscle testing done, it's basically like
small movements like imagine I'm going to stick out my
arm and Elizabeth is going to kind of tap on
(05:54):
my arm with a single finger, and she's going to
ask questions, and if my arm falters or moves when
she asks the question, then I guess that's like a
no answer from my body. And if it if it
stays strong, that's a yes answer from my body. So
if you lean into this idea of kinesiology and muscle testing,
you could ask your body any yes or no question
(06:17):
and your body's going to give you an answer. So
you could ask your body, do you need this supplement,
do you need a massage? Do you need to take
a break, do you need to take a nap? And
your body's going to give you a yes or no
answer based on this muscle testing. Now, I'm oversimplifying because
there are obviously other things that you need to do
in order to get the answers that are the correct answers.
(06:39):
Elizabeth teaches an entire class that teaches you how to
muscle test yourself, so you can literally do this in
real time to ask your body what it needs. But
the point I'm trying to make is that there can
be a difference between what you think you need using
your brain and what your body actually says it needs,
or the story that you you think you need to
(07:01):
tell using your brain and the story that your body
is actually trying to tell. So, for example, I go
into her office that day, I think the story that
I'm there to tell is like the last five years
have been such a wild ride for me. I haven't
been able to fully integrate all of the experiences. It
has felt traumatic at different points, my daughter's birth, the
kidney surgery, while I'm pregnant with my son, having this stunt,
(07:24):
put in, having it taken out, moving across the country,
you know, all these different things that have taken place
in my life. And Elizabeth is like, yeah, your body's
saying that's not the thing that it came here to
talk about. And I'm like, wait, but hold on. There's
like I'm having this phantom pain it's like in my kidney.
And she's like, that's not the thing that your body
came here to talk about. That's not the story that
(07:46):
it's trying to tell. So I was like, okay, okay,
I'm going to stay open and I'm going to listen
because in my brain I'm so on this track of
I'm here to talk about the kidney stuff. And when
she was testing my energy systems, she is like, your
kidneys are actually fine. They might be out of balance
because another part of your body is out of balance,
(08:07):
but it's not the kidney system that's asking for attention
right now. So when she was testing my energy systems,
she was like, it's actually your heart that's asking for
attention right now, which, in a weird way did resonate,
like it did make sense to me, but not in
a logical kind of way. I couldn't pinpoint why it
would be my heart. I've had no heart problems physically speaking,
(08:29):
and so I was like, I'm just going to stay
open to this experience and open to what you know,
Elizabeth might want to share with me and what my
body might want to share with me today. So we
continued on with the appointment, and she was muscle testing
me and asking my body different questions. And the first
question she asked is can I ask what age this
took place? And my body said no. And she said
(08:50):
to me, a lot of times when I ask can
I ask what age and the body says no, What
that means is is it's not just one age, it's
multiple ages. And by the way, I just I'm feeling
like I need to say this. There's one part of
me that's like this is not weird at all, Like
this is totally normal. And then there's another part of
me like this is so kooky and weird, like you're
talking about like pushing on my arm and my arm
(09:12):
said no that you couldn't ask the age, Like this
doesn't make any sense. And then there's another part of
me that's like this makes perfect sense. Does this is obvious?
This is so logical? So if there's a part of
you that feels like you don't even know if kinesiology
is real or muscle testing or what the heck is
this that she's even talking about, just know that you're
not crazy. If you can suspend your disbelief for just
(09:35):
a little bit and kind of come on the ride
with me, hopefully I'll be able to wrap this up
in a way that will feel really grounded too. And
then also, Elizabeth in her episode does a great job
of explaining what exactly kinesiology is and what it does
and why it works, and why it's so important that
we listen to our bodies when they speak, So that
would also be another episode for you to go back
(09:56):
and listen to. So she asks my body, can I
ask the age? And the body says no. So she's like, okay,
well that means most likely, that means that it was
many ages. She starts asking my body about the like
(10:18):
the sector or section of my life that this took
place in, and she asks about my home life, she
asks about my church, she asks about my family, she
asks about my sibling relationships, and then finally she asks
about education and my body says yes to education. So
it's like no, no, no, no, no, yes. So she's like, okay,
(10:39):
talk to me about something that took place at every
age inside of your education, and I shared with her
the first story that came to my mind, which was
this idea that as a young child in the education system,
I realized that there were two paths that I could take.
One path was the path where I got really good grades.
(11:02):
I got lots of affirmation and validation from the adults
around me. I performed really well at school. I was
a good kid, I was on student government, I was
a leader, all these things. That was one path that
I could take. The other path that I could take
was to be this version of myself that felt very
(11:24):
authentic to who I was, which was kind of spacey,
kind of dorky, a little bit like just not super cool,
who was a little like woo wo and out there,
who was very spiritual, who couldn't figure out totally how
to turn assignments in on time, much more creative, artistic, spiritual.
Those were the two paths that I could take, and
(11:45):
I remember at various points in my education, in particular
in just the public education system, feeling like I picked
the path where I would be popular, successful, validated, approved, complimented,
the good kid, all of that like this sort of
straight and narrow path that I picked. And in choosing that,
(12:07):
I don't think that there was a writer or a
wrong choice, but in choosing that, I did, in a
way leave behind that little girl in me who is
very creative, artistic, kind of weird out there woo woo,
very spiritual, very connected to realities that are not as physical, intuitive,
very empathetic, deeply deeply feeling sensitive, soft, and not as regimented,
(12:33):
not as organized, not as good at following the rules,
following directions, turning things in on time, you know, living
up to the expectations. It was like I had to
choose between those two things, and I picked getting the
attention and validation of being the good kid. And again,
I don't think that there's a writer or a wrong choice,
(12:53):
but it was the first time in my life that
I've ever realized that those two roads were diverse in
a narrow wood, as Robert Frost would say, And I
chose the one that was a little bit more straight
and predictable. I chose the one that I knew would
get me the validation and praise and accolades that I
was looking for that made me feel good about myself,
(13:15):
and in doing that, I did leave behind this other
version of myself. So I had this realization. In her office.
I was telling her this story about how this impacts
me as an adult, about how I find myself in
a lot of different situations performing for the validation and
praise of other people rather than admitting the quirky, weird, creative,
(13:38):
artistic person that I really am underneath of all of that.
And I was saying to her in her office like
I wouldn't know how to get back to that little
girl if I tried to, Like I sometimes feel like
I try to give her, especially since meeting with Elizabeth,
I will intentionally try to give that little girl's space
to live and breathe, and it feels challenging because it
(14:00):
feels like the more practiced muscle for me is ooh,
I know what hoops I have to jump through in
order to get the validation and praise in order to
stay on the straight and narrow path, in order to
be the good kid, in order to whatever whatever, And
I don't know as easily how to be that quirky,
weird kid that I was when I was young, and
(14:23):
one thing that I've used for inspiration as I've thought
about like how to bring her back into my life.
And also I feel like I need to emphasize again,
I don't think that there is a wrong choice here.
I don't think I made the wrong choice. I just
think that I abandoned part of myself that now I
would like to reintegrate because the lessons that I learned
(14:43):
on the path that I took are important lessons. Lessons
of showing up on time, places, of understanding the expectations
of those around you, of cooperating on a project where
you've got deadlines and do dates and you've got to
turn certain things in on time. Those are all important
lessons that all of us need to learn at some
point in our life. And yet there's this other part
(15:06):
of me that got shut off or got cut off
at that point in my life that I would like
to revisit. I would like to give her more breathing room.
And one of the ways that I've inspired myself to
do that is by watching my two kids. Because I
realized as I was reflecting on everything I learned in
Elizabeth's office, when I came home and I'm parenting my
(15:29):
two children. I realized how often I'm asking them to
choose the path that I chose. I'm asking them to
choose the path of understanding expectations, meeting those expectations, jumping
through the hoops, following the rules, being on time places,
saying please and thank you. And again, none of these
things are about or wrong. It's not about right or wrong.
(15:50):
It's just like, can I allow the fullness of their
experience to exist? And can I allow the fullness of
my own experience to exist? And I realized how much
I was sort of pushing them to this one experience
of follow the rules, be a nice boy, be a
nice girl, do the right thing, jump through the hoops,
you know, get the validation, et cetera, et cetera. And
(16:10):
I just started asking myself, like, how can I give
more space and more permission for silliness, for play, for
not following the rules? You know, there's there's definitely a
strategic time to break the rules. How can I give
more permission for that? How can I give more permission
for chaos, for things to be not totally zipped up
(16:31):
and put together and put in their right exact place,
and not always to need everything to be perfectly clean
and perfectly presentable to other people. One example that's coming
to my mind right now is my daughter. She's three
and a half. Her name's Nella, and she loves to
dress herself. She's obsessed with it. She's like, doesn't want
(16:52):
any help getting dressed. She wants to go up to
her room all by herself, and she wants to dress herself.
And there are certain guidelines that I have asked her
to follow, Like she has all these play dress up
clothes and she always wants to wear them out of
the house. And for a lot of different reasons, I've
just said, like, we're not going to wear your princess
dress that you have to the park or to school
for a lot of different reasons. But beyond that, you know,
(17:14):
I have experimented with just allowing her to wear whatever
she wants to wear. Put together whatever outfit you want
to put together. It doesn't need to match, it doesn't
need to look good by my standards, It doesn't need
to be something that someone else would wear, someone else
would tell you to wear. Just experiment with putting on
what you feel like putting on today, and pay attention
to how you feel when you put those clothes on
(17:34):
your body, and so certain things like that, like she'll
come down with like a very mismatched kind of silly outfit.
But I'm like amazing, Like good for you for following
your good feelings and just expressing yourself in whatever way
feels good to you, and it's not hurting anyone, it's
not hurting me, just like allowing her to have that
freedom of self expression is very healing for me. And
(17:57):
asking myself, like, in what ways do I want to
have that freedom of self expression? In what ways have
I tried to fit myself into a box and force
myself to be this one certain way because I think
that's what's expected of me. So watching my kids has
really helped me as I think about how I want
to recapture that young part of myself who decided that
she didn't have the right or the permission to be
(18:20):
chaotic or to express herself in a way that wasn't
in an outright sense sort of celebrated by the world
around her, And watching my kids has given me a
really great visual of what it looks like to recapture
that part of myself. One of the ways that I've
(18:44):
seen this show up in my career. Is I've noticed
myself choose career paths that are going to get me
attention and accolades, that are going to more obviously provide
a paycheck, that are safer and straighter, that are are
more like logical, practical, strategic, and in the process of that,
(19:05):
there's nothing wrong with those choices. But I have abandoned
at times the paths that I feel genuinely called to
because the path is not as clear, or the path
is not as you know, it's a little more chaotic,
or it's a little bit more foggy than the clear
path that I see on the other side of things.
So it's like two roads that split off from one another,
(19:27):
and one is clearer and more strategic, and the other
one is a little bit more chaotic and confusing, And
so I've chosen the one that's clearer and more strategic,
when in reality, there's this part of me that knows
that deep down, I am more than a book coach,
I'm more than a ghostwriter, I'm more than an author.
I'm a spiritual teacher. And that really is what I
(19:50):
was put on this planet to be. That I'm an
intuitive person I'm an empathetic person. I see realities beyond
the physical reality at times, and I can sense and
understand things that not everybody can sense and understand. But
I haven't had enough confidence in myself in that path
in order to really embrace that part of my unfolding,
(20:10):
and so instead I've been like, well, the easy way
to explain this is that I'm a book coach. Like
you can come to me if you want to publish
a book, and I'm going to help you outline your story.
And that has not been a wrong path. I'm not
saying it's been wrong. I've learned so much from my
work in publishing, and I can use my gifts to
help someone who wants to publish a book, to take
a story from their life and turn it into a
(20:32):
physical product that they're able to sell. But I think
one of the things that's happening for me as I
awaken this other path, this other part of myself that
has been abandoned, is I'm realizing that actually a greater
view of my purpose in the world is not just
about helping people publish things, but about helping people better
understand the story that they're here to live. And my
(20:54):
new book, Write Your Story. It has been born out
of my work in publishing. But I really think that
the book and this podcast and all the work that
I'm doing without your Story is helping me to build
a bridge between this work that I've done in publishing,
which has been an important part of my development in
my career, and also this part of me that I
abandon somewhere along the way, who wants to come back
(21:16):
to life, who wants to have room to speak and
to breathe. Here that I have a gift of being
able to hear a story that you want to tell,
to pull out the parts of it that are most important,
to make connections between seemingly disconnected parts, to build a thread,
and to help you see your story in your life
more clearly. When you see your story more clearly, you
(21:39):
see your life more clearly. And when you see your
life more clearly, you're able to make decisions from a
better place. You're able to understand your purpose. You're able
to feel more grounded, more confident, like your feet are
on the ground. You're able to feel more at home
in your own skin. You're able to see your contribution
to the greater whole and feel more connected to the
people around you. Everything generally improves when you see your
(22:01):
life in that way. So I'm moving from this place
where I was helping mostly people who were hoping to publish,
to get a book written so that they could submit
to a publisher and get a book contract and get
their book out in the world, to really speaking to
a much broader audience of people who are like I
don't know if I would ever publish a book, maybe,
But beyond a book, I know that I have an
(22:24):
interesting story unfolding in my life, and I want to
better understand what the story is and why it matters
so much, and what makes me important inside of it.
And that's really the work that I feel that I'm
put here to do. And I feel like this time
in my life is about recollecting that part of myself
that I abandoned when I was very young in the
education system, and the part of me that wouldn't have
(22:45):
fit in there. You know, she would not have fit
in there. She didn't fit in there. She knew she didn't,
and so she needed to shape shift and to find
this other way of being so that she could find
some sense of belonging. But like Brene Brown, says that
belonging by changing yourself isn't real belonging. And I feel
that deep in my bones, and I think that's what
(23:06):
my body was trying to tell Elizabeth that day in
her office, is that the story that's causing you pain
is not really about your kidneys, or your childbirth experience
or everything that's happened in the last five years. Everything
that's happened in the last five years actually has been
about bringing you back home to that part of yourself
that you abandoned. And it has felt painful because it's
(23:28):
the dismantling of all of the things that you did
in order to fit in, in order to get validation,
in order to get positive feedback, in order to be
part of the club, in order to feel like you
mattered and were contributing. And actually that facade that you
created is preventing you from genuinely belonging and genuinely fitting
(23:49):
in and genuinely stepping into your true power and your
authenticity and what you have to contribute to the world.
And so that's why the past five years have felt painful.
But the pain and it's not really about the last
five years. The pain is about the abandoning of self
that you did when you were young, and that abandoning
of self has happened over and over and over again
at every single age, So it's not just you were ten,
(24:11):
or you were twelve, or you were nineteen. It's like,
at every age you've made the decision, I'm going to
be this version of myself who fits here and who
people can make sense of very easily, and who follows
the rules and fits in the box and fits in
one of my neat little categories. I'm going to do
that so that I can get the positive feedback that
(24:33):
I'm needing. And then the last five years of my
life have been about dismantling that persona that I created
so that I could really be my authentic, true self.
And of course that's felt painful because it's been letting
go of the validation and letting go of the accolades
and letting go of the you know. At certain points
in the last five years, and this may not make
sense from the outside looking in, but at certain points
(24:54):
in the last five years, it has felt like I'm
losing my career. I'm never going to achieve my objectives,
I'm never going to write another book, I've said that
to myself when my kids were little, like they're still little,
but when my kids were being born and I was
really in the thick of postpartum and stuff, it just
felt like, this is all it's all being taken from me,
(25:15):
it's all going away. And I think what was really
going away was the facade that I had created, the
persona that I had created in order to get positive feedback.
And what was coming to life was this version of
myself that I abandoned way long ago in the story
because I didn't think that she would fit in or
belong And all the timing is perfect, and it's all perfect,
(25:37):
and I don't fault myself for any of these choices
that I made. I made the choices that I needed
to make to survive. And I actually think that choosing
the path that I chose, I learned a lot of
really valuable skills that will be of use to me
along the rest of my life journey. But the intention
that I'm setting for myself now is about reviving and
revitalizing this little girl who is intuitive, chaotic, confusing to
(26:02):
certain people, empathetic, she's soft, she's artistic, she has a
lot to give that doesn't immediately fit into the categories
that people expect from her, and I really am focused
on reawakening her and revitalizing her and reviving her and
integrating her into my life in really meaningful ways. And
(26:25):
one of the reasons why I wanted to share this
story is because I think one of the ways that
I will integrate her into my life is one of
the first ways is integrating her into my professional life.
And I really feel like, write your Story, the podcast,
the book, the idea of write your Story is the
bridge to this new way of me and the new
(26:46):
way of my being in the world, meaning that I'm
not just a publishing coach. I'm not saying I can't
ever help someone again to write a book that they're
going to publish, or pitch to a publisher or get
an agent or whatever. I have a lot of practical
knowledge inside of the field of publishing that I think
can be useful. But what I am saying is that
my life's purpose is less about helping someone get a
(27:09):
book published and much much more about helping you understand
your story, understand the meaning of your life, understand what
you're here for, understand your purpose in the world. Understand
your connection to the broader hole. And there are gifts
that I have been given of intuition, of just understanding energy,
of being able to see things when, especially when someone
(27:32):
writes out their story, it's like I can see, I
can see beyond what's written on the page. And that's
what has helped me to be such a great publishing coach.
But it also can help me to assist someone in
moving into the next phase of their life and better
understanding what their life thread is all about. And so
(27:53):
I wanted to share this story in part because I
think you might resonate with this feeling of abandoning a
part of yourself long ago in order to fit in,
to belong, to be part of a group, to make
a contribution. I think there's a really good chance that
you resonate with leaving a part of yourself behind somewhere
along the way. And if you do resonate with that,
(28:16):
I want to just say to you that there's no
shame in making that choice. You made the choice that
you needed to make in order to survive at the time,
and you can actually have a lot of gratitude to
that version of yourself that made that choice. There's no
right or wrong answer here. It's not like you picked
the wrong path, but you picked that path, and now
how can you go back and find that version of
(28:38):
yourself that you left behind and integrate her into the
pathway that you want to build moving forward? But I
also share this story as sort of like a just
a statement I want to make about who I am
and the work that I want to do moving forward,
that anyone who works with me, whether you come to
me in a book in six months and you're actually
(28:59):
working on a book manuscript, whether you come to one
of the write your Story workshops, whether you are reading
the Writer Storybook or listening to this podcast, or whatever
it is that you're doing, I want to just clearly
state that the work that we're doing here is far
more spiritual than physical. If you never write a book,
if you never even physically write the words down on paper,
(29:21):
your story on the paper, if you never do that,
that doesn't mean that you're not doing the work that
we're doing here as a community. I said on a
podcast interview the other day that the people who are
drawn to this work are the ones who are hungry
for spiritual evolution. That's who comes to this work because
this is not for the faint of heart. This is
not just about yay. I got a six figure book contract,
(29:43):
I sold a bunch of books. I got on the
New York Times Bestsellers list. Although all of those things
are wonderful, I'm not knocking those things. It's like, if
there are the two paths separated, one is that the
path of Accolades is New York Times bestseller, sold a
bunch of copies, got my book in bookstores. That's like
the flashy, glamorous side, and there's nothing wrong with it.
(30:04):
It's not a wrong path. But the path that I'm
trying to reintegrate now, and the path that I'm trying
to walk now, is much more about getting in alignment
with the truest desires of who I came here to
be and the clues to who that person is. Our
President's side of your story, and that's what I want
to help you uncover. That's what I want to help
(30:26):
you find. That's what gets me out of better than
in the morning. That's what makes me excited to do
this work that I do. That's why I record these
podcast episodes. That's why I wrote write your story, not
because I hope you hit the New York Times List
one day, although wonderful if you do, But because I
hope that you can find a deeper meaning in your
(30:47):
life than you have been able to find before. I
hope you can go back and find the threads of
yourself that you lost, and you can reintegrate them into
your life and feel like a fuller, more whole person
than you have ever felt before. I hope that you
feel like you can really make a massive contribution from
a place of total authenticity, from your heart in this lifetime.
I hope that you're able to recapture that or reaccess
(31:11):
that in a way that you had never dreamed possible.
And that's really what I'm here to help you do,
more than I'm here to help you get an agent
and a book contract and a big publishing deal. So
that's why I wanted to tell the story for two reasons.
One because I'd ask you to consider what threads of
yourself have you left behind along the way? What parts
(31:31):
of yourself did you decide were unworthy or unnecessary or
you know, what parts did you decide wouldn't fit in
to the culture that you are a part of, And
how can you go back and recapture that essence of
yourself and pull that into the person who you are today.
And also writing your story is an amazing, incredible way
(31:53):
to recapture that essence of yourself. To sit down and
think about, what are the events of my life? How
would I tell this story? What comes up for me
on the page that I never noticed before when I
just sat down to think about it, you know, going
all the way back to the Elizabeth Bennett conversation, she
talks about how our body is speaking to us in
a way that our brains may not be. When you
sit down to the page to record your story, the
(32:17):
act of putting pen to paper activates a part of
your brain that is not the higher thinking part of
your brain. It's not the part of our brain that
we live in most of the day. It's a much
more primal part of our brain that is much closer
to your body. In fact, that part of your brain
is called your limbic system. Limb comes from the word limb,
(32:39):
just like your limbs, So your limit system is much
more primal. It's connected to your body. It's your body
speaking to you when you sit down to write your story.
And this is why writing your story can be such
a powerful tool for transformation and change because it puts
you in touch with a part of you that you
may have lost track of a very long time ago.
Thank you for bearing with me in that very difficult
subject to talk about. I don't mean difficult. I'm not
(33:00):
like feeling overly emotional or anything. I just mean it's
hard for me to capture the essence of it in words.
This episode felt a little chaotic, it felt more disorganized
than usual. I hope I did it some justice. I hope, really,
I hope you got what I'm talking about. Because I'm
sitting here, I have no notes, I have no script
in front of me. But I really wanted to communicate
(33:21):
this message to you, and I hope that it landed
for you in an important way. I hope you're walking
away with some kind of nugget that's going to help
you to move through your week with a little bit
more purpose and confidence in the authentic you and who
you truly are. And I look forward to seeing you
again here soon and talking about all the different ways
that we can use this process of writing your story
(33:43):
to recapture your authentic essence. So I have a lovely day,
and I will see you next week on the writer
Story podcast.
Pick up the pieces of your life, pulled them back
together with the word to write all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
You got the.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Words and said, don't you think it's time to let
them out and write them down and cover what it's
all about and write.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Your story.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Write you, write your story.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and today on the show,
I want to tell you a story that I haven't
told before. I really haven't told this story to anyone before.
I mean kind of literally, I haven't told it to
anyone before. It's a little out there. Maybe it's not
as weird as I'm making it up to be in
my brain, but because I haven't vocalized this story before,
(00:52):
I'm not totally sure how it's going to come out.
I've been thinking about it a lot, and I feel
really called to share it with you today, so I
know I want to do that, but I haven't verbalized it.
I haven't even written this story before, and so I'm
so grateful for you being here, for you listening, and
for your grace as I try to just get this out.
It may not be the most smooth episode I've ever recorded,
(01:14):
but for whatever reason, it feels really important to share.
So I'm going to share it with you just like
we're sitting down to lunch or sitting down a coffee
or something, and I'm going to pretend that you're sitting
across the table from me, and I'm going to pretend
that I'm holding my favorite chi which I'm not holding,
but I pretend like I am, and I'm just gonna
tell you this story like we're just friends and we're
hanging out. Part of why I'm gonna do this is
(01:34):
because this is the power of storytelling. The most beautiful
things that happen when we tell stories are when we
just authentically share from our life experience with another person
as a way of connecting and saying, hey, you're not crazy,
you're not alone, You're not the only one who's experienced this.
And I have a feeling that a lot of you
are really going to resonate with what I have to
share today, and so I'm excited to get to share
(01:56):
this story with you for the very first time. If
you listen to the episode I recorded a couple of
weeks ago with my friend Elizabeth Bennett. Elizabeth, by the way,
is an energy kinesiology expert, an energy healer. I guess
she uses energy kinesiology as a way to listen to
the body and understand and hear the story that the
(02:18):
body is trying to tell. So the whole point of
that episode was maybe your body is telling a different
story than you would tell. Like if you were to
sit down in a therapist's office or sit down across
from a friend and tell them a story, you would
tell the story one way, But what if your body
would tell the story another way. Our bodies are infinitely
wise and intuitive, and sometimes our bodies have access to
(02:38):
information that our conscious minds don't actually have access to,
and so listening to the body can be an amazing
way to go even deeper with your story. And that's
why I wanted to have Elizabeth on the show. I
met Elizabeth and I told part of this story on
the show with her. But when I met her, I
met her because I had been intuitively looking for someone
(03:00):
who could do some energy work with me that was
beyond your typical Western medicine, Like I had this sense
that there was some stuff going on in my body.
If you've been around here a while, you know. I
had a kidney surgery while I was pregnant with Charlie.
That was in twenty twenty one. I had some kidney
issues at a stint put in, and then the stint removed.
I had kidney issues after pregnancy. I've had some weird
(03:23):
phantom pains in my kidney since then, and so I
have had an MRI, I've had a cat scan, I've
had all the things done, I've had my kidneys tested.
Everything looks normal, and yet I'm still having this weird
phantom pain. So because of that, I was like on
the lookout for someone who could do some energy work
with me, just to see if there was something a
little bit deeper going on that the Western doctors weren't catching.
(03:47):
So I was already intuitively on the lookout for this,
and I had stumbled across a few options along the way,
Like I was in a coffee shop and found a
card of this energy healer and followed the link on
the card to her website and whatever, and I was
just like, oh, not really feeling the connection. There. A
couple of different instances like that had taken place where
(04:09):
I would stumble across someone's Instagram page, I would be like, no,
it doesn't really feel totally right. And so I was
just sort of open and waiting for this person to
come into my life who I felt connected to. And
when I found Elizabeth. I found her because my friend
Ruthie Lindsay, who I have also interviewed on the show,
(04:30):
she shared about Elizabeth and her work on her Instagram.
She had had Elizabeth come and talk to her substat group.
They recorded an interview. She shared part of the interview
on Instagram, and I was telling Elizabeth when I sat
down with her. When I saw this short clip of
her interview, it was like instant resonance. I was like
(04:50):
immediately drawn to her. It took me about forty five
seconds from the time I heard her talk to the
time that I made it on her website and booked
an appointment with her, because there was just an instant resonance.
It was like I knew this was the person that
I had been looking for. So I booked an appointment
with her. I ended up in her office and I
was telling her about the things that have gone on
(05:11):
with my kidneys. She was asking about any other shocks
or traumas that have happened, and I told her about
my childbirth experience with my daughter. The entire experience was
a very dramatic I tried to avoid using the word traumatic,
but in some ways it was traumatic. It was a
completely unexpected unfolding of events that happened with my daughter,
(05:32):
and there were certain parts of it that were a
little traumatic anyway. So I shared that with her and
then she just said, you know, well, let's talk to
your body and see what your body wants to show us.
So what that looks like in practicality is muscle testing.
If you've never had muscle testing done, it's basically like
small movements like imagine I'm going to stick out my
arm and Elizabeth is going to kind of tap on
(05:54):
my arm with a single finger, and she's going to
ask questions, and if my arm falters or moves when
she asks the question, then I guess that's like a
no answer from my body. And if it if it
stays strong, that's a yes answer from my body. So
if you lean into this idea of kinesiology and muscle testing,
you could ask your body any yes or no question
(06:17):
and your body's going to give you an answer. So
you could ask your body, do you need this supplement,
do you need a massage? Do you need to take
a break, do you need to take a nap? And
your body's going to give you a yes or no
answer based on this muscle testing. Now, I'm oversimplifying because
there are obviously other things that you need to do
in order to get the answers that are the correct answers.
(06:39):
Elizabeth teaches an entire class that teaches you how to
muscle test yourself, so you can literally do this in
real time to ask your body what it needs. But
the point I'm trying to make is that there can
be a difference between what you think you need using
your brain and what your body actually says it needs,
or the story that you you think you need to
(07:01):
tell using your brain and the story that your body
is actually trying to tell. So, for example, I go
into her office that day, I think the story that
I'm there to tell is like the last five years
have been such a wild ride for me. I haven't
been able to fully integrate all of the experiences. It
has felt traumatic at different points, my daughter's birth, the
kidney surgery, while I'm pregnant with my son, having this stunt,
(07:24):
put in, having it taken out, moving across the country,
you know, all these different things that have taken place
in my life. And Elizabeth is like, yeah, your body's
saying that's not the thing that it came here to
talk about. And I'm like, wait, but hold on. There's
like I'm having this phantom pain it's like in my kidney.
And she's like, that's not the thing that your body
came here to talk about. That's not the story that
(07:46):
it's trying to tell. So I was like, okay, okay,
I'm going to stay open and I'm going to listen
because in my brain I'm so on this track of
I'm here to talk about the kidney stuff. And when
she was testing my energy systems, she is like, your
kidneys are actually fine. They might be out of balance
because another part of your body is out of balance,
(08:07):
but it's not the kidney system that's asking for attention
right now. So when she was testing my energy systems,
she was like, it's actually your heart that's asking for
attention right now, which, in a weird way did resonate,
like it did make sense to me, but not in
a logical kind of way. I couldn't pinpoint why it
would be my heart. I've had no heart problems physically speaking,
(08:29):
and so I was like, I'm just going to stay
open to this experience and open to what you know,
Elizabeth might want to share with me and what my
body might want to share with me today. So we
continued on with the appointment, and she was muscle testing
me and asking my body different questions. And the first
question she asked is can I ask what age this
took place? And my body said no. And she said
(08:50):
to me, a lot of times when I ask can
I ask what age and the body says no, What
that means is is it's not just one age, it's
multiple ages. And by the way, I just I'm feeling
like I need to say this. There's one part of
me that's like this is not weird at all, Like
this is totally normal. And then there's another part of
me like this is so kooky and weird, like you're
talking about like pushing on my arm and my arm
(09:12):
said no that you couldn't ask the age, Like this
doesn't make any sense. And then there's another part of
me that's like this makes perfect sense. Does this is obvious?
This is so logical? So if there's a part of
you that feels like you don't even know if kinesiology
is real or muscle testing or what the heck is
this that she's even talking about, just know that you're
not crazy. If you can suspend your disbelief for just
(09:35):
a little bit and kind of come on the ride
with me, hopefully I'll be able to wrap this up
in a way that will feel really grounded too. And
then also, Elizabeth in her episode does a great job
of explaining what exactly kinesiology is and what it does
and why it works, and why it's so important that
we listen to our bodies when they speak, So that
would also be another episode for you to go back
(09:56):
and listen to. So she asks my body, can I
ask the age? And the body says no. So she's like, okay,
well that means most likely, that means that it was
many ages. She starts asking my body about the like
(10:18):
the sector or section of my life that this took
place in, and she asks about my home life, she
asks about my church, she asks about my family, she
asks about my sibling relationships, and then finally she asks
about education and my body says yes to education. So
it's like no, no, no, no, no, yes. So she's like, okay,
(10:39):
talk to me about something that took place at every
age inside of your education, and I shared with her
the first story that came to my mind, which was
this idea that as a young child in the education system,
I realized that there were two paths that I could take.
One path was the path where I got really good grades.
(11:02):
I got lots of affirmation and validation from the adults
around me. I performed really well at school. I was
a good kid, I was on student government, I was
a leader, all these things. That was one path that
I could take. The other path that I could take
was to be this version of myself that felt very
(11:24):
authentic to who I was, which was kind of spacey,
kind of dorky, a little bit like just not super cool,
who was a little like woo wo and out there,
who was very spiritual, who couldn't figure out totally how
to turn assignments in on time, much more creative, artistic, spiritual.
Those were the two paths that I could take, and
(11:45):
I remember at various points in my education, in particular
in just the public education system, feeling like I picked
the path where I would be popular, successful, validated, approved, complimented,
the good kid, all of that like this sort of
straight and narrow path that I picked. And in choosing that,
(12:07):
I don't think that there was a writer or a
wrong choice, but in choosing that, I did, in a
way leave behind that little girl in me who is
very creative, artistic, kind of weird out there woo woo,
very spiritual, very connected to realities that are not as physical, intuitive,
very empathetic, deeply deeply feeling sensitive, soft, and not as regimented,
(12:33):
not as organized, not as good at following the rules,
following directions, turning things in on time, you know, living
up to the expectations. It was like I had to
choose between those two things, and I picked getting the
attention and validation of being the good kid. And again,
I don't think that there's a writer or a wrong choice,
(12:53):
but it was the first time in my life that
I've ever realized that those two roads were diverse in
a narrow wood, as Robert Frost would say, And I
chose the one that was a little bit more straight
and predictable. I chose the one that I knew would
get me the validation and praise and accolades that I
was looking for that made me feel good about myself,
(13:15):
and in doing that, I did leave behind this other
version of myself. So I had this realization. In her office.
I was telling her this story about how this impacts
me as an adult, about how I find myself in
a lot of different situations performing for the validation and
praise of other people rather than admitting the quirky, weird, creative,
(13:38):
artistic person that I really am underneath of all of that.
And I was saying to her in her office like
I wouldn't know how to get back to that little
girl if I tried to, Like I sometimes feel like
I try to give her, especially since meeting with Elizabeth,
I will intentionally try to give that little girl's space
to live and breathe, and it feels challenging because it
(14:00):
feels like the more practiced muscle for me is ooh,
I know what hoops I have to jump through in
order to get the validation and praise in order to
stay on the straight and narrow path, in order to
be the good kid, in order to whatever whatever, And
I don't know as easily how to be that quirky,
weird kid that I was when I was young, and
(14:23):
one thing that I've used for inspiration as I've thought
about like how to bring her back into my life.
And also I feel like I need to emphasize again,
I don't think that there is a wrong choice here.
I don't think I made the wrong choice. I just
think that I abandoned part of myself that now I
would like to reintegrate because the lessons that I learned
(14:43):
on the path that I took are important lessons. Lessons
of showing up on time, places, of understanding the expectations
of those around you, of cooperating on a project where
you've got deadlines and do dates and you've got to
turn certain things in on time. Those are all important
lessons that all of us need to learn at some
point in our life. And yet there's this other part
(15:06):
of me that got shut off or got cut off
at that point in my life that I would like
to revisit. I would like to give her more breathing room.
And one of the ways that I've inspired myself to
do that is by watching my two kids. Because I
realized as I was reflecting on everything I learned in
Elizabeth's office, when I came home and I'm parenting my
(15:29):
two children. I realized how often I'm asking them to
choose the path that I chose. I'm asking them to
choose the path of understanding expectations, meeting those expectations, jumping
through the hoops, following the rules, being on time places,
saying please and thank you. And again, none of these
things are about or wrong. It's not about right or wrong.
(15:50):
It's just like, can I allow the fullness of their
experience to exist? And can I allow the fullness of
my own experience to exist? And I realized how much
I was sort of pushing them to this one experience
of follow the rules, be a nice boy, be a
nice girl, do the right thing, jump through the hoops,
you know, get the validation, et cetera, et cetera. And
(16:10):
I just started asking myself, like, how can I give
more space and more permission for silliness, for play, for
not following the rules? You know, there's there's definitely a
strategic time to break the rules. How can I give
more permission for that? How can I give more permission
for chaos, for things to be not totally zipped up
(16:31):
and put together and put in their right exact place,
and not always to need everything to be perfectly clean
and perfectly presentable to other people. One example that's coming
to my mind right now is my daughter. She's three
and a half. Her name's Nella, and she loves to
dress herself. She's obsessed with it. She's like, doesn't want
(16:52):
any help getting dressed. She wants to go up to
her room all by herself, and she wants to dress herself.
And there are certain guidelines that I have asked her
to follow, Like she has all these play dress up
clothes and she always wants to wear them out of
the house. And for a lot of different reasons, I've
just said, like, we're not going to wear your princess
dress that you have to the park or to school
for a lot of different reasons. But beyond that, you know,
(17:14):
I have experimented with just allowing her to wear whatever
she wants to wear. Put together whatever outfit you want
to put together. It doesn't need to match, it doesn't
need to look good by my standards, It doesn't need
to be something that someone else would wear, someone else
would tell you to wear. Just experiment with putting on
what you feel like putting on today, and pay attention
to how you feel when you put those clothes on
(17:34):
your body, and so certain things like that, like she'll
come down with like a very mismatched kind of silly outfit.
But I'm like amazing, Like good for you for following
your good feelings and just expressing yourself in whatever way
feels good to you, and it's not hurting anyone, it's
not hurting me, just like allowing her to have that
freedom of self expression is very healing for me. And
(17:57):
asking myself, like, in what ways do I want to
have that freedom of self expression? In what ways have
I tried to fit myself into a box and force
myself to be this one certain way because I think
that's what's expected of me. So watching my kids has
really helped me as I think about how I want
to recapture that young part of myself who decided that
she didn't have the right or the permission to be
(18:20):
chaotic or to express herself in a way that wasn't
in an outright sense sort of celebrated by the world
around her, And watching my kids has given me a
really great visual of what it looks like to recapture
that part of myself. One of the ways that I've
(18:44):
seen this show up in my career. Is I've noticed
myself choose career paths that are going to get me
attention and accolades, that are going to more obviously provide
a paycheck, that are safer and straighter, that are are
more like logical, practical, strategic, and in the process of that,
(19:05):
there's nothing wrong with those choices. But I have abandoned
at times the paths that I feel genuinely called to
because the path is not as clear, or the path
is not as you know, it's a little more chaotic,
or it's a little bit more foggy than the clear
path that I see on the other side of things.
So it's like two roads that split off from one another,
(19:27):
and one is clearer and more strategic, and the other
one is a little bit more chaotic and confusing, And
so I've chosen the one that's clearer and more strategic,
when in reality, there's this part of me that knows
that deep down, I am more than a book coach,
I'm more than a ghostwriter, I'm more than an author.
I'm a spiritual teacher. And that really is what I
(19:50):
was put on this planet to be. That I'm an
intuitive person I'm an empathetic person. I see realities beyond
the physical reality at times, and I can sense and
understand things that not everybody can sense and understand. But
I haven't had enough confidence in myself in that path
in order to really embrace that part of my unfolding,
(20:10):
and so instead I've been like, well, the easy way
to explain this is that I'm a book coach. Like
you can come to me if you want to publish
a book, and I'm going to help you outline your story.
And that has not been a wrong path. I'm not
saying it's been wrong. I've learned so much from my
work in publishing, and I can use my gifts to
help someone who wants to publish a book, to take
a story from their life and turn it into a
(20:32):
physical product that they're able to sell. But I think
one of the things that's happening for me as I
awaken this other path, this other part of myself that
has been abandoned, is I'm realizing that actually a greater
view of my purpose in the world is not just
about helping people publish things, but about helping people better
understand the story that they're here to live. And my
(20:54):
new book, Write Your Story. It has been born out
of my work in publishing. But I really think that
the book and this podcast and all the work that
I'm doing without your Story is helping me to build
a bridge between this work that I've done in publishing,
which has been an important part of my development in
my career, and also this part of me that I
abandon somewhere along the way, who wants to come back
(21:16):
to life, who wants to have room to speak and
to breathe. Here that I have a gift of being
able to hear a story that you want to tell,
to pull out the parts of it that are most important,
to make connections between seemingly disconnected parts, to build a thread,
and to help you see your story in your life
more clearly. When you see your story more clearly, you
(21:39):
see your life more clearly. And when you see your
life more clearly, you're able to make decisions from a
better place. You're able to understand your purpose. You're able
to feel more grounded, more confident, like your feet are
on the ground. You're able to feel more at home
in your own skin. You're able to see your contribution
to the greater whole and feel more connected to the
people around you. Everything generally improves when you see your
(22:01):
life in that way. So I'm moving from this place
where I was helping mostly people who were hoping to publish,
to get a book written so that they could submit
to a publisher and get a book contract and get
their book out in the world, to really speaking to
a much broader audience of people who are like I
don't know if I would ever publish a book, maybe,
But beyond a book, I know that I have an
(22:24):
interesting story unfolding in my life, and I want to
better understand what the story is and why it matters
so much, and what makes me important inside of it.
And that's really the work that I feel that I'm
put here to do. And I feel like this time
in my life is about recollecting that part of myself
that I abandoned when I was very young in the
education system, and the part of me that wouldn't have
(22:45):
fit in there. You know, she would not have fit
in there. She didn't fit in there. She knew she didn't,
and so she needed to shape shift and to find
this other way of being so that she could find
some sense of belonging. But like Brene Brown, says that
belonging by changing yourself isn't real belonging. And I feel
that deep in my bones, and I think that's what
(23:06):
my body was trying to tell Elizabeth that day in
her office, is that the story that's causing you pain
is not really about your kidneys, or your childbirth experience
or everything that's happened in the last five years. Everything
that's happened in the last five years actually has been
about bringing you back home to that part of yourself
that you abandoned. And it has felt painful because it's
(23:28):
the dismantling of all of the things that you did
in order to fit in, in order to get validation,
in order to get positive feedback, in order to be
part of the club, in order to feel like you
mattered and were contributing. And actually that facade that you
created is preventing you from genuinely belonging and genuinely fitting
(23:49):
in and genuinely stepping into your true power and your
authenticity and what you have to contribute to the world.
And so that's why the past five years have felt painful.
But the pain and it's not really about the last
five years. The pain is about the abandoning of self
that you did when you were young, and that abandoning
of self has happened over and over and over again
at every single age, So it's not just you were ten,
(24:11):
or you were twelve, or you were nineteen. It's like,
at every age you've made the decision, I'm going to
be this version of myself who fits here and who
people can make sense of very easily, and who follows
the rules and fits in the box and fits in
one of my neat little categories. I'm going to do
that so that I can get the positive feedback that
(24:33):
I'm needing. And then the last five years of my
life have been about dismantling that persona that I created
so that I could really be my authentic, true self.
And of course that's felt painful because it's been letting
go of the validation and letting go of the accolades
and letting go of the you know. At certain points
in the last five years, and this may not make
sense from the outside looking in, but at certain points
(24:54):
in the last five years, it has felt like I'm
losing my career. I'm never going to achieve my objectives,
I'm never going to write another book, I've said that
to myself when my kids were little, like they're still little,
but when my kids were being born and I was
really in the thick of postpartum and stuff, it just
felt like, this is all it's all being taken from me,
(25:15):
it's all going away. And I think what was really
going away was the facade that I had created, the
persona that I had created in order to get positive feedback.
And what was coming to life was this version of
myself that I abandoned way long ago in the story
because I didn't think that she would fit in or
belong And all the timing is perfect, and it's all perfect,
(25:37):
and I don't fault myself for any of these choices
that I made. I made the choices that I needed
to make to survive. And I actually think that choosing
the path that I chose, I learned a lot of
really valuable skills that will be of use to me
along the rest of my life journey. But the intention
that I'm setting for myself now is about reviving and
revitalizing this little girl who is intuitive, chaotic, confusing to
(26:02):
certain people, empathetic, she's soft, she's artistic, she has a
lot to give that doesn't immediately fit into the categories
that people expect from her, and I really am focused
on reawakening her and revitalizing her and reviving her and
integrating her into my life in really meaningful ways. And
(26:25):
one of the reasons why I wanted to share this
story is because I think one of the ways that
I will integrate her into my life is one of
the first ways is integrating her into my professional life.
And I really feel like, write your Story, the podcast,
the book, the idea of write your Story is the
bridge to this new way of me and the new
(26:46):
way of my being in the world, meaning that I'm
not just a publishing coach. I'm not saying I can't
ever help someone again to write a book that they're
going to publish, or pitch to a publisher or get
an agent or whatever. I have a lot of practical
knowledge inside of the field of publishing that I think
can be useful. But what I am saying is that
my life's purpose is less about helping someone get a
(27:09):
book published and much much more about helping you understand
your story, understand the meaning of your life, understand what
you're here for, understand your purpose in the world. Understand
your connection to the broader hole. And there are gifts
that I have been given of intuition, of just understanding energy,
of being able to see things when, especially when someone
(27:32):
writes out their story, it's like I can see, I
can see beyond what's written on the page. And that's
what has helped me to be such a great publishing coach.
But it also can help me to assist someone in
moving into the next phase of their life and better
understanding what their life thread is all about. And so
(27:53):
I wanted to share this story in part because I
think you might resonate with this feeling of abandoning a
part of yourself long ago in order to fit in,
to belong, to be part of a group, to make
a contribution. I think there's a really good chance that
you resonate with leaving a part of yourself behind somewhere
along the way. And if you do resonate with that,
(28:16):
I want to just say to you that there's no
shame in making that choice. You made the choice that
you needed to make in order to survive at the time,
and you can actually have a lot of gratitude to
that version of yourself that made that choice. There's no
right or wrong answer here. It's not like you picked
the wrong path, but you picked that path, and now
how can you go back and find that version of
(28:38):
yourself that you left behind and integrate her into the
pathway that you want to build moving forward? But I
also share this story as sort of like a just
a statement I want to make about who I am
and the work that I want to do moving forward,
that anyone who works with me, whether you come to
me in a book in six months and you're actually
(28:59):
working on a book manuscript, whether you come to one
of the write your Story workshops, whether you are reading
the Writer Storybook or listening to this podcast, or whatever
it is that you're doing, I want to just clearly
state that the work that we're doing here is far
more spiritual than physical. If you never write a book,
if you never even physically write the words down on paper,
(29:21):
your story on the paper, if you never do that,
that doesn't mean that you're not doing the work that
we're doing here as a community. I said on a
podcast interview the other day that the people who are
drawn to this work are the ones who are hungry
for spiritual evolution. That's who comes to this work because
this is not for the faint of heart. This is
not just about yay. I got a six figure book contract,
(29:43):
I sold a bunch of books. I got on the
New York Times Bestsellers list. Although all of those things
are wonderful, I'm not knocking those things. It's like, if
there are the two paths separated, one is that the
path of Accolades is New York Times bestseller, sold a
bunch of copies, got my book in bookstores. That's like
the flashy, glamorous side, and there's nothing wrong with it.
(30:04):
It's not a wrong path. But the path that I'm
trying to reintegrate now, and the path that I'm trying
to walk now, is much more about getting in alignment
with the truest desires of who I came here to
be and the clues to who that person is. Our
President's side of your story, and that's what I want
to help you uncover. That's what I want to help
(30:26):
you find. That's what gets me out of better than
in the morning. That's what makes me excited to do
this work that I do. That's why I record these
podcast episodes. That's why I wrote write your story, not
because I hope you hit the New York Times List
one day, although wonderful if you do, But because I
hope that you can find a deeper meaning in your
(30:47):
life than you have been able to find before. I
hope you can go back and find the threads of
yourself that you lost, and you can reintegrate them into
your life and feel like a fuller, more whole person
than you have ever felt before. I hope that you
feel like you can really make a massive contribution from
a place of total authenticity, from your heart in this lifetime.
I hope that you're able to recapture that or reaccess
(31:11):
that in a way that you had never dreamed possible.
And that's really what I'm here to help you do,
more than I'm here to help you get an agent
and a book contract and a big publishing deal. So
that's why I wanted to tell the story for two reasons.
One because I'd ask you to consider what threads of
yourself have you left behind along the way? What parts
(31:31):
of yourself did you decide were unworthy or unnecessary or
you know, what parts did you decide wouldn't fit in
to the culture that you are a part of, And
how can you go back and recapture that essence of
yourself and pull that into the person who you are today.
And also writing your story is an amazing, incredible way
(31:53):
to recapture that essence of yourself. To sit down and
think about, what are the events of my life? How
would I tell this story? What comes up for me
on the page that I never noticed before when I
just sat down to think about it, you know, going
all the way back to the Elizabeth Bennett conversation, she
talks about how our body is speaking to us in
a way that our brains may not be. When you
sit down to the page to record your story, the
(32:17):
act of putting pen to paper activates a part of
your brain that is not the higher thinking part of
your brain. It's not the part of our brain that
we live in most of the day. It's a much
more primal part of our brain that is much closer
to your body. In fact, that part of your brain
is called your limbic system. Limb comes from the word limb,
(32:39):
just like your limbs, So your limit system is much
more primal. It's connected to your body. It's your body
speaking to you when you sit down to write your story.
And this is why writing your story can be such
a powerful tool for transformation and change because it puts
you in touch with a part of you that you
may have lost track of a very long time ago.
Thank you for bearing with me in that very difficult
subject to talk about. I don't mean difficult. I'm not
(33:00):
like feeling overly emotional or anything. I just mean it's
hard for me to capture the essence of it in words.
This episode felt a little chaotic, it felt more disorganized
than usual. I hope I did it some justice. I hope, really,
I hope you got what I'm talking about. Because I'm
sitting here, I have no notes, I have no script
in front of me. But I really wanted to communicate
(33:21):
this message to you, and I hope that it landed
for you in an important way. I hope you're walking
away with some kind of nugget that's going to help
you to move through your week with a little bit
more purpose and confidence in the authentic you and who
you truly are. And I look forward to seeing you
again here soon and talking about all the different ways
that we can use this process of writing your story
(33:43):
to recapture your authentic essence. So I have a lovely day,
and I will see you next week on the writer
Story podcast.
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