August 12, 2025 • 36 mins
Does your life ever feel like it moves at an absolutely break-neck pace?
Maybe that pace works well for you or maybe, over time, you start to feel like you’re drinking from a fire hose.
Like you’re overwhelmed with experiences and information, unable to integrate and disconnected from everything that is happening.
If that sounds true for you, today’s episode offers a meditation I’ve been using lately to slow things down and live with more peace.
Maybe you naturally move with intention through your life.
Maybe you LOVE moving quickly.
Whatever pace you choose to move, I hope this new phrase inspires you to reflect on how your pace might be affecting your wellbeing; and that it brings you even the smallest measure of deep peace.
Sign up for a yoga class taught by Ally for free on the MindBody app.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Follow Ally on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allyfallon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold. It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, 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 I am here
this week with a brand new episode. I'm so excited
to share with you. I want to talk about a
phrase that I've been using to help myself make sense
of my life, to process my life when inevitably things
happen that are unexpected, or when changes take place, or
(00:53):
when things get really busy and crazy and chaotic and
there's a lot going on and I'm having a hard
time processing it, or and there's big decisions to be
made and I don't know which way to go left
or right, you know, black or white. It's like, how
do I make the right decision in this situation? Or
when problems arise speed bumps, you know, just inevitable life
(01:14):
challenges come up and I'm not sure how to navigate them.
This is a phrase that I've been using for myself
to help myself navigate those moments, to make sense of them,
to shape my own inner landscape, and help myself, you know,
feel soothed as I move through the process. And also
to just direct my focus my decision making, like to
(01:36):
help me make those decisions or to help me, you know,
solve a problem or mitigate something that comes up at
the last minute. This is a phrase that's been like
a mantra to me. It's been a meditation, it's been
a bit of an intention that I have set for myself.
And I find this to be such a supportive tool
and so helpful. And it didn't come from me, by
the way, I'll tell you the story of where it
(01:57):
came from today on the podcast, I'm giving a little
shout out to my friend Julie.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Here.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I'm going to share with you how the phrase came
up in my conversation with her, the moment that she
gave me this phrase, and how I've been using it
since then. And then I'll offer it as an invitation
to you if it feels good to use this as
a similar meditation or invitation in your own life. Yeah,
(02:22):
to use this phrase if it feels helpful for you,
It has been extremely helpful for me. It feels so supportive.
It feels like a way that I one of the
many ways that I am reparenting myself in my life,
as so many of us are, and just providing myself
helpful context so that I can reorient my nervous system
in a very chaotic world. So here's the story. I'm
(02:45):
going to back up a little bit because you need
context in order to understand the story. But if you've
been here a while, some of this might be repeats,
so I'm going to fly through it really quickly. If
you've been around, you know that the last year for
me has been filled with a lot of changes and
a lot of loss. I lost my dad last October.
I lost a pregnancy before that. Before that, my husband's
business venture that he had invested so much time and
(03:08):
so much money into fell apart, and even though it
was his business, it really affected me and we just
had a six month The second half of last year
was just kind of an onslaught of disappointments, you know, failures.
Although I don't love that word, I don't think I
would necessarily currently today use that word to describe the
(03:28):
second half of last year, but it definitely felt like
that at the time. So disappointments, failures, setbacks, problems, issues, losses, grief,
different than how I expected it to go. That was
the theme of the second half of twenty twenty four
for me, and so that meant that at the end
of last year I had to make some pretty significant
changes just to make my life work for me. So
(03:50):
I took a step back from my business. I stopped
taking new clients. I decided I wasn't going to run
a cohort of my program, which I do every year
in January, my book writing program for authors, we always
run a cohort in January, and I chose not to
do that because I just needed to create some space
for myself to hibernate, to grieve, to feel through what
I was feeling, and to figure out it felt like
(04:11):
something was shifting and changing, but I wasn't totally sure
what and I knew something was coming, but again I
didn't know what that was, and so I just needed
some time and space to figure that out.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Now.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Immediately, when I made this announcement that I was not
going to be taking one on one clients, anymore, and
that I was pausing my online program, I started getting
messages from people. I mean a lot of messages from
people that were like, Oh, I'm so sad I was
planning on taking the program, or thank you so much
for everything you've done. This is such a massively important program.
Thank you, and you know, take all the time that
(04:43):
you need. Like lots of really like loving, supportive messages
from people. And then I also got a handful of
messages from people that were equally as loving and supportive,
but that were like, Hey, is there something that we
could do to support you, to help you keep the
doors open to this program, because it's such an important
program and it's significant and it has the POTENTI to
help so many authors. And so I started having conversations
with a handful of people who were interested in maybe
(05:05):
like a partnership or you know, potentially a buyout or
something like that. And I had a handful of those conversations,
and I really came in with an open heart and
an open mind, and I carried each of those conversations
to their inevitable conclusion. And it was kind of like
a long from January of this year until present day.
(05:26):
So We're in August right now, as I sit here
recording this, It's been a long process of like staying
open to the idea, keeping my mind open, keeping my
heart open, and also really not finding something that felt
perfectly a lot or taking all the steps that I
could take in terms of like receiving the help, receiving
the support, potentially finding a partner, but just each of
(05:47):
these potential partnerships, we got to a place where it
just seemed like it wasn't going to come to fruition,
and so I carried out each of those conversations until
the end. But as this was all unfolding, I remember
feeling and like this sense of responsibility that like, Okay,
I do have this program that people really appreciate they
want to be part of. I want to allow the
(06:08):
legacy to continue to move forward. There are all these
people who are offering to help, and who are you know,
bringing resources to the table or suggesting these different ways
that this could work. And I'm having these conversations and
I really do want to stay open to this and
I love this idea and feeling almost like a pressure
to make a decision or to make make a call,
like yeah, just pick a partner or make a call
(06:30):
or say yes or you know, put this thing in motion.
And yet at the same time, I'm in my own
process of grieving of losing my dad, of you know,
integrating the experiences of the last six months of my life,
and those two processes were happening concurrently, and there's part
of me that is a very human part that wants
(06:52):
to be like, Okay, can we just speed up this process?
Can we microwave this a little bit and move through
this messy grief part and move move on to the
next part where I get to relaunch the program, And
maybe I do that with a partner, or maybe I
do that without whatever. Can we just kind of get
back to our regularly scheduled program. But every time that
I would think about this is the point I'm trying
to make. Every time I would try to think about
(07:14):
doing that, I would start to feel anxious. I would
start to feel like like something just I couldn't put
my finger on it. And I would sit for hours
and talk to my husband about it, because he was
really trying to help me clarify what it was that
was stopping me from making a choice. And every time
we would sit down and talk about it. We would
talk for hours and I really couldn't put it into words,
(07:37):
but I just knew that I knew that, I knew
that it just wasn't the right time. It just wasn't
the right time to make a choice. It wasn't the
right time to make a call. It wasn't time to
move forward. It was time to sit still, to be quiet,
to get off Instagram, to get off Facebook, to get
off you know, to just sort of like cocoon myself,
(07:59):
to hiberning and to let this unfold at the pace
of peace, which I did not have that language at
the time. But I was having this conversation with my
friend Julie Walton, who I'm going to give a shout
out to in this episode. I was having a conversation
with her because at one point I had reached out
to her saying like, hey, there are these conversations happening.
(08:19):
There are a few people who are interested in maybe,
like you know, partnering to bring back a book in
six months. She had been a part of an original
cohort of a book in six months and had been
a really supportive participant in the program. So she was
part of the program. She would always like pull these
groups of people together. She was like, how can I help?
(08:39):
Can I, you know, take notes on the calls? Can I?
There were a handful of things that she would do
for me that were extremely helpful and that just contributed
a lot to the community. And so I reached out
to her and was like, I literally don't know you
know where you are in your life or what your
work life looks like these days, but if we were
to bring back a book in six months, is something
(09:00):
that you might be interested in collaborating with me on
if I needed someone who could be, like, you know,
a community manager or something along those lines. And at
one point she and I sat down and had about
an hour long conversation about this, and we threw around
a bunch of ideas and I basically just told her
at the end of the call, you know, at the
beginning of the call, I was very candid with her
(09:20):
that I'm like, this is an exploratory conversation at this point,
like I don't have a partner, I don't have a
plan to move forward. I don't really know what's going
to happen with this. I'm just kind of staying open
to these ideas and I'm exploring my options, and I
was just curious, is this something you might be interested in?
And she was similar. She was open to the idea
of having the conversation with me, but not necessarily committing
(09:41):
to anything, and just sort of like talking about, like,
if we were going to do something like this, what
might that look like. So she and I had this
long conversation, and at the end of the conversation, she
said to me, you know, I think you can trust
yourself to move at the pace of peace. And that
statement stayed with me because I think she could see
(10:03):
and you know, I was being very open with her
about this the dilemma that I was feeling that there
are these people who want to be able to benefit
from this program, and I know that it's so powerful
and the content is there and everything is kind of
like it's all available, So how can we make this
available to people with like the least amount of expectation
(10:24):
or tax on me presently because there's just a lot
of other stuff going on for me. And so she
was sensing my dilemma and basically saying, you don't have
to make a decision right this minute. You can trust
yourself to move at the pace of peace. Whatever this
anxiety is that you're having about the program or making
(10:44):
a decision, the anxiety is enough of a reason for
you to just take a pause and to slow down
and to allow yourself all the space and all the
time that you need in order to make the decision
that feels right for you. And it might feel like
there's a deadline or a timeline on this thing, but
you can actually just choose to move at the pace
of peace. And I really took that phrase to heart
(11:09):
and took it on as my own and have started
using it in every circumstance in my life. So anyway,
Julie and I have this conversation, she offers this phrase
to me, it really struck a chord with me, and
(11:30):
I just was like, I love this concept of moving
at the pace of piece. And I think one of
the reasons why this struck such a chord with me
and why I held on to it so tightly, is
because it is the opposite of how I have lived
my life. In fact, if you ask my parents or
anyone who knew me at a young age, or really
anyone who knew me for most of my life, the
(11:51):
pace at which I have lived my life is like
one thousand miles an hour, and both of my parents
would have said that to you. My dad, if he
was still here, would that was maybe his biggest frustration
with me was that he felt like he could never
keep up. I was always just like onto the next thing,
onto the next thing, onto the next thing. And I
did come into this life with just a tremendous amount
(12:12):
of energy, like almost energizer bunny ish, and have always
just crammed a thousand things into every day. I'm always
bouncing from one thing to the next. I have so
many interests, and so I think that's part of it.
Is just temperament and how I was born and how
I was wired, and part of it, I think now
as an adult at forty two years old, looking back
(12:32):
on this also has to be trauma that I think
we move quickly through our lives when we're afraid to
feel whatever is in the present moment. I mean, I
think about those days after losing my dad and just
the difficulty of the clothes of twenty twenty four, how
there was a part of me that felt like I
want to just hibernate. I want to be in a cocoon.
(12:53):
I want to, you know, just rest and kind of
talk to nobody and be in silence and be at
home by myself, my comfort zone. And there's part of
me that's like I want to just bounce right out
of this, like I want to just snap out of
it and fast forward through this, move on to the
next thing. There. I can sense that there is a
part of me that understands that I could avoid some
(13:13):
of the pain of feeling sad or feeling lost, or
feeling depressed or feeling whatever if I just build another business,
or if I just take on another task or take
on another job or something like that. So I think
there's both of those things at play, both how I'm
wired and my temperament and also just trauma that lived
(13:34):
in my body that I was trying to avoid feeling
whatever it was I didn't want to feel, avoiding feeling
that by moving at an absolute breakneck pace through my life.
And this continued has continued for most of my life.
And I've noticed since I've taken on this mantra of
moving at the pace of peace, and since I've reminded
(13:56):
myself this of this on a daily basis, I'm realizing saying,
how this is still a huge pattern for me that exists,
Like I'm using this many many times a day to
slow myself down and give myself more space and to
really check in with my body and ask, like, Okay,
aside from how you think about this, Like, aside from
(14:16):
the strategy that your brain is doing, the strategy that
your brain is making up, I should say, aside from that,
how does your body, like check in with your body
and how does your body feel about this? And your
body will probably tell you something different, or my body
has been telling me something different, because my brain can
come up with a solution, or my brain can come
(14:36):
up with a reason, or my brain can come up
with a story or a narrative or whatever. But my
body will tell me how I feel about this decision
that I'm about to make, or this you know, activity
that I'm about to go do, or this plan that
I'm about to make, or something I'm about to put
on my calendar. My body will give me usually a
(14:57):
different piece of information about that thing. And I've started
just checking in with myself and saying, is this am
I moving at the pace of peace? Is this me
moving at the pace of peace? And I've noticed that
moving at the pace of piece is not only counterintuitive
to me personally, to my own patterning, but it's also extremely,
(15:18):
extremely culturally counterintuitive. It's running backwards to how our culture runs.
So in order to move at the pace of peace,
I not only have to short circuit my own patterning,
but I also have to short circuit, or at least
move against the grain of the patterns of the broader
culture that we live in. So maybe that there's a
third reason there that I have moved so quickly is
(15:39):
that I've gotten a lot of accolades for that. I've
gotten a lot of positive feedback for being so kind
of Johnny on the spot, like I'm always at everything.
I always do, you know, have my hand in a
little bit of everything. I am the one who, like
growing up, would show up to every church function and
show up to volunteer at every single thing, and I
would never miss an activity, and I would never miss
(15:59):
a practice, and I you know, I mean I was
like the straight a student. I think I've talked about
this on the podcast before too, that that's an archetype
of myself that is only a small part of who
I am, but is a mask that I would put
on early in my life and through a lot of
my life to survive was the archetype of the straight
(16:20):
A student that I knew how to walk into a
space and be the best of the best at absolutely
everything and perform in a way that I could get attention.
And straight A's like, you know, positive recognition, positive affirmation
from those around me. And the more that I've reflected
on this, the more work I've done, the more healing
work I've done, the more I've realized that this straight
(16:42):
A student is not really who I am. I'm not
saying that it's not at all who I am. I mean,
there may be small parts of it that are, but
it's not really who I am. It's only a small
fragment of who I am. Or it's a mask that
I wear to make, you know, to make myself known
in a certain setting. And so I'm operating against that
(17:03):
when I say to myself, Okay, we're going to slow
this way down. We're going to move at the pace
of peace. I think I got off on a long
tangent there, But my point is that there's three kind
of things operating here. One is my temperament or my
original wiring. One is my patterning or my trauma, my
way of moving through the world as a means of survival,
(17:25):
you know, my the mask that I wear in order
to survive and thrive in the world. And then one
is the world at large, like how the world actually
operates and who the world rewards and what the world
rewards and the culture that we're in and how quickly
things move. And so there's all those three things operating
that make you feel like, oh my gosh, I have
(17:45):
to hurry, hurry, hurry, race, race, race one thing to
the next. Pack my day's top to bottom. Be as
productive as possible, Be extremely efficient, you know, be friends
with everybody, go to everything, be supportive, be the best friend,
be the best wife, be the best mom, be the
you know, the best everything. And that is at war
(18:06):
or at odds with this concept of checking in with
my body, checking in with myself. How does this decision
make me feel? And I've been playing with this like
I don't I'm not an expert by any stretch of
the imagination. I don't feel like I have this figured
out now. I'm not like, oh, I learned this one
phrase and then now I'm cured, not by any stretch
(18:27):
of the imagination. In fact, I think it's a little
bit like it's so nuanced of a conversation that it's
not just like boundaries cancel everything, never show up for
anybody's you know, events, because I think you could really
easily let the pendulum swing to the other side where
you suddenly are like, yeah, I only do what's good
for me. I only do what makes me feel good.
And that's not what I'm saying, But I am suggesting
(18:51):
or asking, could we instead of just assuming that, like
all the expectations that are placed on me by the
external world and all of the patterning that I have
in my own body, I just have to abide by that.
And I don't have any choice in the matter. I
have no agency and I just have to live my
life at the pace that I've been living it. Or
do I have some agency and when something comes across
(19:12):
my path, I can actually choose. I can check in
with myself and go like, how does it feel to
me to say yes to this event? Or how does
it feel to me to move forward with this opportunity,
or how does it feel in my body to even
like go to this dinner or whatever it is, take
my kids to a birthday party or something, check in
(19:33):
with myself and ask myself, how does this feel in
my body, and then allow myself the permission to move
forward at the pace of peace. The pace of life
is not the pace of peace. And I think this
is the dichotomy that I'm realizing as I move through
this experiment, is that life moves at this absolute breakneck pace.
(19:54):
And I've always been like, I will keep up, Like
I can do this. If anybody can do this, I
can do it. I have so much energy, I have
so much to give, like I'm going to figure out
how to check every single box and be at every
single thing and be you know, the straight a student
for all of it. And my question now to myself
is like what happens if I choose to move at
(20:16):
the pace of my own piece, and if I choose
to let some of the balls drop, and if I
choose not to go to every single thing. In fact,
for a while, there was an air quotes rule that
I implemented in my house that was the one Big
Thing a day rule, and I think I recorded an
episode about this too a long time ago. The one
Big Thing a Day rule was a rule that I
(20:37):
implemented shortly after Charlie was born, so this would have
been in early twenty twenty two. He was born in
December of twenty twenty one, so in early twenty twenty two.
My epiphany to myself was like, we only really have
as a family of a family of four, but really
just three because Matt was gone and working a lot
at the time and I was home with the kids.
We only really have it in us to do one
(20:59):
big thing a day. That's about the energy that we have,
and beyond that things start to become unfun. Like if
we plan to go to a play day in the
morning and a birthday party in the afternoon, and we
nap in the car and then we go meet up
with friends for dinner, at some point in the day,
there's a tipping point where things stop being fun most
of the time. And it wasn't always that way, Like
(21:19):
I found, our energy varied from day to day depending
on how we felt, so there were days where I
could add more to the plate. But what I realized
was is that if I only gave myself permission to
plan one big thing a day, then I knew for
sure that we were resourced for that one big thing
a day. We could go do that thing and then
whatever else happened on that day. Of course, you know,
ten million things need to happen in any given day
(21:42):
with kids, cause you're like, everybody needs to be fed
multiple times a day, you know, like six to eight
times a day when you have little kids, and we
need to get from point A to point B, and
the mail needs someone needs to get the mail, and
we got to go drop the package off at the
post office, and we got to get the garbage out,
and so there's a thousand things in any given day
that need to happen. But what the parameter that I
(22:03):
had set for myself was we're only going to plan
one big thing a day. And when I set that
rule for myself and for our family, I realized how
much I was bumping up against this urge to plan
way way more than that. And so I would have
to kind of talk myself through that and be like, Okay,
well we've got this one thing planned. There's this other
thing that came up that we really want to do,
So now we have to pick. Now it's like am
(22:26):
I going to do this thing or am I going
to do this thing? I don't know if you resonate
with this at all. But I sometimes have this superhuman
feeling like I don't need to pick. I can do everything,
I can have everything, I can go everywhere, I can
(22:47):
be everyone's friend. And I think motherhood for me. Maybe
it's motherhood, maybe it's COVID, maybe it's getting older. I
don't know what it is, but I know that there's
been a stark transition after twenty twenty to just realizing
I cannot do everything. I do not have capacity for everything.
My energy levels are not endless, and in fact, if
I try to push myself to do more than what
(23:07):
I have the capacity for, then not only do I
stop having fun, but the people around me stop having
fun too, And my kids don't get their needs met,
and I don't get my needs met, and it just
becomes really unpleasant to be in my life. And so
that was the reason for setting the one big Thing
a day roll. And we did that for a long time,
like all of twenty twenty two and probably a lot
(23:28):
of twenty twenty three two, and then I think maybe
tapered out of it slowly. And this concept of moving
at the pace of peace has brought me back to
that same idea that what happens if it's not necessarily
a one big thing a day role, it's more like,
if I check in with myself and really ask myself,
what is my body telling me about this choice or
(23:50):
about this thing that we could go to, or about
this decision that we have to make or whatever. If
I really check in with myself, do I feel at
peace about it? And if I do, then it's a yes,
and we move forward and we do it with our
whole hearts. You know, we're all in two feet, like
we jump in the deep end. And if it's a no,
it's a no. Or if it's if I'm not at
(24:10):
peace about it, then it's just a no for now.
And maybe that doesn't mean no forever, but it does
mean no for right this minute. That has been a
practice that has been extremely challenging for me, but that
is also shifted and reshaped the way that I feel
in my life. Number One, because just practically speaking, it's like,
you know, you have these opportunities where it's like you're
(24:32):
invited to something or there's there's something happening, you know,
even if it's just like a concert or a show
or something, and you want to go to it, or
there's something that's on the calendar because it's been on
there for a long time and you want to go
and you want to do it, and in your head
you're like, yes, this makes sense, let's make this happen.
But really, when you check in with yourself, you're like,
this feels like too much or this doesn't have to
(24:54):
be energy wise either. It could also be financial. Matt
and I had a plan to go on a trip
to the beach to take our kids on a trip
to the beach, and we ended up canceling the plan
at the last minute because when we sat down to
look at our finances, we just were like, you know what,
like we've been kind of out pasted. Our skis kind
of and that's kind of like the understatement of the century.
(25:14):
Since this business venture fell through, it's been really challenging financially.
It's taken us to a place that neither Matt or
I have really experienced before financially. Of it's honestly, it's great,
Like this is a side note, it's great for us
to experience this because we've mostly experienced a ton of
privilege in our life, and this is teaching us that
these things are extremely complicated, and it's really humbling in
(25:37):
a great way. So I mean, but all that to say,
for most of my adult life, I have not had
to make these kinds of value decisions where I sit
down with the budget and go like, well, we can't
afford to go on this trip right now, so we're
gonna have to cancel it. And it was just such
a good experience of going like when I check in
with myself, I'm like, oh, gosh, it doesn't feel good
to spend this money right now because we have these
(25:59):
other things we need to spend money on, and we're
also trying to kind of get back on our feet
and regain a little bit of stability, and so we
just made the decision to cancel the trip, and it
was such a like, oh, like a relief. And then
there's this part of me that I realize is the
unhealthy part that is I'm having to work through as
I make these choices that starts to feel like the
(26:20):
story is like like our kids are gonna you know,
they're gonna grow up and they're never going to get
to go on fun vacations or we're always going to
be stuck in this place or all we ever do
is just take them to the same playground every single day,
like they have this boring which is not true, but
you start to get in your head about it. It's
like they have this boring childhood. I wanted to offer
them these other experiences, and you see how crazy making
(26:43):
it is because it's just it's just simply a like
face value practically speaking, just not true. My kids have
lots of great experiences. But also even if it were true,
even if we do go to the same park every day,
a child's experience of their childhood is not about how
many cool vacations you take them on. It's about how
present I am as a mother. And so it starts
to root out some of those unhelpful narratives and some
(27:06):
of those like you know, misinterpretations that we make. So
it's just been so good and healing for me to
have this conversation with myself and ask myself about every
problem I run into, where everything I'm about to step into,
every new opportunity, every new beginning, every start of something,
every commitment that I make, every plan that we put
(27:28):
on the calendar, everything to just go. I'm checking in
with myself, like am I moving at the pace of peace?
And am I giving myself plenty of time to make
these choices so that I can only make choices that
I feel at peace with? And I'll tell you the
biggest rub is that you start to feel like, well,
(27:49):
I shouldn't put this on anyone else. I have a
twisted narrative that says, the world's going to move on
without me, Like all these opportunities are going to fly
by me and I'm to miss out and I'm not
going to have any of them because if I move
so slow and the world moves so quickly, then how
could I ever really take in my life? And yet
(28:10):
the great irony of that is, like, how can you
take in your life when you are flying through your
life at one thousand miles an hour, unable to really
integrate and metabolize everything that takes place? Like, how could
you ever take in your life when you're moving at
that pace? And when you slow things way down, you
realize you might have fewer opportunities, you might have fewer
(28:33):
you know, commitments, fewer engagements, fewer parties, fewer friends, fewer people,
fewer a smaller circle. And yet the less actually becomes
more because you can really deeply sink your teeth into it,
you can really deeply experience it, you can really go
all in with the few things that you do do.
(28:55):
And I'm laughing at myself because I was a pick
up for my kids the other day, and I the
same moms that pick up every time, and we were joking,
all of us were joking about quitting our jobs, especially
after having the second baby, because you know, we were
all like feminists. We're like, we're never We're gonna work
till we die, you know, we're gonna never let our
kids rob us of our opportunity to contribute to society.
(29:15):
And then you have a child and you're like kind
of you know, smiling through the tears, You're like, I
can do it. I'm great, I'm still doing it. And
then the second baby comes and it's just like, yeah, yeah,
I can't even pretend anymore. I can't do this. This
is too much for any one person to do, which
I mean, I'm being sort of sarcastic. There are ways
to make it work to still work as a mom
(29:36):
and have two kids, and plenty of women do that,
and that's one percent viable choice. But these moms and
I were just all joking about how you think your
energy is endless and you think your capacity is endless
until you have your second kid and it just kind
of tips you over the edge of crazy and you
realize like, yeah, no, nobody could do that. I'm letting
myself off the hook, and you move on about your life.
And so one of them was saying back to me,
(29:59):
She's like, well, you're hilarious because you quit your job,
but then you like took on six other jobs. And
I was like, what are you talking about. And she's like, well,
you became a yoga teacher and now you're teaching yoga
and you you know, you're homeschooling your kids. And she's like,
so you didn't really quit your You did quit your job,
but then you took on these other jobs. And I
was like, oh my gosh, I really do have a sickness,
don't I Like, I can't sit still. It really got
(30:23):
me thinking about again, back to this meditation of moving
at the pace of peace. It's not a matter of
like how many things do you have in a day
or how many commitments. It's more like, if I check
in with myself, am I really at peace with the
way my days move. Am I at peace with myself
inside of my life? Am I at peace with the
(30:44):
way that I'm engaging with the activities in my life,
with the other people in my life? Am I moving
at the pace of peace? And I am not? Always?
Not every some days I'm like, how would someone move
at the pace of peace? Because you are absolutely moving
counterculturally and I'm moving counter to my own patterning. So
it's like I have thirty Well I'm forty two years old,
(31:07):
so who knows how many years of patterning, Like at
what point did I start the shift? I don't know,
but like maybe close to forty years of patterning of
moving at one thousand miles an hour, and then you know,
brought this shift into my life, maybe starting in twenty
twenty two. So I have all these years of patterning
that I'm working against. I'm working against the pace of culture,
(31:29):
and so I do have days where I'm like, I'm
completely overwhelmed, Like, no, I'm not at peace, I'm not
moving at the pace of peace, And I question myself
because I'm like, well, maybe it's not possible to move
at the pace of peace because life is just wild,
and how am I supposed to say no to like,
you know, my kid is sick and I got to
go pick them up from their thing early. And now
(31:50):
I was supposed to do all these other things, and
now I'm trying to fit everything into one day that
was supposed to you know, too many things into one day,
too high of an expectation of one person. So of
course I'm not at peace. And how what am I
supposed to do about that. I can't just not fulfill
my commitments or whatever. So I have that conversation with myself,
and then I also go, like I can always always
(32:11):
check back in and go. We are allowed to move
at the pace of peace. I am allowed to move
at the pace of peace, even if it means upsetting people,
even if it means canceling things last minute, even if
it means disappointing someone. In fact, especially if it means
disappointing someone, I am allowed to move at the pace
of peace. And there may be some days where life
moves crazy fast. No matter how much you you know,
(32:34):
how much you use this meditation, or how hard you tried,
there may be days that you don't feel peaceful. And
yet I think elevating this concept has been helpful for
me to say, I am going to allow myself, even
in the chaos, to move at the pace of peace.
So even if there's seventeen things that need to get
(32:54):
done today, everybody's expecting them from me, and you know,
I do need to get through as many of them
as I can, I'm still going to allow myself to
move at the pace of piece. I'm still going to
allow myself the space to be fully present two feet
in one thousand percent with my whole heart sitting here
recording this podcast until it's done, until it's sent off
(33:15):
to my producer, Thank you, Houston. So that's part of
moving at the pace of peace, too, is just allowing
myself to be fully present for the one thing I'm doing,
instead of allowing this seventeen item long to do list
to loom over me and make me feel like if
I don't get all this stuff done in one day,
then so and so is going to you know, be mad,
and I'm going to you know, lose this job or whatever.
(33:38):
Moving at the pace of peace means allowing myself to
be a human being and to only be able to
accomplish what any human being could accomplish in a day.
And I think that for most of my life, I
have assumed that I'm supposed to be superhuman. I'm supposed
to be accomplishing way more than most other humans could
accomplish in a day. I'm supposed to be above that somehow.
(33:59):
And I tell you, it is such a relief to
rejoin the human race. As an author I worked with
once would say, welcome to the human race, he would say,
and I loved that part of his messaging. He would
just say like, sometimes we think we're above this stuff,
and then it's like, welcome back to the human race.
It is such a feeling of relief to go like,
(34:19):
I'm just only one person. I'm only one person. There's
only so much I can do. And so, you know,
a small side note that last week I texted Houston
at the last minute, actually, my producer, Houston texted me
and was like, where's your episode for tomorrow? And I
was like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I the
day got away from me. I was putting out a
little fire with my kids, and I'm sorry, I have
(34:42):
nothing recorded for you tomorrow. And he was like, no problem,
we can post an old episode and so that's what
we did. So thank you for your grace with that
last week. That's that is the perfect example of moving
at the pace of peace. It's like, okay, everyone, take
a breath. I'm only one person. I can only do
some things. The fact that you can't do two things
(35:03):
at once is not a failure of you. It's a
failure of the expectation that you could do two things
at once, because nobody can do two things at once. Nobody.
You're a human being, You're only one person. You can
only do one thing at a time. And so lowering
the expectation for ourselves is not about like excusing sloppiness
(35:24):
or laziness. It's like lowering the bar to say, like,
I'm only one person, I can only do one thing
at a time. I can only do so much, and
I give myself permission to move at the pace of peace.
So this is my invitation for you, and it's the
same invitation that my friend Julie Walton gave to me.
Thank you, Julie. Are you moving at the pace of peace?
And can you give yourself permission to move at the
(35:45):
pace of peace? What would have to fall through the
cracks if you were going to move at the pace
of peace and maybe, maybe, just maybe those things should
be allowed to fall through the cracks. Maybe if you
explore why you're so afraid for those things to fall apart,
maybe you'll discover another layer of healing that you didn't
even know was possible, or you didn't even know was there.
(36:07):
Move at the pace of peace, Join me, Join me,
Join me, and moving at the pace of peace. I
am sending you so much love. I'm sending you a
big hug, and I will see you next week on
The Writer Story podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cold. It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, 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 I am here
this week with a brand new episode. I'm so excited
to share with you. I want to talk about a
phrase that I've been using to help myself make sense
of my life, to process my life when inevitably things
happen that are unexpected, or when changes take place, or
(00:53):
when things get really busy and crazy and chaotic and
there's a lot going on and I'm having a hard
time processing it, or and there's big decisions to be
made and I don't know which way to go left
or right, you know, black or white. It's like, how
do I make the right decision in this situation? Or
when problems arise speed bumps, you know, just inevitable life
(01:14):
challenges come up and I'm not sure how to navigate them.
This is a phrase that I've been using for myself
to help myself navigate those moments, to make sense of them,
to shape my own inner landscape, and help myself, you know,
feel soothed as I move through the process. And also
to just direct my focus my decision making, like to
(01:36):
help me make those decisions or to help me, you know,
solve a problem or mitigate something that comes up at
the last minute. This is a phrase that's been like
a mantra to me. It's been a meditation, it's been
a bit of an intention that I have set for myself.
And I find this to be such a supportive tool
and so helpful. And it didn't come from me, by
the way, I'll tell you the story of where it
(01:57):
came from today on the podcast, I'm giving a little
shout out to my friend Julie.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Here.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I'm going to share with you how the phrase came
up in my conversation with her, the moment that she
gave me this phrase, and how I've been using it
since then. And then I'll offer it as an invitation
to you if it feels good to use this as
a similar meditation or invitation in your own life. Yeah,
(02:22):
to use this phrase if it feels helpful for you,
It has been extremely helpful for me. It feels so supportive.
It feels like a way that I one of the
many ways that I am reparenting myself in my life,
as so many of us are, and just providing myself
helpful context so that I can reorient my nervous system
in a very chaotic world. So here's the story. I'm
(02:45):
going to back up a little bit because you need
context in order to understand the story. But if you've
been here a while, some of this might be repeats,
so I'm going to fly through it really quickly. If
you've been around, you know that the last year for
me has been filled with a lot of changes and
a lot of loss. I lost my dad last October.
I lost a pregnancy before that. Before that, my husband's
business venture that he had invested so much time and
(03:08):
so much money into fell apart, and even though it
was his business, it really affected me and we just
had a six month The second half of last year
was just kind of an onslaught of disappointments, you know, failures.
Although I don't love that word, I don't think I
would necessarily currently today use that word to describe the
(03:28):
second half of last year, but it definitely felt like
that at the time. So disappointments, failures, setbacks, problems, issues, losses, grief,
different than how I expected it to go. That was
the theme of the second half of twenty twenty four
for me, and so that meant that at the end
of last year I had to make some pretty significant
changes just to make my life work for me. So
(03:50):
I took a step back from my business. I stopped
taking new clients. I decided I wasn't going to run
a cohort of my program, which I do every year
in January, my book writing program for authors, we always
run a cohort in January, and I chose not to
do that because I just needed to create some space
for myself to hibernate, to grieve, to feel through what
I was feeling, and to figure out it felt like
(04:11):
something was shifting and changing, but I wasn't totally sure
what and I knew something was coming, but again I
didn't know what that was, and so I just needed
some time and space to figure that out.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Now.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Immediately, when I made this announcement that I was not
going to be taking one on one clients, anymore, and
that I was pausing my online program, I started getting
messages from people. I mean a lot of messages from
people that were like, Oh, I'm so sad I was
planning on taking the program, or thank you so much
for everything you've done. This is such a massively important program.
Thank you, and you know, take all the time that
(04:43):
you need. Like lots of really like loving, supportive messages
from people. And then I also got a handful of
messages from people that were equally as loving and supportive,
but that were like, Hey, is there something that we
could do to support you, to help you keep the
doors open to this program, because it's such an important
program and it's significant and it has the POTENTI to
help so many authors. And so I started having conversations
with a handful of people who were interested in maybe
(05:05):
like a partnership or you know, potentially a buyout or
something like that. And I had a handful of those conversations,
and I really came in with an open heart and
an open mind, and I carried each of those conversations
to their inevitable conclusion. And it was kind of like
a long from January of this year until present day.
(05:26):
So We're in August right now, as I sit here
recording this, It's been a long process of like staying
open to the idea, keeping my mind open, keeping my
heart open, and also really not finding something that felt
perfectly a lot or taking all the steps that I
could take in terms of like receiving the help, receiving
the support, potentially finding a partner, but just each of
(05:47):
these potential partnerships, we got to a place where it
just seemed like it wasn't going to come to fruition,
and so I carried out each of those conversations until
the end. But as this was all unfolding, I remember
feeling and like this sense of responsibility that like, Okay,
I do have this program that people really appreciate they
want to be part of. I want to allow the
(06:08):
legacy to continue to move forward. There are all these
people who are offering to help, and who are you know,
bringing resources to the table or suggesting these different ways
that this could work. And I'm having these conversations and
I really do want to stay open to this and
I love this idea and feeling almost like a pressure
to make a decision or to make make a call,
like yeah, just pick a partner or make a call
(06:30):
or say yes or you know, put this thing in motion.
And yet at the same time, I'm in my own
process of grieving of losing my dad, of you know,
integrating the experiences of the last six months of my life,
and those two processes were happening concurrently, and there's part
of me that is a very human part that wants
(06:52):
to be like, Okay, can we just speed up this process?
Can we microwave this a little bit and move through
this messy grief part and move move on to the
next part where I get to relaunch the program, And
maybe I do that with a partner, or maybe I
do that without whatever. Can we just kind of get
back to our regularly scheduled program. But every time that
I would think about this is the point I'm trying
to make. Every time I would try to think about
(07:14):
doing that, I would start to feel anxious. I would
start to feel like like something just I couldn't put
my finger on it. And I would sit for hours
and talk to my husband about it, because he was
really trying to help me clarify what it was that
was stopping me from making a choice. And every time
we would sit down and talk about it. We would
talk for hours and I really couldn't put it into words,
(07:37):
but I just knew that I knew that, I knew
that it just wasn't the right time. It just wasn't
the right time to make a choice. It wasn't the
right time to make a call. It wasn't time to
move forward. It was time to sit still, to be quiet,
to get off Instagram, to get off Facebook, to get
off you know, to just sort of like cocoon myself,
(07:59):
to hiberning and to let this unfold at the pace
of peace, which I did not have that language at
the time. But I was having this conversation with my
friend Julie Walton, who I'm going to give a shout
out to in this episode. I was having a conversation
with her because at one point I had reached out
to her saying like, hey, there are these conversations happening.
(08:19):
There are a few people who are interested in maybe,
like you know, partnering to bring back a book in
six months. She had been a part of an original
cohort of a book in six months and had been
a really supportive participant in the program. So she was
part of the program. She would always like pull these
groups of people together. She was like, how can I help?
(08:39):
Can I, you know, take notes on the calls? Can I?
There were a handful of things that she would do
for me that were extremely helpful and that just contributed
a lot to the community. And so I reached out
to her and was like, I literally don't know you
know where you are in your life or what your
work life looks like these days, but if we were
to bring back a book in six months, is something
(09:00):
that you might be interested in collaborating with me on
if I needed someone who could be, like, you know,
a community manager or something along those lines. And at
one point she and I sat down and had about
an hour long conversation about this, and we threw around
a bunch of ideas and I basically just told her
at the end of the call, you know, at the
beginning of the call, I was very candid with her
(09:20):
that I'm like, this is an exploratory conversation at this point,
like I don't have a partner, I don't have a
plan to move forward. I don't really know what's going
to happen with this. I'm just kind of staying open
to these ideas and I'm exploring my options, and I
was just curious, is this something you might be interested in?
And she was similar. She was open to the idea
of having the conversation with me, but not necessarily committing
(09:41):
to anything, and just sort of like talking about, like,
if we were going to do something like this, what
might that look like. So she and I had this
long conversation, and at the end of the conversation, she
said to me, you know, I think you can trust
yourself to move at the pace of peace. And that
statement stayed with me because I think she could see
(10:03):
and you know, I was being very open with her
about this the dilemma that I was feeling that there
are these people who want to be able to benefit
from this program, and I know that it's so powerful
and the content is there and everything is kind of
like it's all available, So how can we make this
available to people with like the least amount of expectation
(10:24):
or tax on me presently because there's just a lot
of other stuff going on for me. And so she
was sensing my dilemma and basically saying, you don't have
to make a decision right this minute. You can trust
yourself to move at the pace of peace. Whatever this
anxiety is that you're having about the program or making
(10:44):
a decision, the anxiety is enough of a reason for
you to just take a pause and to slow down
and to allow yourself all the space and all the
time that you need in order to make the decision
that feels right for you. And it might feel like
there's a deadline or a timeline on this thing, but
you can actually just choose to move at the pace
of peace. And I really took that phrase to heart
(11:09):
and took it on as my own and have started
using it in every circumstance in my life. So anyway,
Julie and I have this conversation, she offers this phrase
to me, it really struck a chord with me, and
(11:30):
I just was like, I love this concept of moving
at the pace of piece. And I think one of
the reasons why this struck such a chord with me
and why I held on to it so tightly, is
because it is the opposite of how I have lived
my life. In fact, if you ask my parents or
anyone who knew me at a young age, or really
anyone who knew me for most of my life, the
(11:51):
pace at which I have lived my life is like
one thousand miles an hour, and both of my parents
would have said that to you. My dad, if he
was still here, would that was maybe his biggest frustration
with me was that he felt like he could never
keep up. I was always just like onto the next thing,
onto the next thing, onto the next thing. And I
did come into this life with just a tremendous amount
(12:12):
of energy, like almost energizer bunny ish, and have always
just crammed a thousand things into every day. I'm always
bouncing from one thing to the next. I have so
many interests, and so I think that's part of it.
Is just temperament and how I was born and how
I was wired, and part of it, I think now
as an adult at forty two years old, looking back
(12:32):
on this also has to be trauma that I think
we move quickly through our lives when we're afraid to
feel whatever is in the present moment. I mean, I
think about those days after losing my dad and just
the difficulty of the clothes of twenty twenty four, how
there was a part of me that felt like I
want to just hibernate. I want to be in a cocoon.
(12:53):
I want to, you know, just rest and kind of
talk to nobody and be in silence and be at
home by myself, my comfort zone. And there's part of
me that's like I want to just bounce right out
of this, like I want to just snap out of
it and fast forward through this, move on to the
next thing. There. I can sense that there is a
part of me that understands that I could avoid some
(13:13):
of the pain of feeling sad or feeling lost, or
feeling depressed or feeling whatever if I just build another business,
or if I just take on another task or take
on another job or something like that. So I think
there's both of those things at play, both how I'm
wired and my temperament and also just trauma that lived
(13:34):
in my body that I was trying to avoid feeling
whatever it was I didn't want to feel, avoiding feeling
that by moving at an absolute breakneck pace through my life.
And this continued has continued for most of my life.
And I've noticed since I've taken on this mantra of
moving at the pace of peace, and since I've reminded
(13:56):
myself this of this on a daily basis, I'm realizing saying,
how this is still a huge pattern for me that exists,
Like I'm using this many many times a day to
slow myself down and give myself more space and to
really check in with my body and ask, like, Okay,
aside from how you think about this, Like, aside from
(14:16):
the strategy that your brain is doing, the strategy that
your brain is making up, I should say, aside from that,
how does your body, like check in with your body
and how does your body feel about this? And your
body will probably tell you something different, or my body
has been telling me something different, because my brain can
come up with a solution, or my brain can come
(14:36):
up with a reason, or my brain can come up
with a story or a narrative or whatever. But my
body will tell me how I feel about this decision
that I'm about to make, or this you know, activity
that I'm about to go do, or this plan that
I'm about to make, or something I'm about to put
on my calendar. My body will give me usually a
(14:57):
different piece of information about that thing. And I've started
just checking in with myself and saying, is this am
I moving at the pace of peace? Is this me
moving at the pace of peace? And I've noticed that
moving at the pace of piece is not only counterintuitive
to me personally, to my own patterning, but it's also extremely,
(15:18):
extremely culturally counterintuitive. It's running backwards to how our culture runs.
So in order to move at the pace of peace,
I not only have to short circuit my own patterning,
but I also have to short circuit, or at least
move against the grain of the patterns of the broader
culture that we live in. So maybe that there's a
third reason there that I have moved so quickly is
(15:39):
that I've gotten a lot of accolades for that. I've
gotten a lot of positive feedback for being so kind
of Johnny on the spot, like I'm always at everything.
I always do, you know, have my hand in a
little bit of everything. I am the one who, like
growing up, would show up to every church function and
show up to volunteer at every single thing, and I
would never miss an activity, and I would never miss
(15:59):
a practice, and I you know, I mean I was
like the straight a student. I think I've talked about
this on the podcast before too, that that's an archetype
of myself that is only a small part of who
I am, but is a mask that I would put
on early in my life and through a lot of
my life to survive was the archetype of the straight
(16:20):
A student that I knew how to walk into a
space and be the best of the best at absolutely
everything and perform in a way that I could get attention.
And straight A's like, you know, positive recognition, positive affirmation
from those around me. And the more that I've reflected
on this, the more work I've done, the more healing
work I've done, the more I've realized that this straight
(16:42):
A student is not really who I am. I'm not
saying that it's not at all who I am. I mean,
there may be small parts of it that are, but
it's not really who I am. It's only a small
fragment of who I am. Or it's a mask that
I wear to make, you know, to make myself known
in a certain setting. And so I'm operating against that
(17:03):
when I say to myself, Okay, we're going to slow
this way down. We're going to move at the pace
of peace. I think I got off on a long
tangent there, But my point is that there's three kind
of things operating here. One is my temperament or my
original wiring. One is my patterning or my trauma, my
way of moving through the world as a means of survival,
(17:25):
you know, my the mask that I wear in order
to survive and thrive in the world. And then one
is the world at large, like how the world actually
operates and who the world rewards and what the world
rewards and the culture that we're in and how quickly
things move. And so there's all those three things operating
that make you feel like, oh my gosh, I have
(17:45):
to hurry, hurry, hurry, race, race, race one thing to
the next. Pack my day's top to bottom. Be as
productive as possible, Be extremely efficient, you know, be friends
with everybody, go to everything, be supportive, be the best friend,
be the best wife, be the best mom, be the
you know, the best everything. And that is at war
(18:06):
or at odds with this concept of checking in with
my body, checking in with myself. How does this decision
make me feel? And I've been playing with this like
I don't I'm not an expert by any stretch of
the imagination. I don't feel like I have this figured
out now. I'm not like, oh, I learned this one
phrase and then now I'm cured, not by any stretch
(18:27):
of the imagination. In fact, I think it's a little
bit like it's so nuanced of a conversation that it's
not just like boundaries cancel everything, never show up for
anybody's you know, events, because I think you could really
easily let the pendulum swing to the other side where
you suddenly are like, yeah, I only do what's good
for me. I only do what makes me feel good.
And that's not what I'm saying, But I am suggesting
(18:51):
or asking, could we instead of just assuming that, like
all the expectations that are placed on me by the
external world and all of the patterning that I have
in my own body, I just have to abide by that.
And I don't have any choice in the matter. I
have no agency and I just have to live my
life at the pace that I've been living it. Or
do I have some agency and when something comes across
(19:12):
my path, I can actually choose. I can check in
with myself and go like, how does it feel to
me to say yes to this event? Or how does
it feel to me to move forward with this opportunity,
or how does it feel in my body to even
like go to this dinner or whatever it is, take
my kids to a birthday party or something, check in
(19:33):
with myself and ask myself, how does this feel in
my body, and then allow myself the permission to move
forward at the pace of peace. The pace of life
is not the pace of peace. And I think this
is the dichotomy that I'm realizing as I move through
this experiment, is that life moves at this absolute breakneck pace.
(19:54):
And I've always been like, I will keep up, Like
I can do this. If anybody can do this, I
can do it. I have so much energy, I have
so much to give, like I'm going to figure out
how to check every single box and be at every
single thing and be you know, the straight a student
for all of it. And my question now to myself
is like what happens if I choose to move at
(20:16):
the pace of my own piece, and if I choose
to let some of the balls drop, and if I
choose not to go to every single thing. In fact,
for a while, there was an air quotes rule that
I implemented in my house that was the one Big
Thing a day rule, and I think I recorded an
episode about this too a long time ago. The one
Big Thing a Day rule was a rule that I
(20:37):
implemented shortly after Charlie was born, so this would have
been in early twenty twenty two. He was born in
December of twenty twenty one, so in early twenty twenty two.
My epiphany to myself was like, we only really have
as a family of a family of four, but really
just three because Matt was gone and working a lot
at the time and I was home with the kids.
We only really have it in us to do one
(20:59):
big thing a day. That's about the energy that we have,
and beyond that things start to become unfun. Like if
we plan to go to a play day in the
morning and a birthday party in the afternoon, and we
nap in the car and then we go meet up
with friends for dinner, at some point in the day,
there's a tipping point where things stop being fun most
of the time. And it wasn't always that way, Like
(21:19):
I found, our energy varied from day to day depending
on how we felt, so there were days where I
could add more to the plate. But what I realized
was is that if I only gave myself permission to
plan one big thing a day, then I knew for
sure that we were resourced for that one big thing
a day. We could go do that thing and then
whatever else happened on that day. Of course, you know,
ten million things need to happen in any given day
(21:42):
with kids, cause you're like, everybody needs to be fed
multiple times a day, you know, like six to eight
times a day when you have little kids, and we
need to get from point A to point B, and
the mail needs someone needs to get the mail, and
we got to go drop the package off at the
post office, and we got to get the garbage out,
and so there's a thousand things in any given day
that need to happen. But what the parameter that I
(22:03):
had set for myself was we're only going to plan
one big thing a day. And when I set that
rule for myself and for our family, I realized how
much I was bumping up against this urge to plan
way way more than that. And so I would have
to kind of talk myself through that and be like, Okay,
well we've got this one thing planned. There's this other
thing that came up that we really want to do,
So now we have to pick. Now it's like am
(22:26):
I going to do this thing or am I going
to do this thing? I don't know if you resonate
with this at all. But I sometimes have this superhuman
feeling like I don't need to pick. I can do everything,
I can have everything, I can go everywhere, I can
(22:47):
be everyone's friend. And I think motherhood for me. Maybe
it's motherhood, maybe it's COVID, maybe it's getting older. I
don't know what it is, but I know that there's
been a stark transition after twenty twenty to just realizing
I cannot do everything. I do not have capacity for everything.
My energy levels are not endless, and in fact, if
I try to push myself to do more than what
(23:07):
I have the capacity for, then not only do I
stop having fun, but the people around me stop having
fun too, And my kids don't get their needs met,
and I don't get my needs met, and it just
becomes really unpleasant to be in my life. And so
that was the reason for setting the one big Thing
a day roll. And we did that for a long time,
like all of twenty twenty two and probably a lot
(23:28):
of twenty twenty three two, and then I think maybe
tapered out of it slowly. And this concept of moving
at the pace of peace has brought me back to
that same idea that what happens if it's not necessarily
a one big thing a day role, it's more like,
if I check in with myself and really ask myself,
what is my body telling me about this choice or
(23:50):
about this thing that we could go to, or about
this decision that we have to make or whatever. If
I really check in with myself, do I feel at
peace about it? And if I do, then it's a yes,
and we move forward and we do it with our
whole hearts. You know, we're all in two feet, like
we jump in the deep end. And if it's a no,
it's a no. Or if it's if I'm not at
(24:10):
peace about it, then it's just a no for now.
And maybe that doesn't mean no forever, but it does
mean no for right this minute. That has been a
practice that has been extremely challenging for me, but that
is also shifted and reshaped the way that I feel
in my life. Number One, because just practically speaking, it's like,
you know, you have these opportunities where it's like you're
(24:32):
invited to something or there's there's something happening, you know,
even if it's just like a concert or a show
or something, and you want to go to it, or
there's something that's on the calendar because it's been on
there for a long time and you want to go
and you want to do it, and in your head
you're like, yes, this makes sense, let's make this happen.
But really, when you check in with yourself, you're like,
this feels like too much or this doesn't have to
(24:54):
be energy wise either. It could also be financial. Matt
and I had a plan to go on a trip
to the beach to take our kids on a trip
to the beach, and we ended up canceling the plan
at the last minute because when we sat down to
look at our finances, we just were like, you know what,
like we've been kind of out pasted. Our skis kind
of and that's kind of like the understatement of the century.
(25:14):
Since this business venture fell through, it's been really challenging financially.
It's taken us to a place that neither Matt or
I have really experienced before financially. Of it's honestly, it's great,
Like this is a side note, it's great for us
to experience this because we've mostly experienced a ton of
privilege in our life, and this is teaching us that
these things are extremely complicated, and it's really humbling in
(25:37):
a great way. So I mean, but all that to say,
for most of my adult life, I have not had
to make these kinds of value decisions where I sit
down with the budget and go like, well, we can't
afford to go on this trip right now, so we're
gonna have to cancel it. And it was just such
a good experience of going like when I check in
with myself, I'm like, oh, gosh, it doesn't feel good
to spend this money right now because we have these
(25:59):
other things we need to spend money on, and we're
also trying to kind of get back on our feet
and regain a little bit of stability, and so we
just made the decision to cancel the trip, and it
was such a like, oh, like a relief. And then
there's this part of me that I realize is the
unhealthy part that is I'm having to work through as
I make these choices that starts to feel like the
(26:20):
story is like like our kids are gonna you know,
they're gonna grow up and they're never going to get
to go on fun vacations or we're always going to
be stuck in this place or all we ever do
is just take them to the same playground every single day,
like they have this boring which is not true, but
you start to get in your head about it. It's
like they have this boring childhood. I wanted to offer
them these other experiences, and you see how crazy making
(26:43):
it is because it's just it's just simply a like
face value practically speaking, just not true. My kids have
lots of great experiences. But also even if it were true,
even if we do go to the same park every day,
a child's experience of their childhood is not about how
many cool vacations you take them on. It's about how
present I am as a mother. And so it starts
to root out some of those unhelpful narratives and some
(27:06):
of those like you know, misinterpretations that we make. So
it's just been so good and healing for me to
have this conversation with myself and ask myself about every
problem I run into, where everything I'm about to step into,
every new opportunity, every new beginning, every start of something,
every commitment that I make, every plan that we put
(27:28):
on the calendar, everything to just go. I'm checking in
with myself, like am I moving at the pace of peace?
And am I giving myself plenty of time to make
these choices so that I can only make choices that
I feel at peace with? And I'll tell you the
biggest rub is that you start to feel like, well,
(27:49):
I shouldn't put this on anyone else. I have a
twisted narrative that says, the world's going to move on
without me, Like all these opportunities are going to fly
by me and I'm to miss out and I'm not
going to have any of them because if I move
so slow and the world moves so quickly, then how
could I ever really take in my life? And yet
(28:10):
the great irony of that is, like, how can you
take in your life when you are flying through your
life at one thousand miles an hour, unable to really
integrate and metabolize everything that takes place? Like, how could
you ever take in your life when you're moving at
that pace? And when you slow things way down, you
realize you might have fewer opportunities, you might have fewer
(28:33):
you know, commitments, fewer engagements, fewer parties, fewer friends, fewer people,
fewer a smaller circle. And yet the less actually becomes
more because you can really deeply sink your teeth into it,
you can really deeply experience it, you can really go
all in with the few things that you do do.
(28:55):
And I'm laughing at myself because I was a pick
up for my kids the other day, and I the
same moms that pick up every time, and we were joking,
all of us were joking about quitting our jobs, especially
after having the second baby, because you know, we were
all like feminists. We're like, we're never We're gonna work
till we die, you know, we're gonna never let our
kids rob us of our opportunity to contribute to society.
(29:15):
And then you have a child and you're like kind
of you know, smiling through the tears, You're like, I
can do it. I'm great, I'm still doing it. And
then the second baby comes and it's just like, yeah, yeah,
I can't even pretend anymore. I can't do this. This
is too much for any one person to do, which
I mean, I'm being sort of sarcastic. There are ways
to make it work to still work as a mom
(29:36):
and have two kids, and plenty of women do that,
and that's one percent viable choice. But these moms and
I were just all joking about how you think your
energy is endless and you think your capacity is endless
until you have your second kid and it just kind
of tips you over the edge of crazy and you
realize like, yeah, no, nobody could do that. I'm letting
myself off the hook, and you move on about your life.
And so one of them was saying back to me,
(29:59):
She's like, well, you're hilarious because you quit your job,
but then you like took on six other jobs. And
I was like, what are you talking about. And she's like, well,
you became a yoga teacher and now you're teaching yoga
and you you know, you're homeschooling your kids. And she's like,
so you didn't really quit your You did quit your job,
but then you took on these other jobs. And I
was like, oh my gosh, I really do have a sickness,
don't I Like, I can't sit still. It really got
(30:23):
me thinking about again, back to this meditation of moving
at the pace of peace. It's not a matter of
like how many things do you have in a day
or how many commitments. It's more like, if I check
in with myself, am I really at peace with the
way my days move. Am I at peace with myself
inside of my life? Am I at peace with the
(30:44):
way that I'm engaging with the activities in my life,
with the other people in my life? Am I moving
at the pace of peace? And I am not? Always?
Not every some days I'm like, how would someone move
at the pace of peace? Because you are absolutely moving
counterculturally and I'm moving counter to my own patterning. So
it's like I have thirty Well I'm forty two years old,
(31:07):
so who knows how many years of patterning, Like at
what point did I start the shift? I don't know,
but like maybe close to forty years of patterning of
moving at one thousand miles an hour, and then you know,
brought this shift into my life, maybe starting in twenty
twenty two. So I have all these years of patterning
that I'm working against. I'm working against the pace of culture,
(31:29):
and so I do have days where I'm like, I'm
completely overwhelmed, Like, no, I'm not at peace, I'm not
moving at the pace of peace, And I question myself
because I'm like, well, maybe it's not possible to move
at the pace of peace because life is just wild,
and how am I supposed to say no to like,
you know, my kid is sick and I got to
go pick them up from their thing early. And now
(31:50):
I was supposed to do all these other things, and
now I'm trying to fit everything into one day that
was supposed to you know, too many things into one day,
too high of an expectation of one person. So of
course I'm not at peace. And how what am I
supposed to do about that. I can't just not fulfill
my commitments or whatever. So I have that conversation with myself,
and then I also go, like I can always always
(32:11):
check back in and go. We are allowed to move
at the pace of peace. I am allowed to move
at the pace of peace, even if it means upsetting people,
even if it means canceling things last minute, even if
it means disappointing someone. In fact, especially if it means
disappointing someone, I am allowed to move at the pace
of peace. And there may be some days where life
moves crazy fast. No matter how much you you know,
(32:34):
how much you use this meditation, or how hard you tried,
there may be days that you don't feel peaceful. And
yet I think elevating this concept has been helpful for
me to say, I am going to allow myself, even
in the chaos, to move at the pace of peace.
So even if there's seventeen things that need to get
(32:54):
done today, everybody's expecting them from me, and you know,
I do need to get through as many of them
as I can, I'm still going to allow myself to
move at the pace of piece. I'm still going to
allow myself the space to be fully present two feet
in one thousand percent with my whole heart sitting here
recording this podcast until it's done, until it's sent off
(33:15):
to my producer, Thank you, Houston. So that's part of
moving at the pace of peace, too, is just allowing
myself to be fully present for the one thing I'm doing,
instead of allowing this seventeen item long to do list
to loom over me and make me feel like if
I don't get all this stuff done in one day,
then so and so is going to you know, be mad,
and I'm going to you know, lose this job or whatever.
(33:38):
Moving at the pace of peace means allowing myself to
be a human being and to only be able to
accomplish what any human being could accomplish in a day.
And I think that for most of my life, I
have assumed that I'm supposed to be superhuman. I'm supposed
to be accomplishing way more than most other humans could
accomplish in a day. I'm supposed to be above that somehow.
(33:59):
And I tell you, it is such a relief to
rejoin the human race. As an author I worked with
once would say, welcome to the human race, he would say,
and I loved that part of his messaging. He would
just say like, sometimes we think we're above this stuff,
and then it's like, welcome back to the human race.
It is such a feeling of relief to go like,
(34:19):
I'm just only one person. I'm only one person. There's
only so much I can do. And so, you know,
a small side note that last week I texted Houston
at the last minute, actually, my producer, Houston texted me
and was like, where's your episode for tomorrow? And I
was like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I the
day got away from me. I was putting out a
little fire with my kids, and I'm sorry, I have
(34:42):
nothing recorded for you tomorrow. And he was like, no problem,
we can post an old episode and so that's what
we did. So thank you for your grace with that
last week. That's that is the perfect example of moving
at the pace of peace. It's like, okay, everyone, take
a breath. I'm only one person. I can only do
some things. The fact that you can't do two things
(35:03):
at once is not a failure of you. It's a
failure of the expectation that you could do two things
at once, because nobody can do two things at once. Nobody.
You're a human being, You're only one person. You can
only do one thing at a time. And so lowering
the expectation for ourselves is not about like excusing sloppiness
(35:24):
or laziness. It's like lowering the bar to say, like,
I'm only one person, I can only do one thing
at a time. I can only do so much, and
I give myself permission to move at the pace of peace.
So this is my invitation for you, and it's the
same invitation that my friend Julie Walton gave to me.
Thank you, Julie. Are you moving at the pace of peace?
And can you give yourself permission to move at the
(35:45):
pace of peace? What would have to fall through the
cracks if you were going to move at the pace
of peace and maybe, maybe, just maybe those things should
be allowed to fall through the cracks. Maybe if you
explore why you're so afraid for those things to fall apart,
maybe you'll discover another layer of healing that you didn't
even know was possible, or you didn't even know was there.
(36:07):
Move at the pace of peace, Join me, Join me,
Join me, and moving at the pace of peace. I
am sending you so much love. I'm sending you a
big hug, and I will see you next week on
The Writer Story podcast
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