December 10, 2024 • 29 mins
If you missed last week’s episode – go back and listen before you jump into this one! We talked about what it looks like to get into the ease and flow of creativity.
This week, I want to address the role of restriction, boundaries, rules and borders as it relates to flow. Boundaries and flow might seem diametrically opposed but these two seeming “opposites” actually play together quite nicely and are necessary for true expansion.
If “restriction” sounds like a bummer to you, or conjures up memories of going without, listen to this episode.
If “restriction” was used against you in the past, as a way to limit pleasure or generate suffering, listen to this episode.
If you yourself sometimes use “restriction” as a form of self-punishment or because you feel undeserving, listen to this episode.
It’s time to reclaim the value of restriction for our creativity and our well-being.
What is getting in the way of your flow?
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, pull them back
together with the word you write all the beauty and
piece and the magic that you'll start too fun. When
you write your story, you get the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cover it.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
It's all about.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And write 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 on this week's episode,
I want to talk about the role that restriction plays
in creativity because I think this is a topic that
gets jumped over most of the time for several reasons.
One reason I think it gets jumped over is that
when we think about something like creativity, an act of
(00:51):
creativity is an act of bringing something out of nothing,
going from not having a book to having a book,
not having a painting to having ating, not having a
baby to having a baby, not having a business to
having a business. We think about creativity as inherently expansive,
and in many ways it is inherently expansive. I would
agree with that statement that creativity is inherently expansive, but
(01:13):
one thing I think we forget about is that in
order to experience that expansion, there is a necessary process
or phase of restriction. And think of this as sort
of the push pull to what I talked about on
last week's episode. This is the topic that I wanted
to cover in last week's episode, which, by the way,
if you haven't listened to last week's episode, it's an
important one to go back to in addition to this one,
(01:34):
because this episode is kind of the push pull to
that episode. In last week's episode, I had planned to
talk about boundaries, was kind of the word that I
had in my head, and instead I ended up talking
way more about the expansive nature of creativity and how
when we can open ourselves and let an idea come
through us, that our creativity comes much more effortlessly, that
(01:56):
it becomes something that we get to participate in that's
much bigger than us. It doesn't have to come from
our will power or our ego or our small self.
It can actually come from something that we may not
even understand, our connection to the broader whole. So yeah,
So the plan last week was to talk about boundaries,
and instead I ended up talking about expansion. So this
(02:16):
week I do want to talk about boundaries and restriction
and the role that this plays in creativity. And I
think these two things, although they seem contradictory, really play
well together. I know they seem like their opposites, but
this is true with a lot of things that seem
like opposites, that when we can hold both opposites in
our hands at the same time, that we actually come
(02:37):
to a broader understanding of the topic as a whole.
It's like two different perspectives of the same situation. When
you can understand both perspectives, you actually get a greater
understanding of the circumstances that were taking place. Like if
I were to sit down with you and your sibling,
or you and your partner, or you and a friend
who both had the same experience together, and I were
to get each of your perspectives, I would have a
(02:59):
broader understand standing of the experience that you shared by
understanding both how you interpreted the experience and also how
the other person interpreted the experience. And the more perspectives
that we get on any one topic, the greater understanding
that we're going to have about that topic. And so
think about that as I'm talking about this idea of
boundaries and restriction today because I think this can be
(03:19):
a really challenging topic for some of us to take in.
I mean, I guess it depends on your personality and
your natural temperament, your natural tendencies. Some of us tend
more toward boundaries and restriction, and we kind of like
the safety of restriction because restriction provides some measure of
safety and certainty and stability. And so if you tend
more in that direction, maybe you like this conversation better
(03:41):
than you liked last week's conversation. Maybe you loved last
week's conversation because it gave you the sense of freedom
and lightness and things can be easy, and so you
love that sensation. But hearing me talk about boundaries and
restriction might make you feel a little more uncomfortable. Well,
think about these things like almost like a rubber band
that stretch you to have a better understanding of the
(04:03):
fullness of what it takes to be a creative person
in the world. And I would say, you know, one
of the things I shared in last week's episode was
how for most of my life, tending toward boundaries and
restriction came really naturally to me. And I shared a
story about being like super super disciplined around food in particular,
and how a nutrition has pointed out to me like
(04:23):
she's like, I've never worked with anyone who didn't cheat
one time on their elimination diet. And I would say now,
in part because I had that experience, and because that's
how I moved through the world, and I've found this
expansion and lightness and freedom of sort of like letting
life flow through me and moving with the flow of life.
Now the conversation of boundaries and restriction feels a little
(04:44):
bit more like I don't love to have this conversation,
but I do think it's a really important conversation to have.
It's definitely a part of life. It's definitely a part
of being an adult and a grown up in the world.
It's definitely part of creating a container for ourselves where
we actually feel safe enough to play and safe enough
to experiment, and safe enough to be creative and to
get curious and to ask questions. And so I think
(05:05):
this is a really important part of the creativity conversation.
And I'm so excited to get to have that conversation
with you today. One of the reasons this topic came
up for me today is because I've been in this
long process of trying to troubleshoot a recurring respiratory infection,
really like plural recurring respiratory infections that keep happening for me.
And I've talked about this a handful of times on
(05:27):
the show, So if you've been around for a while,
you've heard me say that. For months now, at least
since June of this year, but probably since earlier than that,
I've been having recurring respiratory infections, and they've gotten like
closer and closer together. I had earlier in the fall
a sinus infection and then bronchitis, it turned to walking pneumonia.
The walking pneumonia lasted for a long long time. That
(05:48):
all started in I think like June, and then it
was the worst. The walking pneumonia happened in August. And
I've just been sick NonStop basically since June, and so
I've been trying to trouble shoot that and figure out
what's going on with my body. What's happening here? Is
this an emotional issue, is it a physical one? Is
there an underlying infection? How can I treat that? Aside
from taking more antibiotics, because I did take three rounds
(06:10):
of antibiotics in the fall, and I feel like my
body has been trying to recover from the antibiotics ever since.
I'm not opposed to taking antibiotics, and I'm not anti
Western medicine in the slightest, but I do like to
look at health from a holistic perspective and think about
what types of things could be contributing to this issue
beyond just the physical. I think that there are oftentimes
(06:33):
more factors contributing to illness than we are consciously aware of,
and so I like to open my awareness as much
as possible and try to troubleshoot the issue from all
different angles. So that's what I've been doing. I've been
definitely focusing on the physical aspect of the illness, and
so I've been taking supplements. I've been making sure to
get all my vitamins. I've been especially going overboard with
(06:53):
things like vitamin C, vitamin D, and zinc. I've been
drinking lots of water. I've been taking my electrolytes. I
met with a doctor and ran a whole blood panel
and made sure that there was, you know, nothing in
my blood work that came up that would show me
why this infection keeps recurring. Thanks to my mother in
law who's been so generous with me, I have been
getting a massage once a month, which is really nice.
(07:14):
I don't know if it's helping with the infection at all,
but it definitely it feels wonderful and hopefully it's like,
you know, whatever toxicity is in my body is helping
drain some of my lymphoids or whatever. And another thing
I've been doing is focusing on food and my diet
and really trying to go back to the basics with food.
My friend Mary, who's always like my phone a friend.
When I have an issue, a health issue that I
(07:36):
don't know how to address, She's always the person who
I call, and so I sent her a text, an
SOS text. I don't know, this is probably two months
ago now, just like, what do I do? I have
no idea what to do. I'm so stuck and lost
on this. Do you have any ideas for me? And
she sent me a long list of ideas, including taking
a really high potency probiotic because you know, as she
pointed out, after three rounds of antibiotics, your healthy bacteria
(08:00):
in your gut is going to be really stripped down,
and so you need to replenish that. And I was
taking probiotics, but she sent me a particular brand that
she likes, and then she sent me a recipe for
this tea that's made out of like really high nutrient
dense herbs. So I've been making that tea from scratch.
And then one of the suggestions that she also had
for me was to go back to the basics with food.
(08:21):
So I've been really focusing on that on, you know,
eliminating dairy from my diet, which I mean, I don't
know if I'll do this forever. I don't love like restricting.
Here's okay, here's the start of the conversation. This is
one of the first areas that I started restricting is
my mother in law kept saying to me, you know,
you might have a dairy allergy. My boys all growing
up had dairy allergies and it caused them all kinds
(08:42):
of sinus issues and they would get ear infections and
all this stuff. And I was just like digging my
heels in and didn't want to believe that dairy could
possibly be an issue and didn't want to give up dairy.
I you know, I don't eat a ton of dairy,
something like I sit around drinking milk, but I do
love cheese and I put cream in my coffee, and
so I was like, I do not want to give
up dairy. Well, finally, I just kept feeling this nudge
(09:04):
from not just my mother in law, but like an
intuitive nudge that hey, maybe if you let go of
dairy for just a little bit of time, maybe if
you restrict around this issue, it will give your body
the resources it needs in order to heal. And so
this is kind of where the journey began. As I
started to think about what would it look like for
me to clean up my diet and just give my
gut a chance to heal, give my immune system a
(09:25):
chance to bounce back from whatever this crazy thing is
that it's been going through. I started to feel myself
really grieve the implementation of these boundaries of this restriction.
I started to feel myself really grieve the loss of
these things that were comforting to me. And I started
to sense that I was very attached to certain things
like cream in my coffee, for example, which, by the way,
(09:47):
is worth pausing on for a second because speaking of
restriction and boundaries, I have been feeling intuitively like coffee
needs to go from my life, needs to be gone
from my life for probably three years now, really since
I got pregnant with Nella. When I got pregnant with
my daughter, who's four now, so this would have been
I mean, I was pregnant with her starting the end
(10:07):
of twenty nineteen and most of twenty twenty. She was
born in July of twenty twenty, and as soon as
I was pregnant with her, I started to notice that
caffeine affected me differently, and particularly caffeine from coffee. But
if you know me, one of the things you know
about me is that I grew up in Portland, Oregon.
I am a coffee lover. I am a coffee snob.
I don't just like to drink a cup of coffee
for the caffeine. I like to drink a cup of
(10:28):
coffee for the experience. Like I want the best coffee,
I want the most delicious coffee. I want the best beans.
I want to brew it in the best way. I
want to do like a slow pour over in the morning,
and like really savor and enjoy my coffee. And I'm
not one of those people who loads up my coffee
with all the cream and sugar in the world. Although
more power to you if that, if that works for you,
The only reason I ever even started adding cream to
(10:50):
my coffee is because the caffeine would hit me in
such a serious way when I would drink it first
thing in the morning with nothing in my stomach and
nothing in the coffee, that I started adding cream to
kind of help my digestive system manage all of the
caffeine that was coming in all at once. But I mean,
in my twenties, I used to brew myself a French
Press and I would drink the entire French Press in
(11:12):
a morning, and the caffeine never bothered me. Or maybe
it just maybe it did and I just wasn't as
conscious of it. I don't know. But all of that
to say like culminating to this moment of realizing I've
had this intuition for three years that I've needed to
give up coffee. I've sort of toyed with the idea.
I've given up coffee for a few weeks at a time,
I've come back around to it. I've given it up
for you know, a couple of months at a time,
(11:33):
or done like only a half a cup or half
calf or a decaf. I've tried all the different things,
and then I come to this moment where it's like, Hey,
you're going to have to give up the cream in
your coffee, which is going to make the coffee that
you're drinking probably not manageable for you. So you're going
to have to find another solution for a morning drink,
which is something that I've known I needed to do
for a long time anyway, And this sort of kicked
(11:55):
off this conversation that I'm having with myself about the
importance of boundaries and restriction. Now. Last week on the episode,
I talked a lot about the resistance, the capital R resistance,
(12:16):
which is Stephen Pressfield's term for the force that comes
up against you anytime you want to make something new,
anytime you want to do something different. And his definition
of creativity is the same as mine, which means this
doesn't have to be like what we typically in our
culture call a creative act. It could literally be like
I want to run a marathon, I want to do
a half iron man, I want to start a business.
(12:37):
I want to I don't know, pick a thing, you know,
start a new sort of like eating plan or get healthier,
or just if you want to implement a new habit
or pattern, if you want to make your bed every morning,
if you want to get up you know the first
time your alarm goes off, if you want to start
writing thank you notes to people when they give you,
whatever it is, anytime you want to do something new
that you haven't done before. Stephen Pressfield says, you're going
(12:59):
to come up against this force, this inexplicable force called resistance.
And in last week's episode, I interpreted resistance as the
gravity that you push up against when you do a
push up. So the resistance is not an evil force,
it's a neutral force. It's a law of nature, is
how I described it. And when you come up against
the law of nature of resistance, you actually use it
(13:22):
to your advantage to push against that force so that
you can create the strength that you need in order
to achieve what you're trying to achieve. And so in
this moment, when I come up against this resistance of
the resistance for me with the coffee and the cream
and the dairy and the trying to get healthy, it's
kind of like, I don't want to do that, that's
(13:43):
how the resistance comes through, and the resistance will come
through differently for each of us. But my resistance was like, oh,
I don't want to do that. That doesn't sound fun.
I like just waking up and drinking whatever I feel
like drinking. What I feel like drinking is a coffee,
And I don't like the feeling of being limited or
restricted or having that rule placed on me. And what
I felt come through so clearly for me as I
(14:05):
started on this journey, as I started making decisions like
letting go of coffee and letting go of cream, letting
go of dairy products, you know, to get myself back
to a place of health, I started to hear so
clearly this insight come in that restriction feels like you're
losing something, but you're actually gaining something. Restriction feels like
(14:29):
it's taking something from you. It can feel like a grief,
but what's actually happening is it's expanding you. It's making space.
Think of it that way. It's making space so that
more joy, more peace, more health, more togetherness, more connection,
more intimacy, whatever it is that you're looking for, more
of that can come in. And without making that space,
(14:52):
there's no room for anything new to come in. So
restriction feels like you're losing. It feels like you're letting go.
It feels like loss, and yet it's making room for more.
It's making room for abundance. It feels like scarcity, but
it's making room for abundance. Another personal example I'll share
with you really quickly. My husband is a huge fan
of Jesse Itzler. If you don't know who Jesse Itzler is,
(15:15):
I can't imagine that most people who listen to my
podcast also follow Jesse Itzler. He's married to Sarah Blakeley,
who started Spanks. He's a serial entrepreneur. He is a
serial like race runner, I guess is what you'd say.
He's like done a bunch of like marathons, triathlons, iron
Man's ultra iron what. I don't even know all the terminology.
(15:36):
But he's always doing something wild and crazy out in nature.
He's always, like you know, pushing himself to his absolute
physical limits. He came out with this product called the
Big Ass Calendar, which is basically a huge calendar that
you put on your wall that you use to plan
out your entire year, so not just you, but your
whole family, Like the entire family puts, like all your trips,
(15:58):
all your plans, all your race, whatever you're doing in
a year, you put it all on this big calendar,
and not just that, so you're not just putting meetings
and whatever on the calendar, but you're actually like planning
adventures for the year. And so my husband loved this idea.
He ordered the calendar. It gets here. We watch this
video or Jesse talks about how to use the calendar,
and one of the first things that he tells you
(16:19):
to do is to go into twenty twenty five or
go into the next calendar year very light. So he
says one of the first things he does is clear
out his email account, clear out his desk, clear out
his closet, clear out his pantry, clear out whatever, and
just get rid of stuff that you're not using, get
rid of stuff that's getting in the way, get rid
of the stuff that's sort of cluttering up your space
(16:39):
to make space for new things to come in the
new year. That was the main example that he used
in the video. And anytime I watch someone talk about
clearing out their closet, I'm sort of like, eh, I
don't really feel like, I have a bunch of stuff
to clear out my closet. I don't know how you are,
but I'm not a hoarder when it comes to close.
The first book that I ever wrote and published was
called Packing Light. The story is about me going on
(17:01):
this big trip with my friend, living with only what
was in our suitcases for almost a year year's time.
And I feel like, ever since I had that experience,
I'm just not a big hoarder when it comes to clothes.
In fact, I'm like almost too quick to get rid
of stuff sometimes to where I'm like, oh, I should
have kept that. I could have definitely used that, but
I didn't use it for six months, and so I
(17:21):
got rid of it anyway. So when he was talking
about clearing out his closet, I was like, not all
that inspired, just because I don't feel like I have
a ton of stuff to get rid of in my closet.
But then last night, I'm in my kitchen, I'm starting
to get dinner ready for my kids, and I pull
out a can of beans from my pantry. And this
can of beans expired in twenty twenty two, and I
was like, ooh, yeah, we're not going to eat that,
(17:43):
so I threw it in the garbage can, and then
I got curious. I was like, I wonder what else
in my pantry is expired? So I started going through
my pantry almost feverishly. I was like, I'll finding all
these things that had expired. And I found stuff that
expired in twenty seventeen, stuff that expired in twenty nineteen.
It was like spices and can good goods and stuff
that I've been hanging on to a bunch of stuff
that expired in twenty twenty two. In part, I think
(18:05):
because I was sort of saving some dry goods and
canned goods back when everyone was talking about a food shortage.
I don't know if you remember that, but back in
like well, I guess Charlie was a baby, so it
would have been like twenty twenty one twenty twenty two.
Everyone was talking about the potential of a food shortage,
and so I started keeping things just can goods and
dry goods, like you know, tomatoes and rice and that
(18:26):
sort of stuff tucked away in my hall pantry. I have,
like the pantry that's in my kitchen, and then I
have one that's in my hallway, And so I started
saving that kind of stuff in the hall pantry. And
when I was going through all of my canned goods
and all of my dry goods, I was realizing, like
a lot of this stuff is like long expired and
probably shouldn't be used. So I just got really sucked
(18:47):
into this. And all of a sudden, I find myself
clearing all of this stuff out of my pantry and
out of the closet and sending so much stuff to
be donated and sending a bunch of stuff to the
garbage can. And it was such a great feeling. It
was just like, oh my gosh, all this stuff was
just sitting in here and it was taking up space,
it was taking up room, and it felt energetically so good,
(19:09):
and I felt so light to just purge and get
it out of my house. It's like, it's not usable,
we can't use it. It has to go to the garbage can.
Or I could use this, but I don't need it anymore,
and so I'm gonna put it in the donate pile
and send it to Goodwill. And it felt so nice,
and I felt so light to get all that stuff
out of my house, and it just reminded me of
this same theme that keeps coming up again and again
(19:30):
and again that sometimes it can feel hard to let
go of those things. Now, sometimes our experience of letting
go of stuff is really easy, Like mine was in
the kitchen, It's like, yeah, that's expired, we're throwing that away.
Although I did have a few moments where something was expired,
but it was like, oh, like this was a really
good spice that I paid all this money for or whatever,
and so I was like having these really you know,
(19:51):
complicated feelings about throwing it in the garbage can. I
was like feeling kind of regretful or guilty or something like, Oh,
I shouldn't have spent all this money on it and
then forgotten about it and now we've never used it.
But I told my husband later, I was like, you
know what was nice about that is I feel like
it kind of like snapped me into conscious focus on
what's in our pantry and what's in our fridge and
just got me to think about how can I pay
(20:11):
more attention to using stuff while it's still good and
not keeping a bunch of backstock on hand that we're
not actually going to use. And So even though there
was like that tension of like, Oh, that feels so
bad to throw that away. It feels so wasteful. It
also made me a more conscious shopper. When I go
to the grocery store, I'm definitely gonna think twice about
(20:32):
buying double of things, or you know, buying more than
we need. And so again, here's another example of a
time when it can feel challenging to let something go,
and yet letting those things go opens more space, creates
more room, makes more openness so that you can have
the experience of flow that I was talking about on
(20:53):
the episode last week. Without room, there can be no flow.
Without space, there can be no f And sometimes to
create space, we have to let go of things. We
have to go stuff in our closet, we have to
go stuff in our pantry. We have to let go
of our morning cup of coffee that we've had since
we were in the fourth grade. I will tell you
a story about how I started drinking coffee in the
(21:14):
fourth grade. I'm pretty sure it was decaf. Don't at
my parents on this one. Pretty sure it was decaff coffee.
My mom still to this day drinks deacaff coffee. She
doesn't love to drink caffeine. Probably for the same reasons
that I do. We're probably made very similarly. My parents
(21:36):
used to, for creamer, put a scoop of Nilla ice
cream in their coffee. If you think about it, it's
kind of the same thing. It's like whole milk and sugar.
It's basically coffee creamer. And so they'd put a scoop
of anil ice cream in their coffee. Weill in fourth grade,
I'm watching my parents do this. I'm like, is that
what I have to do to get ice cream for
breakfast is just drink a cup of coffee. And so
I started drinking. You know, it was like a tablespoon
(21:57):
of ice cream with like a tiny bit of coffee
over the top of it. And again I think it
was decaff coffee, but still it acclimated my taste buds
to coffee. And I tell Matt this all the time
when he laughs at me how hard it is for
me to give up my morning coffee, I'm like, I've
been drinking coffee. I was acclimated to this flavor from
the time I was in fourth grade. You know, I
grew up in Portland, Oregon, which is like coffee country
(22:19):
of the USA, and coffee became part of the culture.
It's like built. It feels like it's built into my DNA.
It's not, but that's how it feels, and it feels
very challenging to let it go. So sometimes we have
these things that are so challenging to let go, and
yet I know, I know, no, no, deepen my bones,
because I've done this before, that when you can have
(22:39):
the courage to let something go, there's newness on the
other side of it. There's space for that flow to
rush in. And when you're letting go of the thing,
all you can see is what you're letting go of.
You can't yet see what's coming to you, and so
it can feel scary. You're like, I don't want to
let go of this thing. You know. Finances have been
tighter for us lately because of the business investment that
(23:01):
we made, and also inflation is insane right now, and
so our budget has been tighter than I'm used to
it being. And because of that, I was clearing out
these things that I bought back when finances were not
this way, and so I was throwing them away, thinking like, oh,
you know, when are we ever going to be able
to buy something like that again? And I just kept
telling myself, there's more where that came from. There's more
(23:22):
where that came from. There's more coming in.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
I'm calling in whatever thing it was that I was
worried about being without. I was like, I'm calling that
in for myself. I'm calling in in in twenty twenty
five and just consciously really energetically letting these things go,
passing them on and trusting that we're going to have
everything that we need. We always have had everything that
we've needed. We've never gone without something that we've needed,
(23:45):
and we even have a lot of stuff that we
want to and I would imagine the same is true
for you. I'm sharing all of this really to say
to you, in what ways do you need to self
inflict some restriction into your life, self inflict some boundaries
into your life, and even let go of things, purge
some things that you feel really really attached to so
(24:06):
that you can make space for more of that flow
to come in. Think of a river or a stream
is probably a better mental image. If you think of
a stream that's clogged up with garbage or just stuff.
It doesn't even have to be garbage, like, even if
it's good stuff. Let's just say it's like, I don't know,
everyone's definition of good is different, but let's just say
(24:26):
for the sake of argument, that in the stream is
like a Gucci coat and like, you know, a really
expensive pair of boots, and like the nicest like bags
and bags of like whole food's food and whatever thing
it is that you feel attached to. It's in the stream.
It's clogging up the stream. The only way to get
the flow, the movement back into the stream is to
(24:48):
pull everything out of the stream. It doesn't matter how
good of a thing it is. Well, first of all,
what good does a Gucci coat do you if it's
in the middle of a stream because it's soaking wet.
So maybe this is a bad metaphor. I don't know.
This is off the cut to go with me here,
But my point is I didn't want it to be
just garbage in the stream, because a lot of the
stuff that you're gonna have to let go of is
not garbage. I don't think coffee is garbage. I don't
(25:09):
think dairy is garbage. I tend to try to stay
neutral around food because I've done a lot of like
really serious, strict dieting type stuff in my life, and
I don't think that overall in life it's helpful to
moralize food, you know, I don't think dairy is like
an immoral food. I think our food system is really
complicated in the US, in particular because of additives and
(25:32):
preservatives and just the way that animals are raised and
all kinds of stuff. There's so many complicated and confusing
things to understand around food. So I think because of that,
it makes sense too for certain periods of time create
some restriction around let's say, gluten, or around carbohydrates, or
around dairy, or around alcohol, or around you know, sugar.
(25:54):
So those foods which are neutral, they're not immoral foods,
but foods that can cause inflammation in our bodies. And
that's something that I'm really working to implement in my
own life right now, just to try to get my
body back to a baseline place. Anyway, So the point
I'm making by telling these personal stories is that I
don't know where restriction needs to happen for you in
order for you to experience more space and more lightness
(26:19):
so that more flow can come through. But that's what
I would love for you to meditate on this week
is think about where where do I need a little restriction,
a little self imposed restriction in my life, something that
you know, there's no point in doing it just to suffer. Like,
restriction is not about suffering. Restriction is about making space
for more flow to come through. So it's not about
(26:40):
getting rid of something that you love. It's about getting
rid of something that you think intuitively might be getting
in the way of you having more flow in your life.
One way to get at this an activity that I've
been doing with myself. I'll share a longer story on
next week's episode about where I learned this from, but
for now, I'll just give you the activity, which is
(27:01):
that I sit down, I write the date at the
top of my paper. I actually do this in the
notes app on my iPhone, so this is not like
it doesn't have to be a physical piece of paper
or your computer or anything fancy. I literally go into
my notes app, I write the date at the top
of the paper, and then I write the question where
do I need to implement restriction in my life today?
Or I might write like where is the flow being
(27:24):
blocked in my life? Question mark? And then I just
respond intuitively through writing to the question, So it's basically
like my higher self answering the question to myself. You
can write whatever question you want. You could just literally
write what do you want to show me today? What
do you have to teach me today? It doesn't have
to be even around boundaries. If you don't feel like
this topic resonates with you, then you can move on
(27:45):
to something totally different, and I'll share next week more
about where I learned this exercise and why I think
it's so important. But for now, I just want you
to focus on thinking and reflecting around this question. Where
could I let go of some things that are impeding
the flow of my life? If I want more flow,
if I want more love, more joy, more abundance, more grace,
(28:09):
more peace, more love, more intimacy, more whatever in my life?
Where is the stuff that's getting in the way of that?
What could I get rid of? What are some physical
things I could get rid of? Maybe for you it's
like resentment or bitterness, or lack of gratitude or something else,
something emotional that's getting in the way. But I want
(28:30):
you to consider, how am I a physical restriction? How
might a self imposed restriction or boundary help me to
improve in this area that I want to improve in.
For me, it's health, maybe for you it's something totally different.
But consider that question. Try that writing exercise. Come back
next week. I'm going to teach you more about where
that writing exercise came from and why I think it's
(28:52):
so powerful. I can't wait to chat with you more,
and I will see you back next week on the
Write Your Story Podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, pull them back
together with the word you write all the beauty and
piece and the magic that you'll start too fun. When
you write your story, you get the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down and cover it.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
It's all about.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And write 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 on this week's episode,
I want to talk about the role that restriction plays
in creativity because I think this is a topic that
gets jumped over most of the time for several reasons.
One reason I think it gets jumped over is that
when we think about something like creativity, an act of
(00:51):
creativity is an act of bringing something out of nothing,
going from not having a book to having a book,
not having a painting to having ating, not having a
baby to having a baby, not having a business to
having a business. We think about creativity as inherently expansive,
and in many ways it is inherently expansive. I would
agree with that statement that creativity is inherently expansive, but
(01:13):
one thing I think we forget about is that in
order to experience that expansion, there is a necessary process
or phase of restriction. And think of this as sort
of the push pull to what I talked about on
last week's episode. This is the topic that I wanted
to cover in last week's episode, which, by the way,
if you haven't listened to last week's episode, it's an
important one to go back to in addition to this one,
(01:34):
because this episode is kind of the push pull to
that episode. In last week's episode, I had planned to
talk about boundaries, was kind of the word that I
had in my head, and instead I ended up talking
way more about the expansive nature of creativity and how
when we can open ourselves and let an idea come
through us, that our creativity comes much more effortlessly, that
(01:56):
it becomes something that we get to participate in that's
much bigger than us. It doesn't have to come from
our will power or our ego or our small self.
It can actually come from something that we may not
even understand, our connection to the broader whole. So yeah,
So the plan last week was to talk about boundaries,
and instead I ended up talking about expansion. So this
(02:16):
week I do want to talk about boundaries and restriction
and the role that this plays in creativity. And I
think these two things, although they seem contradictory, really play
well together. I know they seem like their opposites, but
this is true with a lot of things that seem
like opposites, that when we can hold both opposites in
our hands at the same time, that we actually come
(02:37):
to a broader understanding of the topic as a whole.
It's like two different perspectives of the same situation. When
you can understand both perspectives, you actually get a greater
understanding of the circumstances that were taking place. Like if
I were to sit down with you and your sibling,
or you and your partner, or you and a friend
who both had the same experience together, and I were
to get each of your perspectives, I would have a
(02:59):
broader understand standing of the experience that you shared by
understanding both how you interpreted the experience and also how
the other person interpreted the experience. And the more perspectives
that we get on any one topic, the greater understanding
that we're going to have about that topic. And so
think about that as I'm talking about this idea of
boundaries and restriction today because I think this can be
(03:19):
a really challenging topic for some of us to take in.
I mean, I guess it depends on your personality and
your natural temperament, your natural tendencies. Some of us tend
more toward boundaries and restriction, and we kind of like
the safety of restriction because restriction provides some measure of
safety and certainty and stability. And so if you tend
more in that direction, maybe you like this conversation better
(03:41):
than you liked last week's conversation. Maybe you loved last
week's conversation because it gave you the sense of freedom
and lightness and things can be easy, and so you
love that sensation. But hearing me talk about boundaries and
restriction might make you feel a little more uncomfortable. Well,
think about these things like almost like a rubber band
that stretch you to have a better understanding of the
(04:03):
fullness of what it takes to be a creative person
in the world. And I would say, you know, one
of the things I shared in last week's episode was
how for most of my life, tending toward boundaries and
restriction came really naturally to me. And I shared a
story about being like super super disciplined around food in particular,
and how a nutrition has pointed out to me like
(04:23):
she's like, I've never worked with anyone who didn't cheat
one time on their elimination diet. And I would say now,
in part because I had that experience, and because that's
how I moved through the world, and I've found this
expansion and lightness and freedom of sort of like letting
life flow through me and moving with the flow of life.
Now the conversation of boundaries and restriction feels a little
(04:44):
bit more like I don't love to have this conversation,
but I do think it's a really important conversation to have.
It's definitely a part of life. It's definitely a part
of being an adult and a grown up in the world.
It's definitely part of creating a container for ourselves where
we actually feel safe enough to play and safe enough
to experiment, and safe enough to be creative and to
get curious and to ask questions. And so I think
(05:05):
this is a really important part of the creativity conversation.
And I'm so excited to get to have that conversation
with you today. One of the reasons this topic came
up for me today is because I've been in this
long process of trying to troubleshoot a recurring respiratory infection,
really like plural recurring respiratory infections that keep happening for me.
And I've talked about this a handful of times on
(05:27):
the show, So if you've been around for a while,
you've heard me say that. For months now, at least
since June of this year, but probably since earlier than that,
I've been having recurring respiratory infections, and they've gotten like
closer and closer together. I had earlier in the fall
a sinus infection and then bronchitis, it turned to walking pneumonia.
The walking pneumonia lasted for a long long time. That
(05:48):
all started in I think like June, and then it
was the worst. The walking pneumonia happened in August. And
I've just been sick NonStop basically since June, and so
I've been trying to trouble shoot that and figure out
what's going on with my body. What's happening here? Is
this an emotional issue, is it a physical one? Is
there an underlying infection? How can I treat that? Aside
from taking more antibiotics, because I did take three rounds
(06:10):
of antibiotics in the fall, and I feel like my
body has been trying to recover from the antibiotics ever since.
I'm not opposed to taking antibiotics, and I'm not anti
Western medicine in the slightest, but I do like to
look at health from a holistic perspective and think about
what types of things could be contributing to this issue
beyond just the physical. I think that there are oftentimes
(06:33):
more factors contributing to illness than we are consciously aware of,
and so I like to open my awareness as much
as possible and try to troubleshoot the issue from all
different angles. So that's what I've been doing. I've been
definitely focusing on the physical aspect of the illness, and
so I've been taking supplements. I've been making sure to
get all my vitamins. I've been especially going overboard with
(06:53):
things like vitamin C, vitamin D, and zinc. I've been
drinking lots of water. I've been taking my electrolytes. I
met with a doctor and ran a whole blood panel
and made sure that there was, you know, nothing in
my blood work that came up that would show me
why this infection keeps recurring. Thanks to my mother in
law who's been so generous with me, I have been
getting a massage once a month, which is really nice.
(07:14):
I don't know if it's helping with the infection at all,
but it definitely it feels wonderful and hopefully it's like,
you know, whatever toxicity is in my body is helping
drain some of my lymphoids or whatever. And another thing
I've been doing is focusing on food and my diet
and really trying to go back to the basics with food.
My friend Mary, who's always like my phone a friend.
When I have an issue, a health issue that I
(07:36):
don't know how to address, She's always the person who
I call, and so I sent her a text, an
SOS text. I don't know, this is probably two months
ago now, just like, what do I do? I have
no idea what to do. I'm so stuck and lost
on this. Do you have any ideas for me? And
she sent me a long list of ideas, including taking
a really high potency probiotic because you know, as she
pointed out, after three rounds of antibiotics, your healthy bacteria
(08:00):
in your gut is going to be really stripped down,
and so you need to replenish that. And I was
taking probiotics, but she sent me a particular brand that
she likes, and then she sent me a recipe for
this tea that's made out of like really high nutrient
dense herbs. So I've been making that tea from scratch.
And then one of the suggestions that she also had
for me was to go back to the basics with food.
(08:21):
So I've been really focusing on that on, you know,
eliminating dairy from my diet, which I mean, I don't
know if I'll do this forever. I don't love like restricting.
Here's okay, here's the start of the conversation. This is
one of the first areas that I started restricting is
my mother in law kept saying to me, you know,
you might have a dairy allergy. My boys all growing
up had dairy allergies and it caused them all kinds
(08:42):
of sinus issues and they would get ear infections and
all this stuff. And I was just like digging my
heels in and didn't want to believe that dairy could
possibly be an issue and didn't want to give up dairy.
I you know, I don't eat a ton of dairy,
something like I sit around drinking milk, but I do
love cheese and I put cream in my coffee, and
so I was like, I do not want to give
up dairy. Well, finally, I just kept feeling this nudge
(09:04):
from not just my mother in law, but like an
intuitive nudge that hey, maybe if you let go of
dairy for just a little bit of time, maybe if
you restrict around this issue, it will give your body
the resources it needs in order to heal. And so
this is kind of where the journey began. As I
started to think about what would it look like for
me to clean up my diet and just give my
gut a chance to heal, give my immune system a
(09:25):
chance to bounce back from whatever this crazy thing is
that it's been going through. I started to feel myself
really grieve the implementation of these boundaries of this restriction.
I started to feel myself really grieve the loss of
these things that were comforting to me. And I started
to sense that I was very attached to certain things
like cream in my coffee, for example, which, by the way,
(09:47):
is worth pausing on for a second because speaking of
restriction and boundaries, I have been feeling intuitively like coffee
needs to go from my life, needs to be gone
from my life for probably three years now, really since
I got pregnant with Nella. When I got pregnant with
my daughter, who's four now, so this would have been
I mean, I was pregnant with her starting the end
(10:07):
of twenty nineteen and most of twenty twenty. She was
born in July of twenty twenty, and as soon as
I was pregnant with her, I started to notice that
caffeine affected me differently, and particularly caffeine from coffee. But
if you know me, one of the things you know
about me is that I grew up in Portland, Oregon.
I am a coffee lover. I am a coffee snob.
I don't just like to drink a cup of coffee
for the caffeine. I like to drink a cup of
(10:28):
coffee for the experience. Like I want the best coffee,
I want the most delicious coffee. I want the best beans.
I want to brew it in the best way. I
want to do like a slow pour over in the morning,
and like really savor and enjoy my coffee. And I'm
not one of those people who loads up my coffee
with all the cream and sugar in the world. Although
more power to you if that, if that works for you,
The only reason I ever even started adding cream to
(10:50):
my coffee is because the caffeine would hit me in
such a serious way when I would drink it first
thing in the morning with nothing in my stomach and
nothing in the coffee, that I started adding cream to
kind of help my digestive system manage all of the
caffeine that was coming in all at once. But I mean,
in my twenties, I used to brew myself a French
Press and I would drink the entire French Press in
(11:12):
a morning, and the caffeine never bothered me. Or maybe
it just maybe it did and I just wasn't as
conscious of it. I don't know. But all of that
to say like culminating to this moment of realizing I've
had this intuition for three years that I've needed to
give up coffee. I've sort of toyed with the idea.
I've given up coffee for a few weeks at a time,
I've come back around to it. I've given it up
for you know, a couple of months at a time,
(11:33):
or done like only a half a cup or half
calf or a decaf. I've tried all the different things,
and then I come to this moment where it's like, Hey,
you're going to have to give up the cream in
your coffee, which is going to make the coffee that
you're drinking probably not manageable for you. So you're going
to have to find another solution for a morning drink,
which is something that I've known I needed to do
for a long time anyway, And this sort of kicked
(11:55):
off this conversation that I'm having with myself about the
importance of boundaries and restriction. Now. Last week on the episode,
I talked a lot about the resistance, the capital R resistance,
(12:16):
which is Stephen Pressfield's term for the force that comes
up against you anytime you want to make something new,
anytime you want to do something different. And his definition
of creativity is the same as mine, which means this
doesn't have to be like what we typically in our
culture call a creative act. It could literally be like
I want to run a marathon, I want to do
a half iron man, I want to start a business.
(12:37):
I want to I don't know, pick a thing, you know,
start a new sort of like eating plan or get healthier,
or just if you want to implement a new habit
or pattern, if you want to make your bed every morning,
if you want to get up you know the first
time your alarm goes off, if you want to start
writing thank you notes to people when they give you,
whatever it is, anytime you want to do something new
that you haven't done before. Stephen Pressfield says, you're going
(12:59):
to come up against this force, this inexplicable force called resistance.
And in last week's episode, I interpreted resistance as the
gravity that you push up against when you do a
push up. So the resistance is not an evil force,
it's a neutral force. It's a law of nature, is
how I described it. And when you come up against
the law of nature of resistance, you actually use it
(13:22):
to your advantage to push against that force so that
you can create the strength that you need in order
to achieve what you're trying to achieve. And so in
this moment, when I come up against this resistance of
the resistance for me with the coffee and the cream
and the dairy and the trying to get healthy, it's
kind of like, I don't want to do that, that's
(13:43):
how the resistance comes through, and the resistance will come
through differently for each of us. But my resistance was like, oh,
I don't want to do that. That doesn't sound fun.
I like just waking up and drinking whatever I feel
like drinking. What I feel like drinking is a coffee,
And I don't like the feeling of being limited or
restricted or having that rule placed on me. And what
I felt come through so clearly for me as I
(14:05):
started on this journey, as I started making decisions like
letting go of coffee and letting go of cream, letting
go of dairy products, you know, to get myself back
to a place of health, I started to hear so
clearly this insight come in that restriction feels like you're
losing something, but you're actually gaining something. Restriction feels like
(14:29):
it's taking something from you. It can feel like a grief,
but what's actually happening is it's expanding you. It's making space.
Think of it that way. It's making space so that
more joy, more peace, more health, more togetherness, more connection,
more intimacy, whatever it is that you're looking for, more
of that can come in. And without making that space,
(14:52):
there's no room for anything new to come in. So
restriction feels like you're losing. It feels like you're letting go.
It feels like loss, and yet it's making room for more.
It's making room for abundance. It feels like scarcity, but
it's making room for abundance. Another personal example I'll share
with you really quickly. My husband is a huge fan
of Jesse Itzler. If you don't know who Jesse Itzler is,
(15:15):
I can't imagine that most people who listen to my
podcast also follow Jesse Itzler. He's married to Sarah Blakeley,
who started Spanks. He's a serial entrepreneur. He is a
serial like race runner, I guess is what you'd say.
He's like done a bunch of like marathons, triathlons, iron
Man's ultra iron what. I don't even know all the terminology.
(15:36):
But he's always doing something wild and crazy out in nature.
He's always, like you know, pushing himself to his absolute
physical limits. He came out with this product called the
Big Ass Calendar, which is basically a huge calendar that
you put on your wall that you use to plan
out your entire year, so not just you, but your
whole family, Like the entire family puts, like all your trips,
(15:58):
all your plans, all your race, whatever you're doing in
a year, you put it all on this big calendar,
and not just that, so you're not just putting meetings
and whatever on the calendar, but you're actually like planning
adventures for the year. And so my husband loved this idea.
He ordered the calendar. It gets here. We watch this
video or Jesse talks about how to use the calendar,
and one of the first things that he tells you
(16:19):
to do is to go into twenty twenty five or
go into the next calendar year very light. So he
says one of the first things he does is clear
out his email account, clear out his desk, clear out
his closet, clear out his pantry, clear out whatever, and
just get rid of stuff that you're not using, get
rid of stuff that's getting in the way, get rid
of the stuff that's sort of cluttering up your space
(16:39):
to make space for new things to come in the
new year. That was the main example that he used
in the video. And anytime I watch someone talk about
clearing out their closet, I'm sort of like, eh, I
don't really feel like, I have a bunch of stuff
to clear out my closet. I don't know how you are,
but I'm not a hoarder when it comes to close.
The first book that I ever wrote and published was
called Packing Light. The story is about me going on
(17:01):
this big trip with my friend, living with only what
was in our suitcases for almost a year year's time.
And I feel like, ever since I had that experience,
I'm just not a big hoarder when it comes to clothes.
In fact, I'm like almost too quick to get rid
of stuff sometimes to where I'm like, oh, I should
have kept that. I could have definitely used that, but
I didn't use it for six months, and so I
(17:21):
got rid of it anyway. So when he was talking
about clearing out his closet, I was like, not all
that inspired, just because I don't feel like I have
a ton of stuff to get rid of in my closet.
But then last night, I'm in my kitchen, I'm starting
to get dinner ready for my kids, and I pull
out a can of beans from my pantry. And this
can of beans expired in twenty twenty two, and I
was like, ooh, yeah, we're not going to eat that,
(17:43):
so I threw it in the garbage can, and then
I got curious. I was like, I wonder what else
in my pantry is expired? So I started going through
my pantry almost feverishly. I was like, I'll finding all
these things that had expired. And I found stuff that
expired in twenty seventeen, stuff that expired in twenty nineteen.
It was like spices and can good goods and stuff
that I've been hanging on to a bunch of stuff
that expired in twenty twenty two. In part, I think
(18:05):
because I was sort of saving some dry goods and
canned goods back when everyone was talking about a food shortage.
I don't know if you remember that, but back in
like well, I guess Charlie was a baby, so it
would have been like twenty twenty one twenty twenty two.
Everyone was talking about the potential of a food shortage,
and so I started keeping things just can goods and
dry goods, like you know, tomatoes and rice and that
(18:26):
sort of stuff tucked away in my hall pantry. I have,
like the pantry that's in my kitchen, and then I
have one that's in my hallway, And so I started
saving that kind of stuff in the hall pantry. And
when I was going through all of my canned goods
and all of my dry goods, I was realizing, like
a lot of this stuff is like long expired and
probably shouldn't be used. So I just got really sucked
(18:47):
into this. And all of a sudden, I find myself
clearing all of this stuff out of my pantry and
out of the closet and sending so much stuff to
be donated and sending a bunch of stuff to the
garbage can. And it was such a great feeling. It
was just like, oh my gosh, all this stuff was
just sitting in here and it was taking up space,
it was taking up room, and it felt energetically so good,
(19:09):
and I felt so light to just purge and get
it out of my house. It's like, it's not usable,
we can't use it. It has to go to the garbage can.
Or I could use this, but I don't need it anymore,
and so I'm gonna put it in the donate pile
and send it to Goodwill. And it felt so nice,
and I felt so light to get all that stuff
out of my house, and it just reminded me of
this same theme that keeps coming up again and again
(19:30):
and again that sometimes it can feel hard to let
go of those things. Now, sometimes our experience of letting
go of stuff is really easy, Like mine was in
the kitchen, It's like, yeah, that's expired, we're throwing that away.
Although I did have a few moments where something was expired,
but it was like, oh, like this was a really
good spice that I paid all this money for or whatever,
and so I was like having these really you know,
(19:51):
complicated feelings about throwing it in the garbage can. I
was like feeling kind of regretful or guilty or something like, Oh,
I shouldn't have spent all this money on it and
then forgotten about it and now we've never used it.
But I told my husband later, I was like, you
know what was nice about that is I feel like
it kind of like snapped me into conscious focus on
what's in our pantry and what's in our fridge and
just got me to think about how can I pay
(20:11):
more attention to using stuff while it's still good and
not keeping a bunch of backstock on hand that we're
not actually going to use. And So even though there
was like that tension of like, Oh, that feels so
bad to throw that away. It feels so wasteful. It
also made me a more conscious shopper. When I go
to the grocery store, I'm definitely gonna think twice about
(20:32):
buying double of things, or you know, buying more than
we need. And so again, here's another example of a
time when it can feel challenging to let something go,
and yet letting those things go opens more space, creates
more room, makes more openness so that you can have
the experience of flow that I was talking about on
(20:53):
the episode last week. Without room, there can be no flow.
Without space, there can be no f And sometimes to
create space, we have to let go of things. We
have to go stuff in our closet, we have to
go stuff in our pantry. We have to let go
of our morning cup of coffee that we've had since
we were in the fourth grade. I will tell you
a story about how I started drinking coffee in the
(21:14):
fourth grade. I'm pretty sure it was decaf. Don't at
my parents on this one. Pretty sure it was decaff coffee.
My mom still to this day drinks deacaff coffee. She
doesn't love to drink caffeine. Probably for the same reasons
that I do. We're probably made very similarly. My parents
(21:36):
used to, for creamer, put a scoop of Nilla ice
cream in their coffee. If you think about it, it's
kind of the same thing. It's like whole milk and sugar.
It's basically coffee creamer. And so they'd put a scoop
of anil ice cream in their coffee. Weill in fourth grade,
I'm watching my parents do this. I'm like, is that
what I have to do to get ice cream for
breakfast is just drink a cup of coffee. And so
I started drinking. You know, it was like a tablespoon
(21:57):
of ice cream with like a tiny bit of coffee
over the top of it. And again I think it
was decaff coffee, but still it acclimated my taste buds
to coffee. And I tell Matt this all the time
when he laughs at me how hard it is for
me to give up my morning coffee, I'm like, I've
been drinking coffee. I was acclimated to this flavor from
the time I was in fourth grade. You know, I
grew up in Portland, Oregon, which is like coffee country
(22:19):
of the USA, and coffee became part of the culture.
It's like built. It feels like it's built into my DNA.
It's not, but that's how it feels, and it feels
very challenging to let it go. So sometimes we have
these things that are so challenging to let go, and
yet I know, I know, no, no, deepen my bones,
because I've done this before, that when you can have
(22:39):
the courage to let something go, there's newness on the
other side of it. There's space for that flow to
rush in. And when you're letting go of the thing,
all you can see is what you're letting go of.
You can't yet see what's coming to you, and so
it can feel scary. You're like, I don't want to
let go of this thing. You know. Finances have been
tighter for us lately because of the business investment that
(23:01):
we made, and also inflation is insane right now, and
so our budget has been tighter than I'm used to
it being. And because of that, I was clearing out
these things that I bought back when finances were not
this way, and so I was throwing them away, thinking like, oh,
you know, when are we ever going to be able
to buy something like that again? And I just kept
telling myself, there's more where that came from. There's more
(23:22):
where that came from. There's more coming in.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
I'm calling in whatever thing it was that I was
worried about being without. I was like, I'm calling that
in for myself. I'm calling in in in twenty twenty
five and just consciously really energetically letting these things go,
passing them on and trusting that we're going to have
everything that we need. We always have had everything that
we've needed. We've never gone without something that we've needed,
(23:45):
and we even have a lot of stuff that we
want to and I would imagine the same is true
for you. I'm sharing all of this really to say
to you, in what ways do you need to self
inflict some restriction into your life, self inflict some boundaries
into your life, and even let go of things, purge
some things that you feel really really attached to so
(24:06):
that you can make space for more of that flow
to come in. Think of a river or a stream
is probably a better mental image. If you think of
a stream that's clogged up with garbage or just stuff.
It doesn't even have to be garbage, like, even if
it's good stuff. Let's just say it's like, I don't know,
everyone's definition of good is different, but let's just say
(24:26):
for the sake of argument, that in the stream is
like a Gucci coat and like, you know, a really
expensive pair of boots, and like the nicest like bags
and bags of like whole food's food and whatever thing
it is that you feel attached to. It's in the stream.
It's clogging up the stream. The only way to get
the flow, the movement back into the stream is to
(24:48):
pull everything out of the stream. It doesn't matter how
good of a thing it is. Well, first of all,
what good does a Gucci coat do you if it's
in the middle of a stream because it's soaking wet.
So maybe this is a bad metaphor. I don't know.
This is off the cut to go with me here,
But my point is I didn't want it to be
just garbage in the stream, because a lot of the
stuff that you're gonna have to let go of is
not garbage. I don't think coffee is garbage. I don't
(25:09):
think dairy is garbage. I tend to try to stay
neutral around food because I've done a lot of like
really serious, strict dieting type stuff in my life, and
I don't think that overall in life it's helpful to
moralize food, you know, I don't think dairy is like
an immoral food. I think our food system is really
complicated in the US, in particular because of additives and
(25:32):
preservatives and just the way that animals are raised and
all kinds of stuff. There's so many complicated and confusing
things to understand around food. So I think because of that,
it makes sense too for certain periods of time create
some restriction around let's say, gluten, or around carbohydrates, or
around dairy, or around alcohol, or around you know, sugar.
(25:54):
So those foods which are neutral, they're not immoral foods,
but foods that can cause inflammation in our bodies. And
that's something that I'm really working to implement in my
own life right now, just to try to get my
body back to a baseline place. Anyway, So the point
I'm making by telling these personal stories is that I
don't know where restriction needs to happen for you in
order for you to experience more space and more lightness
(26:19):
so that more flow can come through. But that's what
I would love for you to meditate on this week
is think about where where do I need a little restriction,
a little self imposed restriction in my life, something that
you know, there's no point in doing it just to suffer. Like,
restriction is not about suffering. Restriction is about making space
for more flow to come through. So it's not about
(26:40):
getting rid of something that you love. It's about getting
rid of something that you think intuitively might be getting
in the way of you having more flow in your life.
One way to get at this an activity that I've
been doing with myself. I'll share a longer story on
next week's episode about where I learned this from, but
for now, I'll just give you the activity, which is
(27:01):
that I sit down, I write the date at the
top of my paper. I actually do this in the
notes app on my iPhone, so this is not like
it doesn't have to be a physical piece of paper
or your computer or anything fancy. I literally go into
my notes app, I write the date at the top
of the paper, and then I write the question where
do I need to implement restriction in my life today?
Or I might write like where is the flow being
(27:24):
blocked in my life? Question mark? And then I just
respond intuitively through writing to the question, So it's basically
like my higher self answering the question to myself. You
can write whatever question you want. You could just literally
write what do you want to show me today? What
do you have to teach me today? It doesn't have
to be even around boundaries. If you don't feel like
this topic resonates with you, then you can move on
(27:45):
to something totally different, and I'll share next week more
about where I learned this exercise and why I think
it's so important. But for now, I just want you
to focus on thinking and reflecting around this question. Where
could I let go of some things that are impeding
the flow of my life? If I want more flow,
if I want more love, more joy, more abundance, more grace,
(28:09):
more peace, more love, more intimacy, more whatever in my life?
Where is the stuff that's getting in the way of that?
What could I get rid of? What are some physical
things I could get rid of? Maybe for you it's
like resentment or bitterness, or lack of gratitude or something else,
something emotional that's getting in the way. But I want
(28:30):
you to consider, how am I a physical restriction? How
might a self imposed restriction or boundary help me to
improve in this area that I want to improve in.
For me, it's health, maybe for you it's something totally different.
But consider that question. Try that writing exercise. Come back
next week. I'm going to teach you more about where
that writing exercise came from and why I think it's
(28:52):
so powerful. I can't wait to chat with you more,
and I will see you back next week on the
Write Your Story Podcast
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