I've experienced the profound transformation that comes with conscious living and now excited to see how all the work I have done will impact my life in Santa Barbara. In this episode I speak about how we ended up getting a secondary home in SB and some of the challenges we faced. I share how our initial visits were during my stepdaughter's college days before I even learned to live consciously and take responsibility for my own emotions. I also talk about how not being committed to one thing can really alter your experience of everything.
This episode is the backstory to how we got into the Santa Barbara community when I was living unconsciously and brings us to the present day where I am now committed to living consciously as a main priority in life. Whether it be engaging in activities like pickleball or being a member of the Rock Creek Ladies text thread, I approach everything with an all-in energy and appreciation of wonderful neighbors and community. My hope is that as you listen to my story, you'll feel encouraged to take a proactive role in your own community and champion the kind of conscious living that can lead to immense personal and collective growth.
Click on the platform of your choice to follow the podcast and write a review so we can spread the news and reach more people!
Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-brain-bs-podcast-learning-to-live-consciously/id1548758744?i=1000643769866
Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/show/4RWxW7Ni1EHTAywriOwY9z?si=d9c181834529414d
Google Podcasts
https://podcasts.google.com/search/The%20Brain%20BS%20Podcast
I Heart Radio
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-brain-bs-podcast-learn-76710324/
Pandora
https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-brain-bs-podcast-learning-to-live-consciously/PC:60845
If you want to get in touch with me
https://www.thebrainbs.com/
In the episode, I mentioned a realtor named Justin Etherton that we used to buy our first two homes in Santa Barbara.
Justin is a great guy and very knowledgeable realtor. He has also made an admirable effort to stay connected with us over a decade now and always there for us to ask him questions.
I would highly recommend him if you are looking for a realtor it the SB area. Here is the link to his website.
https://www.ethertonrealestate.com/
I've experienced the profound transformation that comes with conscious living and now excited to see how all the work I have done will impact my life in Santa Barbara. In this episode I speak about how we ended up getting a secondary home in SB and some of the challenges we faced. I share how our initial visits were during my stepdaughter's college days before I even learned to live consciously and take responsibility for my own emotions. I also talk about how not being committed to one thing can really alter your experience of everything.
This episode is the backstory to how we got into the Santa Barbara community when I was living unconsciously and brings us to the present day where I am now committed to living consciously as a main priority in life. Whether it be engaging in activities like pickleball or being a member of the Rock Creek Ladies text thread, I approach everything with an all-in energy and appreciation of wonderful neighbors and community. My hope is that as you listen to my story, you'll feel encouraged to take a proactive role in your own community and champion the kind of conscious living that can lead to immense personal and collective growth.
Click on the platform of your choice to follow the podcast and write a review so we can spread the news and reach more people!
Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-brain-bs-podcast-learning-to-live-consciously/id1548758744?i=1000643769866
Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/show/4RWxW7Ni1EHTAywriOwY9z?si=d9c181834529414d
Google Podcasts
https://podcasts.google.com/search/The%20Brain%20BS%20Podcast
I Heart Radio
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-brain-bs-podcast-learn-76710324/
Pandora
https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-brain-bs-podcast-learning-to-live-consciously/PC:60845
If you want to get in touch with me
https://www.thebrainbs.com/
In the episode, I mentioned a realtor named Justin Etherton that we used to buy our first two homes in Santa Barbara.
Justin is a great guy and very knowledgeable realtor. He has also made an admirable effort to stay connected with us over a decade now and always there for us to ask him questions.
I would highly recommend him if you are looking for a realtor it the SB area. Here is the link to his website.
https://www.ethertonrealestate.com/
This is Maureen Kafkas, the BrainBS co-chair, to tell you about the episode today. But before I get to that, I want to remind you that the BrainBS podcast is here to offer you a psycho-spiritual approach to life that will inspire you to live consciously and make your overall health a priority. While it can enhance your quality of life dramatically, it is not meant to be a replacement for a needed intervention. So if you are struggling with your physical, emotional or mental well-being, please seek the professional support that you need. So before we dive into what the episode is about today, I just want to remind you of the direction that the podcast is going in. We're experimenting with consciousness in Santa Barbara, so I'm going to first share the backstory of how we ended up in Santa Barbara. And the truth is, at that point I was not living consciously. It wasn't a priority, it was maybe a little bit of a blip on a radar. I had read some spirituality books in the past, but I wasn't actually implementing anything that I learned on a consistent basis. So I'm going to share that with you first, before we actually get into how I was able to start living consciously and the impact it's had, and how much different my life is now here in Santa Barbara than it was when we first arrived and then. So today, that episode is the backstory how Santa Barbara became our secondary home, and then we're going to go in a sequence from there that I'm going to share with you how our time here has evolved, how our life has evolved here, and how much living consciously has improved it in drastic ways that are so much fun, and I can't wait to see what an impact me bringing this to a collaborative community is going to cause, because I was living consciously for myself and being a role model in my family of how to do that. But now I want to do that at a collective level and an amazing community, and I'm so excited and can't wait to see what happens. So sit back, settle in and get ready to hear the story of how Santa Barbara became our secondary home. Do you want more out of your life, but not exactly sure what that might be? Are you longing for something but can't quite put your finger on what it is? That is the universe speaking to you, and it is time to listen up. I'm your host, maureen Kafkas, the BrainBS coach. I created the BrainBS podcast to help people define what success means to them and show them how to get it. I help you to let go of fear and doubt and prepare your nervous system for success. I show you how to understand your own energy and to trust yourself to make all the decisions. If you are ready to go inward and stop looking outside yourself for all the answers, this is the podcast for you. Now let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Brain BS podcast.
Speaker 1:Today we're going to talk about how we ended up coming to Santa Barbara, why we ended up coming coming here. I kind of make up my own timelines because I'm 60 now, so I was like trying to do a little math and figure things out and I did it based on how old Alexis was, because the reason why we came to Santa Barbara is because Alexis went to school at UC Santa Barbara. Also, the the girls their mom always loved to come out to California. Bob, you know, when he was married to her, always loved to come out to California. Bob, you know, when he was married to her they would all come out and she had family out here. So it was a big focus California. So when I came into Dynamix I was like what's the big, what's the deal with California, like, why do you guys always want to go there all the time? I had been there before, but it wasn't a place that I really thought much about. I certainly didn't know my future was here and we started coming here even before Alexis went to school here and I got familiar with the state and I loved it. It's so beautiful there's nowhere else. In my opinion that's quite like it, with the mountains and the ocean.
Speaker 1:So we started visiting here and we would stay at the Harborview Hotel in Santa Barbara on Cabrillo Boulevard and it was like luxurious, we thought it was. It was kind of pricey. We stayed in a couple other places that were cheaper, but it was really loud and you could hear through the walls. So we ended up staying at the Harborview for almost the whole time that Alexis was in school at Santa Barbara, because she graduated in four years and we actually didn't end up buying a house here until after she graduated, which I'm sure was kind of annoying to her. I want to say that I even remember her saying that in the past.
Speaker 1:But it's a big deal when you decide to do something like buy a second home. It's really. People always think that it's just about money. But it's not. It requires courage and effort and a big leap of faith and a willingness to be really uncomfortable and do a lot of hard work to make things happen, and that's what we had to do.
Speaker 1:So we ended up finding this house on the mesa at ricardo and dolores, and it had an amazing ocean view. It was so beautiful and there's no wires in it. You couldn't see anybody else in our backyard and it was just this beautiful Channel Islands view. It was spectacular. But that was the only thing spectacular about that house in that lot. It was very small. The house really we didn't think was made that well. It felt very small and kind of lower quality. It just wasn't what we were used to in Illinois and the house that we had there that we had built together. So we loved it and it was on the Mesa and we met a realtor who lives on the Mesa when we first came here and he's the one that made us think we wanted to be on the Mesa.
Speaker 1:We I bought into that for quite some time. Bob started to get a little bit leery of that and not buying into it when we were fogged in all the time. So the house was beautiful. The lot was, you know, the. The sunsets were amazing when it wasn't fogged in and when it was nice out. And it took me about five years to agree with Bob that I would move away from the Mesa because we were coming here from Chicago. It was our secondary home. We wanted sunshine and it became evident that if you just drove like five minutes closer to the mountains, the sun was out often when it wasn't at our house. So we ended up.
Speaker 1:You know, we had this house. We did a big renovation on it when we got it. We had to learn some lessons, had to come back and forth from Illinois to Santa Barbara. It wasn't really a time yet at least not for me for online shopping. So almost all the stuff that we got for the house and we rented this house out at first too, when we we got it that's how we made um made it affordable that we would do it as a vacation rental and we hired a company to help us and I would drive down to Oxnard and Ventura because they had cost plus stores there and then they had a cost plus store here in Santa Barbara and almost the whole house was furnished with Cosplus, so it was perfect furniture for a vacation rental and we were very mindful of what you would want in a vacation rental because we had gone to so many ourselves.
Speaker 1:So we created this amazing little home that had everything that you could need when you go on a vacation and it had a hot tub in the back. It was a, you know, above ground hot tub because we didn't have a pole and all that. So we, we really, um, loved that house at first and we loved that view. And then, as time went by, um, the neighbors uh, really one in particular, the one the street. He really didn't like us because we also hired an architect at the time to go up on our house.
Speaker 1:After living there for about three or four years, we wanted to go up so we could get a better ocean view from the second floor for our house. It wasn't going to impair anybody's view with where we were doing it, but it didn't matter, because people really didn't like it that we were running our house out. And then he, the neighbor, went to extremes, like the one time we went back to Illinois and when we came back there were signs up in the neighborhood telling us to get out and get away and acting like we were doing something horrible and all these people are going to be coming and going and it was going to be a big party place and in fact, he even went so far as to tell somebody that we were going to live upstairs and rent out the downstairs. It was just all brain BS, major brain BS on this guy's part who lived across the street from us and it turned us off so much and between that, in the fog, we eventually decided that we were not going to stay in that house and we would look for a house that was warmer and sunnier, that was closer up towards San Roque. Everyone kept telling us we, you want San Roque, if you want sunshine, and we're like, okay, let's go check out San Roque. So we ended up checking on San Roque and I love San Roque. We have a house here in San Roque now and it's amazing.
Speaker 1:It was also another renovation and I like to think that we're learning as we go. But we really have to be sensitive to Santa Barbarians when it comes to their outdoor space. They're they really take it seriously and the village has a lot of ordinances and and like rules and permits and it is. It is a process to get work done here and, especially if you're living out of state, to try to make it happen Now these days with like Zoom and FaceTime and cameras on the house, which of course, we have cameras at both houses because we want to know what's going on in Illinois and California, depending on where we are. So we ended up looking for a home in Sanaroki and then we had to, because of capital gains and taxes and all this stuff we had to try to, to close on our new home that we were going to get on the same day that we closed on the house that we were selling.
Speaker 1:And this was before I was really into living consciously. So I I really didn't. I was. I was really kind of in a very bad way when we came to California because I was a stepmom in a blended family where I didn't feel like I belonged, where I felt like an outsider and that nobody appreciated me. Excuse me, it was very much from a victim victim mentality that everybody you know everybody was more important than I was. I didn't have biological children, so I wasn't, as my relationship with anybody wasn't as important as my husband's relationship with his kids, that I just felt like, uh, like I came secondary and I felt like at the time I thought that it was other people that thought that I've come to realize that was just me projecting my own shit on other people and that I had made it all up and none of it was even true. But I didn't know that at the time and I really bought into it hook, line and sinker, because that's, that's life.
Speaker 1:When you're not living consciously, you always think that everybody's doing everything to you. You blame everyone else for your emotions and the way you're feeling. You think, oh, if they would just do this differently, if they just behave differently, if so, and so just did that, everything would be fine. But the truth is that none of that's true. It all comes from within us. I didn't know that then. So there was a lot of stressful times when I look back at how hard it was for me then to share my home, to open it up, to feel safe enough emotionally, to open my heart and to not feel like I had to self-protect. That took me a long time and I was only able to do it once I started living consciously.
Speaker 1:But we got that house. We got that house on the mesa because it was part of the plan and it was what I could handle at the time, and there was a lot of life lessons I needed to learn and for me, things had to get tougher before they got better, which is usually the case for all of us. So I had a lot of, a lot of. I couldn't set boundaries, I couldn't make my needs a priority. I felt like I had to do what everyone else wanted. So I was people pleasing to a crazy degree, but I was also. My resentment was building and building and building, and then I would blow sometimes and I'd get really angry and I was passive, aggressive and self-righteous and all kinds of things. And I'm really happy to say I do not spend much time in those places anymore, but I'm still human with the brain, so I am guilty, but I catch myself way sooner and can get out of it fairly quickly and I never never knock on wood get to the degree that I was then, when I just had not even really, when I wasn't even aware about what I was creating, with the way I was thinking and the way I was feeling, the way I was resisting all my emotions and trying not to feel them. They're just anyway. So that that was all before I learned how to live consciously. So then this now we're on Rock Creek, right, that's that's where our house is. Now I move into this amazing neighborhood.
Speaker 1:We we got into this house and we did that. We gutted it. We worked with flagship construction with Calvin Peterson he's not here in Santa Barbara anymore, but he tried so hard to please us and take good care of us and we got through the renovation, loved it. We've continued to do work on the house and really get it, you know, in a way that we like. We love working on our space and especially our outdoor space to make it really amazing. We love watching sports outside with the big TV and heaters and blankets and the whole indoor outdoor experience. We, um, we did a pool. We did, uh, uh, the whole decking, everything. We redid everything but in. In we redid everything but in.
Speaker 1:When we did it, we, we did it with the notion that we knew we gave up that view and that was always something that was hard for me. Now the house that we have now has palm trees. He shipped in like 70 palm trees, so there's palm trees everywhere. It's like a tropical oasis. It's beautiful and there's a small mountain view from the hot tub in the pool, but it didn't have the view that we, that we gave up. So that was always something that resonated with me. And there was also sorry, my throat got scotchy. I had to have a sip of water. There was also like some of the rooms aren't are not quite as big as I would like. Um, the office is a little bit smaller, but it's. It's a house, for sure, that we could totally live in and we could live in for a very long time if we had to and and really enjoy it like I love this house that we're in now. It's amazing, it's beautiful. We did so much work. We really worked on storage and all kinds of stuff, so it's great.
Speaker 1:And this year was the first year because of me turning 60. And I use that as a catalyst for a lot of things, and one of them was that I was no longer going to be spending winters in Chicago and because I took that lead and that leadership energy, my husband followed me and he's semi-retired and he's still working from a distance here online, but he he was finally able to leave there for the winter and it's really changed everything for us being here for the winter. And it's not just being here for the winter, because if I didn't start to learn how to live consciously and I didn't learn how to make myself a priority and I didn't start doing what I want to do and living my life the way I want to live it, and and giving myself what I deserve, if I didn't do any of that, we still wouldn't be here for the winter. Who knows how long it would have taken. It is when you do the work internally. It is reflected in your external environment, and I have been wanting to be here in the winter for a long time, so I grabbed the dogs, we got in a car. We had a two-week adventure getting here I've been here since November and coming to it for the winter and not leaving, because we were going back and forth every couple of months for three to four weeks.
Speaker 1:I was leaving my dogs in Illinois. It was stressful. It was getting hard to keep track of what was in what house and what we were doing. I was getting tired of the flying back and forth and the amount of money that you have to spend doing it. It was just like taking a toll. And you know, you just, I just want. I don't want to go back and forth as much, I want to be in one place. But little did I know when I got here how amazing the Santa Barbara community is and I we've had a home here for like 12 years or something like that a little bit less than that but we've been coming here for about 15. So it's not like I'm new to the area, but I'm approaching it from a totally different energy, an energy of being all in in the community and not okay, this is great, but I'm leaving in a couple weeks and then I'll go back here. So it was like splitting my time between the two places was sort of like splitting my energy between them, not being able to really commit to anything in either place because I wasn't going to be there and I was going to be going back and forth. I mean, we didn't even have plants in our house here because we were going back and forth, so much.
Speaker 1:So coming here and staying for the winter has changed everything and me setting boundaries and establishing what my priorities are with my family earlier in the year, disappointing them to a degree, telling them that I had other things I wanted to do besides just spend time with them as much as I love them and so happy that they're all a part of my life. I have goals, I have dreams, I have aspirations. I want to collaborate with people in the Santa Barbara community. I want to promote other people. I want to network. I just really want to see what all this work that I've done on Living Consciously, what it can produce for me and other people in this community here, and I'm really excited about it and I'm happy to be here now and because I have a different energy, I'm tracking all these things like newcomers, organization score. These are all things that I'm going to talk about on the podcast. I'm going to have people come on that I meet throughout this process so that you can understand how communities should work. And if you're in Santa Barbara, then you can take advantage of what's here, but if you're not, you could bring some of what you hear here back to your community. Take leadership energy, have a ripple effect on the people around you, learn from what you hear on the podcast here and take it to your own community. That's like what I'm really hoping for everyone.
Speaker 1:So here I am it's 2024. I turned 60 this year. It's by far the best year of my life, hands down doesn't even compare to anything else, because I'm living consciously, I have peace of mind, I have passion, I have like fulfillment, I have joy. I helped so many people this past year. I got my dogs out here. I'm living in Santa Barbara instead of Illinois. The cicadas are coming for their 17 year. Whatever you call it hatch. I'm living in Santa Barbara instead of Illinois. The cicadas are coming for their 17 year. Whatever you call it hatching, I'm not going to be there and I'm so happy about that. I am living, I'm literally living the dream out here in California and I have like this energy of not being attached to any specific outcome and just seeing what each day produces, and so far, a lot of things have happened, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to do a little timeline here. I'm going to try to do it in sequences as much as I can of how things unfold, and one of the first things that I'm going to talk about coming up is well, I had done an experiment with a woman.
Speaker 1:I met Chris Gere, who I did before. I changed the focus of the podcast and I actually moved here for the winter, but I am. I'm going to start with her as the first part of the Santa Barbara phase, because I actually met her here on Rock Creek where our house is, and I met her through a good friend of mine, denise Cooper, and Denise and Kim are our neighbors. They're wonderful neighbors and they introduced us well, I. So I did a housewarming right after we moved here, like a week. It was crazy. I had a big open house for the whole neighborhood but in all of them came because they're so open and they're so nice and they, they wanted to see what we did with the house and interact.
Speaker 1:And then I've been here, all you know, for about five years I think in this house, like I said, I make up timelines four or five years. And just recently, because I came for the winter, just recently, I got added to the text thread of the Rock Creek Ladies and I'm one of them and it was like it's what I'm talking about, even though I was friends with them and we talked and stuff. Now I'm one of them because I'm here more and that is what I wanted. I want to be a part of the community and I want to be in a community that I really care about and my intuition was screaming to me a thousand percent that Santa Barbara is that community, that that's where I'm supposed to be, that's where I am supposed to be leading my family, and that we're supposed to be creating a life here right now. And I feel like I'm following the plan and I'm listening to my intuition and it just feels really good to be here. So that's so then.
Speaker 1:So we're going to do the experiment with Chris, because I met her through Denise, and Chris was here visiting and we started talking, and we started talking about pickleball, and pickleball is a big part of how I'm getting introduced into this community. In a way I wasn't before either. We had some people that we played with, but it was always kind of a challenge to find someone, and now I have so many people to play pickleball with, and I can play with couples, with my husband, or I can play by myself, and then the people that I'm meeting while I'm playing pickleball are exceptional human beings. These are really cool people. They have cool lives. They care about a lot of the same things that I do, so now I'm working at how to tie that into everything.
Speaker 1:So I'm seeing everything as an opportunity for collaboration and as an opportunity to support other people and to give people a platform to speak their truth so they can truly step into their personal power. Because that's what everybody tells me happens for them when they come on the podcast and they tell their truth and they're authentic, and they get to like literally just get it out of their mind and their body and get it onto the recording and to hear it and they come back to it to listen to it over and over to um, to get that feeling again, to remind themselves of who they are and that they do have personal power and it's accessible to them, because it's accessible to all of us. It's in there, no matter how bad things might seem, it's in there. And often I just like have to remind myself I will go outside myself and I'll think, well, I just need, like we just need to go out to dinner and that'll be fun and that will make me feel better. Or, oh, we should do this. Or and I try in my mind to think what would make me feel better and I still, even after all this studying and all this practice, have to remind myself I don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to talk to anyone, I don't have to make any reservations, I don't have to go buy anything. All I need to do is come into the office and get still, meditate or relax and just see what comes up and feel my feelings. That's it. I don't have to that and that's. That's always there. And when you, when you really embody that and you realize that it changes everything.
Speaker 1:So so I'm going to stop here for now, because the other things that some of the things that are coming up, like you definitely have to meet. My realtors love them, sean and Tiffany. You met Sean. We did an experiment, but that was before I worked with them professionally. So we're going to talk about how I manifested my new home, how amazing it was. But I'm going to kind of do things in order. So we're going to start with Chris and the experiment of being at Denise's house and me meeting her, and then we're going to kind of go from there and sometimes I'm going to get out of order, because that's just how I am and I can always be like a little bit off and um and get a little confused and I'm just like so tired of thinking I have to do this or I have to do that. You know if a certain day comes up and I'm feeling the urge and I'm just going to share what I want on that day. But the premise is going to be Santa Barbara and how you can be a leader in your community. By learning to live consciously, you can have a big impact and you can inspire other people to be impactful as well and you can create a ripple effect that goes far beyond your geographical region that you're living in. So, yeah, I think I covered everything that I want to.
Speaker 1:So we're not on the mesa anymore, we're in San Roque. We worked with Justin Etherton was our realtor first when we first came here and he was a real go-getter and he was like really hungry and very ambitious and we loved his energy and we kind of came across someone else this past year, sean, who is very similar to Justin when he started out. And you know, sometimes our relationships with people with even with family members is not meant to last forever. Sometimes there's an end date. That's just the way life works. Everything is temporary Hate to break it to you, but consciously so you can take advantage of all the opportunities that are available to you if you really consciously create what it is that you want.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to stop here. I'm going to try to keep the episodes under 30 minutes, especially when I'm by myself, and the next episode we'll be doing the Chris experiment, and then after that I think I'm going to talk about pickleball and then get into how I manifested our new home, and that is that manifesting my new home has taken me to a whole other level of feeling powerful and like I'm capable of doing anything if I set my mind to it. So I hope you learned something valuable here today. I'll see you next episode. Hope you enjoyed the podcast today as much as I enjoyed creating it for you. If you're inspired, I appreciate a five-star review and sharing podcasts with anyone you know so that I can have a bigger ripple effect on the people around me, and you can too. If you want to learn more about me, you can go to wwwthebrainbscom and you can schedule a connection call with me or sign up to be part of a BrainBS experiment. See you next time.