What If The Medicine Has Always Been You

Transcript

Honoring Stories And Why They Matter

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the spiritual shit show. My name is Julie Wynn, and I want to say thank you for being here. You know, I created the spiritual shit show out of my own need to make sense of what I was processing in my life. Nine years ago, I always go back because nine years ago is when my everything kind of stopped in my life. And it's been a journey, what I call my spiritual shit show, or you can title it my hero's journey of finding myself again, learning lessons and love and forgiveness and healing deep, deep, deep wounds within myself. I feel very honored to be able to share, to be able to heal publicly, but more importantly, the intention is I just believe so much that our stories are important. And the intention here is to not share my story for the sake of sharing the story, but to hopefully anchor you into your own aha or permission to begin to love your parts again, to love the entire, the entire story of what you have lived, all of it. How do we really encompass the truth of our journey? And today, the more I dropped into what I wanted to share today, I I almost didn't record it. But I'm sharing this story because the more time I spend in sacred spaces, especially with other women, the more I am entrusted to listen to their stories, witnessing their lives, holding their truths, and they do the same for me. I am reminded again and again that we heal in spaces where we are allowed to be real. We heal when we slow down enough to breathe and courageously look at our own lives, not wanting to fix them, not wanting to rewrite any part of the story, not pretending parts didn't happen, but when we can lovingly and compassionately hold all parts of our journey. Whoa. Wow. This is the story of me. And our stories matter so much. And what I'm realizing is that the real healing isn't leaving pieces behind, not shedding, not burying, not wanting to pretend it never happened. It's learning how to dance with every thread that created you. So today I'm sharing something that came up for me today. And honestly, I've been sitting here trying to figure out how to start this because there is this like strange edge you walk when you share your story. Because you don't want to live in the past, but you also don't want to pretend the past didn't shape you. And for a long time, I didn't talk about my story because I was afraid that the moment that I did, someone would say, and they did say, actually. So there it's it's totally fear-induced. Um, which really it's like the fear I recognize is what put a chokehold on my throat to not speak because I was so afraid of hearing again you're just being a victim, or it's your fault. Or there you go, living in the past again. And that fear kept me silent. But not telling it didn't free me from it. It actually kept me inside of it because unspoken pain doesn't disappear. It becomes anger and resentment and confusion and distortions. And a quiet loneliness you can't always explain. And again, this is why I am so grateful for the healing spaces with other women, where we don't have to hold that quiet loneliness by ourselves because we've created healing, sacred spaces within each other. I say my healing journey has been nine years, but honestly, it's been a lifetime of trying to understand who I am. I did a lot of inner child work, and I realized, you know, as a kid, I used to look around at other people's lives and think, why can't I have that? Why does this feel so hard for me? How come I don't have anybody in my life who is loving me, guiding me, nurturing me, supporting me? And one of the hardest griefs to admit out loud is this that sometimes I still feel sad when I see healthy families. It's not jealousy, it's more like grief. Grief for something that I didn't and probably will never get to experience in my own bloodline. And thank God, you know, this year I really was able to drop in and settle into, you know, that the universe is harmonious and will bring you what it is that you're seeking. It may just look a little differently. So I am so grateful for my husband's family. And I am so grateful that my daughter gets to know what healthy love is within a family and support from aunts and uncles and cousins. And to be honest, a lot of that has tripped me up inside, you know, looking at my sister-in-laws who get to be held and nurtured and nourished by my by their mothers when they have a baby. It it still is a little tender on my heart. Because again, I have to honor that there's a part of me that wishes that I knew what that felt like. When I became a mother, that was actually one of the loneliest times of my life. No one was mothering the mother. I didn't have support. I didn't have that healing love. I didn't have anybody cooking for me or guiding me or supporting me in my journey in motherhood. And that's a specific kind of loneliness. When you are giving love constantly, and when you are in a state of survival for yourself because you don't have a mother or you don't have a strong woman in your life to guide you and nurture you. You don't know what it feels like to be held while you're also doing it. And so, in so many ways, my healing began there. And I will say, I'm so grateful for the tribe of women who, again, have shared their stories because I know that I'm not alone in my story. I have met so many women who don't have a relationship with their mother. My mother passed away when I was little. Um, but there's also a certain pain that comes along with not getting along with your mother and she's alive, or having a narcissistic mother or an abusive mother, and how painful and tough that is being estranged from family members. When I hear other people share their stories where, you know, they just don't get along, and the pain that comes along with not talking to your brother or not talking to your sister. And it's just like an unspoken pain, and nobody else gets it because they only see you. But there's something that you're you're longing for when you're estranged from a family member, it's something that it really hurts at a at a cellular level because it doesn't make sense, you know, that somebody that is a part of you also is doesn't want to talk to you and can cut you off and uh chooses to be estranged from you. Like it, there is just a lot of pain there. A couple nights ago, I wasn't feeling well, and so I slept downstairs. And in the middle of the night, I woke up to this gentle nudge and an inner whisper, and it said, go upstairs. And per usual, I fought with it because everything that I am told to do, I will do so, kicking and screaming. So I'm like, no, I'm so tired. I don't want to get up. I'm just gonna lay here until it's time to get up. And I heard that nudge again, which is what I know spirit is, which is just a gentle, patient nudge. I heard go upstairs, get in bed. So finally I was like, Julie, are you gonna listen? I mean, my God, just listen to the nudge. So I dragged my butt upstairs and crawled in bed next to my husband. And the moment that I felt his arm around me, I just heard that whisper, but a little louder this time. And it said, You have been seeking for so long. You have been on your healing journey for so long. And look, the journey has brought you back to where you started, which is home. And that part makes me cry a little bit because I exhaled. Because, yes, what I have been seeking my entire life has been here the entire time. My home, my family. And deeper than that, what I understood in that moment was ultimately my spiritual shit show, all of this seeking, all of the healing, all of the medicine journeys, all of the therapy, all of the podcasts, all of the journaling, all of it, everything that I have been seeking to put these pieces back together, these fragmented parts of self. I have been so desperate to claim back, to understand, to heal all of it, all of it was ultimately bringing me back home to myself. What I realized this morning is that the real healing wasn't and hasn't been about fixing myself. And that's the loop that I got stuck in. I need to be better, I need to be more stable, I need to heal, I need to. And what I really needed was self-love, self-compassion, self-forgiveness. And what I've been really working on lately, which is so powerful, is I have to forgive myself. I have to forgive myself for every time I abandoned myself, every time I looked in the mirror and thought that I was ugly. Every time I thought that my message didn't matter, every time I thought that I wasn't talented, every time I thought that I'm not a good teacher, that I am not a good mother, that I'm not a good wife, that I'm not enough, that there's something wrong with me, I'm not lovable, I'm not worthy. I have to forgive myself for every single time I thought that about myself. And it's so funny because I look back at photos of myself in my 30s. And when I look at it, I'm like, what? I was so cute. I was so adorable. I was so successful, I was so creative, I was so powerful, I was so alive. And I know for a fact in every one of those pictures, I wasn't convinced that I was any of those things. You think you're searching for something that you aren't, and then you finally realize you have had it the entire time. My journey lately in my meditations have been bringing me back to the remembrance of who I am, and in so many ways, it feels like I'm collecting these fragmented parts of myself that I have been, it feels like army crawling through life for the past nine years, and many times wanting to give up, so desperate for relief from the healing, wanting to not have to try so hard, actually. And it's like when I can collect the reminder of who the fuck I am, my memory does go back to the past to heal the past, not the wounds, but to collect the parts of me that I have forgotten that I am. Today it was like Julie, go back, think about when you first started your dance studio. Think of all the creative, cool dances that you did. Look at the costumes. Don't you remember how you trusted your instinct so wholeheartedly? You had strong vision and you executed on these strong visions. You were creative. Oh my gosh, you were such a trailblazer. And that list went on and on. And I was like, oh my gosh, I forgot. I forgot. And I was like, oh my gosh, I am so sorry. I am so sorry to myself that for all of these years I forgot who I was. And I downplayed what I have done in life and who I was as a choreographer and a teacher and a friend and a human. I lost so much of myself. And the journey really has been to come back home to myself. A huge part of my healing has happened in circles with women, with my friends, spaces where we told the truth, where we could repeat the same stories again and again, not because we were stuck, but because the body heals in layers. Because life happens in layers. So of course, it's like one layer peels back, and then the next, and the next, and the next, and that takes time. For me, it feels like the call to heal the wounded womb of the woman. For me, that wound came from losing my mother, and then experiencing estrangement from my older sister. That has been painful, and probably a relationship that will never heal in this lifetime. The wound of the womb, the feelings of loneliness and betrayal and estrangement from the feminine in your feminine line. And in that it makes so much sense that it's been the women who've held space long enough for my nervous system. See, here comes the tears. The women who have held space long enough for my nervous system to learn. Love can stay. We see you, we love you, we believe in you, and healing isn't always in advice, but in presence, and being in the presence of these women who held compassionate space for the layers to be healed, for the wounded womb of the woman to be held in feminine love. What a gift. I'm wiping my nose. The healed woman doesn't become the healer. The healed woman becomes the medicine. And for so long, I thought that I was healing. Every step in my own healing journey, I wanted to help heal others, but I've gotten through so many layers, and I am realizing that the healed woman becomes the medicine. She stops proving her worth. She stops performing her value. She moves powerfully, softly at the same time. Because she knows who she is, and she then becomes a mirror for others.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

The medicine is within you, in your courage, in your story, in your ability to love every single layer. The power has never been outside of you.

The Healed Woman Becomes The Medicine

Ways To Connect And Be Held

SPEAKER_01 19:39

It has always been you. Some of us go on long journeys seeking, searching, wandering through identities, relationships, and lifetimes of becoming. Honor your personal hero's journey. And remember that every hero, no matter how far they travel, always returns back to the village, always comes back home. And the story was never really about the mountains you crossed and the dragons you fought and the people who left and the versions of you that you tried to become. It was about finding the way back to yourself. Because sometimes we have to leave in order to recognize what never left us. We have to search to remember. We look everywhere else just to discover the treasure was buried quietly within us the whole time. Nothing you are longing for lives outside of you. Not love, not worth, not belonging, not home. Everything is within. You are never meant to become someone new, only to remember something true. So if you feel like you've been wandering, good. The path is working. You are not lost. You are returning. And home has been waiting for you all along. Thank you for sitting me, sitting with this tears and wiping of my nose, and I hope that this podcast softened something within you while listening. And if you want a space to process, share, or be held in conversation, remember that I offer one on one soul sessions, coaching. And on Monday night, we have an online energy club at 7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. And in the meantime, I am sending you so much love. Be gentle with yourself. You are closer than you think.