Earthquakes, Emotions, and Standing again

We share the story of walking away from a 17-year dream and the long desert that followed, where anger, grief, and panic became guides instead of enemies. We show how somatic therapy, self-forgiveness, and honest permission to feel helped us stand again.

• why spirituality can feel messy and human
• the earthquake moment that ends an old life
• the cost of refusing to let go of identity
• anger as boundary intelligence and fuel
• the desert after shock and how to endure
• depression, anxiety and nervous system overload
• why early positivity can become gaslighting
• somatic therapy practices that complete cycles
• permission to feel as the path to relief
• self-forgiveness, grace and finding true ground

Transcript

Why Spirituality Feels Messy

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, and welcome back to the spiritual world.

Identity, Ego, And Self

Life’s Earthquakes Defined

The Toxic Partnership Story

Walking Away And Aftershocks

Letting Go Of Lost Dreams

Flailing Ego And Standing Up

The Desert After The Quake

Anger As Healthy Energy

Depression, Anxiety, And Shame

Somatic Therapy And Release

Permission To Feel And Heal

Self-Forgiveness And Grace

You Are Not Broken

SPEAKER_01 0:07

And I record these podcasts, sending my voice out into the universe, universe, universe, to see who is listening, listening, listening, and maybe my story. These tips and tools might help you. May these podcasts find you when you are searching and you are seeking, or you're needing a voice to ground you, to remind you who you are. I created the Spiritual Shit Show podcast because spirituality can feel like a total shit show sometimes. Welcome to life. And being a seeker of life, of the mystery of life, of the mystery of who we are, getting curious about who you are, why you are the way you are, why you've made the choices that you make in life, how did you get here in your life? What's my personality? What's my ego? What's my spirit? What's my soul? It's fascinating. You are the most incredible creation. And you learning how to honor yourself, love yourself, allow yourself to be the incredible light that you are. What an incredible task for you to take time to remember who you are and to feel supported in who you are and loved for who you are. Today I want to talk a little bit about how do we get through the shit show? Because there are moments in life that feel like earthquakes. Moments where the ground underneath your life suddenly cracks open and everything you thought was stable isn't. And I think if we live long enough, every one of us experiences these moments. Sometimes it's a divorce, a breakup, sometimes it's losing a job, sometimes it's a scary diagnosis, sometimes it's the end of a business or a dream that you thought was going to define your life. How do we move through these shifts? And when it happens, it feels like the entire map of your life disappears. I know this because it happened to me. And again, it may happen to you. It's inevitable. Years ago, I was in a business partnership that had become incredibly toxic. And when I say toxic, I mean the kind of environment where two people are standing in a room with a match and a tank of gasoline between them. Neither of us were moving. We both were locked in this power struggle for a year and a half. I was stubborn. I knew that my business partner wanted me out of my business. I am not leaving. I am just grounding in. This is my business. I'm not moving. And the more toxic it became, the more we both dug our heels in. They wanted me out. I wasn't going anywhere. And eventually it got to a point where I walked into my business one day, and I remember hearing something inside of me say one word. Enough. It was like a slow snuffing out of my light. And right before my light was about to go completely out, Spirit said, Enough. I left that day at five o'clock. I went home and my husband looked at me and said, Did you get off work early? And I said, No. I quit. I quit my own business that I worked my ass off in for 17 years. Just like that. And that felt like an earthquake because everything suddenly in my life was gone. My business, my community, my identity, my livelihood, the life I had spent years building, friends, family, gone. What followed was a year of legal battles, fighting over buyouts, attorneys, spending money on attorneys that I didn't have. And honestly trying to reclaim something that felt like it had been taken from me. My light, my story, what I thought I was good at. And underneath all of that was this deep internal gripping, this voice inside of me saying, You can't take this away from me. See, I was still in my stubbornness. I will rebuild and I'm gonna come back bigger and better. And honestly, here's the part that's hard to admit I did not come back bigger and better. None of those things that I set out to rebuild in the world ever happened. I never became this big motivational speaker for dance teachers and studio owners. I never traveled nationally teaching what I loved, which was dance and life coaching to dancers. I never was able to reclaim that dream. And that on its own brought its own kind of suffering. Maybe because I kept thinking, maybe if I just work harder, maybe if I just keep pushing, maybe if I just keep proving my worth, my value, my gifts, maybe if I just don't let go. And what I didn't understand, and it literally has taken me nine years, nine fucking years to get to this point, is that sometimes the suffering isn't just the earthquake, sometimes the suffering comes from refusing to let the old life actually end. Fuck, that's hard. Because letting go of an identity can feel like dying, and you're literally in real time seeing these parts of yourself that you love that you value, like getting carried away, lost in the wind. And when I experienced that, the identity of who I am as a dance teacher or a choreographer or a business owner, when I had to let go of what I thought my value is and or was, let me tell you, it's full panic. Full panic. Nervous system, full panic, mind, full panic, body, survival mode. And when I look back at how I handled, how I processed this big earthquake in my life, and then nine years of unraveling from it, it reminds me of this video that I saw online one time. And it's this little kid in the water, and he's can't swim, and he's in the water and he's flailing all around. And everybody who's not in the water is yelling, just put your feet down, just put your feet down. And so finally the boy puts his feet down and he stands up and he realizes that he's like in three feet of water. And he wasn't, in fact, drowning. He was fine. That is what my ego was doing for a really long time. When I lost everything, I went into full panic survival mode. And I was flailing the at anything that I thought could keep me afloat. You think you're drowning, but what's actually happening is that life has shifted you into a place where you need to stand up in a new way. Fuck. And I am recording this because I wish somebody would have told me this nine years ago. Put your feet down and stand up. So this is a part of life. The earthquake is going to happen. You're going to start flailing. You're going to need somebody to tell you to put your feet down that you're fucking fine. You're going to get through it. And after the earthquake comes the desert. This is the part that nobody talks about. It's this long middle. It's this part where you are grieving and you may feel like nobody understands your grief and your pain and your anger. And you are going to feel like it's too much and you're in it by yourself that nobody understands and or wants to hear about it. And I want you to know that after the earthquake, when this big, massive shift happens, you're in the desert. Life looks different. You can even feel abandoned and angry at life. It is okay to be angry. It is okay to be devastated. It is okay to be sad. Because what I found happens is when we experience these kinds of life events, people immediately start telling you to move on. Let it go, be happy, look at the bright side. Everything happens for a reason. Forgive. It's okay. Find the lesson in it. And while those things you will eventually get to, and they are true, when they are said too early, and you try to get into that space too early, they can actually become a form of gaslighting. Because what they do is disconnect you from the truth of your own experience. And the truth is when something traumatic happens, your body has an emotional response. This is normal. This is human. This is fine. This is part of it. This is part of the spiritual shit show. You are going to experience grief. You are going to experience anger. You are going to experience confusion. And anger, I think, is one of the most misunderstood emotions we have. I know in my life, in my spiritual upbringing, I was taught that anger is wrong, that you should be peaceful and you should forgive and move on and find peace. But anger actually is a very healthy emotion. Anger is energy. Anger is the body saying something happened that crossed a boundary. And sometimes anger is the very thing that keeps you from collapsing completely. When I was in my earthquake and everything disappeared, I remember feeling like my experience was too much, my feelings were too much, that it was my fault, that I couldn't say anything, that my story was too much for everybody. And I didn't have anybody to help me process it. I felt so alone. And because I felt like what I was feeling was too much and I had to be happy or move on or just shift or build something else or have hope. Because I didn't allow myself to process the anger, because I didn't have anybody saying, whoa, fuck. Holy fuck. I ended up having depression so that I remember for an entire month I could not get up off my bathroom floor. I grabbed my comforter and my pillow and I told my husband I had the flu. And my daughter at the time was three. So that still brings back a lot of pain, I think, obviously, as I'm sharing it, tears, because I felt like I was holding the entire situation on my own. And I didn't feel like I had permission to feel the pain and the quake of everything, that I just had to move on and I just had to be fine for everybody else. And I just had to keep it together. And because I wasn't able to really process or I wasn't giving myself permission to process all of it, it just spun me right to the floor for a month, for a solid month. And then that led to anxiety so bad that I couldn't leave my house, that I couldn't check out, like at a I couldn't check out anytime I was at a grocery store or TJ Maxx, I would have full-blown panic attacks at the register and I would have to leave. I would leave all of my stuff at the register and have to walk out embarrassingly. And then it was like compounded on top of that was like shame or guilt, or I am crazy, or there is something wrong with me. And because I didn't feel like I could process and feel the anger, the resentment, the oh my God, or the confusion of it all, that just spiraled and turned into depression and anxiety, debilitating depression and anxiety. And then that eventually led me to seek help, which honestly, talk therapy did not work for me. But what did was somatic therapy because my body was feeling the depression, my body was feeling the anger, my body was expressing anxiety. That allowing my body through somatic therapy work to process, to cycle through these feelings of anger, grief, devastation, that was really, really healing. So I want to remind you that what you're feeling is okay. Give yourself permission to feel it. Don't gaslight yourself out of it. Know that emotions have to move through. The only way out is through. And emotions are energy moving through the body. And when we suppress them, shame them, or force ourselves to bypass them, just like everything else, they don't disappear. They just stay trapped in our nervous system. Instead of just talking about what happened, which I did, but somatic therapy and giving myself permission allowed my body to express what it had been holding for me, which was the anger, the disbelief, the grief, the devastation. And sometimes that meant screaming in a pillow. So there's healthy ways to express anger. Sometimes it was punching a punching bag. Maybe it was going for walks for hours. But because I was allowing myself to finally give myself permission to feel the body was finally allowed to complete the emotional cycle. And something incredible happens when you allow that. When you give yourself permissions to be okay, it's okay to be angry. It's okay to be in grief. It's okay to feel devastated. And you give yourself and allow your body to move through it, you feel lighter. And then you can remind yourself that you can stand again. You're not drowning. Just put your feet on the ground and stand up. If you are in the middle of an earthquake right now, I want you to hear this. You are going to get through it. You are going to get through it. Put your fucking feet down and stand up. You are not drowning. You do not have to rush through the process, though. You are allowed to feel angry. You are allowed to feel grief. You are allowed to be in your experience. And then I want you to find your resources. Find the people who can sit with you in the dark without trying to fix you. And slowly, over time, your nervous system settles. The water that you once were flailing in clears. You know that this earthquake is not going to end your life. And as hard as it can feel, this earthquake is here to shake it up, to shake up your life, to shake out the things that were not in alignment with your soul's path. It's hard, but it's teaching you that you can learn how to stand in a deeper alignment with a deeper ability to remember who you are. What I wish I heard when my first earthquake hit my life is that you are gonna get through it. I also wish I would have given myself permission to feel it. I wish I didn't feel so rushed to let it go, to move on. I wish I didn't feel shame around feeling how I felt about it. I wish I didn't carry my baggage around for so long because I didn't give myself permission to actually feel how fucking like whoa, fuck, fuck. Like that is whoa. Who the fuck leaves their business? Wow, that is painful to lose a business relationship. Wow, that is hard to lose family and feel like it's your fault. Wow, that is hard to not be able to tell your story. Wow, that is fuck. I am so sorry. I am so sorry that happened to you. That's what I wanted to hear. That's what I needed. I wish I would have given myself permission to actually see how fucking crazy it was. I wish I would have been able to tend to my inner self more, to offer myself way more grace and compassion and understanding instead of gaslighting myself and blaming myself for A, what happened and B, for taking on, you know, the story of, oh, you're too stubborn or this is your fault or you're crazy or you're whatever. I had to learn, and what I'm learning now is huge self-forgiveness for thinking those things about myself. I wish I had somebody who would tell me, you know, and talk therapy. They don't really tell you the answers, they just let you talk about it, and then it'll take you three years to finally get to the answer. I wanted a quick fix and I wish I would have gotten somatic therapy work. For me, that worked the best because obviously I'm a dancer. So being in my body and processing through my body felt in alignment with what was true for me. And that was a game changer. I wish I would have wrapped myself with more loving grace. I wish I would have given myself full fucking permission to be angry about it and to be okay with feeling resentment and not feeling guilty and shame around not being right or perfect or taking the high road or taking too long to heal from it. And so I just want to leave you with this. If your life feels like it's shaking right now, if something has cracked open and you're standing in the middle and wondering what the hell just happened, I want you to hear this. Nothing has gone wrong with your life. You are not failing. You are not too much. You are not broken. You are human. You are loved. You are experiencing what happens in life. And every single life will eventually experience earthquakes, moments where something ends, something shifts, something collapses, something changes. And when it happens, it can feel like you're drowning, it can feel like you're crazy, your body panics, your heart breaks, you may want to lay on your bathroom floor for a month. But I want you to remember, put your fucking feet down and stand up. You are not drowning. Take a breath. You are here, you are alive, you are going to get through this. Not by pretending everything is okay, not by rushing yourself to forgive and move on and be positive, but by allowing yourself to feel what is real. Your anger is valid, your grief is valid, your confusion is valid, your experience is valid. You are not too much. Your feelings are not too much. Your story is not too much. You are a human being moving through a human life. And sometimes the bravest thing we can do in the middle of the earthquake is to simply stay. Stay with ourselves, stay with our breath, stay with the moment, stay with the fucking shit show that is happening, and trust that even when the ground shakes, you can still stand. Put your fucking feet down and stand up. You are going to get through this. And when you do, you realize something incredible. The earthquake did not destroy you, it did not take anything away from you. What it did is revealed the truth of who you are. It revealed your strength. It challenged you to be in your wisdom, in your truth, in your power. I fucking love you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your strength, your love, your light, your gifts. Thank you for standing your feet down on the ground and standing up again and again and again and again. I see your power. And may today you feel the powerful light that you are.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Now go shine brightly.