#311: How Your Buried Passions Reveal Your Ikigai in Midlife Transitions

What did you love doing as a girl, before life told you to be practical?

If you have spent decades inside the playbook of career, family, and what you were supposed to want, there is a good chance you have left someone important behind: the girl who knew exactly what made her come alive. In this Thursday check-in of the My Story series, Kavita continues unpacking ikigai, this time exploring how your buried passions are not nostalgia. They are signals, and they hold real information about your purpose and your next chapter.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why the things you loved as a girl were never random, and what they reveal about your ikigai today
• The difference between anabolic and catabolic energy, and how reconnecting with a buried passion shifts the energy of your whole week
• A simple reflection to begin recovering one buried passion this week, without having to overhaul your career

Press play to meet the girl in you who went quiet, and to start letting her energy back into your life.

If a question is rising in you about Kavita's journey, your journey, or the dreams you buried along the way, send it to her at Kavita@itsmytimenowcoaching.com. Ask Me Anything throughout this My Story series.

If this episode stirred something in you, take the Career & Life Fulfillment Quiz to see where your own ikigai is asking to be reclaimed, or book a Clarity and Next Chapter Call with Kavita to explore what your next chapter could look like.

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This podcast explores career and life transitions, helping women find clarity, confidence, and purpose through Ikigai and self-discovery. We cover navigating change, overcoming self-doubt and limiting beliefs, finding your purpose-driven career, and building the courage to start your next chapter - whether you're facing a career transition, life transition, or midlife reinvention.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Inside you, my friend, is a girl who used to know what she loved. Today, I want to help you find her again. Welcome to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast, a podcast helping women in career and life transitions achieve clarity on their next steps so they can transform uncertainty into an energizing next chapter. I'm your host, Kavita Ahuja, and the founder of It's My Time Now Coaching. If you're wondering what's next in your career or life, you are in the right place. Through solo and guest episodes, you'll gain practical tips, tools, and inspiration to help you uncover blocks, gain confidence, and be, do, and have what you want. I rediscovered myself after the age of 50, and I know you can too. It's my time now to help you do just that. I'm so excited you're here. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast. It's your coach, Kavita, with your Thursday check-in. On Monday, I told you about the dreamer girl I was. And if you didn't listen to the episode, you can go back to episode 310 for the whole story. This is the girl who read books past her bedtime and wrote stories on scraps of paper. The one who went quiet during the playbook years of my career and family life. Today I want to talk to you about her some more because she is not only my story, she's yours too. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know I love the concept of Ikigai. This is the Okinawan idea of your reason for being, the place where four things intersect your strengths, your passions, your values, and what the world needs from you. Last Thursday we sat with values and how our values have often been shaped from our ancestors. Today we're going to spend some time with passions. Because your buried passions hold more than you realize. And today I want to help you find them. Here is the truth I want to leave you with today. The dreams you've had as a girl were not random. They were not childhood whims that you outgrew. They were signals. The earliest, clearest evidence of what you came here to love. We are taught somewhere along the way that childhood passions are something we leave behind. That growing up means putting away the things that delighted us as girls. The dance class, the piano, the notebook full of stories, the hours spent drawing or building or daydreaming. The way certain books or certain places or certain people made us feel alive. Yes, of course, we cannot live always as twelve-year-olds forever. The shape of how we live changes. But what we loved at twelve was not random. The pull was telling us something about what makes us come alive, about where our energy naturally flows, and about what was waiting for us to come back to it. For me, it was reading and writing. I wrote stories on scraps of paper, in notebooks, in the margins. I read books way past my bedtime with a flashlight under the covers. I dreamt of places I had never been because of the books that took me there. And then somewhere along the way I made what I thought were practical choices biology, the MBA, the pharmaceutical sales career. And none of those choices were wrong. They were right for that chapter. But the writer in me, the reader and the storyteller, the dreamer, she did not disappear. She just went quiet for a while. It took me decades to recognize that the passion for storytelling I had as a girl was not something I had outgrown. It was something I had buried. And it is one of the deepest reasons I podcast today why I write to you, why telling my story week after week feels like coming home. For you it might look entirely different. Yours might be music, and you have not touched an instrument in twenty years. Yours might be animals and you have not made space for one in your adult life. Yours might be teaching the younger kids in the neighborhood and you ended up in a career far from that. Yours might be building things with your hands and you sit at a screen now. Whatever it was, the pull was real. And the pull is still real. It is buried under what the playbook said you should be doing instead. So here is a shift that I want to leave you with. Recovering your buried passions is not nostalgia, it is reclamation. It is signal reading. And it is one of the four ways your Ikigai is trying to reveal itself to you. And here is the freeing part. Your buried passions do not have to become your career. That's not the point. The point is that recognizing them tells you something about your own internal compass. Once you know what energy is, you can bring it more of that into your life through your hobbies, through your relationships, through how you spend your weekends, and sometimes through your work. The girl who loved music can pick up an instrument again on a Tuesday night. The girl who loved animals can volunteer. The girl who loved building can build. And the girl who loved teaching can find one young person to mentor. The recollection begins quietly with you giving yourself permission to take her seriously again. And here is what I want you to understand about why this matters at an even deeper level. In the coaching methodology I am trained in, we talk about two kinds of energy moving through us at all times. There is anabolic energy, and that is the energy of aliveness, of possibility, of something moving towards what matters to you. Catabolic energy is the opposite. That's the energy of contraction, of depletion, of something living against our own grain. And many of us have been running on catabolic energy for years without naming it. When you reconnect with a buried passion, even in the smallest way, you release anabolic energy. And here is what most people miss. That energy does not stay contained to the activity. It spills into your work, into your relationships, into the way you walk through the next morning. The woman who picks up her violin again on a Tuesday night is not only playing violin, she is shifting the energy of her whole week. And so this is why recovering your buried passions is one of the most generous things you can do for everything else in your life. You're not only giving that girl, you're not only giving the girl who went quiet her voice back, you're bringing aliveness into a life that may have been running on autopilot for a very long time. So here is what I want you to sit with this week, my friend. Take a quiet moment somewhere you will not be interrupted, and write down three things you loved as a girl. Not what you were good at, not what you were praised for, or not what looked like a viable career, only what you loved. The things that made the hours disappear, and the things you came back to without anyone having making you do it. The things you would have done for free. Then look at the list and ask yourself one question. How much of any of this have I let into my adult life? And what is one small way I could let one of them back into my life this week? The noticing is the beginning, and the choosing comes after. The career shift, if there is one, comes much later. But it all begins with remembering what you used to love, or your passions. Before we close, this quick reminder that this whole series is being shaped by you as well as by me. If a question is arising in you about my journey or your journey, the dreams you have buried, or the chapter you were sitting in, send me an email at cavita at it's my timeowcoaching.com. I'm answering listener questions throughout my series of this my story series. Ask me anything. So I'll see you back here on Monday when my guest Deborah Knight joins me to share her own reinvention story. Listen for the echoes between her story and the playbook you may be wrestling with right now. And remember, my friend, you get to decide what comes next. So say it with me, and say it with confidence. It's my time now.