Claim the Power You're Ignoring

Feeling stuck on the inside while life keeps rolling by? 
You're not alone—and you might be looking in the wrong place for answers.

In this episode, Stephanie and Maren dive into why we feel so powerless when we focus only on the outer world, and how real transformation happens when we turn inward. They explore the connection between our physical symptoms and emotional stuffing, why nobody wants to deal with emotions and how learning to do some simple inner work is the key to creating the empowered life you actually want.

Do you push down feelings, stay busy to avoid discomfort, or wonder why your body keeps breaking down despite "doing all the right things?" Then this episode is for you, it will shift how you see everything.

Key Takeaways

• Your symptoms aren't the problem—they're the messenger. That shoulder pain, upset stomach, or chronic headache? Look elsewhere for the cause.
• We've been taught to ignore our emotions, and it's literally making us sick. When we stuff our feelings, they don't disappear—they manifest in our bodies and our lives.
• The "beach ball effect": You can only hold so many emotions underwater before they start popping up uncontrollably, often hurting yourself or others.
• Emotions are your power center. They're the energy that weaves together body, mind, and soul—and they're essential for manifesting what you want.
• Pick your uncomfortable. Feeling emotions now is uncomfortable. Divorce, migraines, and cancer are also uncomfortable. Choose wisely.
• Create space with your emotions. Instead of "I'm angry," try "A part of me is experiencing anger." This simple shift gives you power to respond differently.

Until next time, remember: the answers you're looking for aren't out there—they're already within you.

➡️ Related Episode: #196 "Pick Your Hard" (go back and listen!)

TRANSCRIPT

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Transcript

Welcome And Core Premise

Stephanie 0:03

In a world where we have everything and it's still not enough, we're often left wondering, is this really it?

Maren 0:10

Deep inside, you know there's more life. You're ready to leave behind the old push your way through and claim the deeper, more meaningful life that's calling you.

Stephanie 0:19

That's what we invite you to explore with us. We're your hosts, Stephanie Allen

Maren 0:24

and Marin Oslac . And this is The Soulful Leader Podcast.

Symptoms Versus Root Causes

Stephanie 0:30

Yay! Hi, welcome to The Soulful Leader Podcast. This is Stephanie, and I'm here with Maren. And I've been reflecting this last little bit, kind of on my life's journey a lot. You know, why I got into being a therapist, why, you know, we are doing a podcast. And what occurred to me is that there's a lot of stuff that goes on in the outer world that we have no control over. And we can feel really helpless and hopeless in that way. And as long as we keep looking outside ourselves, it just... we just we just lose lose our power, we lose our inspiration. And I thought, you know, today we could talk a little bit about how to really connect in with why that's not true. Because that that is totally not true. Like in the way of when we just make it about the outer world, meaning what we see and what we hear and on the outside, and we neglect what's going on inside ourselves, there is a connection. Years ago, when I was in my training with John Burns and myofascial release, I remember one of the things he taught me. There's a couple things, lots of things he taught me, but one in particular was when there's a symptom shoulder pain, upset stomach, you know, an old headache that won't go away. We tend to treat the shoulder, the stomach, the headache that won't go away. And what John Barnes would tell me is like back up, look at the bigger picture, look at all the interconnections. That's where the symptom is, but look elsewhere for the cause. And that's the missing piece for most of us.

Maren 2:18

You know, that's true in business too, of wherever the symptom is, is not where the cause will be, right? The root cause, you have to back up and look before that, because that's a result. The symptom is a result, it's not the cause.

Stephanie 2:39

Yeah. So I have a story of ...you know, my dad has been sober for 16 years, alcoholic. And as a little girl growing up in an alcoholic family, my father was never violent in the way of a physical violence, but he would have this deep grief that he would have, depression. And he would distract himself with alcohol to make it go away. That's how he coped. And what happened systemically in my family is everyone would abandon him. They would just run to the other direction. Except for me, I would go and I'd sit, which I figure that was my early training as being a good listener and a therapist, as I, you know, at two, three, four, five years old, trying to understand why my father was in such pain and why he was drinking. You know, and like I said, he's been sober for 16 years now. And what's happening now is that, and he's in his later years, and all the things that we stuff in our shoulda, coulda, ought to's... our emotions, our thoughts. We stuff it in there. When we become sober, guess what happens to those things that we stuff? They start to come up.

Maren 3:54

That was the grief that he was stuffing.

Stephanie 3:58

Exactly. The grief, the fears, the hopelessness, the helplessness... and we use this, you know, we all have addictions. I'm not just talking about alcohol. There's an addiction to distracting ourselves, addiction to worry, addiction to shopping. There's so many different addictions, right?

Distraction, Doom Scrolling, And Cost

Maren 4:17

And I mean, one of the most prevalent ones you know, the way that we distract ourselves today is scrolling, doom scrolling, right? Just constantly like, I don't want to think about my life. I'll go look at somebody else's life.

Stephanie 4:30

And as long as I'm busy, I am on purpose. I have a purpose.

Maren 4:35

Yeah.

The Beach Ball Metaphor

Stephanie 4:36

It's not a healthy one, but it's and so what's the cost of stuffing? It's like a beach ball, right? You take a beach ball and you stuff it under the water and you sit on that beach ball, and someone else just throws you another beach ball, and you guys.. you try to put that one underneath. Well, eventually you can't hold it all together. Those beach balls are going bing, bing, bing, and they're flying up and they're hitting people and making lots of big splashes, and you're out of control. You know, you're overwhelmed. And this is what I mean about the cause is so much deeper than the symptom. So you may have just tiny little symptoms. Maybe you can't sleep at night. You know, maybe you have some neck pain, you know, yeah, just a stiff shoulder, or maybe you feel like you're getting older, you look... you're gaining weight, you're heavier. Well, those are symptoms. Sure, we could say we could eat better, we could exercise, we could stretch, we could do lots of little physical things that we could do, but good heavens, look at all the stuff that's out there. Oh my god, you could spend a lot of money on the physical things. What if I told you doing the inner work of looking at what you've stuffed in there? Yes, it's gonna be uncomfortable, it's not gonna be pleasant, it's gonna be ugly. But if you're... I'm gonna tell you the truth...

Maren 5:54

It is true.

Stephanie 5:56

But it... I'll tell you, we think it's like, yeah, but I don't want to go there, I don't want to go there. But your body's already gone there and it's already hurting, and it's forcing you to go there. And I always say you can turn toward it and actually work with it, and you don't have to do it alone, or you can just wait till it like breaks you down.

Maren 6:17

Well, what happens when you turn away from it is it chases you.

Stephanie 6:21

Oh, yeah.

Maren 6:22

It's like you know, the little critter exactly. We think, you know, we assume that like the whole little kid thing of like, if I can't see you, you can't see me, right? We hide ourselves.

Stephanie 6:37

Oh yeah!

Read The Road Signs

Maren 6:37

And that's the distracting thing. It's like if I just pretend like that emotion is not there, if I pretend that the hopelessness is not there, if I pretend that the anger, whatever it is, and so we just distract ourselves and we pretend it's not there, and then we feel better for a moment until we have the upset stomach, and then we don't relate it back to the fact that we stuffed the anger, the hopelessness, the grief, the whatever. So we take 'Tums' and we think, oh, I'm all better. Guess what? That is chasing you, yeah. And if you don't address it through the inner, you're gonna keep having more and more symptoms until you know, like I love one of the things that Stephanie always says is that you know the symptoms, they're like signs, they're like road signs for us. So we'll get a yield sign and then we'll get a stop sign, and then we'll get a stop light, and then the stop light will fall on us. Like it just keeps getting worse.

Stephanie 7:47

Yeah, and we're taught to ignore them, right? Like so, so well that we learn to ignore them, and then when they show up, because we've turned off that part of ourselves to recognize it, we go down the wrong road that that has been detoured and we fall off the cliff.

Maren 8:09

Yeah.

Stephanie 8:11

And then we beat ourselves up, which I really wish we wouldn't beat ourselves up, instead of saying, what if we could learn to read the road signs and take the detours and enjoy the new experience that we're going to go on that we haven't been on before, and discover that actually we do have this incredible, hopeful, inspiring toolbox within ourselves that we could actually tap into that because we're not hopeless. We're not helpless.

Choose Your Uncomfortable

Maren 8:41

I think the the biggest challenge for people is that it's uncomfortable. Oh god. So in the moment, it's easier to scroll or take a tums or do whatever than to look at that uncomfortable emotion that came up. Or if you're in the middle of a discussion just saying to somebody, nope, don't want to talk about that.

Stephanie 9:06

Make it go away. What I want to say is like, well, guess what? You know, divorce is uncomfortable, migraines are uncomfortable, cancer is uncomfortable. So pick your uncomfortable, right? Pick your heart... be all heart.

Maren 9:23

It is. We have a podcast named Pick Your Hard. So go back and listen to that. And so yeah, like I can be on a little bit uncomfortable in the moment and train myself to be more comfortable with being uncomfortable and avoid the symptoms later. Because remember, we talked about the symptom is not the cause, the cause is whatever you're uncomfortable about that you're stuffing, the beach ball that you're like, make it go away. So train yourself from now.

Stephanie 9:59

Yeah.

Maren 9:59

Be a little bit uncomfortable now, so you don't have to deal with huge uncomfortable later.

Body Mind Emotion Soul Integration

Stephanie 10:05

Right, right. And another part of this is that, you know, this is also, I remember John Barnes telling me this one too for training. And so, you know, years ago, hundreds of years ago, you know, we split up our awareness, our consciousness. So we split it up to... we have a body, we have a mind, we have emotions, and we have a soul. Nobody... and yet we kind of separated them all, chunked them. Even though, you know, they are all unified and integrated together. You cannot, you know, you cannot take apart our bodies all, you know, on an operating table and then put it all back together and think it's gonna work. It's like there are things that are going on in the machine here. It's not just like, and a lot of my clients say that it's like, oh, can you just you know change my arm like as if it was like changing your own tire? Like there's a deeper cause. And so John Barnes would say medicine took on the physical body, so physical trauma, physical pain. You know, psychologists, mental health took on the mind, the thoughts, the anxiety. You know, the the religions would take on the spirituality or the soul. Nobody wanted the emotions, nobody wanted the uncomfortable. Like, forget that. We'll just like throw that out. Except for it's the emotion, energy in motion that weaves all of those together. And it's our power.

Maren 11:41

It is, it's our power center. It literally is our power center. When you, if you were to go to any manifesting class that's worth its salt, say, the first thing they'll tell you is you have to put your emotions behind your desires. That's how you make it happen. And so oftentimes our emotions don't feel so good. And when we stuff them, here's the thing is we don't stop those emotions from manifesting stuff in our lives. We just become unconscious about what it's manifesting because we've stuffed it. You know, we've stuffed it in the trunk and we're driving along. We're thinking, oh, I'm doing really well. And meanwhile, it's manifesting back there like big potholes in front of us, and you know, yeah, it's having a cookout, it's having a cookout back there, and it's invited all its friends.

Stephanie 12:41

Party on, party on in the trunk.

Maren 12:44

Right. It is, it gets heavy, and so why not own that and be the one who takes on the emotions? And when I say take them, take on the emotions, it sounds like oh, I have to take that on. And I just mean like start to welcome them into your into your world. Rumi has a poem. Do you.. can you...

Welcoming Space

Stephanie 13:10

I was gonna say I can ask a question of that.

Maren 13:12

Yeah, go ahead.

Stephanie 13:13

How do you work with them? How do you not wear them? So, like, say somebody in that you love or that you're or even just somebody that you're working with is going through an emotion. And there tends to be in our society that we either want to fix them, so we want to stop them from feeling that. So, hell, let's give them a drug, or just, oh, it's gonna be okay, it's gonna be all right. Pat, pat, pat on the head kind of thing. Or we think we're setting a boundary saying, okay, that's enough, Maren. Like, I don't need to hear about that. I've heard about that enough. Either need to go get some help about that, but I don't want to hear about it anymore. Because we're feeling it, we're connecting, we're feeling it. And so our uncomfortability with somebody else's uncomfortability is now it's festering. There's the junk in the trunk, you know, the party's going on, the cookouts going on. So it's like, how do you deal with it? How do you I love that?

Maren 14:12

Yeah, I love that question, and I think it will be different for everyone. For me, you know, I was about to mention that Rumi has a poem called The Guest House, and it was really powerful for me along these lines. So I'm gonna share it and see, you know, maybe it's also powerful for you. It comes down to space and allowing, instead of either fighting something or running from it, just being present to it, not making up a story about it. Not when I say making up a story about it is I'm angry, and now all of a sudden I'm angry because this person did that, and blah, you know, like just feeling the anger and letting it be there and being like, you know what? I'm angry, and then taking it to the next level of like, you know what? That's not who I am. A part of me is experiencing anger. So now I have just built in a layer of space between me and the emotion, which allows me to go, oh, and I can relax a little bit, at least in my body, that feels it feels really different, and you can play with that, you know. Right now, you guys could, as you're listening, be like, okay, I'm a part of me.

The Guest House Poem

Stephanie 15:31

So what what I'm hearing is like to really separate yourself from it without stuffing it, you're still acknowledging that emotion, but to say a part of me is feeling right, or a part of me is experiencing.

Maren 15:45

So that's what I was gonna invite them to play with is like right now, just sit in your body and and be like, I'm angry, right? And and say that to yourself, and then say a part of me is experiencing anger, and you can say it with the same amount of like oomph, right? And it just feels different in your body, and that creates some space, yeah.

Stephanie 16:10

Yeah, like for me, it gives me a little bit of that empowerment to go, I see you, anger. I know what mess you're making, and I'm not shaming it, but I'm giving it some space to actually observe it, yeah, to notice how it's running in me so that I can make a different choice. A choice that is more aligned with the truth of what I stand for.

Practice: A Part Of Me Is

Maren 16:40

And I'm about to read the poem, and one of the things in the poem is that we don't know the reason behind things. So Stephanie mentioned earlier all the interweaving and the connections that we tend to ignore as a society and how we pull things apart and think they're separate. Everything is interwoven and we don't really know how they work. There's so much that is happening behind the scenes, right? Of our own bodies, our heart beats. We don't know how it beats, we just we let it beat. It lets us. And so that's one of the things I love about this poem and why it was very empowering for me. So I'll share it with you. "This human, this being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all. Even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond."

Stephanie 18:10

Very powerful.

Maren 18:12

Yeah.

Stephanie 18:14

To not resist it, I'm gonna make a bunch of rhymes here. I go to feel it is to heal it. When we resist it, it persists. And sometimes, most often, rejection, I always say rejection is God's protection. So those are those rhymes. I love those.

Maren 18:39

Yeah, and you know, it's like like I said, we don't know why it's in our lives, and we assume that it's bad and it should be stuffed. What if it's not? What if it's the best thing that is ever happened to us and we're pushing it away?

Stephanie 18:59

Yeah, and I mean, this kind of ties into one of our podcasts that we did before about responsibility, the ability to respond. Change that around. It's like when we push emotion away or we shame it, and that can happen within ourselves too. You know, instead of looking at it, that this is a bundle of energy, like deep depression is actually deep pressed ions. It's actually compressed light, compressed energy. And so when we feel something, when we allow ourselves the space to emote, or we allow another person the space to emote, you actually claim back your life force.

Maren 19:44

Yeah, you harness your own energy.

Stephanie 19:46

You actually will have more ability to respond.

Maren 19:50

Yeah...

Stephanie 19:50

...it's amazing.

Maren 19:51

And create and live and heal.

Make It Practical

Stephanie 19:56

If you know what persists, you know, if it... you know what we resist will persist. So if we take that energy, that emotion, and we stuff it like the beach ball and we push it down, it's going to pop out and it's going to create probably something not so pleasant. It's going to either hurt ourselves or hurt another. So if we can allow that energy to unfold in a healthy way.

Maren 20:22

Well, and I want to go back to that. So when you... I love the image of the beach ball, and to make it practical, you know, when you're tooling around in your life happily, and then you get triggered by something, and then you take your husband's head off, or you take your kid's head off, or you take your boss's head off, and you're like, oh shit, I hate it when that just pops out of me. Guess what? That's the beach ball, just boop, it just came out of you, and you had no choice because you've been trying to repress it for so long.

Stephanie 20:55

So I think, you know, as a great practice, can you allow yourself to be present to emotion in your life, whether it's in yourself or in another? Like this could be a great practice.

Maren 21:10

I love it.

Stephanie 21:10

And just breathe. I want you to just allow yourself to breathe to that part. "Part". It's like, okay, a part of me is experiencing frustration or anger or sadness or whatever, even happiness, joy. Can you give yourself that space and then just be with it? Don't try to fix it, don't try to figure it out, don't try to shut down another person or shut down yourself. Just say, I am safe and I'm going to breathe to this part. I'm going to soothe it. And be curious of what might unfold. Because when somebody can like allow someone like yourself or another person just to go off and you don't say anything, you don't do anything, there's nothing left. It's like, you know, a boiled pot of water. And if you try to like put the lid on it, it's going to blow that lid right off. Versus like, okay, well let's just... you know let that lid come off and just let it boil dry. See what happens.

Maren 22:08

All the air goes out of it.

Stephanie 22:10

Inner Space. So good practice.

Maren 22:13

I love it. Thank you. So we are available on YouTube and on LinkedIn and on Facebook, all on under The Soulful Leaders at Soulful Leaders, and on our website, the www.TheSoulful Leader Podcast.com and our other website. Wow, we got a lot of places you guys can find us. So our main website, which is the www.tslp.life.com which is The Soulful Leader Project. And we are all about that. We would love to have you come join our project. And we'll see you all next week on The Soulful Leader Podcast.

Stephanie 22:57

And that wraps up another episode of The Soulful Leader Podcast with your hosts, Stephanie Allen and Marin Oslac.

Maren 23:05

Thank you for listening. If you'd like to dive deeper, head over to our website at the www.TheSoulful Leader Podcast.com.

Stephanie 23:14

Until next time!