[00:00:00]Hi there. Welcome to One Day You Finally Knew: A Podcast For Women Breaking Away. I'm your host, Jessica Chasnoff. I'm a psychologist and coach, and I've had the great privilege of working for nearly 20 years, mainly with women in transition. What I've learned in this time is for many of us, one day, we finally knew that it was time to go.
I have had the great joy of walking alongside women as they go through this journey and I've been wanting to reach more women. So I've launched this podcast. May the offerings here be an aid and a balm to you on your unique journey, home to yourself.
Hello, lovelies. Mmmm, so good to be here with you and talk a little bit about [00:01:00] the importance of being able to settle into not knowing, not knowing what's happening, not knowing what comes next, the ability to feel what's going on exactly as it is. This is a toughie. I have historically had a lot of difficulty not knowing the answers to things, whether it was something going on in my own life or something going on for a client or in the world, whatever it might be, I would give myself a really hard time for not being able to figure it out. I mean, when I say it used to, I mean, this is as Mary Oliver would say "good work ongoing". It's a practice that I, I still need to come and sit with, this idea that I don't yet know what's going to be.
[00:02:00] And I'm just going to sit and let it all simmer. There's a gestational quality to this process. There's all kinds of ways that we create in the world. Whether it's creating a human or whether it's gestation of, and then birthing of an idea, whatever the creative process is, what kind of art you're making, things need to sit and cook.
And then one day finally, it'll be like "BING!" turkey's done, then whatever it is, gets born. There's a whole process of the birthing. Yes. And then this being, or this thing is out in the world, but until that actually happens until it's out in the world, we can't know what is happening along in the process.
We, we get to just be in the process. This is hard. I mean, I, I am [00:03:00] the least patient person I know. I am the Veruca Salt of patience. "I want it now. Daddy! I want a golden egg!" That part lives inside me and is wanting to be heard, on the regular, my dears. So I say this as somebody who has really had to make it a practice to be okay with the unfoldment and everything that comes as part of the emergence.
I can get really anxious, not knowing what's happening, not knowing how to handle something. And, often it, there's a feeling that's going on in me. There's something that's happening. I just talked about anxiety. I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling worried. I'm getting twirly. I'm getting a little ungrounded.
The way that I have historically dealt with that has been to want to discharge that energy of [00:04:00] the feeling that doesn't feel good. And for anyone who's ever had anxiety, which is most people, I think really. If there is anybody on the planet at this point who has not experienced anxiety, okay A) good for you. Must be nice. And B) don't want to know you. Thanks. Thank you next. Uh, so I'm going to hang around the people that have a little worry sometimes.
In the past, what I would do is I would start to feel these feels that wouldn't feel good and anxiety is an interesting energy. It starts in the body, kind of moves. For me, it kind of feels like a kind of a a tornado or typhoon. Something that is just moving and swirling and funneling. And then it kind of funnels up an out, just bring me out of my body. So, not wanting to feel that, I would try to discharge that energy as quickly as I could. Just get it out of me. Right? I [00:05:00] call, these kinds of feelings, you know, the painful feelings, the difficult feelings, I call them hot potato emotions because we just want to get them out of our hands as fast as possible. Like drop that emotion, like it's hot. Let's get it out of the system as quickly as we can.
The problem with this is we can't feel what wants to emerge, can't gestate this creative process that will at some point have an outcome, if we don't steep in it. If, if we don't just let it cook. And it's a difficult thing to allow yourself to just feel it when you don't want to feel it, right?
Birthing anything is uncomfortable. And often the gestational process is not an easy thing. I think of the [00:06:00] metamorphosis that takes place when the caterpillar has gone into that pupal stage. I think I have this right. I, I don't get all the science-y stuff right. I don't get most of the science-y stuff right. The hard science-y stuff. Damn it, Jim, I'm a psychologist, not a hard scientist. That is to say that when the caterpillar goes into what I think is the pupa, it actually turns into a soup. It has to be digested. Everything needs to get totally eaten and transformed, so the butterfly can emerge. That is what happens in any kind of creative process.
Deciding to leave something or something or someone is a creative process. You're sitting and you're feeling into the possibilities. You're contemplating the actions and then potentially going for it. The breaking away is the final piece of it [00:07:00] followed up, of course, by the consequences of the breaking away and how you're going to work with that throughout your life.
But there's this really important piece, which is to understand that before we actually make the decision to move, we have to sit and dream into what it is that we're wanting and feel the uncomfortable feelings that come along with that. We need to allow ourselves to really go deeply into that place where what wants to die gets eaten, gets metabolized, gets transformed. And then we are in a place where we can make a decision and move forward. It's interesting. It makes me think a little bit of Ken Wilber and his Integral Psychology, talking about the necessity of including [00:08:00] before we can transcend. And that is true, my sweets, with everything. We have to include it all.
What I want to invite you to do is really allow yourself to sit and simmer in all the feelings that are coming up, whatever it is that you're working with. Get really curious about this process as exactly that. It's process. It's inner work that is creating the space, creating the bandwidth for you to be able to dive into the next thing.
I'll tell you a little story about a dear client of mine. If I ever use names, they're changed. I change situations. So, just wanting to say that. This client of mine had been married for many years, about 35 years. And the marriage [00:09:00] had always been challenging, really from the get-go.
They met each other in Washington state when they were in college. Shortly after graduation, the job that her husband got, they got married pretty much just out of college, and the job her husband got took them here to Arizona. My client loved the Pacific Northwest. It was really her heart home, was where she wanted to be.
And she always knew that. And she knew that she was making a choice to give that up, to move with her husband. And that's what they did. And then for the next 35 years, they lived here in the desert. It was a tough road. It had always been a tough road. They had gone to marital therapy. They had done some work.
Generally what she found was that whenever they would do that, the problems in the relationship would be blamed on her. She felt like she was the identified patient in the relationship. They just weren't [00:10:00] connecting. And she was feeling her life pass her by. In a session a few years ago now, she was talking about how much she loved Washington and she just lit up. Her countenance changed. Her body changed. She moved into a place where her nervous system was appearing more regulated. It really felt like this was her body's home. I could feel that coming from her. All I said to her was "you really want to be back there. Don't you?" She just looked at me and this single, it was so sweet, this single tear just came down the side of her cheek and she looked at me and she said, "Yes".
Then she pretty quickly moved out of this place where she had been feeling more peace and contentment in that memory, but then coming back to the present and realizing, okay, this is not what it is now. Getting anxious, getting upset and wanting to change the [00:11:00] subject. "Well, nothing's going to change about that. This is where we live. My husband hates Washington. He loves it here."
And this is something else I should mention. They, at this point, we're both retired. Really the only thing that was holding her here was this marriage to a person she did not feel connected to, and hadn't felt connected to for a long time.
What I said was, Hey look, nothing needs to change. Nothing may change. But what I want you to do is just sit with the feelings around the possibility of it changing. All the feelings, whatever comes up and just dream into it, just dream into what it would be like if things were to shift, knowing, going into this exercise, knowing it's okay, if nothing changes now or ever, and all this is is an exercise about feeling into the dreaming, right? Allowing yourself to go between the feelings that are really pleasant and lovely, [00:12:00] the feelings of what the moisture in the temperate rainforest feels like on your skin and coolness of the air. All the feelings you were feeling when you started to talk about how much you love the Pacific Northwest.
And then also the feelings that come up around "this can't possibly happen". "No, I really need to stay here". Those feelings are going to be those hot potato emotions that I'm talking about. You're not going to want to feel them. You're going to want to get up and leave the practice. You're going to want to get busy and do something else.
But what is actually underneath that if you sit with it. It's just a practice of sitting and dreaming. There's a lot of things that are going on when we're doing this. And I don't know how all these things work. I don't know how any of these things work; what is actually going on around the energetics of intention setting or how we [00:13:00] end up being able to... I don't love the word manifesting.
I'm not going to lie. I, it feels a little "New Age Light Chaser" to me. So I don't love it. Suffering is suffering. When something really horrible happens to us it's not that we were somehow manifesting with our thoughts, something horrible happening or attracting something to us. I just can't go down that road because it doesn't make room for suffering, which we all have.
But just to say that there is something energetic behind this that I can't explain because I don't really get it.
Now, I'm noticing while I'm talking to you. I'm like, oh my God, I don't, I don't know this answer. Right? So here you are in this moment, getting me going "I have this podcast and I'm talking about this thing, and I don't know how it works, arrrgh!
So in this moment, you're going to see me work with this. I'm just going to take a breath. And I'm going to remind myself that I don't need to know how this works, not for [00:14:00] me. And I don't need to know how it works in order to tell you about it. I'm just inviting you into a practice, I've found to be really helpful, even though I really don't know how it works, which is kind of how... I mean, here's the thing. When you really surrender to that, not that you don't need to remind yourself every now and again like I just did there, you see how I did that?
See how I did that all on purpose? Ha ha ha! Yeah. Not really, that was, that just happened. But I'm glad you got to see it. When we do this for ourselves, when we keep coming back to this practice of like, I don't know how this is going to work, I'm just going to sit and allow myself to feel all the feelings that are coming up around it and work with it.
Then shifts happen. It might not be a shift that you thought was going to happen. Things might look very different than the way that you thought that they might unfold or had even hoped that they would unfold. But there are going to be shifts that happen.
Coming back to my sweet client. So she was amazing at this. She diligently gave [00:15:00] herself this practice. She really worked it. She really, I was so impressed. She did such a great job. And before she knew it, she was telling her husband that she wanted to go back to Washington. And he was saying, "well, I don't want to go back to Washington". And she was saying, "That's okay, I'm going to Washington. You don't have to come with me".
Took such incredible courage, but because she was able to sit with everything that happened as uncomfortable as it was, she got to this place where she was able to say that to him and he did not resist this at all. There was no fight there. Interestingly enough, it did get revealed that he had been involved with another woman for several years.
And so when they did split, they sold the house and my client moved back to Washington. Still there now. Having a wonderful time. And what's so super cool, I'm licensed as a psychologist in both Washington and Arizona. So she didn't even need to find another therapist when she went back to Washington, which was [00:16:00] really wonderful. Bonus!
So they sold the house. She moved to Washington. He moved in with his woman that he had been with. She broke away. My client broke away. And it doesn't mean that there weren't other bumps on the road. She did it. And it took time. I mean, I know that I said before she knew it. It wasn't like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie, arms crossed over and nod and blink.
It took some time. It took a couple of years, but she's living the dream. She's living her dreaming. Her dreaming. So for those of you who are in this space of knowing that something needs to change, I want you to take the pressure off yourself of actually changing it. All I want you to do is just sit and allow yourself to feel all the feelings that are coming up. Just sit and be with it and really name the feeling. When my client felt into what it was like to be in the Pacific Northwest. Peace, contentment, ease, relief. [00:17:00] You're going to hear about these feeling states a lot from me because those feelings are ones that we really want to look out for when they come up. They show us what our body is wanting, what our body is consenting to. Or not. When you encounter the hot potato emotions, do the best you can to just sit with them. I think it was Pema Chodron who talked about yourself in meditation. You're training your mind like you would train a dog. You know. Sit. Stay. That's exactly right.
Just sitting and staying with these feelings. What's great is the more you're able to sit with the difficult feelings that are coming up, the more bandwidth you have to do that. The more you're able to tolerate it. You kind of come to the realization that the boogeyman has no teeth. You know, you're not going to implode.
And when you feel, if you have a Veruca Salt, like I do going, "But I want it now, Daddy. I want a golden egg". You just say " Sweetheart, it's all going to get sorted. [00:18:00] Just stay with it. Just say with it and see what happens. Okay. That's what I wanted to talk with you about today.
Just dreaming into what is going to come next. And again, it might not end up looking like what you were dreaming into, but you're going to find that shifts happen. So sitting or walking. You know, I say sit, but I want to be really clear about this. You don't have to be sitting. You could be sitting, you could be walking.
Whatever you're doing, just really allowing yourself to feel what's coming up as part of the dreaming. This is the gestational process of what is being created. When it's time for it to be born, it will be born. Okay? (Exhale.)
I hope this practice is of benefit to you. If you have any questions, any thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out and let me know.
All my links to my socials are in the show notes. If you are enjoying this podcast, I would be [00:19:00] ever so grateful if you would hit subscribe or follow and leave a review. That way when other women come check it out, they might be a little more likely to give it a listen. I'll look forward to the unfoldment between now and next time we come together.
See you then.