Birthdays, Expiration Dates & Time Travel with Dori Martin

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Hey there, Lady! 

How do you celebrate your birthdays? 

I just had a birthday and started thinking a lot about where I've come from and where I want to go from here.  

In this episode, I share what I've been doing make this next part of my life the best ever, and that includes time travel, thinking about friendships, spirituality, and making dreams come true.

I also share the top 5 regrets of the dying. I've been guilty of many on the list, but since we're ONLY in midlife, we have time to course correct and avoid those regrets when the time comes for us to recount how well we lived this precious, amazing and magical gift of life.   

Hope you enjoy the show!

Transcript

Happy birthday actually happy birthday. Whenever it is during the course of the 12 months coming ahead, I just had my own birthday and I just turned 52. That sounds like such a big number when I say it out loud. And in the past, when I've had birthdays, especially after my mid forties. I would treat it like a really bad thunderstorm.

I would cocoon indoors and maybe curl up with a nice distraction, like a book and wait for it to quietly pass. But you know what, this time I'm thinking that it's a 52 is a big number. Definitely. And. Taken so much, , joy and frustration and trauma and growth. And I've done so many things to get to this point.

I feel like I earned it so spending more time this week, actually my birthday was may 20. Thinking contemplating celebrating, taking assessments of what went well. And some of the things that I can learn from. So I am actually doing my birthday celebration my own way. And I actually had dinner with a really close friend.

We were calculating how long we've known each other. And. We came up with a number 30, which is a really long time, isn't it? And so I am so grateful that I have friends like her that are able to mirror back to me. Some of the things that I've gone through in life and they were with me and they were witnessed to that.

And they're able to mirror back to me. Who I am and what I'm about. And I'm really grateful for that because we spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves in a certain way from our own lenses. And it's really nice to see what other people see. And I think it'd between those two lenses is truth who you really are.

And during my birthday, also, I started thinking about the things that I did in the last couple of years, especially to. Prepare me for, and actually I'm really in it already, to help set myself up for an amazing life ahead. And so I wanted to share with you  some of the reflections, and hopefully they will be things that you can relate to, or maybe help you also, if you're not already on your path to intentionally creating an amazing bid life, these are some of the things that might be helpful.

So. Number one definitely is. I had decided that I would practice extreme self-care. That was something that was new to me. And so I needed to enlist some support and I read a lot of books. I took some courses and I also started working with other practitioners in health, on Mollis and in the process of getting certified in.

Being a meditation teacher and emotional freedom technique, and taking a neuro-linguistic programming practitioner certification course. And, um, there were a few other things too. I took a trauma healing course, and that was a course that was created by an amazing lady who is an expert in trauma healing,  Alison smiley.

And that was where I learned that I. Don't only have, well, first of all, I found out what complex trauma is. So I took the course because I wanted to learn how to help my husband, who has PTSD. He's a combat veteran, and he's had a lot of really interesting things happen in his lifetime. So I thought, you know, part of all healing is healing, trauma and negative belief systems, and also working on mindset.

I could see that because of his PTSD,  that's one of the blocking factors to healing, a lot of different aspects of life. I took this trauma healing course thinking that I would get more tools to be able to help my husband. And that's when I found out that I actually have a lot of complex traumas and that complex dramas don't have to be something that is.

Super upsetting to maybe people in general, but it's whatever you decided to make of the situation, whatever story you're telling yourself, based on that experience that you had. So maybe going to the amusement park and then, losing at some kind of game that could be something that would be traumatic to one person and completely nothing to another person.

So traumas aren't actually very obvious. A lot of them are just the. Stories or the meaning that you put behind the situation that happened, that informed how you started living your life afterwards. So every time you think about the thing, it basically is sort of like a form of programming. You start responding to something in a way that maybe is serving you.

Or a lot of times when you're of course talking about trauma is not serving. And a lot of the things that you learned during your upbringing, from parents, from experiences in school, with other kids, your peers, and, um, it's also, of course trauma includes like the big things, the things that really changed the way that you viewed the world.

Is it safe? Is it good, bad, um, you know, different ideas about what people are like. So. Working on those things, practicing, self-care recreating a morning routine, definitely having a gratitude practice, all of those things really matter.  But also dealing with those traumas. Then that's where I think that it's really important to assess things that happen in your past as part of your self-care.

And there's this thing called timeline therapy. That is, I think, mostly attributed to neuro-linguistic programming, but it's taking an inventory of the things that happened during the entire course of your lifetime. And it sounds really daunting. And that's why this is really a great thing to do with a practitioner or you take something that is.

Recurring in your mind, something that's maybe causing you to have a limiting belief or feel bad about yourself, or have a chronic fear about something in your life. That's holding you back from something that you really want to strive for and have. And when you practice timeline there.

What you do is you take inventory of everything that you've experienced throughout your lifetime, and then find the things that were notable. Something that stood out to you. That's either obviously very upsetting or something that just kind of changed your belief system of the world. Maybe that you're not good enough.

Maybe that you're not good at math in my case, or maybe. You don't fit a certain mold of beauty intelligence and worthiness, and then find out where that started and then reframe it, work through it so that you erase that from your belief system so that it doesn't affect you from the present and moving forward.

And the fascinating thing about the brain is it doesn't mean. The difference between what you're imagining and what's really happening. So with a therapist or a really good therapist, we'll take you through a time when something happened that changed your belief system, or really, really traumatized you and worked through it so that you can think about the thing that happened, but you race the negative emotion and belief and therefore actions that you pin taking based on that situation.

So. I've been doing a lot of that. And some of the ways that that showed up in my journey is an emotional freedom technique. I wanted to learn how to do that again, because I was trying to help my husband through trauma because one of the elegant and genius, , aspects of emotional freedom technique is that it's able to disconnect the negative emotion from a memory that you have in the past.

I wanted it to be able to do that. And I took the EFT practitioner certification course so that I can help my husband with his PTSD. And around this time it was the overlap of when I was taking the trauma healing course. So I started working pretty intensely on myself and disconnecting a lot of the traumas and I really wanted to learn it very well.

And so I went on to complete the master level three EFT practice. Course and in doing so that's where we learned timeline therapy, going back in time, parts therapy, looking at the different aspects of yourself and disconnecting the things that,  don't serve you. And again, disconnecting those traumatic things you think about during the course of your life, 

 That's holding you back from the life. You really. Another way that timeline therapy showed up in my journey is, a brain retraining program. I'm working with a practitioner that does something called D N R S. And she also has a lot of different techniques and tools that she uses. And it does incorporate.

A form of timeline therapy. And so I've been working with her through that, and that shows up in the form of meditations where you think about your timeline and your lifespan, and you think about a situation that happened in the past, and then you move into the future to conjure up the person, who's your all knowing and wise future self, and you have a conversation and all of that.

Leveraging the idea that you always have the answers already and you have good intuition and to trust that intuition. And so when you do something like that, you're actually talking to that calm and intuitive and wise version of yourself

so that's another way. Timeline therapy has been really helpful for me. And then parts work.  I have an achiever part. I have a mother part. I have a caregiver part. I have the student part. I have the. Perfectionist the inner child. And so taking timeline therapy and working through all of those different aspects through part's work has been really helpful for me too.

And then finally, the most recent thing that's been so amazing is I don't know if you're familiar with Joe Dispenza, the work of Joe Dispenza, he's the author of so many books. But the first one that I read was again for my husband, but.  Turned out that it was so useful to me was called you are the placebo talking about the mind body connection and how.

What you think and what you believe because 99% of our world is energy and our thoughts are based on energy and something called the quantum field. And I know I'm getting really woo, but woo. Mary science, I think in the world of Joe Dispenza. And I think that's why a lot of people really respond to his work because it does take the woo out of the woo and it makes it,  our present.

Dogma of reality, which is science anyway, um,  I took a course by Joe Dispenza called designing your destiny and in it, there's a meditation. And what you do is you. Visualize your future self and what you want in your future. And when you imagine something and you have this feeling of gratitude and you really embody that experience, you're able to attract that to you.

So this is kind of law of attraction, but when you read the science of it, so I encourage you to do that because it's really an amazing process. I've been practicing this for a few weeks now, but you're able to really believe that it can happen. Yeah. Naturally because of the way the human brain works, you start taking steps to really make that happen.

And so it's like a  self fulfilling  prophecy, but it's like ,  time travel, and it's projecting you into a future reality that you want to have, and it trains your brain to begin to strive for it. And so it makes reaching your goals a lot easier. So that's been really helpful and such a game changer because it brings a lot of positivity and hope.

And it's really having me do something that I don't do often. I'm often just reacting to the moment and living in the past and not in the present.  But this gives me the opportunity to project, what I want to do in the future. And then in the moment, Be able to take different steps to be able to get there.

If that makes any sense. I hope that makes sense. Also, now that we're in midlife, it's, we're kind of a living timeline, speaking of timeline, right? A form of time travel, because while we're in midlife, we're able to see as a parent or even if you're an aunt. I could see the younger generation that's come after us.

And so for me, I'm lucky enough to be a grandmother already at 52. And honestly, I can't take any credit for that. My husband has a couple of adult children. Who's had. Babies. And so I get to relive that time in life. Not at, not only from the standpoint of being a new parent, but also from the standpoint of looking at these babies and how  they're going through life in the early years and watching how well, I guess you can't call it courageous.

They're fearless. That's the word they're fearless. And their eyes are always popping open, full of wonder and curiosity. And. Potential and  they're always learning and they're in the moment and they're full of joy and there are no limitations. They're not self-conscious, they don't feel like there's something that's beyond their capability.

Anything is possible and they accept themselves and love themselves just as they are. And so there's so much to learn from that stage in life that I'm working on recapturing now at my mid-life going forward. And then when you think about. The young teenagers that I have that are about to launch into their lives ahead.

It's such an exciting time for them. But then I remember all the questions that you have, people ask you, what do you want to do? And,  you have these worries about like, how is it going to go? When I go to college, if you're going to college, we have a template in our society of all the things we're supposed to do during the course of our lifetime,  we're supposed to.

Finished school and then maybe get an advanced degree and go to college and know what you're going to do with your life. Graduate. Find that significant other, get married, get a really good job and maybe have kids and then work until you get into retirement and then see what happens until you get to the great beyond.

And,  it's funny because I'm looking at where my sons are there. One's going to be 19. And the other one's going to be 17 this year. So I'm going to be an empty-nester soon. So I'm thinking about all these things about what it feels like to be in that stage in life.

And if I could just go back in time, and this is what I tell my boys, . I think it's sort of going back in time as I'm parenting my kids. I'm talking to you. Younger self that it's okay. You don't have to have all the answers right now. And life will unfold the way it's meant to just do things that make you happy.

Things will present themselves. I think it's been said that 78% of people who went to college, aren't really doing the thing. They went to college for. And in my case, , I ended up also following that template, got a divorce. And that was actually a good thing because my ex went on to live the life that he was supposed to, and we were so different.

And so it would have made things really difficult if we continued on, especially. In terms of parenting. And then I went on to really reconsider what I wanted to do. I, I had to recreate my life. I had to make things up as I went along. And so even though I have been divorced when my kids were so small, 

my younger son was five months old and my older son was a couple of years old and having. Course correct. And recreate my life at a time, seemed really challenging. But now looking back, it was one of the best things that could have happened to me because it really made me think about what was important and recreate my life and create something that really made a lot of sense for me because the trajectory that I was on based on the expectations of society, wasn't really the right thing for me.

And also now, The young adults that are my step children and looking at how they're doing some things that are so great.  And some things that maybe I would have done differently, but it is a really great way to kind of assess life and,  adulthood. And I'm still in a place where some of the things and lessons that I'm learning apply to how we want to live now and moving forward.

And then you get into the stage of parenting. Some of the things I wish I had known that I know now is that, um, you know, things will all work out at the end of the day when there are challenges and tragedies, those are the opportunities to teach your kids to be more resilient when.

A lot of challenging things happened with my kids. I didn't want to avoid them. I didn't want to make it easier by pretending they didn't happen, which actually doesn't make it easier because kids know. And I think  they have the need to process things. You know, life isn't so great, but it was an opportunity.

Anytime something negative happened to teach them as I was learning my self, how to navigate through them and also the importance of celebrating and trusting that if they just do the next thing, that feels good and feels right, that makes a lot of senses and it makes them happy. Then their happiness and their good future we'll find.

And also to not take everything quite so seriously because it's a moment in time and that moment will pass. And so getting that stressed out and worked out, feeling like it's the end of the world, you know, the world does go on and it's just a moment in life. And so wish I knew that when I was in my teenage years and also a young adulthood, and now it's something that I realized, and I tell myself when things go a little bit sideways and.

 Also when you're in midlife, of course, this is a time when we may have already lost our parents or a lot of us are navigating through their Twilight years. Along with them. I helped my stepdad through his end of life in, well, it ended in 2012. Okay. And this is when, when the kids were young and it was really stressful.

And a lot of us, when we end up caring for our aging parents, it's a surprise because it's not something that we had considered as part of our life experience. Uh, but I learned a lot, even though it was really heartbreaking and challenging and so stressful in so many different ways. It made me realize that we do have an expiration date.

And I know a lot of people don't like to think about it, but I think that it's a gift to have the opportunity to see that transition and be really mindful of that we don't live forever and there is an expiration date. And when there's an expiration date, it helps us really be able to be more mindful and intentional with how we spend that time so that it isn't wasted.

And through that experience. , now I have my mom with me and she's in relatively decent health, actually. I mean, there are definitely signs that, things are transitioning, but I'm so grateful to see that for the most part, she's very healthy and she's a snowbird. So she lives with me part of the time in sunny, California.

And then. Visits the Midwest in the summer. And that's where she is right now. And she's kind of a living DNA. I know that I'm a functional health coach and I'm an FDN. That means I run functional labs to see what's going on with people's health. And some of the practitioners are in this field look deeply into genetics.

, but I look at my mom and I consider. My timeline, my DNA to my future self  for obvious reasons and for the most part, she's very healthy. And I understand that the generation before us  in many ways are a lot healthier than the generation in our current times. But.  It helps me see, some of the things that are coming up that I need to be mindful about with my health and wellness because there's so much we know about health and anti-aging, and. How to use lifestyle epigenetics to stay vibrant. So it's great to be able to see what may be coming down the pipeline in our DNA to head off at the past. And at the same time, I really grateful for some of the strengths of my genetics that my mom had is exhibiting so that I know that there's some things that I could probably be able to take advantage.

So, yeah, these are the kinds of things that I've been thinking about as I've been going through my birthday week. I guess it's not a birthday, it's a birth week and just contemplating what I want to do coming up ahead. And during that end of life journey, I did a lot of deep study about what it means to be at end of life.

I actually wanted to launch a course and it was about to launch . Before my husband's diagnosed with.  In  2014, I was about to launch an online course called,  end of life with your parent, with your health and sanity and tagged. And it's funny because we were trying to think of a shorter title.

Um, and so it's a work in progress. Stay tuned, maybe will be launched at some point, but one of the things I learned that is that not talking about what. In your end of life is one of the most expensive conversations we're not having because a lot of us have a lot of opinions, but really don't know that we have so much choice.

And I found out that a lot of the. Treatments visit upon the dying. We're not for the dying, it was for the benefit of the living. And that's so tragic, isn't it? Because that really shouldn't be the case. And at end of life, there are a lot of opportunities to make a lot of decisions about how you want to navigate through the great beyond and when those aren't spoken and that person doesn't get the opportunity to have this final say in something so important.

So powerful. I was in the room with somebody when they transitioned. It was somebody that I didn't know very well, but somehow, um, we, we got connected and I was asked to be there during the last hours of her life. And I was holding her hand and I was talking to her and I saw her take her last breath. And I have to say it was such a sacred, amazing.

If you're not as  spiritual person, this is something that would definitely make you rethink. But her transition out of this life was like her getting up and walking out of the room. She was there and suddenly she wasn't there anymore. And it took away a lot of the fear that I had about the transition.

And since then I've been kicking out a lot about what it might look like.  

There's so much about the universe that we just don't understand yet. And so to be open to possibility and to be open to different ideas out there, I think is really helpful, especially when facing down something that could be so scary, like what is beyond. But one of the things that I realize is that it's something to not be feared, but to use it for what it is, and to know that you want to make your life relevant and meaningful something that was worthwhile. And we're admitted midlife. So the good news is we're only halfway through. There's so much more living to be had. And so why not make it amazing? I think one of the things to be able to help that happen is something called the top five regrets of the dying. And this is something I came across when I was helping my dad through his end of life journey, a palliative care nurse Bronnie ware.

Started talking to people during the last moments of their lives and ask what were some of the top regrets that they had. And she published her findings in a blog called  inspiration and chai. And it got such a huge response that, Rodney decided to put it into a book

and I wanted to read to you the five regrets. So the first one is I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me. And this goes back to just being brave and being true to yourself and thinking about what you really like and what makes you happy.  This also goes back to ditching perfectionism, which is what I talked about in episode two.

Just not worrying about being perfect, not worrying about doing everything in a certain way, enjoying it and just doing it for yourself. What makes you happy versus doing it to an audience that ultimately, maybe it doesn't really matter? Regret number two is I wish I hadn't worked so. And I have to admit that that's something I'd been doing for a lot of my life.

And I think it's because it goes back to fear of not being enough fear of not being worthy. And part of it is just not trusting that things will work out. And so I wish I hadn't worked so hard. That's definitely true for me. And I'm looking for ways to enjoy life more and celebrate more and just know that things are going to work out.

Regret. Number three is I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. And this is about just being true to yourself and speaking up for yourself  I think this falls squarely in the category of practicing, self-care being your own advocate, sharing what you need asking for help when you need it.

And I know there are different times in my life when I could have really used the help and I didn't reach out and ask for help or something was happening and it really didn't feel right. And I didn't speak up for myself. So I definitely don't want to collect more of those situations going forward. So that's a really good one to be mindful of, have the courage to express your feelings.

And this goes along with creating boundaries. And so incidentally, I have episode five where I had that conversation with Denita Sparling that I think was just super helpful for me as well, just to affirm some of the things that I'm already doing and also giving me some insights about things that I can do to advocate for myself and speak up for myself, moving through.

So regret number four is I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. Oh, wow. Yes. I'm at 52. I have a lot of friends.  However, I have fallen out of touch with a lot of really dear people in my life. And I had that dinner with my friend a third years. She lives really close by just minutes away.  But I hadn't seen her for, I want to say the entire year we probably see each other once a year.

And I know time happens. Time can get away from you. But now that I'm heading into the second year of life, I know who my good friends are, the ones that have been with me through thick and thin.

So I want to make sure that I keep in touch with them as I start approaching Twilight years. And as I start cultivating more free time and finding more joy and not working so hard, not being so busy. Right. So I definitely want to cultivate, really good friends that I'm meeting with the different activities.

And programs  that I'm doing, and definitely keep in touch with friends that  I've made through the course of my lifetime, because at the end of the day, friendships are some of the things that I, I can treasure and that I can enjoy moving forward.

Regret number five, I wish I had let myself be happier. This one makes me a little bit emotional because thinking back to all the shoulda coulda, wouldas all the things  the perfectionism being so difficult on myself, feeling like I'm not good enough feeling like I needed to prove myself feeling like I didn't fit in.

It's time to let all those things go. I'm letting those things go. And I'm super grateful that I have the tools to be able to do that because I do want to be happier and I read somewhere and I think it's true. A lot of people don't realize that happiness is a choice and it sounds absurd when  you're in the middle of something really horrible, but that's the beauty about.

The human mind, you are actually able to think of things and honor things and be grateful no matter what your circumstances. And this is something that I've practiced over time. And it really is true.  Take the leap of faith and find out how to do that. And, something that you can do is, look at episode number six, where we talk about sparking joy.

So those are the top five regrets of the day. So at midlife, this is a perfect time to assess what's next and use everything that we can learn from our memories, our historical timeline, and our ability to imagine what's possible in the future and the resources that we collected over all this time and our friends to connect to .

 What's possible.  If we choose health, it can happen. If we choose a career path that we want to cultivate that we've been thinking about for a long time, this is the time. Goal. If it's about improving a relationship or finding new relationships, then we have the ability to do that. And so as you're either approaching midlife or like me well into it, what do you want most for the next stage of your life?

And what's in your way  what can you do today to make it happen?  Who can you ask for help? Because whatever it is, I hope you go from. And I want you to know that I'm here cheering you on. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you make it an amazing day ahead and remember lighten up.