Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses

#85 Content vs. Context: A Shift That Changed Everything

• Bundle Birth, A Nursing Corporation • Season 6 • Episode 85

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In this soul-stirring episode of Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses, Sarah Lavonne and Justine Arechiga dive deep into the powerful shift from content to context—a mindset that invites you to slow down, be present, and choose intentionality in both your personal life and your nursing practice.

Together, they explore what it means to stop "should-ing" yourself to death, reclaim your presence at work and at home, and actively participate in your life instead of simply going through the motions. Through personal stories, metaphors (hello, mushroom eater!), and real-life insights from the floor, Sarah and Justine challenge you to step out of the noise, embrace the silence, and give yourself permission to thrive.

Whether you're deep in the hustle or struggling to find your footing, this conversation is your invitation to pause, reflect, and remember that being present is hard work—and it’s worth it. Thanks for listening and subscribing!


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Justine: Hi. I'm Justine.
Sarah Lavonne: I'm Sarah Lavonne.
Justine: We are so glad you're here.
Sarah: We believe that your life has the potential to make a deep, meaningful impact on the world around you. You, as a nurse, have the ability to add value to every single person and patient you touch.
Justine: We want to inspire you with resources, education, and stories to support you to live your absolute best life, both in and outside of work.
Sarah: Don't expect perfection over here. We're just here to have some conversations about anything birth, work, and life, trying to add some happy to your hour as we all grow together.
Justine: By nurses, for nurses, this is Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses. I feel like this is going to be one of the first episodes we've had where I have no idea where it's going. [laughs] [unintelligible 00:00:54] I'm excited. [laughs]
Sarah: I, too. We were looking at the lineup for what was on the docket for this season, it was everything we had so far was heavy on the clinical, which is great. We love clinical learning. We know that you do too. Also, we are more than clinical people around here. What's also important to us is your own personal growth, because who you become, you take into your everyday life. It becomes who you are, how you carry yourself in the world, and how you impact those around you, including those at work, but also at home. We want you thriving in your lives. We were talking about this episode, and I was like, "I have a soapbox I could get on. I have some stuff." She was like, "Okay, you do that."
Justine: Based on what you told me, I don't know how much I'll be able to contribute, but it'll be a good alternate view.
Sarah: I pictured that we haven't caught up for a while. There's always something happening. There's just always movement forward. In my world, if you've been around and you've followed us for a while, you know that we're lifelong learners, you know that it's really important to me to continue to level up myself. When I get better, I know that influences my team, I know that influences you and the other people that I care for, so it's extremely important to me that I continue to grow as a person and push myself internally. It makes me feel more alive.
That's where I'm going with this. You get the little insider scoop on what's been going on in Sarah's head. I know that last season, we ended with how hard the year was. I opened up about just the layering amounts of challenges that year was for me and how hard it was, for lack of a better word, painful, and all of that. Now we are, let's see, we're probably six months out from that. I'm in a different place. I feel really grateful. I feel very grounded. I feel very content. I'm in a season of trying to actively notice and appreciate how amazing my life is.
Now, does that mean my life is perfect and we've fixed all the problems that I mentioned in that episode? Not whatsoever. I think, once again, the one thing you can control is your attitude. The one thing you can control is your perspective and how you carry yourself in the world. I feel like I'm in just a really, really good place mentally for now. That's really fun. I want to talk about it.
One other thing. Where we're going with this is I was driving down the 405 to go see my best friend from high school, who moved to LA, which I could not be more happy. That's a component of the many things that I'm very grateful for in this season. It was last Sunday. If you have been following us at all, we haven't let you in because we're so scared about announcing a date for this family's launch, because it kept getting pushed and kept getting pushed.
We have been working for two years on trying to re-enter, contribute to, have a presence in, and help the space of childbirth prep for families. We do all the nurses' stuff, but we also do the family stuff. Hardcore for the last year, most of my time has been pivoted to families, building this website, editing this class, filming new classes, and getting everything all revamped, rebranded, all of that, while also launching new classes, formatting workbooks, and trying to get all sorts of things out, including this new emergency pocket guide, et cetera. It's just been crazy.
Last October, we sat down, myself and my sister who works for us. We looked at the calendar, and we were like, "All right, what does the next year look like?" How we didn't do this before, I have no idea how we survived without this exercise, because I am so attached to that calendar. I work in the back with the calendar of post-its on the wall, only so I can look at it half the time. Anyway. We looked at this calendar and we were like, "Oh boy. We are not out of the weeds yet," especially one of the things we've been working on for, Lord, how long, Justine, trying to get me more time and less dependent on me?
Justine: Six years. No, literally. [laughs]
Sarah: Everyone is so sweetly worried about me and constantly like, "Sarah, you need to do less. Sarah, health." We're constantly trying to figure out how I can not do so much and delegate out things and then only do what I do best, which is life. That's what we're all trying to do in our lives. Let's be real. Outsource that housekeeping. That's been the ongoing conversation, but we looked at this calendar and I was like, "Oh my God."
We have this amazing team, but there's still a lot that only I can do, so I made a conscious decision after retreat, which was the beginning of December 2024. I said, "Okay, it is on." For the next at least three months, which ended up being five, I do not get a day off. In order for us to get to this launch, my head is in the sand. There's no social life. I don't mean this in a woe-is-me. It was a very logical decision where I made a conscious choice that I will be working every weekend, I will be working every evening, and the only way that we get this done, this meaning all of my tasks done, let alone everybody else's tasks, getting them done, is if I focus, I hustle hard.
I want to say something, that I did have a conversation with the team. I said, "I am making a conscious choice that this is my life. Therefore, I do not need pity. I don't need people being worried about me. I don't need a 'Well, Sarah, you need to take a break. Well, Sarah, you need a nap.' No, I don't." I have enough self-awareness that if I'm tired, I'm going to sleep. I know the tasks that I can do when I'm in the right mood, I'm very gut-driven. There are days I'm like, "I can't write this new class today. I'm going to format a workbook. It's a very different brain space.
I made a conscious decision that the world is gone, my one sole focus was working hard for a time being. What I want to talk about is this concept of balance in our lives because I was driving on the 405, looking at the traffic, which it was a Sunday afternoon, and yes, in LA, there was still traffic-- Put a plug in that story because I'm going to come back to it. I've also been reading this book, again, which I mentioned on another episode, about the map of consciousness. The most woo-woo, crazy book ever. It's one of the hardest reads I've ever read.
Justine: So dense.
Sarah: It's not for everyone. There's a lot that I think a lot of people would be very turned off to. I like to approach any learning with I think there's wisdom everywhere. It was one of those, "This is going to push my brain outside what I know." Whoa. It did. Anyway. There was a section in the book that talked about content versus context. I'm going to read you this page in the book because he gave an analogy that I think is so interesting and plays into this story.
Justine: You're going to finish this book.
Sarah: Oh, I finished it.
Justine: Oh, you did?
Sarah: Yes.
Justine: I'm impressed. Actually read, front to cover.
Sarah: Actually read, front to back.
Justine: We only say that because Sarah and I both are pretty big skimmers.
Sarah: Oh yes.
Justine: [laughs]
Sarah: I'm a vicarious reader. If you're reading a book, I want to hear all about it. Then I'll be in conversation and be like, "There's this book--" You'll think that I've read it and I have not, but I'm doing better and it's been so helpful. Just bear with it. I'll give some context after I read parts of it. Just take it in with an open mind. The good news is that the mind is already 99% silent. If 99% of the mind weren't silent, you wouldn't even know what you were thinking. It's because of the silence of the forest that you can hear the bird song. The forest is 99% silent and 1% birdie.
It's only because you listen to the 1% that the forest seems noisy. You're hypnotized by the 1%. It's a hypnotic trance with the content of the mind. What you do is shift to the context of silence out of which the content emerges. Ego identifies with content. Spirit is context, which is silent. The mind is like a giant football stadium where everyone has gone home, and you're the only one in the entire stadium. Over in the corner, there's a small radio playing, and you get focused on that radio. You say, "Gosh, this is a noisy stadium." You think your mind is noisy because you're focused on the 1%, which you think of as me.
It isn't the mind that's an obstruction to enlightenment. It is your identification with the working of the mind as me. You think that's who I am. That 1% has various devices to keep you hypnotized. It likes to politicize, moralize, analyze, romanticize, criticize, idealize, emotionalize, dramatize, hypothesize, theologize. Is that a word? Theologize? I don't know. Welcome to my world trying to read this book. I'm trying to be smart. Fantasize, catastrophize, and so on. That's all the content of the mind. The silence is the context. The relationship between the content and the context is what spiritual work is all about.
By spiritual, we don't mean religious. We mean the spiritual aspects of your body and mind. I read this piece and I remember being like, "Holy shit. I get it." There was something that clicked in me, where I was like, "That was why I had to read the book." Since then, I have been going through my life thinking, "Is this content or is this context?" That content being 1%, and it's what we focus on. It's what we emphasize, but there's always a bigger picture going on.
Justine: Your demeanor.
Sarah: I'm driving down the 405, I'm listening to an Oprah podcast, I'm just living my life, like, "Wow, I'm out. I'm about to be social for the first time because, yes, we launched Families." Please go over there and add your babies to the wall of babies, by the way. We would love to see your little Bundle Birth babies. We'll link that down below. I'm in traffic on a Sunday afternoon, I am like, "Ugh. Come on, LA. You suck. What in the world? It's Sunday. Can't I just ever get anywhere driving? It's constant. On a Sunday, where are all you people going?" I am going on and on and on.
I heard my brain go, "That's content." I was like, "Okay." I'm focusing on the 1%, which is the cars driving in front of me, the problem in front of me, what's frustrating me in front of me. It completely was changing my whole mood. I was like, "Okay, what's the context?" I promise you, it was like my whole world illuminated. I had an enlightened moment on this drive. [chuckles] I'm just kidding, but it felt that way, where I'm like, "It is such a beautiful day. Where do all these people have to go?" All of a sudden, I was so curious. I was like, "I wonder if they're going to see their family or maybe do they work on a Sunday? That's sad for them, even though I work on Sundays."
I was like, "Wow, I'm so close to the beach. I'm about to see my best friend who lives here. Look at the palm trees lining the street over there. What a lovely thing. Who lives over here?" All of a sudden, it was like the entire world opened up to me. I thought about my morning. I thought about where we're going to go to brunch. I thought about the outfit that I was wearing, that I was so grateful for. I thought that I showered in a warm shower. [laughs] I pulled back from the content to the context. Therefore, I arrived to Carly in the best mood ever, just feeling so grateful to be alive and so grateful to be there with her.
Then we go to brunch. I sat and for the first time in months, maybe years, maybe years, and this is a testament to the growth that's taking place in me, I think-- Because one of the things we talked about was, "How do you know you're growing?" Which we'll come back to. I was like, "I feel like for the first time in as long as I can think, I get to just enjoy brunch with my best friend." That has not been my reality with my whole life. It's like there's this constant voice of you should be doing this. You should be doing that. You're getting behind. You have so much to do. You're going to let people down. They need you here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah content.
I was like, "No." I gave myself permission to just enjoy brunch for the first time in so long. With that, going back to the balance thing, I don't believe in balance at all. I haven't believed in balance for a very long time. Now, mind you, I grew up in a very religious context that was like, "You must balance. You must rest on the sixth day," or seventh day. I don't remember. You Sabbath. You do all these things that are ritualistic and very rigid. You have to have balance. "It's not balance, Sarah. It's not healthy, Sarah." I've been told that more times than I can count.
Even, I'll say, my dad might listen to this. That's totally fine, because he's about to come out. We're going to have a conversation about this, but he has been so worried about me every time we talk on the phone, "I'm just so worried about you, Sarah." We had this conversation once again, where he's just like, "Could you think you could just take a day? Could you take a few hours?" I was like, "Dad, I'm taking hours. I do not work every single hour of my life."
I'm thinking about work most of that, but I work out, I hang out with my niece and nephew. I have taken days off strategically, but there's always been this underlying, "In this season, work needs to be at the forefront of my mind, or we're not going to make it to this deadline. There's no hope for my future of ever having a break." I remember telling my dad, "Dad, I am so happy. I am so content. I feel so grounded." In fact, at this leadership conference I was at, he said, "Flow is when you love the sweat."
I was like, "I love that," because I feel very in flow. I feel like things are coming together. I feel like I'm finally accomplishing finishing projects, but it took me making a conscious choice to put my head in the sand, put blinders on to the rest of the world, and be like, "Just grind." Then we all have an opportunity to make a choice that goes back to mentorship. I was thinking about our landing and launching session, or the launch module, which is the last month in our 12-month mentorship program, so important.
I have this analogy that I teach in that section about these little rainbows. They're like, "We're all on these rainbows. We're in different seasons of our life." Then, eventually, certain seasons come to an end. I like to think about balance less through of what you should or shouldn't do, "You need more balance in your life. You did 2 hours of leisure and you did 17 hours of work. You're no longer balanced." Why are we measuring? Who's deciding shoulds?
Remind me to come back to the should concept because I will, but this balance, it's less balance than it is season. I made a choice that I am in a grind. I told my team, "Don't pity me. I'm good. I am going to do it. I'm going to feel so good when it's over. We're all going to benefit when it's over. Then guess what? I'm not doing this forever." For me, I thought back to this launch piece in mentorship of I landed something. My rainbow landed on the ground. Now, anytime you land, you naturally are launched into something new.
As I'm driving, literally, we launched this website Saturday, this is now Sunday, I'm like, "It's out there. It's free. We're one step closer." There's a million ongoing things. YouTube came out on Tuesday. If you don't subscribe to my YouTube channel, go look over there because we have lots of new stuff coming there. They're so beautiful. I'm so proud of what we're doing, but we landed, and I was like, "Now I'm launching into something new."
It was like, as I'm picturing this launching pad, a spring sprouting forth, as I'm driving down the 405, I am like, "I get to choose what this season looks like. I am not a victim to my circumstance. I have so much I can't control, but there is so much I can control. Just like I made a conscious choice to grind, I am choosing to make a conscious choice to look for context." It was like I gave myself permission to just open my eyes to the world in which I live in versus "You're just in the grind. There's traffic on the road." What a more free, beautiful, open, expansive life that is?
Justine: Super.
Sarah: My definition of balance is more seasonal that like, "What are you choosing? What choices do I choose for my health?" What does balance look like? It looks like working out three days a week, at least. If I can hit a fourth, great. All of it, I'm coming back to the shoulds, that we should ourselves to death. This has been my new challenge of, pay attention to when you use the word, you should, because should comes from where?
Justine: All the time. Five million times a minute.
Sarah: Right.
Justine: That's crazy.
Sarah: Who says you should do anything? You get to decide what you should or shouldn't do. Even then, I would reframe it like, "Maybe I should have done that in the past." The new reframe my sister sent me was like, "I didn't do that in the past. I just didn't." It becomes so much less judgmental, so much more neutral, so much more free, so much less shaming on ourselves. Ultimately, it comes from the ego.
The ego is a whole other thing. I don't know how much time we have to touch on, but that's a huge component of another thing I've been thinking about, which the ego is just, and I wrote this down as a definition, because I didn't want to get it wrong because it's so hard to describe, I think we think of being egotistical or putting ourselves first or being a dick, but it's not bad. It's very, very neutral. We all have an ego. It's not you stroke your ego. I think we've ruined the definition.
The definition of your ego is the ego is the mental and emotional structure that tells you who you are. It is your inner narrator built from past experiences, beliefs, roles, fears, and desires that helps you make sense of the world, stay safe, and feel like a separate self. It's not bad. It helps us a lot. The problem is when we put ourselves, our perspective, our narration of the world, our viewpoint, beliefs, roles, fears, desires, as the only, as the primary, as the right one, that's when the ego takes the driver's seat instead of the passenger seat.
Justine: What about when you're reading that, if we are negative about ourselves, is that making my ego meaner to me? Would that work? [crosstalk] self-hate or self--
Sarah: I think there's a lot of motivations of the ego. That's where so much of the ego plays into your past traumas, experiences. How you function in the world, again, I'm still learning here so we can workshop this out, but to me, it's like, "Why are you responding the way you are?" Because your ego is trying to defend itself. It's trying to keep itself safe. By safe, I mean comfortable, because a lot of times when we're drawn to toxic things, we're drawn to what we know more than what we don't know.
What we don't know is more scary than what we do. The devil you don't know is worse than the devil you know.
Justine: Sure.
Sarah: That's the ego talking. You think about the way the world functions, it's control. The ego's job is control and identity. Who you are is so much bigger than your ego, but so often, and I will say from my perspective, the world is functioning, their ego is in the driver's seat. That's one of the reasons why we can't quiet the noise and we judge each other so freaking hard.
If we can learn as we evolve as a human, as we level up our lives, and as we grow, it's, instead of putting down, "Well, you should do this, you stupid thing," or you're led by your ego, that instead you learn to have it as your companion of like, "Okay, that's helpful." You get curious about why you're making the decisions you are, why you're triggered by certain things, or why you're feeling defensive. It helps you become so much less judgmental as a person if you can help control your ego. My understanding.
Justine: It's helpful in parenting, too-
Sarah: Oh my God.
Justine: -with the triggers of your child, whatever is triggering you, to look into, "Why am I [unintelligible 00:24:09]"
Sarah: Yes. Totally. Why we assign meaning to everything. Don't write people's story is the opposite of functioning through your ego, "I'm writing their story. I'm deciding they are the way that they are," when they are the way they are through your lens only. It's like your ego is the screen on the window. You're looking out a window to life, all you see is what's outside, but what you don't realize is you have a filter on where you only see through your screen, and somebody else might have different of glasses.
My glasses, I can see what I see, but I might even have different vision of what it is, or you're colorblind and I'm not, we're seeing different things. It doesn't make them wrong or not. There isn't right or wrong, hardly at all in the world. That comes down to the let them theory. In thinking about all that, that plays in as well of like, "Just let them." That we interpret, we assign meaning, they should have done this. They should have done that. I should have responded, or I should respond. We assign meaning to things that are mostly neutral in the world.
I'm going to read you another [crosstalk]-- What?
Justine: It's not easy for people that are listening. Even when you said in your intro where you are, you added the for now, which it's rang true for me too, because there's seasons of my life that I'm like, "Oh, I'm so good. I got it." Then I got the skill, I'm going to do it. My gratitudes. I think about with Noah, I was so deep in my gratitude stage that I was getting up from my C-section in the middle of the night, he was waking up a ton, it was a very hard postpartum, it was awful, but I remember walking to the bathroom, without even thinking about it, my first thought was like, "I'm so grateful that my bathroom is connected to my room." [laughs] Because it just flows.
When you were talking about your gratitudes of when you were driving down the 405, I was like, "Oh, I got to get back into my gratitudes," because it's easy to slip, slip. It's easy, you get busy in life, you do other things, and you have other focuses, to be like, "Oh, I need to do that." Just as listeners are listening, these skills are not easy, and they take effort. I do believe that it does become more natural, but just so you know, it's hard work, but worth it. It's so worth it. You're right. If everyone just functioned in this way, our world would be a much better place.
Sarah: Think about our units. None of this is new, but it's just one other new approach to look at it, of there's so much more context going on on your units. The one action, the one weird look the doctor gave you, the one weird look the nurse gave you, the patient being hesitant with you. There's so much more content. Look for the silence, look for the forest, not the little birdie chirping. Otherwise, to me, it's you miss so much of what's going on in the expansiveness of life.
Even since thinking about this last week, I've been recording so many podcasts in the last week. It's insanity. What that means is a whole lot of conversations that are meaningful. Even this one. We're not talking about the weather. We're talking about heart stuff, Kaylee, about her AFV, and then I had another intense conversation with a doctor this week. It's easy to just breeze through. That's just like, "I'm at work. I'm recording a podcast. That's the content."
Again, we have choice. We're not victims to our lives, and we are functioning through the lens of being a victim or a martyr, or a bystander. When we think about, if I'm going to take and be empowered in my life to own my decisions, own my thoughts, own my actions, and own how I align with my brain, my body, and my actions, that we all have this opportunity to look beyond. As I've been doing that, I have found this deep, it is a gratitude, but an awareness of what a beautiful thing to be in relationship with other people, to have this job, to be known and to know, to be let into people's suffering, and to slow down enough that--
I played catch yesterday with my nephew for 5,000 years. There was a piece of me that was like, "I need to go back inside because I have a deadline." I was back in that. I was having a kink in my neck like, "Oh my God." I kept being like, "Who says I should be inside? There's nothing more important than being present right now in this moment." While that rings true in our everyday life, that also rings true to when you're at work.
Justine: You said something that reminded me of an email I got recently. It's another tip for people. It's a blogger that I followed for years, probably 15 years since I was 20 years old. At least [crosstalk] I love her. She quit the internet a year ago. I remember being so sad. She recently came up in my email, just like, "Here's what's been going on." I feel like that's so hard. She lived on the internet. She had such an amazing platform. Anyways. She did a podcast episode with another set of bloggers. She talked about how, since she wasn't on the internet anymore, specifically Instagram, she had this space for people again.
She's like, "Instead of taking in thousands of people's stories every minute, I could handle more meaningful relationships with the people around me." If we're trying to listen to the forest and not just the birdie, I challenge all of us. I think, Sarah, you say you're on your phone, you say you're on social media, but you work all day. You're not as on as much as you think. I don't think so. Maybe your late-night swipes or whatever.
I think that there are so many of us so addicted to our phone, just swiping to numb, and swiping to cope. I saw this meme recently of these little babies talking about, "Sorry about my mom's screen time. It's the only thing that soothes her." Funny because kids with their screen time, but it's true. Just a little side note of it's one way to quiet your mind. Think about your swiping, think about what you're consuming day in and day out, because it's anxiety-inducing, and it's hard to touch grass, for better words, grass around you. Just a little side note there.
Sarah: It's that practice of presence, that if you're feeling a little chaotic of like, "I don't even know what she's talking about." When I read that paragraph about the football stadium and all that, at the end, it says, "The silence is the context. The relationship between the content and context is what spiritual work is all about. In meditative or contemplative style, you constantly surrender all content as it arises."
That's meditation. That's visualization. That's slowing. That's grounding. That's everything we taught at MOVE. That's what you experienced at our MOVE learning retreat, and you'll experience again. That's also why I put together the visualization class for families. It's for families, but it's for you too. We call it visualizations for labor, birth, and life. There are specific labor ones, but there's also life ones. We'll link that down below.
I give a mini class on what it looks like to meditate or to visualize, "Why is the science there for it?" You can get that part for free if you want. We'll also link that down below. You can try the hospital one. Regardless, it's a resource to you. Initially, I was like, "That's why I meditate." I do. I've been trying. I've been falling off. I was going to say, "I should do more," but we're not shutting ourselves to death.
I have not made the time for it. I have focused on other things in the meantime, but I would like to be the person that has a consistent practice of meditation, but what it did was it gave me motivation of like, "Oh, I'm moving my brain from content to context when I meditate, when I slow, when I'm present," when you do take off your shoes and you put your feet in the grass and you actually feel what it feels like to put it on your feet and connect with the earth. That sounds very woo-woo. You're standing in the grass; look at the clouds. Mind you, you are living very much that way right now, of being more present with your goats and your canning.
What a beautiful life that is and season that is. If that's been an active choice for you to focus on your goats, your plants or your vegetables, your chickens, your family, and your canning, then you made a cognizant choice. I'm making a choice not to prioritize those things because I have other commitments. Mind you, I'd love to have some goats and chickens. Oh my God, that sounds so fun. I have to come see your baby goats before they're too old.
Justine: I know you do.
Sarah: I should take the kids.
Justine: Yes.
Sarah: Now I might have time for that because I could choose to make time for that because I am in full control over my decisions. I am not a victim to my circumstances. [laughter] This is me trying to be that way, even though internally I struggle big time with all of that. Anyway. I think ultimately, the bigger picture for me and the lesson has been, don't focus on balance. Balance to me is a lot of shoulds. Instead, actively participate in your life and actively participate in the way you respond to how the world responds to you.
I think specifically on our units, it's very simple. Don't write their story, show up and apply yourself. If you haven't listened to episode one of the Starfish Awards, go back there for some inspo of like, "Oh, I could be that nurse." You can be that nurse. You can choose to show up every single day, apply your brilliant brain, be compassionate, put yourself in their shoes, and don't decide what somebody should or shouldn't do with their birth experience, their birth plan, but show up a neutral force.
You are. We all are a force in this world. Together, we're making things move. Change happens because you have that one person that decided to respond and decided to be that person. I'm going to use this at MOVE. I'm going to give this away because I'm going to work this in. This came from the leadership conference I just went to. Erwin McManus told this story of how he was at this TV show. He was filming with-- He didn't say names, but he was like, "The biggest leadership guru in the world," who was going out before him. He was very intimidated. He was a new person in the industry. It was like, "Oh my God." They were bringing him out after this huge guy.
This leadership guy's advice was, "The world is like a bunch of mushrooms." I am ruining this. Bear with me. [laughter] His advice was, "Don't be the mushroom eater." Some mushrooms are good. Some can kill you. You have an expansive list of types of mushrooms. Some are like a superfood, and some of them will literally kill you. He's like, "Someone has to eat the mushroom first to know if it will kill you or not." His advice was, "Don't go be that person. Let somebody else eat the mushroom, then you'll know, and you can respond accordingly."
Erwin comes out and he's like, "Man, I'm so excited to meet you. Thank you so much." He's like, "Because of what you just said, you just showed me my life's mission, my entire life, and what it's about." He was like, "Wow. Okay. What is it?" He goes, "I'm a mushroom eater." You know I think in metaphor. I am metaphor queen. Whether my metaphors are good or bad, we don't know. Half the time--
Justine: You're the mushroom eater.
Sarah: I don't know if I'm the mushroom eater, actually. In some ways, maybe, but I don't know that I have the confidence to say that I'm a mushroom eater. I don't know if I would even identify that way. I haven't really thought about it, but I think that it's like we need that person to take the first step. If we had no mushroom eaters, we would have no mushrooms. Think about all the ways that we use mushrooms.
It takes that one person to have the ripple effect of then opening up the entire world to everyone else because they were the one to be courageous and do the hard thing, to speak up, to connect, to be different, to show that there is something else, and to test the waters, even risk, whatever it may be figuratively, in this case with mushrooms, death, for the sake of the whole. I know I want to be that person. I think in some ways, maybe I have, but have I taken that much risk? No, I'm still a scaredy cat in many ways. What's your takeaway?
Justine: My takeaway is, one, the shutting yourself to death is so good. You're so right. I literally sent a text out to my mom group about feeling this anxious energy that I'm so behind on so many things. I was like, "Behind who?" I even said that. It was like, "Who am I behind? Why do I have this energy?" The studs are very apparent in my brain, and trying to be quiet of that. I want to explore the content more because our brains are pretty loud. The birdie is really loud if you let it. The little music, when you're standing in a football field, if everyone was there, you wouldn't hear it. If you're alone, you do, and it feels loud, but it's not. That's really interesting. It's an interesting takeaway.
Sarah: If you're coming to MOVE 2026, expect some content versus context talk. As I've been reading that and I've been processing, I am starting to put together some of that. That will be back for season seven. We will announce and we will, in the next season, talk about exactly what we're going to be learning, but it is coming together. I hope that it is invitation and challenge. I'm sure it will be, because that's how I function, but I'm brewing over here. I see an opening talk that will set the stage for all of our learning clinically and how we approach the patient experience.
Justine: Thanks for spending your time with us during this episode of Happy Hour with Bundle Birth Nurses. If you like what you heard, it helps us both if you subscribe, rate, leave a raving review, and share this episode with a friend. If you want more from us, head to bundlebirthnurses.com or follow us on Instagram.
Sarah: Now it's your turn to go and just pay attention to where you're using the word should and start replacing it with something much more neutral, and see how that feels. We'll see you next time.