Episode 43: "Hey, wait!" with Jay Moon Fields

What happens when the stories you learned as a child about what it means to be “good,” “kind,” or “easy to love” become the very patterns that keep you stuck in one-sided relationships as an adult? 

In this deep resonating episode of The I AM Well MD Podcast, Dr. Santi Tanikella sits down with Jay Moon Fields, somatic coach, author, and creator of the “Hey, Wait!” framework to explore how childhood conditioning shapes our emotional landscape in adulthood.

Jay’s work has reached nearly a million learners through LinkedIn Learning, and her approach blends embodied intelligence with emotional honesty to help people step out of people pleasing, self-doubt, and overthinking.

Together, we discuss:

• How early conditioning teaches us to prioritize others’ comfort over our own truth
• Why many adults find themselves accepting unbalanced relationships as “normal”
• How to reclaim your worth and begin honoring your emotional experience in real time
• Practical ways you can develop healthy relationships with yourself and others

This episode is a gentle but powerful invitation to pause and say “Hey, wait” to make space for your own inner experience - because it matters.

Connect with Jay Moon Fields:
jaymoonfields.com
Instagram
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LinkedIn

Transcript

Are you a busy parent? Do you feel like you're being pulled in multiple directions all at once? Are you exhausted and overwhelmed? Meet my mom. Her name is Santi Tanikella. She's a pediatrician, expert in mind body medicine, and a life coach. She can help you break free from guilt and overwhelm, so that you can enjoy the life that you've worked so hard to create.

She can also teach you how to support your family in a more holistic way.  

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the I Am Well MD podcast. Today I'd like to introduce you to Jay Moon Fields, who is a leading educator, coach and author. Nearly a million people have taken her courses featured on LinkedIn Learning and her book "Teaching People, Not Poses," is used by yoga teacher training programs globally.

Her Hey Weight Framework teaches people how to honor their emotional experiences and share them authentically, helping them to break free from the cycles of overthinking, people pleasing and self-doubt.  For over 20 years, Jay has taught the principles and practices of embodied social and emotional intelligence to individuals and groups from Patagonia, Wieden and Kennedy, Apple, the UN and Baker Tilly.

 She has been a guest on over 30 podcasts and was named one of the top 50 health and wellness bloggers making a Difference in the World by greatest.com.  She has been a featured speaker at the GoPro Women's Summit, the 15 Seconds Festival and the Omega Institute.  She received her BA in Psychosocial Health and Human Movement from the College of William and Mary and her master's in integral Transformative Education from Prescott College.

Please check out her new book called, "Less Lost."  Well, Jay, I'm excited to have you here. So, welcome to the podcast! 

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me.  

So your path has been a very, very interesting one.  I can see from your education that this clearly set you up for what came after, but tell me a little bit about your path and how you got to be who you are today. 

Well,  I think for me, in terms of education and, and that path started in college, I was William and Mary like you said and I had gotten into doing yoga and I had grown up as a competitive gymnast. So I was bendy and I was strong and I could do all the poses but it was the first time ever that I was actually invited to be in my body.

You know, it's, it's wild to think of all  that I could do that I,  how embodied I thought I was growing up.  But once I started doing yoga, I realized oh all of that was performance. I wasn't actually behind my own eyes. So getting into yoga shifted everything for me and I wanted to start to study what was going on.

For me when I was practicing 'cause there was something happening, as you well know as someone who practices yoga,  something was happening where I could  actually feel being present with myself for the first time ever. And I wanted to know  what that was, why it made me feel. So much more calm, so much more, um, connected to my ability to be with my emotions, all of that.

So that's where studying psychosocial health and human movement came from. And that led me to a career in my twenties where I was kind of.  I was either teaching yoga in the yoga studio, or I was out in the wilds working with mostly a, a lot of adjudicated youth at first and then grownups in nature, helping them  to be more connected to themselves through rites of passage work in nature.

So those two things kind of side by side for a while, um, while I was also trying to figure out who I was,  all of the things that I did along the way were really for me, and then I would offer them to someone else. You know, they always say you only have to be like two steps ahead of somebody on your journey in order to do the work.

 So that's where it started.  

 I can totally relate whether it comes to yoga or even, you know,  you mentioned rites of passage. Sometimes, even though I'm in my forties, I feel like  there's still many rites of passages to come. 

So many, right? So,  yeah. And so to step back, I would say, you know.  In teaching the things I needed to learn. I was someone who grew up outside of Washington DC, Northern Virginia, that's an area that's very much, they have like the best public schools in the country. It's very much about how smart you are, what school do you go to, you know, what job do you get?

How much money do you make? And so I really was in that coupled with being a. Uh, a gymnast. As a kid, I really got good at performing. I really got good at perfectionism. I really got good at people pleasing, which are all things that the people I work with now struggle with. So much of my work as a individual and then translating into what I do with other people has been learning how to overcome conditioning.

 Especially because those of us who are smart and good girls or good boys,  we're gonna naturally do really well the things we're trained to do. So if you're trained to be a people pleaser, or you're trained to be perfectionist, you're gonna be good at it because  you're dedicated and a good learner.

And,  I've found that first being able to understand what were the things that I got conditioned to be and do that I can't see that are causing me to not have a good experience of myself in my day-to-day life.   

So  you said, "not having a good experience of myself."

Tell me more about what that means.  

Well, to me, that's the thing that happens when  you've done all  the stuff to have the shiny life, the successful life, the, "good on paper" life. But in your day-to-day world,  you don't like how your insides don't feel like they match your outsides. Where it feels like, you know, inside you might be just overwhelmed with anxiety, boredom, or fear, but that is not what you show.

Right.  You're showing the thing that people wanna see. You're being the person that people need you to be in order to stay connected to them or in order to stay employed or whatever that is. But you don't have a good experience of yourself because you know that it doesn't feel good how you're being.  Like, I had  a new client to me the other day, say in our first session. She said, you know,  I want to be kinder to myself  and  I will do everything I need to do to be that. I just literally don't know how.  That, it's that thing of like, you know, the, all that inner stuff going on in your mind, all the ways that you try to position yourself to be liked, to be respected, and how it doesn't sit well in your gut,  but you don't know how to get out of it, like intellectually. 

People know I should be setting boundaries or intellectually people understand, you know, um, I have to be authentic or whatever. All these buzzwords that we use, all these things that  if you've been around the planet for a couple decades, you know these things. It doesn't mean you know how to do them, though. 

That's amazing that you've  brought all that together so quickly. So, this mismatch between how you feel on the inside and the outer world. That's something that  so many of us, I would say the vast majority of us do on a daily basis. 

Yeah. 

 And don't even recognize that there's a different way.

Yeah. 

There is a different reality that exists out there that is achievable. Those that do recognize that that exists also knows that the pathway to get to that place where your insides match your outsides,  they know that, that path might not be an easy one. For others, it might be an easy one. Yeah.

Can you speak to that a little bit more? I know that some of the clients that you work with,  this is the piece that they struggle with.  

Yeah, it's, and I'll say it in my own experience, uh, for me,  I'd been doing this work of trying to heal myself and trying to have a better experience of myself and relationship for years and in my mid thirties, I was still doing... 

like, it was almost like the more I knew intellectually, the worse I did relationally.  Because I felt like I had the tools I needed to have a healthy, romantic relationship or set boundaries in my work, but for whatever reason, it wasn't translating into me being able to do those things and the reason I mention that is because the amount of pain that I was in, because I was like, I'm smart.

I understand this stuff, and  I am repeating behaviors in relationships over and over and over again that don't feel good to me. And  I remember feeling like  kind of the rock bottom feeling of like, if I can't figure this out.  I don't know what I'm gonna do 'cause this is painful. And luckily at the time,  my better angels stepped in and  finally sent  a mentor who was exactly  what I needed to be able to,   to not, how would I say it? 

Up until the point where I had met her, I understood how to work at the level of my nervous system and regulate my emotions and all of that. But I couldn't see that underlying,  um, how did you say it before we talked? The, the, um,  the pearls of bull. Shit.  The pearls of bull shit that I've been  offered  through  the conditioning of my family through my growing up years, through society.

And like, once she finally kind of helped me see  the,  almost like taking the film off the screen and being like, no, this is the clear picture. You just never seen the clear picture.  Once I saw the clear picture, it made things so much easier because I wasn't.  Trying to apologize for myself anymore  if that makes sense.

So when people come to me, they're coming because they have the sense that  they should know better than to have their life feel the way it does,  and they don't.  And it's creating a lot of pain and  sometimes yes, the work can take years, but what I've found in my own experience and with working with people is if someone can give you  a clear picture,  it really can make things 

change so fast. 'cause it's like you just, all of a sudden you see there's a whole new room in your house that you didn't know existed, right? Like it's just there's a whole new reality that you're like, oh,  that actually really does change everything.  

I feel like even just knowing that you have a choice too, right?

Mm-hmm. That this is a possibility. If we don't even recognize that this is a possibility,  then we keep walking that path. You know?   One of the things that I've heard you talk about is.   If we change our trajectory by one degree, that you end up hundreds of miles away from the original destination that you were aiming towards.

Yeah. And that is absolutely true. So, you know, when we make small changes, even, in our lives, um, small openings in our brain to allow for possibility  through action,  it can change the path immensely.  

Yeah.  

So  how do your clients come to accept this cognitive dissonance as normal? 

You mean up until the point where they come to work with me? 

Yeah.  

That is a good question, because  I don't think  there are any messages out there saying  it isn't normal.  Meaning, that generationally I think  most of our parents didn't get training in how to  be emotionally resonant with our children.

They didn't get the message of like how to actually  raise a child who can become differentiated and trust their own inner experience, trust their own emotions, and to no fault of their own. Like, it's not that they're bad people or bad parents, it's that where would they have learned it from, you know?

And so it's kind of like we're all swimming in the same water and we can't identify that we're in water. 

 So when a person starts to realize that perhaps this dissonance, this feeling bad on the inside, but looking good on the outside, 

mm-hmm. 

Once they realize that that's not particularly normal, how can a person begin to reclaim their sense of worth in relationships, especially when they've been conditioned to believe that they're supposed to care for everybody else above themselves. 

 I feel like in order to best answer that, let me get kind of practical or I'll go back to a tool that I use with people. And this is where "hey wait!" actually came from. Those two words, hey wait. Because hey wait is a way to not just understand that you want to shift your self-worth, but to actually have.

Something to say in difficult moments that is easy to remember that pivots  the conversation that pivots the,  situation as a way to say like, "Hey, wait, I need to be considered here too." Which is the underlying  root place that self-worth.  Exhibits itself in a relationship is when you believe that you get to matter as well, right?

As opposed to, well, I'm with you now. So that means everything has to be about you being okay, you being happy, you being, you know. So this is one of those,   teachings that kind of peeled the film off the screen for me. So, I learned this from my mentor, Dr. Nancy Dreyfus. And I think she even shared this with me  in an introductory call.

We weren't even working together yet. And I remember thinking, good Lord, this woman helped me in 20 minutes for free more than anyone ever has. So, here's the scenario.  Imagine, for the person listening, imagine that there is a little girl in the room and she's playing with her blocks and she's sitting on the floor and she's totally ensconced and playing with her blocks and mommy a

walks into her room and kind of grabs her by the wrist and says, "we have to go take your grandma to a doctor's appointment right now." And the little girl goes, "but I don't wanna go. And the mom goes, well, it's tough. We've gotta go right now, or we're gonna be late."  Okay, so there's scene A,  scene B. Same little girl playing on the ground, same blocks.

She's totally into it. Mommy B now comes into the room and Mommy B goes, "oh my gosh. Look at what you've created here. This, this little world with your blocks. That's incredible. What's that over there?" And the little girl tells her, "oh, that's where you know my horses live." And Mommy B goes, "I hate to do this.

But we have to go, we have to take your grandma to the doctors right now." And the little girl goes, but I don't wanna go. And Mommy B goes, "of course you don't. Why would you? This is so much better than having to go get in the car and drive grandma to the doctor's appointment. But we do have to go. But when we get back, we'll come back to this and I would love to see more about what you're doing." 

So at this point, if I'm sharing this with a client, I would say, what's the difference between mommy A and mommy B? Do you want to, do you wanna answer that as  my  stand in client? 

Oh, absolutely. So, you know, with mommy A, it sounds like they were very much in their own world centered on what they had to do and also centered on grandma, where that was the task at hand was they had to take grandma to get medical care. 

Yeah. 

Whereas Mommy B  recognizes that there's her world, and then there's also the world of her child, and she validates the world that her child is exactly currently living in um, and in so doing, I feel like, like if I were that kid,  I would've felt seen.  Yes. You know, which makes a huge difference in how we relate to one another.

Like I know in the instances in my childhood when I felt seen mm-hmm. Is when I thrived the most even during  situations that weren't the best. 

Right, right. Well, you absolutely nailed it because I would say that a lot of people, when I first ask them that question, then this is the, like, they don't even recognize, the conditioning that they've had themselves.

Like they've so normalized it that a lot of my clients will say, well, mommy A was more efficient.  Hmm, which is true, she got her out the door. And for parents who are busy and, you know, just things need to flow or else they're going to, their day is already so stacked and so overwhelming, they just need the kid to be acquiescent.

Just go with me. So people will say, mommy A was more efficient and Mommy B was more kind.  Again, not untrue, but what you said is the, the real kicker. Mommy A it  was all about her own world and didn't see the little girl at all. Mommy B could see, showed her like, I see you  and I care about what's happening for you.

And this is also true. It's also true that in my world it's important that we go pick up grandma. Both of those things get to be true. And so what happens to a little girl or a little boy child who gets seen that way?  They start to actually  believe that they matter, too.  If you're getting,  if mommy A is coming into the room and taking him by the wrist and basically saying, we gotta go right now. 

You're getting the message that you're just an extension, like literally, you know, if you imagine the hand on the wrist, you're getting the message that you're literally an extension of whatever mommy A's world is and your only course of action in that scenario is to either comply, go along, be the good girl  or defy,  throw a fit. 

Fight for your reality. So those of us who were raised by well-meaning mommy A's, grow up to believe that our only option for having a reality is to, meld with the people around us, is to enter their reality and then to hope that one day they're gonna see us and enter ours but they don't. I mean, why would they, they've got connection  and we're in their world. 

Or we feel like we have to fight. You know, that's the, um, the adult who in a relationship, whether it's uh, professional or personal, will say yes and say yes, and say yes, and go along and go along and go. And then all of a sudden they're like, boom. And they get pissed and they drop a huge boundary.

And the other person is like, what the, where did that come from? What came from this un. Underlying peace in them. That feels like if I am gonna get seen, if I am gonna get considered, I ha it has to be a fight.  I have to be big and dramatic and mean about it.  

So. Interesting. 



It's so  many of us.  Yeah.  So here's then scenario C.  Little girl's playing with her blocks.  Mommy A comes into the room and does her thing of just not seeing her and said, you know, we gotta go right now. We gotta take your grandma to the doctor. Grabs her by the wrist and the little girl says, "Hey, wait."

So this is where those two words come from. The little girl says, "Hey, wait, look at what I've done here."  So essentially what she's saying is, "Hey wait, consider me.  Hey wait, I matter too. Hey wait. I'll go with you, but like,  look at me, see me."  So, when my mentor told me this story,  she added onto it. She said the day that you stopped saying, "Hey, wait" Is the day that you stopped believing that someone would relate to you  and the day that you've started to have shame for wanting

someone to relate to you.  So where I went with that in my head in that moment was,  well, I just have to start saying, "Hey wait," again.  I don't even know when I stopped saying it was so long ago. I have no idea when I stopped saying it, but I could start saying it  and this is what I now teach my clients to do. 'cause you know those moments, you know the moments where you feel, metaphorically grabbed by the wrist, where you feel like your only option is to comply or defy.

And I wanna say to your listener right now, this is the like paradigm shift that can change your world. You have another option. You can say, "Hey wait," And then whatever form of asking to be considered is appropriate to that situation  because this is how you make yourself a part of the picture again, right?

This is a part of how you create two realities again in a situation where the other person,  because of their conditioning, is operating based on the fact that there's only one reality.  Because that's what most of us do. Most of us go around feeling like, well, it's, it's two of us here, and one of us is gonna get to win out on who gets to feel better. 

You know, that's not relationship,  that's conditioning, that's  codependence.

 

 Life can feel like a constant balancing act, work deadlines, family responsibilities, and everything in between.

It's really easy to get stuck in go mode without ever stopping to ask,  "what do I really want?"  Imagine if you could set boundaries with confidence, say no without guilt, and start doing more of the things that light you up. That's what life coaching is all about, helping you get clear on what matters most and giving you the tools to make it happen. 

Your life is unique, your journey's unique, and your solutions should be too. If you're ready to stop surviving and start living with intention, let's talk.  Visit me at iamwellmd.com  and click on the link to contact me.  Send me a little message and we'll get you started with an introductory call.  I hope to see you soon.  

 I will say that as I was listening to you talk about this piece, the piece about,  saying, "Hey, wait," and shame.  

Mm. 

It literally,  it just hit me in the heart. It did  because yeah, you're right. A lot of us do feel great shame when we ask for our needs to be met.   As if we don't have a right to receive help.  

Mm-hmm. 

You know, and it makes for a very lonely world for us if we feel like we don't have the ability  to "wait."  Yeah. To ask the people around us to wait. You know?  Having worked with so many children of trauma and parents who have experienced trauma  is sometimes it's not safe  to say, "hey, wait."  And so in those situations,  what would your response be?  

Hmm. For a child or for a grownup?  

Well, let's start with a grownup. 

For the grownup, I think the thing to understand is hey wait doesn't have to be said to someone else. It can be in a situation where you feel like, one, this is safe, and two, this is a relationship that I value and I want to shape into a place where there's room for me. "Hey, wait" can also just be said to yourself as well. The important piece here is that you're recognizing, Hey, wait, I don't feel considered here.  You don't have to say it to the other person for it to start to rewire your own self-worth because the problem, the challenge is that when you

are still in the behavior, consciously or not, of having shame for wanting to be considered, for wanting to be related to. If you can't name it for yourself, you're gonna stay in the shame space. So like, if you can say to yourself, "Hey, wait, I don't like how that feels." That's a way of you  bucking  your internal system that says, "well, you don't, you don't get to have a preference here.

This is about the other person," right? Like this is about you being able to say to yourself,  "I matter and whether or not I can get this other person to see that or change does not matter. What matters is that I can see it for myself," and  you know, after that saying to yourself, "Hey, wait, I don't feel considered, or, Hey, wait, I don't like how this feels."

Then you get to choose well, what do I wanna do about that?  If it's not safe to say something to the person, maybe this is the day where you start figuring out how to not be in that relationship.  

Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head, right there.  When I coach people,  I do talk about this piece.  We cannot expect the people around us to change. 

We can ask to be seen. We can say, "Hey, this is what I'm interested in," or "this is what I'm about." Mm-hmm. And you know, "this is  what I disagree with you on,"  but simply by saying that we should not be expecting the other person to change. 

Mm-hmm.  I mean, think back to  the example of the third scenario where the little girl says to mommy A, "Hey wait,:"  I can imagine a world in which mommy A keeps doing the thing.

Mommy A keeps coming in to this girl's room year after year after year, grabbing her by the wrist and saying, this is what we're going to do now but as long as that little girl can hold the, "hey, wait" and keep asking to be considered, she would grow into a grownup who values her insides, who trusts her own experience, who realizes that her emotions are valid even if someone else doesn't say them.

So can you see how in that scenario, even it doesn't matter.  Do we want mommy A to change? Yeah, we do, like, that would be great. But if that person  in the dynamic, the little girl can stay with the that internal fortification of like, no, I get to matter and I'm gonna just keep saying it.

That's,  making it more real to the little girl.  And that's all that really matters because then that little girl grows into someone who doesn't  get in relationships- professionally, personally, romantically, friendships, any of that- with someone who wouldn't see her, she just wouldn't. Here it is, 

yeah,  that's the pearl right there. Even if there's one person that does not listen to you and it happens to be a main caregiver, that doesn't mean that there's 

that one reality left for you. Yeah.  There's still a reality that is present where you are seen and heard and valued for who you are and what you bring. Yeah.  

Yeah, and it doesn't even have to be that it's the main caregiver. It could just be the, it's the caregiver that is so overwhelmed and so stressed and just in their own trauma response or stress response

so much of the time that they can't, they just can't. They can't  process their own emotions and, and really see you. Um, and I think that's then an important piece to say, because oftentimes when I do this with my clients to look at and heal where their own patterning and conditioning came from.   You know, the first response is like, oh my God, this makes so much sense

and then the second response is, oh my God, I've been doing, I've been mommy A to my kids.  Right. And then that second wave of shame comes up and they're like, oh, I'm a bad parent and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You were doing what you were conditioned to do. That was being a good parent, and, great news.

There's two pieces of good news, now moving forward, you could do it differently and  the second piece of news, if you don't do it differently, 'cause you, there will be days where you're like, we got, I don't care what you're doing, we gotta go or.  Um, you can always make the repair.  You can always go back and say, Hey, earlier,  I really didn't stop and acknowledge you, and I'm sorry. 

That must not have felt very good. And that repair  means the world. It really does.  Like I'm imagining this.  Picture of cells going back into a healing place, like it really does make a huge difference. I mean, that's the thing of whether it's a, whether it's a spouse or whether it's a parent, or whether it's a friend who would come to you and say, Hey, I, hey, wait, I don't like how I treated you  the other day.

Um, I'd like to acknowledge that  and apologize. I mean, you can feel it in your own system, how it just goes, whew.  It matters.  

 Oh, absolutely. I've noticed   in my relationships with my kids,  there are times where I am mommy A and I have to check myself.

Mm-hmm. 

Or I'm having the mommy a mental rhetoric.  

Sure we have to 

go, this is it, we're done. You know, your playroom's a mess. I'm just gonna throw everything out, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever it is.  I have that mommy a rhetoric, which is very like me in my own mind and then there are times where I'm Mommy b and then there are times where that third scenario comes up where my child will remind me and stop me nice and say,  and they'll say, Hey mom, this will only take a minute. 

They know what I'm gonna say. Oh, 

oh funny.  

They know that I'm gonna, but that means they feel, feel safe.  

That's a good sign. It means they feel safe to ask.  Yeah. 

Yeah. When they do say, Hey wait, this is only gonna take a minute, I start to feel bad 'cause I'm just like, Ugh.

They guessed that I was gonna be mommy A in this moment. They knew it was coming. 

Yeah. 

 So they checked me and I'm, I am grateful for that. I am grateful for that safe relationship because I work really hard on that relationship every day.  People who've worked  with me in the office setting, right?

Like the  parents of the patients that I see, you know, sometimes they will ask me about parenting and I'll bring this up: the importance of a child  feeling seen.   And how we can communicate to our children in a non-inflammatory way mm-hmm. Where there is more collaboration rather than this,  authoritarian way of parenting.

  Part of what I get at is  your 7-year-old one day is gonna be 16.  Right.  And our job as parents. Yeah, we do set boundaries. We do try to teach them what's right from wrong, and at age seven, right and wrong are very black and white. But at age 16 mm-hmm  All sorts of shades of color are thrown in there where good people can do bad things and bad people  can do good things.

And that's very confusing, right? Because when they were littler, they were taught that it was black and white.  But now you have the 16-year-old who then wants to do something, is not allowed to do something.  And is expecting their parent to  bring down the hammer. 

Mm-hmm. 

Whereas  if they were expecting a more collaborative conversation, what would that look like? 

Hmm. What would be the level of peace in that household in general? 

Right. 

You know, and that pathway doesn't happen overnight. No. That trust has to be bidirectional,  right? Yes. That relationship is bidirectional. And this 16-year-old will one day be the 40, 50-year-old that helps us when we are older and infirmed. 

Right. And are they going to be mommy a  

Exactly. Are they 

gonna be the parent that we exhibited ourselves to be? Right. Yeah. Because that's what happens right when we get older, is if our kids do take care of us,  they're gonna model the relationship that we had with them. 

Unless they've done a lot of work.

True, yes. Exactly. Unless they've done the inner work. Yeah. And  we don't know what that's gonna look like, but Right. It, it does. Leave it to us too, to  ask ourselves, you know, do we wanna be the person that is willing to  question ourselves and say, Hey wait.  Yeah, something doesn't feel right here. What is it?

Let's kind of put this into words and figure out a path  forward. 

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is so right. And the thing that I would want the listener to take away is like under underlying this idea of, hey wait is, there are more than one reality. And to be able to speak to someone else's reality while also communicating yours is foundational skill for having collaborative, well, I was gonna say having collaborative relationships, but really I would say having relationships 'cause anything other than

collaboration and being seen  and having your reality,  considered that's on a relationship. And so I find that for my clients, they say one of the major things that changes their dynamic in all of their challenging relationships is remembering I get to have a reality here too.  Which doesn't even mean you have to be confrontational or even say anything.

It just means that you don't disappear  around another person. You don't vanish yourself until you get to be alone again.  For the people pleasers out there, it means that you can  use your skill of empathizing with someone else and seeing their reality, but just adding to it your own.

It's like you already have the skill of seeing someone else's reality,  but then you can now include yourself in that. So I said that out loud. I, I hesitated for a moment there because I was thinking of, some clients of mine, multiple different clients  who've come to me because they wanted to improve their marriage.

 And I think this happens in marriages, I think this happens with children. I think this happens with best friends, is that you are so accustomed to that person being around that   you forget to see the reality.  You stop remembering. You're like, oh, I know. I know what he's gonna say here.

Or I know how he must be feeling here. Or,  I know how this goes. And you dismiss you. You kind of just  wave their reality away without saying like, what's this like for you?  What do you want here?   Even as little as what it comes to where to go out to dinner, you know, like.

What sounds good to you as opposed to just the default of Well, I know what you're gonna say. 

 It's so true that that piece on curiosity is very important because the curiosity is the thing that it literally keeps the door open, it keeps communication open, it keeps the flow of emotions,  free, you know?

Mm-hmm. 

And compassion is almost like the thing that holds it all.  It's a container for that. Yeah.  So being able to have that curiosity and compassion present at any given time to have a thriving relationship. 

Mm-hmm. 

You know, and relationships too. I feel like it's constant development. Like there's always something in motion there. 

 And I think that that's a very beautiful thing about relationships is  you're never in the same relationship, even day by day.  

No, I think like a constant renewal. I think that's why in my mid forties now, I would say the relationships that I value the most and I seek out the most are with people who are curious. 

'cause that's  everything else stems from  compassionate. Yes. But like the curiosity of like, I.  I wanna know more. I wanna know more about me. I wanna know more about you. I wanna know more about us. I wanna know more about this world. Like that's the thing that allows a relationship to not get stagnant.

 I think that's the thing that I was most terrified of is growing up, was seeing how much stagnance there was in relationships  in the world, in my world,  people who weren't willing to look at themselves, weren't willing to be open and curious like that. I was like, I want no part of that. 

It's part of why I do what I do.  

 That's personally,  that's an area of alignment, right? Like,   I'm gonna segue here.  One of the things that you talked about was this misalignment between how we feel on the inside and how we feel on the outside.

Mm-hmm. 

And this is where the relationship with myself started to really reveal itself and  I realized that I wasn't paying attention to the things that brought me joy.  

Mm.  

So I bring this up simply because, you know, when we are in such deep misalignment and we think that it's normal to feel bad, 

it's normal to always have anxiety. You know, we are dismissing ourselves.  We really are. Mm-hmm.  Um, and so there were these very pivotal moments in my life during my medical school training where I felt like really elevated.  And I'll use a personal example. Um, like I was doing a meditation and I did it off the cuff.

Somebody asked me to do a, a meditation during a conference. I did a 10 to 15 minute meditation.   Completely ad-libbed it, and  it went really well. Now, if anybody knows me, I am that type of  personality who likes to know what I'm jumping into, who likes to have a script, who right like I need, I need the crutch.

And in this moment, I did not need the crutch,  you know? Um,  and it, it felt amazing. 

Mm-hmm.  

And then I recognize that time and time again the same scenario came up.  So  when we start to pay attention to the things that bring us joy within ourselves   and allow for that to be a reality. Mm-hmm. We then allow for our partners and the other people that we have relationships 

to hold that as a possibility for themselves too,  that they can have a relationship with themselves that allows for joy, which actually might be more normal than we ever thought.  Might be more necessary than we ever thought. 

Yes. Might 

be life sustaining actually.  

I think so. I think so. and the older I get, the more I'm realizing that's a relationship that I

want to cultivate 'cause it, I think it is one of those, again, back to the conditioning that we get.  I don't know that I got,  "find your joy," "acknowledge your joy," as explicitly as I got " be smart, be successful,  be number one." You know, all of those things and  

 speaking of the, you know, if you're one degree off, you get further and further away from the original destination. Like  following Joy, I think is  the most pure navigational system. It's not easy necessarily, but the older I get, the more I'm like, yeah, that's, that's the answer  for all of us.  

I agree, and I think  there's this aspect where I can imagine somebody asking, well, if  my kid followed their joy, they'd be gaming all day long. 

Sure.  

While that might be true, what I mean by that is,  sometimes people will game for, for pure enjoyment but it's being able to have the joy of kind of recognizing where we want the future to take us. Mm-hmm. And then building the blocks to get there.  Mm-hmm.

But that path might be an uphill climb. 

Mm-hmm. 

Right. So it doesn't mean that it's gonna feel joyous the whole way there. 

Mm-hmm. 

Right. We may pivot, we may,  change things around so that  we meet our goal.  In the way we need to for that phase of life that we're in.

But it's the journey itself, right? Where you have to  insert the joy.  

Well, it, it makes me think of, I had someone on my podcast, uh, Dr. Meyer Holtzman, she's a somatic therapist as well, and she taught me and my listeners "joy spotting" and I love the term, and I honestly, quite honestly, genuinely still do it every single day since the day I've talked to her.

 I do it at night when I get into bed because when I first get into bed, I can definitely be in  the mental  busyness of like.  I  am going over my day and like, where did I mess up? Or, you know, all the, all the crap that my, my busy critical mind can do. Or I can be stuck in my head about like, okay, so what do I need to do tomorrow and what's the flow and all of that.

But, so I've trained myself when I first get into bed and turn out the light, I, I joy spot. I go back through my day and I look for when were the moments where I actually experienced joy, because it doesn't necessarily, you know, to, I think what your point was saying, like, it's not that every day of your life should be filled with joy.

That's not realistic, but if you  can't look back on your day and find a moment where, you know, maybe it was a funny text that your friend sent you.  Yesterday for me, one of mine was the way the light hit a particular tree in my front yard, it was just so gorgeous. It brought me joy. And  I laid in bed thinking about that moment and expanding the moment and letting myself really look at the tree in my mind's eye and feel that joy.

And if you can't look back in your day and find moments of joy,  then that's a good indication that you're in survival mode. It's a good indication that you are living a hundred percent from your conditioning as opposed to anything that's aligned internally with what makes you feel seen and known, even by yourself.

So I would encourage people, like as a, as a great starting point is like start joy spotting because that'll teach you  if you have  the doorways for it in your life, which is important, the doorways for joy, but it will also help you see the patterns  and create the directional shifts that bring you more into the day-to-day life where that just naturally happens more. 

I agree. Yeah. Because we know it exists,  we start to figure out the pattern Yes of what does bring us joy. Yeah.  It helps to  give ourselves permission to bring more of it into our lives. Yeah. So if we have a job that perhaps we don't really a hundred percent love, maybe 50%

love it. What are the things about our job that we really like to be able to bring more of that in. 

Mm-hmm.  Right? To add to,  it becomes a way to advocate for yourself. You could then, I've never thought of it this way, but you can link your joy spotting to, Hey, wait. You know? Like, Hey, wait, I noticed that I really don't enjoy this aspect of my work.

Is there a way that I could elevate this aspect over here that I do that I do enjoy? What could I ask for? What could I implement?  It's that thing that you keep saying, which is permission. Right? It's not just acknowledgement and awareness. It's also give yourself permission to start making it real. 

Yeah. It starts with yourself and then we start creating the circles around ourselves. Mm-hmm.  Fortification.

 Yeah. Yeah.  It feels like the somatic or the embodied experience of it. It's like you become more solid, you become more, um, I don't like the word resilient, so we'll say fortified again.

It's like you're fortified with yourself and your own knowing. 

 So. Part of the reason I created this podcast was because I wanted to create a pathway for people to heal themselves, heal their children, and heal their children's children. 

Mm-hmm. 

As we come to a close with today's podcast, do you have any last words of advice for our listeners? 

  You know, everything that we talked about  is the major theme that I would want to say.  In that line of  healing yourself, healing your children, healing your children's children. This lineage is, it takes curiosity to what's the conditioning that I didn't even know I got.  Compassion to yourself and others to,

to take the action to start changing it. And I would really encourage people to start using hey wait with themselves and with each other.  As you, you talked about healing this lineage,  what I imagine is like, we need, we need disruptors, we need interruptions. We need the places where we go, wait, the way that this is flowing isn't how I want it to keep flowing.

And to me, hey wait is a really gentle but powerful way to interrupt the way things have been going and to see what healing you can interject into  your own life and your lineage. So I hope that the people listening use it and find that to be true.

 I definitely have been using it.  I can vouch for cool for that.

Cool being true. Cool. It, it really does. You know, if I say to myself, Hey, wait, that's an automatic, like, breathe in, breathe out, clarity,  self-regulation, reset. I'm, yes, the reset. It happens  and I'm grateful for it because it does totally change what's gonna happen next for me. You know, perhaps those words that I had in my mouth that really probably weren't appropriate would not come out.

Yeah. Right. Right. And that means that the tone of the day stays good, you know? Yeah, yeah. It also means that I'm not carrying it, you know, I'm  not exactly carrying the angst. I'm not carrying  the irritation because I've allowed myself to have that pause.  

So,  

uh, Jay, this was great.  I'm, thank you. So appreciative of you being here.

How can our listeners find you?  

 My website is the easiest way to find all the iterations, and that's my name, which is jaymoonfields.com, and that's where they can find out about my courses and coaching, but also my podcast, which is called, Hey wait. So now you'll have a sense of what it's about. And  as you mentioned in the introduction, my new book, "Less Lost," so you can find out all about that and stay in touch with me through my newsletter by going to j moon fields.com. 

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jay. 

You're so welcome. Thank you for having me. 

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