Notes From a Fart Walk: Your “Wellness Manager” Is Exhausting You: The Winter Reset You Actually Need

Welcome to the very first Notes from a Fart Walk—a monthly digest episode inside Sink & Swim where nothing has to be polished, optimized, or resolved to be worth sharing.

This episode is an invitation to metabolize life in real time. Not with hot takes, diagnoses, or “here’s what you should do”—but with honesty, humor, and a body-led pace that lets things stay half-formed. Julie shares why “fart walking” (moving, processing, and sometimes being a little messy with a witness) is her response to urgency culture, performative wisdom, and the pressure to always be the expert—especially for high-achieving women in healthcare, law, corporate, and entrepreneurial spaces.

You’ll hear Julie sink into her own inner world—naming recovering good-girl conditioning, the fear of making waves, and what it feels like to reclaim her voice without needing agreement. She explores the shift from being the internal “wellness manager” to actually experiencing her life, especially in winter, when the body is wired to slow down, not optimize.

This isn’t a teaching episode. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a walk.

00:58 — Orientation: how to listen with your body (without fixing, analyzing, or optimizing)

09:08 — What a “Fart Walk” actually is: creating space for unpolished, in-process life on the internet

13:54 — Why digestion matters more than consumption in a loud, urgent, certainty-obsessed world

27:47 — Sink Into the Deep End: Recovering Good Girl conditioning, palatability, and the fear of making waves

35:59 — Sink Into the Deep End: What feels stinky right now—letting go of urgency, optimization, and inherited narratives

42:48 — Sink Into the Deep End: Listening to your body in winter (slowing down, seasonal rhythms, and the “speed of love”)

47:14 — It’s a Team Effort: Friendship starvation, transactional connection, and why millennial women feel lonely despite success

52:31 — Swim Practice → Swim Meet: Turning inner truth into real life—values, nourishment, identity, and contribution

57:53 — Nourishment in perimenopause: carbs, energy, and unsubscribing from wellness culture fear

01:07:34 — Delight without purpose: maps, geology, and why unexpected connection matters

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Transcript

Julie Granger (00:58)

Hey there, I'm really glad you're here in the Sink and Swim podcast. Before we get into today's episode, a little housekeeping. I wanna help you get oriented just so you know where you are, how the space works, and how to take care of yourself while you're listening. So first, a gentle invitation. As you listen or watch, see if you can listen not only with your ears or watch with your eyes.

but also by noticing what's going on inside your body. And that may change throughout the whole episode. And as you notice permission to know you don't need to fix anything, you don't need to analyze it, but just notice it. Some parts of you might feel seen. Some might feel exposed. Some parts might feel resistance or concern.

about what we're saying. Other parts might feel relief, encouragement, or they might want to reach through and help us or hug me if it's just me talking.

So notice how you feel as you settle in, whether you're listening in a quiet place or out on a walk or driving or in the middle of something.

and also how you feel when you're done.

That noticing is really sacred work.

And after you listen to the episode and notice, if you find yourself feeling the tug to stay connected to me or to the podcast or to any of my guests, please make sure to check the show notes and also make sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening right now. Now is a great time to go hit that subscribe button. And I'm not asking that for numbers, but because it lets the episodes find you,

without you having to remember or keep track. And if you like having something you can read or revisit or sit with more slowly, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and that's in the show notes as well.

You can also find clips and highlights on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, and Facebook. All different platforms, different doorways to the same house. So choose whatever feels easiest for you. At any point today, later, or months from now, if something in you starts whispering, you know, I feel this nudge inside.

My life or my work looks really good on paper. Everything I've built should feel good, but that's not how I feel. And sometimes that can be a sign that it's time for deeper support and reorientation. And that's where working with me in a soul story mapping session comes in. It's a private one-on-one session, not a discovery call, not a sales conversation. It's an actual coaching space.

to map what's true for you right now and get clear on what wants to shift. Even if you don't do anything with it, we're just gonna map it out. All of the links to all of those things live in the show notes, so you don't have to hold any of this in your head, but I'm saying it now to orient you in case you're listening and something comes up and you wanna know where to go next. Okay, let's drop into today's episode now.

Julie Granger (03:54)

Hello friends, welcome to the first ever Notes from a Fart Walk episode in the Sink and Swim podcast. We are here in season two and I am so excited about these episodes, which will be a series of episodes. This idea came to me literally on a fart walk. And if you're not familiar with what a fart walk is,

You know, you have a big meal and you get that urge in your body that you just need to move to help things metabolize and digest. You might go on a walk. Perhaps you take a friend with you. Things are metabolizing. They're moving. You might fart. Yes, I said fart on the internet. You might be stinky. There might be things in process.

And this is ideally best done with a witness, with someone else to help you process through things. It's what your body needs to do. It's what we do with each other. I go on walks with my neighbor all the time. We may or may not be farting, but we're just processing through life. And I think that there's not a lot of places on the internet where that's a welcome thing to do, you know?

you're told that you need to show up with a hot take, you have to pick a side, you've got to be polished, you've got to look like the expert, you've got to be of service to people. And I think that puts a lot of pressure on people in the online space, whether you're a creator, whether you're an online business person, whether you're just posting about your family's vacation to the Virgin Islands.

there's this idea that things have to be filtered and polished and perfect and complete and you have to have this like you know whirlwind lesson that you learn on the trip you went on or the hard thing that you went through that you're sharing about. You've got to come to these conclusions and that's great and I love reading that kind of content and I love hearing from experts and and really sometimes I love scrolling through hot takes you know and reading the comment sections.

but there's not a lot of spaces and places where you don't have to be polished, where things don't have to be completely processed out and where you don't have to be the expert. And I just think in the theme of a fart walk that there's a real opportunity to create spaces for that so that you can see not only

the unprocessed things that are going on in my world, but also maybe see yourself and give yourself permission to remove the thumb push down, like pressure hold on having to always be perfect and polished. And I think as the recovering good girls, the recovering perfectionists, high achievers, that can be a really vulnerable place to exist.

A fart walk is a really vulnerable thing because your body's processing. It hasn't actually absorbed all the nutrients yet. It's not actually putting them to use. It hasn't become a part of you yet. Your intestines are churning about, right? Things are in the in-between. And so I just hope that this space can be a place where I share all kinds of things like that. And some of the things are going to be really light and completely funny or like

useless knowledge and some things are going to be a little bit more deep. And the idea is that we are also always in process and we can hold the nuance of the light and the fun and the funny at the exact same moment that we're facing things that are really hard and gut wrenching. And I think that our world wants to teach us and our nervous systems are wired to choose one or the other.

from place of safety, from a place of identity. And that can be really challenging because we're also wired to be a nuance. And if we're always chasing this certainty or being one dimensional or picking one lane and staying there and never seeing all the other parts of you and all the ways you can feel and experience the world, that's not fully living. So this episode.

in summary is to just create a place for life being lifey and talking about it and talking through it. And I think that when the world is very loud and everything is urgent and everything is polarized and everyone's offering certainty and quick fixes and diagnoses and hot takes.

It can make you really tired of the internet. And I get tired of the internet and I get burned out and you probably do too, right? So I just want to offer a space for that. And when things, good things are happening, right? I have been replanting and reprocessing and rebirthing my work. This podcast is part of that. We've gone through one season that was part of the rebirthing.

I've had so many things in process where I wanted to like tell you about them and jump and squeal about everything that's currently in process. But you know how when you're creating something that's really near and dear to you, maybe it's art, maybe it's a piece of writing, maybe it's a project, and it's not quite ready to be told to the world yet because...

Other people have a hard time handling things that are uncertain or in process. They want things to be done. They want to know what it is. They want you to have your one minute elevator pitch about it. So this is also a place where I might be dropping breadcrumbs or sharing about the processes I'm in on the good things that are going on in my work, in my family, in my marriage, and with my dogs, being a dog mom. I might share about the things I'm reading, the things that are cooking in my kitchen that are keeping me fueled.

And it's kind of meant to be a digest in many ways, which goes perfectly with the theme of farting and metabolizing and processing. So thank you for being here. Thank you for walking with me. I hope that this experiment that I'm on with the notes from a fart walk episodes, because it is an experiment, it is in process, will bring some type of...

I don't even know. I don't want to say enjoyment. I don't want to say benefit, but we'll bring something to you in some way. So this is all unfinished stuff. It's still metabolizing. It's not really scripted. I'm not trying to do deep research and give you citations on things I might share about. This is not a teaching episode. It's a digest. It's not the longer monologue episodes where I'm like talking about one topic.

It's like a newspaper where I have all these different sections and segments about what's moving through me right now. And I think that also on the internet, we consume a lot of information. I contribute to that and I consume a lot myself, but the digestion part matters just as much as the consumption, if not more. It's where we integrate, it's where we incorporate, it's where we eliminate, it's where we discard what doesn't belong and it's where we become.

And so my invitation is to you to come along on the walk, if that would feel good to you, to be a part of what's half formed, what's literally still cooking, what's not polished, what's not optimized, what's definitely not AI generated, what's not cleaned up for performance and perfection, even as a podcast episode. What I'm opting out of, the agreement I have with myself is I'm opting out of urgency.

I'm opting out of hot takes. I'm opting out of performative wisdom. Like trying to come across as wise and having the answer. I'm opting out of jumping to clarity before I'm actually there. I'm opting out of diagnosing or fixing myself or others in public. Definitely opting out of optimization culture. But I'm opting into honesty.

I'm opting into noticing. I'm opting into humor. Sometimes something only I might find funny and I'm perfectly okay with that. I'm opting into contradiction and consistency of being unpolished. I'm also opting into not needing anyone to agree with me. So I'm not here to convince anyone of anything unless it's like you have to read this book.

or you've got to try this recipe. Like if there's something that I am just gonna bang the drum about, you might hear about it. But even if you don't agree with me, that's okay. Like it's totally okay. So welcome to the fart walk officially. This opening is a little bit longer than the other episodes will be just because it's the first one. So if you're still with me, I invite you to just

orient a little bit. I'll this on all my episodes moving forward, but just notice where you are. Maybe you're driving, maybe you're on an actual fart walk yourself. Maybe you're chopping vegetables in your kitchen, maybe you're laying in bed, maybe you are wrestling with children, wrangling dogs. Maybe it's just quiet where you are, however you are. And if it's safe to do so and you feel inspired to do so and available.

I invite you to notice your body, not looking at it, but just notice how it feels from the inside. One way to do that is just drop into your breath, hear the sound of your breath coming through your nostrils in and out. That's sometimes the simplest way to drop in. Just notice the sound of it. If you notice nothing else. Another thing.

you can do as you're noticing that sound is look around the room where you are. If you're driving, keep your eyes on the road, please. You're walking a dog, please pay attention to your dog. So whatever you can give attention to, I'm just inviting you. Notice as you look around, maybe pick a color and notice that color where it might exist. As I look around, I'm noticing yellow. I have a yellow

like tiny little silicone cup. use these for pills I need to take or sometimes &Ms that I leave by my desk. I have a yellow lacrosse ball. I use it at my desk for muscles, sometimes a little muscle massage when I get tired of sitting in my chair. I have a sticker with Taylor Swift drawn on it as a cartoon and her hair is blonde, ie yellow. There's a yellow envelope. So.

That's sometimes a nice little orienting thing just to bring yourself into the room. What I'm not asking for is that you're calm when you listen to this, that you're just like laser focused. You're not taking notes. I'm not asking for insight. I just invite you to notice now and then throughout the episode as I talk, maybe just take a minute to tune back into the sound of the breath coming in and out of your nose or your mouth.

and just allow yourself to be as you are. That's my invitation to you. So segment one of Notes from a Fart Walk is gonna be called Sink into the Deep End. There is gonna be a bit of an order to this digest with different segments within each, just like a magazine or a newspaper where you can start to predict what's coming. This Sink into the Deep End part is the part where I slow down enough

to process and feel what's alive inside of me right now.

And notice how it feels in my body when there's an awareness that I'm living out some inherited hardwired story. That's maybe not a story I authored or a should as you might call that.

And this is like a look into my internal world as I relate to myself. That's really what Sink Into the Deep End is about. It's the real digesting part, the processing part, the relationship between me and me. It's a part I can't skip if I want anything else to change. And if you've tried to change anything, whether it's your health or your relationships or your

body or your career, your business, your work, your hobbies. You know you can't skip your inner dialogue, your inner feeling experience. Well, you could try, but it won't get you very far, right? And sinking into the deep end, not only on theme for the podcast as a whole, but even for the fart walk theme.

is the real part that's about always being in process. It's always in process. There's never an arrival. There's always a deepening. There's always a getting to know yourself even a little bit more, even if it's just micrometers at a time. And some people choose to dive in headfirst into that kind of process. Some people are overcommitted to that where there's a constant

never enoughness on getting to know yourself and like improving yourself and your self-dialogue and all that kind of thing and getting to know your feelings. You can do too much, right? Just like you can consume too much in a meal and then it's your body has a really hard time digesting and metabolizing. And so there's also the complete avoidance of what's going on in your inner world, right? Our world is highly invested in you being not connected with your inner world.

It wants to sell you things. It wants you to feel really bad about yourself. It wants to give you a fix and a way to improve literally everything about your life and yourself. So we'll be going over lots of things in this, the deep end part of my inner world of what's just in process. And the first segment for today of Sink Into the Deep End is the recovering good girl corner.

Raise your hand if you identify as a good girl or you were raised as the good girl or you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the straight A student, the person who was the girl next door or boy or person. You don't have to be a woman or girl identifying. That's what I'm going to speak to because that's my pronoun here on this podcast.

the achiever, right, the perfectionist, all those things live here. And...

I'm doing a lot of deep work around this constantly, right? Like this is a never ending thing. But one thing that I've been noticing lately is something coming alive in me. And when I say something coming alive, there's like this buzzing about in my cells as if they are all these tiny little Tasmanian devils waking up and going, we're here. Hello, we have a voice.

and it almost feels like it's not an anxiety, it's like an aliveness. It is a livelihood. It is like a party going on in my body. It's actually quite pleasant and it's an invitation.

to really look at a surfacing of...

true version of how I see myself and a letting go of a version of how I thought I was supposed to see myself or show up. And this particular story and narrative and program that is feeling very alive right now that I'm paying attention to and forming words around is my

place in the world, but also my relationship within myself to something that's very alive in our world right now, which is political unrest, we'll say, especially in the United States. And what this segment is not about is about what side I'm on or choosing a side or what political party I'm affiliated with, which by the way is none of them, in case you're wondering. It's about

a previous narrative that I inherited unknowingly and many of you listening might have as well, which was a narrative to be palatable, agreeable, useful, be easy, be the easy going one, be cool. Don't choose a side, don't take a stand, don't show your opinion.

And you know that can show up as the quote of, I just don't want to get too political. I don't want to make waves because that's awkward. And what I notice is this the bracing that happens in my body when that narrative comes through. When it's like, I don't want to be too political. I don't want to tread too far in that direction because what will someone think or will it will they be put off or will they

no longer be my friend, you know, or family member or like whatever it is. And when I think about that, and really kind of get into my body and listen, I don't feel those little Tasmanian devils alive. It feels dead. It feels quiet. It feels braced. It feels cold. It feels stagnant, like walking through

⁓ sticky mush or even like walking on eggshells through sticky mush. And that feeling gives me this sense that that's not my story. I inherited that story. And I'm grappling with that. And it doesn't mean I'm just like, breaking off the outer shell that's protecting me inside that story and being like, all right, I'm just gonna yell from the rooftops.

everything I think about politics. But it means I'm finding my voice. I'm letting myself lean into having an opinion, and even sharing it in places sharing it on Instagram. I did that this week, I wrote a poem. that was

used a lot of symbolism and a lot of metaphor, but it was in response to the shootings in Minneapolis. And, you know, I think that as women, I've done a lot of study on this, not just like psychological study, but somatic study. I'm an intellectual at heart. I love to read about these things. And women are taught, you know,

so much more than men, but men inherit the story too, not to be political, don't make waves, be palatable, be agreeable, be useful, be the cool one, be the easygoing one. And I have to kind of stop and go, okay, well, that's not my story. I didn't author that story. And who is that story actually serving? You know, why not tell people?

what I think. Why would I be quiet? Because I'm literally here preaching authenticity and being your fullest self and sharing your deepest soul story with the world and yet I'm muzzling and silencing myself. Not really voluntarily, but it's an inherited program that's running. It's a story that's running inside of me. It is obviously happening to keep me safe and avoid some perceived danger, you know?

And I have a lot of grace and compassion for that. I'm not holding it against myself. But I have to kind of look at my identity and go, wait, which one of these is identity level, this is me, and which one is a narrative I've inherited? And what I've become aware is, well, I know how it feels to feel really alive and invigorated and like, this is who I am and what I live for. And I also can feel that this one makes me feel, for lack of a better phrase, dead inside. And...

I'm not doing a lot with it. I'm testing the waters. I'm putting things out there. And you know what? I posted this poem that basically says I don't agree with senselessly shooting someone without cause. What a weird concept. I know I didn't die. You know what? No one came after me. No one came for me with torches.

Maybe some people decided to stop following me. Maybe some people were lurking on my social media and immediately formed an opinion of me and put me into some political box where I don't actually belong, which is what we do as humans. We're looking for labels because it helps our nervous systems that hate uncertainty. It helps the discomfort that we feel to get a short-term pass.

and quiet down for a moment when we can label someone and put them in a box. It makes us feel better for a moment is what I'm saying. But it doesn't help anyone, right? In the long run. In fact, it just makes us feel more divided. We don't need to get into the psychology of that today. Again, this is not a, this is not a educational session. But I think that we can only really

learn and practice expressing our who we really are by doing it by practicing and for whatever reason that aliveness that has been forming and or coming to the surface inside of me from a very deep place there was enough inner resource there was enough outer resource there was enough perceived safety for me to say you know what i'm going to share this it's not really something i've taken a lot of ⁓

time to do in the past. I certainly have like reposted people's memes or, you know, I think anyone could kind of look at me and take a wild guess who I might have voted for in the election, you know, but I think that there's a lot of opportunity when it comes to expressing ourselves to practice that and also

to know that it might be even a little bit in service to someone else.

So first and foremost, it's in service to me to allow the parts of me that are me to be expressed because those are the alive parts. It feels really good. And it moves me out of that sort of dead cold space, you know? But secondly, I know that we as humans are wired for connection and belonging more than we are for authentic expression of who we are. So our nervous systems will always choose belonging in our group, in our tribe, in our family, in our friend group or our

professional group, whatever it is, whatever the group is, could be religion, will always choose, if unchecked, if you're not actually kind of like sitting with it and being with it, it will always choose group or tribe over authentic expression of who you are. It's like literally how the human psyche, human nervous system is wired. And so that's why it can feel so scary to...

even move a teeny bit in the direction of expressing your opinion or taking a stand because there's that very real concern of what will not just what will strangers on the internet think but what will the people closest to me think and so that is actually a very real thing that's not rooted in trauma it's not this baggage it's just a very real human wiring thing.

Okay, and so that is one thing that I'm grappling with. Now we can also be in the good girl corner because of lots of trauma, the fawning response. There's tons of reasons why you're there, but this particular one I'm speaking to today isn't so much rooted in childhood trauma or existential trauma and more just conditioning of both the wiring of the human psyche and nervous system to choose group over self and also.

societal conditioning, especially to women to not make waves. When I think about who that narrative really serves, it doesn't serve women. That's for sure. It's serving the people who are in power, right? The people who are in some type of power position, the people who hold the levers of society, whether it's in a group or a broader societal thing.

There's way too much to unpack. could do a whole webinar on that. So I guess that with this one, I'm playing around with it and my job's not to convince anyone to be on my side or be in my group. In fact, it's very much...

I think in service to, hey, you know what? If you've been feeling muzzled and silenced and feeling that bracing sensation or feeling dead inside when you quiet yourself.

you're safe with me to express. Like we're all walking each other home here. It's safe. I'm not gonna judge you. I'm not gonna come after you. I'm not gonna shake my finger at you. I'm not gonna yell at you. If anything, I'll be proud of you for sharing, know, even if we don't agree. And I think that especially when we're butting up against the fear that the people close to us

will exile us or leave us or kick us out of the pack. If we express ourselves, when the people close to us start to share or the people we admire, the people we look up to or the people who we see as peers, we see that we're safe with them, then it gives us permission, whether we realize it or not to do the same. So that's kind of a secondary reason I wanna share. The first reason is for myself, but if you haven't,

I posted what I think is a really beautiful poem. It's on my Instagram. So head to my Instagram. There's links in the show notes to all my social media. And check it out. Let it sit with your body. Just be with it. You don't have to comment or let me know anything, but just be with it.

Alright, the next piece of the Sink into the Deep End segment is the What Feels Stinky Right Now moment.

All right, so I actually did a, I'm taking a training, a really long training in somatics and I did a meditation this morning. I've been doing a couple of these around the topic of shifting my relationship, well, really my relationship to a part within me that we'll call the wellness manager of my body who fixes, optimizes, regulates, not just,

health-wise, but you know, once believed she had to optimize my beliefs, optimize my thoughts, sanitize them, make them good positive thoughts. Who once believed that she had to survey and sort of manage all my emotions. So I was again, palatable and nice and calm and all the things, right? And I'm shifting from that part.

leading the way to being the experiencer of all the things, which has been a multi-year process. I've had lots of support around it. But what I'm doing is I'm shifting from essentially having a part of myself watching me move through the world and live through the world and feel in the world to instead being in the world.

and letting go of that part that's watching and surveying and monitoring and then giving me tasks to stay organized and optimized and do things right, you know, to instead of just being. And this is such a beautiful thing, especially here in winter. I'm recording this on January the 29th, where it's very cold and

We started winter, technically, over a month ago on the solstice, and our bodies are wired again to winter as a verb. And that means you might not exercise as much. You might not produce as many things. You might be less quote unquote consistent with your exercise or with your social outings or with your work.

And that can be not just a series of habits and behaviors that you change, but it also butts up against your identity. And in this deep end where I'm grappling with the identity of this manager of sort of optimized health, right? We'll just say health of like making sure I have consistent strength training, get the right amount of protein and all the things that you need in perimenopausal. And by the way, I'm an athlete and training is important to me.

and I want to have a healthy body so I can be active with my husband. And so it matters in my relationship and I want to have a healthy body so I can feel energy in my work. All of it, right? It's very deeply rooted in identity and purpose. And there's a narrative I've inherited, which is you got to be consistent, you got to show up, you got to keep going.

Now's the time to like the new year is starting and we got to go, go, go, go, go. Those aren't my narratives. I didn't write them, but I certainly have realized I inherited them. And so it's this simultaneous process of letting go of this constant management and surveying and doing everything right and staying consistent and keeping up with optimization and staying the same.

all the time and leaning into more of a cyclical nature and a seasonal nature and a feminine nature and allowing things to just be. And that doesn't mean I'm just sitting around meditating next to a fireplace while there's snow falling outside. It means my relationship to myself, my relationship to my identity, my inner stories is shifting more towards inner driven stories that are mine.

that are written in my DNA, that are written in my body, that are written from my soul. Things that I've always kind of said, that'd be nice if I could just slow down in winter, wouldn't that be nice? That's a desire, that's my soul speaking. And so I've had the space and the grace and the opportunity to test this out the last couple of winters and shift the narratives and stories over many, many years of...

instead of being the constant manager to being the experiencer. And the experiencer, I think of animals, I think of my dog, they're not saying, I need to be. I mean, yeah, they keep us pretty consistent. They say I need to go on my walk twice a day, they let us know. But like, they sleep more in winter. They eat more in winter, because they've got to stay warm. And we when we're metabolizing, we create warmth. And

I think that they're not going, I need to produce. I need to have a consistent workout routine for the sake of staying in shape. You know, and I think these are very human things and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's just an opportunity to pause and sink in and go away. That is an inherited narrative that a part of me is telling and driving to stay optimal and consistent in all of those things. Not

the actual narrative written in my body, written in my DNA, or even written for me in this season of life. And I get to be the author instead of the one who's blindly following certain stories. that's been, I have it in the, feels stinky right now because it does feel challenging. I get challenged by it every day to...

just

slow down. And a great example of that is I

to just slow down, just enough. And not just slow down and actually take life slow, although that is part of wintering. And sometimes I literally purposely will walk at snail's pace through my house. I work from home. When I feel that hurry and rush start to take over, and I'm starting to rush through things and I'm like, it's getting a little haphazard.

and I'll catch it and go, we're gonna move like almost like a sloth. Like I'll just start like one foot in front of the other so slow. And the other day, a great example, I am in the process of unveiling several new elements of my work to the world. So close, but there's still a couple little things behind the scenes I need to finish and patch up before it's time to birth them.

I am working with a mentor and they gave me some feedback on something that had to do with my website. And I was like, all right, I know exactly what I need to do. I need to do it right now. And I want to get it done before Friday. This was Tuesday. And I looked at the clock. It's 4.30 PM. I pretty much never work past 4 or 5 PM. I start walking the dogs. I start doing my whatever my exercise routine is that day.

And I was like, no, you're not, you're not doing this right now. But I felt that like, go, go, go push and just dropped in felt that hurry, like almost frantic panic within me. And felt that in my body and was like, this is not my story. Whose story is this? Why do I need to go fast? What's the rush?

And it took actually a couple hours to kind of come off of that. And I won't unpack all the things that were hidden behind it, but it was not my narrative. It was a part of me that was trying so hard to optimize and keep up with a narrative that it had inherited. It was trying to keep me safe, but it was trying to keep me safe from a threat that doesn't exist. Let's put it that way.

⁓ and so it helped me recenter to drop into my body and feel that hurry and start moving at sloth pace and just take a breath and go, you know, this is not your story. It doesn't have to be this way. We can just take it at what I love to call the speed of love.

And sometimes the speed of love does look like hurrying. Sometimes it does look like...

getting a whole lot done in a day. Sometimes it does look like working past 5 p.m., but that day, I listened and asked my body what it needed, and it needed me to walk away from the computer, close the laptop, put the harnesses and leashes on my dog, and take them for a walk. And even if that meant that I would be quote unquote falling behind.

or not moving at a speed that would get this out as soon as possible. So that can be a challenge sometimes to figure out which voice is actually mine. Is this a story that I wrote? Does it feel like a story I wrote, but it's not actually mine? And who is it actually serving?

And in that case, the hurry, hurry, hurry story was not serving me. I'm not actually sure who it was serving, but I was able to gently let it go.

so that is the sink into the deep end section of the fart walk. Thank you for sinking with me. I'd love to hear from you if something landed for you there. The next segment is it's a team effort. This is where I look at the people around me, the ones who make it easier to digest my life and the ones who make it harder.

I look at who is present, who is not present, who's steadying me, who is scrambling me, and who gives me room to be honest. And the first section of It's a Team effort is specifically around being a millennial woman who has entered the decade of her 40s, the millennial midlife woman corner.

This is where I talk about perimenopause, the fatigue of adulting, generational conflicts or contradictions I see, because I feel like as millennials, we are like smack in the middle of the generations, right? You've got the baby boomers, you've got Gen X, you've got millennials, you've got Gen Z. And then you've got even like the, what is it now, Gen Alpha? I don't even know. And so we're like right in the middle. And

you can look up and you can look down, but there's just all kinds of interesting generational things that happen when you're like in this 40 year old age group. And one thing that I did, I do notes from a fart walk on my Instagram stories once a week where I'm literally on a walk processing something and I was processing out the

concept of transactional and commodified friendships, especially among women entrepreneurs and just how even before I became an entrepreneur when I worked working in the healthcare space, the commodified and transactional friendships among women in the healthcare space were absolutely present and also even more say I'd say more so I would say in the coaching space.

or the online entrepreneurial world or even just the entrepreneurial world. And when I say transactional, I mean, it's like, I won't support you unless you do something for me. I won't send you a client unless you do something for me, which in and of itself isn't friendship. It's more of a transactional arrangement of some sort. And it's like an unspoken one. And what's really challenging is...

People will call it friendship. They will posture as friends. There's these sort of networking groups, right, where it's taught or it's modeled or it's spoken that we are friendship first. We're just here to make friends. But there's that underlying pressure you might feel to show up with a polished elevator pitch or be ready to ask for something of someone else or give something to someone else.

there's this pressure as soon as we kind of tack on the label of like, this is a networking event or it's business or it's work. And I was just talking about this with a mentor of mine today and how it's just wild. how women will then...

and be almost like married to their work, even if they have like decent quote unquote work-life balance, they have a relationship with their business. They have a relationship with maybe members of their team. They have relationships with their family. They have a relationship with their self. But then they feel really lonely because they they're missing this crucial ingredient to womanhood, which is non-commodified and non-transactional friendships. Even if they have a network of women who

either are or are not supporting them. And so I find that that can be a really, really hard place as an entrepreneur to exist when I am genuinely interested in genuine friendships. And you kind of go out and you meet colleagues or you talk, do zoom calls with them, or you do a coffee date with people. And you can already tell there's this subtle energy of like, they're sizing me up and they're kind of like asking me about my work, It's not weird to ask me about my work.

And they're talking about theirs and then it's sort of like here's how we're going to support each other. But there's no like follow up just on the level of hey I see you as a human I care about you what's going on with your dog? You know? And sometimes we do have those relationships that are only kind of work related but I find it I find that in the entrepreneurial space especially the online one

it's almost like a parasocial friendship where you might meet these people or connect with them and they like your posts or maybe they don't, but you see them looking at your posts and lurking on your stories and they go out of their way not to, which is a whole other conversation. And there's not a real effort to see someone beyond the way they produce.

things into the world, I find that commodified friendship or almost default friendship shows up in sort of the workout and wellness spaces too, where they're your running group friends, but you don't hang out outside of that, you know, and if you are injured and you can't go to running or you are no longer training for triathlons, you lose those friends and some of that is a normal dynamic in the world. But

We, think one thing that we can learn from older generations is, I think about my parents' generation is they're friends with their neighbors They hang out with their neighbors just because. They don't have to have an agenda. There's no like, hey, we're networking. There's no, hey, you know what? We're all gonna go on a walk. It's not scheduled. They don't need permission to just drop by.

And it's certainly not, hey, you're only in the club if you can run at this pace or you train for these programs or anything like that. So it's not to say that those types of relationships and friendships are wrong. But I have heard this from so many millennial women specifically that we weren't brought up that way. We were brought up to focus on achievement, to focus on making the grade.

Excelling at the sport, getting into the right college, getting the right job. You can have it all. Go be a great mom. Get a good marriage, all of that. But I feel like the value of social currency, of social relationships for the sake of having friendship, just for the sake of them, it's like the exchange rate for those has gone down.

even though your body and as humans we are wired to need that as extremely important fuel to feel safe and energized and like you belong. And going back to what I said earlier, we're wired for that. We're wired for that belonging to group. And when your groups are all dependent on what you perform, what you produce, what your vocation is,

we lose that real more genuine human connection. I know for me, I studied this in college. I was the president of a sorority, you know? And I've always been so fascinated about women's peer relationships.

And it's been a challenge for me moving to a new town five years ago, working from home, working in online business to find that community. But I think even further back than that, we lived in a home in a neighborhood in Atlanta before that for six years, and we didn't know any of our neighbors. So like,

It isn't just this kind of new phenomenon in the 2020s. It started before that and it wasn't just us, you know, like we would reach out to neighbors and try and get to know them when we were at the park, walking the dogs and stuff like that, but they wouldn't, they wouldn't reciprocate, right? So I think it's a cultural thing for this generation. think that COVID didn't help anyone when we were literally socially distanced for.

On and off for two years, I think that the movement towards more of an online type of social interaction has been a real dissonance for our generation, because we grew up without online interactions, but we also came of age when the online world, the America online AOL and AIM became a thing. And so I feel like we have this real like, it's like a crossover. Like we understand the value of like real genuine in person.

friendships that are just for the sake of friendship. But then we also straddle the boundary into the more online type, more parasocial connections. And then we came of age and came into our adult life and

professional worlds where we were taught to focus on the productivity and the achievement and less on the actual softer side of building true relationships. And again, that's not to say that you can't have real friends with your work friends or your friends from Run Club and that there's not crossover into what you might call a third space that has real no purpose except for bonding. I have those people, you might have those people, but I think as a trend,

as a generation, it's, it's, hear from so many millennial women who say they feel friendship starved and they feel lonely and they are questioning how we got here. And I'm in that same boat. I have great friends. I have wonderful connections, but there's still some deficit happening. So I'm just naming that because I think that we need to talk about it and, and

listen to those tugs from our body that say we feel lonely and we really long for really genuine important social connections. And so I'm saying it out loud and I hope that if you have felt that way too that it gives you even one tiny little micro movement into not being alone in it and not knowing that it's your fault that

you feel lonely, that it's not some commentary on you as a person, but it's a huge cultural shift that's happening. I want you to know that it really is. I have studied it. I have heard from hundreds of clients now that are in this boat. And I know that if it's happening in my little sphere, that it's probably happening in a lot of places to different degrees. But a lot of women have told me that. So anyway.

That is the part of, it's a team effort, the millennial corner, and I hope that that lands for you. All right, the next big segment of the fart walk is swim practice. This is where I take what I'm hearing inside, my values, my desires, and the things I'm ready to let go of and put them into real visible life. So this is like action, this is habits, this is rituals, this is choices, this is patterns, this is activities, these are...

the good and the messy that turn those inner truths into action. So, you know, me posting on social media about my stance about the Minneapolis shootings, that's action. That actually lives here in swim practice. It's me practicing. But why I shared it under the sink into the deep end section of the this episode is there was there's really a deep, deeper process, inner process going on behind that that I'm grappling with.

So I will be sharing today about what's going on in my kitchen. What's cooking? What am I doing? I think to support the concept of wintering. What does it actually look like in action? I do have ⁓ on my Instagram, there's a highlight you can go to to see what I'm doing. It's called wintering.

But I hope that in this episode, you can kind of see my why behind the wintering. It's not just like I'm sharing habits that you should do. But for the kitchen segment, think for me, it's like the theme of this one is it's a work in progress of fueling, of cooking, of meal prep, of like actually creating an ecosystem around fueling.

around nourishment for like every woman in the world. There's so many cultural factors that come into our identities around eating, around our relationships with our bodies, our relationships with eating, our relationships with food and culture and all of that. And I think as an athletic entrepreneurial work from home woman in perimenopause,

who also has a professional identity in the health and wellness space. This can be a confusing world sometimes for me. And one thing that I have come to realize is, and this is a big thing and this kind of speaks back to that process of moving from being the optimizer and sort of the surveyor.

of what I'm doing and eating and am I doing it right and is it optimal to instead, what does it really feel like to experience nourishment in my body? And why am I doing it? And does it bring pleasure? And is it my narrative of what I really need versus what the world is telling me I should be doing? So when it comes to that,

the big thing that I have unsubscribed from, like a should from society, especially as a woman in perimenopause whose body is changing daily, is carbs. Guys, carbs are not the enemy. I'm subscribing to that narrative. I'm unsubscribing from the demonization of carbs.

You know, as a really high level athlete, I have probably skirted the line or been firmly into reds for most of my life, unintentionally. And reds, by the way, stands for relative energy deficiency in sport. Previously known as and still known as the female athlete triad, but it's so much more than a triad and it's so much more than females and so much more than just athletes.

So relative energy deficiency is a little bit more a holistic term for it. I will not be teaching on that today, but I have done an enormous amount of writing and clinical research on that in my career. I think cancer recovery is a big factor in my overall nourishment and fueling. I think I'm still recovering 10 years out from cancer treatment. I think I probably always will.

And then of course the ongoing like training of my body. I love swimming. I love mountain biking. I do enjoy Pilates and strength training. Just simply it's a place where I feel alive in my body doing those things. As an athlete, I was a collegiate swimmer. All of that to say, it's kind of a perfect storm when also being fed the narratives that the wellness culture is teaching about.

carbohydrates, it's a place where if you've got a part of you that wants to do things right and genuinely cares, and, you know, is butting up against what that optimization culture is telling you to do. It's really easy to make carbs the enemy. Guess what we need carbs for energy is where you get energy from. It's where your brain gets energy from if you're working and you have a job.

And yes, there are other ways to eat that don't include a lot of carbs and that works for some people. But what I've learned is it does not work for me at all. And just very much learned that unintentionally I found myself migrating towards lowering my carb intake. And that was in the effort of upping my protein intake because right now protein is queen apparently. And I've

what I've learned over the past couple of years by reintroducing carbs slowly, by the way, if you try and do it overnight, you'll get sick. Or like, I wouldn't say reintroducing them. I didn't have them totally gone, but just like getting back up to a level that is really supportive is, I feel so much better. And so I just want to give voice to that if part of you has a weird and strained relationship with carbs.

⁓ that it's okay to listen to your body on that. And, you know, I recommend if you want more professional support, talk to a registered dietician who's really skilled at working with like driven, highly active women in perimenopause, But given what I know professionally, both my professional expertise, but also personally is... ⁓

more than likely you need a lot more carbs than you're taking in if you are one of those active, high achieving women. And it more than likely isn't going to make you gain 300 pounds overnight if that is a fear of yours. But I highly recommend talking to a professional about that if you want some extra support around it. Yeah, so that's what's going on kitchen wise is allowing myself to

have both like, like what we might call healthy carbs and unhealthy carbs and guess what, it's going okay. And it, but it was sort of a slow process of like challenging all the narratives going on in that part of me that's that sort of wellness optimizer and working my way into really bringing in good nourishment in my life. And it feels really good. Certainly helps all of my like,

metrics like be a lot happier, right? Also your adrenals, your cortisol, you need carbs for those to be balanced. So just throwing that out there. All right. The other part of the swim practice, the actions I'm taking is reading. I love reading. I love

reading. have a book club, like a private book club that I sort of spearhead, but I also love our local little indie bookstore has four book clubs a month you can go to. And I love that because someone else is leading it. They suggest books I might not ever read. And it is a beautiful group of people who come together, different people every time I don't go every week.

⁓ But the first book club is coming up the first week of February and the book that they chose is one that I happened to read in December by Alex Harrow. It's called The Everlasting. It's a fantasy book. She is an amazing author. If you like fantasy books, I highly, highly recommend this book. It was one of those books that I think is going to stay with me for a long time. I never really was a fantasy reader until

maybe about a year and a half ago when someone recommended a different Alex Harrow book. So we can say that Alex Harrow is like my gateway drug to fantasy. And the first book of hers I read was the 10,000 Doors of January, which is, I don't know, maybe top five book of all time for me. And the everlasting though was this book that it was slow to warm up and

took me a minute to kind of feel like I was hooked into it. But once I was hooked, I couldn't put it down. I love those books. And it was one of those like, books that happens at multiple times throughout life, like the multiple timelines. But the characters kind of go in all of those timelines. And there were so many underlying themes within it.

that it just is really gonna stay with me for a long time. Sort of like the powerful woman, there was a woman who was a knight as the main character, there was a love story, there was history, and there was a lot of metaphor as happens in fantasy books, obviously. And I've really grown into fantasy because it's honestly like a really long, long poem. Like if you think of poetry as full of metaphor,

and story, like bringing storytelling in. It teaches lessons. It teaches things in a way that don't just come out and say it. You've got to really use your imagination. It's very full of sensory information. So creative. It blows my mind to think about the creativity that a fantasy author has to possess in order to write something like that. I mean, think of Harry Potter.

like brilliant. I know JK Rowling is a bit of a controversial figure these days, but her writing is not controversial. It's amazing. But I think that I've really grown to really like fantasy. I haven't really gotten into the romantic stuff, like the Akatar series, but I do like a good almost like historical fiction fantasy book.

with a really strong female protagonist. So highly recommend The Everlasting for that. The other book that I just finished up that I adore is called The Artist and the Feast. I can't remember who wrote it. But it's set in 1920s Provence in Southern France. It follows the story of a famous artist and his niece who is basically his

imprisoned housekeeper. And I won't spoil the story, but it is also a story that I feel like is going to stay with me for a really long time. I gave it five stars and I don't give many books five stars. But I loved about the writing was it was so rich and I felt like I was like in the book and I could smell what she was writing about and I could feel my feet.

in the earth and I could taste the food she was writing about and it was just so sensory rich and such a wonderful grounding book to read especially I read it pretty much in the timeline of all the Minneapolis stuff that got like super super triggering in the news. It was a really beautiful book to ground into and just remind me that there's beauty in the world even when there's darkness.

That's the going analog portion of the swim practice segment. I would love to hear what books you're reading. I always want to hear what books are amazing, so please make sure to reach out to me if you've got a really good book to share, or if you've read either of these two books. I would love to hear your take on them. We can do like DM book club. It would be delightful. All right, the last part of swim practice. I love this one so much is the random facts you never asked for.

All right, in this section, I will be sharing rabbit holes that I go down purely for delight. So one thing you might not know about me is I love maps. I love geography, I love history, I love strange facts, I love staring at rivers on maps, and I love, I think maps are such a beautiful way to chart our history in many ways and like,

They tell stories about culture and yeah, I was a social studies geek growing up, if you can't tell. So, you know, there's been a lot going on in our current news about the United States and its relationship to Europe and Greenland. This is not going to be a political section. Here's what I want you to know about relationships between the United States and Greenland and Europe.

Did you know that the Appalachian Mountains, which if you're not in the United States, that's the mountain range that spans basically the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, those mountains geologically are the same mountains that are in the eastern section of Greenland, the western section of Norway, and Scotland. So to my friends in the UK,

Scottish Highlands. Those mountains are the same mountains that are literally in my backyard, geologically speaking. So this is a well-established fact in geology. The Appalachian Mountains, the Scottish Highlands, the Mountains of Eastern Greenland, and the Scandinavian Mountains of Norway, they're all part of the same massive mountain range known as the Central Pangean Mountains. Over 300 million years ago, the Earth's continents collided to form Pangea.

which was known as the Appalachian Caledonian origin. Words are hard. And this created a mountain range that was as tall and dramatic as the current modern Himalayas. Then the continents drifted apart. 200 million years ago, so for 100 million years, they created a mountain range and they drifted apart. The Atlantic Ocean formed, and this single massive mountain chain was ripped apart.

So today's remnants are the mountains I already mentioned. And by the way, they also include, I forgot to mention, the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Fun, right? So interesting. So there are actual connections between the US, Greenland, and Europe, and Africa for that matter. And we are way more connected than you think we are. There's your fun geology moment for the day. All right.

Last segment of the fart walk after the swim practice is the swim meet. This is my leg of the relay race. This is the part where I share about my place in the bigger picture, my contribution, my work, where I share how I actually belong to myself, how my purpose shows up.

in my work and how my inner work, the sink into the deep end, how my team efforts, how my swim practice turns into real contribution and how the world responds in return.

Today, I am, I already mentioned the seasonal rhythms I'm actively working to embody. And as this episode comes out, we'll be rounding the corner into the end of the year of the snake and beginning the year of the horse. One thing I've really embodied and started to embrace, not just in my mind, but really practicing.

in my swim practice, in my life actions, but also like in my narratives inside of me and surrounding myself in the team effort is the fact that the new year actually begins in spring.

right around the change from February to March or really in March, not in January. Another interesting fact, the Gregorian calendar, which basically was written by a whole bunch of old white men, and I believe it was the 15th century, was changed so that they added, I believe, they, I don't, sorry, I don't know all the details, but basically they added,

had the New Year start in January instead of where it previously started, which was March. If you want to read about that, read about it. It's really interesting. But as humans, seasonally speaking, the way we are wired is for newness and new beginnings to happen in March or right around the spring equinox. And if you look at Chinese New Year,

i.e. the change from the year of the snake to the year of the horse, which you might have been hearing about. That happens, it happens mid February, but it's right around the onset of spring. And I think that, so with my work, I feel that go, go, go, go, go energy, which is happening within me because I've been rebirthing and building something for the last couple years, and it's ready to be birthed.

and I've had to really pause and move slow to let that final shedding of the year of the snake complete. There's some loose ends, as I told you, that I want to tie up and nuts and bolts to tighten before I'm ready to fully birth it. And that takes a lot of patience and trust to go slow and steady to reclaim.

and rebuild an entire brand and process, which I've been doing for honestly, three years now. I committed to it three years ago. I've still been working and doing things, but it's all been in service to this unveiling here. It's taken an enormous amount of patience and trust to not rush it to completion. As someone who previously liked to do things fast and get it done as soon as possible and was capable of doing that.

That has been a real shift for me, letting my intuition lead, and really letting my body lead. And it's such an exercise of bending into trust. The other thing that's been a real big shedding for me, not just in the year of the snake, but over the past 10 years, has been shedding healthcare as both my identity and my literal work. And

I just did a podcast episode with Breanne Grogan who has been on a very similar journey, including a very similar timeline. And what I loved that we both did was it's not that you let go of an identity, you integrate it into who you're becoming. I've outgrown that container of healthcare and there's a more expansive purpose for me outside of that container, but I'll always be a physical therapist. I'll always have gone to PT school. I'll always...

have an identity as healthcare is just not my primary sort of professional identity at this point. And that can be a really hard process because, you know, we're often not afraid of leaving behind the thing. We're actually afraid of stepping into the unknown more than we are afraid of letting go of things. And I think it might be a lifelong process to continue to step into this expanse of unknown.

And I wonder if anyone listening has been going through some of that shedding and reclaiming and rebuilding. I'd love to hear your story. And I also invite you to just take another moment here to come back to your breath and your body and notice what's come up as I've been talking about my own identity and purpose and all the things going on.

inside of me,

in my leg of the relay race, but also in the other segments of this. The actions I'm taking, the things percolating in relationships, the things going on inside of me as well.

Alright, so with that we conclude the walking portion of the fart walk. Thank you for coming to the very first fart walk. I have no idea how this will land, but it has been a joy for me to record this today and I just want to do some gentle orienting again. Maybe look around your room, pick another color, look for something blue or pink.

or look for certain textures that might be interesting to you. And as you do that, I will orient you within this space. So I will do a notes from a fart walk episode once a month.

There will also be, hopefully, I'm still working out the details, a monthly live free session you can attend called Just Be with Julie. Where I'll lead a bit of a meditative contemplative session, some journaling, and you'll have an opportunity to ask me questions, get some coaching, pick my brain, whatever.

So that's a great way to stay connected. And the best way to know when those sessions will be will be to join my newsletter list, which is called Notes from a Fart Walk also. And you'll know exactly when those sessions are.

It's also a great place to be, to keep up with my writing, any links, any events going on in my work.

any causes I'm supporting. And in that, notes from a Furtwock newsletter, I don't push you to do anything. I will share about my work. There will be invitations to work with me, but it's just invitations. There's never pushing. It's not hard selling, nothing like that. So I welcome you to stay connected. If you haven't already, please subscribe.

this podcast so it will show up in whatever podcast player you love to use without you having to remember. Thank you for being here on this first ever fart walk with me. I invite you in the next week to go on your own fart walk literally. No phone. Just go out. Notice the world around you. If you need to have music in your ears, do it. But even then,

I invite you to do it without any other input and just take in the world around you and let things in your world and in your body metabolize. All right guys, thanks for being here today. Can't wait for the next one. May we all continue to fart walk together.