S01E07: Softening the Grip

As mentioned in the podcast, here are the links to Ignis, the Fire Dancer and the Fire Dancer Journal & Scrapbook.

Transcript

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This has been a heavy year in our house, loss uncertainty, a lot of gripping for control. Today I'm exploring the practice that's keeping me human in all of it, and that is softening. The choice to meet a moment with humanity instead of control. And. I'll share a story. I'm not proud of, what this looks like beyond our homes. I will introduce a new elemental Prima who will teach us to let heat become light. If you're tired of being on edge, this one's for you. hello everyone. Welcome back to a life and color. I am so happy to be with you on this beautiful autumn week. I think our trees reached peak colors this week. I know everybody's a little bit different, but here, my house in Virginia, the trees are red and orange and yellow and still some green. We had a very windy day the other day, and The leaves were just everywhere, Do you all ever watch any of those? There's like YouTube videos that are, there's just music and then like usually like an AI generated image of something beautiful. Maybe it's like a coffee shop and you're sitting at a table next to a fireplace that's lit and out the window. It's just colorful autumn trees and leaves that are sort of gently falling to the ground, I don't know. We use those a lot'cause they're just lovely to have on the tv. It looked like that out the window. It took my breath away at one point. I stopped and I was like, I'm in this right now. It's real. It's amazing. It's so beautiful and it's getting colder, which I actually love for sleeping at night. I think it was down in the thirties, a couple of nights this week. winter is coming. I can feel it, but right now we're in the fall. The soccer games have been chilly. You should see all of us on the sidelines. The moms, the dads are like still in shorts and sweatshirts, and I think probably secretly shivering, but us moms are shamelessly bundled up on the sidelines. we have blankets that live in the car just to bring and lay over our laps or wrap over our legs during the games there's this one mom on the team that walked up. It was a nighttime practice during the week after school, and it was probably in the upper fifties that night, but it was breezy. So it was chilly. But she walked up full winter gear. Big puffy coat. She had a hat on. She had her hood up over her hat and had pulled the hood really tight around her face, all zipped up. She had mittens and hand warmers. We were laughing at her. I asked her like, what would you be wearing if it was in the thirties out here? Or would it be the same She said if it was in the thirties, I would never be out here. No way. And then we have one of the coaches on the team never wears pants. He is always wearing his, he's got like short shorts that he wears every single day, no matter what the temperature is. So it's an interesting time, and I know everybody reacts to this differently, but I just love this time of year and I have been giving a lot of thought lately to the things that we talk about here. So when we talk about. The need to allow everybody to be their full, authentic selves and allow everybody to find their inner colors, the things that make them feel awake and alive and excited, and allow them to come out. Allow them to express whatever is inside of them. Allow yourself to let your colors out and let yourself be whatever it is that you are. And my desire to try to create a world that makes it safe to do that. and I've been thinking about what it will take to get us there what are the obstacles in our way, and there's one thing that keeps coming up for me, not just when I'm thinking about all of these things, but also because I struggle with this in my own life. And I know in the moment and after the fact, I know that this is an obstacle that I need to overcome for myself to find peace and to help play my part in creating this future world that I'm hoping will eventually actually exist. what I wanna talk about today is softening. I think this whole year, this has been a tough year. This has been a tough year for me personally, and this has been a tough year, I think, for everyone in the world. I'm just gonna say that with a level of certainty because everywhere I look, it doesn't matter where you come from or what level of wealth you have and security or what gender you are, or age it. This has just been hits from every angle. This year. This has also been a year that has asked me to practice what I'm talking about. It's been heavy for us. My husband was injured last year, which changed our rhythms of every day for months. We had a sudden loss in the family earlier this year, and then a couple months later we lost our dog unexpectedly. Work has felt uncertain at times for both me and my husband. It was just one thing after another and staying soft felt basically possible. And what I've noticed is that before I can soften, frustration is often the first thing that rises. like, really? Seriously? Did we need this right now? Or, what are we gonna do? there's a level of confusion, there's a level of fear about what it means and how it's gonna change the future. you know, I start to try to kind of project like, oh, what's our new reality gonna be? How long is this gonna last? What do I need to do to try to minimize the impacts? So with an injury, it's one thing, it's temporary. With death, it's permanent. That is a permanent change in the makeup of our family. This is a change in our day-to-day reality, and so the effort to soften through these events first starts with recognizing that that urge to grab on to control something is fruitless. It's a futile urge to control. There is no control. There is no way I can bring anybody back. There is no way I can change the situation, and there's no way that I can know what this is gonna look like going forward. And so what softening looks like in that moment is basically accepting what is This has happened and we are going to have a period of grief things are never going to be the same as they were before, and everybody's going to be grieving in a different way, over a different timeline. And that we all need to make space for each other to adapt to this new reality. And so that softening, that understanding right up front that this is going to be necessary lays the groundwork for me to be able to draw upon that later the kids are acting out in a weird way or my husband is sad, but his sadness looks different than my sadness, and so I might misinterpret it as something else. There is a level of understanding that happens that allows me to then say, pause. Wait a minute before I react in some other way. Is there something else going on here? Is there a way that I can understand how they're behaving, or what they're presenting right now through a lens of understanding and softness and acceptance and love, and receive them in a way that doesn't necessarily match what they're putting out. And that has been something that has been, it's very difficult because I also have feelings and I also have things that are happening in my life. I'm also grieving. And so to be able to pause and say, listen, I understand that they are going through whatever it is they're going through, so I'm not going to react to the tone. They just said whatever to me and or their actions necessarily. I'm gonna try to understand why and approach them with love and kindness and calm if I can. And that groundwork, that choosing acceptance and kindness in the big moments like we've had this year, that groundwork has helped me in the small ones, which brings me to a story from our very normal, very noisy life. Both of my boys play soccer and the weekends tend to be very busy. It's always been a long week at work there's a lot of things that I'm dying to just either paint or create or sit down and think about and let my mind wander. I just need some time to myself and especially, no offense to all of the boys out there, but boys are noisy. My house is not a quiet place to be in general. They're just loud and they drop things and they run into things and they wrestle and they yell. And sometimes it's a little overstimulating for me. the other day I was feeling overstimulated, feeling the need to step away. It was a beautiful day outside so I was gonna step out onto the deck and just sneak out there and find a quiet corner for myself and just sit write a little bit and just have a few moments to myself. so I did. I went out there. I caught my husband's eye on the way out, like, I'm gonna go out there, Don't tell the boys like, can I please just have some time? And he kind of nodded. So I had assumed okay, I'm safe for a few moments, I'll be able to have some time to myself. I don't know if any of you can relate to this. You just hide somewhere. do you go in the bathroom? Like, I don't know where you're supposed to go to get a few minutes to yourself, but my boys follow me everywhere. And that's what happened that day. I had a couple of minutes, enough time on the deck to relax into the moment I started writing. I was starting to feel my calm return to me and starting to feel some peace just as I started to relax into that, they found me and followed me out onto the deck and they were. just yelling to each other. And one of them had run down to the yard and found a tennis ball. And so they were playing catch one of them up on the deck and one of them on the yard throwing this tennis ball back and forth to each other. I didn't wanna, it's so hard when that happens. I didn't wanna kick them out. I didn't wanna be like, no, get away from me. Hey, I tried to soften in this moment. okay, well maybe they'll just play their game of catch and I can still enjoy the warm sunshine, and maybe eventually they'll find something else to do. as I'm trying to soften, I get hit in the face with a tennis ball just right smack on my left cheek with the tennis ball any semblance of softening. Completely evaporated in that moment. They both of froze and looked at me like, oh God, like what's gonna happen? We just hit mom in the face I think maybe fire shot out of my eyes. I don't know. I threw down my book. I'm not proud of this. I would love to have been able to soften in this moment and to just say, Like they didn't mean to do it. they certainly didn't mean to do it. Nobody threw it at my face. They didn't come out deliberately to destroy my peace. They were just trying to be with me. It's a beautiful day outside. They're just having fun as children do, but instead in my mind. It was more of a what the hell, universe? I'm just trying to be soft and understanding and find a moment for myself. even as I tried to relax into it, then they come out and then I try to find softness and this happens. Like what? And so I am sad to say, I stood up, I yelled, I slammed a door, I stormed upstairs, I cried. just the fury inside of me that rose up on top of all of the overstimulation and exhaustion and stress that was already in there, it just poured out of me in unhealthy ways. And of course afterwards I repaired, I found them and apologized and told them I shouldn't have yelled, I feel better. I feel like. they understood and you know, I explained that we all have moments where we're not very proud of the way we behave they hugged me and I feel like we're fine. And I also felt really, really guilty about that for a couple of days because I think I said something like, as I was yelling, as I was like feeling the pain on my cheek and just seeing red, I think I yelled something like sometimes having kids sucks Which is not helpful. That's not something that you ever wanna hear your mother say. I felt pretty bad about that. The words have power And also in the moment, I've meant it a hundred percent. maybe this is authenticity. I don't know. So when I say that I understand that softening is so difficult and not always possible. This is my evidence for you. This is one example of trying and failing to be softer through this moment. that moment reminded me how quickly our best intentions can evaporate and how powerful the pull of control and overstimulation really is. we're so overstimulated, we're so anxious, we're so afraid that something is going to threaten this fragile existence that we have built for ourselves, that we harden, we pull in, we tighten our grip, we try to control everything, and in doing so. not only causes us to react in an oversized manner, but it breaks connection. And the story that you start to tell yourself in your mind of oh, my children are reacting with this attitude and they have to learn discipline. And they're never gonna grow up to be good human beings if they don't understand how to respect people. And, and also, I deserve respect, and I would never have gotten away with that if I was a kid. And what would my parents have said? And just this whole. dialogue starts in your head a story starts to form that takes this one event and pulls it into a much broader story. A much broader piece of the whole picture of your life or of the world or your children's future. And it causes you to react in a much bigger way than if you were to just focus on that one thing that happened in that one moment and find a way to understand that that is not actually a threat to you. It breaks our ability to understand ourselves a little bit more through that moment. So if you are feeling angry about something in general, that anger represents something and you can learn something from that. If you are able to soften in that moment and try to take a breath, take a moment before you react. Try to assume noble intent for whoever else is involved, and then maybe try to understand maybe I have a wound there from a past encounter or a, or an event that happened that I haven't fully processed yet that I need to work through, but it's not actually related to this current event that's happening right now. I think it's so important to consider all of those things. So when we talk about softening, what I mean is exactly that. Find your calm, find your kindness, your humanity. Try to come at things from a sense of empathy. You know when, when my children act out, it can be depending on the day, depending on the situation. It can be extraordinarily difficult for me to remember that they are children, they don't fully understand the implications of their actions. They don't fully understand the context of the situation and that they likely have a whole other narrative. Narrative is the word that I was looking for before. A whole other narrative in their minds about what's happening. So whereas I'm thinking, I told you to brush your teeth and put your shoes on because we have to leave because we said we would be there by X, Y, z time and now we're gonna be late, and all of these other domino events that are gonna happen because of it, they're thinking maybe I was just trying to tell you this one other thing, and I thought it was really exciting and now you are interrupting me and you're not listening and I was hoping to snuggle with you this morning and we didn't have time for it, and now my morning is different than what I expected. Whatever the case may be. We are all walking around with these stories in our heads and this narrative that colors our reaction. Including our children, and it can be very difficult for me to remember that. But if I could in that moment, if I could remember like, okay, they are actually one whole person too, and they have their own wants and needs and expectations and hurts and fears and all the things that go into being human, and it seems like something is bothering them right now. And even though I have my own needs and things that are bothering me right now, maybe if I can help them, which is my role as parent, if I can help them to better understand how they're feeling and why they're feeling the way they are, maybe we can move past this moment with one, a lower likelihood of this exact thing happening again later today or tomorrow or at some point in the future. And two, a better understanding of how to react and what this situation actually came from. And three, them feeling held and understood and closer to me because I took a moment to soften and to come to them instead of coming at them with my feelings. It's so hard, you guys. I don't mean to make this sound easy. And softening doesn't only happen at home if we zoom out even further and we think about the headlines and the conflicts and the endless stream of outrage right now, I think softening almost becomes a form of rebellion. we're not ignoring the injustices or pretending that everything is fine. We're just choosing to not let fury and anger and vitriol become our identity. It means responding with empathy and vision and not panic and polarization. I think that's the only way anything ever heals over. what would happen if even for a day? We could assume noble intent, like in the parking lot, if someone cuts you off or if you are at work and a colleague says something to you that seems rude. when you read something that makes you, just makes your blood boil. What if we met strangers and colleagues and fellow adults with curiosity instead of judgment? I just think maybe this world would feel a little less sharp. I have this image in my head though, of what a world might look like if we all perfected this, if we could all find a way to soften into each other, to not react so strongly when something happens to kind of stay. Human then I think that we could really create a world that is full of more color, more laughter, more space for authenticity, because we would be able to meet each other in that way and make each other feel seen and connected and valued for the differences that we bring to the table. This is my dream. every time one of us softens the world becomes a little bit safer for truth and authenticity I also think that this year for all of us has maybe been an exercise in letting go of attachment. I don't mean letting go of attachment to each other. I think your at attachments to other people are maybe the most important thing that we all have in life. When we look at our attachments to everything externally, when we think about our attachments to the past, the way things were, the way things, used to be, there are people that talk about, wistfully or romantically romanticizing. It's totally a word, right? Uh, looking back at the past and the way things used to be, or looking at the way things were expected to be, the direction that people thought this country was going in. And no matter where you stand. politically, no matter where you stand in the world, I think we all have felt a sense of loss and grief around some of the events that have happened this year. that grief is made so much worse by a sense of attachment to all of these things. To old institutions, but I think if we can soften into this moment and try to find a way to allow our grief and our anger and our fear to become something that illuminates a future that would make us all feel happier, that is the way forward. if we allow ourselves to cling to the grief, to the anger, All of the intense feelings that come up when global moments like this happen, there is a real risk that that becomes part of your identity and part of your way of meeting everything in your life. And that gets in the way of forward progress and of creation and if we soften more into curiosity. And creativity there's a real possibility that we could make a world that looks more like a welcoming for everybody around us and more like something that would encourage connection rather than pushing us into different groups and trying to make everybody angry at everybody else This is my dream. Last week we talked about, Lux, my elemental prima named Prima Lux. how she is basically the guardian of the realm of light. And I told you last week that I was going to continue to introduce you to some of the other primas. So this week I wanna talk about prima iness. She's the fire dancer. As we're talking about softening and attachment and how overstimulated and just tired we all are. it's important to think about passion and anger and big, enormous feelings that rise up inside of us because they will. They always will. No matter how much you perfect your ability to soften in the moment, you are always going to have big feelings hopefully passion about many things in your life. It is one part of being human. so I think it's so important to figure out how to feel those feelings. We don't wanna suppress anything, any of our colors that come up. We're not trying to suppress, we're not trying to avoid feeling any of these things. When I say soften, I don't mean don't feel angry. It doesn't mean ignoring what's happening. It means refusing to let fear or fury become the whole story. There's more to the story than that, and Ness is the guardian of the fire realm. All of these big, fiery feelings that we have, that is her focus. I will put a picture of her in the show notes. the painting just makes me feel powerful but not in an angry way. Just powerful. In like a, like a yes kind of a way. So I wanna read to you right now, the origin of Iness. Before there were planets, before there were names, there was Flame. Iness did not enter this world quietly. She came screaming into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. Not in protest, but in exuberant defiance of silence. Her cry was the first sound. The first. No, the first. Yes, the first. I am here. It rang out across the nothingness and the stars began to gather. She wore her feelings like a crown where others might have whispered ness, roared, where others might have hesitated. She lept as a child of the cosmos. She danced through nebula and spun joyfully through supernovas. Her limbs painted arcs of light across the void. She twirled through the winds of space as galaxies began to spin, tangled with asteroids before they settled into moons. Every moment was creation. Every emotion was fuel. She showed up wherever something burned. Passion, fury, vitality, courage. She never dimmed, never stepped aside, never apologized for the heat that she carried. Her anger was not chaos. It was clarity. The sacred fury that says this must change. The others told her to rest, to contain her fire, to still her feet, but ness only danced faster. Her body caught the rhythm of the stars, then outpaced them, and one night in a burst of uncontainable joy. She danced herself into the heart of the sun. From that moment on, she was known as the fire dancer, the one who moves within the flame and never burns. Iness is really important to me because her realm touches on anger and big feelings. And I grew up in a house where anger was not an acceptable emotion, not for me or from my parents. there was no anger in my house growing up, so I came to adulthood with exactly zero skills on how to handle my own anger because of course I feel it. I feel big emotions and rage sometimes, as we all do. in my house growing up, that looked like absolute suppression. you don't express anger in any way except for very passive aggressive body movements. So you might quietly walk through a room. close a drawer in the kitchen, a little harder than you might have. You don't ever talk about it, you don't acknowledge it, and you certainly don't express it at anybody else. my parents, to be fair to them, I mean this is how they were raised as well. to them anger feels like a very threatening. Thing as if somebody feeling anger towards somebody else is equivalent to somebody not loving you anymore. It was that level of avoidance in my home growing up. So I don't have the skills for handling anger and for understanding how to hold my fire in a way that allows it to move through me rather than trying to hide it and stuff it down and pretend it's not there. And so, this story about iness and, all of the work that I've done around this is incredibly personal to me. So, because I think it's so important for us to understand, I to soften to ourselves and to each other, I've actually created a journal based on Prima iness. This journal is all about big fiery feelings and how to not suppress them, but how to contain them reframe them in a way that will help you shed light on what you're actually feeling what your body is actually trying to tell you. the Fire Dancer Journal is a space to notice where you've hardened and begin to soften again. This journal was not created to try to control and suppress your fire. This journal. Which I really created for tweens and teens, because I think that is when the suppression begins. When people start to tell you that you need to calm down or you need to quiet down your flame, or you shouldn't be so angry, and you start to silence your passions and you start to hide your emotions and suppress things. I think that's when it starts. So this journal has a ton of different exercises and prompts and, guided meditation so that you can understand what is the root of what you're feeling, and how can you hold the flame without it consuming you, but also without extinguishing it, how can you allow it to shed some light on yourself and figure out. a deeper layer of yourself that you weren't aware of before. underneath every flare of anger there's a fire of wanting something to be right, or it means you're caring deeply. And when we live armored all the time and we fight that, and we hide that, that fire has nowhere to go. It can't dance like it wants to. It can't come out in the form of movement and art and poetry and music and whatever the case may be. And we have to learn to soften so that we can carry that fire in a way that is helpful, not hurtful. So that is what this Fire Dancer Journal is intended for. I know it's written for tweens and teens. I've actually used it myself. I think it's really helpful and I think it's something that I wish that I had had when I was you younger. I encourage you to take a look at that. It is also the first product that I've created for life and color. First of many I hope, and it was absolutely a labor of love and I'm so proud of it. I'll put a link to it, in the show notes. I wanna talk a moment about, when I say noble intent. What I mean, this is actually something that, I use in my marriage all the time. We made a deal with each other years and years ago when we first got together, that we would always assume noble intent. And what that means is no matter what the other person has done, and always assuming that they did so with good intentions, they didn't mean to break what they broke or hurt you or. Whatever it was that happened, break a promise. I don't know. Sometimes it's big things, but they didn't mean to do it is the assumption that we have granted each other. They're not trying to cause harm It's just what happened. the child that is carrying the glass of milk across the room did not mean to spill it the whole way as he was walking. He was just trying to bring it to you Did he ruin the floors as he was going? Maybe, but his intention was noble. That's a very simple example. But, so I grant this to my husband and I tried to grant this to the world around me. It takes a level of trust for sure, and it is not always earned, and it's not always, I don't grant it to everybody. It's a starting point. Baseline is you get an assumption of noble intent. Now, if you violate that, if you do something that is not with noble intentions, that you intended harm, you intended to. hurt somebody, or you consciously made decisions that ended up breaking something that's different. But we start with noble intent. So when I see something happen in the world, when somebody says something, when somebody does something or an event happens, I try to start every reaction with assuming that there were noble intentions and seeing if there's any way that I can make it through the story of what happened with a story of them being a good person, just misguided maybe, or like it was not great decisions, but their intentions were pure. And I think that what that is is that allows me to tell myself a story about the world that is maybe different than what is immediately apparent when I'm looking at any situation. when I used to go to therapy, When I was in therapy a few years ago, I was told something that actually completely shifted the way that I look at myself. because this applies to yourself as well. when I say soften softening into the moment, soften like, go easy on the world around you. Go easy on your children, but I also mean go easy on yourself. I was in therapy and I was saying something about how I procrastinate all the time. I always have. I just put everything off until the last minute. I became kind of known for it as a child. I had a poster in my bedroom that was the Procrastinator's Creed because it was kind of a joke within the family, I just do, I put everything off until the last minute and I always said it in a kind, a little bit of a judgmental way'cause it's still true. I have to force myself to do things early sometimes. and my therapist kind of stopped me and he was like, say more about that? What do you mean by you procrastinate a lot? So I told him a story about, when I was working for. the kitchen remodeling company right after college. That was a very intense experience, not in a good way. there were high levels of burnout. There was a lot of harm done during that period to my mental health. I told him about how, towards the end of that job. I would rack up these enormous lists of things that I needed to do, long lists of conversations I needed to have, or actions that I needed to take. And really many of them were very urgent, like really needed to happen right away. People were waiting on me. it all sort of came down to me doing what I was supposed to do and instead of doing any of the things that were on the list, I would find some other. Meaningless task to focus on because I was avoiding the discomfort of everything that needed to be done. And I said, you know, I, it's so easy for me to look back at that and think about how much easier that period of time might have been if I had just gotten my life together and done the things I was supposed to be doing. Like maybe that whole situation could have been easier or less. Painful. I just have a habit of looking back and thinking about how if I had only done things better, things could have been different. This is one example of many situations that I have that thought process about. And he said, I wanna invite you to think about that a little bit differently. Maybe you were not avoiding. It was less about you avoiding what was on that list and more about you giving yourself what you needed in that moment. Like you needed rest and dopamine, or you needed rest and somebody to hold you, and you needed a break from that intensity. so you granted that to yourself. You did not rob yourself of peace in order to meet someone else's expectations in that particular moment. And that is actually a kindness that you gave to yourself. That's a form of self-care. it sort of knocked me over the head to think about it that way because that is just a totally different story, a totally different way of telling myself that story. I wasn't being irresponsible. I was actually taking care of myself in that moment and that really changed the way the story that I tell myself about so much of my childhood and my life, that it's okay in the moment to take a beat. It's okay to answer your own needs at the expense of someone else's expectations. That's okay. the idea of me changing those stories and looking back is a way of me softening When I look at myself and I look at what I've done in the past or haven't done as the case may be, of softening and understanding that in that moment that was the best thing I could do for myself, that was the right decision for me to have made. To care for me, which is every bit as important, probably more important than meeting someone else's expectations. That really did change my feelings about so much of my life. I invite you to do the same thing. Look back at some of the situations where you're not so proud to think about how you reacted to something, or you're not so proud of your performance or the results of something that you did, or you're kind of ashamed or you judge yourself or hold yourself accountable for something. Is it possible that in that moment there is a way for you to soften and understand that you were doing the best that you could do in that moment you made the decision that you made because that was where you were or what you needed, in that moment, no matter how it turned out or what the consequences were. It can really shift the way that you think about yourself and your life, and I think it's worth thinking about in that way. I will ask you this as we move into the coming weeks, if you are able to, so today, notice the next moment that makes you feel super tense, a delay. Whether you have a tone from one of your kids or someone makes a mistake, and go ahead and just pause take a breath and let yourself drop your shoulders and just soften ever so slightly. You don't have to become smaller. You're just trying to stay open. Try to keep that fire alive without burning out, and don't blow it at anybody like a dragon. The world does not need us all to walk around being harder and in control of everything. It needs us whole. It needs us warm breathing, and a little bit softer around the edges. Yeah, I think we'll wrap there today. If this idea of softening through fire resonates with you, take a look at the Fire Dancer journal. It's the companion I wish I'd had when I was first learning to hold my own flame. Feel like it's, the companion that I'm happy to have now as I'm still trying to figure out how to navigate my own flame. I will, again, there will be a link to it in the show notes. You can find it on Amazon. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of this podcast. Please remember to like and subscribe and drop us a review. If you have thoughts, I would love to hear from you. As always, my email address is Laura at a life and color.co I just hope you have the best week and I will see you next time. Thanks everyone.