Okay, friends, welcome to the very first podcast, head case to Headspace. And I am smiling probably with the biggest smile. Hopefully you can feel my energy through the microphone because it just makes me laugh when I say the title and the reason, the whole, main reason of. Starting this podcast right, was to bring this work. To be accessible to everybody. And there's so much information out there right now in the personal development space, and it's a matter of finding what works for you, finding the right podcasts for you, the right books for you. The right programs, the right courses, right? There's so much out there right now. It's about, about finding what works for you. And this is about. Teaching you, assisting you on this journey so that you are able to be your own self empowerment leader, right? You're able to have such an awareness to do this work on your own, and that's not meant to say that you never do courses or have, a mentor. All those things are amazing, and I think what we really, truly need is to come back to ourselves. And be able to do the work on our own, right? Because truly, we're the only ones who know ourselves. Truly. We're the only ones who know what we're going through, and I really think that's the way. So this is about that, right? And these are meant to be. These episodes are meant to be honest, down to earth takes. On how to implement the inner work into your daily life, right? I want these conversations to be conversation between me and you as if we were sitting down to have coffee together, right? Have a great girlfriend besties conversation. So anyway, that's kind of the, thought of this and the head case to Headspace. I just laugh because. Some days I really truly feel like a head case. I have a million thoughts running through my head all the time. I have conversations with myself to myself or out loud sometimes. I think my husband came home one time and was like, who are you talking to? Like the kids were in the other room and he came in and he is like. Were you just talking to yourself? I'm like, yeah, I do that all day. Is that not normal? So anyway, hopefully you can relate to that, because a lot of it really is just working through stuff and figuring things out. So I figured if I'm having all these conversations in my head that I might as well share them and hopefully. You know, help somebody else out. So anyway, haven't really decided what I'm even talking about today. Like I said, these are meant to be honest, down to earth you know, on the fly. So no notes, no plan, just seeing, what happens, you know, as if we're having a conversation, coffee together. My background, so you can kind of get a feel for that for me and how I started into this work. And then maybe we can, talk about, some things about how to get started and how we're going to move forward from here. I mean basically just getting to it, I was 26, I think 26 years old. My first husband, we had just got married. And he got diagnosed with cancer a year later. So it was right after our first wedding anniversary, and then he passed away 10 months after that. So we went through cancer, he went through a cancer diagnosis and within 10 months he was gone. So I was 27, I guess I turned 27 right after that. He was 35, when he died. So I was in the place of. Going from the highest high of just getting married to the lowest low of what you could possibly like. Worst case scenario, you know, I was planning a funeral and while most of my other friends and people my age were planning weddings and baby showers, so that was my. Rock bottom, I guess if you really wanna call it that. I feel like we all have millions of rock bottoms in our life, but I guess that was, you know,, the shift in my life that was just like, I have to, you know, I had to pick myself up off the floor and move forward every single day. And with that happening, obviously something like that gives you an extremely. New and different eye-opening awareness about life, what life's about, questioning life, questioning your every day questioning, you know, what is this, where am I? Like, how could this happen? Questioning spirituality and God and everything. Right? So that basically was the. I guess start of my personal development journey. That was the start of it. So from there I had to basically,, still get up every day, most days and still do things. And I found running, I started getting into, I was always a runner, so I started getting into running more and doing, running for team and training, raising money for cancer and things like that, doing marathons. And ended up getting hurt, obviously, because I was running millions of miles and marathons with this stressed out pain and grief in my body. So now looking back, it was obvious. However, at the time I then had to stop running. So I needed to find something else, which was power yoga. So I went into a power yoga. Studio I was living in Manny Young Philadelphia at the time. So I walked down the street and there was a power yoga studio and I walked into it and was just blown away by not only the physical practice, but the mental awareness of it as well. And that kind of started the whole journey of personal development and, you know, looking. Inward at myself doing the work, whatever you wanna call it. I always call it doing the work, but coming back to yourself, doing the personal development, doing the work on yourself. Doing the work. That's what truly. It got me into that was stepping into that first power yoga studio. I remember my teacher, the teacher at the time, who was teaching, it was a packed class. We were right next to each other. Everyone's sweating. The teacher was like throwing F-bombs around. I'm like, this is awesome. Like I felt great after. And then from there started doing some trainings. I went to week long trainings with the Baptist Institute and you know, that just started the whole journey of all of this for me. So that was, let's see, that was 2012. What are we in now? 2025. So however long ago that was, but what I've really. You know, and there's been a million things that have gone on with my life since then. But what really has become clear within the past few years, and I too think with a lot of people discovering these things for themselves and discovering how to do the work for themselves is it is a daily practice. It is a. A life practice. It is and does become part of your life because it has to really, I mean, we are, we are human beings trying to make it in this world, trying to be happy and it really can be a struggle a lot of days, whether we have. Insane, crazy, traumatic things going on with our life at the moment, or we have just the basic daily bullshit that we have to deal with. So it, it becomes one of those things where, you know, no one's coming to save you. You can go to trainings, you can hire the coaches, you can listen to the podcast, you can do the reading. You can sit down and do the journaling and do like, do the dirty work, I guess. But it really comes down to you. No one is coming to save you. This is all about you self discovering what it takes to pull. Everything like within you to become your best possible self. And, and that means, you know, there's a million different analogies I could use to describe that. Could be peeling away the layers and like, getting back to your true self. It could be,, creating boundaries in your life to figure out, you know, who you really wanna be around, who you don't wanna be around. It could be trying a bunch of different things to figure out who you really are. It can be the journaling, it can be the. Podcast, the courses, all the things to like, to figure that out. But it really comes down to sitting down with yourself and being honest, telling the fucking truth on yourself. What do you, what do you really want? You gotta look at yourself deep within yourself. You have to look at your shadow self. You have to look at your dark side, your dark self, because if you are not acknowledging that, if you are not aware of that, then it's, it has control of you. What you're not aware of has control of you. And that's really what the work comes down to is looking deep within and being really brutally honest with yourself. And I think that's where, you know, a lot of people struggle because,, this is the perfect segue to a bunch of other episodes, really, because where we are. Struggling and trying to figure out where we where. What that is so much of the information. So many of our thoughts aren't even our own. It's what we think we should be doing with our life, what we think like other people want us to do. People pleasing, doing things for other people, doing what we should be doing. Taking the safe path. Taking the easy path, like just following what society does or following, what other people do, following what you know, we just are taught, basically growing up, following what we're taught, doing what we were told to do, right? So it really does take sitting down with self, looking at self and being honest of like, maybe none of that is what you actually want. And being honest with yourself is saying that the, however many years are wasted, and that's never the case. But, saying, wow, what I'm doing right now, I don't wanna be doing at all. Or saying, the person that I'm with, I don't wanna be with that person at all, or I don't wanna be living here where I'm living. I don't wanna be. You know, I don't wanna do the regular life that everybody does. I don't wanna take the safe path. I don't wanna work the nine to five the rest of my life, you know,, whatever it is for you. But it really takes that looking within seeing yourself and being brutally. Honest with what you actually do want. And it's not just a one day session of that, you know, it's doing that every single day. Checking in on that every single day, doing that throughout the years of your life. So how the fuck am I supposed to start over or start now or start from fresh, right? So when you start to. Get into this when you start to do this, coming back to the simplicity of that, like really looking within, really looking at what you want, really looking at what you don't want, and it doesn't have to be a big, huge, life changing thing, right? I actually ended up selling my Manny on cows in 2013, basically selling everything that I owned. And moving to Hawaii. So I lived there for a while. I sold everything, got rid of everything, moved across the country, moved to an island because I wanted that, that fresh start. Right. It doesn't have to look like that, though. You don't have to do that. That's what I needed at the time, and that's what I was called to do. And that's what my heart was pulling me to do, and I'm so glad that I did it. But it doesn't have to look dramatic and drastic like that. It can be that every day, just awareness. Questioning yourself being the head case, right? Being in your head, asking yourself the questions of like, what am I doing on a daily basis? Like, why am I doing that right? Why am I doing these things? Why am I at this job? Why am I with this person? Like, why am I around these people that necessarily don't make me feel good? Right? It's asking yourself those questions. It doesn't have to be some big, huge thing. It just has to be the daily awareness. Right, like implementing this work into your daily life. And I like to think of it as, and here's a way to kind of segue and wrap up from here, but since we're really just starting, but coming back to just awareness. Awareness of yourself, why you're doing certain things, how you're showing up. Why you, make certain deci decisions or how you're feeling, even just how you're feeling on a daily, regular basis. Are you happy? Maybe you are. Do you wanna be a better person? Maybe you don't. Then turn off this, don't listen to the next episode, I guess. But, so really coming into that awareness, the daily awareness and as if you were the perfect comparison and the perfect like wraparound that I like to say is. Bringing it back to your daily coffee. You know, that can be your ritual, your check-in, or whatever that looks like in the morning for you, it can be that simple as bringing awareness to what you're doing or why you're doing it. Bringing awareness to your thoughts, getting out of that head case space and like creating. Head, case head and getting into the space of giving yourself the availability to listen. Giving yourself the space to be able to check in and asking yourself the questions, right? You're not just going through the motions of your day. You are not just talking to yourself in your head, but being aware of that, talking to yourself. Talking to yourself through things, right? Not just having meaningless conversations in your head or noticing why you're having those conversations, where they come from. Is there something that you do really need to clear with someone? Is there something that you do really need to be honest with? Just getting back to the basics of drinking your morning coffee. Let that be a ritual of check-in, you know, checking in. Noticing then throughout the day, let it be simple. Let it be, easy. Let it be fun because that's what it gets to be. And in order to continue, in order to continue to do this work daily, moment to moment for the rest of your life, like it will have to be fun. It will have to be. A project, it will get to be exciting and honest and easy and down to earth. So start here. Start with your daily self-awareness, checking in and let's go from there. I'm so excited about this. This is gonna just gonna be a really fun journey. So what I'll do is put some show notes, some things down in the link. I'll put my links and information down in the show notes. I think what will end up happening is probably a few of these will come out at one time, but we can make this, that the first one. I feel like this is a great place to start getting to know me, getting to know each other, and just like tapping in, getting our foot wet. You know, sipping that first sip of coffee. Asking yourself some questions, it gets to be that easy. All right you guys. So thank you for listening and I'll see you soon. Bye.