Episode 2: Radical Honesty, Joy, & More

Join Nicole on her uncut rambling discussions on joy, radical honesty, and more. She shares a poem and discusses the energy of spring. Come hang out! 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Crows and Roses Podcast, a podcast made for creative and intellectual explorations centered in love and liberation. I'm your host, Nicole Oluatidapo, and my intention for this podcast is to invite listeners into deeper awareness of themselves and the world around them, inviting courage and discernment while hopefully providing some tools and insight along the way. Now, always remember that what I share here is based on my own life and experiences. These are my insights, so although I encourage listening with an open heart and an open mind, it is up to you to choose what is most valuable and resonates with your own life and experiences. So without further ado, let's begin. Hello, welcome back. If you're new here, my name is Nicole Oluadedapo. I'm assuming most of you probably know me in real life if you're seeing this, and by seeing this, I mean hearing this. So how are we doing? How's spring? How are things? I'm doing pretty good myself. I was sick last week. I was busy. I went up north for work. And um it's Thursday evening here. I've been learning to rest. So today I had a nap, and now I'm sitting here in my house coat, all comfortable and enjoying, hopefully enjoying this. And yeah, so my idea for the podcast is that we're gonna have some contemplation, some exploration, some you know, discussion, and then probably kind of just hang out. So I may bounce around a little bit, and that's just gonna be part of it. So yeah. I'm curious what you guys have been up to and um how you're liking the podcast so far. My idea is to kind of have it uncut. So I need notes. I made notes now, and I had so many ideas, and I wanted to talk about like a million things to the point that when it came time to sit down and write my notes, I like went blank because I just like wanted to talk about so many different things, and then yeah, I kind of got overwhelmed and I didn't it took me some time to write these things out, and I even used I have this like herbal astrology oracle deck, and I used it to kind of help guide what I wanted to talk about today, which was fun. I made it fun, and I like to make things enjoyable for myself. That's kind of one way that I find that I can access my motivation a little bit better. So, yeah, so this is gonna be uncut, and I hope that that is an enjoyable method. If it's not, let me know in a private chat and I'll adjust. Um, I do care about how it is to listen to, so yeah. Today we're gonna talk about a few different things, but first I want to start by like really digging deep into what are we enchanted by, what excites us, what makes us joyful, and yeah, there's quite a few things for me. I've been getting back into writing again, and writing is an interesting one because I used to write a lot and I would always be so inspired, and I would write only when I was like really inspired, but it happened so frequently, and then I like had there's like a lot of rhetoric around for writers and like artists that you like have to do it every day and like do it every time, every day, at the same time, and that just did not work for me, and ended up feeling so much like a chore, and it like sucked the joy from something that I really loved, and I just stopped being inspired, and I stopped writing, and I it took me a really, really, really long time to come back around, but now I feel refreshed and rejuvenated and like I'm excited to write and excited to look back at like my old writing, and you'll even hear a poem that I wrote, you'll hear that today, and so yeah, figuring out what we're enchanted by and finding our own rhythm because there's always gonna be so many messages about how you're gonna operate your life, and how you have to do things a certain way, and that just might not work for you, and I think that it we owe it to ourselves to listen to ourselves and be really honest about what works and what doesn't work, and so I think that figuring out what truly excites us and then also what doesn't work for us that may work for others, and just like playing around with that in as a form of self-devotion and self-discovery, and yeah, so I have a little um a little, I'm like it's a task, but a little homework if you feel inspired by this. It's something that I've done where you make a list of all the things that bring you joy, and it's a way to know ourselves better and to remind ourselves on the hard days, or to have a list of things that like we can commune with when we want to or when we feel inspired to. Um and sometimes writing things down, I just remember it better, and maybe you find that too when you write something down. You can remember it better, so yeah, a list of things that we love and things that bring us joy, and so you can access that at a later date, and maybe you'll do some of them, or if it's like I love the sunshine, then maybe you're communing with that. Um that in a way to make yourself feel better, or just to have more joy in your life, and yeah, and I wanted to say too, because as humans, I think that we have this like infatuation with being joyful and being happy, and that sometimes that's just not well all the time, that that's just not going to be accessible to us all the time, and yet I think we live in such a chaotic and busy world that it is of of benefit to uh figure out easy, simple ways to find joy and to bring more joy into our lives and to romanticize our lives and the little things and to find beauty in the small things and beauty in the things that we do each day. Because why not? Why not find joy in each day? But yeah, we may strive for joy, but welcoming the full spectrum of our emotions and being radically honest with ourselves about how we feel and how we're responding to things in our lives, things that we might want to change, things that we want to pour more into, and just being really, really, really radically honest. And on radical honesty, I have written a poem that I want to read. I should have brought water here, but you know what? That's fine. We're here. Um, so yeah, this is a poem on radical honesty. Honesty is the healing bomb that we need to reimagine our lives. Without honesty, we are aiming to soothe the wrong part, the wrong spot. But when we can be radically honest, we can tell ourselves which part of ourselves are hurting, and when we do so, we can put the bomb onto the tender bits and love those parts of ourselves even more, even more deeply. We might fear being honest, out of fear of how we will react to the truth, but it is only with the truth that we can heal. So it is only with the truth that we can heal. It's only with the truth that we can bring the changes that we seek. And it's kind of hard to pivot from there, but we're gonna pivot, and we're gonna pivot to also changes, change of season. We're entering into spring, things are quickening, the light is returning, the warmth is returning, and I love to think about the energy of spring, and there's this inspiration, this hope, this newness, this uh place where we plant our seeds into literally and figuratively, and so some habits that I will be incorporating this spring and that I feel like hold the energy of spring are dancing, finger painting, and uh imagining new imagining new um sometimes I think that uncut is a bit chaotic, but you know what? I'm just in your ears here, I'm just here and envisioning newness into our lives. That's spring, it's bringing this imagine dream of winter and planting this new vision for ourselves. So I'm curious, what's being born in your life? What are you tending to? And what are you planning to plant this season? What are you planning to plant this season? What newness do we want to incorporate into our lives? Because you can utilize and work with the energy of spring to see those come to life. And just remember that the day you plant the seed is not the day that you get to eat the fruit. So sometimes it takes a long time for things to come to fruition in our lives, and that's something that I've had to learn is that slowing down, slowing way down and allowing things to come in time, not now, not everything now. Sometimes can come later, and later than we want. I believe it's divine timing. And another thing that I think helps is to be really specific, specific on our focus and slowing down. So something that I do is I'll have three goals for a day, and this is on the more minor scale and not in the envisioning new things, but in the day-to-day, where you know we can have the world's longest to-do list of things that we want to do and things that we want to accomplish, and it can't all happen now. So choosing the three main focuses and pouring into that, and then you can see it check it checked off, it's done. Boom, done. Three things, and that that fuels something for us as humans to see that we've accomplished what we've wanted to, and to accomplish what we said we're going to do. I think it fuels something deeper where it's having this integrity with our word and with what we said we were gonna do. But sometimes we don't always do the things that we said we're gonna do, and different things come up, and that's okay. Something that I like to use on days like that is the done list, where instead of writing a to-do list, I write all the things that I did. And I don't know if it's just me. I would love to hear if you guys have tried this before, but where you're writing down all the things that you've done instead of a to-do list. So I find that it like it fuels me and it like creates this snowball effect where I end up doing more than I would do if I wrote all those things as a to-do list, but I'm writing it as a done list, and I find that it's a very powerful practice, and yeah, the other thing would be to anchor into joy for our routine. I find that it brings me energy and it brings me happiness and it gives me capacity to show up to my responsibilities in a way that's refreshed and clear and able. It builds capacity for me to do the harder things in life when I am making time for joy and for rest because rest is so important. I'm learning to rest myself still, and I hope that we are all resting and taking care of our well-being. In spring, I know that it's a time where things are picking up and we can get really excited and we might want to do it all. But we don't have to do it all. We can wait, we can slow down and we can be specific. And then lastly, what weeds are we pulling? If we if our lives are gardens and we are sowing seeds and we're tending and we're watering, there's gonna be weeds that we have to pull. So, what are those self-limiting beliefs that we are uh uprooting and releasing and composting? What are they? What are the stories that we tell ourselves that limit us? For me, one of my stories that I tell myself that I am wishing to uproot and compost is that I don't belong. I tell myself I don't belong. And everybody knows it. I think that I I like part of me believes that I have like a post-it note on my forehead that says, like, she doesn't go here, like mean girls, she doesn't belong here, and I feel like I walk around with this feeling that everybody looks at me and can see that feeling of being an outcast, and I realize that I'm projecting, I'm assuming that my fears and my feelings are seen by others, and like it's just it's actually kind of complicated to explain, but I think that you're following, and yeah, so that's something that I'm wishing to compost because I want to feel like I belong, and I want to experience belonging and comfort, and I think that I'm still learning on what that will look like for me, and yeah, so there was quite a few things that I covered today. Making a list of all the things that bring us joy, communing with those things, making art, dancing, enjoying the energy of spring, envisioning new things for our lives, releasing and finding our own rhythm. I think that that's the takeaway that I would like you to have is to find your own rhythm, find what works for you, listen to yourself and be honest with yourself about what works and what doesn't. And yeah, being radically honest is a gift, and it's painful, it's painful to be honest sometimes. Sometimes we're not honest because we don't want to face the truth. But the sooner we face the truth, the sooner we can make the change that we need, the sooner we can see that change that we're avoiding come to life and actually be able to enjoy the honesty that comes from from making change and becoming more comfortable in our lives and more at peace in our lives. And yeah, so I think that that it basically covers everything that I wanted to talk about today. I'm gonna play this back and see how the uncut is. I might end up editing not this episode, but later down the road. And yeah, uh what are you looking forward to? Uh where will you be next time that we check in? I'm gonna have my friend Cece on the podcast next time, so that's something to look forward to. And maybe the sun will be shining, the birds will be chirping, and maybe we'll be able to see the ground, the earth. And that's my funny way of saying maybe spring will really be here, because my mind knows it's spring, but my eyes see winter. My eyes are still seeing winter. And so last time I had a prompt of goodbye, and this time it's a long, leisurely exit. So I thank you for being here if you've made it this far. And take good care. Take good care of yourself. Bye for now.