Soul Joy: Ditch Burnout and Fall in Love with Life

Transforming Stress into Soulful Living

• Dr. Julie Merriman

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Ever wondered how first responder families celebrate the holidays amidst the chaos of service demands? Join me, Dr. Julie Merriman, as we unpack the emotional complexities faced by professional helpers and explore holistic self-care strategies to combat burnout and compassion fatigue. As we approach the holiday season, emotions can run high, and understanding how they manifest in our bodies is crucial. I'll share insights from my personal journey and guide you through recognizing and embracing emotions, while navigating the inherent messiness of life. Together, we'll delve into the importance of emotional education and how acknowledging our feelings can transform not only our lives but also the lives of those we serve.

Buckle up for a transformative experience as we engage in a guided body scan meditation, aimed at heightening awareness of physical sensations and emotional cues. We'll journey through the chakras, exploring how subtle feelings like warmth or pressure can teach us about our needs and desires. By practicing mindfulness and journaling our discoveries, we can enhance our self-awareness and personal growth, even in emotionally triggering times. Whether you're a seasoned professional helper or someone seeking personal development, this episode offers invaluable tools for fostering well-being. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review to help spread the message of soul joy.

Speaker 1:

Hey y'all, I'm Dr Julie Berryman and welcome to SoulJoy. In today's episode we're talking about those pesky emotions. Understanding and accepting all your emotions is a necessary component of holistic, sustainable self-care. I call wellness All right. Thank y'all so much for being here with me today. Can you believe oh my lanta, can you believe that the holidays are here?

Speaker 1:

I don't know where the year has gone, but so let's think about the holidays. I think y'all know, but maybe not my husband's a state trooper here in Texas and then my youngest son, blakers Blake I love to call him Blake oh, he's so sweet, he still lets me call him that, but Blake is a Houston firefighter. So we've got two first responders in the family and for my first responder wives and husbands and people out there y'all know that the holidays are really different for us first responder families. My son and my hubby are usually on duty serving those of us who need them on those days. So as a family, we just celebrate when we can, right? I mean, it's when everyone's together and we get to celebrate. And Blakers, oh man, he was born the day before Thanksgiving, so he's always he's dealing with his birthday around Thanksgiving also. But that's here and there, just thinking about man. The holidays are upon us, okay.

Speaker 1:

So, professional helpers, y'all know this podcast is dedicated to preventing and overcoming the occupational hazards of the careers that we have chosen. Specifically, we're looking at burnout, prevention of compassion, fatigue and vicarious traumas, and those can sneak up on us and bite us in the butt if we're not really careful. And on top of all this, so that is why I'm doing this podcast. I hope that it gets someone's attention and please know, if you want more, go to my website, juliemerrimanphdcom, and my book In Pursuit of Soul Joy is for sale on that website, and that's all about overcoming and preventing these occupational hazards. So, okay, last we spoke, we had started to explore our sacral chakra. Now this we have our root chakra, which is the bottom half of our body, from our sits bones down to our feet, and then the sacral chakra is that next chakra located in our lower belly. So, y'all, this chakra is all about emotions, and I'm here to tell you I'm here for it.

Speaker 1:

Emotions are messy and if you try to escape that, you are robbing yourself of some quality of life. So often we've been taught not to understand our emotions, right in elementary school, in middle school, in high school, in college, unless you go into a master's in some sort of the helping fields, you are not taught about emotions, and what we learn about emotions we learn from our parents and grandparents and those folks in our family taking care of us who most likely haven't been taught about their emotions. So this generational thing starts occurring, where everyone's trying to get away from emotions. See, the fact is, life is messy and our emotions are messy, and that's normal and that's okay, and we need to hold space for that and just accept that when we're trying to get through life clean and without causing mess for lack of a better word we're not doing life like we need to do it. It's impossible to escape the fact that life is messy and emotions are messy. So don't get me wrong, okay, over the years, as I've worked with patients who were hell-bent on trying to escape their emotions, they really had created some big problems in their lives and it was just because people struggle to accept life is messy, emotions are messy. I haven't done anything wrong, it's okay.

Speaker 1:

Ironically, when we try to escape emotions and keep everything all nice and tidy, you stay stuck. You stay stuck in some emotions that are really not friendly to be stuck in. I had and maybe I've told you all this, but it's worth telling again got my phd at texas tech some years ago and dr marbly, who was a phenomenal uh professor. I was going through some rough stuff, I I forget uh what, but she sat down with me and she was like girl. There are times that you just need to sit in the hole and feel what you need to feel. So you get your butt she said something else into that hole and feel what you need to recognize and label your emotions. You cannot escape them.

Speaker 1:

I know you help those you serve with this, with finding their emotions, with experiencing their emotions. But, sweet soul, how do you do this for you? As a seasoned helper, or maybe a brand new helper, you have learned and you know emotions are very complex when we start digging into them and getting to the root of what's going on. There's some deep stuff there. You've got to observe your emotional responses and you've got to be able to describe the context of those emotions. Here's how I'm feeling and here's the situation I'm feeling.

Speaker 1:

This, in the ability to bring such awareness, has the power to change your life. See, thoughts happen in our head, but I believe emotions happen in our body and it can be very foreign to start trying to note where emotions are happening in your body. I've met with some patients over the years that almost got a bit sideways with me when I was really being insistent and trying to help them find those emotions in their body. It was just such a foreign thought for them. It took a hot minute to accept that paradigm and start to know how to go into their body and feel their emotions. So I just invite you to hold some self-compassion for yourself in this. If the thought of going in and trying to find those emotions and figure out what you need with those emotions seems overwhelming or taxing, I invite you to hold some space for that. It's worth the journey and it's worth building this paradigm for yourself.

Speaker 1:

See, you have to note where the emotions are happening in your body and ask yourself what is that all about? And then asking yourself, what is it that I really need? What is it that I really want? What is it that I really desire? As you well know, you got to feel it to heal it and I know that's a bumper sticker and it gets kind of thrown around, but y'all, there is absolute truth to that you can't heal something you have not felt. You have to feel it to heal it, because that's where you get that information you need so you can get to the other side of healing. It's high time you practice what you preach, or y'all at least.

Speaker 1:

That is what it was like for me when I had my crash and burn that I write about all in the book, but y'all and I can, I accept it and I own it. I could teach others to feel their emotions and what they needed to get out of their emotions, but I refused for some reason to take the time to do these things for me. Now, looking back, you know I really can't even tell you why I refused to do this for me. Perhaps I did not believe I was worth the time and effort. Perhaps it was too painful and I was scurrying away from it. Perhaps I didn't recognize how important it was. I was pretty young, really, when I got my master's in counseling and I think that life experience really helps us be better counselors, better helpers, but for some reason I didn't do that for myself.

Speaker 1:

And if that resonates at all with you, I really encourage you to go back and listen to some earlier episodes where I'm digging into the root chakra and helping you to find, because there's a real need as we go through our root chakra, there's a lot of work to be done on valuing ourself. So I've done a lot of, I've done several podcasts on that and I've got the PDFs and all that fun stuff with those podcasts. But I really invite you to go back to your root chakra and look at how you are valuing yourself, because when we really value ourself, we're going to take the time, whatever it takes, to feel those emotions and note where they are in our body and see what need needs to be met, see if there's some old schema that needs to be worked out. Whatever it might be, you're worth the time. Okay, so we're about to kick into the activity and before we do that, I just want to remind you to subscribe to my email list so you can get the weekly email for these podcasts where I include the bonus PDFs or F sometimes it's more than one of the activity that I'm about to go over. All you got to do is hop on over to my website again juliemerrimanphdcom and sign up for my email list and I will get you those PDFs weekly. You'll also get an email with a link to the podcast. So every week you don't have to think about it, I'm just going to show up in your inbox and we're going to do this together, all right? So today we are going to do a feelings body scan and I want you to have your journal ready at the end of the body scan, because it's one thing to go through the body scan, but I want you to process thisall. That's where the that's where the gold is. When we process what we've done, we've got to have that aha, that epiphany. That's great. But then we need to restructure those cognitions and that happens with that processing and that's where change happens. That's where lives move from being something we dread to being something we've fallen in love with, and there's all kinds of yumminess there for us. So let's go through this body scan and grab that journal at the end of that body scan.

Speaker 1:

So during the body scan exercise, I want you to pay close attention to physical sensations throughout your body, noting feelings in your chakra areas. The goal is not to change or relax your body, but instead to notice and become more aware of where those feelings are living and what cues those feelings are giving you that you need to take care of. So we're going to move slowly through the body scan and I want you to begin by paying attention to the sensations in your feet feet Notice if a feeling shows up. Slowly move up your body to your calves, thighs, sits, bones at your root chakra. Notice any sensations such as warmth, coolness, pressure, pain or a breeze moving over your skin. Notice if a feeling shows up and ask yourself what that feeling is trying to tell you. Slowly move up your body to your pelvis and lower stomach, your sacral chakra. Notice any sensations such as a warmth, coolness, pressure, pain or a breeze. Notice if a feeling shows up and ask yourself what that feeling is trying to teach you about.

Speaker 1:

You Slowly move up your body to your upper stomach, your solar plexus chakra, and again notice sensations maybe warmth, coolness, a pressure pain or perhaps a breeze moving over your skin, noticing also if a feeling shows up and what that feeling has to teach you about. You slowly move up your body to your chest, back, shoulders, arms, hands and fingers. This is your heart chakra and you're noticing sensations maybe. Maybe a warmth, a coolness, pressure, pain or simply a breeze brushing over your skin. And as you do this, you're noticing if a feeling shows up and what that feeling might have to tell you about yourself. Slowly move up your body to your neck that's your throat chakra, and again you're noticing warmth, coolness, pressure, pain or a breeze of some sort brushing across your skin. And you're noting if a feeling is showing up for you and as you note that you ask yourself what does this feeling have to share with me? About a need I might have?

Speaker 1:

Slowly move up your body to your eyes that's your third chakra area, and again you're noticing sensations Warmth, coolness, pressure, pain, a breeze and as you're doing that, you're noticing if a feeling shows up and you're very curious about that feeling and you want to know what that feeling might have to teach you. And slowly move up to the top of your head, your crown chakra, noticing again sensations warmth, coolness, pressure, pain, breeze and as you're doing that, you're very curious. You're noticing if a feeling shows up and you're very curious about that feeling, wondering what it might have to teach you about you. If any feeling shows up, you ask yourself might I need, what might this feeling be teaching me? And y'all you bring no judgment, just curiosity. There's no right or wrong.

Speaker 1:

After you've traveled to the top of your body. I want you to travel back down your body through each chakra until you reach your feet. So we started our crown, feeling Any feeling there. Third eye, any feeling there, throat, looking for feelings, any sensations. Chest, our heart chakra, down to our belly, upper belly, sacral chakra, just solar plexus chakra, just being curious Down to your sacral chakra, really noting there that's where a lot of our feelings live what's going on in your sacral chakra and then moving your attention back down to your root chakra, all the way down to your feet. Remember you move slowly and you're just paying attention.

Speaker 1:

And once we've once we you've completed that body scan, I want you to grab that journal and I want you to write about what you've discovered, about your feelings and needs and your body, where these things are living in your body. Okay, so I'm going to send out the email with this activity listed out so you can do it for yourself anytime you want and bookmark this episode and listen to it again and again, because you it's easy to do this when something hasn't triggered you, but I want you to be able to do this when maybe you do feel a bit triggered, maybe you do feel a bit irritated or angry, or whatever it might be. This is a great time, a great activity, to learn more about yourself. So, all right, that's it for us. Today, please subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you listen to podcasts, leave a review, help me reach more people and, until next time, take care of you.