Could we be this year's 'Outstanding Podcast'?

Also a sad rant about sleep disruption, Spiral Dynamics, and where to find hope.

I don’t sleep well these days. The hormonal medications I’m taking to slow (hopefully stop?!) the spread of my endometriosis and pain caused by fibroids has turned me into someone to wakes up fully after 4-5 hours. I’ve been a champion sleeper my whole life, so this has been a very unwelcome change, but it’s still better than the quick-trip-to-the-ER bleeding I was having before.

This new sleeping pattern has become the background noise to each day. Many of us struggle with sleep, and if that’s you, I’m sending you a big hug and a knowing grin. I’m amazed at how we keep on living our lives from a not-fully-rested state.

And from a our-world-needs-radical-change state.

And from a how-do-we-keep-going-through-the-motions-of-normalcy state.

I listened to this episode of Pulling the Thread exploring spiral dynamics as a way of understanding human development, and on the one hand felt comforted by the predictability of human nature…and on the other hand deeply frustrated by why we’re not rising above our own predictability.

As a coach, I spend my days talking to clients who are invested in improving themselves and bettering their relationships with others. At the end of each day, I feel so filled with hope about how we’re uplevelling global consciousness, how this is the age of the light-workers and healers, and believing that we’re experiencing the darkest-before-dawn moment.

I wish I could live in this hopeful, little bubble all day. But it bursts with the first glance at the news, watching how maligned marginalized influencers are on social media, and feeling the impacts of not getting full-night’s sleeps depress my energy and mood.

My ups and downs are getting more polarized, and my quest to understand joy is getting more complicated.

In my conversation with Lama Rod Owens (airing May 21), he said joy is the capacity to hold all the polarities, that there’s joy in an outstretched consciousness that can be with all.

These days I’m feeling into the stretchiness of that perspective, flinging my arms wide to hold the world and myself as we move through each day…finding moments to feel both joy and terror…holding space for conversations with others as they find their equilibrium moment-by-moment.

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I sat down this morning to invite you to help me with my submission to win an award for ‘Outstanding Podcast’ from The Fuller Figure Industry Awards, and then all of that spilled out, likely not even coherently, but I’m going to leave it.

And I’m also leaving all the how-many-words-can-I-connect-with-dashes too!

And all the sentences that start with a preposition!

Because it brings me joy to write freely and send my inner editor to a beach on the Bahamas and put a delicious beverage in her hands.

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Thank you for reading my ramblings and for answering the survey. You’re part of my joy!!!

xx