Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the words you write. All the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down and covered it's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk about something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, because this is a habit or a way of being that I've really wanted to practice having more of in my life. And I hesitated at first bringing this up as a topic because in some ways this idea feels a little bit cliche to me, or I think when I think about this, I sort of feel like, well, lots of people have talked about this topic or lots of people have covered this, and it feels kind of like old, like from the past, and yet it's something that in a practical way, I still really struggle with in my life, and I feel like it's holding me back from having the richness and deepness that is available in any of our lives, and so I wanted to bring this up today and hopefully be able to tease it out and share some practical ways that I've struggled with this and some practical things that I've done in order to maybe exercise this muscle and hopefully shed some light on the topic in general. So I hope this is helpful and even maybe insightful for you. The topic is this concept of being comfortable with the mess I feel like for me, I am a bit of a perfectionist. I have a streak of Type A. I'm not one hundred percent Type A. And one of the things that I've unpacked on previous episodes is this tension I have between the part of me that's an artist and the part of me that I call the valedictorian or the straight a student. So the part of me that wants to get the external praise and attention, that wants to get everything perfectly right, that wants people to be like, like, yeay, you did a great job, stand up applause. You know, we're so impressed with you. And then the part of me that wants to just kind of wander and play and explore and be creative. These are two parts of me that both coexist inside of my body, my spirit, my essence, and sometimes it feels like the two of them argue a little bit. So, you know, like the artist in me wants to have a little bit more spaciousness in my day. This is the part of me that thinks like I would really like to practice being a little bit more comfortable in a mess. And on the surface, I just mean, like, you know, my house is a mess, there's a lot of laundry to be done. And could I possibly sink a little bit deeper into the nature of my life, into the day to day of my life. Could I feel more comfortable in my own skin inside of the mess without feeling like, well, I can't rest until the mess is cleaned up. I can't relax until all of those loose ends are tied up, Like once the laundry is done, then I can sit down and rest. And that's just kind of surface level, but I think on a deeper level, what I've been noticing is that it's not just laundry or dishes or or like a messy house that makes me feel like I can't let my guard down. It's also anything that's open ended, So like Let's say I have a conflict with a family member or a friend that's ongoing over the course of days, which is actually unusual for me, because most of the time, if I have a conflict with someone, I'm the type of person who goes in headstrong to solve the conflict immediately, which I didn't learn until a couple of years ago is actually a result of an anxious attachment system feeling like, Okay, I'm not safe unless every relationship is in a place of harmony. And so I had a hard time sort of holding space for a conflict in a relationship, knowing that sometimes conflicts happen in relationships. Sometimes we don't see eye to eye sometimes you know, or we're going to have different perspectives on things, and those tensions get resolved over time, but they don't need to be necessarily resolved immediately. And I think there was a per time in my life up until fairly recently, where resolving that conflict immediately felt absolutely important to my sense of personal safety. So, like I said, I learned recently that that has to do with having an anxious attachment system, not feeling secure in my own self. I didn't have the bandwidth to let a relationship be a little bit messy for a period of time while we worked to understand one another, while we worked to come together, or while we just allowed each other to have differing perspectives, differing ways of doing life. And this is something I've really been practicing so again, not just the practical stuff of like, there's lots of dishes to do, there's you know, weeks worth of laundry to get through in the laundry room, and yet my daughter is asking me will I play school with her? So in the practical sense, I'm practicing going, yes, let's play school. The laundry can wait. That just just can wait for a little bit. Can I find a way to feel at home in my own skin, to feel safe even when the house is a mess. That's just kind of surface level part of this conversation, but going a level deeper. Can I find a way to feel safe in my body when there's conflict with someone that I love? Can I find a way to feel safe in my body when our finances are still a mess from this big investment that we made a couple of years ago, we're still trying to kind of clean up and tie up the loose ends from that, can I find a way to feel safe in my own body when we don't know what the future looks like. We're still trying to navigate this transition from me sort of stepping back from coaching, Matt stepping into more of the sole breadwinner role, trying to decide, you know, what we're going to do about this business that we started together, the investment that went upside down. Trying to tie up those loose ends and figure out what do we do moving forward and what does life look like moving forward? And my question for myself has been can I be okay? Can I sync into my life and experience my life even while the mess is taking place. Something I've heard my husband say a bunch that I think he was taught for a mentor he had in high school and college is that it's messy in the nursery but tidy in the grave. In other words, while we're here on earth, there are all kinds of messes. It's you know, loose ends are going to be untied. Nothing is a perfect bow on top of this perfect package like we think it's going to be. You know, there are questions that are unanswered. There are stories that are incomplete, there are conflicts with friends and family members, There are messes in our house. There are circumstances that unfold that are outside of our control, that create a sort of mess of an experience. And I'll tell you an example of that here in just a second. But while those things are happening, can we fully experience our life while the mess is taking place? In other words, not putting our life on hold until the mess is cleaned up, so that then we can enjoy our life. It's like, well, once the house is clean, once the relationships are all safe, once you know these circumstances sort of clean themselves up, well, then I can go about enjoying my life. But actually, can I just enjoy my life right this minute, just as it is, even with the chaos, even with the mess. And one of the reasons why I think this topic is so important is because, you know, you look around our world right now, and there's a lot of chaos happening. And I've asked myself many times. I don't know the answer to this question. I've asked myself, is this unique to our time that we're living in or has the world always felt this way? I don't know. The answer to that question. But I know that when I look out at the events that are taking place in the world, at climate change, at the wars across the planet, at you know, our current political conundrum that we're in at just like all the changes that are being made, everything that's happening around us, it feels extremely chaotic. And I have to ask myself, are we going to wait until all of this mess is cleaned up before we go about enjoying our lives and living our lives and you know, making decisions for ourselves and forging forward and having pleasure and making friends and being in community and smiling and crying and you know, railing against the whatever the things that we disagree with, and voicing our opinions and writing our books and chasing our dreams and all these things, like, are we going to wait until the mess is cleaned up before we start doing those things? Or is life lived in the here and now? Is life lived in the middle of the mess. It's messy in the nursery, it's tidy in the grave. The only time it's tidy is after it's all done, you know, after we leave this planet. And perhaps we have a vantage point to look back and say, oh, I can see now why all of that took place. But I think one of the things that has happened for me as I have explored this concept of writing your story and making sense out of the things that happen in your life is I've brought some of that perfectionism and obsessiveness with kind of cleaning things up into my life experiences where I'm always trying to put my experience into the container of a narrative arc and life I've talked about ad nauseum and at absolute length on this podcast. This can be an extremely healing experience to take a chaotic experience from your life, to put it in the context and the container of a story, to see it as a narrative arc, and to begin to understand some of the reasons why this thing could have took place, or to begin to craft actually your own moral to the story and decide, like, why did this unfold the way that it did, and who have I become as part of that process, and how has this shaped me as a human being? So that's an extremely healing process. And yet one of the things that I've noticed is that my obsession with kind of cleaning things up has almost taken over my brain at times to where I can't just let a story be unfinished. I have a really hard time just letting the story be messy for a little bit of time, letting there not be a resolution quite yet, and living in the middle of the story where things are a little bit more chaotic and things are a little bit messier, and the loose sins are not totally tied up, and there is it's no clear resolution, and we don't know why this took place, and we don't know who we're becoming as a result of this, and there's just despair or sometimes hopelessness, or sometimes fear or other emotions that we would rather avoid. And so I'm asking myself this question, is it possible for me to sink a little bit deeper into my life to fully receive the experiences that I'm having without needing to immediately clean them up. This is something I've been practicing in my life. Again, like I said, both on that practical level, just really simple like leave the dishes, We'll do those in the morning, which by the way, is extremely hard for me. And I know there are different types of people in the world, and maybe you're not the type of person who has a hard time going to bed with dishes in the sink. But it's extremely hard for me to go to bed with dishes in the sink. I'm practicing that, or playing school with my daughter instead of doing the laundry. It's extremely hard for me to say yes to that, and I'm practicing that. And I'm also practicing letting a conflict with a friend or family member linger for a little bit of time, because when I russian to clean up the mess, I miss what the story is actually trying to show me. I miss what the middle of the story is actually trying to percolate. It's like a soup that needs to simmer for a little bit longer so that the flavor profile can develop its fullness and its richness. And if you try to speed up that process, then you know you'll get a soup. But it's just not going to be as deep or as rich of a soup as it would if you would have given it the time that it needed and asked for. So I've been really trying to practice that in all these areas of my life. I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like when I decide that I want to practice a skill or a habit or like integrate something into my life. Life starts giving me all of these opportunities to make good on my word and actually practice them. And I feel like my life has been doing that lately. Case in point, I literally just had to stop recording because my husband walked in to the house. I'm sitting at my kitchen table as I always do, recording this episode, and my husband walked in. Bless him, Lord, bless him with the groceries that I asked him to pick up from the grocery store. Anyways, he was very apologetic and made the dog bark. We had to pause the recording here for a minute. But then I was just laughing to myself. I'm like, well, I'm recording an episode about being in the mess of life, and so alas, here we are in the mess of life. I'm sitting in my kitchen table. The house is not clean, the groceries are sitting on the counter, thanks to my wonderful husband, and it's all going to get taken care of, and all of the loose ends will eventually get tied up, and they're just not tied up right now. And so, despite my impulse to stop this recording and go all the way back to the beginning of the podcast and re record the entire thing because of this interruption, which I'm not joking that that is an impulse. I don't know if that tells you, you know, how sick in the head I am with needing things to be clean and tidy. But that is an impulse that I have. And yet I'm going to bypass that impulse and practice what I'm talking about, which is allowing there to be some mess in life and allowing myself to find some measure of comfort. You know, there is I want to acknowledge this that there is a level of tolerance that each of us have with chaos or mess, and for each person it's different. But you know what it feels like when you move outside of your zone of tolerance for chaos, because the minute that you move out of your zone of tolerance, your nervous system is disregulated and it might make you feel physically sick. You might feel just kind of anxious and disturbed, and you'll find yourself wanting to leave the situation or go home or whatever. And for everyone, their zone of tolerance is totally different and different things will bump different people out of their zone of tolerance. So you might witness someone get bumped out of their zone of tolerance and think like, well, that wouldn't do it to me. Dishes in the sink, don't do it to me. But what is it that does it for you? Maybe take a minute and think about what is the thing for you that makes you feel like, my life is messy, It's impossibly messy. I can't be comfortable until this mess is cleaned up. Maybe for you it's more about inner personal conflict. Maybe for you it's more about a physical mess in the space. Maybe it's lighting, or maybe it's music, or maybe it's politics, or you know, something else entirely I don't know. Maybe it's something I'm not even thinking to a list. But whatever it is for you that makes you feel like I can't get comfortable in my life in my space until this thing is fixed, I want to challenge you, along with me, to practice, just practice exercising the muscle. I'm not saying don't fix clear problems that are fixable. You know, like it is fixable to just tidy up your space, and sometimes that can make you feel better. So I'm not saying don't do that. I'm just saying, in situations where you don't have one hundred percent control over the circumstances, can you exercise the muscle of sinking in and settling in a little bit deeper to an environment that makes you feel agitated. This is the primary way that I've been using cold plunging to So this is another great example. Cold plunging for me, has a lot of psychological benefits, a lot of chemical benefits. It's the main way that I've avoided going on pharmaceutical drugs for anxiety and depression in the last couple of years, since twenty twenty three. But one of the mental practices that I've had as I've practiced the exercise of cold plunging is going into the environment that is extremely uncomfortable for me aaka the cold water. I do not like cold water. I'm like notorious for not even wanting to go in like a lukewarm swimming pool because i just don't like cold water. But I've been practicing the art of going into the cold water and attempting to fully receive the experience that is unsettling for me. So attempting to settle in to an environment that would otherwise bump me out of my zone of tolerance. And it does bump you out of your zone of tolerance. That's the whole point of cold plunging, is that it bumps you out of your zone of tolerance. But the question that I ask myself each time that I do this is can I go into the water and actually, instead of what a lot of people will instruct you to do when they're teaching you to cold plunge, which is to stay in for three minutes or whatever, I've stopped trying to get myself to stay in for three minutes. What I've started trying to do is ask myself, how long can I stay in the water which is uncomfortable for me and allow my body to fully settle in? Can I let my muscles relax? Can I fully receive this experience that is not my ideal experience? Can I avoid trying to immediately change the circumstance so that I can feel comfortable again? And try to find a way that that middle way that seems almost impossible, where I feel comfortable in the uncomfortable And I know that seems kind of elusive, but it's something that my one of my favorite yoga teachers, and one of the women who's leading my teacher training has been talking about a lot too. She talks about finding the third way in yoga, because there's the way number one, which is effort. It's like, I'm gonna push through the pain. I'm gonna, you know, whatever it takes, I'm gonna hold the pose. There's that way. There's also the way of giving up, backing off, laying down, taking a break, which is nothing wrong with either of those ways, to be honest, But then there's this third way where we ask ourselves, can I stay in this discomfort without the whole story behind it, without the like grit and grip and uh, I'm going to effort my way through this. Can I stay in the discomfort and just fully receive what this experience is wanting to offer me? Fully fully receive what the experience is wanting to show me. That's the third way that I'm looking for when I cold plunge. I've started thinking about this in my yoga practice, and I am one hundred percent thinking about it in my life. So, like I said, life for me, whenever I decide I want to work on something, life always throws lots of opportunities my way to work on it. Like a couple months ago, I was like, boundaries, that's what I really need to work on, and then all of a sudden, it was just like opportunity, opportunity, opportunit to work on setting better boundaries with people in my life. And I appreciate that life does that for me, or or perhaps I'm doing it for myself. Maybe I'm curating that for myself. Either way, I'm grateful because it gives me the opportunity to really learn the thing that I want to learn. And in this case, over the past couple of days, I've had many, many opportunities to learn how to get a little cozy, get a little comfortable with the mess, and invite myself to sink even deeper into the experience of life even when it's a total mess. So let me walk you through with the last seventy two hours of my life have looked like. On Thursday afternoon, I got stung by a bee, which I haven't been stung by a bee in a long time. I think I got stung one other time in twenty eighteen, and before that it was like childhood, so I have been stung only a handful of times in my whole life. I've never had an allergic reaction to a beasting before. But I got stung by beyond Thursday, and at first it didn't seem like a big deal. But over the course of about forty eight hours, my arm swelled up to the size of I don't even know. It was like so swollen, red, tight, kind of hot. I'll spare you all the details, but it was quite gross, and it was, you know, taking up my entire arm. So I called a nurse practitioner who we have who comes by our house fairly often. She came by, she took a look at it. I'm very sensitive to medicines and I don't take a lot of pharmaceutical drugs, and so all it took was, you know, a double dose of benadrilla or whatever she gave me to put me out. And I slept really hard on Friday night and expected on Saturday morning to wake up and have my arm be much better. And yet it just really wasn't. It was continuing to grow. The circumference of the itchiness and redness and pain was getting bigger and bigger, and so I called her again, asked her her advice, and she said you need to go to the er because she was worried about a secondary infection like cellulitis, which can get you know, it can become dangerous fairly quickly. So this is not my plan for my Saturday morning. I was supposed to go to a yoga class. I was really excited about the teacher and excited to go to the class. And I had to cancel my class and get in the car instead and drive to the ear which is nobody's plan for a fun Saturday morning. And alas, this is what we were doing. So thankfully my mother in law lives next door. I called her and asked her if she could take the kids. Kids ran over to her house. Matt drove me to the er and it was a fairly uneventful er visit, but you know, it's no fun to go to the er. They took a sharpie Mrker and drew around the circumference of the infection to make sure that I didn't get any bigger. They prescribed me some meds. They told me to continue taking benadryl slash zyrtech so something for the antihistamine, also an antibiotic for the secondary infection, which the nurse at the er confirmed she was concerned that there was a secondary infection like cellulitis, and then a steroid to kind of give my body the kick to fight this thing off. So again, I'm not used to taking drugs, but I'm like, you know, taking all these pharmaceutical drugs hoping that I can help my body get back on track. We come back from the er, we get the kids. The kids are understandably, you know, a little like out of their routine and they're feeling a little crazy. And it was rainy on Saturday, so they're going star crazy and we were all just like up to our ears. So I'm like, let's get the kids out of the house and go to the park. So we loaded the kids up in the car. You know, I'm still feeling a little drowsy from all the drugs. But we drive down the street. We're going to the park. We're at the park and my daughter keeps complaining about her head itching. We're at the park and my daughter keeps complaining about her head itching. I'm like, what is going on with your head? And she's like scratching, scratching, scratching, And of course, the first thing that comes to my mind is lyce. But I'm like, our kids don't even go to school, how would they have gotten lice? So I'm checking the back of her head, and I don't really I'm not a lice expert. I don't really know a whole lot about lice. But I did notice that she had like this ring of red around the nape of her neck. So I text my friend who her kids are in school, and so they had just done a round of lice at their school. So I said, what did you do when your kids got lyce? You know? She sent me the name of this place that I could take the kids to get checked. I was like, let's just to keep things on the safe side, let's take the kids in to get them checked. So now we're at the park. We're re routing our day again. We're driving across town to go get the kids checked for lice. Sure enough, both of the kids and me all have lice, so we all have to get treated for lyce. We all get treated for lyce now at six pm. And we've got a three year old and a four year old. So I'm like, I don't even have time to get home and get dinner. The kids usually go to bed at seven o'clock. So we're stopping for dinner on the way home. So I'm like, now, not only have we had the nurse come to our house, we did the er visit, we had the lice incident. We're coming home. Every item in our house has to be sanitized or washed. So every blanket, every sheet, everything's going into the washer and dryer. I'm stripping the kids' beds, I'm stripping our beds. I'm doing all the things. Matt and I are up till midnight doing laundry. We finally get the kids in bed around eight o'clock, and I was just like, what on earth? You know? This wild weekend that was nothing like I expected, nothing like I had planned or wanted. And yet I'm sitting there going it's messy in the nursery, it's tidy in the grave. You know, I could be really angry that this is how the day turned out. I could be whatever I mean, and I can feel however I feel about it, and I'm not trying to say that I need to change my emotions. But I was aware of the intention that I had set weeks earlier to invite this new way of being into my life. To settle into the fact that life is messy, that things don't go as planned, that we don't have one hundred percent control over our circumstances, and that a lot of things happen that we maybe wouldn't prefer to happen. And yet if we wait for those things to be over before we get to enjoy our life or live our life or begin our life or whatever, then we will never begin our life. We'll never live our life, we'll never have a life. And so I just started asking myself what would it look like for me to just get okay with the mess, to just settle into the fact that this is motherhood, this is having little kids, this is life, This is life, This is life that things don't go with planned, This is life that we made an unexpected trip to the er. This is life, and such as life? And how can I settle even more deeply into the set of circumstances that isn't the way that I pictured it, that isn't the way that I planned it, that doesn't seem to have like a clear moral or reason or purpose or anything. Yet I think that was what I was saying earlier in the episode, that I've gotten to the point where I feel kind of obsessive sometimes about making there be a meaning to the story. And one of the things that really struck me the other day as I was practicing yoga, as I was thinking about judgment, because a lot of times yoga teachers will say, you know, sort of notice your body without judgment, or notice this pose without judgment. And what occurred to me is that judgment can be negative or can be positive. Judgment is simply making up a story about something. So when we make up a story about something like this happened because you know, I need to learn more patience or whatever, we're almost like cutting off the real meaning of the story or the real lesson the thing, the energy that the story is trying to show us or teach us, the place the story is trying to take us by really making a snap judgment and trying to give the story a moral too soon. And so part of being willing to sit in the mess means I'm not going to jump to conclusions too soon. I'm not going to wrap things up too quickly. I'm not going to resolve the story as fast as I possibly can. I'm going to have some allowance for the fact that this story is slowly unfolding, and it's going to show me what it needs to show me. And I don't have to manage that or control that, or take that over or take it on that. Getting comfortable with the mess means taking a more passive role, taking a more surrendered kind of approach to our life, and allowing life to show us what it wants to teach us. And I do think life is collaborative, So I don't want you to hear me speaking from a binary place here. I don't think it's one or the other. But I wonder if you could reflect for a moment and ask yourself, where in my life do I get bumped out of my zone of tolerance by messes, messes with people, messes with a work situation, messes in relationships, messes in my house, messes in whatever whatever it is for you. Maybe for you the mess is feeling like you took a test and it didn't you didn't get one hundred percent, or you did a project for your boss and he didn't say good job, or whatever it is. I don't know wherever you find that level of perfectionism and control, is it possible to soften around that? Just a little bit, to sink a little bit deeper into the discomfort and to allow that to be part of life, to allow it to be life that's unfolding gently in front of us. It's something I've been really working on. It's something I've found a lot of value in. I know it can sound cliche on the surface, but I hope after I unpacked it didn't feel cliche to you. It's something that's really teaching me how to be more present in my life, to not wait for life to begin until I have all the loose ends tied up, because hello, Hello, life would never start if I had to have all the loose ends tied up before life could begin. And I was asking Matt about this topic last night and he was like, oh, man, you have gotten so much more laid back since I met you. And I was like, oh, interesting, tell me more about that. And he was like, I don't know, just when I met you, you seemed like really kind of wound up pretty tight. And he's like, yeah, since we met, you know, I've just noticed that you've been able to let go of control of a lot of different things. And so we just had an interesting conversation about that. I was saying, you know, some of that was trauma from the relationship that I had prior to Matt, that was an extremely controlling relationship. Some of it's trauma from my childhood. Some of it is personality and just temperament and kind of how I came into the world, and some of it is choice. And I think all of us have this choice, despite the childhood trauma, despite the trauma of the relationship, despite how I'm wired, I have the choice to decide to relax a little bit deeper into my life. And it was neat to hear from that that he's seen that transformation in me, because I feel it deeply in my life. And I will say one thing that I've noticed from being able to relax more deeply into my life is that I just enjoy life more than I ever did before, because when you have to be in that position of control, you don't have the opportunity to sit back and receive the goodness that life wants to bring to you. And yes, does life sometimes bring us things that are uncomfortable. It does. It brings us er trips, and it brings us life, you know, drama, and it brings us tension in relationships, and it brings us messy houses and whatever. And yet in the midst of those things, it also brings us the fullness and depth of what it means to be a human being. And so this is my invitation for you to come a little bit deeper into what it means to be a human being today, to allow there to be some mess in your life, to just let it be okay that there's a mess, and not to take it on as a job that like you have to fix this or clean it up, or tie up the loose ends or immediately figure out a resolution to this situation. But you can just let the mess be there, and let the mess percolate and let the soup simmer on the stove and develop all that richness and fullness and depth that you want a soup to have, and you get to be the soup, and you your life gets to be the soup, and your life gets to be so full and so rich and so messy and so delicious. And it doesn't have to be all clean and tidy all the time, because it's messy in the nursery, but tidy only in the grave. So when we leave this planet, then things can maybe be tidy. But in the meantime, the whole point of being here is to experience the fullness of life, which includes all of it, the ups, the downs, the good, the bad, the ugly, and I want to invite you into a little bit more of a rich experience of your life today. So I hope that is encouraging or inspiring to you in some way wherever it hits you in your story, love to hear about it, and I will see you back here next week on the Write Story podcast.

Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the words you write. All the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down and covered it's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk about something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, because this is a habit or a way of being that I've really wanted to practice having more of in my life. And I hesitated at first bringing this up as a topic because in some ways this idea feels a little bit cliche to me, or I think when I think about this, I sort of feel like, well, lots of people have talked about this topic or lots of people have covered this, and it feels kind of like old, like from the past, and yet it's something that in a practical way, I still really struggle with in my life, and I feel like it's holding me back from having the richness and deepness that is available in any of our lives, and so I wanted to bring this up today and hopefully be able to tease it out and share some practical ways that I've struggled with this and some practical things that I've done in order to maybe exercise this muscle and hopefully shed some light on the topic in general. So I hope this is helpful and even maybe insightful for you. The topic is this concept of being comfortable with the mess I feel like for me, I am a bit of a perfectionist. I have a streak of Type A. I'm not one hundred percent Type A. And one of the things that I've unpacked on previous episodes is this tension I have between the part of me that's an artist and the part of me that I call the valedictorian or the straight a student. So the part of me that wants to get the external praise and attention, that wants to get everything perfectly right, that wants people to be like, like, yeay, you did a great job, stand up applause. You know, we're so impressed with you. And then the part of me that wants to just kind of wander and play and explore and be creative. These are two parts of me that both coexist inside of my body, my spirit, my essence, and sometimes it feels like the two of them argue a little bit. So, you know, like the artist in me wants to have a little bit more spaciousness in my day. This is the part of me that thinks like I would really like to practice being a little bit more comfortable in a mess. And on the surface, I just mean, like, you know, my house is a mess, there's a lot of laundry to be done. And could I possibly sink a little bit deeper into the nature of my life, into the day to day of my life. Could I feel more comfortable in my own skin inside of the mess without feeling like, well, I can't rest until the mess is cleaned up. I can't relax until all of those loose ends are tied up, Like once the laundry is done, then I can sit down and rest. And that's just kind of surface level, but I think on a deeper level, what I've been noticing is that it's not just laundry or dishes or or like a messy house that makes me feel like I can't let my guard down. It's also anything that's open ended, So like Let's say I have a conflict with a family member or a friend that's ongoing over the course of days, which is actually unusual for me, because most of the time, if I have a conflict with someone, I'm the type of person who goes in headstrong to solve the conflict immediately, which I didn't learn until a couple of years ago is actually a result of an anxious attachment system feeling like, Okay, I'm not safe unless every relationship is in a place of harmony. And so I had a hard time sort of holding space for a conflict in a relationship, knowing that sometimes conflicts happen in relationships. Sometimes we don't see eye to eye sometimes you know, or we're going to have different perspectives on things, and those tensions get resolved over time, but they don't need to be necessarily resolved immediately. And I think there was a per time in my life up until fairly recently, where resolving that conflict immediately felt absolutely important to my sense of personal safety. So, like I said, I learned recently that that has to do with having an anxious attachment system, not feeling secure in my own self. I didn't have the bandwidth to let a relationship be a little bit messy for a period of time while we worked to understand one another, while we worked to come together, or while we just allowed each other to have differing perspectives, differing ways of doing life. And this is something I've really been practicing so again, not just the practical stuff of like, there's lots of dishes to do, there's you know, weeks worth of laundry to get through in the laundry room, and yet my daughter is asking me will I play school with her? So in the practical sense, I'm practicing going, yes, let's play school. The laundry can wait. That just just can wait for a little bit. Can I find a way to feel at home in my own skin, to feel safe even when the house is a mess. That's just kind of surface level part of this conversation, but going a level deeper. Can I find a way to feel safe in my body when there's conflict with someone that I love? Can I find a way to feel safe in my body when our finances are still a mess from this big investment that we made a couple of years ago, we're still trying to kind of clean up and tie up the loose ends from that, can I find a way to feel safe in my own body when we don't know what the future looks like. We're still trying to navigate this transition from me sort of stepping back from coaching, Matt stepping into more of the sole breadwinner role, trying to decide, you know, what we're going to do about this business that we started together, the investment that went upside down. Trying to tie up those loose ends and figure out what do we do moving forward and what does life look like moving forward? And my question for myself has been can I be okay? Can I sync into my life and experience my life even while the mess is taking place. Something I've heard my husband say a bunch that I think he was taught for a mentor he had in high school and college is that it's messy in the nursery but tidy in the grave. In other words, while we're here on earth, there are all kinds of messes. It's you know, loose ends are going to be untied. Nothing is a perfect bow on top of this perfect package like we think it's going to be. You know, there are questions that are unanswered. There are stories that are incomplete, there are conflicts with friends and family members, There are messes in our house. There are circumstances that unfold that are outside of our control, that create a sort of mess of an experience. And I'll tell you an example of that here in just a second. But while those things are happening, can we fully experience our life while the mess is taking place? In other words, not putting our life on hold until the mess is cleaned up, so that then we can enjoy our life. It's like, well, once the house is clean, once the relationships are all safe, once you know these circumstances sort of clean themselves up, well, then I can go about enjoying my life. But actually, can I just enjoy my life right this minute, just as it is, even with the chaos, even with the mess. And one of the reasons why I think this topic is so important is because, you know, you look around our world right now, and there's a lot of chaos happening. And I've asked myself many times. I don't know the answer to this question. I've asked myself, is this unique to our time that we're living in or has the world always felt this way? I don't know. The answer to that question. But I know that when I look out at the events that are taking place in the world, at climate change, at the wars across the planet, at you know, our current political conundrum that we're in at just like all the changes that are being made, everything that's happening around us, it feels extremely chaotic. And I have to ask myself, are we going to wait until all of this mess is cleaned up before we go about enjoying our lives and living our lives and you know, making decisions for ourselves and forging forward and having pleasure and making friends and being in community and smiling and crying and you know, railing against the whatever the things that we disagree with, and voicing our opinions and writing our books and chasing our dreams and all these things, like, are we going to wait until the mess is cleaned up before we start doing those things? Or is life lived in the here and now? Is life lived in the middle of the mess. It's messy in the nursery, it's tidy in the grave. The only time it's tidy is after it's all done, you know, after we leave this planet. And perhaps we have a vantage point to look back and say, oh, I can see now why all of that took place. But I think one of the things that has happened for me as I have explored this concept of writing your story and making sense out of the things that happen in your life is I've brought some of that perfectionism and obsessiveness with kind of cleaning things up into my life experiences where I'm always trying to put my experience into the container of a narrative arc and life I've talked about ad nauseum and at absolute length on this podcast. This can be an extremely healing experience to take a chaotic experience from your life, to put it in the context and the container of a story, to see it as a narrative arc, and to begin to understand some of the reasons why this thing could have took place, or to begin to craft actually your own moral to the story and decide, like, why did this unfold the way that it did, and who have I become as part of that process, and how has this shaped me as a human being? So that's an extremely healing process. And yet one of the things that I've noticed is that my obsession with kind of cleaning things up has almost taken over my brain at times to where I can't just let a story be unfinished. I have a really hard time just letting the story be messy for a little bit of time, letting there not be a resolution quite yet, and living in the middle of the story where things are a little bit more chaotic and things are a little bit messier, and the loose sins are not totally tied up, and there is it's no clear resolution, and we don't know why this took place, and we don't know who we're becoming as a result of this, and there's just despair or sometimes hopelessness, or sometimes fear or other emotions that we would rather avoid. And so I'm asking myself this question, is it possible for me to sink a little bit deeper into my life to fully receive the experiences that I'm having without needing to immediately clean them up. This is something I've been practicing in my life. Again, like I said, both on that practical level, just really simple like leave the dishes, We'll do those in the morning, which by the way, is extremely hard for me. And I know there are different types of people in the world, and maybe you're not the type of person who has a hard time going to bed with dishes in the sink. But it's extremely hard for me to go to bed with dishes in the sink. I'm practicing that, or playing school with my daughter instead of doing the laundry. It's extremely hard for me to say yes to that, and I'm practicing that. And I'm also practicing letting a conflict with a friend or family member linger for a little bit of time, because when I russian to clean up the mess, I miss what the story is actually trying to show me. I miss what the middle of the story is actually trying to percolate. It's like a soup that needs to simmer for a little bit longer so that the flavor profile can develop its fullness and its richness. And if you try to speed up that process, then you know you'll get a soup. But it's just not going to be as deep or as rich of a soup as it would if you would have given it the time that it needed and asked for. So I've been really trying to practice that in all these areas of my life. I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like when I decide that I want to practice a skill or a habit or like integrate something into my life. Life starts giving me all of these opportunities to make good on my word and actually practice them. And I feel like my life has been doing that lately. Case in point, I literally just had to stop recording because my husband walked in to the house. I'm sitting at my kitchen table as I always do, recording this episode, and my husband walked in. Bless him, Lord, bless him with the groceries that I asked him to pick up from the grocery store. Anyways, he was very apologetic and made the dog bark. We had to pause the recording here for a minute. But then I was just laughing to myself. I'm like, well, I'm recording an episode about being in the mess of life, and so alas, here we are in the mess of life. I'm sitting in my kitchen table. The house is not clean, the groceries are sitting on the counter, thanks to my wonderful husband, and it's all going to get taken care of, and all of the loose ends will eventually get tied up, and they're just not tied up right now. And so, despite my impulse to stop this recording and go all the way back to the beginning of the podcast and re record the entire thing because of this interruption, which I'm not joking that that is an impulse. I don't know if that tells you, you know, how sick in the head I am with needing things to be clean and tidy. But that is an impulse that I have. And yet I'm going to bypass that impulse and practice what I'm talking about, which is allowing there to be some mess in life and allowing myself to find some measure of comfort. You know, there is I want to acknowledge this that there is a level of tolerance that each of us have with chaos or mess, and for each person it's different. But you know what it feels like when you move outside of your zone of tolerance for chaos, because the minute that you move out of your zone of tolerance, your nervous system is disregulated and it might make you feel physically sick. You might feel just kind of anxious and disturbed, and you'll find yourself wanting to leave the situation or go home or whatever. And for everyone, their zone of tolerance is totally different and different things will bump different people out of their zone of tolerance. So you might witness someone get bumped out of their zone of tolerance and think like, well, that wouldn't do it to me. Dishes in the sink, don't do it to me. But what is it that does it for you? Maybe take a minute and think about what is the thing for you that makes you feel like, my life is messy, It's impossibly messy. I can't be comfortable until this mess is cleaned up. Maybe for you it's more about inner personal conflict. Maybe for you it's more about a physical mess in the space. Maybe it's lighting, or maybe it's music, or maybe it's politics, or you know, something else entirely I don't know. Maybe it's something I'm not even thinking to a list. But whatever it is for you that makes you feel like I can't get comfortable in my life in my space until this thing is fixed, I want to challenge you, along with me, to practice, just practice exercising the muscle. I'm not saying don't fix clear problems that are fixable. You know, like it is fixable to just tidy up your space, and sometimes that can make you feel better. So I'm not saying don't do that. I'm just saying, in situations where you don't have one hundred percent control over the circumstances, can you exercise the muscle of sinking in and settling in a little bit deeper to an environment that makes you feel agitated. This is the primary way that I've been using cold plunging to So this is another great example. Cold plunging for me, has a lot of psychological benefits, a lot of chemical benefits. It's the main way that I've avoided going on pharmaceutical drugs for anxiety and depression in the last couple of years, since twenty twenty three. But one of the mental practices that I've had as I've practiced the exercise of cold plunging is going into the environment that is extremely uncomfortable for me aaka the cold water. I do not like cold water. I'm like notorious for not even wanting to go in like a lukewarm swimming pool because i just don't like cold water. But I've been practicing the art of going into the cold water and attempting to fully receive the experience that is unsettling for me. So attempting to settle in to an environment that would otherwise bump me out of my zone of tolerance. And it does bump you out of your zone of tolerance. That's the whole point of cold plunging, is that it bumps you out of your zone of tolerance. But the question that I ask myself each time that I do this is can I go into the water and actually, instead of what a lot of people will instruct you to do when they're teaching you to cold plunge, which is to stay in for three minutes or whatever, I've stopped trying to get myself to stay in for three minutes. What I've started trying to do is ask myself, how long can I stay in the water which is uncomfortable for me and allow my body to fully settle in? Can I let my muscles relax? Can I fully receive this experience that is not my ideal experience? Can I avoid trying to immediately change the circumstance so that I can feel comfortable again? And try to find a way that that middle way that seems almost impossible, where I feel comfortable in the uncomfortable And I know that seems kind of elusive, but it's something that my one of my favorite yoga teachers, and one of the women who's leading my teacher training has been talking about a lot too. She talks about finding the third way in yoga, because there's the way number one, which is effort. It's like, I'm gonna push through the pain. I'm gonna, you know, whatever it takes, I'm gonna hold the pose. There's that way. There's also the way of giving up, backing off, laying down, taking a break, which is nothing wrong with either of those ways, to be honest, But then there's this third way where we ask ourselves, can I stay in this discomfort without the whole story behind it, without the like grit and grip and uh, I'm going to effort my way through this. Can I stay in the discomfort and just fully receive what this experience is wanting to offer me? Fully fully receive what the experience is wanting to show me. That's the third way that I'm looking for when I cold plunge. I've started thinking about this in my yoga practice, and I am one hundred percent thinking about it in my life. So, like I said, life for me, whenever I decide I want to work on something, life always throws lots of opportunities my way to work on it. Like a couple months ago, I was like, boundaries, that's what I really need to work on, and then all of a sudden, it was just like opportunity, opportunity, opportunit to work on setting better boundaries with people in my life. And I appreciate that life does that for me, or or perhaps I'm doing it for myself. Maybe I'm curating that for myself. Either way, I'm grateful because it gives me the opportunity to really learn the thing that I want to learn. And in this case, over the past couple of days, I've had many, many opportunities to learn how to get a little cozy, get a little comfortable with the mess, and invite myself to sink even deeper into the experience of life even when it's a total mess. So let me walk you through with the last seventy two hours of my life have looked like. On Thursday afternoon, I got stung by a bee, which I haven't been stung by a bee in a long time. I think I got stung one other time in twenty eighteen, and before that it was like childhood, so I have been stung only a handful of times in my whole life. I've never had an allergic reaction to a beasting before. But I got stung by beyond Thursday, and at first it didn't seem like a big deal. But over the course of about forty eight hours, my arm swelled up to the size of I don't even know. It was like so swollen, red, tight, kind of hot. I'll spare you all the details, but it was quite gross, and it was, you know, taking up my entire arm. So I called a nurse practitioner who we have who comes by our house fairly often. She came by, she took a look at it. I'm very sensitive to medicines and I don't take a lot of pharmaceutical drugs, and so all it took was, you know, a double dose of benadrilla or whatever she gave me to put me out. And I slept really hard on Friday night and expected on Saturday morning to wake up and have my arm be much better. And yet it just really wasn't. It was continuing to grow. The circumference of the itchiness and redness and pain was getting bigger and bigger, and so I called her again, asked her her advice, and she said you need to go to the er because she was worried about a secondary infection like cellulitis, which can get you know, it can become dangerous fairly quickly. So this is not my plan for my Saturday morning. I was supposed to go to a yoga class. I was really excited about the teacher and excited to go to the class. And I had to cancel my class and get in the car instead and drive to the ear which is nobody's plan for a fun Saturday morning. And alas, this is what we were doing. So thankfully my mother in law lives next door. I called her and asked her if she could take the kids. Kids ran over to her house. Matt drove me to the er and it was a fairly uneventful er visit, but you know, it's no fun to go to the er. They took a sharpie Mrker and drew around the circumference of the infection to make sure that I didn't get any bigger. They prescribed me some meds. They told me to continue taking benadryl slash zyrtech so something for the antihistamine, also an antibiotic for the secondary infection, which the nurse at the er confirmed she was concerned that there was a secondary infection like cellulitis, and then a steroid to kind of give my body the kick to fight this thing off. So again, I'm not used to taking drugs, but I'm like, you know, taking all these pharmaceutical drugs hoping that I can help my body get back on track. We come back from the er, we get the kids. The kids are understandably, you know, a little like out of their routine and they're feeling a little crazy. And it was rainy on Saturday, so they're going star crazy and we were all just like up to our ears. So I'm like, let's get the kids out of the house and go to the park. So we loaded the kids up in the car. You know, I'm still feeling a little drowsy from all the drugs. But we drive down the street. We're going to the park. We're at the park and my daughter keeps complaining about her head itching. We're at the park and my daughter keeps complaining about her head itching. I'm like, what is going on with your head? And she's like scratching, scratching, scratching, And of course, the first thing that comes to my mind is lyce. But I'm like, our kids don't even go to school, how would they have gotten lice? So I'm checking the back of her head, and I don't really I'm not a lice expert. I don't really know a whole lot about lice. But I did notice that she had like this ring of red around the nape of her neck. So I text my friend who her kids are in school, and so they had just done a round of lice at their school. So I said, what did you do when your kids got lyce? You know? She sent me the name of this place that I could take the kids to get checked. I was like, let's just to keep things on the safe side, let's take the kids in to get them checked. So now we're at the park. We're re routing our day again. We're driving across town to go get the kids checked for lice. Sure enough, both of the kids and me all have lice, so we all have to get treated for lyce. We all get treated for lyce now at six pm. And we've got a three year old and a four year old. So I'm like, I don't even have time to get home and get dinner. The kids usually go to bed at seven o'clock. So we're stopping for dinner on the way home. So I'm like, now, not only have we had the nurse come to our house, we did the er visit, we had the lice incident. We're coming home. Every item in our house has to be sanitized or washed. So every blanket, every sheet, everything's going into the washer and dryer. I'm stripping the kids' beds, I'm stripping our beds. I'm doing all the things. Matt and I are up till midnight doing laundry. We finally get the kids in bed around eight o'clock, and I was just like, what on earth? You know? This wild weekend that was nothing like I expected, nothing like I had planned or wanted. And yet I'm sitting there going it's messy in the nursery, it's tidy in the grave. You know, I could be really angry that this is how the day turned out. I could be whatever I mean, and I can feel however I feel about it, and I'm not trying to say that I need to change my emotions. But I was aware of the intention that I had set weeks earlier to invite this new way of being into my life. To settle into the fact that life is messy, that things don't go as planned, that we don't have one hundred percent control over our circumstances, and that a lot of things happen that we maybe wouldn't prefer to happen. And yet if we wait for those things to be over before we get to enjoy our life or live our life or begin our life or whatever, then we will never begin our life. We'll never live our life, we'll never have a life. And so I just started asking myself what would it look like for me to just get okay with the mess, to just settle into the fact that this is motherhood, this is having little kids, this is life, This is life, This is life that things don't go with planned, This is life that we made an unexpected trip to the er. This is life, and such as life? And how can I settle even more deeply into the set of circumstances that isn't the way that I pictured it, that isn't the way that I planned it, that doesn't seem to have like a clear moral or reason or purpose or anything. Yet I think that was what I was saying earlier in the episode, that I've gotten to the point where I feel kind of obsessive sometimes about making there be a meaning to the story. And one of the things that really struck me the other day as I was practicing yoga, as I was thinking about judgment, because a lot of times yoga teachers will say, you know, sort of notice your body without judgment, or notice this pose without judgment. And what occurred to me is that judgment can be negative or can be positive. Judgment is simply making up a story about something. So when we make up a story about something like this happened because you know, I need to learn more patience or whatever, we're almost like cutting off the real meaning of the story or the real lesson the thing, the energy that the story is trying to show us or teach us, the place the story is trying to take us by really making a snap judgment and trying to give the story a moral too soon. And so part of being willing to sit in the mess means I'm not going to jump to conclusions too soon. I'm not going to wrap things up too quickly. I'm not going to resolve the story as fast as I possibly can. I'm going to have some allowance for the fact that this story is slowly unfolding, and it's going to show me what it needs to show me. And I don't have to manage that or control that, or take that over or take it on that. Getting comfortable with the mess means taking a more passive role, taking a more surrendered kind of approach to our life, and allowing life to show us what it wants to teach us. And I do think life is collaborative, So I don't want you to hear me speaking from a binary place here. I don't think it's one or the other. But I wonder if you could reflect for a moment and ask yourself, where in my life do I get bumped out of my zone of tolerance by messes, messes with people, messes with a work situation, messes in relationships, messes in my house, messes in whatever whatever it is for you. Maybe for you the mess is feeling like you took a test and it didn't you didn't get one hundred percent, or you did a project for your boss and he didn't say good job, or whatever it is. I don't know wherever you find that level of perfectionism and control, is it possible to soften around that? Just a little bit, to sink a little bit deeper into the discomfort and to allow that to be part of life, to allow it to be life that's unfolding gently in front of us. It's something I've been really working on. It's something I've found a lot of value in. I know it can sound cliche on the surface, but I hope after I unpacked it didn't feel cliche to you. It's something that's really teaching me how to be more present in my life, to not wait for life to begin until I have all the loose ends tied up, because hello, Hello, life would never start if I had to have all the loose ends tied up before life could begin. And I was asking Matt about this topic last night and he was like, oh, man, you have gotten so much more laid back since I met you. And I was like, oh, interesting, tell me more about that. And he was like, I don't know, just when I met you, you seemed like really kind of wound up pretty tight. And he's like, yeah, since we met, you know, I've just noticed that you've been able to let go of control of a lot of different things. And so we just had an interesting conversation about that. I was saying, you know, some of that was trauma from the relationship that I had prior to Matt, that was an extremely controlling relationship. Some of it's trauma from my childhood. Some of it is personality and just temperament and kind of how I came into the world, and some of it is choice. And I think all of us have this choice, despite the childhood trauma, despite the trauma of the relationship, despite how I'm wired, I have the choice to decide to relax a little bit deeper into my life. And it was neat to hear from that that he's seen that transformation in me, because I feel it deeply in my life. And I will say one thing that I've noticed from being able to relax more deeply into my life is that I just enjoy life more than I ever did before, because when you have to be in that position of control, you don't have the opportunity to sit back and receive the goodness that life wants to bring to you. And yes, does life sometimes bring us things that are uncomfortable. It does. It brings us er trips, and it brings us life, you know, drama, and it brings us tension in relationships, and it brings us messy houses and whatever. And yet in the midst of those things, it also brings us the fullness and depth of what it means to be a human being. And so this is my invitation for you to come a little bit deeper into what it means to be a human being today, to allow there to be some mess in your life, to just let it be okay that there's a mess, and not to take it on as a job that like you have to fix this or clean it up, or tie up the loose ends or immediately figure out a resolution to this situation. But you can just let the mess be there, and let the mess percolate and let the soup simmer on the stove and develop all that richness and fullness and depth that you want a soup to have, and you get to be the soup, and you your life gets to be the soup, and your life gets to be so full and so rich and so messy and so delicious. And it doesn't have to be all clean and tidy all the time, because it's messy in the nursery, but tidy only in the grave. So when we leave this planet, then things can maybe be tidy. But in the meantime, the whole point of being here is to experience the fullness of life, which includes all of it, the ups, the downs, the good, the bad, the ugly, and I want to invite you into a little bit more of a rich experience of your life today. So I hope that is encouraging or inspiring to you in some way wherever it hits you in your story, love to hear about it, and I will see you back here next week on the Write Story podcast.