Follow Your Calling in Each Season of Life with Chela Davison

by | Jun 13, 2022 | Uncategorized

Follow Your Calling in Each Season of Life with Chela Davison

Chela Davison works with individuals to help them discover the call of their soul and make the meaningful impact they wish to see in their lives.

The core of Chela Davison’s work is to help people meet their calling, discover what it is and develop the capacity to carry it out in the world.

In Episode 392 Chela shares how her calling is evolving and how she is reckoning with that now, in the same way you may need to mourn when a role you’ve previously played no longer is sustainable in your current  life. Because let’s be honest, life changes and you need to learn to change with it.

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Life, like nature, has seasons, and when you try to operate in an “endless summer,” negating your Autumn, you can enter burnout and/or crisis. You’ll know if you are headed this direction because you might find yourself in the middle of self-sabotage or saying things like “I just want to burn the whole thing down.” 

Because life’s complicated and multifaceted you might find various parts of your life in different seasons all at once. 

Listen to Chela Davison on episode 392 to hear how knowing where you’re at in each aspect of life can help you hold space for those dynamic tensions and avoid the suffering that comes from not letting go.

Listen to episode 392 now!

In episode 392 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:

  • [1:28] Chela’s definition of God and how she communes with God
  • [2:26] Communing with God in nature
  • [5:57] The Divine is in everything – even in the trash
  • [9:36] The way we commune with our trash – both physically and metaphorically
  • [11:03] Life lessons Elizabeth is taking from her current parking spot
  • [13:55] The cycle of life falling apart and coming back together
  • [14:08] How the myth of individualism applies too much pressure in our personal and professional lives
  • {15:27] Running a Post Capitalism business
  • [15:33] The difference between Anti Capitalism and Post Capitalism
  • [18:50] The regenerative aspect of the 1 for 1 business model
  • [22:38] The core of Chela’s work and how she helps people find and develop their calling
  • [26:57] What to do when your calling evolves
  • [29:03] Shedding roles that are no longer sustainable for you
  • [31:49] What is saviorism and are you allowing it to keep you stuck 
  • [32:56] What is extraction and how is it depleting your energy
  • [37:13] Experiencing burnout and how honoring the seasons of life
  • [39:55] Language as a guide to understanding if you are approaching or are already in burnout
  • [40:21] Signs you need to let go of something
  • [43:21] The beauty of starting something new in December instead of waiting for January
  • [47:02] Learning to “winter” in different phases of life
  • [49:32] Balancing various aspects of life (personal, business, projects) that are in different seasons at the same time
  • [51:37] are you operating from intentional strategy or from the nervous system’s desire to survive
  • [54:31] How Elizabeth feels about dating in this season of life
  • [01:01:02] Recognizing cultural programming
  • [01:04:07] Chela’s backup plan in standup comedy

Resources mentioned by Elizabeth in episode 392 “Follow Your Calling in Each Season of Life with Chela Davison”:

Quotes from this Week’s Episode of the Embodied Podcast:

  • “Nature is a huge one for me; I draw on nature as source, as support, as metaphor, as a literal place to go to tune in to that which is greater and mysterious.” [02:26:57] Chela Davison
  • “The Divine is in everything, even in the trash can.” [05:57:30] Elizabeth DiAlto
  • “The falling apart is a part of The Divine. Things come together, things fall apart and that’s what happens continually.” [13:55:78] Chela Davison

  • “This myth of individualism is really, really strong and I think it creates an excessive amount of pressure on the individual and finding those sweet spots where we don’t abdicate individual responsibility where we can take it but where we also don’t just completely bog ourselves down and collapse in these collective systemic issues being individual problems.” [14:08:74] Chela Davison 

  • “The core of my work is about helping people to meet their calling, discover what it is, and develop the capacity to carry it out in the world.” [22:06:13] Chela Davison
  • “What I’ve found over the years for me personally is how much my expression in the world of what my calling is evolves.” [22:38:73] Chela Davison
  • “I’m just going to play with no more extraction…my experience of extraction is like, there’s a point within my body, and when I say body, my physical body, but also my energetic body, where I’m like ‘oh I don’t have more to give.’” [34:27:79] Chela Davison

  • “I think what a lot of people experience when they experience burnout is trying to perpetuate summer without heeding autumn when it comes, and now you’re in a winter and now you’re in a crisis.” [37:13:56] Chela Davison

  • “There can be a lot of grief in Autumn, especially if you don’t want to put things down.” [39:30:39] Chela Davison
  • “If you feel like you want to blow something up, it’s because there have been things that you’ve been needing to let go of, or compost, or whatever, and you have not been doing it.” [40:21:95] Elizabeth DiAlto
  • “There’s nothing I love more than not going into crisis in areas where I used to.” [42:30:77] Elizabeth DiAlto
  • “Crisis’ can bring pain, but the degree to which we suffer about them has to do with how much we rail against them. [45:49:74] Chela Davison

How was this episode for you?

 

Was this episode helpful for you today? I’d love to know what quote or lesson touched your soul. Let me know in the comments below OR share the episode on Instagram, tag me your stories @elizabethdialto, or send me a DM!

 

About the Embodied Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto

 

Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.

If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussion on Instagram here.

 

Transcript for Episode 392 “Follow Your Calling in Each Season of Life with Chela Davison“:

– Everybody. This is exciting because when I debuted the podcast in 2015, I had Chela interview me. Do you remember that?

– I do, I do, I do remember it, it was so fun.

– It was so great and we interviewed you and so now this will be your third time back, but like seven years later.

– Good for you, like that’s some stick-it-with-it-ness.

– Okay, but can we really also just talk about how the mother fuck seven years has gone by? What’s happened? Who are we? Who are we?

– That’s a really good question. Who are we now? How have we evolved?

– You know, well, we’ll get into that, but let me start where I’ve been loving starting this year. It’s kind of like this three-pronged question so I just hit you with all three so you can take ’em in whatever order however you want to. I want to know what you call God, how you are currently, what is your current relationship to God, if any, and if you have one, how do you commune with God?

– Wow, I mean.

– You know, me just minor stuff.

– I love it, no, let’s go.

– It’s sick shit.

– So how do I call God?

– Yeah, what do you call it?

– I would say probably most consistently the mystery.

– Mm.

– But God works too. Maybe because I wasn’t, I don’t have any religious ruins. I wasn’t raised religious, so I don’t have a religious affiliation with God so I actually really like that word. God in a non-gendered, mysterious kind of way.

– Yeah.

– What was the second question? What’s my relationship, how do I commune?

– Yeah.

– I find, so one of my favorite quotes, I think it’s a Zen proverb maybe, is to be enlightened is to be intimate with all things.

– Mm.

– First time I heard it, it just felt like, like that could be nourishment for my soul for the rest of my life and so, I would say it really depends. Nature is a huge one for me. Like I draw on nature as source, as support, as metaphor, as a literal place to go to tune into that which is greater and mysterious and nurturing, so definitely nature, which has kind of like a third person relationship with God. And then I do, in the last few years I’ve developed more of this kind of second person relationship, like an I vow of entering into prayer and God as mystery. So some mysterious benevolent force that is part of me, but also separate from me to, you know, give stuff over to and ask for and be guided by and rest in. And in a sense there’s like the yeah, coming through nature, but then also like coming through, you know, sometimes especially in times of really deeper angst and suffering, I’ll look to like, what’s the like totally banal places to find God in doing the dishes, in laundry, in maintenance work and that which isn’t like considered kind of conventionally profound and then sometimes in my children, although sometimes it doesn’t feel like there’s God there at all.

– Maybe the devil is in these things. I’m not finding God today.

– But, you know, in my, and in just relationship generally of like, oh, defining me, defining you, when possible.

– I love this. I like you said this thing that which is greater, even that as a reference to God, I love just this acknowledgement that of course there’s something greater than us that somehow is keeping all of this together, even though it absolutely feels like it’s coming apart at the seams often. And you said something else in there. Oh, the mundane. I really love this and this has been up recently. I was actually just today, the week that we’re recording this, like right now, it’s April 21st and the podcast interview that went out this week was with my friend Antisa and we talked a lot about having a primary relationship with the divine and creating this intimacy with all things, which really goes with your Zen quote. And then I was just reviewing earlier today the show notes with my friend Po, and that will be coming out again at the time we’re recording this next week on Monday the, who knows. You can find it, it’ll be episode number-

– 25th.

– 385. And we talked a lot about the divine being in the mundane. And when you just said that, it reminded me many years ago, I asked one of my teachers, Riay, who has also been on the podcast, I was having, this is like a real, this is a hashtag Virgo-specific spiritual problem. I love the pillar candles, like the mother Mary, specifically the Our Lady of Guadalupe candles, but I went through a period of time where I was just keeping them after they burned down because I didn’t wanna throw them in the trash. I’m like, “I can’t put Mother Mary in the trash.” And I remember asking Riay, “What do you do with your candles?” And she really reminded me that the divine is in everything, even in the trash can.

– Hmm. You know this, so I’ve been reading, “How to do Nothing” by Jenny Odell. Have you read this book?

– No, I haven’t heard of it.

– Oh, it’s gorgeous, it’s gorgeous. It’s a real, what’s the subtitle? “How to resist the attention economy,” and it’s an anti-capitalist manifesto and-

– Oh, well then we must read it.

– Yes, we must, we must, and it’s really, in many ways like not what I expected, not that I know what I expected, but she definitely goes into many different artists and resistance stories and one of the ones that she got into that was like really fascinating, and I can’t remember the artist’s name, but it was a woman who was an artist in residence with a waste management company for like 20 years or something and her art was all around the sacredness and the value of maintenance work.

– Oh.

– And that, you know, culturally, especially within this capitalist system of really valuing wealth acquisition and hoarding and valuing progress and more and getting somewhere and being someone, we tend to diminish maintenance work. And we can see that in actual fields of work, care work, maintenance work, but even the at-home care and taking care of the home and so there’s this valuing of even where the divine is seen is like in the profound, in the big and the deep and the sacred and it’s like, actually it’s in like wiping your own ass and in cleaning your own toilets and in what it takes to actually sustain a life and a body and relationships. It’s like in those places and so I was really inspired by that in this book.

– I love this so much and what flashed into my mind immediately, in my neighborhood there are these specific little trash stations that are attached to either like light posts or telephone poles that have the plastic things for people walking their dogs, the little doggy, and then that’s where you put that and I will literally cross the street to not have to walk past one of them. I could smell the shit. And a couple weeks ago I happened to be walking back into my building when the waste management person, whose job it is to empty those, was going by and I just had this moment of, I am so thankful for that person and I don’t know why this is the line of work he’s chosen, but I am just so grateful that he did. I am so grateful that, and this also reminds me of living in New York City when it would be trash day and there would just be piles of bags and things like on the sidewalks. And I’m like, ’cause I remember there was a strike. I think the Department of Sanitation, there was a strike and so things really, I mean, even after a week, especially in a place like New York City.

– I remember that, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t live there, but I remember that, seeing the pictures and hearing people’s accounts.

– Literally one week goes by without the Department of Sanitation and there’s like skyscrapers of trash.

– This is I think a really important thing to, I don’t know, talk about, but even like in relationship to God, but also in relationship to our way of relating to the world and what we’re a part of is how much trash, whether it’s our own like, whether we wanna look at this metaphorically, like our own darkness, our own waste, or literally the ways that we disassociate from it and don’t wanna look at it, don’t wanna smell it, don’t wanna manage it, don’t wanna deal it, but all of that’s going somewhere. Like the little moves that I really appreciate, one of them all around the city of Vancouver now where they have like recycling and compost and garbage, instead of it being labeled garbage, it’s labeled landfill. And when I move to where I live now, we do have trash pickup, but we don’t have recycling pickup and so we have to manage all of our own recycling and take it to a depot ourselves and it’s brought me in greater relationship with the waste that comes with my consumption and it is really big. And here we have billions of people on the planet doing it and it’s like, I don’t know, there’s something really rich in being willing to think about it, look at it, face it, and actually make different moves in our own individual and, you know, individual only goes so far, but collective lives to reckon with that we actually create waste and we’re creating it in a way that isn’t sustainable.

– I really am, I’m so glad we’re having this conversation. It’s so random, but-

– It kind of is.

– My parking spot in this building where I live now is right next to the dumpsters. It is the worst parking spot, but every day of my life, I think about garbage because there’s two, so we have like the trash shoots on every floor of the building where landfill garbage goes and I also moved from the state of California, which is all about recycling to the state of Florida, which is not, right?

– Oh, wow.

– And also in California, like there hasn’t been a plastic bag in a grocery store since I don’t know, 2014, 2015. I remember ’cause I lived in Laguna Beach, which was 2013 when they were starting to get plastic bags out of the grocery stores. And then you come to Florida and people just use so much plastic in the grocery stores and that was a little shocking to me. The bins next to, there’s two dumpsters next to my car and one is the mixed recycling and one is landfill and it also says landfill on it here, and yet people just don’t even look, they just throw whatever in whatever.

– Oh no.

– And I’m like, do they even really recycle in this state or is it just a farce? But anyway, I’m constantly thinking about the garbage.

– Great, well, it sounds like your parking spot is actually like a really great divine intervention of like deeper intimacy.

– ‘Cause I also have to face my own entitlement when I called the office and was like, “Hi, are there any other options?” But it’s also, well, if I’m not gonna park in here, someone else is gonna have to, so why should I get bailed out of this and then it’s somebody else’s?

– Yeah.

– So fine, I’ll park next to the trash.

– Right.

– Like what the hell.

– Get some like nice deep inhalations, exhalation.

– It doesn’t stink. Somehow, it doesn’t stink. The other thing that I’m constantly thinking about is how quickly it fills up every day.

– Right.

– It’ll be empty and then by the end of the day. I don’t even live in a high rise building. There’s 10 floors here. The building next door is like 20 something. I can’t even imagine their trash situation.

– No.

– So now that we’re 20 minutes into this, we could stop talking about garbage if you want.

– All right, are you sure?

– What is the unsustainableness, unsustainability, insustainability? I really do think about it all the time. I don’t know what to do about it.

– No, me neither, mean neither. I mean, I think maybe that’s part of what our, call it a spiritual practice, call it a human practice, gets to be is like there’s actually a lot that’s happening. You know, when you said earlier about God is something greater and it’s like something’s holding all of this, even though it feels like things are really falling apart. I mean, that was like, ooh, that that was piercing and also like, oh, and the falling apart is part of the divine, right? Things come together and things fall apart and that’s what happens continually. But there’s a lot that is, there’s a lot of suffering that we just can’t solve individually and this myth of individualism is really, really strong and I think it creates an excessive amount of pressure on the individual in finding those sweet spots where we don’t abdicate individual responsibility where we can take it, but where we also don’t just completely bog ourselves down and collapse in these collective systemic issues being individual problems.

– Okay, this is another thing that drives me wild because I even, I look at, even as a small business, when I look at practices around accessibility and things like this and anti-capitalism, small business owners are not gonna solve capitalism because we are not the ones who are making it the enormous issue that it is. There are huge corporations that, until they do anything, our little small businesses making these choices are only gonna move the needle in these micro waves that are not gonna dismantle anything.

– Right.

– But we do put, I personally have put so much pressure on myself to solve capitalism.

– Totally, oh God, me too. I mean, it’s like, it’s one of the guiding principles that I hold in my business is intending, aiming, trying to even figure out what it means to run a post-capitalist business, but there’s actually a distinction that I’ve found really helpful, which is the difference between anti-capitalist, which I’m down for, but anti-capitalist and post-capitalist and the distinction that I see is when holding an anti-capitalist, I look at the suffering that capitalism causes or the ripple effect of the systemic issues and go, “Oh, if I’m an anti-capitalist, I need to be actively working to right these wrongs.” And I think that’s where you can get into the, well, we’re not gonna solve this until these bigger systems stop doing what they’re doing. But when I go, “Okay so what’s a post-capitalist imagining?” Then I start to think about what are practices that I can actively engage that aren’t gonna solve capitalism itself, but are voting with my money, with my relationships, with who I invest in and hire and where I spend, and even what I espouse to start to cultivate ways of moving money, even in micro ways that contribute more to local economies and small businesses and individuals that I know.

– I love this.

– And even finding other ways to trade time and service and contribution as well, bI totally hear you and I think that a lot of small businesses and people who deeply care attempt to, well, over-give and engage in unsustainable practices that end up actually being more of the capitalist spell because then we extract of ourselves to try to heal what’s being extracted of all of us.

– I wrote an email a couple weeks ago because now that we, I relaunched my whole entire body of work a couple weeks ago and one of the things that we’re doing with our membership is we’re doing a one-for-one model where anyone who pays for the year in full is sponsoring somebody else’s year long membership, which I love, and oh man, I’m losing my train of thought. What did you just say that? Oh, and when I sent out this email, I was like, “Yeah, I actually really love this model because finally it feels like a way to create more accessibility without bankrupting myself, almost bankrupting myself in an effort to make my shit more accessible.” Not that I’ve been on the brink of bankruptcy, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but I’ve definitely put myself in precarious financial situations over the years by undercharging or doing sliding scales or pay what you can on things that really didn’t make sense to because of the energetic exchange involved and the amount that I give that I just can’t not energetically.

– Yeah, time, energy. Like these are resources that we have and I’ve done the same thing and it’s tricky to try to find what those sweet spots are and sometimes for me it’s more organic. It’s like, “Oh, this is a place obviously,” you know like somebody reaching out and asking for a scholarship to something where I can go, “Yes, I’m gonna be holding the energetic field, but I’m already holding the energetic field for a wide number of people. Come in, yes, come in. Let it contribute to you.” I love that model of the one for one. It’s beautiful. And two, you know, what I think is potentially really regenerative about that is that you then have people who are entering into a space where in terms of actual, there may actually be more energy that you are holding or generating to hold a wider container in a wider energetic field of having more people in there, but that you’re not doing like one-to-one exchange that you’re not being paid for. But at the same time, I imagine that’s gonna be regenerative in terms of all of those people who are in there also contributing their gifts and their wisdom and their care and their friendship into the space.

– 1,000% and one of the things I shared about it is over the years, when I’ve done these things, I mean, there’s nothing more exciting, satisfying, fulfilling than when someone, who at some point needed a sponsorship or a scholarship or even just like a behind-the-scenes free spot that we, that I was like, just come in and we didn’t tell anyone, you know, it wasn’t like a big announcement. And then those people, because of what they were able to do in the container, go on and later they become a full paying one-on-one client, you know, or whatever they’re able to do. People leave abusive relationships, get themselves out of poverty because they have, they’re buoyed by the community. That’s so worth it to me.

– Totally. I’ve had times where I’ve had people that I’ve granted scholarships for or given, you know, sliding scale discounts and then yeah, become fully paying one-on-one clients later, or go and become clients of peers and there’s like a ripple in that that feels really, really good.

– Totally, yes. And that’s what you’re saying. This is what I love about this word regenerative. Putting things back into the collective in one way, shape or form, in an aligned way, which feels so exciting. So speaking of all this work stuff, I would love to hear, your work has obviously evolved in many ways over the years. You have, you are still coaching on some levels. I know you’re shifting into more writing. You’ve taken leadership roles. So many cool things have expanded, evolved, and moved around for you.

– Yes, some cooler than others.

– Some cooler than others. What do you wanna, what can you, or do you want to, or feels exciting to share about that?

– Oh, wow, that’s such an open-ended question. What do I want to, or feels exciting about that? Well, maybe I’ll speak to what’s exciting right now.

– I don’t always ask such open-ended questions, but you’re such a person that I’m just, I know I will be so delighted by wherever you wanna take something.

– Okay, awesome. Wasn’t a criticism. Not that you were saying that was a criticism.

– No, no, no, I know, but I was actually noticing. I’m like, “Wow, I keep doing this to her.”

– That’s fine. Yeah, I’ll roll. So, okay, well maybe it’s actually, what I’d love to share has like a little bit of a meta quality to it so what I’ll say first about the core of my work that while it’s evolved in its expression, in its structure and where I’m doing it, I think really at the core of my work is about helping people to meet their calling, discover what it is, develop the capacity to carry it out in the world. And when I say calling, I really mean, I mean, some people may not experience it as a relationship with God or God coming through them, but that’s kind of how I hold it. It’s like there’s something greater that I identify as being here for and some folks just know what it is and then they need support in, well, how do I actually bring that to bear to the world, and then some folks don’t. And what I’ve found over the years for me personally is how much my expression in the world of what my calling is evolves and so this is the part that feels a little meta is like, okay, so I’m here to help people meet their calling and how I’ve been doing that for a long time is through one-on-one coaching. In the past couple of years, I developed a group coaching program called Lead which is where a collective all works on their own pieces of meeting their calling, but we’re doing it in group. You will have known from having done a program with me, where everybody has their current way metaphor and new way metaphor and the muscles that they’re growing into and so these forms have changed, but really at the core has been this inter-relational collective way of working. And last summer I started to really hit a wall. I mean, I’m sure it’s a collection of things, extracting of my body, overworking, still breastfeeding a toddler. The other day, I’m just gonna do an aside and then I’ll see if I can remember where I was and come back, but the other day, somebody was watching my son, he’s 3 1/2 and his name is Wilder. And, you know, like when he was an infant, people were like, “Well, you really set yourself up for that one.” And we did and we almost put Wilderness on the birth certificate and we’re like, “That’s just like a little too island for us so we’ll just call him Wilder.” But somebody was like, “Wow, this kid really has endless energy,” which is very different than my other child. And it was like the first time I went, “Did he like, did he take mine?” I’m tired, but I’ve always been like I’m a very high energy-generating being and in the past few years I’ve really felt a decline in my energetic capacities. Certain energetic capacities have expanded, but I was just like, God, is it age? Is it breastfeeding? Is it having a baby just before 40? Is it like, what’s going on? And so in my hitting a wall, I really pulled right back, stopped running any of my programs, just did some very small one-on-one work and really went into a winter, which is one of the metaphors I love working with is, you know, against our kind of capitalist trend of constant growth and linear growth is actually working-

– Endless summer, always spring.

– Endless summer, yeah. Working with life and death cycles and given my, I don’t know, my constitution, my personality type, the internalization of capitalism, I have tended to endless summer myself. And so even though I’ve worked with these metaphors in this lens for years, really granting myself a winter has not been something I’ve had that much skill with. And so this kind of wall hitting was kind of like, God, my body, my body of work, even, I think that’s one of the tricky things about being in a kind of evolutionary business is whatever work you’re bringing out there that work’s just gonna like have its way with you over and over and over again.

– 1,000%.

– You wanna teach about winter? Why don’t you actually have one? So I’ve been really, really wintering and in that wintering started to reckon with my expression of my calling, just how much my interior keeps going. I just wanna write, I just wanna write, I wanna write, I wanna write and since I’ve been identified with helping other people so strongly, it’s actually had a lot of identity-reckoning and I am still working with people and I still do love working with people and I feel a very deep pull toward my own creative expression, so not just writing within my professional identity, but writing in all sorts of ways. So I’m writing a solo show right now. I’m about to embark on writing a standup set and I’m just like really playing with it. But it was like, oh my God, my whole brand, my life’s work is all about helping other people with their calling and now what I’m called to is not that. How do I reckon with that? So that’s kind of been my most recent evolution.

– I love this and it’s reminding me, towards the end of last year, I was realizing that something I was doing was not sustainable, which was all these akashic records readings I’ve been doing since 2019. Did a couple hundred over the course of basically the pandemic and I just started to realize that was not gonna be sustainable for me, A, because sitting at the computer for all those sessions every week, also just bearing witness to the stuff that people bring to those readings, which is so beautiful and it’s such an honor to listen to and hear and hold space for and, you know, give them whatever guidance is coming through from their own masters, teachers and loved ones, but it was killing me.

– Right.

– It was so much ’cause I’m such a sensitive person that even if I’m not taking on people’s stuff, hearing it all the time is a lot for this tender heart, to be quite honest.

– Yeah.

– And it made me think a lot about priests taking confession in the Catholic Church year in and year out of it, like talk about the place and therapists during the pandemic who were doing way more sessions than I was doing readings, where you’re just constantly listening to the most challenging stuff people have going on that they’re probably not talking to anybody else about. There’s an intensity with that. So I was like, “Okay, I can’t do these anymore.” And you know, I knew that was gonna be letting down a lot of people and we’ve since had people messaging us, “Hey, I noticed akashic readings aren’t on, I’m trying to.” I’m basically just finishing out packages of people who had bought packages, but I’m not doing new readings and I’m certainly not doing readings for new people who I’ve never done readings before anymore and it’s been hard to say no to people.

– Yeah, I can really appreciate that.

– And like you’re talking about the identity is I know I’ve played this role for you for the last couple of years and I can’t do it anymore.

– Yeah.

– That’s hard.

– It’s really hard. Well, when I decided not to run Lead last year, it was like, God, I don’t know, whoever, or just like, obviously people are gonna apply, but I just like, I hit my wall. I didn’t update my website. I didn’t send anything out to my list. I just was like, I’m not running it and like at some point I’ll tell people. And then I got these two applications that came in and one of them, as I’m reading it, it was like, she was everything, everything that not only that I would want to work with and contribute to and I also knew her and had worked with her before and then what she was facing and wanted support in this program was like mattered so much that I almost, oh, I think I texted you. Do you remember when I was like, “I’m dealing with a thing and can we talk,” and then I never followed up?

– Yeah, yeah, I do remember that. It was the summer, right?

– Yeah, yeah, that was this moment and I had like and I had an SOS call with Rachel and it was like my nervous system went into this freak out in part of obligation but it wasn’t, the flavor wasn’t obligation. It was like being identified with somebody who can and does deeply contribute to other people. And by saying no it felt selfish. It felt like I was going to let her down. It felt like I was going to cause harm. And it was really wild to watch how intense my spin was. And then we just ended up working together one on one and it was beautiful and awesome. I shared about it with her later at the, and she goes, “Wow, I’m really glad I could be part of your breakdown.” And I was like, “Thanks.” Like it was really, but it was a big test ’cause I could see myself trying to then go, “Nope, I’m gonna run it.” And just like, whoa.

– Isn’t that wild? Did you, at any point in that, in processing that, did you bump into saviorism anywhere? Was that part of it at all?

– Oh, good question. Probably. I don’t know that I necessarily articulated it like that, but that’s, you know what, that might be part of my identity, my professional identity.

– ‘Cause I feel like this just because I can doesn’t mean I should thing. But sometimes when there’s also sometimes this element, which this really might not be your experience, that’s why I’m asking, of, well, if I don’t do this, what is gonna become of this person?

– Yeah, yeah.

– Which that is saviorism because there’s 7 billion people on this planet who will find somebody else to support them and if I have to say no, there’s a better fit or I wouldn’t be saying no.

– Yeah, I don’t think I have that professionally. I think I might have that in my family system a little bit. Like if I don’t over-give, if I don’t hold, I can get a little bit like kind of crusty martyr a bit, you know, around what will fall apart if I don’t extract it myself and so that one feels more true, but I don’t think so, I don’t think so ’cause I think one of the things that I do feel actually very deeply is this part of how many of us there are and that there’s a lot of unseen and seen support. There’s a lot of human support and there’s a lot of other forces that are conspiring to heal and support people and yeah, so I don’t think I have an it’s all up to me thing going on.

– Okay, I wanna ask you something. You’ve used this term extract or extraction a couple times. I’m curious when it becomes extraction. What’s the point where we step out of just giving of myself and being of service into extraction? If someone’s listening, going, “Huh, I wonder if I do that,” how would they even know?

– Hmm. Well maybe I’ll start with my experience of it.

– I’m sure it’s different for everybody, so yeah. Experience would be great.

– Yeah, so I mean, just like as a definition what I would say is that more is taken than can regenerate. So, you know, and we see this at a macro level. We’re running out of coal. Like, you know, like maybe we should have like started shifting some things a while ago. So like the extraction of the earth is a real macro version of our micro, you know, bodily extraction. I think what you talked about earlier of the energy and financial exchange being imbalanced, such that more and more is taken of you over time that if you continued on that path, you would end up bankrupt or not, your business not running.

– So I’m also hearing lax reciprocity, very uneven energetic exchange.

– Yes, yes. And then how I experience it. And this was part of in the summer when I was going like, am I gonna run this program? Do I wanna keep working? I was just like, I could feel myself extracting on myself and I went, “Well, I’m actually just gonna play with no more extraction.” So my experience of extraction is like, there’s a point within my body and when I say body, my physical body, but also my energetic body, where I’m like, “Oh, I don’t have more to give.” And this fluctuates and depends on all sorts of things and what I have a lot of skill with and like a hyper capacity with is generating energy. So it’ll be like, “Oh, I’m tired. Oh, I don’t really have it in me.” I will like. I’m just gonna generate that shit but that actually comes from somewhere. So for me, extraction is when I am generating fuel to give that is actually depleting my resources, energetically, emotionally, physically. That’s extraction to me. And so my way of like, as I was going, I’m just not gonna extract of myself anymore, which is a massive inpractice commitment to take on, especially when you you’re habituated to doing that and in this existing culture is I would be checking for, I’d be checking it within my body, my actual physical reserves and my energetic reserves and go like, “Oh, do I need to push through a message to stop or to rest in order to say yes to this, and in order to deliver this, in order to hold this, in order to give this?”

– I love this conversation and then I wanna ask you one more thing related to this. I’m curious. What adjustments did you have to make to be in winter? ‘Cause if we look at the animal kingdom, bears do something before they go into hibernation. They’re not just like first day of winter, see ya later. There’s preparation so that they can hibernate.

– Yeah.

– So as a person, did you have to lean into community, create a village, just make some sacrifices for lack of a better term or some adjustments? How did you set yourself up to even be in a winter?

– Yeah, great, not that well, but I have before.

– Like well, actually.

– Well, because, and I think this is part of what the wisdom is of actually working with seasonality is they’re predictable. So autumn, you know, just like you said, like a bear, you know, there is a harvest season in autumn that helps us prepare for winter and I love that you’re asking this question. And so I think what a lot of people experience when they experience burnout is trying to perpetuate summer without heeding autumn when it comes and now you’re in a winter and now you’re actually in a crisis and that’s what I hit the edge of. And so that’s what I mean by not very well is like, I’m just like, okay, I’m not running things. So like, you know, it totally impacted things financially. I let go or reduced team members. I took projects off the table that I was relying on and other people were relying on. So I like had some really difficult conversations and disappointed people. And thankfully my relationships are really secure and loving and they could see it coming such that there wasn’t a break in relationship, but it was still really hard to make adjustments and put things down so I would say that those were, and those are all autumn moves, saying no, putting things down, but also harvesting. And so like, you know, I mean, in the States, I don’t think you guys get mat leave at all. We do, our government provides that, but not for, unless you sign up for a program, not for self-employed people. So when I knew I was embarking on a winter when I was having my son, part of my autumn preparation was looking at how much time do I want to be able to be in this fourth trimester in not showing up and not generating revenue and then I can prepare by, you know, ensuring that I’ve got a nest egg and for that I prepared by gathering a village and community and I told everybody, “I don’t wanna leave my house for 40 days and I don’t wanna leave my bed for the first couple of weeks,” and so people brought food and cared and it was really awesome. So yeah, I think that there are, and that’s where actually just looking to, so what happens in autumn? We harvest, things drop leaves, composting happens. It’s actually a really dynamic season of a lot of unknown and a lot of loss. There can be a lot of grief in autumn, especially if you don’t want to put things down. A lot of times when I work with people who are entering in an autumn phase, they use language like, “I just wanna burn it. I wanna burn it. I wanna quit everything. Fuck this, I hate everyone.” Like, there’s actually like a lot of-

– I wanna blow this mother fucker up.

– Yeah, it’s like ’cause it’s death energy that’s coming. And so when we can like heed it and make moves for that, then we can like go underground and do it well.

– I really have this hypotheses that like the proportion of violence that you feel the need to exact on the death, or like the aggression, “I wanna burn this down. I wanna blow it up.” That’s like in proportion to how you just haven’t tended to the seasonality.

– Totally.

– There wouldn’t be this buildup, right? It’s kind of like this buildup. Like if you feel like you wanna blow something up, it’s because there have been things that you’ve been needing to like let go of or compost or whatever and you have not been doing it and that’s why it gets to the point of being like, “I gotta blow this shit up!”

– Totally and I think when all of that’s operating unconsciously, that’s where you actually get people blowing shit up unconsciously, creating all sorts of sabotage because there are things that are alive in their work, in their lives, in their field that really aren’t serving them, and layered on top of this is a capitalist system that we don’t recognize as a system. We are so in this water that this is actually just the way things are and it’s so internalized that our value is linked to productivity, that time equals money, that the only thing that is going to make us valuable or successful is to constantly be growing and expanding. And now in this world of social media and visibility, being visible is extreme productive and being valuable. It’s just like, it’s a big mess. And so all those messages make us believe and feel that when autumn starts to come or when winter’s coming, that we are failures, that we are not rising to the occasion, that there is something wrong with us and there’s not.

– So I love talking about the seasons and whether anyone resonates, they feel these seasonal changes as the seasons actually change according to the calendar or whether they phase in and out of them during their life ’cause like you said, you hit winter last year in summer.

– Summer, yeah. So disappointing too ’cause I really wanted to like enjoy the sun.

– And that could be even more conflicting, right, when it feels like I should be out doing things and you don’t have the energy for it. So what this is also making me think about, I wanna come back to something you said when I asked how you did it or what adjustments and you said, “I really didn’t and it created crisis.” There’s nothing I love more than not going into crisis in areas where I used to and I did it by accident this year. So many years ago, actually, I’ve not had a great streak of business coaches, but there’s always something you get out of it one way or another and someone I worked with back in 2017, one of the things she talked about was how like the month of December really is such a great month to be like enrolling for things or like wrapping up the year, wrapping up the year. And you know, if you have a mentorship or mastermind or whatever, doing that in December, not doing it in January with like, you know, the rest of the world is trying to get off to the races like new year, new you, fresh start, da, da, da. She’s like, “Do it in December.” And I’ve really done that for many years now. And one of the things I love about it is then that I go into the month of January, I’ve just opted out. I feel like Januarys are like Mondays. Everyone feels like they gotta do all the shit and all the pressure and whatever and December is like Sunday where you’re like, ah, scrambling, whereas there’s a holiday season. We should be able to just kind of like chill a little bit or whatever, whatever you celebrate or not. And so this year I had no idea that I was gonna have emergency gallbladder surgery in January, but I just did my usual thing of like cool let’s, you know, invite them in special restraining closes in December. So I went into the month of January not realizing that I’d be getting my gallbladder moved on the 11th and then I did not do a single revenue-generating thing for the rest of January, all of February, into the middle of March, but because my practice is to do that harvest at the end of the year, it was fine.

– That’s so great.

– And it was cool to see. So it’s almost like an opposite of your experience where not only was it a crisis happened, but I was inadvertently prepared for the crisis.

– Right, yeah.

– And it was cool to be like, oh God, that’s such a great rhythm. Like I’m committed to that rhythm forever now.

– Nice, nice. Well then you get these kind of, I find anyway, these like magical nods, right, or divine nods of like, oh, okay, this is great. And I think too one of the actually biggest things that got, that had me, even though, oh, this feels like a crisis, to not relate to it as a crisis that is beyond something that I can navigate and hold and recognizing that crises actually do happen. Sometimes we create them. You know, or they come ’cause we don’t listen to things that takes too long for us heed the message. And then sometimes they, who knows, sometimes we are participants in them and then sometimes they just like powerless to the crisis that arrives. But I found that having worked with this seasonal lens so intimately, it didn’t make like the painful parts or conversations or exhaustion, like it didn’t mitigate that, it didn’t make me not tired. It didn’t make me not feel grief, but it helped me know where I was in a way that I wasn’t railing against it and I think that that’s a big part of, at least in my experience is crises can bring pain but the degree to which we suffer about them has to do with how much do we rail against them. And so I wasn’t railing against, and anytime I’d be like overwhelmed or super painful or like, you know, other people are doing this and doing that and I’m just like, I don’t wanna, I’m over here. I’m gonna like watch “The Walking Dead” like it’s my part-time job.

– Yeah.

– And that is nourishment for me right now. And I’m not, I’m just like opting out and opting out and opting out and I could, and then I’m gonna trust that at some point my reserves are going to fill and at some point I’m gonna feel like having a conversation and even like you invited me to come do this back in September and then I was like, eh, you’re like, “Hey, you’re wintering.” I’m like, you know what? Yeah, we’ll see you in the spring, literally and figuratively.

– Literally and figuratively, I love this and I just, I love honoring, I love encouraging anyone to honor this for yourself in whatever way that you can. And again, acknowledging that because we do live in still a capitalistic system, what might be accessible and available to some people might be different than others. Some people might have to find a way to winter while still going to work because they don’t work for themselves.

– This, it feels so important to acknowledge not only are there things they may not have power over, but I also think that different parts of our life call for different, are in different seasons in our projects. So, you know, when, and this is one of the things I’ve taught. I’ve got a podcast episode on seasons specifically and sharing some of these pieces is there was a time.

– We will get that from you and put it in the show notes. Thank you.

– Okay, awesome. When I was, just had my earliest, my latest child, the most recent one, a few months into after he’d been born, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and we then moved through this journey of new and first and I mean, it was all a lot of wintering and caring for her until she passed in our home and it was a really, really intense, reverent, sacred, beautiful, excruciating time, a very exhausting time with a baby that was not sleeping and yeah, a mother who was like-

– Talk about life and death being right next to each other.

– Right next to each other.

– Like on the nose.

– All these firsts and all these lasts. Oh, it was, I mean, it was really, it was excruciating, but it was really beautiful and one of the things about that time is there wasn’t like a question of what was needed. It was just like, ’cause you’re just so in the immediacy of what’s needed, but so I would say in my parenting, personal family life, that was a winter, like really time to batten down and hunker down and be in this ending. Even though birth is a new beginning, it’s still a winter. It’s still got this hibernation, those early months. Excuse me. But then my business was in a spring and there were a lot of new things that I was implementing and putting out and kind of, and reviving after, you know, you talked about this leadership transition for a while and then coming back so there was actually a lot of spring energy and it required a certain kind of energy and being able to know, over here I’m in this wintering, and over here is a spring, now I can calibrate my expectations of what I can give to each. So I’m not gonna be like my business is in spring and I’m gonna give it all this spring energy to drive it into summer as soon as I can. It’s like, ooh, I gotta slow my horse. So our projects and our work, or you know, maybe our personal life, they can be in different seasons at different times and if we can hold those dynamic tensions, it can inform what, like we actually maybe need to give less to something that needs a lot or, oh, I’m in a winter, but I still gotta show up and go to work or, oh wow, I really need deep rest and I’m going to nurse this child.

– Yeah. And I love too, in those times where there’s this just natural tension or paradox or whatever you wanna call it, how there’s always an invitation to go, “Great, what’s absolutely unessential?”

– Yeah, that’s a great question.

– And, or what’s a distraction? What have I maybe thought is so important, but it’s really a distraction. And so I feel like those periods, like what you’re describing and they’ll show up differently for everybody, really helps us to actually see, oh, shit, I’m giving this so much space and it doesn’t, it goes to that like regenerative reciprocity conversation again, should be like, oh, this actually doesn’t feed or nourish me in any kind of way that I need right now.

– Yeah, I mean, even as I moved into my wintering and then just kind of focused on some one-on-one work and didn’t run programs and did I left social media, like there was the actual proportion of drop in revenue was very small and I worked 10% of what I used to. So like this last year has been like, I work with clients two days a week. I work two, maybe three days a week. My revenue is pretty close to the same. A lot of energy expenditure that I’m not doing.

– Turns out I did not need to be in the hamster wheel to survive.

– Not necessary, not necessary, but I really appreciate that you just said that word survive ’cause I think that this, the things that feel necessary and maybe they’re a distraction or they think they’re, we think they’re gonna get us something or somewhere that we’ve internalized as a place that we need to be.

– Yes.

– I think at the core for so many of us, there’s a nervous system wiring around survival and belonging that is driving that show far more than our actual intentional strategy is.

– It’s so unbelievable. Can I share what my recent discovery around this is for me?

– Yes, please.

– And I’ve mentioned this here and there on podcast interviews, but it’s just so clear and anchored in more recently is in the fall, people on this podcast have heard me talk about dating and relationships and all these things so much over the years, my conscious ho phase, which was really fun.

– Conscious ho, love that, sign me up.

– It was really fun. But in the fall, I actually met this great man and he was essentially doing and saying and being all of the things I’d been saying I wanted and I was so bored and so uninterested and there was a part of me going, “All right, let me first check myself and make sure I’m not being like love avoidance, ’cause that’s a thing.” I was like, no, I actually, when faced with someone who was like courting me and wanting to like already make plans for the holidays and whatever and to, I’m like, “I don’t wanna do this.” It’s getting served up to me exactly the way I’ve said I wanted it and I’m realizing I don’t want it.

– Wow.

– And I was looking at my conditioning being like, “Oh my God.” Well, and especially since getting to Miami and this is something I’ve also shared, there were these things I thought partnership would get me because that is another program. That’s more conditioning.

– 100%.

– Especially for women.

– Yeah.

– Especially women of a certain age as I approach 40. But I had it since it got to Miami, community, companionship, like, and even again, it was even more anchored in in January when I had my surgery and I didn’t even need to call my family. My friends had me, I was taken care of, I have a village here now. I have company, the environment holds me. There’s just all these things and I’m like, I don’t give a fuck about dating or meeting a partner. I don’t even want to. I want to give zero energy. When I reflect, I mean I had my first crush in kindergarten. So I’m 38. So I’ve spent 33 years of my life essentially centering romance.

– Oh God, I feel you, yeah.

– And now I’m like these last, what is it, November, December, October, November, December, October, November, December, January, February, March, we’re in April, so for the last six months, I’ve kind of been like, what if I don’t even want it? That was the inquiry. But then more recently I’m like, I just really don’t.

– Wow.

– I just don’t and it feels so liberating to be like, can I really just stop putting effort towards this?

– Yeah, I was just about to say the energetic, can I just not put energy into this.

– And you know what I’ve actually thought about so many times since I’ve been in this inquiry is I don’t remember, I think it was probably when I interviewed you back in 2015 and you talked about growing up, like the compulsion to want to lose weight. That started with like your very first like women’s magazine and then reaching a point, I think you said it was like in your 20s or 30s or being like, “Oh, who am I if I’m not constantly in the pursuit of weight loss?” And this is me right now, like, “Oh, who am if I’m not constantly in the pursuit of a lover or a partner?” Turns out I’m my favorite version of myself. Just enjoying life so much more.

– Oh, I love this. It really has me so, and thinking for people listening, it’s like, so what’s the program? I mean, I can totally relate. I am married, but I had that, like I was, I was very single for a long time. Like I didn’t have boyfriends in high school. I mean, I don’t know that I would’ve called it a conscious ho, I was just a ho for a while. Maybe I was consciously like into it, but I’ve had two long-term relationships, both of which being men I had kids with, but in my, yeah, teens and 20s, didn’t have this, just kind of had this identity of being single and pursuing relationship and pursuing romantic love and what that would mean. And certainly partnership, I experience it as a spiritual practice or relational practice.

– Totally.

– It’s this kind of programming that, oh, then we meet the person, the happily ever after thing, it’s like, we can all go, oh we know that’s bullshit, but like we don’t, there is some part of us, most of us who’ve been inculturated in this programming that believe once we meet our partner and we get married and we do the thing that it is happily ever after, not that it is a ton of work.

– It’s so much hard.

– Healing from your attachment wounds together over time. That’s what marriage is. Oh, I’ve got attachment wounds, oh, so do I. Okay, let’s like activate them and heal them together over and over again.

– And then also, you know, there are, there’s all these things, there’s all these really oversimplified, glorified things that happen in like the meme culture of the world, which is like, if it’s real love, it’ll be easy.

– No, horse shit.

– And like there might be ease about it. There might be softness and safety beyond what you have felt in other places, but it’s so much work. And that’s also the other thing. I have so many friends who are either married or in long-term partnerships and I really feel like in the last six months, one of the things that I’ve done is zoom out on whether or not I want partnership, ’cause it was never a question to me before. Like when I was younger, it wasn’t a question to me whether or not I would have kids ’cause it, again, it’s so indoctrinated. You’re like, well, at some point I’ll take this, I’ll make this step. I’ll do that because it just is the thing that comes next. But then at a certain point I started to be like, oh actually I don’t have to do that if I don’t want to and I started to have that thought around relationship, oh wait, I don’t actually have to do this either. And I was really, wow, like all my friends that are, it’s so much work, I was like, I don’t have any pets, I don’t have any kids. I could also just opt out of this too and who knows? I mean, the thing that I’ve been saying is I remain eternally open and available for like deep love and intimacy if that’s something that God wants for me, I’m like, cool, it’s just gonna literally have to like knock at my door or bump into me at the grocery store or something ’cause I’m not looking anymore.

– That’s so cool. Do you know, I literally, I think of you some days when I am in the midst of the, of parenting, you know, or like I have two dogs, six chickens, a third husband and two children and, I don’t have three husbands, it’s just, you know. I know I just said I had too long, anyway, the first one doesn’t matter, he didn’t count, but the, start over another time. Now I feel like I just like opened something that I’m just gonna like.

– It’s okay, we’re coming close to the end. I’m just gonna listen.

– Okay, great. But like feeling the, and there’s a lot that I love, obviously, that’s like the caveat, you know, but it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of bringing my life force and capacity and love and care to other beings. And of course I receive a ton from them as well, but in the times when I like, I just wanna be alone. And I’ll go, “Ah, Elizabeth’s doing that right now.” And I will, and then I’ll be like, and I’ll just kind of like radiate out the, actually two things happen when I think about it. One is like, “Oh, wouldn’t that be nice?” But then I also go, “That’s not my life, but I can feel filled up and nourished that you’re getting that life right now.”

– Oh, I love.

– Yeah, like we all kind of get to, not everything is for everyone and so we get to hold and participate in life in these different ways.

– And the same way that I super celebrate my friends who are like rocking parenthood. One of my favorite things that I’m looking forward to is who my friends’ kids are gonna be when they grow up because they are being raised by parents who have gone to therapy, who are doing healing work, who are emotionally and spiritually mature. Like even seeing how these kids are not at like four and six and whatever, I love it so much and I’m just also so glad that I’m not doing it. I could just be part of the village. But same, or my friends who are in relationships and they’re finally, they have longed for partnership for so long and they’ve met someone or my friends who are in the long-term partnerships that are evolving and growing and they’re healing and it’s coming, I’m like, God, this is so beautiful to be able to celebrate the things that other people are experiencing in their life that are not our path or even things that we want, but like you said, and even be energized by it. Like, God, I’m so glad that person has that, or I’m so glad that exists.

– Yeah, and what really just struck me as you were saying that, but it just feels really important and maybe a potential reflection point for folks too is when you said that’s also a program, wanting or needing partnership is a program. Where we go, our work, our value, our productivity, is there are just so many different cultural programs that are running, many of them being about who we’re supposed to be or becoming someone and what the different conditions are that are that and how much, I think, a lot of people don’t even ask, “Do I want this?”

– Yes.

– They don’t even ask, “Do I want this?” They just go, “Well, I should want this.” Like you said about children, you know, it’s like, I mean, I never asked that. I’m like 40 and now I’m going like, “Do I wanna have kids?” Like, it seems kind of late to ask that, not because I’m 40, but because I have some, you know, it’s like, I didn’t ask, but I mean, I’m here for it. I’m doing it. People just, it’s like the way that we just internalize these programs and then assume that we’re supposed to drive towards something that may or may not be for us so I love that question, that inquiry that you just kind of, it’s like, “Is this for me? How do I know?”

– And you know, ’cause there’s that question. This shows you what the program is when people ask, “Well, why are you still single?” as if not being single is an indicator of some life accomplishment that we all need to get to.

– Yeah, oh, that’s so strong, it’s so strong. I’ve got a friend who’s, I think she’s 42. We were just talking about this recently and I’m like talking about my age all the time and I was like, really? You don’t tell people your age? And she’s like, Chela, I am single. People are assholes that I’m over 40 and single. I was like, oh, ’cause there were all these women around who were like, not, you know, and those ones I understood ’cause they lived in LA. They’re like, “Oh no, I’ve had my 25th birthday like six times.” This is hilarious.

– I know.

– But it was like she was really feeling the pain of the cultural expectation and weight and judgment and yeah, it’s like, what’s wrong, what happened? Are you okay?

– Or what kind of crazy are you? And I love, this comes from, this is in a heterosexual context, and more often than not, it comes from men. “Well what kind of crazy are you if no one has chosen you yet?” That’s like the undertone of the question and it’s like, “Actually, I’m not out here on display to be chosen by any of you mother fuckers.” I actually removed myself from your menu of options.

– You can’t have me. I’m gonna be over here being a ho.

– Actually, this is not a problem, this is a choice. This is so great. I think there was one more thing I wanted to ask you. Oh, just for fun, tell me about this standup thing you’re about to do.

– Okay, well, I mean, I don’t know what I’m about to do or where I’m about to do it, but I just, this has been like the thing that’s kind of been, it’s a joke I’ve been saying to Andrew for years. It’s like, oh, if this, you know, if this like serious coaching biz thing doesn’t work out, my backup plan is stand up.

– Which is super easy to get into.

– Yeah, exactly. Super kind to women. Yeah, people succeed in it all the time. That’s my backup plan. I don’t know and I don’t actually know if it stand up specifically, like I’ve wanted to create a solo show for a long time and it’s been really funny ’cause I’ve been working with, I’m in a course to do it, to create the solo show, and every week we bring five minute more minutes of content and so I’m like weaving jokes in, you know? I’ve always kind of felt like, you know, my husband and my son, I said I want to stand up, my 14-year-old, like I’m so cringe. He just thinks I’m the cringiest cringey cringe. And so he’s like, “You, no, you wanna do standup?” And so I’m like funny enough to get by, but am I funny? And that’s the question that I just really love standup. It’s one of my favorite things to watch. I love laughing and I feel like creatively I’ve done a lot. I’ve dedicated a lot to depth, to depth and intellect and analysis and perspective taking and it’s just like, I’m just so fucking working and serious about it and I’m just like, you know, I’d like really just like to be funny. So I’m, there’s a, somebody recently introduced me to Gold. It’s like an all-women and non-binary really like safe group to practice stand up and they do open mics and they’ve got a standup 101, so I haven’t started yet, but I think I’ll do that. So my goal is to, I wanna have a five minute set by the end of June.

– I just love this. This is so, it’s so therapeutic for exactly what you said. Like in 2018 when I was doing standup, just for fun, that was the thing, I was like, I could say whatever the fuck. I don’t have to worry about needing to, you know, I’m still me and I still have integrity and values so I’m still not gonna be out here like saying things that are demeaning to others or punching down or like whatever, but I could speak unconsciously about things or not so carefully choose my words and just kind of let some shit rip in a way that I don’t in other contexts of my life. It is so, I can’t wait. I’m gonna be checking in with you about this ’cause it’s just so fun.

– I think it’s really fun and what’s really been cool too is by seeking out other communities that are not online, entrepreneurial, personal spiritual development spaces. It’s actually really contributing to my work and creativity in my work by being in different spaces and playing with different things and yeah, I just like, I’m finding it really energizing and really fun.

– And I also found it so fun to like get out of this bubble that we exist in and remember that there’s a whole rest of the world and there’s all kinds of other people who do other things like, who don’t even know that we exist and that what we do exists. I love that reminder.

– I love that you did, I wish I went and watched you. I think that unselfconscious piece is really important and I think one of the things that I’m discovering, I found this comedian, oh, I can’t remember his name, but I was watching it recently and I said to my husband, “Have you seen this guy before?” Like it’s so dry, it’s so dark. It’s basically dead baby jokes the whole time and it’s so funny. So what I’m discovering is actually my humor is really dark and quite vulgar and so like how do you weave that into a newsletter? So it’s like I just wanna be able to it’s like, I mean, I’ll joke about the apocalypse with my clients, no problem, and people find me that are into it, but yeah, I need a more expansive medium to express myself.

– Oh, so fun. I’ll send you, I have some links to some of my.

– Oh, yay! Please.

– I’ll send those to you offline. Thank you so much. Where do you want to send the people? Where do you want them following, subscribing or checking out?

– ChelaDavison.com. You can head on over, you can subscribe there. My newsletter, I send out practices, I would say on the regular, but depends on what season it is.

– Regularish.

– Regularish. Yeah, musings and then depending, yeah, depending on when this airs or what’s going on, like currently I don’t have one-on-one space, but often I do. And in September I’ll likely be running Lead, which is my group coaching program, it’s nine months long, but that’s not open at this point so heading to my website, checking out, I’ve got a podcast. It’s called “What is leadership?” And those are the places but I think my website’s gonna have all the things.

– Okay, great and we’ll put links and anything else we might have mentioned in the show notes. I love you so much, thank you for coming, this was great.

– Thank you for having me. This has been so fun and so energizing.

– Of course, I’ll see you later.

– Bye.

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