Mini Episode: Excavating the Basement of Our Soul

When I hit rock bottom in 2020, it felt like the basement of my soul was full. What do I mean by that?

If our souls take the form of homes, and these homes have basements, then mine was filled with junk. 

I never opened my basement door, but occasionally, I’d peek through the door crack. Then I’d close it quickly, not wanting to deal with that right now. My basement was a dark, scary place to be.

But as I hit rock bottom, and RT and I separated for a period, I couldn’t NOT ignore that door any longer. My basement was bursting at the seams, and I was confronted with this opportunity to begin my inner work in earnest. It was time to start digging myself out.

My “opening the basement door” metaphor is one I use a lot in coaching. Every time I hear this metaphor, it resonates with me on so many levels, which is why I’m sharing it with you today.

Resources & Links

Did this episode resonate with you? Share your takeaways with Lindsay directly at hello@lindsayroselle.com. 

Learn more about Lindsay’s coaching and consulting services at https://www.lindsayroselle.com or follow along on Instagram at @lindsayroselle and @motherload.pod.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Mother Load, a podcast for ambitious entrepreneurial mothers who are navigating the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful when it comes to the relationship between their desire to succeed and their devotion to motherhood. I'm your host, Lindsay Roselle, a serial entrepreneur, growth and performance coach, and boy mama of two. Each week I'll bring you solo episodes, engaging interviews, and candid conversations that expand your capacity to do both things well, help you feel less alone, and hopefully bring a little levity to what can otherwise feel like a very heavy load. I'm so grateful you're here. Now let's jump into today's episode. I just want to share this metaphor that I use a lot in my coaching. And every time I say it, it resonates to a level where I'm like, dang, I need to share this with more people, not just my clients, because I think that this really gives a way of thinking about doing inner work that makes it really tangible and understandable. So I call this my opening the basement door reference metaphor practice guide. So how this often comes up in my coaching is when I'm telling my story around what led me into the deep inner work and into consistent inner work and how I experienced that feeling of kind of waking up. And for me, over my lifetime, it had felt like a lot of things had built up in me, just a lot of resentment and a lot of kind of regret and these feelings that start to seethe underneath the surface and can degrade the quality of everything else that you do, but aren't necessarily that hard to hide. And I think by the time I got to 2020, where everything kind of fell apart for me, there was a lot of that ugliness that I had just shoved down and shoved down and shoved down. And I'm an Enneagram three, and there's this notorious part of being an Enneagram three that is like we can chameleon into anything we want to be. We can hide our emotions and compartmentalize and really not feel, even though we're in the heart triad of the Enneagram, we can really not feel like dissociate from the heart, dissociate from emotions and kind of show up as whoever we want to be, devoid of emotion or in some version of emotion that is appropriate for the setting, not necessarily authentic to us. And I'm guilty of that. You know, there were so many things over my life through 2020 where I would be in situations where I'm wanting to say or do or feel something else, but I'm kind of showing up in a version of myself that's the best thing for that situation, that's, you know, getting me what I need out of that situation, even if it's to an extent kind of painful or out of alignment for me. So what that led to in 2020 was, you know, this rapid acceleration after COVID hit with a couple of my businesses where I was facing failure. You know, I was facing closing those businesses down, partially because they'd been mandated to close and partially because I was so effing out of alignment with them by that point that COVID really brought it to the surface and in some ways was a really beautiful kind of reckoning for me because it forced me to look at these two businesses and say, is this really, really what you want to do? I bring all this up because what it felt like when everything kind of hit rock bottom in the fall of 2020, it felt like the basement of my soul was full. What I mean by that is, you know, every as people, as humans, our souls are kind of the house that we live in, right? And everything about us is inside of this home we build within inside of ourselves. And when I think about that, it's like, okay, this home inside myself had this basement that I never opened the door to. And occasionally I would peek in through the door and just see darkness and gunk and buildup and all the gross things and just close the door again really quickly and be like, I don't want to go down there. I don't even want to deal with that right now. That's not a fun place to be. It's dark, it's scary, it smells weird, you know, all the things that a lot of basements are. And it's funny in my mind, as I'm telling this story, I'm like having a vivid flashback to the basement of the home I lived in as a child, which was like a hundred-year-old home at the time. So my inner child doesn't like this either. But as I hit rock bottom, I really felt like that inner basement was full. And I could not ignore that like the door to the basement is like bulging at the seams of the door and like kind of in cartoons, like the door is bending. It just wants to burst open and let out all this stuff that really needs to be worked on. And when RT and I separated and I was really kind of confronted with this opportunity to begin the inner work in earnest and consistently, I really felt like, okay, it's time to open the basement door and start digging myself out. And what I mean by that is the metaphor I make is the inner work literally feels like you have to open the door to the basement of your soul and you've got to take that stuff out shovelful by shovelful. And so it's every single day, it's like take a shovel. You know, you got to look at what's in the shovel. You need to, is there anything in here that needs separated, cast out, thrown away? Is there anything in here that we need to take and learn from? Or is that a memory that we want to keep or we want to reframe? So it's not just as easy as like, okay, I'm just gonna dig all this stuff out and not look at any of it and haul it away and be done. It really is, I'm going to take this out shovelful by shovelful. So day by day, looking at every little bit of what I'm excavating out of this basement of the soul and learning from it. And for me, you know, I remember sitting in therapy on the 180th day of my dark hour. So 180 days straight, I journaled and I did my dark hour practice. I have another episode about that. You guys can go back and listen to. I did that for 180 days straight, and every single day was looking at an element of myself that I was learning about through reading books, self-exploration through journaling, podcasting, therapy, family reflections, RTs reflecting stuff back to me, my own insights, because it's kind of cumulative. As you start to have insights about yourself, it's easier to have more insights about yourself. And so as I got deeper and deeper into the work, so as I dug deeper and deeper into my own basement of my soul, you know, it starts to feel easier. You get through kind of the hard shell of everything, and then you're just digging out the softer dirt all the way until you get down into this cavern, you know. And in my mind, it's like this dirt cave underneath the house that is you, underneath this home you've built within yourself. And it's like this dirt basement, and it's actually a quite a cozy, warm place to be if it's all cleaned out and you've turned the light on, you've built a little fire, and you make it a place that's actually warm and inviting and safe. And for me, the picture in my mind is like literally a little wood-burning stove and a rocking chair and a cozy blanket and this like red heart hanging on the wall. And for me, it's this visual of finding my heart that was so buried underneath all of this accumulated shit of my life that I had allowed to bury my heart so deep in this cavern of my soul that it took me months and months and months of daily practice to excavate out this space and get back down to where my heart lived. And once I uncovered my heart and it could breathe again, it wasn't suffocating underneath the weight of all the unexplored and unresolved parts of myself that I didn't love or that I had stuffed away, or all these hurts and wounds and shadows and all the things. Once I got into this space, it was actually quite a beautiful place to be. And for me now, this practice, my inner work practice, the dark hour, all these things, the whole point for me is to keep taking the shovel fulls out so that that space does not ever accumulate so much again, where my heart gets suffocated and the door is bulging at the seams, and it's a place that I don't want to go. You know, it's one of those things where if we can keep up with the maintenance of this basement of our soul, if it if we can keep it cleaned out and we can keep the fire going and it remains a place that we can go spend time with ourselves, then we don't get to the point where our life falls apart again because we're not seeing how out of alignment we are. So I wanted to offer that today as a metaphor for you and for these times when it feels like doing inner work is another hard thing that we have to do. It's another, it's more work on top of all the other labor we do in our lives as women, as mothers. And I often come back to this thought, this visual in my mind of like, if I just go take a shovel full out, you know, if I keep it clean, if I go in there and I look at this thing that just happened, or this new, this new trigger coming up, or this pattern I see repeating, and I go take that shovel load of dirt out today and I bring it out into the light and I explore what's going on and I can cast it out of the space, then this basement of my soul, this place where the warmth comes from, where where the fire is built that heats up the whole house, like it's the furnace, right? If I can keep up with it and I can get the gunk out before it accumulates, then the fire never goes out. The warmth never goes away. And I stay really in touch with my heart and with my soul. So I hope that that's helpful. I hope it's a helpful analogy. As always, I love to talk about this stuff. So feel free to reach out to me on Instagram and share your thoughts. And I always appreciate you listening. I'll see you on a future episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you love this episode and know someone else that would benefit from today's conversation, it would mean so much to me if you share this episode with them or even share it to your social media and tag me so I can personally thank you. As always, I am so grateful you're on this journey with me. And until next time, remember that even when the load feels really heavy, you are never alone.