Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.
Hello everybody and welcome to episode number 79 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast.
In San Diego, summer is coming. I love the way that this time feels the end of the school year, the work year, whatever, even if it doesn't mark a huge transition in your rhythms, like if your time, your schedule, doesn't really change that much. There's like an energy to it. In San Diego, anyways, the weather really warms up. Kids are out of school, educators' schedules change, some other people's schedules change and there's just this fun, maybe laziness, maybe playfulness, just adventure that comes across the city.
And I'm also probably projecting my own memories of my childhood, like leaving the house on a bicycle when I was like 10, and just driving across our country town for, like I don't know, it was like seven miles or something across highways, and all of this just being free until I got to my grandparents' house and ditched the bike and jumped in the swimming pool. There's just this nostalgia for the summer and it just feels so miraculous to live in this miracle of these seasons that we have these human brains that connect our nostalgia of our own lived experience with, but that we get to choose what to do with.
This year, this time, over and over again, we have this library of all of the things we've done before, but we could do something totally different. So, I always tell y'all that I like to make a bucket list with my kids, and we have some fun things on the bucket list. The major thing for the summer on our bucket list is nothing. My kids are going to like one week of camp. I don't really know how we're going to figure that out because we both work but they're just going to have free time to wild out. I believe that's so important for kids. So, we're just going to try to create as much as we can, and we'll see how it goes. I want to wild out too.
Today we're going to talk about something that my brain has been playing with like silly putty, like one of those slap hands, like a whoopee cushion. I have been thinking about this really entertaining thought over the past few weeks as I've been coaching clients. A couple of times I said, hey, yo, slow your roll in a moment and consider this. And the first time I said it to one of my clients I was just this happens a lot in client sessions or in my group coaching programs where I'll just sort of like throw a concept out there in the moment that I haven't developed or thought of before, and then you know, most of them I throw out there and that's beautiful and relevant for that time, that session.
But sometimes they stick like one of those sticky hands. I'm all and it sticks to the wall and my brain turns into a playground and I start thinking about these concepts. So this happened a few weeks ago and since then I've shared this concept with quite a few of my clients when it's relevant for them and they're you know you can always tell when something's really landing, because they slow down and start nodding really slowly Like yeah, this makes a lot of sense thinking about this in this way. So that's happened many times over the past few weeks.
And then also myself, I had this day where I was just kind of off, probably related to my cycle coming. I just felt like off, more anxious. I usually don't feel a lot of anxiety, felt a little anxious, but I just felt weird in those days. I think I've said this before but if I feel emotionally off, I just don't talk a lot. I'm like I just feel like I need to be a little bit quieter today until I work out whatever it is that is happening, and then usually it's related to my cycle and that's fine, have a quieter day.
And then I'm like, oh yeah, this makes sense. But on that day, when my feelings were bigger, I was using this and they weren't way big, they were just a little different, you know, a little wobbly. Well, where'd that come from? I'm usually pretty consistent and grounded. I was just a little wobbly that day, so I started using this concept and it really helped me. So here I am, bringing it to you, the concept of playing with a sixth sense. So here you are.
Imagine this, you're sitting on the couch, your couch. Picture yourself there, feel yourself supported by the cushions, listening to the sounds around you. What is it like there? My house? There's like all these flowers that I planted. They're wild and out, like my kids will be this summer. On the side of the house, I planted butterfly and hummingbird flowers and this a couple of species of them are really happy there.
So, they took over all these red rushy flowers. So there as I'm sitting on the couch, hummingbirds and bees, pollinators are all over these flowers, all the time buzzing up. So, I'm going to picture those. What are you picturing?
You're sitting there on the couch, maybe you're reading something, maybe there's some music on, and all of a sudden you smell something burning. Okay, Are you there with me? Here's the question I want to ask you what do you do? What do you smell something burning? What do you do? Think about it for just a minute.
Do you stand up and start screaming at the top of your lungs that we're all going to die? Do you grab a fire extinguisher and just start spraying it everywhere? Do you drop to the ground and cry no. You stand up and you walk around to go check it out.
What is the source of this burning smell? Your sense of smell picks up a scent. You take in that information, that data that the system of your body has offered you. Right, your nose, right your sense of smell, olfactory sense has offered you information about the environment in the form of the smell of smoke. And then you go to be like, what is up? Is it something on fire? Here, is my car exploding? Is there a tree in the backyard?
Did our Christmas tree that is shoved in the alley for half the year just finally go up, like you know, what is it right? Maybe it's a bundle of sage that your housemate or the neighbor is burning. So, you go to check it out and you're like, oh, it's kind of nice. Yeah, okay, it's nothing wrong. Maybe someone has a controlled burn. Maybe it's an overactive toaster setting, that a housemate is using the toaster and it's like it's burning, right, something in the oven. But you don't do any of these things, you don't relax and say it's no big deal or grab the fire extinguisher until you investigate the smell.
And that's pretty much true for all of our five senses and it's also true for our sixth sense, our feelings, our intuition, our gut, that ping, that knowing. I like to think of it as a combination of feelings and thoughts. It's like whatever you like to think of that, your spidey sense. But we seem to have forgotten that. So, whether you call it intuition, gut or feelings, whatever that is, it's just like all of our other five senses, it's just data.
So why don't we treat it that way, most of us, with our feelings, we stuff them down or we just pretend they're not there. Right, we shove them down, or we overreact and act them out like screaming right when the smoke is there. We make rash decisions to avoid experiencing our feelings. If you think of things like loneliness or exclusion, we'll just be like no, no, no, I'm not doing that, so I don't have to feel that thing.
We make a really big life decisions to avoid feeling things or to chase feeling things, or we numb ourselves out with things that could be harmful to our health, harmful to our brains, harmful to our sense of aliveness in the world and overall we kind of stay in a state of confusion about why the heck we're still sitting on the couch scrolling instead of texting that person back. That triggered the heck out of us. Like we'll have feelings, and we just stay confused about that.
So, imagine treating your sense of smell like that you smell something, and you just pretend that you didn't smell it, or you kind of freak out that you smelled it, or you deny that the smell exists. I mean, true, if a smell is bad enough, we're going to plug our nose, but that's true for other senses too, including our feeling or our gut sense. Sometimes it's telling us to peace out and get the hell away from a burning building. Maybe that's what our smell is telling us.
Sometimes, our sense of taste is telling us to spit out something rotten that we're tasting. Sense of smell is telling us. Sometimes our sense of taste is telling us to spit out something rotten that we're tasting. Sense of hearing is telling us to cover our ears, so they don't get damaged by a loud sound. And our feelings are the same. If we pay attention to them. They'll let us know when it's time to bail, when something is not right, when it does not feel safe or aligned with our values or our joy, or just what we want to be doing with the precious moments that we have.
But we don't do that. We don't use that spidey sense in the way that we could. Most of us Most of us have different ways of dancing around it or shutting the door on it in these weird ways. It's the one sense that our human body offers us data that the majority of humans are not listening to effectively enough. So why? Why are we so out of touch with this?
I was talking to my friend, Reggie, about this brilliant human. And Reggie was saying that he thinks that we used to be really in tune with our intuition, but that one of the toxic traits of society is to teach us, since we're tiny babes, to ignore and not trust that sixth sense, that through the last many decades, centuries of economic meltdowns and, more recently, 9-11, pandemics, wars, ethnic, gender and wealth inequality we've been ingrained to not pay attention to that nagging feeling that something is wrong.
So, we're trained, because of this globalism and this awareness of all the things that our spidey senses might tell us are off, we're trained to not really listen to those or to have them really alarm us, instead of having them as data that tells us, hey, something's off. I think that's interesting. I was like, can I share that with people on the podcast? That's so interesting.
My own perspective is a little different than Reggie's. My perspective is that we used to trust it because our emotional compass was a lot more relevant to our survival. So, if we are afraid, it was because we might get, you know, ostracized from our tribe and we might lose our ways of survival. We might lose access to food, shelter, community, we might get eaten, we might freeze to death, and that's just not accurate anymore.
We're still walking around, not fully moved into our prefrontal cortex, so we don't trust any of the information that our system gives us because some of it feels some of it is a mismatch for the world we're walking around in. So, we just kind of don't trust any of it. The world we're walking around in, so we just kind of don't trust any of it. Or we don't get to know it and get to recognize what is what many of us are and if that's true, that's a problem.
Because like what would it be like if you didn't trust your other senses, if you just like didn't believe that it was happening or pretended it wasn't happening when someone called your name? I'm sorry I'm using ridiculous examples, but this is fun. Let's say you like hear someone, or pretended it wasn't happening when someone called your name. I'm sorry I'm using ridiculous examples, but this is fun.
Let's say you hear someone calling your name and you're like nope, nope, nope. Not feeling that right, not hearing that, not hearing that, nope, nope, nope, nope. Or you like turned up the music really loud, like scrolling right, so you don't have to feel it. You turn up the music really loud so you couldn't hear them. Do you know what would happen? Or like you put your fingers in your ears.
If you did any of these things, they would just get in your face. Most likely, most people would start getting higher in volume. They'd start yelling your name like trying to get your attention, or maybe just come up in your face, right, they'd get loud and obnoxious until they got your attention if they really needed your attention just like feelings. Do you feel me? If we're not acknowledging them, what is this data? What is this information tugging at me, calling my name? They get big and loud and obnoxious and weird, or they overflow or explode or leak out in destructive behavior when we just are refusing to acknowledge them.
Or what about this? What would it be like if you made your other senses a source of shame? This really made me laugh when I was in my mental playground with this idea. Can you tell I'm so entertained by all of this? So just think about this. Right, like with our other senses, sight, sight, taste Like.
If we taste something we don't like, we just don't eat it again. We don't make ourselves feel shame and feel terrible for having experienced something that tastes bad. Right, we don't beat ourselves up for hearing the neighbor screech their tires on a late morning. We just take in the information and decide what to do with it. Maybe we're going to keep our windows closed in the early mornings, maybe we're going to talk to them about it, whatever. But we make ourselves wrong for our feelings all the time, which invalidates the important information, the data that we could be getting from them.
One last thing that really cracked me up like what if you pretended your other senses weren't there and tried to make them less acute.? You know, if we don't want to feel a feeling, maybe we numb out through alcohol or food or overworking or Netflix or scrolling? Like what if you just walked around all the time with earmuffs on or purposefully burned your taste buds with hot coffee so you couldn't taste for a week? Or what if you wore gloves all the time so you wouldn't have to feel rough textures and only took them off for smooth ones?
Okay, that's maybe a ridiculous analogy, but do you see, this is kind of what we do with our feelings. We shove them down with substance or social media or overwork, we ignore them, we pretend they're not there for the purpose of not needing to see, not wanting to acknowledge the information that they're offering to us. Maybe that? Or maybe just not wanting to experience how they're offering that information? So wild, right here we are wanting to experience how they're offering that information. So wild, right here.
We are wanting to take back our spidey senses. At least I am and a lot of my clients are and take back our sixth sense. So, what do we do? Well, here's the practice, y'all. We think about our feelings like a sense, and we play with it.
Anytime we have a feeling, we pause like a sense, and we play with it. Anytime we have a feeling, we pause. And instead of acting it out like the smoke analogy and running around screaming at the first smell of smoke, we're not going to yell if we feel angry, we're just going to pause. Instead of beating ourselves up for feeling angry, we're going to pause. Or instead of pretending like we're not angry, not believing that we're angry, we're going to pause and check them out.
I was at a gathering this past weekend with this lovely woman who runs a yoga practice and she's a parent at my kid's school, and she was wearing this necklace that had a pause on it. Do you remember? Like an old? I don't know, maybe they still show a pause like this, but the two parallel lines that are vertical like on an old VCR. It was a pause button around her neck, and I just noticed it and thought, yes, the pause.
We pause and we notice that one part of us is experiencing a feeling and then we notice where it's coming from, just like checking out the smoke. If it's old shame programming or pain programming that the smoke's coming from, that the feeling's coming from. If it's a feeling of insufficiency or something that we just kind of want to like override in a loving way, we just thank that feeling for protecting us and decide how we want to act. Self-doubt is a great example of that. We decide we're not going to keep making ourselves small, as we've been socialized to do. We're going to put ourselves out there despite that old feeling of self-doubt, trying to be our guardian and keep us safe.
In the case If it's a feeling that isn't from old shame or pain programming and it's coming from a thought that we have, my suggestion is that we listen, and we really check it out. If it's not something that we want to kind of reparent ourselves and let our higher mind overcome after we really experienced the feeling in our body, go into our feeling I didn't mention that, but I have in many other episodes dropping down into our body.
Where is the feeling, where is it in our body? What color, what shape? Just feeling and experiencing it. And then we really check out. What is it trying to tell us? Here's what I'll say. What is it trying to tell us? Here's what I'll say, every time that I make decisions and actions based on my true intuition, after doing that investigation, after checking out what thoughts and feelings, what thoughts are coming from, what feelings are there, how the feelings are, what's going on, what's my story about everything, and I just sense a gut intuition, a gut reaction to something.
Whenever I really follow that little ping, it steers me right. My higher wise mind, my prefrontal cortex, using the information from my body, being all synced up and in alignment, all systems go, steers me in a way that my conscious mind isn't quite understanding. In that moment. Maybe it's my spirit who knows where that information is coming from. Whatever your spiritual beliefs are, it could just be your systems in your body. Maybe it's some guidance from somewhere, I don't know. But in that moment when I follow that, I don't know.
But in that moment when I follow that it steers me right, whether that's my universe or my ancestors or God or just my big brain. Whatever it is, it doesn't let me down. But I let it down sometimes. What about you when I ignore it and I do something anyway, when all my spidey senses are saying no, don't do this. Time and again, senses are saying no, don't do this. Time and again, those are the pain points of my life. So that is what I have for you.
Your practice this week, if you would like it, is to ask how can you pause this week? Picture that VCR, two vertical lines, pause button in your mind. How can you begin to see your feelings, your intuition, your gut as a sixth sense, just like your sense of taste, of smell, of hearing, of touch? Where is it coming from and where will it take you next? Okay, love y'all. That's what I've got for you this week. I hope this entertained you as much as it entertains me. It's a funny and useful tool, my fave, and I will see you next week.
Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.
