Eps 536: Self care tips for the season you’re in

Joyful courage is leaning it to what I need without apology.

Transcription

Casey O'Roarty 00:04
Hey listeners, welcome back to the joyful courage podcast, a place for you to hopefully feel seen and heard as we talk about all the things that come with the season of parenting adolescents. Parenting teens is messy, no doubt, and when we remember that our kids are growing through what they're going through, and we are too things can start to feel okay. We can have faith and believe that everything will be okay. I am Casey overdy. I'm your host. I am a positive discipline lead trainer, a parent coach and the adolescent lead at sproutable. I have two young adult kids of my own, and have been in the trenches just like you. I love supporting families. I work one on one with parents all over the world, and run a thriving membership program. Speaking of the living, joyful courage membership program, doors are opening for new members, January 1. I would love for you to consider taking part in it. We currently have 40 members, many of which are in their second or third year. We do twice monthly group calls, quarterly, one on one, calls, office hours, and we have an active community forum. These are real parents moving through real challenges, showing up vulnerably and feeling the love and support from a like minded community. This is my favorite way to support parents, and I want you to check it out. Go to be sproutable.com/l J C, and before January 1, you can join the wait list and get early access to enrollment. Woo hoo. Again, that is be sproutable.com/l J C, for more information and to enroll, doors open January 1. Thank you for listening to my little promo. Let's get on to today's show. Hey, hi everybody. Hello friends. Welcome back to the podcast. So glad to be with you today this gray, wet, Pacific Northwest afternoon. For the last few weeks, you've been listening to shows, and I've been on vacation. I pre recorded, I got everything dialed in so that I could go off the grid, and oh my gosh, I spent almost two weeks, 12 days in Puerto Morales, Mexico, the first week I was down there with my husband, and we had some really good drop in couple relaxing spa, no day swimming time. It was really special. We haven't done a trip like that, just the two of us in a very long time, and it was really good. And then he came home, and I stayed down, and a bunch of my friends showed up, and we all did

Casey O'Roarty 02:53
a music festival together. Yes, four days doing my favorite thing, which is getting my dance on, burning up the dance floor, which happened to be the beach, to one of my very favorite bands with some of my very favorite people. It was so fun, and I met so many people. And it's funny, this band, we've all been seeing them for like, 30 years, and the band's grown up, and we've grown up. And for me, like I said to Rowan, I said, you know, I am doing the things that I loved to do in my 20s, before I had you, and now I'm circling back to it in my 50s, and it is way more fun. Oh, my God, it's so much more fun being 51 and doing this stuff even than it was when I was 25 which it was also fun then. But, you know, we grow into these midlife people with so much more wisdom. For me, I feel just so much more confident, so much more grounded, so much more in my skin and Mann, it's a party, it's a good time. And looking around, I see all these other midlife people, some of which are kind of in the same boat. They have teenagers, or they're empty nesters, or they're people that never had kids, which is always really trippy to me. I'm like, Oh, you didn't have kids. What have you been doing doing the last 20 years, you know, but we're also as mid lifers looking at, you know, all the other things that come with this time of of life. And we're gonna get into that. But anyway, so, so, so fun. I had the best time ever. And if you're listening, because I met you there and said, Hey, I have a podcast, you should listen to it. Hey, hi. I'm so glad you listened and that you are listening in right now. So great. So yeah, got home from this big trip last week, took a few days to unwind and detox and show up back to work. So I'm a little bit frazzled, especially because. Considering next week is the holiday, right? The big holiday, if you celebrate Christmas, if you celebrate Hanukkah, whatever you celebrate, it starts next week. And I am not really on top of things. Let's just say that. But I'm also realizing that I feel way less pressure than I did when the kids were young, and there was this expectation of just magic, and, you know, surprise. And now my kids are like, this is what I could use. And I'm like, okay, great, I'll go buy that for you. In fact, I literally took Ian. He needed a new phone. He truly did need a new phone. And we went into the Verizon store, which, oh, my God, of course, it takes, like, an hour and a half. It's no small thing, but I ended up getting him a new phone, a new What do you call it? Charging block, a new screen protector, a new case. And I said, Okay, give me all those boxes, because I'm gonna wrap them all and put them all and put them under the tree. Merry Christmas, right? Because I walked out of there spending, what, like, $600 or something crazy. Anyway, yeah, it's different when they're big and, you know, sending things out to my family and everybody got a really cute gift box of olive oil and vinegars, balsamics, from a local shop here in Bellingham that you know, will do mail orders. And so everybody got their own olive oil vinegar gift set, and I feel really good about that. So good news is, my family doesn't listen to the podcast, so I'm not giving anything away, but yeah, just feeling a little bit frazzled. How are you feeling? Also not really doing any events. I mean, not a lot of holiday parties. Just it feels very anti climatic this year for whatever reason. And I'm, I mean, I'm here for it. Ian got home on Saturday, so just this morning, we had a conversation around, let's talk about when you're gonna get up in the morning and, like, how that feels and expectations. He was up at like, 1230 today, and I had some feelings about that, but he also got up and took the dog to the groomer for me at 930 and then came home and went back to bed. But we've talked about what it looks like to take care of his, you know, dishes and things, and what we expect as far as time together, so we're having to have those conversations being explicit, rather than resentful, because we're not explicit. It's all the things. It's all the things. And I don't know, did you listen to Monday's show? Monday's show was a replay of the webinar that Julietta and I did with Dr Shefali. And one of the things wanna be honest, so we each had a part. If you listened, just bear with me. My part was, it was all about the gift of presence, or something like that. So my part was, you with you, like how we maintain presence, our presence and show up during what can be really stressful season. Julietta talked about being with our kiddos and our families, and Shefali kind of took it next level. And we weren't really sure what Dr Shefali was gonna talk about. We just said, Hey, here's your part. And she shows up in all of her brilliance, and she starts talking about how the holiday season is a construct, and it's not even really real. And I remember feeling a little like, oh, that's where you're going here. One of the things that she says is she's like, You know what you are the holiday. The holiday is nothing more than you and how you show up. Those are my words. But that was the message that she kind of conveyed. And she was like, you don't have to do anything. There's nothing that you have to do. And if you feel like there are things you have to do, like, take a pause and ask yourself, Do I because what's real here? What's real here? Like, and I bring this up in the webinar and on the pod on Monday, you know, I'm terrible about holiday cards. No, I'm not. I'm gonna actually retracting that I'm not terrible with holiday cards. I'm good for every about five years on a holiday card. That's when you the people on my list, get a holiday card for me about once every five years, right? And sometimes I have feelings about that, especially when I start to get my friends holiday cards, and I'm like, Oh, look, I could have done that. I didn't do it. And then I remember, I don't have to, I don't have to, I don't have to do that. I don't have to do anything. I can do whatever I want. This year we're gonna go down on Christmas Eve, which is also Ben's birthday, my husband's birthday, so we're gonna go down to his mom's, and we're gonna do a Christmas Eve with his sister and her family and his mom, and it's just going to be lovely and different. We haven't done that before, and it doesn't always have to be the same. It doesn't always have to look a certain way. I mean, we have certain things that we do, like jammies on Christmas Eve. We really like doing jammies on Christmas Eve, which I need to get on top of we like to do, you know, we take turns. When we open little things in the stockings, which is typically a lot of toiletries, you know, there's things that the kids can count on, but really that's not a lot. I mean together time period, that's what they can count on. Together time I am the holiday, right? I am the holiday. So whatever you're feeling today as we move into the break and the time I see you, I feel you, I hear you, I am you. We're gonna get through it. It's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. It's gonna be great. Actually, it's gonna be great. If you decide it, make it, make it that way, you get to decide how you're going to feel through the holiday, and if you haven't listened to Monday's show, I encourage you to do so, even if you just listen to the first part, which is me, because I take us through some breath work and some grounding and some practices to really help us maintain and choose and decide how we are experiencing, our experience, so I think it's valuable. Check it out. Check it out.

Casey O'Roarty 11:12
So as I've been doing on these solo shows, I've been grabbing from the Facebook group and using posts to kind of guide us. But I'm not going to do that today. There are some great posts in the Facebook group, so if you haven't been in there lately, jump in there. There's some posts about pot smoking, about teenagers that seem to know it all and are kind of pushing us away. There's some requests around finding some college prep support. There's all sorts of things in the Facebook group, so go check it out. Joyful courage for parents of teens, and if you're not a member, fill out the three questions and I'll pop you in there, but it's a great place for support. I'm not going to use a post today. I'm going to keep on this theme of staying grounded, staying grounded in this season. And when I talk about this season, it could be this holiday season. It could be this parenting season, you know, the adolescent season, as I call it, it could be this midlife season, right? There's a lot happening right now, and there's a lot of pulls, and there's a lot of things that are showing up in our path, boulders in the path, road bumps, obstacles that can show up, that can throw us off, and that can really kind of shove us, if we're not paying attention and we're not being intentional, into spirals that aren't useful, even just the grander picture of midlife, I have had many people recently talking about, you know, the health of their aging parents, a friend of a friend who recently lost a mom, friends people in midlife who are getting sick and dealing with scary illnesses. We're losing people, right? We're supporting people through their health, while also parenting, while also dealing with the holiday our own aches and pains. I've been going to physical therapy myself because I have this weird thing happening in my arm that's connected to my neck and how I sleep, but it's also connected to my hands and my posture when I'm working on the computer, and it's really annoying, and I'm going to physical therapy for it. There's so many things that are in the soup of life right now that it starts to become crucial that we take care of ourselves. And I have beautiful people in our membership, the living, joyful courage membership community, who are moving through really challenging things with their family, whether it's with their kids, like I said, or their aging parents, and it feels like there's such an output to the people outside of us that the last thing on our list is taking care of ourselves. But I am using today as a call out, a shout out, a wake up, to remind you you have to take care of yourself. It's not at the bottom of the list. It's not optional. You have got to put your oxygen mask on first so that you can navigate all the stuff, all the stuff that's coming at you, right? And listen, there's a lot of things, right? There's a lot of things. I was actually I have one of my best friends, my sweet, Nancy. Shout out to Nancy. I love you. Girl. She was sending me a message today. She said, Oh, I went to the doctor. It was a wellness check, and I told her, Okay, I want to talk about menopause, and I want to talk about ADHD, and I want to talk about this and that, and this and that, and it was all these things, because she recognized, like, wellness isn't just one thing. It's all the things. It is going to the dermatologist and having those weird skin spots checked. Now today, don't avoid it. It is getting a mammogram right and making sure that we're all good in the hood, right, and doing that regularly. It is having our hormones tested. And for you know, those of you, I know I'm speaking to the women here with the mammogram and the hormones, but our hormones are depleting. It's happening. Menopause is happening, and I am a huge supporter of hormone replacement therapy. I'm also a huge supporter of you doing your own research and figuring out what the right thing is for your body, but you've got to do it. There's a reason that you feel extra irritated or extra tired or extra achy. Don't ignore it. Don't ignore how you feel, because you are telling the story of everyone else's needs being more important than your needs. It is bullshit. You with you. Man. You start off life, you with you. You end life, you with you, right? All these other people, they matter. Of course, they matter. You get to show up well for them, but if you're not showing up well for yourself, then you're screwing everybody. So quit ignoring the aches and pains. Quit ignoring the weird spots on your skin, because I'll tell you what can happen, right? I've lived this. Ben had a lot of pain in his body for almost a full year before he was finally able to go in and get a contrasting MRI where they found a massive tumor on his spine, which nearly ate through his entire spine and blood cancer. What would his story have been had he gone in sooner? But he was busy. He doesn't like doctors. He didn't do the things. I didn't push him in. I was in my own stuff with Rowan. We can't ignore these things. We can't ignore these things. We've got to take care of ourselves. Go to the doctor, go get all the things checked out, because the good news is you go and probably what they'll say is, oh, no, you're good. Everything looks good. And guess what? You get to

Casey O'Roarty 17:09
take that breath and make the follow up appointment for the following year and walk into whatever challenges you have with a little less weight on your shoulders, because you know that weird spot on your skin isn't myeloma or whatever melanoma or that weird ache in your hip isn't you know you needing hip surgery or whatever. Right take care of your physical body, and also taking care of your physical body is moving your body, making time, take a walk, do yoga, go to the gym, whatever that looks like for you, right? We had a virtual retreat on Saturday for my membership. And we do these twice a year. It's just on Zoom, it's a couple of hours. It's really personal growth and development focused. So it's less parenting and it's more like, really soul nurturing. And my good friend Karen was my co facilitator, and she had us do some movement. And the movement she had us do is to stand up, and you can do this with me if you want, and pull our arms way up overhead and like, stretch, stretch, stretch to the sky, which, oh my gosh, I'm doing it right now. It feels so good. And then as we exhaled, coming all the way down to the ground and bending our legs and kind of in that squat position. And we did that a few times. It was such a simple move, and my body was like, Oh, there you are. Like, that was the experience I had of the movement was my body just being like, there you are. Welcome back. I mean, we live in our bodies, but we aren't paying attention to our bodies, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a little bit. But moving on the regular, right on the regular, on the daily, we have to be moving our body, and we have to, probably most of us, we have to pay attention to how we're eating and what we're putting in our body and our sugar intake, you guys. We gotta get that together. We gotta rein that in. Watch fed up. If you need a little inspiration, we've gotta pay attention to how we are fueling our body, because if you feel tired, if you feel irritated, maybe it's the hormones, maybe it's not that we're moving, or maybe it's just that we're eating shit and we're not eating what we need to feel good, right? Do a little research. There's a ton of podcasts out there about diet. There's a ton of documentaries like do some deep diving, right? You're already probably on your phone doing like, non intentional scrolling. What if you kind of reined it in and got a little bit more educated around food and around how your body what your body needs? Kids, right? Look at your habits. So two Mondays from now, so on the 30th, Julietta is my guest, and we're gonna, I was gonna do an end of the year wrap up with her, but then we ended up talking about screens and phone use and all that stuff. And one of the things we talked about was how important it is, especially with the upcoming like New year, new me, New Year's resolutions. Regardless of how you feel, you can make it a time where you decide you're gonna change your habits, around screens, around food, around substances, but if you're gonna do that, what I would encourage you to do first is get honest. Take a look at your habits. How are you coping with what is stressful? What do you reach for? Right? What do you do when you want to avoid hard feelings or avoid hard conversations or avoid whatever, right? What do you do? How are you coping. And how's that working out for you? Right? How's that working out for you? Taking care of ourselves means getting a therapist working through our shit. What are we still carrying with us that is continuing to get in our way? You know, I love that quote. We are not responsible for what happens to us, but we are absolutely responsible for how we allow what happens to us to drive the rest of our life right. We get to heal. We get to heal from our childhood trauma. We get to heal from bad relationships. We get to heal from perhaps poor choices that we made earlier in our life. We get to you get to you can, right? That's the other thing. You can it is possible, if it's not about that, you know, if you just need some support with accountability, get a coach, hire someone to help you. It is not weak to not be able to, you know, move over that hump and really get to where you want to be going get support. I was listening to armchair expert this morning, because I love that podcast with Dax Shepard and Monica padman, and the episode that came out this morning, which I'm recording on Monday, is Dax talking to Jesse Eisenberg, and they were talking about self doubt, self pity, and how we really can get into this mindset of like, My life sucks. I have bad luck. Everything happens to me as if we are so important that the universe is conspiring against us right now. Guess what? Life is hard. We all have heartbreak, right? We're all struggling. We all have things that we have to make sense of and navigate. My stuff looks different than your stuff, and their stuff looks different than my stuff. But life is a series of events that we get to decide how we're gonna make sense of. And I really don't want to be dismissive, because fucked up things happen really awful, terrible things happen to people, and what happens when we choose to see those awful things as an opportunity, either to be with those things, to grow from those things, to learn through those things, to use those things. Yes, pain and suffering is real, and it is and it can bring you to your knees, 100% 100% a and the mindset that we walk through the world with matters. It does and we can nurture a mindset that's more useful and less hurtful when we are actively taking care of ourselves when we care as much about ourselves as we do about others, when we decide to show up to our life as well as we work to show up to our family, our kids, Our partners, our parents, right? And it takes practice.

Casey O'Roarty 24:27
It takes practice. So what does routine and ritual look like for you? What does it look like to have something on the daily that you do, that you choose into to to keep you grounded in tending to yourself, right? What does daily choosing in look like? And listen, it's an ebb and a flow, right? It's an ebb and a flow. I definitely have fallen off the wagon with some of my self care practices, with being on vacation. And or moving through, you know, hard times, it's easy to release those practices. And they're always there for you to come back to they're always there for you to get back on right you're capable of that. Falling off the wagon is a part of riding in the wagon. It's a part of it, right? Life is an ebb and a flow, and we all ebb, and we all flow, and we get to when we notice, oh, I'm in the ebb. Because sometimes we're in the ebb and we're just kind of like, oh, not realizing that we're literally being dragged behind the wagon. Oh, I'm being dragged behind the wagon. Oopsie or Oops. I'm on the side of the road. There goes the wagon. I'm gonna go catch up and get back on. You are capable of that. And you get to ask for help when you need it. You to ask for help when you need it. And you can also find a community. I love community. One of the things that I met this great gal at the Music Festival, she was going around and giving really cute little pins and stickers, and she's like, Oh yeah, I have a community of women. And we all go and see the same kind of music. We all kind of live the same kind of lifestyle as far as our interests go, and it's a place for us to come together and celebrate being women. And I guess what I did, I joined it. I'm in the Facebook group, and it is so fun to be in there and see what's going on a new community that I'm really excited to participate in, right? So, find your community. Find your community. And you know, I mentioned this at the start, but I think one of the most powerful things that we can do for ourselves is to learn to tune into our bodies. Like our bodies give us so much information all the time about how we're doing right and why is it hard to tune into our body. This is not something that's taught you know, it's not really something that's valued in the mainstream. We don't talk about this, about tuning into our body. Some of us have had some pretty traumatic events that perhaps taught us to distrust our body. If that's your situation, I really encourage you to go get some help, energy work, therapy, body work, whatever is the mode that is useful for you. It's new, right? Maybe we don't know how to do it. Maybe we hear it, but it's like, I don't really know what that means. And so we feel foolish, or we feel silly, or we just, it's like, I don't really get that, so I'm just not going to do it. Okay, all of this might be true, but you can still learn to tune into your body. It's not as hard as you're making it out to be, and so let me just help you up. So tuning into the body can be as simple as pausing, like finding some stillness and doing a scan. What are the current physical sensations like? As I sit here right now, my back is sore. I've been at my desk all day, so I know that my posture hasn't been great. I'm hot. That's a physical sensation. What else am I noticing? A little bit of a headache. I could use some water. Yeah, those are my current physical sensations, right? And, and we can really start to play with physical sensations. You've you heard me talk about this before, so I'm just going to do it again, because that's how important I think it is. You know, we can tie physical sensations to our emotions when we use memory, right? So we can think about our happy place. For you, what's your happy place? If it's safe for you, I encourage you to close your eyes and bring to mind a place that you love, right? Maybe it's your cozy couch in your tidy living room. Maybe it's a towel on the beach. Maybe it's a mountain meadow. Whatever it is for you, imagine yourself there. Truly see yourself there, and how does your body feel? What are the physical sensations that go along with your happy place? Maybe you're not experiencing those physical sensations right now, but can you imagine? Can you imagine, and as you imagine those physical sensations, can you invite them in right now, so that your body truly feels like it's in that happy place. And as you do that, do you notice what happens to your current emotional experience? Right? We can do this with whatever emotional experience Think about the last time you were angry, right? Think about that picture. It. Put yourself in there. How does that feel? What are the physical sensations there? Right? We might not want to. There's rarely a time where we're like, oh, I want to shift out of this experience and move into an angry experience. But when we get familiar with our tight bodies or rigid bodies, or whatever happens for you in anger or sadness or fear or spiral right when we get familiar with, oh man, my body's really tight. Like what's happening for me right now? Okay, I know how it feels to be in my happy place. What happens when I breathe in those physical sensations? Can we make it a practice? Years ago, like 2016 2017 I did this whole program where I invited people, and some of you old timers might remember this, where I would invite you to set alarms on your phone. Like this technology we're attached to this technology might as well use it for good, set an alarm or three on your phone to ping each day, to kind of jar you out of your dream state, which is also living our life, and invite you to notice, what are your physical sensations right now? And for me, I know I would notice like, Oh, I'm slouched. I'm going to pull my shoulders back, I'm going to open my heart, I'm going to do a little stretching. I'm going to change my physical experience, and with that, I'm typically changing my emotional experience, my mental experience. I'm changing everything for good. We tune into the body to connect with where we are in the present moment and perhaps take baby steps towards shifting into a more intentional experience, right? That's why we do this. That's why we do this. We want to be intentional with our present moment. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and the quicker and more often you notice like, oh yeah, whoops, I'm gonna shift out of this. This is not the experience I want to be having. I know what to do. I can shift. I can and that is taking care of yourself, just like going to the doctor, just like moving your body, just like eating good food. This active practice around present moment also lives underneath this self care umbrella, right? You are the holiday. You are the season. Your presence is the present, and how you show up to right now matters. It matters. It's what your kids will remember. It's what you will remember. All we have is this moment. So how do you want to be experiencing this moment? What do you need and how can you be more intentional with it? That's what I got. Listen. I know a lot of this is a repeat of the things that I talk about on this podcast, but you know, like I've said before, and I'll say again, we can't hear this stuff enough. I know I can't hear this stuff enough, and I'm pretty immersed in this work, and it feels great to remember like so much of what we're experiencing is in our control, and really it's about how we are experiencing it. We have a lot of power there, my friends, we have a lot of power. Use it. Go to the doctor, go to therapy, go for a walk, drink more water, eat more vegetables, take deeper breaths, pause, feel your body, and I'll see you again next week. Thank you for being here. I appreciate each and every one of you. There is a interview on Monday. So if you're doing some last minute gift wrapping, I would encourage you to listen. It's a good one, and I do have a solo show coming out the day after Christmas on the 26th so check that out. And I'm just loving you all so much. I'll see you soon. Bye, bye. Music.

Casey O'Roarty 34:06
Thank you so much for listening in today. Thank you so much to my sproutable partners, Julieta and Alana, as well as Danielle and Chris Mann and the team at pod shaper for all the support with getting this show out there and helping it to sound so good. Check out our offers for parents with kids of all ages, and sign up for our newsletter to stay better [email protected] tune back in on Monday for a brand new interview, and I will be back solo with you next Thursday. Have a great day. You.