0:00:03 - Briar
Hello everyone, welcome. I am Briar Harvey. This is the Neurodiversity Media Network, and today I'm very excited for the premiere of this show. We are here with the fabulous Deidra Towns and we are going to be talking about how you change your life and how you change your life, and that sounds very grandiose, and also it's all about the little things. So this is really really important for neurodivergent folks to understand that when we look at the big picture which can be hard for a lot of us often what we're not seeing are the million steps that it takes to get there. And so when we're doing the work, we are naming all of those little steps and then translating that into the bigger thing, and the way that we individually do that is different, but what's key is that you can name that.
So that is what we're going to be talking about in this series is how to name the changes that you want to make, how to speak them into existence, and this is not manifesting 101, because you all know how I feel about that. That is not what we are doing here. We are building things from a baseline and letting it live in our bodies, and how that happens is going to be different for all of us, but there is a process here. So Jirger is going to break it down for you into steps that you can take, that you can feel like you're doing shit, because that's the whole point, dierdre, welcome, thank you so much for having me so happy to be here.
So excited. So tell us a little bit about how you came to this work and how you got here.
0:02:36 - Deidra
Hmm, I'm like which story do I tell I came to transformational work because my life included, basically?
0:02:50 - Briar
Isn't that always the way?
0:02:52 - Deidra
Isn't that always the way? So I followed all the things that I had been taught. You know, you grow up, you go to school, you get married, you have kids, you buy the house, you do the things. I had done all the things and it wasn't working. It just wasn't working. It felt like buyer's remorse, like this is not what I was told I was going to get when I did all the things. And so it was during 2008,. The housing crisis, et cetera. The whole thing fell apart. The marriage ended in domestic violence, the house was underwater. It was just a very, very difficult time. But what happened for me in that moment of crisis was I was like whatever they told me that I had been believing isn't true, and now I'm going to find out what is. And that sent me on a journey of discovery.
And I already had a background in spiritual things. I am a preacher's kid. I am both my grandfathers or pastors, two of my mother's three brothers. It's a lot of church in my family. But I went beyond or I don't even know beyond. I expanded that to include some other modalities outside of the one that I grew up in, and that has was the foundation that I built upon and I was like I'm going to be a pastor, I'm going to be a pastor, I'm going to be a pastor. I came back to what I knew was true. I knew that there's something bigger than me happening here, and when I was early 20s, I heard a pastor say God does everything according to a pattern and a principle, and that really resonated with me and I started looking for those things across culture, across the religious spectrum, across the spiritual practices, to find the common threads, because that's where, for me, that's what I believe would be the truth.
0:05:15 - Briar
I think it's really interesting how and I know this was true for me- I think it's really interesting how and I know this was true for me Foundationally I learned so much more about myself when I stopped rejecting the teachings I was given and started figuring out how to incorporate them into the wider body of work.
0:05:39 - Deidra
Right, Absolutely, Because I definitely went to a phase when I was a teenager where I was like I don't know if this is really, I don't know if this is really true, what they're telling me, and so. But I think it's really interesting how I started rejecting the teachings I was given, and so. But, depending on what paradigm you're in, it's okay to question, right Spirit would welcome questions, test me and see if for yourself what it is, and so that's what I did. It was a process.
0:06:15 - Briar
And it's the testing that helps us grow Right.
0:06:21 - Deidra
It is the experiential things, because that's the real knowing. The real knowing comes from experience, because people tell you things and you know them intellectually, you speak the language, you understand the words, but the experience gives you another level of understanding, which you said something earlier about it being in your body. Right, we're going to touch on how things get into your body. You know it on a cellular level. You know it in a way that you don't have to think about it. That kind of knowing.
0:06:56 - Briar
So when we talk about this kind of knowing, this is especially important for people who have experienced trauma, people who are marginalized, people of color, because that stuff is all there on the ancestral metasellular level, Right. This goes back for generations. Healing, then, isn't linear in terms of time. We're not just healing ourselves now, at this moment. We're healing the past, and we're healing the future and holding space for that is a lot. How do we do that?
0:07:48 - Deidra
How do we do that? So for me, that's a really big question. For me, everything starts with awareness, with your level of awareness, with your level of self-awareness, with your awareness of is this mine or is this not mine? Because highly sensitive people pick up on all kinds of energetic signatures in the ethers and sometimes it's hard to discern what's yours and what's not yours and to hold space for that. And even in recognizing, oh, I have this thing that I'm carrying, it's not yours, but you still have to be responsible for it. So it's not yours, in that it doesn't necessarily have to define or influence your identity, who you are in the world, but you still are responsible for. Oh, there's a thread, right, there's a thread of rape in my lineage. So I'm adopted.
I was adopted as an infant and when I met my biological mom about 15 years ago, I found out that I was conceived because she was raped. And then we had other discussions about other people in the lineage, and this is a thing. And so there are patterns going back to patterns and principles, there are familial patterns, and so my awareness of that is the first step in me being able to heal it, to acknowledge it and, at the risk of sounding trite it's really being able to love it. Not love that she was raped, but love that she's not damaged because that happened to her Right To love her.
In spite of, or even to allow that, I can't be completely mad. If it didn't happen, I wouldn't be here. Do you know what I mean? So it's like I don't want her to have had that pain, the pain of that, and God bless her because she is a phenomenal woman. When I met her, she was so transparent and she had done her own work. She had done her work around having been raped and she had gone to therapy and she had done her processing and I believe that that is part of what helps me to do my work, and it has helped my daughter to do her work, and so it becomes a resource that we get to share with each other. And that's the beginning of the awareness of it, the not sweeping it under the rug, the being willing to talk about it, because you can't heal what you won't talk about.
0:10:43 - Briar
Absolutely, and we're all threads in a tapestry woven together and we don't quite see where we end and everyone else begins. How do we do the work internally in ways that allow it to project out, because that's kind of key right.
0:11:17 - Deidra
Right. So the places it's almost like the squeaky wheel gets the oil the places where you're triggered, the places where you're hiding, the places where it feels edgy is something you know you need to do. What you don't want to do. What is that? It's the pee under the mattress. You can't sleep because there's a pee under the mattress and you can feel it. It's like it's doing like this at you. It's asking for your attention. And so there are these things that, if you can move beyond the duality of good, bad, this is good or this is bad, this is what happened and this is what I can do about it, or this is how I can respond, as opposed to react to this thing, this incident, this circumstance, these words, these feelings, because sometimes I'm here by myself and I'm having feelings. There's nobody else, there's nobody to blame, it's just feelings are happening, and how do you be with that? Can you be with it? Can you have the experiences and stay on your center? And your ability to do that then translates into the way you relate to others. So if you are having a moment, you are in stress, you are in crisis.
My mother used to always laugh at me. She said you don't have to help your friends by getting in the hole with them, so you can be with them and hold space with them to process what they're doing, without joining them in the, in the melee, in the malaise, and that, recognizing that emotions are energy in motion. So you're having a feeling and you can do what is counterintuitive, which is to open up to the emotion, even though it might not feel so good, and to breathe through it and to allow it to pass through. But our tendency is to constrict on the feeling or the bad, the thing we call bad or wrong. We constrict on it and so now we're stuck with it. It's like a Chinese finger puzzle In order to get your fingers out, you have to push your fingers together, which is counterintuitive. So to do the counterintuitive thing helps.
0:13:51 - Briar
And we're going to talk a lot about how you heal your nervous system and release this stuff, and talk to us a little bit about how we start identifying that the work needs to happen.
0:14:19 - Deidra
Mary Marcy has a term called divine discontentment. You are irritated but you don't know why you are triggered by things. Your response to the trigger is disproportionate to the offense. You are flicking off on people and they don't understand what is going on with you. You're emotional kind of, for no reason. You don't know why. It's a feeling of things not working, this isn't working, this doesn't fit. I keep trying to make this thing fit and it doesn't fit. There's so many ways that life tries to reach us and to get our attention. It starts off with a whisper. I myself have had to be hit with a cosmic 2x4 from time to time.
0:15:20 - Briar
Listen same boat over here.
0:15:24 - Deidra
Right, I'm not listening, I'm just going along and then boom, full stop. You need to pay attention to this, because that's the tendency. There's a tendency among a lot of people, especially among people of color, of push through. You have to go to work, no matter how you feel, because you have to make the money. You have to show up, you have to do the thing, and we're not taking care of ourselves, we're not listening. We're not listening to our bodies are telling us things all the time. I, for one, lived from the neck up for a really, really long time. Are you connected? Are you breathing? Are you feeling yourself?
0:16:07 - Briar
And I don't want to make people feel bad, but talk us through how this shows up.
0:16:17 - Deidra
I think of an example from my own life, how it shows up the feeling of something In my marriage. I, we had a conversation, maybe around year three, and it was. I had asked him for something before we got married and he said he would do this thing. I wanted more affection. I was like this is not enough for me, I'm going to need more. He said I got you, I'm going to work on it. By year three it had diminished and I went and had a conversation with him and his response was it's not my problem. And I felt betrayed. I felt betrayed. I felt like but we had an agreement, but you knew this before you married me. But but he was just like you're responsible for your feelings, which is true. But I did kind of think that we had an agreement and now you're telling me you know if you're couch, and so I, instead of leaving at that moment, I went on a full scale for the next seven years of trying to make it better, but it wasn't working.
For one, I can't make it better by myself, it's a co-creative thing and but I kept ignoring that. I kept ignoring it and ignoring it, and ignoring it until I got to the point where I got to the point where I was just like I can't do, I'm tired, I can't do, I'm a tourist, I have it as insane stamina right. I can do a thing for a really long time. I'm methodical, I'm going to do the thing. I'm focused, all the things. I got to the point after seven years I was like, dude, I can't do this anymore. I can't do another 10 years like the last thing. I can't, I won't, I shouldn't have to, I'm too young for this, all the things. And that was the beginning of the transformation. That was the beginning of instead of me saying I can't do any more time like the last three years. That's what I should have said at year three.
But no, no, I wanted to make it work. I made vows before God. I had all the reasons that I was supposed I was shooting on myself. Please don't shoot on yourselves. Shooting on yourself is or shooting on other people. Don't shoot on people, don't shoot on. It's messy. It's messy. And so I was really shooting on myself. I should stay married. I should find a way to work it out. I felt like it was my responsibility to single-handedly fix it and make it what I wanted it to be, and so there is awareness and there is acceptance. This is what it is, this is who he is, this is who he wants to be, and who am I to tell him to be otherwise? And if he doesn't want to be and create what I want to create with me.
0:19:53 - Briar
And the problem here is that often the darkest hour is just before the dawn and you have decided, and then you get your shit knocked out of you by that 2x4.
0:20:07 - Deidra
Exactly, exactly, and so it's an awareness of what's working, what's not working, a willingness to accept what it is. It doesn't mean it has to be that way forever, but you can't heal what you won't talk about. You can't change what you don't. You have to accept that this is what it is. If you're lying to yourself, oh, everything's okay. If you're lying to yourself about what's working and what's not working, then nothing changes. You don't even see how to fix it. The solution, the alternative, doesn't even come into your view. It's there, but you can't see it.
0:20:55 - Briar
So, when we have reached a place where we are willing to consider alternatives, how do we start moving forward?
0:21:11 - Deidra
This is probably the hardest thing because you start taking, because when you change one thing, you change everything, right? So who's going to be impacted by this change? Right, my kids will be impacted. My parents, his parents, all of these different people and facets and the tentacles of where your places that your life touches when you change, all those places and people are impacted.
And very often we try to temper our response because we don't want to upend, we don't want to adversely impact others, and so that can keep a lot of people stuck. It can keep a lot of people trying to make the best of it, trying to make do with something that doesn't work, and sometimes it takes just you got to be done. When you get to the place that you're done, you start to feel like I'm not available for this anymore. It's that that's the point, that you and you start to see that whatever impact is going to happen, I can be with that. I can manage that, I can mitigate that. That is easier than dealing with more of this that I've been dealing with Sometimes. That's what it takes.
0:23:01 - Briar
But it's a choice that you have to make constantly, over and over and over and over again, right?
0:23:08 - Deidra
Right, it's not just one time. To me, marriage is the same way. You got to choose that person every day. It's not just that one day, it's every day. You got to wake up and choose that person again, choose to love them, choose to consider them, choose to pour into them, and you do that with your kids too.
0:23:30 - Briar
Yes, I made a joke the other day that, since the economy is bad, I should perhaps furlough my children for a while and see if we can't. Wouldn't it be nice, right? So since we can't furlough our spouses or our children, how do we take people along with us when we're on these kinds of journeys?
0:23:56 - Deidra
This is where communication comes in very, very handy, even if that communication is I need a minute, right, because you can't explain it, what's going on with you to people. And you need to be able to say I need a minute, can I get back to you in 10 minutes? And you have to have the courage to be honest, the courage to be honest with yourself, the courage to say the thing, to say the hard thing, to have the hard conversations and to realize that you nor them is going to break because of whatever it is that you have to share.
0:24:45 - Briar
And it's the regret that we will look back at at the end of our lives as the not being brave enough to say what we needed.
0:25:02 - Deidra
I find, especially with women, that we have the most difficulty asking for what we want. I think men are sort of culturally it's in the culture that they are just trained to that they can ask for what they want. It's okay. They can be outrageous with their ask. Maybe it's how the dating world is set up, that men do the asking and women do the answering.
But yes, there's something very, very powerful about being able to articulate your needs and to be able to be with no, I can ask you, and to ask and not be attached to the result, to know. For me, this comes from knowing that this is not my source. I'm going to ask you and you might give it to me, but if the answer is no, you are not my source. There's another opportunity out there. And so to ask without guilting the other person, without putting pressure on them, without making them feel like they can't be themselves, whoever they are, to give them the freedom that you would want to have yourself, to say yes or say no, or say later or whatever the answer is.
There's something very powerful about creating a safe space, a space where people feel safe. To be honest, that doesn't happen automatically. We are not trained that way we are not acculturated. That way we don't feel safe. You don't feel safe to be completely honest at work. You don't feel safe to be completely honest, necessarily, with your spouse. A lot of us spend time trying to mold ourselves or melt ourselves into a form that fits whatever is there, as opposed to being a stand and saying, yep, this is what I want, this is what I need, and to set a standard, not for the other person, but for yourself, this is what I will accept and this is what I won't. There's something very powerful and sovereign, your own personal sovereignty, which I'm not really into the colonial words, but that's the word that applies.
0:27:15 - Briar
Well and there's something here about safety and bravery and making those choices right that I am never really safe, so choosing to be brave is sometimes the only option available to me.
0:27:39 - Deidra
Right? Well, for me, safety is something I create for myself. It is not something that comes from outside of me and it comes from my faith and trust in my own capacity to be with whatever happens. I'm gonna say the thing and I'm gonna stand right here on my square and be with, whatever that consequence is. So the not saying the thing is an avoidance. You're avoiding the consequence, you're avoiding the reaction. Right, I'm gonna say something and you could flick off and I'm gonna be like, yep, she got upset about that. I don't have to make it my thing. I don't have to take it in per se, and that doesn't mean that I don't have compassion for you or whatever I've said that may have triggered you, because sometimes you have to deliver bad news. That's just life. But can you be that? Can you be with that person?
One of my favorite movies is I'm a movie person and I often reference movies when I talk to people, so that's the thing. But one of my favorite movies is what Dreams May Come with Robin Williams and Annabella Sciora and they're married and they have some rocky marriage and they have some really tragic things that happen to them and that creates a wedge between them, and one of the tragedies is that the husband, robin Williams, gets killed in a car accident and then Annabella Sciora tries to kill herself. Well, no, the kids. First the kids get killed in an accident. She tries to kill herself, she comes back, they reconcile, then he gets killed in a car accident and she's just all to pieces. But he goes to heaven and whatever heaven is for him and he meets people from life in heaven and et cetera, et cetera.
And then someone comes and tells him that his wife has died and he's like, oh great, when can I see her? And they're like, oh, you can't see her because she kills herself. She's going to go to another place. And he's like I'm going to get her and they're like you can't go there, nobody, he has to go to hell. You know, nobody can go there and come back. He's like I can. He was like you can't even find her. And so that's part of the movie, that he basically goes to heaven, goes to hell to find his wife, and when he gets there he tells the guy who guided him. He says, yeah, I'm not going back, I'm going to stay with her. And that act is what brings them both back to heaven, because he could be with her where she was, and that was so poignant to me because that's really hard to just be, just to be present with someone. He didn't do anything, he was being with her and that decision to do that healed the whole situation.
0:30:27 - Briar
And there are so many places in our life where we just have to be with the people that we love.
0:30:33 - Deidra
Right where you can't fix it. It's one of the hardest things with your kids especially. You see them making a huge mistake, but they're 21, maybe right, and you kind of have to let them. You can say things for me. With my kids it's like I have this understanding that whatever I say don't do is what they will do. So I don't say don't do it. I don't say don't do the thing. I try to say. Are you aware of the potential outcomes of the thing that you are looking at doing? Are you thinking about these? Are you thinking about all these different options? And then they might decide to go do the thing anyway, and then I have to just be there. I just have to be there when the inevitable happens. But that's life, because that's how they learn, that's how we all learn.
0:31:26 - Briar
Right, we can't learn someone else's lessons for them.
0:31:32 - Deidra
Hart, though we may try.
0:31:34 - Briar
We typically don't learn from someone else's mistakes. That's just not how this human thing works for us, nope, which makes this a really cyclical process. Right, making shifts happen in our life requires that we are constantly evolving. Talk more about what that looks like in action.
0:32:02 - Deidra
So change is the constant in life in general. It's almost like if you're not changing you're gonna get left behind, and that is very reflected back to us very clearly in the realm of technology. Right, you have a computer, your computer still works, but they're no longer offering tech support for your computer because it's old. If you're not keeping up, you will get left behind, you will be obsolete. So my father is so funny. My father's 89 years old and he's high touch and low tech. And so I'm just, and he's still working, my dad consulting and these other things. But I'm just like I'm amazed that he can do anything, because he's really not that computer tech savvy and every all of business happens with technology.
And so to your question around being with change, being with change. It's so funny because it's like, on one hand I talk about standing, staying in my center, right, Holding my center, can I hold the center? But the other piece to that is to push the edge, to push the edge of my comfort zone, to ride the waves of change right. Riding the wave requires balance, right, If you stand on one foot, you're not standing still, you're a foot that's on the ground is doing this because you keep having to make these miniature adjustments to keep yourself standing upright. That's the best metaphor I can think of to speak to the idea of how life changes.
And not only does life change, right. So, like my youngest is now a junior, in college I was actively mothering, and now I'm not actively mothering so much anymore. I don't have any grandkids, so I'm not a grandmother yet. And it's like so life changes, so your roles change. So there's that that you ride the waves through those changes. And then there's also the decisions you make I don't wanna do this anymore, I wanna do something else. I don't wanna be this anymore, I wanna be something else. And so those are changes that are initiated from within. So there's the changes that initiate from without, and then there are the changes that initiate from within.
0:34:29 - Briar
And because we're constantly in a state of flux around these changes, it makes it difficult to grow consistently. How do we manage the flux? That's such a beautiful question. I think it's about allowing it.
0:34:48 - Deidra
It's about expecting it right. You're not always going to be in growth, right? This in nature. We have growth and we have contraction. Right. We have expansion, we have growth, we have expansion, we have growth, we have growth, we have growth, we have expansion right, we have expansion and contraction. We grow and we rest your hair. It grows, it, rests, it, sheds. It grows, it, rests, it sheds.
It's cyclical and so it's interesting because that's a feminine kind of worldview, whereas the masculine worldview is very, it's like a vector, it moves in a direction and it's very straight. But that's not really how life is. So for me it comes back to alignments, with alignment and awareness with what's happening. Are you in alignment with it? Are you out of alignment with it? Because you'll be off balance and you'll feel unstable Out of sorts is a word that would describe it and so, in your awareness, if you have an expectation that this is going to change, right?
I had a great conversation with my girlfriend today. She is, she has a young child, she's in her 40. She has a child under two who is autistic and he's home. He's got two therapy sessions that come to the house to help, you know, prepare him, and she was telling me that it's so hard with working and the other children and all of the things. And I was, and I just I comforted her by reminding her if this is just a season, it's not always going to be like this. I know this is a hard season, but it is just a season and it will end and then you'll be doing something else or it'll feel different, you'll do some other things and they'll feel different. I think knowing that, having the knowledge of that, having the expectation of it, and knowing that it's okay and it's normal, right, because a lot of times we get into the shoulds because we think this shouldn't be happening.
0:37:05 - Briar
So how do we deal with the season of rest, especially when we are marginalized, when the cultural expectation is that we produce constantly?
0:37:24 - Deidra
This is, for me, a conversation about identity. So in our culture, especially in American culture here in the United States, if you let them tell you who you are, you will be a commodity. Your, the expectation, is that you will produce whatever, whatever the unit of production is for your industry. And it's really of the utmost importance for you to know who you are. For me that is. I am a spiritual being having a material experience. That's what I believe. I am more than whatever I produce. I am more than that. I am bigger than that. That does not define me. The amount of money in my bank account does not define me. The job title, the letters behind my name none of that defines me. That's all just little facets. There's little things I've done. But that's not who I am at my essence, the essence of my being.
And when you know who you are, it's so funny. My mom used to tell me all the time when I was young know thyself. I didn't know what the hell she was talking about, because I'm very literal. I was like, how could I not know myself? You know, I'm like 13. So like, how's that possible? And then I grew up and I learned how you could not know yourself Very much, so All the way, with some more the way, all the ways, and so. But to know yourself, to know who you are, to know who's you are, to know your strengths and to know what's not your strength and to know that that's okay. You don't have to be good at everything. You're good at your things. That's why you're essential, and somebody else is good at their things and that's why they are essential to the tapestry that you brought up earlier, that were all threaded together in this tapestry, so aware. It goes back to awareness and identity. Who are you and do you know who you are? And who told you that? How did you come to know who you are?
0:39:32 - Briar
Redefining identity is so powerful and can be, in a very practical sense, dangerous, especially when you are a marginalized person. So how do we incorporate those things while also maintaining that sense of safety?
0:40:01 - Deidra
I think part of it is you have to know who you're talking to. So you and I are having a conversation at a certain level of understanding and everybody doesn't have this level of understanding, and so you kind of have to meet people where they are. And I'm not talking about talking down to people, but you wouldn't talk about defining your identity with a five year old, because they don't have the capacity to really understand the concept of identity. And so and it's interesting because there is a whole conversation about identity, about with trans people because they get to define who they are, and they absolutely do we all get to define who we are and to know who you're talking to and to know it's almost like choose your battles Right, I don't wanna argue with you.
I don't have to argue with you. I don't have to prove anything to you. For me that's a part of standing on my square, that's a part of being in my center, that's a part of being sovereign. I don't have to explain who I am, I just am. But everybody doesn't have that and I get that. Everybody doesn't have that and some people I can be in a conversation with about it and some people I choose not to be in a conversation with about it and they'll learn what they need to learn in their own time.
0:41:28 - Briar
But it is not my responsibility to give that knowledge to everyone else.
0:41:40 - Deidra
Right. Right, you've heard what you think of me as none of my business. Right, because really, our experience of others is heavily influenced by the lens through which we see them. It's our lens, right. At the risk of talking about politics, because I come from a political background, the people who really, really like Trump are looking at him through a lens. It's their lens through which they see him. That lets them see him the way they see him. And for the rest of us to see him differently, excuse me, we have a different lens through which we are looking.
0:42:25 - Briar
That's correct.
0:42:27 - Deidra
And to be aware that you even have a lens number one, and that everybody doesn't have the same lens, and to let that be okay. For me, that's where the power is.
0:42:44 - Briar
Well, because part of shifting how you see the world does involve changing how you see other people. They cannot all be the enemy.
0:43:02 - Deidra
Right. So I look for myself. So there was a time when I was young when I didn't think I could kill anybody. I couldn't kill anybody, I couldn't be a murderer, I couldn't be a murderer. Then I had a child and in that instant I recognized that I could really kill somebody. I knew in myself like if somebody heard her, I could be moved to kill somebody. And that was confronting for me Because for a long time I didn't think I was capable of such things. And so to recognize they were all capable of all the things, if you, that levels the playing field and it opens the door to be compassionate to people, even if you don't understand them, even if you don't agree with them, if that helps.
0:44:01 - Briar
Which brings us back to choice right. Every single day, we're making choices about who we are and how we're moving through the world. How do we?
0:44:15 - Deidra
know we're making the right, right, right.
0:44:19 - Briar
And how do we know we're making the right choices?
0:44:24 - Deidra
There are no wrong choices. What if there are no wrong choices?
0:44:29 - Briar
Say more.
0:44:31 - Deidra
What if the choice you make is the choice that you need to make to learn what you need to learn? So this kind of brings us to the question of why are you here? What are you here for? What are you doing here on this earth, in this life, in this body? And for me that comes back to I am here to learn and grow. In spirit and in truth, that means I'm here to learn some things. Learning things is not always fun. Learning things is sometimes painful. Learning things it requires sometimes some hard lessons. I've heard so many people who are characterized as uber successful talk about how they learn more from their failures than they do from their successes, which you gotta be. Can you lean into that? Do you have the courage to lean into doing what's hard, doing what's uncomfortable, doing what's counterintuitive to making those choices? To always be self-reflecting, to be looking at is what I'm doing, moving me toward or away from my highest self and the highest expression of who I am?
0:45:43 - Briar
And that means ultimately, at the end of the day, understanding what the highest expression of myself is. I have to define that for myself.
0:45:54 - Deidra
You have to define that for yourself. Who do you want to be?
0:46:00 - Briar
How do I do that?
0:46:03 - Deidra
How do you do that? You have a lot of how questions. I think the first, the how, starts with desire Do you want to do that? Are you willing to do that, to do what's required, because a lot of us want to do a lot of things until it gets hard and so it's. Do you want to do that? I think when you start moving in that direction, you start to see things that you didn't see before, and this becomes a it's like a spiral. It's something that keeps building on itself. So even that definition of what you see as your the highest self expression today could be one thing, and in 10 years it might look very different, especially if you've hit the milestone. Oh, I want to be the person who yada, da, da, da, da da. I wanted to be a wife, a mother, and I've done that. Now, what do I want to be? You get to choose again. I'm not having any more kids.
0:47:15 - Briar
Amen to that. I love my kids Absolutely 100% finished.
0:47:21 - Deidra
I'm ready to welcome some grandkids and that's it. Whenever they're ready, I'm not in a rush, not a rush.
0:47:31 - Briar
But that brings us to the waiting right. There's a lot of in between times between here and there. What do we do with that time?
0:47:53 - Deidra
Are you suggesting? How do you not get bored, how do you not get distracted, how do you stay on task?
0:48:01 - Briar
Those are all good questions and no, not it. How do we stay on mission?
0:48:19 - Deidra
When there's a low, when there's quiet, is rest a part of being on mission? Because sometimes it's time to rest, sometimes it's time to be still, sometimes it's time to reflect Everybody. The astrology people right now are talking about Venus is going retrograde in two days. Retrogrades are like tests. It's like time to review. Let's review, and that's life. This is part of the cycles understanding the patterns and the principles that are at work. So we're in a cycle of go forward and then rest a little bit, and then go forward some more and then rest a little bit. Even babies do it when you see them scooting on the floor. They scoot a little, they stop, they scoot a little more, they stop, they look around, they put their feet in their mouth.
0:49:23 - Briar
I am a Virgo rising, so I like nothing better than the time we spend reflecting on what we've done and how we could do it better. I recognize that that is fairly unique. How do we embrace that reflection period?
0:49:48 - Deidra
I think it's like it comes down to a value thing. Right, you have a value for review. Let me review this. Let me look at what worked, what didn't work, what I could do differently, what I would do this, what I would change, what I wouldn't change. That's a value, and so I think a person would have to come back and look at their values. Do you value rest? Do you believe rest is essential? Do you believe reflection is essential? Do you see how the difference that it makes when you have it versus when you don't? Some people just prefer to be out there all the time by the seat of their pants. They're thrill seekers. That's what they're operating on.
0:50:38 - Briar
But we have to ask the questions to be able to sit with the answers.
0:50:45 - Deidra
Yes, for sure.
0:50:50 - Briar
Okay, as we are on this journey, do you have any? And I recognize this is very differential for people, but is there anything that you recommend as a kind of record keeping system? How do we keep track of the fact that we're changing things? How are we doing those reflections?
0:51:19 - Deidra
That we're changing things or we're changing ourselves.
0:51:22 - Briar
That we're changing ourselves. How are we keeping ourselves aware that, while we're doing this work, we've become already? It's the awareness that I am not who I want to be yet, but I am much more than I was a year ago or five years ago.
0:51:48 - Deidra
I think people do what works best for them. So what kind of processor are you? Are you a verbal processor? Then you probably need some people that you're in community with, that you're sharing, with People who can reflect back to you. Oh, I remember the last time you were in this situation and you did something different, and now you're doing this. I can see your growth. There's that dynamic. There's people who write Excuse me and so they like to journal.
There are people who I want to say if you're visual, you start paying attention, because your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. So I had a friend. I was dating a guy and he used to always complain about the cops. The cops are always stopping me. I can't stay in the cops. And I was like you're giving them too much attention. You're giving them too much attention. Stop paying attention to them and they'll stop paying attention to you. And he did. And then, a few months later, he was like I don't even see the cops anymore. So that's a seeing thing. The things you used to see, you don't see them anymore. I was sitting in the seat right here. My cousin was sitting next to me and he kept getting eaten by mosquitoes and I was not yeah that one hasn't worked for me yet, but I'm going to keep on working on it.
0:53:18 - Briar
Keep working on it, okay, okay. What would you say to people who are just starting this journey?
0:53:33 - Deidra
Hmm, oh, that's a good question. So people who are just starting the journey of self-awareness, so people who are just starting the journey of self-awareness, how do they know that they're starting the journey?
0:53:51 - Briar
Oh, asking good questions back, because they have at least been uncomfortable enough to know that they need a change.
0:54:04 - Deidra
Okay, I think, follow your curiosity. You probably are not in a space yet where you really trust yourself or you trust your intuition yet. You're not quite there yet, but you can follow your curiosity. Sometimes I ask people what they want and they don't know what they want. But they know what they're curious about. What are you curious to learn? What are you curious to know? What are you curious to experience? Follow that and see where it leads you and it will lead you into the experiences that will grow you.
0:54:54 - Briar
Yes, that's perfect, and I think that's where we'll leave it, because we're going to be talking a whole lot more about how you trust your intuition and how you heal and how you sit with these things. This is going to be an amazing series, dear. I'm so excited.
0:55:15 - Deidra
I'm so excited, I'm so grateful to be able to share.
0:55:20 - Briar
See, this was so much easier than you thought it was going to be.
0:55:23 - Deidra
Absolutely. I was totally nervous.
0:55:27 - Briar
And this is amazing You've got all these people here still sitting with you.
0:55:36 - Deidra
Thank you for coming, thank you for my friends.
0:55:39 - Briar
Yes, thank you for being here. We are the Neurodiversity Media Network. We are building masterclasses that allow us to explore these kinds of concepts in depth. We want to be able to have these bigger conversations and ask these hard questions and figure out what that looks like. And if you have not yet subscribed, you can find us at neurodiversitymedianetworkcom. Lead memberships are on a discount. It's my birthday today. It's 20% off, taking it to a $20 per month. Right now. This is the only time of year I run a discount, so get on the list if you would like to see more of these kinds of classes. We could not do this without you. Thank you all so much for being here today, and we will see you again two weeks time, and we will be talking about making all of these things work together. It's going to be great.
0:56:46 - Deidra
Very excited.
0:56:47 - Briar
All right, y'all. See you next time Bye.
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