Welcome to the One Heart Podcast, I’m you’re host Brooke Snow and I’m so grateful you are here.
In this episode we are going to explore a question. Typically in social settings we tend to ask the same questions of each other.
How are you?
What’s going on in your life?
Or if it’s someone you haven’t met before, perhaps questions like, Where are you from? What do you do for a living? Do you have children? Are you married?
While these questions are still important insights into someone’s life, I was recently asked a casual question at a dinner that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for more than a month. It stopped me in my tracks and made my heart beat fast. I’ve never been asked this question before so I didn’t have a practiced response, and perhaps that is why it was so impactful. I had to really really search within myself for an answer, and to be honest, that search is still happening. And the search to this single question has added so much meaning to my life. I’m excited to ask you the same.
But before we get started, I invite you to join me in a short three breath meditation to settle into your own heart. After all, this is an incredible practice for finding the answers in our own soul.
When I was in Boston last month I had a dinner conversation that rocked my world. My friend Lizzy asked a simple question that I believe will go down in history as one of those moments in which the whole world stands still and there is life before and life after. For those listening, this question might not seem all that magnificent. For me, truly allowing myself to contemplate an honest answer in many ways has shifted the trajectory of my life.
What was the question?
What makes you feel alive?
What makes you feel alive?
So I offer this same question to you… What makes you feel alive?
Now this question of course leads me down the rabbit hole of so many other related questions…
First being, do you feel alive right now?
I was recently reading a book that spoke about the five existential fears of a human. First among those fears is no surprise. It is the fear of death. But weirdly, another related fear to that of death, is the fear of living.
Most people may not think of living your life as something to be afraid of. But if you are interested in treating this as a honest inquiry for yourself, I ask you the same question. How might you be afraid of living?
And I’m not talking about the basics of being alive. You’re physically breathing, you exist, you have a job and a family and responsibilities and you check the boxes of your to do list each day. You can do all of this and not feel alive at all. You can do all of this and feel that you are living on auto pilot or living in a safety zone. You can do all of this and feel like you are living it all for someone else…
Maybe that someone else is your parents, your spouse, your children, your job, your community or some identity that was presented to you by an institution outside of yourself as who you are supposed to be and the life you are supposed to have in order for you to be happy. The irony, is that those ideal identities are laughably one size fits all and impossibly perfectionistic and never take into account your unique personality, gifts, desires, dreams, and divine mission. So… when your day to day is operating to serve everyone else or to serve an identity that actually isn’t YOUR UNIQUE BLUEPRINT, you will quite likely NOT FEEL ALIVE.
You will likely be living life by playing it safe. Doing the things you believe you are supposed to do.
I have worked women for several years in my Creation Coach Certification program and we spend a significant amount of time talking about what brings you joy. It’s always interesting to note that many women have no idea what brings them joy. And I totally get it. I have had seasons where I couldn’t answer this question either. I was so dissociated from my own needs that to answer that question felt really distant. One of the requirements for our certification is that certifiers have a big JOY goal that they work on for the year and it’s so funny for me to watch people turn the joy goal into something they think is far more productive.
“I’m going to grow my business!”
“I’m going to remodel my kitchen!”
“I’m going to organize all the papers in my office that have piled up for the past ten years!”
No judgement on these goals. It’s very possible that these things really do bring joy to these individuals. But my hunch in the energy I was reading around their answers, is that they really don’t know what their joy is and they think that by having these projects completed then they will experience joy as an outcome. I highly suspected that the process of getting to the outcome was not exactly something they enjoy.
And thus, I think this is why I loved this new question posed to me so much. It is not at all targeted as an outcome. Instead it invites you to consider what makes you feel ALIVE in the present moment.
What makes you feel alive?
What does feeling alive feel like?
Can you think of a moment in your life when you truly felt alive?
I think for me, feeling alive means that I am ultra present and all my senses are activated. I am acutely aware of my environment, what I hear, smell, feel, taste, and see…
I remember feeling vibrantly alive while skinny dipping in Jackson Lake at midnight under the light of moon with all my summer girl friends in college. Of course, none of us were brave enough to run naked to the lake, we simply took our suits off once we were in water up to our necks and raised them above our heads in cheers at our scandalous act and then properly put them back on before coming out the water. But my goodness, swimming nude in a fresh water glacier lake most definitely made me feel alive. I had the most glorious refreshing sleep that night.
I remember feeling alive welcoming a new baby into my life. Having gone through all the stages of pregnancy and then seeing this new person in my arms now on the outside of me and so dependent upon me for their life.
I remember feeling alive after surviving 9 pulmonary embolisms after the birth of my second child and nearly dying from being unable to breathe. To go from an ambulance pumping 20 liters of oxygen into my body, to a life flight helicopter to miraculously later on breathing on my own without support, very much made me feel alive. Alive because my brush with death was so so close.
These of course are all epic moments, and they are memorable and often a once in a lifetime moment.
Sometimes they are planned for, sometimes they come upon us unexecptedly, sometimes they are initiated by someone else and we just happen to join in (for the record I did not plan the skinny dipping adventures but I have been forever grateful to my friend Alison Cartwright for being the thrill seeker because otherwise I would have spent my life being proper and sticking to the expected day in day out work life of a summer job.
I tend to think my exposure to these alive moments was probably greater when I was single and engaging with friends who were more adventurous. I confess, that I have always been a serious person, but I was probably more open to play before I got married and somehow getting married felt like it came with a societal expectation to take life more serious. So imagine serious Brooke thinking she needs to become MORE serious than before. Then when I had children, the serious serious Brooke, now needs to get even more serious because she has kids. Now I’m serious serious serious!
I know that there are people who have a natural gift for playfulness and adventure regardless of whether or not they are adults or married or have a long list of responsibilities. To those of you like this, I consider you my role models. Please keep playing and being adventurous and sharing it on social media and reminding the rest of us that we need to not lose what it means to feel alive.
My friend Lizzy who asked me this question happens to be one of these types of people. She’s naturally playful, funny, adventurous, and lives a very embodied life. Having this question come from her felt like the most beautiful invitation to investigate how I could live more in that energy of being alive.
As I sat there thrilled by her question i started to slowly answer what came to my mind.
What makes me feel alive?
Music.
Nature.
Hiking.
Biking.
Hugs and kisses with my daughter.
Hugs and kisses with my husband.
Really amazing food that I can just eat with my eyes closed so I can divert all my sensory power to just tasting and enjoying the flavors.
Chocolate.
Ice cold Kombucha.
Mocha Lattes.
Being in the rain.
Yoga.
Dancing.
Chanting with my Harmonium.
Doing a really amazing guided meditation.
Being underneath the starry night sky.
Watching the moon.
Walking in water.
Washing my face in cold water from a mountain stream.
Being on the top of a mountain.
Improvising at the piano
Walking outside in the dark.
Walking outside in the early morning.
Listening to crickets.
Smelling essential oils
Traveling to a new place
Marveling at the sunset.
These are just a few snapshots of what makes me feel alive. And you know what, I could do almost all of those things every single day if i wanted to. They’re easy. Most of them are even free.
I have spent the last few years facing a lot of the beliefs that I have grown up with and really looking at which ones were serving me and which ones were not. One of the trends I have noticed in my own behavior is how much I lived for the future. Whether that future was the next life or the next outcome I was working towards. Nearly every self help book I’ve ever read has put me on course for an outcome. The American Dream is all about an outcome, you can become something better than you are now, you can make something of yourself. Religion taught me to live my life for a heaven that comes after I die. Everything seemed to be aimed towards a future destination, all the time.
There’s a time and place for future thinking. But when your entire life is spent living for the future, you miss out on the present. You aren’t really alive if you are living in the future or if you are living in the past. You can only experience what it really feels like to be alive if you are present. When you’re living in the future or the past you are living in your mind.
The power of the present is the embodied experience of living with all your senses right now and letting go of the judge or victim narration in the mind.
This is when I feel most alive. When those voices turn off and my senses turn on and I can fully experience and appreciate this moment right now. To feel the wonder of what it is to be alive RIGHT NOW…
Not feeling alive WHEN
I will feel alive when I make more money
I will feel alive when this person changes into the person I want them to be for me.
I will feel alive when I have a new house, a new car, a new body
I will feel alive when I have the approval from the people I seek
Weird thing to say, but feeling alive is a skill. And you have to practice it by experiencing it.
Even if you have future outcomes you’re really working for, if you aren’t allowing yourself to feel alive NOW, when that outcome finally makes it’s way to you, don’t be surprised if you don’t feel the way you hoped you would, simply because you’re so out of practice at feeling.
The Law of Attraction emphasizes the need to feel the way you want to feel now, to help you attract what you want in life.
I’ve just spent the last seven lessons talking about emotions and feelings. What’s it all for? Why does it all matter?
This is why it matters.
So you can feel alive.
So you can get out of auto pilot living.
So you can get out of only living for a hoped for future while missing the life the you have right now.
So you can un-numb yourself from all the emotion you think you’re too afraid to feel and actually feel alive again.
Being alive, truly living, is having the faith to allow yourself to be fully human. Yes, sometimes feeling alive means you’ll feel pain, anger or grief or sadness. And, it also means that you’ll feel gratitude, wonder, awe, love, exhilaration, and joy. This is totality.
To live with totality, means to live life embracing all of it. The ups and the downs. The highs and the lows. The joys and the sorrows. You’re willing to feel all of it, because you know what a gift it is to even be here on this planet.
We don’t always think of life here as a gift. Sometimes life is something we just want to escape because it feels hard. I’ve been there. I’ve been through some betrayal and sorrow so deep that I no longer wanted to live. Even though I could see good in my life, the burden of feeling so broken hearted felt too heavy to bear and I wanted to be done feeling and being done living felt like the only way I could be free from feeling what hurt too much to feel. If this is how you feel, please know that no feeling lasts forever. It can’t. Everything passes eventually. The pleasure and the pain. And if you have the courage to feel the depths, you open yourself to also feel the heights.
The past few years have been my own dark night of the soul. I have experienced one epic trauma after another. One day in tears I joked with a friend that the first forty years of my life were easy compared to what I have been through the past three years as if i cosmically decided to cram all the hard life lessons into a short time frame. We laughed together. And then I marveled at how I would have enjoyed those first forty so much more, had I known how good they really were.
The only constant about life is change. Life is always changing. And even if time feels slow and feelings feel slow… they too will change. They have too. The world keeps spinning, the seasons keep changing, the clouds float across the sky, literally everything in the universe is in constant flux. Nothing is actually static. Even the most painful circumstances and feelings– by nature of universal law –HAVE TO CHANGE.
We can resist that change. We can fear the change. We can block it by not allowing ourselves to feel our feelings … but low and behold, what happens if we do allow ourselves to feel? Our feelings change. They move on. And so do we.
Hopefully this series of Reclamation of Feeling has helped to provide you with some tools and exercises to help you know how to unblock emotionally. How to allow yourself to feel the depths so you can feel the heights.
And what is it all for?
So you can feel alive.
So you can more fully LIVE.
Not live in the past or in the future….
But to live RIGHT NOW.
To be able to live right now without the voice of the judge or critic in the mind, but to turn those voices off and turn your senses on.
Enjoy the wind on your face.
Enjoy the smell of freshly cut grass.
Enjoy the beauty of mother nature’s splendor.
Enjoy the laughter and hugs and tears of those you love.
Take delight in food and music and gathering and celebrate life by FULLING LIVING IT.
And you can only FULLY LIVE, if you’re willing to FULLY FEEL.
You can only fully live, IF YOU’RE WILLING TO FULLY FEEL.
You can only fully live, IF YOU’RE WILLING TO FULLY FEEL.
It’s worth it.
And you have to practice.
Start with the small stuff.
I used to live by the mantra of work now and play later. Sometimes that could also be interpreted to mean work now and live later. Since I’ve been pondering this question, I’ve changed my mantra.
Live now.
I’m excited to spend my summer living. Weird to have a goal to be alive, but I want to savor moments. I want to fully feel. I want to experience life so deeply that I build core memories from the most basic simple moments because I got so lit up by them. I want to touch the sacredness of feeling every single day. I want to live.
I know that I will still experience hard feelings and hard moments to come. But I feel differently now. I’m willing to feel it all because I know nothing lasts forever. I’m willing to feel it all because I know the universe expands equally in both directions. I am willing to feel it all, because doing so has given me access to greater love and peace that I have ever known.
Live now.
Live now.
Live now.
What makes you feel alive?
How much of what makes you feel alive shows up in your life every single day?
Perhaps you need to make space for it. Go on the walk outside, turn on the music and dance, whatever it is…
And maybe it’s already there but you need to be present for it. Put the phone down. Tune into your body and your senses. Live NOW.
What makes you feel alive?
The light in me honors the light in you.
Namaste.
If you have enjoyed this episode, it would mean so much if you would leave a five star review in itunes or share it with a friend. This is a new podcast and reviews really helps us reach new people.
This episode is the final part of a new course I’m teaching on the Co Create app called “Reclamation of feeling”. And although you can surely benefit from the lessons shared for free here on the podcast, I would love to invite you into a deeper experience of the course on the app, complete with guided meditations to integrate these principles and exercises as well as the opportunity to submit questions and be part of our community. If you aren’t yet subscribed to the app, I would love to invite you to a free one month trial, simply use the code OneHeart30 for 30 days free at brookesnow.com/app.
The light in me honors the light in you. Namaste.
SHOWNOTES:
Use code ONEHEART30 to get 30 days free on the Co Create App and gain access to the guided meditations and Q&A that accompanies this Reclamation of Feeling course.
