Hello and welcome to another episode of the Wild Free Well podcast.
Today,
As promised,
I am here to talk a little bit about a experiment that I was running in my own life and like and yeah I'm gonna ask for a little bit of patience because I took notes throughout the last couple weeks and so I'm going to have to like kind of refer back to them.
But basically what I decided I would do is I would spend a week originally focusing exclusively on self-care.
So what I mean by that is I didn't stop working,
Nothing that way kind of changed,
But I made the decision that I was going to try to do as many things as possible to take care of myself.
I made the decision to do this because I have,
I mentioned on the podcast last week that I'm in a bit of a transition period and there's kind of a lot going on in my life and you know like my client roster is growing and things are getting a little bit busier which I think is normal because we're really moving into the new year now.
We're not you know kind of in that like January can be kind of like almost like a recovery month from the holidays and and so people are still kind of getting things together but now as we're moving into spring and I'm recording this officially in spring so now that we're moving into that season the days are getting longer and things are shifting and so people are starting to get more into that kind of like yeah I'm ready to make some changes I'm ready to make some shift energy and so I've had more requests from clients and I've been busier that way too which has been really nice and a little bit difficult actually which I'll talk about a little bit later.
There's that kind of came up as part of like this whole experiment but essentially I decided to do this because I'm in the midst of a transition I really wanted to see what would happen if I really doubled down on self-care if I really showed up for myself and if I really did all the things that were necessary to like really really care for myself and I think you're gonna be really like I think you're gonna be surprised by what came up.
Yeah like I mean spoiler alert it did not go great like it was so good it was so beneficial and so so many good things came out of it but it really did not go at all how I thought it would.
So my intention for this was really to spend as much time as humanly possible doing only things that I loved outside of like obviously my regular kind of activities like things like taking care of the house,
Taking care of Mila,
Taking care of clients and stuff like that like showing up the way I normally do and then in my spare time really dedicating that time to to myself and so what that meant for me and what that looked like was getting rid of social media for this time and I haven't been posting at all I've been radio silent on social media and like showing up for the things that were necessary so I recorded a podcast episode last week but beyond that I didn't really do a whole lot within my business in the last couple of weeks besides like I said showing up for clients and then getting rid of the games on my phone and then really doubling down on what self-care is for me.
So self-care for me in this week looked like obviously that space really cutting down on screen time as much as I as much as I possibly could and like really doing things to care for my physical body which I really enjoy.
I understand that that's like almost like cliche self-care and that's fine but it's something that brings me a lot of happiness makes me feel really good makes me feel really cared for so I wanted to incorporate a lot of that too and and then like some some surprising things came up too so I also started doing more movement and that has been really really valuable but I'll break this down a little bit like kind of week by week so I decided to do this last week I started officially I think it was late Saturday or early Sunday morning now I don't remember because it was almost two weeks ago to when I'm recording this but I started by deleting social media so I had nothing on my phone and that was super and then this this week of self-care kind of coincided with my with my cycle as well these like last two weeks so there was a little bit of like emotional kind of kickback from doing all of these things like I knew that I was craving space and needed space to really process what was going on and I also knew that I was very much afraid of what would come up in that space that was one of the things I was kind of I was really dealing with at the beginning when I first started this process so when I decided to do this no sorry after I decided to do this on Monday I started like looking at horoscopes and stuff like that just for fun because it's something that I enjoy doing and like everybody was on board like this is the week to take care of yourself like everything was aligned like it was like it was meant to happen it was really funny because I was getting a lot of like synchronistic messages after I made the decision that said like yeah you really should double down on self-care I actually should have screenshotted them so I could have shared them because it was so funny I don't know if I can go back and get them but I'll I'll see so yeah like there was a lot of like there was a lot of feedback about how this was a really good time to prioritize space and freedom and really getting to know yourself which was essentially my my intentions for the week and then like while I was meditating a word that came up for me was like I said spaciousness but that really on the one hand I was craving it desperately and on the other hand I knew that in the weeks prior I had been using my phone purposely to avoid that so I was feeling a little bit wobbly a little bit emotional and kind of wondering and questioning will I be strong enough to kind of deal with whatever presents itself and that was something that hit hard like hit really hard on Monday that was I think also because there was like a little bit of PMS in the mix so I was kind of emotional for other reasons but like there was just so much coming up that day and I really really tried to be deeply present in my body and to really allow whatever feelings came up to just flow there was a ton of energy in my chest area and every time I kind of tried to tap into that energy not tried to but every time I tapped into it I could feel my eyes start to tangle like the emotions were literally trying to like burst out of me so that was really interesting and I realized too that connecting with my breath was going to be so powerful really allowing that ebb and flow like the physical ebb and flow of the breath to to move the emotions through me whenever they presented themselves and just being super present with whatever was happening with me whatever was coming up whatever I was feeling and and allowing myself to feel the things that we often don't allow ourselves to feel so like how many times when we are in maybe an inconvenient place or an inconvenient moment and we have this kind of like ugly emotion you know we have an emotion that we don't want to be having but it's there and oh sorry like dog hair in my mouth because that's what it's like living with a border collie um sorry little detour there but how many times do we kind of push it down like no now I can't feel this emotion you know now I can't have a big feeling I'm on the subway um I'm on the bus you know I'm walking to work I'm at work I I'm in front of other people like I can't have a big emotion and I felt that a little bit too during this week because in kind of like allowing myself to feel something it sort of released the floodgates and so for the first few days like I'd say from Monday to Wednesday of last week in addition to PMSing obviously that's a factor that we can't eliminate from this discussion it just happened to be the way that things went but in addition to that like just so much emotion coming through me as I'm moving so I'm walking Mila and I'm like having all of these feelings come up and like you know I can feel that kind of the tingle of emotion in my body again like this idea of sensations in my chest or tightness in my shoulders or like my eyes kind of starting to water and stuff like that there's just so so much um coming up and one of the questions that really presented itself at the beginning of the week for me was this idea of how can I interact with the world from a healed place so what does that look like what does it mean to respond while I'm not charged while I'm not having all these big emotions learning to really sit with my emotions and not forcing other people to deal with my shit and I think that that is a huge aspect of self-responsibility I talk about that a lot on on the podcast and in my work in general when we are being self-responsible it means that we are responsible for ourselves literally so if we're having a big emotion it doesn't matter who we think may have caused it or what may have caused it or where or whatever it doesn't matter whatever situation it might be it doesn't matter what we think caused it we are having this experience and it is our responsibility to deal with it and so how can I kind of come up come at the world from this healed place from a place of deciding like okay even if I'm having a big emotion I'm not going to be an asshole about it and um like I don't think that I have an answer to that question necessarily I do think it's a process that is unfolding for me right now because whenever you're in a period of transition I'm sure you can relate to this you have so much going on and your mind is in seven million places like I remember um at the end of like about two weeks ago I was walking my dog and like this guy came with his dog off a leash and it drives me nuts that's just like a no-go for me when people don't have their dogs on a leash um because there's always like a reason I'm sure that's very valid for them but I really don't care I just think it's like appropriate that when you're walking your dog in a setting that is not like a field or whatever you're in like the city your dog should be on a leash and this dog comes up and kind of like starts jumping all over Mila and he's really excited and she's not really into it at all and so I'm worried that she's going to like freak out and I responded to this guy really not as my best self let's put it that way I wasn't really rude and I didn't yell at him but he was like can I pet your dog and I'm like yeah yeah you can pet her when you put your dog on your leash like and that's just it and okay so I didn't do or say anything particularly bad but here is the point I didn't need to respond that way that was not me responding as my best self and no matter what I think about this guy not having his dog on a leash it is not going to change anything like it literally doesn't matter that I think that what he's doing is wrong because he's cool with what he's doing so he's not going to change because like some crazy lady in the park is like hey put your dog on a leash do you know what I mean it was just unnecessary and it left me feeling like shit feeling like shit because the situation in and of itself was negative and then feeling like crap too because I wasn't really proud of the way that I responded because a lot of what came out at him even though it wasn't really rude it wasn't really that rude I should say um what came out at him had nothing to do with him it was just me having all of these other things going on in my life and then this was like the straw that broke the camel's back and he kind of got the brunt of it and like I'm proud too of the fact that what he got wasn't actually that bad because I think that like a version of me from years past would have behaved in a much different way but it's this idea like if I was able to be responsible for my emotions if I'm really letting things flow through if I'm really being present and taking really good care of myself maybe I don't respond to that guy at all because I just don't give a shit you know what I mean because I care that his dog is not on a leash but I also respect that my opinion about his lived experience doesn't matter and it's not going to change anything so I just let it go I don't hold on to it and I don't I don't bother responding right um so moving kind of forward through the week the first three days were kind of bumpy and I'm going to admit I got rid of social media that's an easy one for me I do it fairly frequently but I had such a hard time deleting my games on my off my phone my I hate saying it it's like I find it mortifying I really do like this for me is like this is one of my shame things like Brene Brown talks about like that I keep hidden in the dark and now I'm bringing it to the light and I'm really proud of myself for that but yeah it took me a really long time so on Thursday so exactly like five or five days I think four or five days after I started this because I started it like late Saturday early Sunday I finally worked up the courage to delete the freaking games and um and I didn't delete them all I just deleted the ones that were like really bad and um yeah that was like especially hard and and it's because like those are such a grade a distraction like they are the best distraction when you don't want to do something or when you don't want to like like for me I have a hard time I find television so like so terribly boring lately like and my whole last podcast episode was about that I'm not talking about it again one episode of the podcast was enough about that but I tend to play games while I'm watching tv because I find that tv isn't particularly entertaining like I don't find that I'm engaged enough in what I'm watching to be able to just watch it I feel like I'm usually watching it and doing something else and I think a little bit that's a byproduct of the way that we're training our minds to be by the the sheer amount of phone use that we have in our lives how much time we're spending and the just kind of like the slot machine uh design of cell phones I think is making us all generally generally generally whoa easy for me to say a little bit stupider I really really like across the board everybody I think who uses a phone and who is using a phone for like four to five hours a day over the long term we are going to see that as a society we become dumber I just I really do think that's the outcome that we're looking towards and so I think and it certainly makes us incapable of focusing and they're doing studies now on the fact that we we obviously are less capable of reading which I think I messaged also mentioned also in the previous podcast so getting rid of these games was like just really difficult because I felt like no social media no games what the hell am I gonna do with myself and that was all also a huge part of why I wanted to do this experiment in the beginning because in the weeks up leading up to this I had felt so terribly bored which is where the other podcast episode came from too like I was trying to find a show but I couldn't find anything I liked um I wasn't really there wasn't really anything in my life that was engaging I was a little bit too tired to be able to like read or do those kinds of things that wasn't really attracting me at the time and so I was like well if I get rid of these games I'm going to have such a void in my life what the hell am I going to do with myself so the fear kept me in that loop a little bit longer and once I finally deleted them I did have a little bit more spaciousness but I still had such a difficult time sinking into the boredom and it's so interesting because I talk about this with clients all the time and I am a huge proponent of like detoxing and like social media detoxing tech detoxing and stuff like that and normally I do a decent job of it but because of the where I'm at in my life and just the timing of when I decided to run this experiment given that it was so close to my cycle given that I was going through all these other emotions and in transition etc etc it just was like I was not capable of doing the things that I normally do like reading and and stuff like that and so I felt really like lost without the games lost without social media lost because I didn't have enough energy to do what I really wanted to do and so I think I kind of ended up escaping a little bit more into television and and coupled with the fact that in these couple of in these days so Thursday Friday and I think maybe Saturday but mostly Thursday Friday I also slept really badly and all of these things were just making it so I'm distracted and I'm confused and I'm feeling like what the hell am I doing with myself and why did I do this experiment in the first place and yeah it just it was it was a little bit difficult but I also found that first thing in the morning this was on Friday I'm looking at my notes so bear with me if things are coming out a little bit weird but on Friday morning I realized that not having games or social media in the morning because I haven't had social media for like five days at this point five or six days and the games I had been without for a day not having those in the morning and not immediately jumping onto my phone has created so much space and really left me with a lot more energy and a ton of clarity because I'm not distracting myself so my brain isn't like already thinking about like how to make these moves and how to do these things with the games and it's not consuming all this content from other people so there was just space for me to be which was really positive in the afternoon is when it got harder for me um not even in the afternoon that's wrong in at night uh is when it got harder because also another thing that I haven't mentioned is that most of these days I was walking for like an hour an hour and a half with Mila um and that has been amazing that has been such a game changer like that space and walking and not running so there was no strenuous movement sorry I didn't do any strenuous movement basically for this entire experiment I only walked but I walked for like longer and I walked in nature um like as nature as it can be given that I'm still really close to the city but walked more in nature and it had such a positive effect on me I felt so much more vital and so much more energetic especially while I was doing it I felt really peaceful really really balanced and centered and then afterwards I felt so tired like by the time I got home and I think it's all just to this idea of like I was in the space of detoxing I was off of all of these things like I'd gotten rid of a lot of my vices and I'm upping my movement and all of these things so I'm adding I'm adding so much more into my life and so it's but I'm also releasing a ton of things and so I'm really tired so I get to the weekend and I feel like I've learned a lot but I didn't really dive as deeply into what I wanted as I as I had hoped because of the situation with the games and taking so long to delete them so I decided to extend the experiment by another week and it went really well I still kept walking really upped my self-care I was doing a lot of like face face stuff and body stuff like dry brushing and gua sha and red light therapy I've been doing a lot of the things that I really enjoy and that bring me a lot of happiness and then I was really taking care of myself as well because at the start of the week I was also like just that was when my cycle had officially started and so I had to really be mindful of like my energy levels and just kind of doing what I could with what I had available energetically speaking and then this week was insanely busy with work like it's so funny because when you decide to do stuff like this sometimes like you you get presented challenges and it's kind of about how you show up to them and so it's been really exciting to be so busy this week this week much more so than even the week previous I think I had four extra four extra client sessions this week than I did the week before which is crazy but wonderful but it's just really interesting too because you make this decision okay I'm going to focus on myself and I'm going to do this and then these these situations present themselves and they're like oh yeah are you like are you actually going to do it like even when things come up are you still going to stick to and do what you say you're going to do and I did I did I kept walking I still kept up the self-care I still stayed off social media although I was allowing myself to check it a little bit more this week um but it was nothing obsessive and that was really really wonderful and I'm just going to check now but I think too that my overall like phone usage went down as well so last week it was down 10% which is really nice um no wait hang on last week or this week now I don't know what I'm looking at um but I I'm yeah I'm just really proud of myself for that for getting it for lowering it um my goal is to be down around three to like two to three hours per day because it's it's definitely higher than that right now but the problem is is that I use my phone um for meditating it's obviously something it's a tool that I use for work I use it when I run and so there's a lot of different ways that I use my phone where that it's actually in a really positive way but it still counts as usage so if I spend half an hour to an hour meditating per day it counts as an hour of phone usage even though the phone is is not being used actively it's being used passively so they're still counting that so in any case I'm really proud of the fact that I did manage to get it down 10% and I want to continue seeing how low I can get it especially as I reintegrate things because it's all like all well and good to do this experiment but real life must go on so eventually I'm going to have to download social media again because I can't continue not posting like that's a part of how I run my business and how I I connect with new people so it's not feasible to ignore it all the time so what happens when I reintegrate it will my hours go back up like will my screen time go back up or can I manage to keep it like under control and really only use it in a sort of positive way it's going to be interesting it is definitely something that I struggle with when I have it I have no problems deleting it but when it's there it's difficult to not like press the button somehow and this is coming from somebody who has really done a lot of tech hacking I'm a big big big fan of tech hacking so like I've made my phone work for me and not making me a prisoner to it and I'm still to a certain extent a prisoner to it I can't imagine what it's like if people don't actually go through the the trouble of making their phone their own and they kind of just leave it at the factory default like how that what that impact must be I just I can't even fathom what that is like my phone has been like a tool for a long time and it's still something that I struggle with so for other people I just can't even imagine anyways the biggest takeaway though for me if I had to sum up this entire experiment the biggest the biggest and clearest takeaway is by far feel it and it will pass it's really simple it sounds almost like bullshit but it is the number one thing that I learned over the last two weeks so anytime something came up and I mean anything whether I was angry or I was sad or I was frustrated or I was confused or I felt overwhelmed whatever it was I just allowed myself to be with it and I did not force myself to do something about it so if I was tired I was tired and I was just tired I didn't force myself to read I didn't force myself to work I didn't force myself to make progress somehow right if I was sad I wasn't trying to move through the sadness I was just trying to be with the sadness and just identify where it was in my body and really connect with it and as soon as I did that in 90% of the cases it dissipated or shifted at least in some way lessened perhaps so like it was really interesting like I really I let myself be upset I let myself be feel hurt I let myself cry if I needed to cry whatever wanted to come up I just let it move through me and and that goes back to what I said too about the physical movement I think the physical movement was a huge catalyst for this because I focused on I didn't say this earlier and I'm reading my notes now but I really tried to walk 5k that's what I normally run when I run with Mila but I tried to walk the same amount pretty much every day I didn't do it every day but I tried to get as many kilometers in as possible and I think my average for last week was something like like 6 or 7k per day so I'm really proud of that actually and it felt so good because like spring is here and it's beautiful out and I was in nature like it felt so good to do that but I think that that made a huge difference because that time was literally just for me so I was not on my phone I was not listening to podcasts I was not listening to music I was walking with Mila connecting with her connecting with nature connecting with myself and for the first time and maybe ever in my life really not thinking about anything or certainly not controlling my thoughts like I was just letting everything flow I wasn't really fixating on what came up I was just moving and I think that that really gave it really gave space to the energetic and the emotional movement that was happening within me over the last couple of weeks so I do think if I'm honest that overall despite the bumps because I think there were quite a few bumps I think there were a lot of bumps actually over this last week and a half or week and a half or two because I'm still in the midst of doing it but I'm recording this because the podcast comes out tomorrow so I think that there have been a lot of bumps but I think that overall the time investment that I made in myself this week deciding to walk as often as possible which is something I'm definitely going to continue doing and even the amount of self-care like the amount of like doing gua sha and dry brushing dry brushing is a regular part of my routine so that's not really anything special but doing all of these things and even some extra stretching at night doing some extra yoga before bed and stuff like that I think that all of the things that I did I don't actually have any intention of getting rid of so I don't even know if the experiment is really coming to an end I think it's about integrating things back into my life so reintegrating social media and and actually with the games I don't think I will reintegrate them not now at least I think there will come a moment where I will god I hate saying this but where I will need them again because sometimes when things get too much um I tend to like go in that direction and also sometimes to like mostly in the winter because in the summer I'm just I'm I'm busy I'm busy doing other things and I'm typically reading a lot more in the summer than I do necessarily in the winter but I think that the time will come where I will where I will need the games again or I will want them again and I will download them but for now I'm not I have no intention of doing that so the only thing I'll be reintegrating is social media but I think that everything that I did this week and everything that I learned and making sure to take the time to go for a walk and to be really present in that moment and and I never even mentioned this but I actually did some rest practices as well during this week um not as often as I could have and I think that that's something I would like to up over time because I think that too that now my schedule is getting busier and busier and that rest is going to be paramount to my my mental well-being and being able to keep up with the pace that I have right now in terms of the number of clients that I'm working with so I think that there's a lot of things that I still want to integrate but I'm not going to let anything go like this experiment it really did shift something for me if if if the only thing that we're looking at is my mental well-being it shifted so many emotions I moved through so much gunk over the last two weeks it is insane it is nuts I just let everything that I was feeling flow out of me whatever came up came up and it went and it was that simple and I just did I didn't really do anything beyond that I journaled because that's a regular part of my routine but I wasn't following any kind of structured program I wasn't using like a book to guide me through this period like I just was going with the flow basically in every sense and it was really really powerful so if you've listened this far you might be thinking what the hell it was the point of this episode like why are you telling me this I think that there is value in looking at there's always value in this not I think there is value in looking at what you really need so can you take a second and be honest with yourself about what you really need in your life right now so if I look back over the last we're going on almost a month of my life okay because it was about two weeks before I started the experiment and I'm coming up towards the end of the second two weeks now of the of being in this kind of self-care experiment okay so if I look at the last month of my life the first two weeks were an absolute shit show just like I said I was in transition not in a great space necessarily not feeling wonderful and just having a lot of emotions there's a lot coming up because it's normal I'm in the middle of a transition that's that's that's the way things go right you know you've got all these thoughts and you've got all these emotions and it's totally fine and it's totally normal and and it just is it's not good or bad it's just it is what it is it was that way for me at least so in deciding to do this I think that I really gave myself space to process everything that was coming up in those two weeks prior and that is just like I didn't even really think about that until I now that I'm saying it out loud I'm like yeah wow I really did so like it's been a month of just moving through my own crap and like being really self-responsible and really showing up for myself and like I can feel the difference now I feel lighter I definitely feel lighter so how you can use this is asking yourself what you need you may not need like a self-care week you may need a self-care day you may not need self-care at all you might need extreme movement for a time being you may need to like literally just release whatever is coming through you and maybe you do that by boxing or you do that by running or hiking or whatever I have no clue what you need you know what you need right because you are sovereign as I always say and you are an intelligent individual you know what you need so really asking yourself whatever it is that you need and then okay wait for it wait for it actually giving yourself that thing can you imagine so you're not just having like this fancy conversation like wouldn't it be nice if you're actually saying wouldn't it be nice if and then you fucking do the thing and I know that that sounds like harsh I'm being kind of like purposely triggering right now because I want you to get it like it's such bullshit to just sit there and have a conversation with yourself don't waste your own damn time like you're worth more than that don't just have a conversation with yourself about what you need have a conversation about what you need and then actually go out and fucking do it and give it to yourself and show up for yourself and be your own champion and be your own hero because you are capable of changing your life which is actually I think going to be one of my next topics for my podcast because I had a call with a client this week who was talking to me about how she doesn't believe that people can actually fundamentally change and I do instead believe that people can fundamentally change so I think it'd be interesting to do a podcast about that but the point is is that if you want something to be different you need to do something differently period you need to do something differently action not think about something differently although also because your mindset needs to change and not even being somebody different but also because if you do that that also helps with the transition but the more that you are actively doing something like taking action and showing up the quicker things will change right nothing changes if nothing changes it's just math it's really that simple and so if you had the opportunity to do something like what I did if you could treat your life your existence like an experiment what experiment would you want to run and it can be anything maybe it's like oh I want to try to post every day to on on social media to grow my business or I want to try to exercise or move my body every single day for the next week so and obviously we are not talking about extremes if you've never moved your body a day in your life you are not going to go to the gym seven days a week don't don't even try please like don't try you're gonna probably hurt yourself it's a terrible idea you're gonna leave the end of the week like exhausted and not at all motivated to continue but if you say to move your body so maybe you go to the gym one day and the next day you just go for a walk or you go to the gym and the next day you do like an easier yoga sequence you can do these things you can implement this kind of change you have that power you just need to be really honest with yourself about your own limitations about your own not your own limitations that was so the wrong word to use but your own your own it is though your own limits like if you've never done something before you're not going to go from zero to 100 it's a bad idea it's just that's not the best way to integrate a new habit and that is kind of what we're talking about here isn't it is making a change on a foundational level not just doing something for shits and giggles although also if you want to it's your life play have fun like do something for shits and giggles if that floats your boat but it's about doing something that helps you fundamentally make shifts right that's what i did i have gotten rid of my games i'm not downloading them again i have lessened my my data usage or my my phone usage for a little while i have upped my self-care i have upped my movement levels and i'm going to continue doing those things because it felt so damn good over the last two weeks that is foundational work i'm not pushing myself beyond my limits i wasn't running 5k every day i was walking 5k every day and that's well within my wheelhouse because i already have a certain fitness base okay but what is it that you want to challenge yourself to do what is it that you want to experiment on in your life because this is your life like there's a reason why we have all these inspirational quotes about your one wild and precious life there's a reason why people quote that that poem from mary oliver not just because it's beautiful because it's true you only have one life one existence what are you going to do with it what do you want what do you need and how can you show up for yourself and go and get it because you can i believe in you i believe that you can i know that you can actually hell it's not even about believing i know that you can do it if you want to if you decide to if you show up for yourself okay so how can you run an experiment and also if you're keen i'd love to hear what experiment would you run or or will you run in your life over the next week what are you going to challenge yourself to do how are you going to make a shift how are you going to show up and play a bigger game how are you going to show up more fully for yourself how are you going to be the version of you that you want to be i cannot wait to hear i cannot wait so you will be able to if you're listening to this on spotify you'll be able to fill out a poll if not please leave a review or a comment or whatever reach out to me on instagram and tell me what it is that you're doing this week what is your challenge what is your experiment i cannot wait to connect you can find me on instagram at candice alacia or on my website www.
Candicealacia.
Com and i will see you next week for another episode of the podcast have a good one
