The Dirty Side Of Growth

There’s a dirty side to growth. There’s a dirty side to choosing yourself that many of us refuse to witness and discuss. The dirty side is that once we begin to prioritize ourselves, relationships change, even the ones we thought would last forever. When we focus on ourselves, we naturally see what works and what doesn’t. From there, another natural process begins—boundaries are put into place. This can turn our relationships on their heads. That’s why we are taking a deep dive into the dirty side of growth: what it is, how it impacts us, and how to stop it right now! So, let’s dive right in.

Transcript

I have been in so many sessions lately and have received so many DMs asking about why growth is so hard and why there seems to be this icky, Dirty side that nobody talks about. And of course, We need to be talking about it. I talk about it if you visit me in private session, But we do need to have a deeper conversation here. So let's do that. How about that? As I just said, There is a dirty side to getting your life together because it's not easy, And it doesn't come without risk or even hard emotions because sometimes choosing yourself is a hard and lonely experience, But it's worth it. It's always worth it. So let me ask you a question. How many of you are still trying to make peace with the fact that people have left your life after you began to make yourself a priority? Let me ask you another question. If that didn't align with where you are or what you have experienced, How many of you have refused to do the work because you're afraid that the people in your life will leave? I see this a lot in couples sessions where one party is really unhappy and the other one is holding on for dear life because they are afraid of what that change will do to them, What personal growth is going to do to their marriage or to their life in general. And all I can tell you is that choosing your worth, Choosing your happiness, Choosing self-love, Respect, Healing, You name it, Doesn't matter what title you give it, Is always worth the journey. And that's why we're taking the deep dive today, Right? Because when we grow, We change. And that is truly the nature of life itself. I talk about that so often. And when life changes, The people around us can become really upset or irritated by that growth, Right? Because when we change, It changes our outside and inner world as well. And that makes us doubt where all the pieces fall into place. And let's face it, Where there's doubt, There's often drama. And we want to stay out of that space. We really want to get into a space where we're no longer willing to hand over our lives or to be fulfilled solely by someone else, Or our needs are absolutely last on the list. And when we get into that space, Sometimes it doesn't hit people right, Especially if they have become dependent on how you always do the work for them, How you make them feel what they need and want from you. When people are used to pushing your weak boundaries, And all of a sudden you push back, Guess what? There's hell to pay. And that is the cost of growth. And I want to talk about that. This is the dirty side. When you make a decision to shift and choose yourself, Letting go of very critical relationships becomes a factor. And it is very hard. I want to share a personal experience with you. So in 2016, I had a beautiful group of girlfriends. In fact, One of them ended up being a cousin of ours that I didn't even know. In fact, We didn't know until after we had been friends for quite some time. But we kind of did everything together. We had Friday evenings and Saturday evenings. Our kids went to school together. We cooked at each other's homes. We took care of each other's kids. There was this natural, Beautiful rhythm of friendship, Or so I thought. There was a lot of background noise, A lot of talking behind each other's backs, A lot of jealousy and inside validation for one person, But not for the rest. It was not necessarily the best group to be a part of. I didn't realize that though. I thought everything was fine until I had those big three things that I often talk about, The death of my stepmom, The death of my father-in-law, And the illness of our middle child come about. Now, It wasn't that they weren't supportive because they were. They were ride or die. However, When I started my own growth journey at that time, I began to notice how unhealthy the dynamic was. I began to notice that there were things that really didn't align with what I wanted and what I needed, Whether it was too much alcohol on a Friday night or a Saturday night, Or the backtalk from person to person, The not supporting one but supporting the other. It began to really irritate my personal growth. And I remember sitting in my meditation spot because that was about the time that I started meditating too. And I said and wrote down, I'm willing to let go of anyone and anything that is going to keep me from really owning my growth. That's a big statement, Right? That is a huge willingness because I said anyone. It didn't matter who in my life that actually narrowed down to, It was anyone. Anyone that was not going to help support where I wanted to go, Anyone who was going to get in the way of me being able to find a beautiful rhythm, And anyone who would really create resistance in my life. And whether I knew it at the time or not, I guess I was on a direct phone call to the universe, Or God or source or whatever you call it. Because within two weeks, Two weeks, 12 days, That entire friend group was done. It fell apart. It wasn't like there was some big drama. It wasn't like everyone made this conscious decision to be done. It was just like, Okay, Our friendships have ended. There was a grieving period for me. And I had to continually remind myself that I had asked for that. I had asked for anything that was in the way of my personal growth to be removed from my space, Removed from my acceptance, Removed from my kind of natural rhythm of my life. And of course, Any time that that happens, There is this natural instinct to hold on. You know, We are community thinkers. We are wired for connection, As you've probably heard me say so many times. And we want to hold on instead of letting go. We're taught that we need to remain in certain relationships and be with family members, Even if it's not healthy. But we have to remember not every situation is important. And not every relationship is good for us, No matter what the tie to that person is. What's so much more interesting in my own personal experience is my children began to fall away from their children. And again, It wasn't like anyone talked about it. It just was done. And this is an important statement. And the reason why I'm telling you this is when you are willing to go all in on yourself, On your growth, You have to go all in. You have to say, I'm willing to let go of anything that no longer supports me. I've told that story many times to many women, And it's an interesting mixed conversation. Some are saying, You know, Oh, I could never do that. You know, I could never let go of my sister who causes me so much drama or my mom or my best friend that I've had since kindergarten. I just couldn't do it. Or I can't let go of the boyfriend or the husband. I just don't have that ability to stand in my own power that way. And I have to be honest, It's not about standing in your power. It's really about being willing to meet your power. If you were already standing in your power, Those people would have been long gone, Right? It's this ability to meet yourself and be willing to meet what you can be empowered through, With, And in this great ability to find, Really. You know, We struggle often to let go because of the fear of uncertainty. We talk about uncertainty so often here. We talk about forecasting. Let me give you a quick little bite of that again. When we talk about uncertainty, What we're really talking about is not having enough evidence that things are going to work out. And so we begin to forecast. And remember, Forecasting is trying to put all of the plans and pieces in place so that we can keep ourselves safe as we move to a new outcome. In forecasting, What often happens is we make up our mind. This is how this is going to go. And that's how I'm going to respond. And that's how they are going to respond. And this will be the end result. How often does that actually work, Right? How often does the thing that you play out in your head, The story that you tell yourself, Play out in real life? It's very rare that that actually happens. But we do it, Again, Because we don't want to have to let go. And yet we have to know that anytime we move into a state of meeting ourself in growth, Finding self-acceptance, Finding self-love, Finding all of those beautiful pieces of ourselves, A relationship with ourselves, We are going to meet uncertainty. We have to know that. We have to witness it. We have to be okay with it. We have to be willing to say, Hey, Universe, God, Source, Whatever you want to call it, I'm willing to put this message out to have that direct call with you that says, Go ahead, Cut it off. I'm okay. You know, Sometimes we hold ourselves back because we can't imagine our lives without those relationships. So that's another piece of it. And that can be even no matter how dysfunctional that relationship is. But we have to realize that we cannot actually grasp ourselves, Grasp our lives, If we keep ourselves in patterns that do not serve us. So again, That direct call, Hello, I'm willing to let go. Help me, Right? When we let go, There's something else that happens. And I talk about this often, But it's worth having just a quick conversation about it now. Our lives are really busy. Our lives are really full most of the time. And if it's full, What does that mean? It means there's no room for anything else. And that's why growth feels so disjointed or so disruptive a lot of times, Because we are really clearing the way. We're trying not to burn everything down, But what we're trying to do is clear the way. Okay, That doesn't work. Let's replace it with this. That does. That doesn't work. Get rid of it. We begin to release really rapidly, But there's something that we have to witness. In that release, We are making room for new opportunities. Growth means expansion. Growth means shifting. Growth means acceleration. Growth means out with the old and with the new, Right? Growth means allowing yourself to move beyond where you are right now while finding the place that you really want to be. Remember that personal growth happens and change. I said it just a few moments ago. And that means we have to do what best suits us. And sometimes we're tested. Okay, Back to that friend group. The reason why I'm telling you this is because it really is the perfect example. So, Okay, The friendships dissolve. And there was one special person in that group that I felt most connected to. In fact, I had brought her into that group. And after a few months, I began to wonder how she was. I also really decided that the reason why I wanted to let go of the relationships as a whole was because of her. I felt like she didn't see me. I spent a lot of time really catering to her needs. And I really kind of wanted just an apology. I wanted her to tell me that she was wrong and I was right. Again, I was at the beginning stages of my growth. And I called her up. And I began to ask her questions. And soon those questions turned to text because she wasn't willing to talk. And I realized that I was being tested. Was I really willing to commit to my growth and let go? Or was I going to circle back and be willing to sit in a ton of reasons why things weren't working for me? And we have to remember that sometimes when we move through something like big growth or big releases, We're sometimes tested to find out if we're going to fully commit. A few years ago, I was working with a woman who decided she was done with her relationship. She couldn't actually pinpoint what was wrong. She just knew she wasn't happy. She knew that this was not the person that she wanted to stay with for the rest of her life. And she left. She continued to question whether she had done the right thing after she began to miss this partner. And then a few weeks later, She was contacted by this person saying, You know, Let's go out on a date. Let's talk. I really miss you. So she went. The relationship fired back up. And within about two months, It was over again. And then we went into a cycle of another two months off and then another two months on. And then finally, They decided that they were going to move back in together and live happily ever after, All while still doing therapy. OK. And it didn't work. In fact, All of the reasons why she decided to let it go were still the reasons why things didn't work then. Growth is hard. It takes personal commitment. It takes the ability to know what you want and need. It takes the ability to get to know you. It takes the ability to witness the fact that there is a dirty side to growth. There's a dirty side to change. In fact, It can suck so bad. There's a few key reasons we have to witness when it comes to being willing to lean into ourselves and get out of the dirt and into the light. So I already said it, But letting go is truly hard. And when we do not stop to truly appreciate and have a true why, A reason that we need to take these actions, Why we need to grow, It actually makes it harder. So we have to be our best. And in order to be our best, We have to spend our time and energy knowing what we need. You know, Those questions I ask all the time. If you're new around here, Here they are. What do I want? What do I need? How do I want to feel? And how am I going to get to my end result? What do I want? I want to grow. I want to get out of this space where I am not living a life that's working for me. How do I want to feel good? Right. I don't want to feel like every day is drowning in negativity or it's hard or it's just neutral and mundane. I want to feel my best. How am I going to get there? I am going to make a plan to let go of whatever isn't serving me and to sit in some dirt for a minute. Another truth that I'm really going to have to witness is the fact that my relationships do not define the kind of meaning or the kind of life that I have. I do. I'm the one who puts meaning on things. If I am connected to something, Then I put an emotion to it. And therefore, That's my connection to it. Have you ever met someone that someone says to you, Hey, By the way, They're a really terrible person. They really do all of these awful things. And, You know, You just aren't going to align with them. And that's their perspective of that person. But you begin to talk to them. You go hang out. You really connect. And you're like, I don't understand. That's what I'm talking about. You are the one who defines the meaning in your life on the things, On the emotions, On the people. And if you deem something toxic, It's going to drain you. If you deem it good, It's going to fulfill you. And that's really how I want you to look at your growth. Right. It doesn't have to be so dirty. How are you connecting to it? Am I connecting to it in a good way? Great. It's fulfilling me. Is that experience draining me? Then it's not what I want. Another truth that we have to look at is that each relationship or each experience that we have adds to the relationship with ourselves. I want to say that again. Each relationship or experience that I have that you have adds to the relationship we have with ourselves. One of the reasons why I didn't fight losing that entire group of friends was because I realized that many of them actually drained me. And as they drained me, It made me feel worse about who I was. I never felt good enough. I always felt like no matter what I did or what I had, What I put on my body, What I looked like, There was always a problem. So if the relationship doesn't add to yourself, It doesn't add to the connection with the self. Right. We also have to remember that the very nature of life itself is change. And if that is the nature of life, That means that's the nature of everything. We have seasons, Right? We have seasons in our nature. We have seasons in our lifetime. We have seasons in our personal experiences. The person you are today is not the person you were five years ago. You now is not the person that you were when you were a five-year-old. We have seasons. We change. Things are going to naturally change. It's the fighting. It's the resistance that keeps us on that perpetual treadmill of our lives. So how do we allow ourselves to make these shifts and keep focus and grow? Because what happens when we lose a friendship or what happens when we change a relationship? We tend to tank, Right? We tend to get into a space that doesn't feel very good, And we lean so heavily into the dirtiness. And we refuse to actually take the next step so often because it hurts too damn bad. And the truth is, That's the time you should be leaning into yourself even more. When we self-abandon, When we say, You know what, This doesn't feel good, So I'm going to lose my focus, We've actually created more drama and less action, And we've created a space that actually holds us in place instead of moving us forward, Which was our natural intention to begin with. And this is true no matter what the relationship or the experience. Say you have a really terrible relationship with one of your parents, And really you take all these steps to put these boundaries up, But they still have contact with you. So maybe there's a long period of silence between you, But then something shows up where there's contact or a reach out again, And it opens the wounds. It becomes even dirtier. It feels even worse. It's important to realize that if you're going to change and you are going to grow, You have to be willing to go all the way in, No matter the relationship. Does that mean that you cut people off and you never allow them back in? No. Sometimes relationships do change. Sometimes your growth settles and you find a new rhythm. Sometimes life really shows up and puts those people right back in our path, And they've changed, And you've changed, And things are okay. But for right now, For our conversation right this minute, Let's talk about what we can do to let go and make ourselves okay with being in the dirt as we shift. And the first one is to recognize when it's time. So often, This is the most difficult part. Letting go becomes easier when you realize that your future and your happiness depends on you being present and willing to participate in it. Right? That seems very simple, But it's so true. We have to begin to recognize the signs in our lives. Say everything is really falling apart and things are really hard, Or you've leaned in, You've decided you're going to commit to therapy, It's time, And you begin to march. And in that marching, You begin to claw your way into resistance. This happens so often where, Okay, I'll do the work. I'll make the changes. I'm good. I'm fine with it. And then there's some little hiccups, There's some feelings, There's some dirt that gets thrown in the way, And it's a, Nope, Never mind. Maybe another time. We have to really begin to recognize the signs in our lives that things are not working the way we want them to be. And when we accept that is when we can decide, Okay, What do I need? Okay, I want to feel better. What do I want? I want to actually feel better. The need and the want are the same. How do I want to feel? What is better? Well, Better is not feeling like I'm always drowning, Not feeling like I'm always committing to things that don't work for me. It's putting myself into the present moment and allowing myself to really witness how I feel. Okay, How am I going to get there? I'm going to recognize that now's the time to do the work, No matter how damn uncomfortable I get. Right? So that's the first part. When we accept the dirt, We accept the challenge to shift and change. The next thing is if someone walks away, It isn't always about us. This is what's so important. That actually came up with that group much later. In fact, Almost a year and a half after that group dissolved, Where someone saw me, They ran into me, And they're like, Hey, I haven't seen you in so long. You know, I never quite understood what actually happened, Like why the group fell apart or why you left. And I had to tell them, You know what? After doing as much growth as I had done at that point, The dissolve of that friendship really wasn't about the way that they made me feel. It was the way that I felt in the group. And that's the truth. When I was at the beginning of the dirty stage, Remember how I said when we look at growth as a way to meet ourselves for the very first time, To get on the path, To be empowered, I thought that my issue was the way that they made me feel. The issue was how I felt in relation to the relationship. And so when someone walks away, Or when you walk away, Sometimes it is about you. Sometimes it's not always about the other people. And sometimes when someone walks away, It's not about us. It's about what they can't see themselves being able to do. It's about not being able to meet you where you are. It's about not being able to align after they have grown and you are still stuck in the same place that you have been forever because you refuse to do the damn work, Right? Or vice versa. It usually is about you, About your inability to really live in a space that doesn't work. So when someone says, You know, We aren't the same, That's the point of life. It's growth. And that's okay. We haven't felt the same in a long time. Okay, I can witness that. I can recognize it's time for a shift. Are we going to shift together? Are we shifting separately? So important, Right? So we recognize when it's time. We recognize if someone leaves or we have to leave, Sometimes it is about us. And that feels dirty in and of itself, Right? But when it becomes clear that you must let go, And this is the next piece to all of this, You must take stock in what you want. Again, Back to those questions. And we have to look at what part of what you're letting go doesn't align with who you're working to become. What are you shifting out of? What do you want as a person? What do you want in your life? Because clearly that's not it. So what's the opposite? What do you want in your relationships? What do you want to live like? Where do you want to be? How do you want to feel? It's all of these questions. And you have to do the work to get through these spaces. You know, Okay, I want to be this person that is adventurous, That goes on these beautiful trips, That lives life freely. Okay, Great. Is that who you are? No, I'm the nine to five. I can't see my way out of this. I want shift and change. Okay, How are we going to get there? I want this relationship to be, You know, Steady and stable and feel good. And there's connectivity. Is that what I have? No, There's fighting, There's drama, We're holding on to one another, When it would just be easier in the long run to let go. Okay, What are you going to do? When you know that it's time to change and to walk through the dirt, You have to take stock and ask yourself, What do I want? So important. We have to remember too, This is another one. This is the next piece in this letting go in the shift in this dirt, In the dirty side of all of growth is we must remember that every loss feels like a loss of ourselves. This is a very interesting thing. Okay, So when the friends left, Again, I was willing to grow, But I did feel like a woman on her own island. I began to question who am I? You know, Why do I feel like this is such a massive loss? And why do I feel like I don't even know what I need or who I am. And really, That's clearing the way. Remember, I said this is the step to get to the path to become empowered. This is that piece where we have to say, Okay, That loss feels like a loss of me, The me that I am asking to shift. So I'm okay with that. Loss is normal. I'm going to take the good with the bad. And I'm going to look for release of all the rest so that I can understand what I want. Okay, Can you start to see that that's where those four questions came from was this experience. And it's the four questions that I've been asking ever since. And so we have to continue to ask ourselves, This feels like a loss, A loss of me. What do I want? What do I need? How do I want to feel? How am I going to get there? And then this is the biggest piece. This is a piece that so often people really struggle with. And it is this, When we let go, When we get into the dirty side of growth, Our memories don't just shut off. Our feelings don't just go away. They stay with us. We have to process them. You know, Just because someone leaves or something changes doesn't mean that what we've locked inside suddenly disappears. Memories stay. And so we have to decide how we're going to process them. And we have to look at those things as ends, As pieces of our story, As these, You know, Situations that we can access anytime we want to, But we don't always have to. And so that's another part. It's a dirty side is just because we have an end doesn't mean that our feelings do or the memories do. It's just that the physical presence ends. The next piece is we have to begin to invest in what we were trying to do in the first place, Which is invest in ourselves, Right? We are not going to shift out of relationships or situations just because we decided we're done. Most of the time, Anyway, Sometimes we do. But we have to begin to invest in ourselves. So we say, Is my self-love, My worth, My self-esteem, The confidence that I have, Where it needs to be? It's likely that if you're in the very beginning of this dirty side, The answer is no. We have to find a deeper space to learn about ourselves in the absence of what's been left. If you feel less than in the group, It's pretty likely that your self-worth and self-love is not where it needs to be. So you begin to really focus. What do I need? What needs a boost? What needs my attention? Where can I walk through this and take all of that energy that I've been focusing on, These thoughts and feelings of what I have let go, Into what I need to preserve and to create and to grow from and through? An elementary exercise that could be very important to do for yourself when you're moving through this space is to write down your self-love definition. Write out how you see your self-confidence. Get into that space where you can really identify how you actually feel about yourself and then rank it from 10 to 1. 10 being the best. There's no work left to be done. I've got it. I'm good. 1 being ground zero. We need to really fire up our lives and really look at how I've abandoned myself and how this dirty side is now moving me up that scale. Where are you? What do you need? You have to invest in the relationship with yourself. And then we flip the perception of letting go and we have to remember that we have to be kind to ourselves. So often we're kinder to other people. We stay because we don't want to hurt people's feelings. And we have to remember that our significant relationships are really these spaces that can own us. And we generally try to keep our toe all the way in, Whether on social media or in a text or we work to get glimpses of them. We ask questions so that we can, You know, Find out how they're doing. We can keep an eye on them, But we have to create physical distance in order to hold our space. In order to grow, We have to let go completely. And this is another dirty side that many people don't want to deal with. They don't want to create the physical distance. They want to keep in contact, But not really be there. And it doesn't work both ways. If it's dirty, It's dirty, Right? So maybe the question is, Is this right? Does this make me feel good? Would I want someone else to be checking up on me if I decided that their relationship didn't work in my life? And the answer is no. So you have to be able to flip the perception, Meaning if I am going to let go, I have to be kind of myself and fully let go. When we let go, When we move through the mud and into the sunshine of our lives, We have to allow the negative emotions to follow us out of the dirt, Right? We have to turn those negatives into neutrals, And then that gives us space to turn positivity. And we have to look at it and not stay in it and not be afraid to lean into sadness, Into grief, Into anger. We have to feel our feelings. The only way through anything is through it. We have to do the work gently with ourselves. We have to clean up our emotions. We have to understand what they mean and why we feel that way. And we cannot avoid them. Healing means going through a process. And so we have to be willing to go through the process. It's this process that most people stop. This is where it gets hard. This is where we take the kid gloves off and we lean all the way in and we have to do the hard work. And it's okay. It's short term. Do you really long term want to stay in a space that nothing is working for you? Do you want to long term stay in a relationship that makes you feel like absolute crap? Do you want to stay in the space where you are not connected with yourself and you're just sort of zombying your way through life? The answer is no. I know that's not what you want. And so you have to give yourself permission to do the hard work. You have to clean up the emotion. You have to do that no matter what you're doing. Anytime you get into a fight with somebody you do care about, Guess what? You're cleaning up the emotion. Why would you not allow that same space for yourself in the hard things and the soft things in anything? You have to do it. It's so necessary. And once you do that, You have to mourn. I said this is the dirty side and mourning feels dirty, But there's actually beauty in that too. In really getting to a space where you let the emotion die, It's okay to grieve. It's okay to say, Wow, I'm really sad. And I didn't like the way that that turned out, But I'm okay with the fact that I learned something. I have the ability to take what I learned and give myself a new witnessing of experience. I can say to myself, I can cry so that I can move past the loss that I don't have to stay in this space. What does it mean to grieve and mourn? It means to let go and to witness what is changing. That is where we want to be. That's the dirty side, But it's also the most liberating side of change. And in all of that, We have to practice the F word. Okay. Not the F word you think I'm going to say. Come on now. I know your kids are probably listening, Or if they're not, You don't want them to hear it. I'm talking about forgiveness. It hurts when things change. Relationships end, People leave, We change. It can hurt. And we have to offer ourselves forgiveness. Forgiveness for being so tied to it that we cannot honor what is. Forgiveness for the hurts. Forgiveness for whatever is necessary to move through. We have to be able to offer ourselves forgiveness and for other people, Right? Not to give them space and peace, But to give ourselves space and peace. And so when we begin to move through all of these things, We witness, We accept, We do the hard work, We let go, We find our emotions, We mourn, We grieve, And we practice forgiveness. We give ourselves the ability to quit resisting our lives. And as I've talked to so many people about doing this, Walking through this path, Finding the sense of personal empowerment by moving through all of these things and getting through the dirt, I often will ask them to check in and they'll say, Okay, I've done all of that, But I'm still not in a place where I feel empowered or I feel like I am really owning my life. And I will say, Okay, Then we have to kind of give ourselves a gauge. And I'm going to give you some things to identify to look for if you are in that space where I've done all those things, Right? But I'm still not feeling my best. I still feel like there's this dirty growth that I'm going through. And I will say there's still more work to be done if you can identify with one or more of these. And so the first one is, If you still wonder about what could have been, Or if you did the right thing, You haven't fully moved through the situation yet. If you're constantly thinking about that person and you have no thought relief, You haven't done all the work yet. When you talk about the situation or the person so often that other people are sick and tired of hearing about it, You haven't done all the work yet. If you feel anxious or angry whenever you see them or you hear them come up or you think of them, You haven't done all the work yet. If you blame them for your pain, For the loneliness, All the things that are wrong in your life, You haven't done all the work yet. If you spend too much time trying to find out about them, You have no physical distance, Whether it's on social media or actual life, You haven't done all of the work yet. If you're unsettled, You haven't done all the work yet. If you're unwilling to continue to grow, You haven't done all the work yet. There are so many things that if the negative is winning, You haven't done all the work yet. And so that's really what we want to focus on. And if we're in that space that the work hasn't yet been done, Go back to the first part. Go back to identifying what you need. Go back to identifying what you want. Go back to identifying how you want to feel and then look for the plan in which you're going to create that. This dirty side of life, This dirty side of change, It can own you or you can own it. It's so important to get into a space where you realize that growth is not easy. Growth and getting your life together is not this very simple thing that you flippantly do. It's often a bonfire, Right? And I tell you so often to not burn your entire life down. And it doesn't matter how many times I say it, That's generally what happens. And we want to get into a space where we can love ourselves, Despite what's happened. We can love ourselves at our core and know that once what felt really dirty has the ability to grow into something quite beautiful. When we plant a seed, We don't know what's going to happen. It's planted in darkness, It's planted in the mud, And then it grows and it bursts into the sunlight and it changes. And soon a flower appears and everyone reveres its beauty. You're no different. The hard things of our lives ask us to find the mud. The hard things in our lives tells us that that dirt feels heavy and it can weigh us down and we have the option to burst through it and flower and bloom or to die in that mud. To stay the seedling that was planted there and never go any further. So what do you want? What do you need? How do you want to feel? And how will you get there? Those are the pieces that take you out of the dirty side. Once you answer those questions, Once you put those things into action, You find yourself getting your life together. And doing so is an essential step. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode, Which originally aired on the Get Your Life Together Girl podcast. Please take the time to review this conversation and follow me here on Insight Timer for more courses, Meditations, And additional conversations. Until next time, Be kind to yourself and others.