Sue Chats: Finding Your Freedom

What does it mean to raise up your voice and be an empowered woman? In this podcast episode, Susan explores the paradox of standing in your power and exploring your inner freedom in the face of fear or doubt. It's about learning to be gracious with ourselves and finding our freedom.

Transcript

Welcome to Chats with Susan Burrell,

And that's me.

I help strong,

Capable women who have pockets of self-doubt access their inner wisdom and clarify their own truth.

Chats with Susan Burrell is where we have rich conversations about empowerment,

Radiating your brilliance out into the world,

And loving yourself more than you ever have before.

And who doesn't want that?

So let's get started.

I want to start with a quote today.

It's just something I found in a little book,

You know,

I got at a bookstore that is entitled Nevertheless She Persisted.

And this is a quote by Malala Yousafzai.

She said,

I raise up my voice,

Not so that I can shout,

But so that those without a voice can be heard.

And when I read that,

I just I thought,

Yes,

That's what Chats with Susan Burrell is about.

I'm going to be having businesswomen,

Authors,

Just regular people in general,

On the show with me to talk about what it means to be an empowered woman and what it means to excavate those,

Clean out those pockets of self-doubt that we all carry around.

It doesn't matter,

You know,

You have your good days and you have your not so good days where you feel really good about yourself.

You got your power outfit on or those shoes that make you feel hot and sexy.

And then there's days where you just kind of feel like a schlump,

You know,

And I don't think I'm just talking about me.

I think that there's a lot of people out there that are empowered women that are successful and happy that you just have those days when you're kind of not.

And so to be that voice for those women out there that maybe don't feel that place of empowerment,

Aren't living in a place where they can have a voice,

Chats with Susan Burrell is going to be that place where we're going to get to do all that and so much more.

So I wanted to kind of talk today a little bit more about this idea that I've been working personally on my journey,

My empowered life journey of finding your freedom.

And I think a lot of us don't really realize that we,

Well,

We may be living a life that feels free.

I mean,

Like maybe where you,

What country you live in,

It's got a decent government so you have freedom to move around and have a say about what your life should look like or where your tax dollars should go and things like that.

But I think there's also this place of inner bondage within ourselves where we don't even realize that we've been holding ourselves hostage,

Where we don't recognize that a life having been lived long enough,

We develop habits.

We develop self-talk that is probably negative at certain times.

We develop the shoulda,

Couldas,

You know,

Well,

I should have done that.

If I could have done that,

Life would have been better.

I should have done that instead of this.

And the idea of finding your inner freedom takes work,

Anything takes work,

But especially when it's about your inner self.

And I am an intuitive healer and a spiritual guide.

And consequently,

Because that's how I've become,

I actually had to grow into all of that.

I had to do the work myself and that was part of the growing experience of crawling through the muck on my belly,

Of facing things in my life,

Like my ex-husband,

That I didn't want to face and say,

Wow,

You know,

I've grown beyond this.

This relationship is complete.

Looking myself in the mirror and during my divorce,

Feeling like who is going to love this person because at that point I didn't love myself.

I can't remember,

I couldn't remember when was the last time I loved myself.

So a lot of us create this inner bondage with the negative self-talk.

I don't know about you guys,

But I tend to download quickly subliminal messages.

If you've been raised,

If you've been born in the second half of the 20th century,

We were all raised with advertising in our faces,

Especially for women,

What you needed to look like and be like.

I'm a natural redhead and I remember those Clairol commercials that always said blondes had more fun.

And it would make me angry.

It was like,

Who gets to say that?

And therefore maybe I'm not supposed to have fun.

What is that about?

So those subliminal messages that we get almost minutely in our lives,

Especially in the Western culture that causes you to buy the things you think you're supposed to have or be the person you think you're supposed to be,

All of that infringes on our personal freedom,

On our inner freedom,

On the truth of who we are.

And when you begin to investigate the truth of who you are,

You find some pretty amazing things.

And some of those amazing things that we begin to find or that I found that I could actually begin in my years,

My older years,

Wrap my mind around is that life is a paradox.

And I found this great quote that I had on my email for a while just to remind myself.

It's by Maxine Hong Kingston.

And it says,

I learned to make my mind large as the universe is large so that there is room for paradoxes.

And certainly that was part of my personal journey of recognizing that I was in a marriage for 28 years with a man I loved for quite a while until I didn't.

And that kind of felt like a paradox.

And then recognizing that the marriage was done,

It was just done.

And we both kind of recognized that at the same time.

So probably that was a gift.

But then realizing as I was in divorce,

All those small places that I had held myself hostage for 28 years practically.

And by hostage,

What I mean by that is the places where I gave pieces of myself away that only created the cage or the fortress that I had been living in for a very long time not realizing.

It's kind of like the story which everybody's heard about the frog in the hot water.

And if you drop a frog in hot water,

It'll jump out.

But if you slowly turn the heat up,

The frog doesn't know it's boiling to death.

And that's kind of what happens,

I think,

When we give pieces of ourselves away.

We are slowly boiling to death.

We're slowly not being our authentic self.

We're slowly not knowing who we are because we've stopped investigating the truth of who we are.

We've stopped living life from a place that's heart centered and connected and loving and kind and gracious with ourselves.

So in beginning to recognize that I wanted to be free,

Not just free from the marriage,

But free from that inner bondage I had created,

All those walls I had put up around my heart that kept me from loving life,

From enjoying life,

From doing things that I always said I wanted to do,

Like travel internationally.

Sounds silly,

Doesn't it?

But we do do that to ourselves,

Where we give those pieces of ourselves away,

Not recognizing that that's what we're doing.

And then we end up kind of feeling empty inside.

I think women of the 20th century and before then,

Probably all history,

Hopefully the women that are coming into their 20s and 30s now don't have this going on.

But certainly my generation,

Even though I grew up during the time of women's liberation,

There was so much that women had to overcome mentally,

Where we were holding ourselves mentally and emotionally in hostage because we had been taught and then the advertising community reinforced it that women's places in the home,

After World War II,

The women that had been working in the military machine of building planes and tanks and trucks and Rosie the Riveter kind of thing,

Had to go home because the men came back and the men got the jobs first.

Now,

Doesn't that just not sound right at all?

If you're working and you're doing a good job at your job,

It shouldn't matter what sex you are.

In fact,

It shouldn't matter what sexual preference you have or what religion you practice.

If you do good at what you do,

Then that should be your job.

Okay,

That was a little sidebar there.

But it is all about how do we find our freedom,

Our inner freedom.

And women were not allowed to have all that.

And fortunately now things are changing.

So I think a lot of people,

Men too,

When we hit the middle age mark,

There's this kind of shock to the system of,

Oh my God,

Is that all there is?

And not just the hormones going a little wonky like they did in puberty where all of a sudden now you notice the opposite sex.

But now in mid age,

It's like,

Oh my God,

The clock is ticking and what have I done with my life?

That means I need to blank,

Whatever the blank is.

And for women,

A lot of it is,

I've been spending most of my life nurturing and giving to other people,

Whether it's cooking and cleaning or holding down a job and then taking care of the kids when I get home or whatever it is.

And it comes to that middle place of life where all of a sudden I know it was for me,

It's my turn.

Wait,

I get to have a turn now.

My kids are grown,

I'm divorced or my husband's happy and looking at retirement.

I get to have a turn doing whatever it is I didn't think I could do because I was so busy doing all those other things like raising a family.

And or being the breadwinner.

And so when we wake up and go,

Wow,

It's my turn,

That's almost like a signal to go within,

To me.

Because how we were raised,

Ladies,

And men too,

Is to look for love outside of ourselves,

To look for the acceptance,

The accolades,

The acknowledgement outside of ourselves.

And then that affirmed to us that,

Wow,

I must be doing something right.

I must be good at my job.

I must be a good person if this person loves me.

The fault or the problem with that is then we're all walking around like plastic Mattel dolls with nothing inside.

There's no heart,

There's no connection,

There's no esteem,

There's no self-worth if we're looking outside of ourselves for our value all the time.

Well,

I know a lot of men have attachment to their job and how much money they make.

It's all that,

Well,

This is who I am then.

I make X and so amount of money,

So therefore I must be really good at what I do or therefore I'm a good person or therefore.

.

.

And there's something that's empty and missing inside.

And that's that place in looking within,

You can begin to see where you've sold yourself out,

Where you've been holding yourself hostage.

And then that's where your freedom can be accessed by making the choice to get to know yourself.

Now,

You don't have to go climb on top of a mountain and meditate and own your way into bliss.

You can do that just by asking yourself questions like,

Who am I now?

And how do I want to express myself in the second half of my life?

Who am I now and how do I want to serve?

Do I want to serve from a place of resentment and anger or do I want to serve humanity or my family or my work colleagues from a place of love and acceptance?

And see,

Those are all qualities that we all have within ourselves,

The love,

The compassion,

The creativity.

And we forget that we have those things when we give pieces of ourselves away,

Where we lose our esteem,

Where we begin to not respect ourselves because we've stayed too long at the fair,

Where we've stayed too long in that relationship,

That marriage or that job that doesn't satisfy.

And so that's where we begin to hold ourselves hostage.

And so finding your freedom is a really important aspect to living a life that is empowered.

Not just happy,

Not just fun,

But empowered because the other thing about feeling empowered is that you get to make it up however you want because it's your power,

It's your life.

So that's just another idea,

Something for you to chew on,

To think about of how to live your empowered life.

So I invite you to go to susanburrell.

Com.

There you can contact me and we will be so happy to send you a guided meditation that I recorded just for you.

So again,

I'm just going to end with,

And so it is,

Namaste.

Reviews

Wonderful to hear wise words on empowerment - relating from a middle-life perspective. Valuable to women in potentially “disempowered” positions, to acknowledge that one could be pressing “pause” on things that are meaningful to one. Thank you ☺️

This relates to my childhood. Probably some of the reasons for my ptsd. The younger generation will be less likely to be subjected to that kind of behavior. I feel they will be more empowering than past generations.