Ease, Rest and Joy: How to start trusting when life feels good | ep74
About this episode:
We know the importance of ease, rest and joy. But if we’re honest, so often when life feels good we get worried. We think we’re missing something, we’re not on top of it or that something terrible is about to happen. But that takes us out of the joy of it all.
Listen to this episode to learn how to start trusting ease, rest, and joy. It’s time to actively pursue a life that feels good, love.
View a clip of my appearance on The Doctors talking all about joy!
Watch the video below to watch me share about the importance of joy and how it differs from happiness.
A quote to take with you:
“When we enjoy our lives, it doesn’t mean that we’re not on top of it. We bring the joy, the ease, the pleasure back into the day to day. That’s what truly is the purpose of why we are here: to be in the pleasure of it.”
This week, I invite you to…
Ask yourself:
What are the narratives that I’ve created around feeling good?
How can I really enjoy & be in the joy of this present moment?
What would it feel like if I actually opened myself up to feeling good?
Want to dive deeper through journal prompts?
If you want to be in the know and get each Mindset Monday straight to your inbox complete with journal prompts to take you even further, get on my email list.
About your host, Shirin Eskandani
Hi, love! I’m Shirin.
Coach, speaker, writer, and life alchemist.
I teach you how to trust your intuition again, tune out all the BS, and let your heart lead the way.
Because once you strengthen your inner GPS, decisions become easier, boundaries become clearer, and belly laughs become a daily thing.
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME:
I’m a certified life coach (accredited through the International Coach Federation)
My husband and I met on Instagram and we live in Brooklyn, NY with our plant babies
I have a masters degree in Music and was a professional opera singer for twelve years. I worked all over the world singing on stage at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera (more on that later…).
I believe in the woo just as much as I do the work (internal and external). No amount of crystals and affirmations will make up for a lack of a healthy mindset and aligned action.
I love all the Real Housewives franchises. Don’t make me choose one… seriously, don’t.
+ Read the episode transcript here
Welcome to wholehearted coaching the podcast. If you're looking for more purpose, more passion, more joy in your life then you have come to the right place. Let's create your dream life while living your dream life. Okay love.
Hi love.
Welcome to wholehearted coaching the podcast. This is where we take a deeper dive into my mindset Monday post, which you can read on Instagram at wholehearted coaching or you can get the full post plus my weekly journal prompts. When you sign up for my email list, you can do that in the show notes. Or you can head to my website wholehearted dash coaching calm.
So today we're going to talk all about ease and rest and joy and softness. And if you're listening to this live, then you're listening to this episode in the middle of the summer time season. And to me, this entire season is really about ease and play and pleasure and joy. However, we have a lot of difficulty, sometimes leaning into ease and rest. And that's what I want to talk about today. Right What stops us from fully opening ourselves up to ease. And having said all of that, in order to infuse some ease into my life, I am taking a couple weeks off from the podcast. So I know I will be taking the rest of July off and perhaps a week or two in August. I'm unsure as of now. But for sure, I'll be taking at least two weeks off from the podcast, I am going to miss you. During this time you can catch up on the podcast, listen to old episodes of mine. And something that would mean so so much to me is if you could go and rate and review this podcast when you do it means that other people can find this podcast more easily. And we can really expand this community. So that would be such a great gift. And when I come back in August, I have some really exciting news to share with you some big announcements. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to taking some time off, reset, refresh and come back to you. So let's get straight into this week's Mindset Monday. It reads, we don't trust ease. We don't trust softness. We don't trust joy. Truth is, so often we don't trust when life feels good. So for the summertime season, I organized my schedule so that I could have more ease and rest as part of the plan. I you know, did a lot of work before the summer and I have some stuff planned for right after the summer. But the summer for me, it was all about recalibrating. Again, like I said, summertime just to me naturally feels like a time of rest. It's also my birthday month in August. And in true Leo fashion, I like to fully celebrate that entire month. And celebration means right taking time for rest and pleasure and play. Having said that, having said all of that, I can recognize that I struggle. When there is ease in my life, I struggle when my life It feels good. Because if I am being honest, I feel like I'm missing something. I have this like sense of dread in my belly that I'm going to be blindsided by something that I need to be on top of something that I should be doing something. And so here I am in this environment where I've created time for rest, for ease for just feeling good. And I'm totally worried and nervous. Because there's this this voice, this voice f anxiety that's telling me you should be doing something with this time that because you're not doing something with this time, something is going to come and throw you off, right? We don't trust feeling good. Because we believe that if it feels good, then we must be doing something wrong, we must be missing something we must be setting ourselves up to fail. That sense of security we're looking for is so often tied to worrying and doing and achieving. And so I really do believe that while I think we are all trying to pursue ease and joy and just feeling good in our lives, we don't trust it. Right. And if we don't trust something, that means that we're not fully opening ourselves up to it, that we're not fully immersing ourselves into it that we're not embracing it fully. And I really do believe this about this idea of arrestin ease and joy and feeling good because if we look at the narratives that we grew up with what was exemplified in our household what we heard growing up They made us think that if we are not struggling, if we are not worrying, if we are not anxious, if we are not achieving, then we are not doing it right. I want you to really take a moment and think of what was exemplified to you growing up, when it came to things like ease and joy and rest? Did people in your household even do that? Were you allowed to do that? Were you given the privilege of the grace to do that? What did you see in society, in your community at large?
You know, when we think of a lot of the narratives around, you know, arrest or ease or versus working, a lot of the narratives are promoting, working and worrying, right, think of what we've heard about relationships, it's supposed to be hard, or our career, rise and grind our bodies, if it's not hurting, it's not working our lives, you know, quote, unquote, it's a struggle. And so here we are, knowing that, you know, we deserve and are worthy of rest and ease and joy and play and feeling good. Here, we are desiring this and also knowing how necessary This is, but also struggling with it. because deep down, there is this belief, right? There is this belief that we cannot trust, ease and softness and joy. For me growing up as an immigrant who, you know, immigrated to Canada under some pretty crappy circumstances. I really believed in this narrative. And I still hold on to the narrative. It's something I'm constantly healing and working through that, you know, the carpet can be pulled from under you so quickly. I think I've shared this memory before with y'all on this podcast, if I haven't, it's probably one of my most tender memories, one of my most painful memories, but also one of those memories, that really is the key to unlocking so much of who I am. So before we emigrated to Canada, my mother threw me and my sister, this huge birthday party. I mean, it was amazing. She invited all of our family and friends, there was tons of food, I even remember that there was like a puppet show. It was incredible. And this was probably, you know, up until that point, the most fun day of my life as a young girl, I was turning four. And I was like, This is the jam, right? All of this amazingness. And one, of course, two weeks later, we immigrated. And what that party actually was, was a goodbye party. And of course, my sister and I didn't know that. But it was a birthday party, but also a goodbye party where we were really having that last final Hurrah with all of our loved ones, with, you know, the food, we love the most music playing. And I think for me, that was a really pivotal moment in which I kind of took in this false truth, but a truth to me at the time that you cannot trust when things are good. You can't trust when things are fun, when they're easy, when they're joyful, because it can be taken away from you. And if you're joyful, and if you're in the moment, then that means you're not on top of it right, you're not on top of what could go wrong, what could be taken away from you. This memory for me is a place where I have done a lot of work, and really have to do so much of my healing. Because I don't want to go through life not being in the present not being in the moment, not trusting the fun and the good. Because that birthday party can be a both and it could be a birthday party of joy and celebration, and also a goodbye party in which we you know, connect for one last time and have fun for one last time.
And so I really realized that through so much of my life, this belief that good things can be taken from me, has made me always on edge has made me feel like I should be worrying my way through life. But the truth is that we can actually enjoy our lives. And when we enjoy our lives, it doesn't mean that we're not on top of it. It doesn't mean that we can't, you know, fix things if they go to the left, or that we can't tend to ourselves when things go wrong. If we actually enjoy our lives, right? We bring the joy, the ease the pleasure back into the day to day. And I think that's what truly is the purpose of why we are here. It's to be in the pleasure of it. Which doesn't mean that there aren't struggles and difficulty and challenges. But how can we really enjoy be in the joy of this present moment. I'm telling you, you You hear about it? And you're like, yes, Sharon, I want to do this, I want to be in the joy of it. But it is a practice. And it requires trust. And it requires just so much awareness of when you are taking yourself out of your joy, why you are taking yourself out of your joy? What talks you out of ease and joy and pleasure? So as I am saying this to you, I want you to get curious, do you have a memory in your life like mine, where you kind of took in this false belief that you can't trust ease or feeling good? And from that, can you see the ripple effect of what that creates in your life? right for me, the ripple effect was just overworking and high anxiety, high stress, not really allowing myself My body, my spirit to just be present. It's exhausting. It's exhausting. So really thinking about what are the narratives that I'm creating that I have created around this feeling good, this being in the joy? Right? And what would it feel like if I actually opened myself up to this? And what would that look like? What would that mean? What would I have to let go of, to fully embrace that? And also, how could I do that slowly, right here, I am inviting you to do this. But I'm inviting you to do it on a timeline that feels really safe and good to you. Because the love, the beauty of life really is in the moments, it's in the pleasure, the joy, the presence of each moment. And that really comes down to allowing ourselves to trust, feeling good. Trust, the softness, to trust, ease, to trust, pleasure to trust, joy. So love, really dig into what that means for you. Where is the mistrust? And perhaps why is it there? What are the lies that the mistrust is telling you? And if you were to fully trust, feeling good, and ease and joy and pleasure, what would life be like? What were your day to day be like this summer? I really encourage you to dig deep into these questions. Because one thing that makes me so excited right now in the World of Wellness is that we are hearing this rallying cry of ease and rest and how important how vital that is that we don't have to work for these things, that these things are not a byproduct of what we do. But they are an integral and necessary a vital part of who we are, that we deserve rest in this moment, that you are worthy of rest in this moment, just as you are with whatever you have done or accomplished. So I love that we're hearing this narrative and some people that I love to follow and listen to when it comes to this are Trisha Hirsi of the nap ministry, and Octavia Rahim
and her book gather. Right? I love what they're talking about what they're telling us to do to rest and really claim that rest. However, yes, that sounds amazing. But if you are like me, there's probably some Distress there. There's probably some resistance there. And that resistance is around what we have seen and learned and what was exemplified to us, and also what we have experienced in our lives. So this to me love for you is a call to action and a call to action in really digging deep into what are the beliefs I am carrying? What I want to let go of, and where do I want to heal. Because once we can start to really trust, feeling good, trust, joy, trust, ease, trust play, that's when life becomes so pleasurable and dreamy and wonderful, right? All those things that we're trying to create by achieving things that's accessible to you right now. By just digging into these inquiries and questions, love with compassion and grace and kindness. My greatest wish for you this summer. My greatest wish for you in this lifetime. Is ease is feeling good. is joy is pleasure. So love with that being all said I am claiming my ease and rest enjoy and feeling good by taking a few weeks off. I'm going to miss you. And I really hope that during this time you also explore and revel in your ease and play and So until we talk again, love, I am sending you all the love all the rest all of the joy. And again, if you could leave a like a review in the comments that would mean so, so much to me. I love. Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you liked this week's episode, please share it with a friend. comment and rate this podcast until next week. See you later, love