Ease, Rest and Joy [Best of WHC] | ep92
Today’s Mindset Monday reads:
Let’s be honest. 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.
This week we’re revisiting both a fan favorite and a personal favorite of mine that’s all about ease and rest.
This summer I made a commitment to myself to rest, play, and have more downtime. When I first aired this episode, I took a few weeks off from the podcast as a way of really adding more ease into my own life.
In order to make this commitment possible I organized my schedule so that this summer could be a time of slowing down. And yet, even though I know that I can rest, even though I know I can take it easy… I was struggling.
I woke up most mornings worried that I was missing something. In the middle of the day, I would wonder if I should be doing more. I would finish the day thinking “I didn’t do enough.” And sometimes, I still do.
Truth is, I don’t trust ease and rest.
As a coach, I know how vital, necessary, and important they are. But as a human being, I push against the idea that I can actually rest.
And perhaps you’re like me.
I grew up in a household of hard workers. I grew up in a society that told me that pain is a sign of progress. I have been socialized to believe that if it doesn’t hurt, then it’s not working. That if I’m not struggling then I’m not doing it right.
Let's think of some of the common narratives we hear:
Relationships: “It’s supposed to be hard”
Career: “Rise and Grind”
Our Bodies: “Make it hurt so good”
Our lives: “It’s a struggle”
On one hand we are encouraged to be soft and on the other, society keeps telling us to be hard and guarded.
Truth is, if we want to become more soft, if we want life to feel more easy, then we have to start with trust.
Because right now:
we don’t trust ease.
we don’t trust softness.
we don’t trust joy.
In short, we don’t trust feeling good.
We believe that if it feels good, we must be doing something wrong. We must be missing something. We must be setting ourselves up to fail.
Love, you can still be safe and protected while being soft. You can still be productive and capable while having ease.
You just have to trust it. And like with all things that require trust, it takes time, patience and practice.
Then, how do we do it? Well, first we unlearn. Then, we untangle. And finally we let go.
I’m in this with you.
Want to go deeper? head to the podcast and try this week's journal prompts below.
View a clip of my appearance on The Doctors talking all about joy!
Watch the video below to hear me share about the importance of joy and how it differs from happiness.
A quote to take with you:
“The beauty of life really is in the moments. It comes down to allowing ourselves to trust feeling good. To trust ease. To trust pleasure. To trust joy.”
Did you know that each episode comes with several guided 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.
Here’s a sample of this episode’s journal prompts:
In my household resting was....
People who rest are…
The last time I felt ease was...
How can I build more trust with ease/rest?
What is one commitment you can make this week that is in honor of ease and rest?
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
[00:00:00] Welcome to Wholehearted Coaching: The Podcast. If you're looking for more purpose, more passion, more joy in your life. When you have come to the right place, let's create your dream life while living your dream life. Okay. Love.
[00:00:21] 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 @wholeheartedcoaching, 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-coaching.com.
[00:00:46] So this month on the podcast, we're doing something. We are re releasing episodes from the past year that were either fan favorites or my favorite. And this week we are doing a fan favorite. And also it's actually my favorite too. This week, we are looking at ease, rest and joy and how we kind of don't trust it, how, when we are in a place of total ease or rest, or when you're experiencing our.
[00:01:17] We're also kind of bracing ourselves for the next disaster for the next thing that can go wrong. We talk so often about ease and rest enjoy, but I think this is a really important thing. We also need to discuss. Our lack of trust when our life feels that way. Right? So here we are trying to cultivate and create all of this ease in our lives.
[00:01:40] But when we get there, we're like, Mmm, I think I'm missing something. Or I think something's going to happen to me. And we take ourselves out of that beautiful state of ease and rapid. This is a really important episode because I think that this is something that we all need to be embodying. It's something that doesn't come unfortunately, natural to us.
[00:02:01] I think our natural state in life is that state of ease and rest. I mean, look at a child, but as we grow up, as we hear what our family say, our community say our society say, as we experience trauma and difficulty, we lose that sense of trust. In that state of ease and rest and joy. So if you've listened to this podcast episode before I encourage you to listen again, because I know you will get something different out of it, that perhaps you didn't the first round, and if you haven't love, enjoy.
[00:02:37] And because this season is all about giving and receiving, regardless of what you sell. Next month in January, I'm offering a free week-long workshop called your best year in the workshop. We're going to be talking about all of the rituals and tools that I use to create a really whole hearted year, meaning a year where I am doing the things I want to do and feeling the way that I want to feel.
[00:03:03] If you want to get on the wait list and be one of the first to find out about this workshop and sign. Head to wholehearted-coaching.com/waitlist, or just go to the show notes. And in the spirit of receiving, I'm going to tell you, this is a hard one for me to do, but if you could love, if you could take just a minute of your time to leave a review of this podcast on whatever platform you listen to, the podcast on, that would mean so much to.
[00:03:35] The more ratings and reviews and subscribers there are to this podcast. It means that this podcast is going to be recommended more and more to other people. So if you could take just a moment of your time to do that love, that would be the greatest holiday gift ever. So let's get into this week's episode.
[00:03:54] So today we're going to talk all about ease and rest and joy and soft. 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.
[00:04:22] And that's what I want to talk about today. Right? What stops us from fully opening ourselves up to. 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.
[00:04:46] 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 E. 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 organize my schedule so that I could have more ease and rest as part of the plan.
[00:05:19] 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 was all about recalibrate. Again, like I said, summertime, just to me naturally feels like a time of rest. Um, 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.
[00:05:44] 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 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.
[00:06:17] 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, right. That because you're not doing something with this time, something is going to come and throw you off.
[00:06:44] 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.
[00:07:18] We don't trust. 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 rest and ease and joy and feeling good. Because if we look at the narratives that we grew up with, what was exemplified in our households, 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.
[00:07:55] 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. Did people in your household even do that? Were you allowed to do that when you've given the privilege of a grace to do that, what did you see in society and your community at large? [00:08:23] You know, when we think of a lot of the narratives around, you know, rest 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.
[00:08:50] 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?
[00:09:16] There is this belief that we cannot trust, ease, and softness and joy. For me, growing up as an immigrant who, you know, um, immigrated to Canada under some pretty crappy circumstances, I really. Believed in this narrative and I still hold onto 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.
[00:09:45] 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, um, is the key to unlocking so much of who I am. So before we immigrated to Canada, my mother threw me and my sister, this huge birthday party.
[00:10:07] 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 and I was turning four and I was like, this is the jam.
[00:10:27] All of this amazingness in 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, um, 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.
[00:10:57] 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 can not 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. And if you're joyful and if you're in the moment, then that means you're not on top of it, right?
[00:11:23] 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.
[00:11:45] 'cause 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.
[00:12:11] 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.
[00:12:34] But if we actually enjoy our lives, 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?
[00:13:02] I'm telling you, you hear about it. And you're like yesterday, man, 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.
[00:13:26] 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.
[00:13:55] I don't really know, 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?
[00:14:23] 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 love the beauty of life really is in the moments it's in the pleasure, the joy, the presence of each moment.
[00:14:54] And that really comes down to allowing ourselves to trust, feeling good, to 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.
[00:15:27] What would life be like? But what your day to day be like? The 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 rally and cry of ease and rest and how important and how vital that is, that we don't have to work for these things, that these things are not a by-product of what we do, but they are an integral and necessary a vital part of who we are.
[00:16:01] 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 Hersey of the nap, ministry, and Octavia Raheem, and her book gap.
[00:16:25] 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 distrust there. There's probably some resistance there and that resistance is around, but we have seen and learned and what was exemplified to us and also what we have experienced in our lives.
[00:16:53] So this to me, love for you as a call to action and the call to action in really digging deep into what are the beliefs I am carrying. What do I want to let go of and where do I want to heal? Because once we can start to really trust feeling, Trust joy trust, ease, trust, play. That's when life becomes so pleasurable and dreamy and wonderful, right?
[00:17:27] 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.
[00:17:54] Is joy is pleasure. So love with that being all said, I am claiming my ease and rest and joy 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 enjoy. So until we talk again, love, I am sending you all the love, all the rest, all of the joy.
[00:18:23] 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.