As the primary caretaker for her dying parents, Nita Baum was not only aware of her grief, but also how she was being transformed. Jenn talks with Nita about what true well-being looks like, and how pain and trauma can be a portal to wholeness, choice, and freedom – as well as connect us to the capacity and unawakened potential that already exists within ourselves.
Guest Bio: Read more about Nita here
Guest Location: Vancouver, Canada - by way of New York City, US
Resource from Nita’s Journey:
As the primary caretaker for her dying parents, Nita Baum was not only aware of her grief, but also how she was being transformed. Jenn talks with Nita about what true well-being looks like, and how pain and trauma can be a portal to wholeness, choice, and freedom – as well as connect us to the capacity and unawakened potential that already exists within ourselves.
Guest Bio: Read more about Nita here
Guest Location: Vancouver, Canada - by way of New York City, US
Resource from Nita’s Journey:
Hi everyone, it's Jen Nguyen here. Welcome to this episode of the High Note Healing Inspirations from Life, where today we talk to Nita Baum about well-being caregiving and how healing leadership happens from the inside out. Nita is one of the brightest lights I know. She is the founder of Be Free, a consultancy that helps mission-driven organizations transform workplaces into healing spaces. Nita is also a leadership coach, the founding board president of a renewable energy nonprofit and, despite having just met her during the pandemic, she is undeniably one of my soul friends. You can read Nita's full bio in the show notes and I'll just say this conversation with Nita is deep. There are levels to it. You'll hear stories about Nita's experiences caregiving for both of her parents before they passed away, nita's take on love and gratitude and her framework for healing leadership in today's complex and challenging world. So this conversation is not only deep, it's expansive and hopeful. Let's get started. Hi, I'm so excited for today's guest. I'll let you introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Thank you, jen, for having me. My name is Nita Baume and I am the founder of an organization called Be Free. Our vision is transforming workplaces to healing spaces and I would say the organization encapsulates my own purpose in the world. Our body of work is healing leadership and I'd say my purpose is to be an embody healing leadership in every moment, in every interaction, in every place that I'm in.
Speaker 1:I have experienced that with you, nita many times, thank you. What is a deeply held value of yours, and when did you first learn about it or realize it mattered to you?
Speaker 2:The value that comes to the fore is well-being, which feels deeply connected to the purpose that I shared, and it's interesting, like I think about values as what we actually live and practice and embody, and I find myself inclusive of this space, just walking into every space I walk into with this kind of invocation which is to leave each space I've entered more well than when I entered it, when did you first realize, as far as you can remember, how much that mattered to you?
Speaker 2:It definitely feels like it's an ongoing realization and I'll start with now and then track back. But this year, throughout the adventurousness of this year, it's really been a transformative year of many initiations and in the form of encounterances with new people, new cultures, new perspectives on existing cultures. And as I've been dancing through that experience, it occurred to me at some point that to embody what I espouse meant focusing on one thing. And it occurred to me I don't think about things as much in terms of outcomes or goals or metrics. But this year I was like I'm going to use all of that language. I have one goal, one outcome I'm seeking and one measure, one metric by which I'm assessing that. And it's all well-being and, as I say that about myself, the experience of myself as being a vehicle of interconnectedness to all that is connected. That's the experience I have of myself. As I say that, while it is focused on what we think of as the self, it is very much about committing to and embodying that experience of well-being through and in the connectedness to all things.
Speaker 2:And when I go back, I definitely go back to my childhood, from quite a young age, a consciousness, I think, this really deep appreciation for the relationship between our well-being and our potential. It was like the culture of our house, our home, the place I grew up in in New York, and it was very much. I would say it was connected to both of my parents. It was like my mom articulated it. My mom communicated it and one of the forms she communicated it in was there was a simple form of what you take in is what you become and what you take in sources, what you put out in the world, aka what you create, like food that you take in. She meant it in all ways. So it was this deep practice of mindfulness.
Speaker 2:In what music are you listening to? What people are you friends with and in relationship with? What are you saying to yourself? What are you studying? What are you eating? Where are you and what are you taking in from where you are? Yeah, the profundity of that lesson has continued to be generative and blossom and mushroom in ways that I could not have imagined as I was learning those lessons and gaining that perspective as quite a young child three, four, five.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I was going to ask did you think it was cool when she was saying that, or were you like, get off my back, give me some space when she?
Speaker 2:was like eat some squash because you know it's going to give you an amino acid you need. I was like no, I'm good.
Speaker 1:Thanks mom.
Speaker 2:But it's a really interesting question because when I tune into that moment, the resistance I felt to the squash specifically, what I remember actually was this is so interesting there were ways I had resistance to what she was sharing in a material sense, like in what I was actually going to do, but I think there were so many ways in which who I was, my being, my spiritual self, my soul self, just was really absorbing what she was saying and finding it resonance. It's like making it my own, yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I was going to ask were you tucking it away? Was there a metamorphosis that was happening within you? You were doing something with it to receive it or live it out more fully? Or did it just stay off to the side and then come back to you in the form of a oneness and interconnectedness that I hear so deeply and feel so deeply in all that you are now?
Speaker 2:I think what I was doing with it, as you know, even at a young age I had a strong sense of self, which what I mean by that is the orientation to be introspective and to have a deep relationship with my inner world was very alive.
Speaker 2:For me, it was a place of both sanctuary and discovery.
Speaker 2:Right, I could travel to places I had never been, in my inner world and was like deep space, and it was deep, you know.
Speaker 2:And so what I feel was happening was I was being resourced by her wisdom and her guidance, which I then took into my inner space. But the resistance was like I'm not going to express this in your way, I'm going to find mine. I'm going to find my unique expression of how to take that wisdom, that guidance and what I think of today as filter it through my own spine, which is both this for me it's about my actual embodiment, like I feel my spine, and it's a reference to psychosomatics and some of the science and the disciplines I've drawn like the spine as this channel that is really receptive and sensitive to what's coming in. But I also think of it as this like you can stack your spine, you can straighten your spine, which to me feels like connecting to yourself more deeply, like. Sometimes I think of it as like can I lean against my own spine? If I can't lean against something else, can I lean against my own spine? An alignment right With myself, right, and so it's this way of working with wisdom and guidance. It's freedom.
Speaker 1:Ooh, how so? Because someone might hear spine and think rigidity, and maybe I'm just revealing some things about where I am in my healing journey that I'm like gotta be ready, gotta be hyper-vigilant, gotta be, you know. Clearly, fighter flights taken over at various points in my life, but you know, my mind could go to rigidity. And then I hear you say freedom, and I wonder how it connects to trust in self. Being aligned with self invites a liberation that I might not otherwise have had access to. So yeah, why freedom from the spine?
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll go material first. I'll say so. The spine, like what's so beautiful to me about it as a feature of our bodies, is its tensile Right. When you align your spine there's so much mobility in it. Part of its strength comes from its mobility and its flexibility and to honor the wisdom of a state of rigidity as an integral part of our experience. So when I say it's tensile, it's tensile and it's mobile, but part of what it can hold is rigidity Right. So it's this dynamic spectrum of like, rigidity or softness, but it's the dynamism across that spectrum that makes it tensile Right, as opposed to brittle.
Speaker 1:It's an option that I can choose. It's not the only option.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and that, just what you said, connects to that sense of freedom. Which is to say I think there have been times in my own life, and particularly leadership journey, like I was reflecting on this today. I was in positions of leadership from a very young age, like sixth grade, when I got elected class president and didn't run. I went home to my dad and I was like what's up with democracy? Because I wasn't even on the ballot.
Speaker 1:But it's it's funny to remember. That's bad ass, Nita. The people wanted you that badly.
Speaker 2:Oh, the people. I love the 12 year old people. So my leadership journey was one of finding myself like having this experience of people recognizing in me something about my leadership, but also feeling like I was in positions of leadership and was under resourced for so long that made me want to not be responsible, like not be accountable. It's like it didn't feel like the support matched the mandate of what it was I was responsible for or going to deliver on.
Speaker 1:It's like in math, balance both sides of the equation. Well, this equation ain't balanced.
Speaker 2:No, I'm not up for the leadership formula that y'all wrote Totally, totally and I think for a long time, like I was oriented to see, I looked outside of myself right as I was making that assessment, and I think the value of that was being able to see the complexity of systems Like there's there's merit to looking, or it made me astute about where there were gaps in systems. Like how do we, how do we develop leaders, like people find themselves in positions of authority right With with enormous I was, you know, 27 overseeing a massive portfolio of projects that were going to impact many students and families lives and I had a lot of leadership capability, but I've also felt I was like I felt the weight of that responsibility.
Speaker 1:And and this, this was as a consultant to education systems departments of education.
Speaker 2:This was at the New York City Department of Education where I worked, so that was after consulting to them. I worked, I worked there and so being able to look externally helped me make this calculus on the complexity of systems where there were gaps. How do we equip people to lead? How do we unleash people's creative potential and capacitate them to be the fullness of who they need to be, when, when they're in positions that impact many people? And as I progressed through my career, and particularly after I left institutions, the work, the work of leaving institutions, was incredibly transformative for me. It was like, okay, I'm free of the institutions. That was. That was like an early definition of freedoms. Like I'm out, drop the mic, I'm out.
Speaker 2:But once I was out, what I found myself in was an deep encounterance with myself.
Speaker 2:I was like, okay, well, I'm no longer looking at institutions and being like we're doing that calculus about the complexity and where the gaps are and what's needed and the misalignment To the clear point about resources to mandate Completely. Then it was like, oh, this work is an inner game, like I'm now responsible for. I started a consulting practice. I was like I'm now responsible for this and the place I need to look as I understand and navigate my own learning and growth and leadership is within, and that was really illuminating because it also cast an understanding for me about what I will describe as like that responsibility theme I was describing. What does it look like to be self-responsible, to be accountable and to source power and authority in anything else you want to call it from within? And once I found myself locating much of that external understanding within the system and the complexity of myself my body is complex, adaptive system Right Is how I see it. It's like once I was doing that from within, I started finding the blocks to my own freedom and liberation and the pathways simultaneously.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm hearing. Leadership happens from the inside out. Healing happens from the inside out. Maybe connected to healing is removing the blockages, filling the gaps, achieving the wholeness and the alignment happens from the inside out. So that makes me curious about moments when you healed yourself, when you got closer to the wholeness that we all have access to. Is there a moment in your healing journey that was a catalyst?
Speaker 2:So, just as I was founding Be Free and Be Free was coming to life, my parents were leaving it In response to was there a moment? There were so many moments in my journey of being a caregiver to both of my parents as they were dying. I source from it today. There were so many moments that I keep sourcing from it today and anew. It was one of the most powerfully whole system transformations, transformative experiences I've ever had in my life. It casts time in a really interesting construct because I'm like, am I still having that experience? In many ways, what I will say is and as you were reflecting back to me some of the language I used just a couple minutes ago, it was illuminating for me about the narratives we have about wounds, trauma and healing and the language that we use today and, I think, the ongoing development of language that we can all be in the co-creation of, to deepen our understanding and our capability around this whole body of healing. The quick story I'll tell is just at the inception of the process. It was 2013 that I founded Be Free and that was also when my parents I would describe it as this last phase of their lives began.
Speaker 2:I went home one day because my mom called me and my dad had I think he had been having many seizures so he had fallen off the bed. I went home and he was lying on the ground and my dad was about six feet tall, weighs 170 pounds I'm like five-four and probably about 102 pounds. So get home and my dad's lying on the floor and I ask him I'm like, dad, do you think you're able to stand up? He's kind of coming too. Do you think you can make it back to the bed? He looks at me and he says, yeah, I think so. I'm looking at him and I'm thinking I don't think so. But I so appreciated his agency in that moment I felt so conscious of it and I was like, let's do this. So he starts to try to get up and he can't. I had this moment where I looked at him and I lifted him up and put him on the bed.
Speaker 2:In that moment it was like this glass shattered and any resistance I had to being the caregiver or switching roles.
Speaker 2:In a sense I was the independent kid who went off to live in other countries and be free for a reason, but with that I had the experience, of course, of my parents taking care of me, but I had that sense of independence concurrently. But in this moment where there was that kind of glass shattering of resistance, there was this instantaneous awareness of a new sense of purpose and meaning in my life. I was like I am here for this. And I think now, as I see that moment, what it illuminates for me is how quickly our faculties and capacities come online in response to what we describe as crisis, trauma or wounds, what we describe as bad things, as bad things, what we judge as bad things, and yet right, and that's exactly the point about language. And yet I discovered a kind of strength, a potential and a sense of purpose in that moment, as quickly as a glass shatters. So how do we judge the wound, the difficulty as the problem?
Speaker 1:When it produces such generative, positive, almost I was going to say capacities, but it's almost a connection to the capacities that were there and we just weren't breaking through the glass to reach out and grab them.
Speaker 2:Yes, so that is my take on what healing is and what wholeness is. It exists already. And that inner work I was describing and the whole period, the whole evolution with my parents, just felt like one encounterance after another with my own orientation to judge, to make myself small, to fear, to identify and over identify with pain, with loss, with what was bad, and most of it was like seeing that in myself, just seeing what came up. And I had this moment, about three months into that experience, where I think I had snapped at someone. And it's not really my way, not these days.
Speaker 1:Sometimes the New Yorker comes out.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it comes out for sure it's definitely in there.
Speaker 1:But only on the subway.
Speaker 2:Oh man, the subway has a big playground of humanity. It's like when you listen to bartenders talk about what they observe.
Speaker 1:Who walked into the bar Totally, it's like that who walked onto my five train Completely D train Seven train.
Speaker 2:Oh, what a joy to dance with this life. So that day when I snapped at someone, it woke me up. It's like again, this encounter is in myself. I was like, oh, I just did that. I said that and the first person who I snapped at I was like that's not fair.
Speaker 2:And it made me pause and ask myself the question of who do I want to be? And when I was asking it it was like a present moment question, but it occurred to me that that was like this portal to actually what I'm saying is who do I want to be, with what I already understand to be a very significant process in my life? That's just beginning and I could almost I could feel its length. I could feel the journey already and the response to that question was I don't want to be an asshole, but part two came right Like part two came, and I kept asking myself that question who do I want to be? And it was a really powerful inquiry. I think it was also part of my discovery of my own purpose. One of the responses in that phase was what if I could hold space for this to be the best phase of my parents' life?
Speaker 1:I'm blown away by the bigness of love in that question. To me it's another shattering of a ceiling. Talk about love conquers all. I mean that just engulfed everything that could have been negative.
Speaker 2:I was such a blessing, jen, it was such an invitation to be present every day with the opportunity of this incredibly potent phase, this incredibly potent transmission that was happening every time I held my dad 's hand or looked at my mom's eyes or sang to her, listened to her. It left me with this experience of appreciation and friendliness and trust in the vicissitudes and the crazy waves of the difficulties, the challenges, the discomforts, the pains and what we consider to be the flip side of that the joy of the high moments, the discovery, the launching pad, the fulfillment of purpose, the awareness of how vast your capacities are.
Speaker 1:I'm so struck by how it's all one which I guess goes back to what you told us about well-being that you had one goal, one metric for success, one desired outcome, that it is all one your well-being is the other person's well-being is my well-being. And I'm hearing that your pain and your loss which I, when you first started speaking, I was going to say I'm sorry for, but the words didn't come out and it's because they were incomplete. What I think I'm hearing you say, nita, is that your pain and your loss and your challenge when your parents transitioned from this life was also your portal to your purpose and so many other powerful things.
Speaker 2:Yes, and in this moment I'm just. I'm feeling deep gratitude for the community of people and caregivers who were galvanized around and encircling my parents through that process, as another expression of how we encounter our collective wholeness in the face of what we experience as difficult and this is not to diminish or dishonor that as humans we will experience it as difficult and the possibility of how we can tap into our freedom, our potential to choose how we engage with what we encounter. This is very enlivening to me. Can I say something there?
Speaker 1:Please Thank you for saying that, because while you were speaking in the last few minutes, I was hearing duality of both and so I wasn't hearing you. Diminish the pain, the difficulty.
Speaker 1:I was hearing honor both, as I hear you speak more. I'm hearing that when I allow myself to feel all of the things. There is a complexity there and it's not two dimensional, it's probably not even three dimensional, and that, in that complexity, is the choice, is more than one option, many more options than we could know, and that's where the freedom is. Thank you, jen.
Speaker 2:I think you're an embodiment about what you just described, so hold up mutual gratitude.
Speaker 1:You're thanking me for summarizing the knowledge that you just dropped.
Speaker 1:Tell that worth, nita, why I'm checking for my understanding of the immense wisdom you just dropped and you're thanking me, yes, and Thank you for highlighting that this is an example of the many things you teach me, down to the embodiment that you're claiming I am.
Speaker 1:My foray into somatics and embodiment practices and learning came from a conversation with you a few years ago, and, in fact, I started taking Pilates this year as another dimension to add to my understanding around embodiment, and my amazing Pilates instructor, jay, is on this podcast this season. Wow, hey, jay, thank you, and I learned so much with him and through my embodiment work, and so I want to put a pin in a poem that came through me quite frankly, I wouldn't even say it came from me after a particular Pilates session that I had with Jay, and that has been a virtuous cycle that you set in motion years ago. So all of this is to say immense gratitude for you, and I'll come back to the poem that came through me as a result of the embodiment work that you made me curious to start.
Speaker 2:I feel this immense potential in how we can use joy and a sense of possibility, play, expansion, fun, adventure, awe right as catalysts for transformation. Like that challenging period I went through with my parents that awakened me to capacities and faculties that I didn't even know existed in the universe period in people, in potential, much less in myself. I have deep gratitude to what I experienced, this challenge and it's not the only way Right Like once we become conscious of our own creative potential, which I think is very connected to our well-being. The more well we are, the more we're accessing our creative potential and wellness. To honor the diversity of who we are is defined by each of us.
Speaker 2:I can't tell you what being well means to you. I can just tell you what that is to me. So, honoring that relationship between well-being and creative potential and how they potentially each other is like this is also where I think there's this expansive possibility for us to open our minds cross-culturally and to look at people who we have, they've just been left out of our awareness or who are invisible because they're in the Amazon or they're in places that feel remote to us, based on our perspective, and that, through the development of our cultures, we have learned to create a hierarchy of human value right, Someone's lesser because ABC, and what would it look like as we do that internal healing to create greater wholeness and greater inclusivity internally, which is why let's do it with joy and fun and dance and play, which is also what many of the cultures we've excluded from our sense of who a leader is actually do and have been sourcing from.
Speaker 2:And just for context, you're talking about how we define leadership here in the United States In the United States In mainland In mainland, what we call the Western world and I think there are probably many threads of that that also are global right, Whether they were influenced by the States or are inherent in what I think is a natural human proclivity to create hierarchy between us, hierarchies of value. I think that's a shared thing and I think it's actually been expressed in particular ways. So that's like part one on the healing leadership. Part two is leaders need to be healed. Leaders need to be well. That statement is just like period Leaders needs to be well.
Speaker 2:Humans need to be well and leaders are humans, so leaders need to be well and you know there's that added dimensionality of like at work that work and wellbeing can be mutually reinforcing and we've built ourselves on a premise where we've got to sacrifice or consume wellbeing in order to work. But that feels very counterintuitive to me when I think the whole, a whole way we could understand why we work, is to be well financially, with our friends and our family, is like holistically in our lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it doesn't seem like a sustainable strategy to have work, consume our capacity to work.
Speaker 2:It's like a cannibalizing strategy. It eats itself up a little bit and then there is in the vein of our evolution together, collectively, leaders need to be able to hold space for the healing and wellbeing of their people, the people we are in community with. We are leading, we are impacting.
Speaker 1:Anyone who's orchestrating, inviting, catalyzing that togetherness, that wholesome communion, has to be sourcing from an increasingly whole place within themselves to create the environment, the conditions, the space that would enable us to do that together. And how virtuous that cycle is when it happens. I'm thinking of the bell hooks quote healing is an act of communion.
Speaker 2:And there are two frames we use in our work. One is that you were speaking to earlier when you were talking about your embodiment. One is how do we capture the wholeness of a person and the idea of body-mind as ecosystem in some way that's accessible and usable and pragmatic? Because, though I love to dance in philosophy and spiritual realm and big picture thinking, I also feel that small is big, which is another way of saying like let's get real and pragmatic about how we translate the immense and vast potential of our own healing into something livable day to day, that we can do so.
Speaker 2:With that we have a frame that we use, which is we are beings who think, sense and feel, so we're not over-indexing on the Cartesian view of I think. Therefore I am, but actually it's all of those dimensions that contain within them an intelligence that, once tapped, can connect us to a more whole potential within us. So the embodiment piece as you were describing your experience of Pilates and as I've been in relationship with you, jen, like the experience I've had of you thinking, sensing and feeling, and how online those dimensions of you are and the ways they dance together, and also my invitation to people as you're listening to that frame is like. Use it in your decision making. Use it to check where your sensing may have intelligence for you, where you're thinking may not right, or where you're feeling may offer you a window into another way of knowing than you are typically used to knowing and in so doing, expand the versatility of your tool set to navigate your life and the complexity of your life. So that's that's think, sense, feel.
Speaker 1:And I get an example of how the think, sense, feel framework impacted a decision of yours for the better.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's a great question. I want to go back. I want to go back to that period with my, with my parents. That's what's most present. So I'll do that. I'll. I'll share my response in the form of a of a story. But there was a day I was sitting between my parents. They were both in their beds. It was a few months after my dad had a stroke, so he wasn't, he couldn't speak much. So we were communicating in other ways and I was sitting between them opening the mail. Because I had so many responsibilities, I had like taken over their lives, right. So I was. I was in this space where I was trying to manage all these different aspects of their lives and just like bring it and do it well. So I was sitting there as a stack of mail, going through each piece of mail, and then all of a sudden I kind of like tuned into. So I was thinking, right, like I was thinking about what I was reading and what bill needed to be paid and so on.
Speaker 1:And then all of a sudden can be all consuming. I say this as a a long distance caregiver. Damian and I together. Once you take on the responsibility of keeping someone's life together, all dimensions of it, it really can consume you.
Speaker 2:And you experienced that as a parent too, I imagine In many ways, yup, yeah. And then I had this sense and I developed more of a relationship to my, to my ability to sense things at that point, I think, very much through the experience. So. So I kind of paused for a second and I was like, what is this sense? And then I just checked in with myself and almost before I could pinpoint the feeling I was having, which was starting to come as like wow, like this moment is really precious. What arose was this really clear and loud inner voice that said put down the mail and hold your dad's hand. Whoa.
Speaker 2:From inside of you, from from around me, I don't know. I just know it was very loud, very potent. It like landed its mark and I literally dropped the mail and I held my dad's hand and a month later he passed and I held his hand every day for the next 30 days the wisdom in that voice, the connection in that voice, the oneness and the love in you to listen and act upon that voice, even when you couldn't fully understand it for your dad.
Speaker 2:And it makes me think it was pattern disruption. Right, my pattern was to try to think my way through the challenge Ain't gonna work, not gonna work, not gonna work right, and certainly not in complexity either. And to pull the lens back up like take the eagle eye view on this moment and what we're living through and the great changes, the great uncertainty that many of us feel, again with that view of like how is all of that an opportunity to get in touch with thinking, sensing and feeling and I'm not dissing thinking, like thinking has a place right, it's a matter of we've indexed on it, we've built it many of us, and it's different for everybody, but just recognize the thing like we have access to all of them. What happens when we tune in and tap into them?
Speaker 1:I'm struck by the alignment that you're proposing. As the challenges in our lives and the world we live in become more complex, we need to listen more complexly.
Speaker 2:I don't even know if that's a word Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:We need to see more nuance, we need to feel sense. Think I probably said that in the wrong order excuse me, it's perfect, it's perfect.
Speaker 1:In a way that matches the challenge at hand. If the challenge is three-dimensional, we can't be two-dimensional. If the challenges feel beyond three-dimensional, so all around us, that three dimensions can't even capture it, then the way we take in information and understand it and relate to it and wrap our head, hearts and being around it so that we can do something and move forward has to have at least that much complexity too.
Speaker 2:And not only do we need to, but this is the opportunity.
Speaker 1:Oh, I see what you did there. This is my thing, yes, and Right.
Speaker 2:This is my thing about healing. It's like what becomes accessible to us in what we describe as our most challenging and difficult moments is that potential. It's the unawakened potential and it's the same thing that becomes most available to us when we're most joyful. It's not actually different. It's like the most quality right. The superlative quality of it has a lot to do with the accessibility that it's like. It's right there when I'm feeling overwhelmed, like I can't, and I feel disempowered or ashamed.
Speaker 2:Shame as this very powerful root emotion. There's an invitation there to. It's like the shame is present, it's visible, it's palpable in a way that it's not usually so. What is that? That's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to work with it and our systems have that capacity our body, mind systems and we need each other right. We need support, we need care, we need coaching, we need therapy, we need all of the ways that we resource ourselves externally to help facilitate and awareness of that capacity within. But the capacity's within and it is so ripe for showing itself or for doing its thing in that very moment.
Speaker 1:Wow so, in the height of our most of our hardest moments, whether that's shame, whether that's overwhelm, fear, et cetera, there's an invitation to get curious about how much more I'm capable of than I currently or previously knew, to get curious about another perspective. I could take on this very experience, and if I can do that with others or in community or in communion, it will amplify, enable, maybe even accelerate my ability to shift perspective see what I couldn't see before, feel what I couldn't feel before. Sense, think, do be what I wasn't previously accessing. Is that right?
Speaker 2:That is right and trust right. Like the other really key facet of this for me is trust. It's like having a practice. For me, the way it shows up is a practice of trust and I articulate it as like whatever comes my way, whatever the unfolding is, I trust that it is for me, it is for us all, it is an opportunity to learn and grow and work with the intelligence of that. And as I share that, like I share all of this with great humility, I leave in the vastness of the unknown and I stand very humble in the face of it. These are invitations to experiment right With what resonates, or perhaps even with what doesn't resonate, and try it on. And to your point about curiosity, like, see what opens up for you. But I will say personally, the practice of trust and in my work with people it's a really powerful one for that alignment we were talking about Yep.
Speaker 1:you're making the spine come back to mind for me. Absolutely. Why do you want to heal Nita?
Speaker 2:It's the most joyful thing I could think of.
Speaker 1:Because it's fun. It's fun.
Speaker 2:It's fun, healing is fun, it's learning, it's demanding. In the ways that feel like, are responsive for me to the question of like, what do I want to do with this one precious life? It's invigorating and I love people, I love nature, I love the opportunity of being alive, I'm, like, profoundly grateful for it and love and gratitude feel very intertwined for me and I love our potential, like I always describe. You know, seven years old in 1984, watching the Olympics, just like glued to our little busted television set where the antenna is. We were always moving the antenna to try to get the signal. Yep.
Speaker 1:And the cord didn't quite reach far enough.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Totally. You're doing the dance with it, right, and that was like an early seeing, in an embodied form, what was possible. Right, every Olympics is like somebody's exceeding the next limit, but what I took from it and there's that material distinction I made when I was talking about my mom, like the material and the spiritual, and I think what it was, what I was seeing, was like who are we, who can we be Like, especially right now, right, the difference between quote unquote, like winning and not the Olympics, is like it's a moment, it's exactly this moment.
Speaker 1:The trust that must be present in every single one of those competitors, participants of the game, of the Olympic game, of the life we live, the trust that it must take, that, though it'll be hard, it'll be worth it. And in embarking on this journey and this attempt to reach the highest and best version of myself physically, materially, spiritually, etc. I might blow my mind and yours. I might reach heights we didn't know was possible.
Speaker 2:You reminded me. You know I grew up with a lot of discipline and conversations about, like, how do you use your time? You know, don't squander your time. Your time is precious. And sometimes my parents would be disparaging about play versus study, right, and I remember this experience. I had some point.
Speaker 2:I was, I was invited to do something adventurous. I don't remember exactly what it was. Might have been like cliff jumping or something. It was good. It was going to be like a whole day, you know, whole journey of adventuring.
Speaker 2:And I and so I was coming with this narrative, this judgment in my head of, like, well, there's, you know, there's productive, good things to do in the world, right. And then there's, like, this play and I could see it. I could see it operating in me. But as I was on that journey, like I said, yes, I want to go do the thing.
Speaker 2:And as I was on the journey, I realized I had this flashback to, to working and to remembering how much I would work, from this like intense place in myself that was striving and driving and often fear driven and feeling under resourced, and how willing I was to like, really, let all of me Just drop everything I had into that experience and as I was on my way to this adventure, I was like, hmm, so interesting how I was willing to give so much energy to that. Why can't I do it for this? And that's to all my mission driven people. That's, that's my, that's my invocation to your wellbeing. Like you can bring, you can bring your energy and you will and you do, and you can trust yourself that you're bringing it to all the impact you're seeking to create, to all the healing, all the all the good, all all of what you're generating. And you are part of that and it's your choice.
Speaker 1:The movement for healing needs to pour into its own healing all that it pours into others.
Speaker 2:And to recognize the oneness of that and also to bring patients and care and honor the complexity of that exercise. Like as someone who works with organizations on wellbeing, I I honor what it's like to hold the spectrum of views that we hold about our wellbeing, to feel like we should sacrifice, you know, and we should give up our own wellbeing, and so it's for each of us to self lead and honor and define how we view our relationship to wellbeing. But I also challenge and encourage people to mix it up, to disrupt our own patterns. Right, like that, that moment of like hold your dad's hand. I'm just like pattern disruption. What a teaching to me about my own patterns, about my own habits, habitual ways of being collectively, like our polarization, our habitual leanings. They, they're singing to us, they're dancing to us for for something really simple, right, and I'm just like do it different.
Speaker 1:What different thing do you wish for others? Different thing Do you wish for yourself as you continue your healing journey?
Speaker 2:It's likely the same thing. It is about remembering that we come with love as much as we come with karma, challenge, trauma, difficulty and, in my view, the love, love is in everything. It's vast. And if love, what love right now looks like to me joy, play, adventure, music, creating it to really embrace that as a possibility, as an expansive possibility and opportunity for our growth and evolution, to really allow that invite it, be receptive to it. Small ways and big, that period for me of learning how to dance with challenge and and loss and grief and pain made me appreciate, like I it. It evoked a deep appreciation for it and it's been a process to recognize that it was time for evolution. It seemed to be attached to that to receive its gifts, to work with what it had to offer. And so the opportunity for something fresh and new and a different approach, right rooted in joy and play, as accessible and as palpable, right as as our difficulties will be like.
Speaker 1:They're both present, so using both Not easy, that's why we got each other Not easy, but doable with each other and worth it.
Speaker 2:This one precious life.
Speaker 1:That's why you heal. Love is why I heal. Oh, you know, I love me some love.
Speaker 2:So much love. Thank you, Jen. Thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker 1:Thank you, nita, for the opportunity. Wow, wow, wow. Thanks for sticking around for my love and learning reflection. Here's the thing, though. What am I loving and learning about this conversation with Nita? Everything Talking to Nita is like the ocean Deep, expansive, healing, beautiful and energizing. I just have to name it. It is so hard to summarize this very big conversation with Nita. There's just so much in it and in fact, there's more. The full recording was two hours long. We even considered releasing two Nita episodes. So instead of me sharing a love and learning outro, I'm going to do something different this time. I'm going to share with you my poem that I shared with Nita in our extended conversation. To hear me read my poem to Nita, check out the next and last episode of this season and if anything resonated with you, please do share this episode or any episode. Thank you so much for listening. Much love everyone.