001 - Welcome to The Wild Return Podcast

In the inaugural episode of 'The Wild Return,' Sarah introduces herself, sharing intimate details about her family life and her journey towards self-discovery. 

Sarah reveals some of her personal struggles and growth, discussing how her experiences have shaped her passion for helping women and mothers reclaim their power and intuition. 

Focusing on the themes of feminine wisdom, natural living, and holistic health, Sarah invites listeners to explore the deeper truths of life and motherhood. 

In this episode, you'll hear:
- an introduction to Sarah and her family
- the vision and purpose behind 'The Wild Return'
- personal anecdotes of Sarah's journey through self-doubt, medical training, and discovering her passion for women reclaiming their power
- insights into the societal challenges faced by mothers and how they are natural leaders of cultural change 
- themes of reconnection with body, intuition, and natural cycles

🖤 Connect with me on Instagram @sarah.schott & @thewildreturnpodcast or email at rootandrise.life@gmail.com

🖤 Download your free Everyday Rituals guide to transform your daily life and bring the sacred into the everyday moments and alchemize your routines into acts of devotion to your one wild beautiful life. 

🖤Visit my website to explore the ways we might work together 

PS -- about this gorgeous music: it's the song: “What My Heart is Looking For” by Bonner Black from Soundstripe.com

Transcript

1:32

Hi. Welcome to the first episode of The Wild Return. I can't believe that I'm actually doing this. I have heard the call to make this podcast for a while now, both from inside myself and outside from others telling me: you should make a podcast. We would love to listen to you. Um, but it finally felt right. It finally felt aligned. I finally wasn't just brushing it off and laughing it off. Here we are. Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you being here and listening in. My name is Sarah. I'm a mom of two young girls. Evelyn is four and a half. Avalon is 15 months. I've been married to my husband, Ryan since 2014, and we've been together since 2007, so almost 20 years. That's half my life 'cause I am now 40. We live in an old 1750s farm home in the countryside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania with our two miniature Australian Shepherds too. And we've been here since 2019 and we've been working on it a lot over the years and really making it our own. I am a highly sensitive person. I am a Libra Sun, Aquarius Moon, Libra Rising, and a three five generator in human design. I love beauty. I love art. I love learning. I love going deep with people, and I also really love singing and dancing. And if I was more talented at it, I would take the show on the road. But right now the show is mostly limited to my kitchen and dancing and singing with my kids. And to be honest, I absolutely love it. It's some of my most cherished times with them. So this podcast is partly a gift for myself to my younger self and a reclaiming of my voice, of my journey, of my truth, of my wisdom, because I've had a hard time really sharing a lot about my journey, and this feels like a great way to do it. So I'm nervous. And really excited to be here. And this is a space for you. If you've been sensing that there's something more, something deeper, something more true to life, and you're feeling a call to connect deeper with your body, with your womb, with your heart, with your soul, with your mission here, welcome. If you're simply wanting to feel like more here, more present, more in your body, and just want to slow down the pace of life. Welcome. I'm learning this more every day. If you feel the weight of these times and want to be able to meet it better again, me too. Welcome. We're learning this together. And if you feel exhausted or burned out or stuck in people pleasing or looking outside yourself for answers or if you're feeling anxious or not creative or disconnected from your body or your intuition, welcome. We're gonna be talking about all of this. This is such a common way to feel, and I believe that returning home to ourselves, to our body, to our intuition, to the deep truth of who we are can really support us in these times, and that's why I'm making this now. Not only because I feel ready, but also because the times that we're in, we know they're not working. We're in this massive collective and planetary moment of death and rebirth. And the feminine wisdom that resides within all of us that's been dismissed and denigrated and buried for thousands of years is rising up again. And this wisdom will help us to create new ways forward, to live in right relationship with ourselves, with our body, with each other, and with the earth. You see, we've been living in these times for hundreds of years where we valued the mind over the body experts, over our intuition, consumption over care extraction, over reverence and regeneration and sustainability, thinking we're separate and better than nature. Our speed and our pace just gets faster and faster and more out of alignment with the pace of the earth. And this is leading to all sorts of dis-ease. We've been focused on becoming hyper- independent, especially here in Western cultures like where I live here in America, and a lack of support and feelings of isolation over relationality, over community, over communal care. And these are all things that I feel like are up now for unlearning and relearning new ways of being. And I feel that women and mothers are really central to this because as women we hold. This beautiful portal of power in our bodies, and have these natural rites of passage that we go through, through menarche and childbirth and menopause that really are more than physical initiations. They are spiritual. They are mental. They are emotional. They are relational. They are social. And we've lost those over the years. They've been pathologized and medicalized and monetized. And by losing these natural rites of passage that help us to really grow up and mature, we've lost connection with our body. We've lost connection with our intuition and our sense of power. Because I deeply believe our womanhood is a source of our power. And as mothers, we are at the center of society of our culture. We are the foundation, we are the heart. We are the nervous system. We are the nervous system in our homes, the heart, in our homes, and in the communities. We are the ones that are really shaping along with fathers the next generations. And by holding the center, we are really leaders in the cultural changes that are happening and that need to happen in order to create. A world based in more love and more care, and more equality and liberation and sustainability and regeneration, and all the principles that we know in our hearts are deeply needed. So we know a lot of what's needed deep down. But how do we access it and trust it and feel safe to hold it and have capacity to really build it. This is part of what I wanna get into in this podcast, 'cause the female path of remembrance is a return. It's not a complete learning from scratch. It's a remembering, a remembering of our true nature, of our wild. To who we were before we were made to forget. And it's a descent. A descent into the temple of our human bodies, into our feeling sense, into our instincts into our nervous system wiring into our breath, into our heart, into our belly, and our aliveness. And this, this is the wild return. It's individual and it's collective. To me, the wild return is talking about a journey back to an innate, untamed, and authentic state of our being. It's embracing the instinctual wisdom of seasonal living, of authentic self-expression. It's a path of healing And when I wanted to come up with a name for this podcast, this is what came to me. This beautiful picture of a path through the woods that we are each forging ourselves, but we are all walking together. And I really hope that through the name of this, through the process of us journeying together, you really feel that you really feel the beauty in your own uniqueness in you in your own path, your own wild return to yourself I believe that we came here to be in our full expression, to be the fullness of who we are, and that is how we are truly. Alive and living our quote unquote purpose. And as mothers, I think sometimes we can forget this or I'll just speak from my experience. I know there have been parts in my motherhood journey where I feel like I need to push aside parts of me outside of my role of mothering, but I'm often reminded of something one of my mentors said a couple years back, it really resonated with me. And she said that our kids chose us. Our kids chose the real full us, not just this one sliver of us that presents in motherhood and our kids chose this time to incarnate here just like we did, and that we're each here for this incredible, unique purpose. It's why we're here to really be all of who we are. And use the gifts that we've been given, the wisdom that we have come in here with and grown over our lifetime to really make the impact that we're here to make, no matter how big or small it may seem. We're all here to be exactly who we are. And that's what the wild return path brings us to. Now, I'm not done. I won't try to persuade you that I have all the answers or have all this figured out. I'm on this journey just as much as you. I'm not here to show you the way, but to support you in forging your own path and continuing to step further and deeper into who you really are and what you came here for. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I don't pretend to be done, but one of my favorite things to do is to talk with other women and moms about all of this stuff, to really go deep and get real and make connections. So the types of episodes you'll see here will be solo episodes. I'll share about my story, my own path, and the wisdom I've gleaned from it or even what I'm currently struggling with. And I also wanna share practices and tools with you along the way to support you on your path. And hopefully in the future I'll have some guests too. I would love that. I plan on recording these episodes for you every week or two, but my goal with this podcast is to keep it easeful and fun and playful. I'll be weaving in threads of the sacred feminine, of womb wisdom of nervous system and somatic work, soul inquiry, seasonal and natural living, holistic health, conscious motherhood, and parenting. matrescence and rites of passage information and really finding the sacred in the every day. So if you're resonating with any of this or feel a tingle of truth or like your curiosities peaked, I'd love for you to come back and hang out with me here. So the last thing I really wanted to chat with you about today is just a thread or two from my own journey so far, and how I've noticed that things I experienced earlier in my life really brought me here where I am today and have felt like these like full circle moments and. How bits and pieces of my path have really culminated to this place where I am and my passion for this work and this life that I'm building. So when I was five or six years old, my grandmother was diagnosed and then subsequently passed away from ovarian cancer. And I remember sitting on the floor of my classroom at school and just getting this deep knowing that. I was here to change the world and that I was going to help women with their health in some way. And in addition to that, I also started to develop this fear of my body and of my, my female body specifically. And I didn't notice that then, but. Again, as I'm looking back, I really see how that seed of fear had implanted in me and how that later impacted how I viewed myself, how I viewed my body, how I viewed life. This, knowing inside of me felt like something really big to hold. And a lot of time over the years I questioned like, who am I to think that I could possibly have this big of an impact and change the world. I had this thread that kept coming up of not fitting in, of being shut down in terms of what I was passionate about, of having my voice questioned and shut down. I had this passion for art growing up, and I remember how it was deemed as unpractical and how "artists only make money when they're dead," and how I gave up on that as a result, like I guess this isn't for me, I guess this isn't worth pursuing, and how I would always question things and let my opinion be heard. And I have this gift of really seeing beneath the surface. And I would bring up things to my dad of things that I noticed and I was questioning and being told, "no, that's not true." And being told to basically be quiet. And then I also had these experiences in school of being put into a gifted program and simultaneously into speech therapy and being taken outta the classroom and just feeling like this, this like strange being, this strange kid growing up in so many ways. And seeing how this all impacted my sense of self and not understanding where I fit in and where I belonged and what was okay to like and okay to say and what wasn't, and just really feeling this sense of: wow, I can't be who I actually am and maybe who I am is actually wrong or bad. This is a belief system that ran in me for a long time. And as I grew up and became a teenager, and by high school my cycle had stopped and we went through all the testing and all the imaging and everything like that and no one could find any reason why. So I was put on the pill, no questions asked, no plan to get off of it or anything, or any lifestyle adjustments to make nothing. And I just stayed on that, not questioning it until I was 30 years old. So I was on that for well over a decade. And also in my late teens, early twenties, I developed disordered eating, which I now see as this big result of just all the stuff I was feeling about myself inside. Instead of art. I went into the sciences and I loved them, but there was always something missing there for me. I studied biology in undergrad, met Ryan while I was in undergrad and didn't know what I was gonna do after I graduated. But he was going to medical school and I knew I didn't wanna teach or be in a laboratory setting. So I said, you know what? That makes sense for me. I, I would love to become a doctor. That makes so much sense. So I applied to medical school. We got in, we got into together, we went to medical school. We even went to osteopathic school, which seemed more holistic and more aligned with both of our philosophies only to realize it. It really wasn't that holistic and. I tried and tried to make that path for me fit, but I didn't like the lifestyle, that I was seeing the physicians living and I didn't feel like we were really getting to the root cause of people's problems and illnesses. So when we were doing our rotations in our third and fourth year, I was like, I need to look elsewhere. Because I need to be happy in what I'm doing. I was very, very clear on that and I was very clear that even if it was a different direction, I needed to do what was right for me. I started studying to become a personal trainer and a health coach. I fell in love with marathon running as a way to cope with all the studying and the sitting and the stress, and I found my power there. I found passion there. I found my physical strength and it lit up this fire in me about health and fitness too. So I was merging all of that. And after I graduated from medical school, I left. I left and became a personal trainer and a health coach. I followed Ryan to where he was going in terms of location for the rest of his training. And I worked in gyms and worked as a personal trainer and a health coach. And during that time I became more and more interested in natural health, more aware of my body. And I decided to. Stop the pill myself. I got off the pill and really worked to get my cycle back naturally. And I also really, by the time we got married in 2013, I made this vow to myself to really heal my, my disordered eating. And it was a long journey and there are times where it's still comes up for me, but I, I really took it to heart to really work to return to my body and my intuition and really listen to what was actually needed and what was actually there and wanted to be healed and worked with and sat with, and I ended up getting my cycle back and ended up really just returning to a state of health and wellness in my body. After Ryan finished his training, we were like, it's time for us figure out where we're gonna live. And we did the whole house hunting search and nothing came up that we liked. We didn't wanna live in a modern development. We wanted some land. We ideally wanted to live in the woods. So we thought about building a home until we realized how darn expensive that was going to be to clear land and build a home And we just didn't have that ability at the time. So we were obsessed with watching all those tiny house shows that were really popular at the time. So we built our own tiny home and we lived in that. And little did I know that was going to be a crucible, not only for me personally, but also for our relationship, which had been strained tremendously during Ryan's years of intense training. So we lived in this tiny home and we got a dog and we were outside all the time. And I started returning to the, the seasons and living aligned with nature and realizing what an impact this had. During this time I also started falling in love with spiritual work. For example, I went on this retreat with Rebecca Campbell in Glastonbury over in the UK, which is this site for the sacred feminine. It's where priestess temples used to be in Avalon. And while we were there, we also found the home that we're in now, and there was a Scorpio linear eclipse going on, and I had this huge portal of transformation happening within my life. That retreat opened up the world of the sacred feminine to me, and I realized I wanted my work to shift too into more like life and soul and heart-based coaching. So I came back from that trip. We bought a house, we were moving out of our tiny home, and I was shifting my career yet again to be more aligned with who I was becoming. That was 2019, and in 2020 the pandemic hit, we started talking about how we wanted our life to shift. I was 34, I think, at the time. We started thinking about having a family and decided that we wanted to try to have children. That same year, I got pregnant very easily and Evelyn was on her way, and pregnancy then opened up a whole big door in my life in terms of my thinking, my ways of being, and my interests. The world of the womb opened up to me and my love for the sacred feminine really deepened. I was blown away by this world that existed there that I was kind of tapped into in terms of bringing my cycle back, kind of tapped into in terms of the spiritual, um. Wisdom I was leaning towards at the time, but this was a whole new game. And while I was pregnant, I was eating up anything I could get about the womb, about the sacred feminine, and about things like reiki and yoga. And I really wanted to have a natural childbirth. And I did. I gave birth to Evelyn at a birth center and my experience giving birth to Evelyn was so empowering. Early motherhood and that birth experience just broke me open to the magic and power of the female body within me, to the depth of life that I never experienced before, to the sacredness of life of mothers of babies, and just really, I was in touch with my own aliveness, my own power in a way I never had been before. But at the same time, motherhood felt really lonely for me. I felt really alone. I didn't have any mom friends at the time, and although I knew on, you know, some level that everything changes when you become a mother, I didn't understand the depths of that, and I don't know if any of us really do, but it was really hard to be with the fact that every layer of my being and of my life was unraveling and I was sitting in this liminal space of caterpillar goo in the chrysalis for a long time before I felt myself being slowly woven into the woman and the mother I was meant to become. And the the mother that I am still becoming. Everything changed. I also had a great deal of support postpartum from my partner, from family, from postpartum doulas, and yet it never felt like enough. And instead of anchoring into the fact that we are supposed to have a true village, we're supposed to have grandmothers and aunties and neighbors and everyone around us supporting us as new moms. And we just don't have that in our society. It's not valued in our society anymore. Instead of really anchoring myself into that and believing it, the old narratives of me not being enough, something being wrong with me, kept popping up and were eating me alive for quite some time. In addition to that: I am no stranger to forging my own path and questioning the experts and authority figures on things, and neither is Ryan, but parenthood ignited that in us both on a much deeper level because through the process of pregnancy, childbirth and early parenthood, we really saw how our systems are not designed to truly support the health and the wellbeing of our babies, kids, new moms and dads, and families in general. So we spend a lot of time really tuning into what we truly value and what our intuition said, and building up the courage to really do things our own way. And we do a lot of things that are against the grain of what is deemed like the normal way of doing things in society. And that's been really difficult. It's taken a lot of time, it's taken a deep level of commitment and it takes a lot of courage and that's been really difficult at times. And also I'm extremely proud of us and grateful that we have done that because I feel like we are truly building a life with our girls that deeply aligns with what we value, with what we feel is true for us at the core of our being and supports our health, our wellbeing, our happiness, and what we feel truly passionate about. This whole journey really ignited a fierceness in me for mothers, for honoring mothers and honoring the childbirth process and, and really a fierceness for our kids. It ignited a devotion in me and a love for the female body that I never experienced before and really brought me back home to my body in a deeper way. It reminded me and made me realize the sacredness that is everywhere. All the time and how children are our greatest teachers, and motherhood is really this spiritual journey that invites us to heal our past woundings and become a deeper, truer version of ourself. It invites us into our fullness. And I believe it can ignite in us a remembering of our deepest calling and purpose. And that's where I'm at now. My work has now shifted again, but it's really become this full circle moment back to that spot during story time in my early elementary school education where I realized I'm here to support women and I'm here to make an impact and change the world. So that's a piece of my story so far. Thank you so much for listening to the reason why I created this podcast, what it means for me, and a little piece of my journey. I'm excited to come back here next time and share more with you. We'll be talking about the Wheel of the year and where we are in that, in this late winter threshold just before Spring comes, and I'm really excited to see what this journey brings for us. Thank you so much for being here, and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Wild Return Podcast. If today's message spoke to you, be sure to subscribe. Leave a review and share this episode with someone you know who might want to tune into. Come find me over on Instagram at Sarah shot and check the show notes for ways we might work together. I'm sending you so much love. I'll see you next time.