003 - The Spirals of Life: Embracing Discomfort and Growth

In this episode I share about what’s been coming for me in my own journey over the past weeks. We’ll explore growth as a cyclical “spiral” rather than linear progress, reframing recurring challenges and “darker” phases as portals for transformation instead of problems to fix. I discuss the cultural tendencies to medicate, pathologize, and monetize women’s rites of passage and why these thresholds matter for personal and collective change.

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

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

Transcript

0:02

Welcome to the Wild Return, a podcast where we explore womanhood as power, motherhood as alchemy, and the journey of remembering who we really are. I'm your host, Sarah Shot, a mother, Matrescence coach, womb guide, somatic educator, doula, and circle facilitator. I've spent much of my life on my own Rewilding journey back to my body, intuition, truth and purpose. And it's all culminated to this work right now of both mothering my babies in these times and supporting other women as they journey back home to themselves too. In this space, we gather to reconnect with how our womb and body motherhood, journeys, and nature are all gateways to our soul, healing and power so that we can live fulfilling lives, show up as the mother our kids really need and step into our unique role in creating planetary change. Because I believe that what the world needs now is wildly, deeply rooted mothers who remember exactly who they are and the power, clarity, courage, creativity, and joy that they hold and wield when they do so that we can do our part to birth the world. We already feel in our hearts, are building in our homes and wish to see for all of us. Let's walk together. Hi, welcome back. I'm really looking forward to spending these next several minutes with you today. And before we get started, I just want to invite you to take a pause with whatever you're doing, if you're able and willing to do so, and just take a few breaths with me so that we can all arrive here a little bit more present, a little bit more grounded, and just a little bit more in our bodies. So I just invite you to, you can gently close your eyes or leave them open if you'd like to, and just begin breathing in through your nose and gently out your mouth. So taking a breath in and then exhaling gently out your mouth. And again, in through your nose and gently out your mouth, maybe allowing an area of your body to soften that's felt tense or tight, and doing a few more rounds here together. At your own pace in through your nose and out through your mouth, maybe letting out a sigh or a sound on the exhale. Ugh whatever feels good. Two more times in through your nose and, and one more. Perhaps bringing a hand or both to a place on your body that would feel comforting to you right now, and just feeling the weight of your hand on your skin and your clothing. And saying something kind to yourself, I know personally I can be really hard on myself, and it still often requires intention to truly be kind to myself in the way that I speak to myself. So saying something, loving and caring and compassionate for yourself right now. Beautiful. Welcome here. Today I would like to chat a little bit with you about what's been up for me lately. The eclipse last week on March 3rd, that lunar eclipse in, I think it was in Virgo. Wow. That came out of nowhere for me in terms of how much it impacted me. I also had my bleed, and I realized just yesterday that I also started night weaning around the same time, so I'm sure my hormones have been literally all over the place with both menstruating and night weaning at the same time. And I've also been two months into my priestess training with the 13 Moon Mystery School lineage. And each moon we go through a different archetype of the Divine Feminine. And this past month has been all about the Goddess of Compassion, and self-Compassion is a real tough one for me, and that's a lot about what's been coming up for me lately. There's been a lot of gunk coming up from my subconscious around expectations and beliefs that I've been holding that box me in and really keep me from living a truly satisfying life. And I've been revisiting a lot about the way I approach my body and my work and just how I show up for myself on a daily basis and noticing the ways that no longer help me or actually anyone for that matter, and I feel like I'm being invited to shift and rework the rhythms, routines, and systems in my life -from everything with like how I schedule my work to what projects I'm focusing on, to even how we're doing the rhythms within our home when I am solo parenting my girls, to Ryan's work and how he is managing his schedule. And we're working to reimagine all of this and how we can bring in more space and greater softness and ease within everything. And it's so funny because I love going deep with people. I am a person that struggles to stay on the surface level in conversations and relationships with anyone. It is. Something that I just don't enjoy doing. I love to go deep and really get real with people, and it's funny because I still resist it in myself. I do love. Learning all of this stuff about myself and working through all of this, but man, sometimes when these things come up for me, I resist it with all of my might. And I did that this time too. It took me a handful of days to really just let myself surrender into it and let it have its way with me, for lack of a better word for it. It's one of my biggest learnings, is letting myself really just be held in the spirals of our life. And that's something that I wanted to talk about today. How i've been working on really unhooking from this belief that I need to be the same every day, whether that's in my energy level, my mood, my emotions, my productivity, or any of that, and realizing that I'm not, that I am a cyclical being and I'm on a spiral journey of life, not a linear path. That that whole linear path thing? It is not actually reality. We are actually on a spiral journey through our lives, especially in terms of our growth and our healing. We are just like the moon and her phases and the earth and her seasons, and we are not stagnant or linear or the same every day. In fact, I am vast. I am full. I have so many different aspects of me and I am ever changing, and that's the way our growth and our healing journeys and our mothering journeys and everything truly is. I believe that we are always somewhere on the spiral. We're always on another turn, and that's why I believe we meet these similar themes in our life over and over and over again. And because we meet these things over and over again. I know, at least from personal experience, I'll speak from that. I often view that as a failure. Like, oh, I didn't fix it last time. When in reality that's not true. That I'm just going another layer, another level deeper, and that it's actually all part of the path. And when I started this talk a few minutes ago and I said that I've been thinking about this stuff, and this stuff has been coming up for me over the past, what, like week or a month or two. I hesitated saying that because in reality this stuff has been coming up forever for me, for as long as I can remember. Maybe even other, in other lifetimes, who knows? And I think that's all because we are actually on a spiral journey here. And i've been working on releasing that belief that I've done something wrong, or that I've failed, or that something is terribly awry because I am meeting with these aspects of myself over again, because I am maybe low on energy or not feeling productive or really reassessing all of this stuff in my life again. And being okay with maybe it not making any sense or it being messy or wild. That life being hard doesn't mean that I'm doing something wrong or that something will go terribly awry if I don't stay on task and stay productive and be energetic and cheerful and joyful all the time. And it sounds so silly saying that because of course I know that, but there's places within me that definitely haven't embodied that yet. And I've been really working on slowing down to notice what's here for me, to really be in my body, with things even just as simple as breathing like those breaths we took together at the beginning, and tuning into what my body is telling me, what my heart or my soul is telling me, and not just living from the mental, from the mind. And noticing when I am using productivity as my baseline or a measure of my worth still and where I'm trying to control everything versus tending and caring and having compassion and curiosity and trust. And this is helping me to really bring about a level of depth, of richness and feeling of meaning and connection with something bigger, something more sacred, the deeper current of life. That deeper spiral of spirit that really holds us here, that really holds us. And I've also been noticing where I am hooking into a victim mentality, where I am looking to challenges or obstacles and viewing them as something that's happening to me rather than something that's happening for me. And you've probably heard that, and you may be even giving me an eye roll right now. I think I even just eyeroll myself because I know that can sound so corny. But that's a perspective shift that I feel has been truly monumental for me, and I'm still working out the kinks in it. So I've been revisiting my routines, my rhythms, my beliefs and expectations for myself, and really working to notice like, where can I soften here? Where can I open up and create space and relax the expectations I have for myself. Relax the deadlines, relax the to-do list. And really bring in compassion and even take up more space, like where can I delegate things or tell Ryan my husband, like, Hey, I need space right now. How can we work that into our schedule this weekend? Like I did this this past weekend. I was on the first full day of my bleed. I had spent the morning meal prepping for the week in the kitchen. So I was on my feet a lot and we had a birthday party scheduled later in the day for someone in our extended family, and he said to me, Sarah, why don't you stay home and rest? And I resisted that because I felt like I needed to be there. I felt like that's something I should do, right? But I took a step back and I paused and I listened in, and one: felt really grateful that he kept that in mind and suggested that to me, and two: felt like, yes, that would be something that would actually feel really nourishing for me instead of pushing myself to go do yet another thing on the first day of my bleed. So I stayed back and had a lovely time just relaxing on the couch. I read a book. I worked on knitting part of my first little sleeveless top for the girls, and it was lovely. I missed spending time with them, yes. But listening to my body and noticing that I needed to do something different and just take care of myself was a beautiful reminder of the power of slowing down and tuning into what's actually real and here for me right now, in this moment in my body. So anyway, that was kind of like a side tangent, but not really. Right. So what's really up for me right now is giving myself permission to shift the routines and the rhythms and the systems in my life and create ones that better support the natural tidal movement, the ebbs and flows of, of me and of life in general. So I can have more room- and we as a family can have more room- to breathe, to move and to be with whatever, wherever and whomever I and we are at any given time. And I am no longer willing to subscribe to the belief that there is something wrong or needs to be fixed about the. Quote, unquote, darker times in my life or darker aspects of me, whether it's the luteal and menstrual phases, the winter of my life, the shadows that come up, the low levels of energy or mood or productivity or whatever. I am no longer willing to look at those as problems that need to be fixed. I'm no longer viewing them as interruptions from my life because it is all my life. Because what is my life if it is not all of it? If those are interruptions from my life, then what is my life? Is my life just what is valued and approved of by capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy and all of these oppressive systems? Is it that I am a certain level of productive all the time? Is it that I am polite and accommodating and quiet? Is it that I'm always in that maiden follicular ovulatory energy? Is it that I am thin and weak and small? Is it that my creativity is only to be commodified and used to generate money and prestige and status? Is it that I need to be clean and neat and tidy and pretty? Is it that I always need to be working and busy? Is it that I need to be on autopilot? I've been looking at all the little micro ways. I do this to myself. I put myself in these little boxes and have these expectations that box me in, and how these are really reflections of the way the greater culture does this on the macro level. For example, how many of us. Seek out medication in some form of another, whether it's pharmaceutical or otherwise, to alleviate discomfort and pain. Not saying that there's anything wrong with that, there's definitely a time and a purpose for it, and all circumstances are different, but I think culturally we do this as almost like a reflex to avoid the discomfort, to avoid the pain, whether it's physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. How we have a fixing mentality about everything, how we view our bodies like machines, how we view ourselves like machines rather than human beings. How we have this linear thinking that I've been talking about and this extreme value on productivity with D regards to much else of what keeps us well. How we ignore the winter season in our lives in many different ways, and how we approach things like menarche and menstruation and motherhood and menopause -these natural rites of passage of women. They're often viewed as interruptions from our life. Think about the way that we handle menarche, our first bleed ,and menstruation. In so many ways, the societal expectation is here's a pill to alleviate the pain. Here's some products to make you go on at lifelike, quote unquote normal, and maybe even here's a pill you can take to make your hormone cycle throughout the month more in that follicular phase forever. And then we enter motherhood and we are marketed to and sold a whole bunch of products that are supposed to help us get back to who we were, to our body. As it was and to our life and work as it was before we had a baby, so we can get back to being our pre-baby, super productive for the workforce selves. And then there's menopause, which we just completely pathologize, medicalize and monetize in so many ways. Just like the rest of our natural rites of passage throughout our lifespan. We view them as interruptions from our life when in reality these things are portals, these times are portals, and I really feel like all these little moments in our lives, like what's been up for me in the past week or so, these are all portals inviting us into a new level of ourselves, a deeper level, a more true level, A, a growth edge to become the next version of ourselves, or who we were always meant to be, or who we are meant to become or to get closer to our potential. Whatever phrase you want to put on it. These interruptions, I'm putting quotation marks around them, I think are actually invitations. They're invitations to slow down, to pay attention, to listen. To shift, to change, to release what's no longer ours to carry anymore and to adapt. they're invitations to connect more deeply with ourself, with our body, with our intuition, with spirit, with life, with the earth. They're invitations to transformation and a deeper truth. They're invitations to remember that we are part of the spiral. That our life is a spiral and we're held within spirals. And that our wholeness is not a problem to be fixed. That our life is actually all of it. That our wholeness and our humanity is not a problem. And it's an invitation to trust even what we don't fully understand. As a society, I feel like we try to fix and medicate and solve and control and medic meditate away everything uncomfortable. And I, I am not exempt from this. I do this still in a myriad of ways. But we need discomfort to grow. And if we aren't growing, what's the point? I fully believe that we are here to grow. We are here to really experience all of life and all of these things, all the discomfort is a part of life. And by avoiding discomfort, we stop growing, we're we get disconnected from our fullness, from our wholeness, from our potential, and from our humanity. We try to manage things instead of embodying them. Instead of being here. We try to live in our heads versus actually being in our bodies. And when we ignore things like these rites of passage of womanhood, which has happened systemically on a cultural level, we miss the transformational opportunity that's there. When we as women are not aware of these rites of passage, when we are not held through them and witnessed through them and supported through them, it's really difficult to get the deep level of transformation that these times in our lives offer. And as we lose the individual transformation, we also then lose the wisdom keepers that we become by going through them. And when we lose the wisdom that we gain and glean from going through these rites of passage, from really growing and being transformed by them, we then no longer have the lineage bearers to pass this onto the future generations. And this is where I think we are a lot right now. We're missing the rites of passage, the big and the small ones, on the macro and the micro level, within ourselves as individuals and within society at large. We're missing these points that become these growth points, these thresholds for transformation and for change, for growth and returning and remembering who we really are, what we came here for, and how to be the change that we wish to see in the world, and really live the life we came here to live. And I feel like that is so important in these times, and that's why I'm so passionate about this work and this podcast and holding space for women as they traverse the threshold into motherhood. So, yeah, that's part of what my wild return is looking like lately, and I wanted to share it with you. If something from this little chat today really resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out to me and send me a message either via email or over on Instagram. It would be amazing to hear from you! Until next time, I hope you take really good care of yourselves. I'll talk to you soon. 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.