BSB Ep 64: Voids
===
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and normally this would be the part of the show where I announce what we're gonna talk about today because I've committed to bringing you a weekly episode where we talk about different perspectives. Mindset shifts and even tips to make your life a little easier.
I also normally record about three or four episodes in a batch just to make my workflow a little bit easier, and it came time for me to record a new batch, and I found myself with nothing to say. So I decided, wouldn't it be great if I talk about that void space? These plateaus, the dips in your creativity or energy when you feel like you don't have anything to give.
And what do you do to get out of that? So at the time of this recording, it's Mercury retrograde, Venus retrograde, and we just had the second of two eclipses. So I'm a woo woo girly. I love to blend the [00:01:00] psychology, the neuroscience and the Woo. You'll know that if you're in my world. But if you're new, welcome.
This is me and I often use astrology to help explain aspects of a client's personality. I love it. But normally in Mercury retrograde, I get amazing business ideas, inspirations and downloads. It's totally quiet this retrograde and , I miss it, but I'm gonna blame it on Venus retrograde. I'm a Taurus and I think it's that Venus retrograde also, which is making things feel like they're a little too quiet in my world. So that happens to everyone. It's absolutely normal that creativity ebbs and flows. And one of my favorite books when I found myself in a creative slump years ago was Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. You may know her as the woman who wrote, eat, pray, love.
You may be more [00:02:00] familiar with that one, but if you are a creative person, a leader, an entrepreneur, I definitely recommend that you check out the book Big Magic, because she has such an interesting take on what happens when you find yourselves in these creative slumps. But if you find yourself stuck and in a void space, and I guarantee this has happened to you somewhere in your life, even if you don't consider yourself to be a creative.
But let's say you enjoy physical fitness. You have at some point in your life tried to change your physical image. Maybe that was lose weight or gain weight or build muscle, and you hit what they know in the physical fitness world as a plateau. And we get really frustrated in these void spaces, these creative slumps or plateaus because we think that something is wrong.
But if you look at it from a holistic perspective, if you were on a weight loss journey and you [00:03:00] had some pretty easy rapid weight loss, let's just say a pound or two a week, and then after about week four to six, that stops happening. Of course, you're gonna start looking for answers because it's natural that you think there's a problem.
But what if we took the problem aspect out of it? Just said, you know what? My body needs a little bit of time to catch up. It got a bit overwhelmed. It needs a chance to catch up on the new direction that we're trying to take it. And there's nothing wrong with a plateau or a slump if we looked at it from a different perspective and said.
To ourselves. How can I learn from this? What is my brain, my body, my energy, really trying to teach me in this moment that I might be too angry, frustrated, or impatient to pay attention to? Because that's normally the case. How many times in your life have you wanted to pursue an idea? And it [00:04:00] felt like you kept getting roadblock, problem setback over and over, and it delayed you to the point where you had new inspiration and ended up changing directions to something that was even better. There's this saying, redirection is God's protection. Right? And you can see that in a lot of different ways If you are aware enough to pay attention that sometimes it wasn't that the idea was wrong, but we needed to tweak it a little bit to refine it, or sometimes it was the wrong idea and we absolutely needed to slow down enough to see that, to appreciate it and get an even better idea. And in the physical fitness world, since that's what a lot of people might be familiar with, is what do they tell you to do? You change direction, you change your workout routine, you change the amount of weight that you're lifting, or you do something different to [00:05:00] shock the body, I think is what they call it, right? You shock the body or you just want the body to go, oh, okay, well I'm gonna adapt to this new way. So it's not that I'm gonna stay sluggish forever, but I've gotten used to the pace. I might be a little bit overwhelmed, so I'm going to change the routine or change the pace.
And creativity is a lot like that as well. So you might find yourself meditating more. Journaling more. Go do something different. And this is what Elizabeth Gilbert does recommend a big magic. And let's say that you are a poet and you've got writer's block. She'll tell you to go try some different creative pursuit.
Like go try sculpture. Go try painting, go try paddle boarding, even. Right. Look around at the beauty of nature and you'll find yourself suddenly re-inspired because you did shock the brain, shock the body and changed [00:06:00] directions a little bit, and that's often enough to get us over the slump or the void space.
But what happens when it isn't? Sometimes the void is a little persistent and it hangs on, even though you've tried to relax, you've tried to change up your routine, you've journaled, you've asked your guides about it, you're checking the astrology, what is going on, and sometimes the lesson is purely patience.
But here's a little trick, as you know, I do. The Bespoke brain system, it's a three brain system that teaches you how to look at yourself in the world from three different perspectives. The unconscious, the subconscious, the conscious. In other words, survival, emotion, and logic. It's the subconscious piece of us and the logic piece of us that is often extremely frustrated by the pace or the outcome not being what we wanted it to [00:07:00] be.
But if you look a little bit deeper, it's usually the survival brain or the unconscious that feels whatever you're trying to do is going to be unsafe on some level. And that it will change your world a little too much. And because that is our dominant brain, it's our security system. It's whole job is to keep us safe.
It has the ability to hijack the other pieces of the brain and take over when you are being threatened, and that brain doesn't know if that's a real threat or an imagined threat, but if you think about what you're trying to do, and I'm gonna use weight loss again as an example. If you've been working really hard to lose 50 pounds and you're almost there, then your brain knows your reality is going to look a bit different.
You are going to need to get new clothes, and you might have people looking at you. You get more attention, you might [00:08:00] get more opportunities. And I don't love that the world is structured that way, but there is a bias toward lean and strong, right? And so you may discover you're getting a lot of visibility, a lot of attention.
A lot of opportunities, and this part of your brain says, you know what? We don't really like that. We're used to blending in or being invisible or overlooked, or having a couple of choices, but not a lot of choices. And your brain will freak out and it'll try to shut that down. And one of the ways it could shut you down is to sabotage your weight loss.
And that might mean plateauing you or giving you a setback where you go binge eat.. I've seen that happen before. I've certainly had clients with that. It reminds me of a client I had at the start of my mind, body career. We're talking 12 years ago maybe, and she came to me because of this very [00:09:00] issue. Her weight loss had plateaued and she wanted to know, was it a mindset thing, an emotional energetic thing?
What could she do to jumpstart this again? So at that time I practiced a slightly different mind body technique where we did go looking for the origin event and we pulled out a memory from her. She was 18 years old. And she was jogging. She was incredibly fit. She was on the track team, , et cetera, et cetera, right?
All star athlete. So this woman was fit and now she's in my office 20 years later, 50 pounds plus overweight. That was where it started because as she was running outdoors, one day this group of men pulled beside her in a car and they started cat calling her, and they made her so uncomfortable. They started saying these things to her, these explicit things, and she was afraid for her safety.
And she said at [00:10:00] that point everything started to go downhill for her. She was afraid to go running outside anymore. So of course when she stopped running, she started eating more and then she started to tell me how that domino effect, she ended up getting relationships where her partner would make her feel bad about her weight and as a form of self-sabotage, she would go eat more, almost as an act of defiance of you can't control the way I look and, oh, you don't like it.
Watch me now, sort of thing. And it was this entire cascade, and it all started from one origin event where she felt unsafe exercising, doing what she loved, being looked at, being visible and this is how your brain works, my friend. It's. Insidious and you have no idea of how it can sabotage you until we get in there and start pulling apart some of these things, and this is why I [00:11:00] love to do one-to-one work with my clients, and I do this through the Bespoke Brain System.
This is that three brain system that shows you how, when, where the problem started so that we can redirect it, eliminate it. Change it, refine it, flip it, all of these things. Whatever's gonna work best for you and your life. So if you'd like to learn more about how the Bespoke Brain System can help you
bust through a plateau, a slump, avoid a sabotage, then contact me. We'll do a consultation call. It's free 20 minutes by phone. You can do it anywhere in the world. And let's get you some answers. Sometimes the answer will be, be patient and wait. But sometimes the answer is there's something in your brain, your body, your energy that is actively sabotaging you.
And when you have that awareness, when you have that knowledge, the key is to unwind it and release it, and [00:12:00] that's what I want for you. So if you find yourself in the void space, my friends, don't despair. Be as patient as you can, but also know that there is an answer and you do have it, but you might need a little guide to show you where it is.
And that's where I come in. Until next week, my friends. Goodbye.
