Hello, friends. Welcome to the very first episode of the Practicing Wholeness Podcast. My name is Brooke Snow, and I'm so grateful that you're here. To begin, I'm sure many of you starting out with this very first episode are likely familiar with my past work. I've been a podcaster for since 2015, so quite a while, and I've had a few different podcasts, and this is one that I'm excited to be able to start for a few different reasons.

It's gonna be a different approach than the ones that I've done in the past. First off, I am recording with video. Apple has just announced that they're going to integrate video into the podcast app, is really exciting. I'm excited to be able to have the option of watching video or listening to audio. I think that just brings a different level to the experience and a different level of connection.

The other thing that is different about this podcast is, in comparison to my past work, is that it is going to be unscripted. And I'm very used to reading a script and writing a script in preparation for doing an episode. It's something that I've done for years and years, and I really enjoy the process of writing writing things out. Gives me time to synthesize, make connections, and really polish what I want my message to be for people. It's interesting that at this time in the history of the world, I am choosing to go the imperfect route.

Maybe it's actually not interesting, but maybe obvious in why I would choose that. A world of AI where we had information overload before, and now we have so much more information. We have tools available to us today that really offer the ability to be more perfect than ever before. For someone like me who did a script for a podcast in the past, wow, I can make my script even more perfect. I could run it through TatchIPT.

Could get other insights. I could use tools like a teleprompter and be able to read it perfectly on a screen. Yet, I know what my heart is longing for so deeply right now is to have more humanness in the content and the people that I engage with in my life. I am just craving. I'm craving that imperfection.

I'm craving typos. I'm craving typos in emails. I'm the type of person at this point who's wanting to see the imperfection, really wanting to be able to engage with something that maybe feels like it's being explored in the moment rather than something that was crafted to perfection, recorded and performed to perfection. It's not something that I really desire right now. So that's one reason that I'm showing up here with no script, pushing rapport, seeing what comes out and hoping that those people out there who are like me and just want to see more of the human side of people and connect with that will resonate.

Another thing to note is the title of this podcast. Called Practicing Wholeness. And I want to talk a little bit about that. One of my hopes for this experience is that it will go beyond the typical expectation of a podcast of just being informational. And I want it to be actively engaging.

So I chose the word practicing for a couple of reasons. That I hope that the time that we spend together is such that we can practice and put into application through experiential exercises the information that is shared. There's still going to be some knowledge shared, but most of us don't need more knowledge. What we need is more integration. We need to be able to move from knowledge being in the mind to knowledge being in the heart and knowledge being in the body to really embody the things that we learn, to move from information to integration.

And if a podcast doesn't offer that, then people are just gonna need to do that on their own. And so I hope to bring in more of the integration piece into these podcast experiences with people. So it might be a little bit different in sometimes I might bring in a visualization or a meditation or a somatic exercise or a journal prompt or question for reflection, some personal inquiry. And I hope that by offering that in the actual podcast experience it really helps people to integrate on a deeper level, to be able to move that knowledge down into the heart and into the body so that we become more whole beings. And that leads into the second part of the title of this podcast: Practicing Wholeness.

There's one more thing I wanted to say. One more thing about practicing. Is that so much of my life has been future oriented. Whether that's having a goal or an outcome, being really focused on the future, who I want to become, and this can all most certainly be useful. And to take it a step further, in a lot of the religious content that I used to create, there was a continuous focus on future orientation towards the next life.

Like I want to be able to make it to heaven. And I think it's only natural for the world in which we grow up in to be really future oriented in that way. And there's a place for it. And the downside, or perhaps a better term would be the shadow side, the shadow side of an imbalance of future orientation is that we're always delaying our happiness, our peace, our sense of enoughness, our worthiness, feeling okay, we're always delaying that for the future. And I know that for me, that sense of never arriving, that sense of always chasing something can it can lead to a feeling of discontent with life as it is right now.

And I think it's important to bring some balance back into knowing that there is nowhere that we can get to but here. The only place you can actually get to is right now. And that's gonna take a little bit of reorienting for some of us from going from living in a future orientation and this destination and sense of arrival as a experience of our day to day life and how can we move back more into a present awareness and living fully in the moment that we have. Future is so great for offering us direction and an orientation of where we're headed and that's about it. It can definitely inform our habits and what we're choosing to do today because we're building it for the future.

And that's about it on as far as like how much role should it play into our life. And so really bringing back the idea that there's nowhere that we're trying to get to but here. So we're practicing. There's a daily practice and there's a daily practice of experiencing life from a place of presence and experiencing life from a place of wholeness. And that's the second part of the title of this podcast is all about wholeness.

Sometimes it's best to explain things by explaining the contrast. And so there's a few contrasts that I want to present. I think I'm going to do that by framing it in the lens of the first half of life and the second half of life. I'm taking this terminology from the author Richard Rohr from his book Falling Upward. And he's not really necessarily talking about a chronology of life, like your first forty years and your second forty years, though it totally could be experienced that way.

He's more so speaking to a spiritual awakening, the experience of a spiritual awakening. And I'm just gonna insert my own lived experience of the difference between a first half of life and second half of life. I don't actually remember the details of what he says in the book but this is my experience. And I want to frame this by saying there isn't it's not about the first half of life is bad and the second half of life is good or vice versa. I think people could look at it the other way also.

It's more so about development. And looking at the first half of life, I characterize this by seeing the world more in black and white. There's a black and white view of the world. There is more judgment. There's more and that is what black and white is, is it's judging one thing as good, one thing as bad, right and wrong.

And there can absolutely be a necessity for black and white thinking and seeing the world from a developmental point of view. When you're a young child it can be a really helpful learning tool to have certain things be classified as like this is a good thing and this is a bad thing. Do not touch the hot stove, do not run out into the road. Just things to be able to keep us safe and to have really clear black and white differentiation between that is super helpful and needed for early development. So I see first half of life as a black and white worldview.

I also see it as a time in which we outsource and we externalize so much of our experience. We outsource our authority. We seek counsel and guidance about our life, about our identity, about who we are. We look outside of us to tell us that information. And also this can be important to our development to be able to have that experience.

The other characterization of first half of life I see is the belief that I need to fix myself. And I have been in that place for a long time. In my twenties I really started getting interested in personal development and more accurately I label it as self improvement. And I loved all the self improvement books and seminars and workshops and courses and I was constantly seeking and being hungry for the answers. The answers of what is it that is going to be the thing that can help me fix myself.

And I learned a lot of things and there probably are some ways that I quote unquote like improved. And yet, it's such a different orientation in the second half of life. Second half of life I see being so much more, it's moving away from self improvement and it's moving towards self acceptance. It's moving from an externalized authority for our life and moving back inward into insourcing and insourcing our love and approval, insourcing our personal authority, going inward for our own guidance and direction. And for a lot of us, those type of things are undeveloped.

We've spent so much time in the opposite extreme that going inward and insourcing and reorienting around a frame of acceptance rather than judgment is so different than how we may have been used to living our life and our worldview can be heavily influenced by that as well. So it can feel a little slower. It can feel maybe counterintuitive. We don't have the neural programming yet installed for being able to think that way and move that way, to feel that way. That's another thing for me.

I just talked about thinking and feeling and moving. I would say my first half of life was very mental based. It was very in the head. It was very academic and trying to solve all the world's problems and solve all my own problems all from the mind. Second half of life has really invited me to come more into the heart and to come more into the body.

That's like part of the process of coming inward is being able to become more fluent in how does my heart speak to me? How does my body speak to me? What information and wisdom does it hold for me? And that's a different experience and it's an amazing experience. I feel like when we're able to bring that on board, we're able to live with more wholeness.

And so wholeness to me, I want to be really clear, it's not about only doing one thing at the exclusion of the other. That would be halfness. That would be taking polarities like external and internal and putting a judgment on one that one is better than the other. So even though I do emphasize more in my work now about insourcing and going inward, it's not at the exclusion of the value that can be found by externalizing or going to outside authority for input and advice and counsel and wisdom, that's still valuable. It's just that we've put so much emphasis on that in our life that we've created an imbalance and sometimes we have to swing the pendulum the opposite side and develop what's underdeveloped, nurture it, develop skills and strength there so that we can bring it back into balance with the whole.

So wholeness for me is developing what's underdeveloped and coming into balance and into wholeness. And that's a practice. That is a practice. So that's a little introduction into practicing wholeness and I'm excited to be able to explore these concepts and to invite you into an experiential experience with these concepts as well to be able to move it from the mind into the heart and into the body. So with that being said, let's end with a little bit of an experience.

And today I'd just like to offer up what I call some somatic inquiry. And that is, I'm just going to simply offer some questions for reflection. And this may feel a little strange if this isn't something that you're used to, but I'm going to offer some questions for reflection. And your first response may be to answer with words in your mind and that's fine if that happens. And also I would like to invite you just to pay attention to the somatic response that these questions might evoke.

Paying attention to like, Oh, do I respond to these questions with a sense of contraction and resistance? Or do I respond to these questions with some openness? Like, And what do I sense about it? Does it feel grounded or does it feel disconnected? And there isn't a right way to feel.

And really the whole purpose is for inviting you into just notice what is present in your experience with these. Everyone's going to have a different response. And that's what I'm excited about with these somatic inquiry exercises that we can do together is this is how you get to have your own experience with the things that we explore together. So to begin, I just invite you, if it's safe, can close your eyes. If it's not safe, then just keep the eyes open.

But I invite you to just slow down for a moment. Just take a pause. Take a breath just allowing yourself to breathe in and to breathe out. If it feels comforting you might consider putting a hand on your heart or your belly. This also helps us to tune into our body as we feel like the sensation of our hand, the weight of our hand on our heart or in our belly.

Just breathing in and out through the nose. Just paying attention to the response of the body as I ask these somatic inquiry questions. First question I would offer is what does it feel like for you to be future oriented? Do you feel like your own experience in life is really oriented towards the future? Are you living for those future destinations, those future arrivals?

Just paying attention to how does the body respond to that. And then we're going to swing it the other direction. What might it feel like to live with more presence? What if the feelings I was hoping to experience by an arrival in the future? What if those feelings could be experienced right now?

And if I could experience those feelings right now, would that bring more depth, more peace, more richness to my present life? Is there space for me to be more present? Does my body want that? And then moving into the final set of self and somatic inquiry questions, just focusing in on what we were talking about with the polarities between fixing oneself and accepting oneself. And just sensing again into the body like which one feels like it's been leading your life more?

Has fixing yourself been taking charge? Who's driving the bus right now? Is that your experience? Or is it more leaning in towards the acceptance? Learning to love and accept who you are right now, shadows and all, imperfection and all, mistakes and all.

Just paying attention of what does your body, what would it prefer? Which one would feel more peaceful? And again, there's no right or wrong answer. This is just information for you to pay attention to. So with that, my dear friends, thank you for joining me in this experience of practicing wholeness.

I look forward to exploring other concepts that fall into these principles of practicing wholeness and having these more time for integration together. And one thing I also want to just take a moment and announce right now is I know I talked about wanting this to feel human and that there's going to be imperfection that is here And something that, like I said, my soul is just craving that human connection. That also means I don't want to just show up by myself as being human, but I actually want to communicate and come into community with other people. And so I'm excited to explore. I don't know how long I'll be offering this but I would love to have at least one podcast episode a month that I record live.

That it's a community experience in which we come into a Zoom room together and we have an experience together. There's going to be a short teaching and then a short somatic integration experience. Maybe there's some meditation or some journaling or something like that. But I want to be able to have at least one episode a month. It would be free to attend, be able to be all of us coming together or whoever is able to come together.

And I'll post a replay of that in the podcast feed, but I would love to be able to have the experience in person virtually with those who would enjoy that experience. And so watch for that in the coming weeks. If you'd like to be part of that, you can be notified if you're on my email list. You can simply check the show notes of this episode. There's a link to join the email list.

And I'd love to be able to see you in person. So thank you for joining me here today. Here is to the second half of life and to living a life of wholeness, a life of love and acceptance, a life that is balanced. The light in me honors the light in you. Namaste.