Thematic Arcs of Becoming Me (Getting ready for 2022)

EPISODE 39 | THEMATIC ARCS OF BECOMING ME (GETTING READY FOR 2022)

We often feel that the journey to becoming more ourselves is a journey forward, you know, forward in time – we want to look ahead, we want to leave the difficulty and the unhappiness of not being ourselves. And we think that being more ourselves lies in the future, right? But as you go on this journey, you will find, okay, it's a universal thing – that you can't go very far without revisiting the past.

[00:00:36] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me.

[00:01:08]
Hi! Happy new year. This is actually my very first IG Live. And part of me is kind of hoping that no one will come across it while I am recording this. It's funny how even though I'm very used to speaking in, you know, live in front of audiences, doing this is kind of like different. So, it's still maybe another month or so before the next season or the new season of Becoming Me is actually going to drop.

[00:01:44]
But I thought I'll take this opportunity to check in for those of you who may be wondering what's coming. And also, because I think I have, maybe, some new listeners and I wanted to frame what this podcast is about, or what goes into the process of me figuring out what to talk about. Now, if you are listening to Becoming Me podcast, and if you're following this account, I would imagine that you're someone who feels the same longing as I do to, you know, become – kind of like discover who you are.

[00:02:22]
And maybe there's a part of you that really longs to have the freedom to not only to discover, you know, what's the unique self that you are, but to have the freedom to be able to be that person. And a lot of times we don't feel free to be who we feel we are. Even when we're not very clear about, you know – sometimes this question, who am I, even when we're not very clear about that, we often feel a tension between who I feel like I want to be, or I need to be what, what feels authentic to me and what I feel like I have to be.

[00:02:56]
You know, the kind of person I have to be the so that I'll be accepted, so that I will belong, right? So, this perennial tension kind of frames this whole journey and the whole theme of the podcast of Becoming Me.

[00:03:15]
And the process to really step into that inner freedom of being authentic and becoming more ourselves – it's 1. a long process, 2. there are many, many parts to it. And that's why I think the best literature or the best, information – if you want to talk about it – that helps us in this journey comes from the great wisdom traditions that are already, you know, thousands of years old, right.

[00:03:45]
From many spiritual traditions. These are perennial questions that we've all been thinking about. So, what I try to do in this podcast is in a more contemporary way, in a more, you know, in a way that suits me be more modern sensibilities – tapping on, you know, some philosophy, tapping on psychology, tapping on experience.

[00:04:11]
I'm sharing all the different things that I gleaned in my own journey that span decades. And helping to maybe give some – a bit of structure, give you a sense of what the process is. You don't have to understand all of it or one goal, right? And depending on where you are on your journey – different parts of the journey, may speak a little more to you. And that's all you need to really attend to; the parts or the episodes, the topics that resonate with you right now, where you are.

[00:04:40]
Right, if you listen to the different episodes, I bet some would resonate more strongly than others. I would invite you to pay a bit more attention to, you know, those that kind of hit a little deeper, right. And you can always – when you feel like it – revisit maybe the other episodes at a later point in your life or a different part of your journey – when you begin to feel like, oh, I'm in a different place right now. Maybe there's something that Ann has said, you know, on the podcast that applies to where I am now.

[00:05:09]
But talking about the podcast in terms of the structure, the first portion; the first 10 episodes or so of Becoming Me – which now I've kind of organized it into seasons, right. So, kind of like the first 10 episodes – those are very fundamental episodes. And if you take a look at the titles, or if you review what was spoken about in the first 10 episodes, really, it can be summed up that in the word – it's about living more contemplatively –

[00:05:41]
– which many of us in our very high-speed society, we don't know how to. Now, if we are to embark on this journey of becoming more ourselves, we at the very least, need to learn how to listen and how to recognize what is real. Okay, that's really what being contemplative is about – being able to slow down enough.

[00:06:07]
So, I was talking about how the first 10 episodes is really about listening. So, other than, you know, introducing the whole concept of why it is that our stories are important, and why it is that we are worth becoming, right – in the first 10 episodes, I talk about listening to your life speak, why it's important to listen to our life.

[00:06:28]
I talk about how we need to live from the inside out because most of the time we're just living on the surface of our life. We are reacting to the situations and circumstances that we encounter. But we never go deep. Right, so, contemplative living allows us to touch deeper places within ourselves, not just at the level of reaction.

[00:06:52]
And that is absolutely necessary if we want to go on this journey of becoming more authentic and more real. I also talked a little bit about slowing down and making space. Again, these are not things that we are usually attentive to. And I imagine that for a lot of you, that's something that sometimes feels impossible to do in our lives because there's just so many things to do.

[00:07:26]
But here's the hard truth, okay – unless somehow we make space in our lives for some silence, for some time of processing, to be with ourselves, to get to know what's going on in our interior space; until we in some way can slow down, even if just a little bit – different pockets of places in our life – we won't be able to make much progress in the journey.

[00:07:51]
Right, so the first season was about that – about being contemplative, learning slowly to listen, to slow down. To be okay with connecting to ourselves. The second season of Becoming Me – or the next kind of like 10 or 11 to 12 episodes, if you want to look at it – is then, now about what happens when we learn to listen, what happens when we learn to be with ourselves.

[00:08:22]
For those of us who are new to it, we'll find that it's actually very uncomfortable because when you start paying attention to what's happening inside of you instead of just being really busy and ignoring what you're feeling, we can often feel very threatened by our emotions.

[00:08:37]
For example, we may find that a lot of things is actually very messy inside of us and we don't know what to do with it. So, that's why in the second season, I had those episodes talking about honouring our limits.

[00:08:49]
So, even in our journey, right, honouring the extent to which we are able to go, recognizing that we have limits, we are finite. We need not push ourselves beyond what our bodies or even our intuition sometimes tells us – you know, this is not for me. There are the episodes that I did with Edwina – who's also, I call her – she's also another interior Pilgrim and guide in a different way, right.

[00:09:20]
She often does spiritual accompaniment and retreats. And we talked in a couple of episodes about being in safe space – that when you start paying attention to yourself, we can get uncomfortable because there are all these things that come up. What does it mean to be a safe space for ourselves, but also what does it mean to seek out other people who are safe spaces for us to enter this more vulnerable part of ourselves?

[00:09:53]
Before we start being interested in being authentic, the truth is that most of us are just not very authentic. We're quite inauthentic. And when we're inauthentic, we wear masks, we just live out of our personas. We are surviving in spaces that are chronically unsafe, right.

[00:10:11]
So, that's how we become inauthentic, and we're used to that. So, when we start to connect with our real selves and it can feel very vulnerable, it is very important that we find safe spaces in people, right. So, that's what this second season is about – about safe spaces, about honouring our limits, about being gentler with ourselves.

[00:10:33]
Then the next segment, the third kind of season for Becoming Me – there was a slant towards the message of, look you and I, we're all different. We're all unique. While this journey that we're on about becoming authentic, is very universal. But each of us, because we are so different, the way we go about it, our experience of it, the kinds of – specific kinds of tools or environments that may help us to, you know, to make this journey can be different, right.

[00:11:08]
And also, the reminder that as we become more ourselves, we might find that we are more different than we expected from the other people around us. Because part of living in an unsafe world – living in an emotionally unsafe world – we kind of try to cover sometimes, our uniqueness because standing out or being very different from our tribe or our family can feel threatening.

[00:11:33]
Right, as we grow the courage to explore parts of ourselves that maybe we have denied or ignored or repressed for a long time, we may recognize – start to recognize how unique we are. And season three was introducing, or – I mean, it still doesn't cover it all; these are kind of like introductions –

[00:11:51]
– introducing the idea that each of us, we're unique. And that's why I had the series of interviews with Dr. Josh Miller – talking about, you know, motivational design, which is one way, one lens through which we can see how different people are. Right, and I want it to do that; give that message because I so often see people looking for a silver bullet or thinking there's a one-size-fits-all kind of solution to becoming, you know, a better person or a stronger leader – you know, a better leader, a better parent.

[00:12:28]
We often have stereotypical, a very narrow concepts of what it means to be the best version of ourselves. Right, so that's kind of like the third season. Now as we go into 2022, I want to introduce another dimension, right.

[00:12:55]
So, all these – they are layers, okay. And you will find that through the different episodes, sometimes I circle back, and I touch on some theme or, you know, that I've mentioned before, because all these, to some degree, they all build on one another. So, here's another reality check. Here's another reality check.

[00:13:15]
While we often feel that the journey to becoming more ourselves is a journey forward, you know, forward in time – we want to look ahead, we want to leave the difficulty and the unhappiness of not being ourselves. And we think that being more ourselves lies in the future, right? But as you go on this journey, you will find, okay, it's a universal thing –

[00:13:43]
– that you can't go very far without revisiting the past. And that's because everything that's happened to us in our lives, all our experiences and especially the wounds that we have received, they've all shaped us to a large degree. And a lot of the experience of being unfree in our lives – that has to do also with the past and with the past that continues to live on in us right now, right.

[00:14:11]
So, we're going to need to talk a bit about healing, about integration in terms of, you know, collecting the parts of ourselves that have been separated in our life. Rebuilding that relationship with ourselves – because a lot of us we've learned to abandon ourselves in order to fit in to what society expects of us, for example, right.

[00:14:34]
So, rebuilding that relationship with ourselves, developing some understanding and compassion for why we fall into the habits that we do. Why is it that we have – even the negative behaviours that we often do that keep us from fulfilling our promise to ourselves to, let's say, wanting to become more authentic and more whole, okay.

[00:14:58]
So, that's the general direction that we're going to start the new season in 2022 with. My plan and my hope is to be able to talk to a couple of friends and people that I know who are professionals in the mental health dimension to psychologists, you know, people who can helped me. So, I'm going to be sharing like the experiences that I went through, but they're going to be able to maybe talk with more expertise and technical knowledge; to share why certain kinds of healing work needs to happen.

[00:15:31]
How that can benefit us. Maybe what's at stake if we don't do that work, right. How might that hold us back from becoming more ourselves. So, that's something to look forward to. If you have any questions or any specific topic in the area of maybe healing, and you know, being authentic – all that – that you would like me to consider for one of the podcasts coming up this year, drop me a DM (direct message).

[00:16:00]
You know, send me a message and I'll be more than happy to put that into consideration, see how I can fit that in, all right? So, wishing you all a wonderful week ahead. I will be going for a short retreat myself for the second half of this week for some stillness and solitude and silence, which I think I may have a bit more trouble entering in because this last year just has been so busy.

[00:16:26]
And – okay, so before I go, I think Miko wants to say hello. Miko's my dog and she's been very restless this morning. So, I've had to do this IG Live with her on my lap. Hey, Miko say hello. Okay, take care, everyone!

[00:16:51] CONCLUSION
Thank you for listening to Becoming Me, where new episodes drop every first and third Wednesdays of the month. Remember, the most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, and no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. 

The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive. Don't forget to visit my website at becomingmepodcast.com and to subscribe to my newsletter as well as to this podcast. Until the next episode, Happy becoming!