You’ve Got Nerve to Reinvent Yourself and Other Feel Good Ideas
- My Dad was born during the Great Depression and Taught Me Stuff. He encouraged us to turn off lights and to buy our cars used. In grad school, I subscribed to the Tightwad Gazette and truly reveled in finding creative ways to live on less. My favorite money saving tip of all comes from my BFF Suzi’s dad Ronnie O. He taught Suzi to cut her kitchen scrub pads (I use the scratchless Scotch brand ones) in thirds. Or you can simply cut them in 1/2. It is SO simple and so satisfying to double your scrub pads and save the earth!
- You’ve Got NERVE...to reinvent yourself! That’s the topic of this podcast I was on this last week. I feel like it was one of my BEST INTERVIEWS ever- maybe the astrology was banging that day, but I was on a high after. The host, Susan Hyatt, is a coach committed to getting women into the driver’s seat of their own lives! If you’re in need of some creative courage- I think you’ll enjoy our conversation! Listen HERE.
- You Can Quit Trying to Love Yourself Better (or More Effectively) Right Now. I did! Because it will never work. But, THIS will! Best explanation of a big life thing that I have read all year from poet Andrea Gibson. Read here.
- I thought I was a Loser But I Just Never Did the Thing. Many years ago, I submitted a pitch for a TV Sit com (based on my memoir Swimming with Elephants) to a competition. A friend had encouraged me to write the pitch and I spent most of a Christmas vacation holed up in my writing room working on it. I went to the website and submitted the pitch and never heard another thing. Months later, I peeked at the site and it said “not accepted”. Inside I felt ashamed…how dumb to think I could do something like that with so little training. Plus- I could have been making cookies for Christmans!:)
Fast forward to a 6 weeks ago. I am back on that same site submitting a documentary (it will premier online in October right here!) that I co-produced with Duluth Creative Co and I spy my old submission. When I look more closely, I notice that the old submission shows that the organizers had requested that I upload a file ( My upload had never processed- so they had no documents for my submission). Ha! So, just for fun, I uploaded and resubmitted to them and another contest. Last week I was notified that my sit com pitch is a quarterfinalist! Stay tuned! Lesson? Double check the fine details!
A bit more about the pitch!
Something is missing. Despite the “perfect” job, a beautiful kitchen with Spanish marble floors, a supportive husband and healthy kids, Sarah isn’t happy. Also: she might be losing her mind. Between long days at the hospital and mothering four children (three adopted, one biological), Sarah is secretly beginning to consult spirit animals – yes, spirit animals. Sarah isn’t going crazy – at least not in the straitjacket sense. Sarah’s spirit animals are leading her – finally – to real happiness and authenticity. They’re also teaching her to heal her patients holistically, emotionally, spiritually, and in ways she never dreamed possible during medical school. The question as her new mission unfolds: does she have the strength to risk everything – career, relationship, reputation – to follow her true calling? Once she does (season one) is she ready for the mayhem that comes with living the call?
4,. The Quote That’s Hitting Deep This Week For Me: It comes from Nick Cave and addresses creatives
“Those drawn to do something artistic are often among the most broken, most flawed, or most sinful. Perhaps that perpetual state of inner excavation, places us, if not closest to God, then forever ascending the ladders in His direction. We understand the dark potential of the world’s heart because we have seen inside our own. In this way, artists are His faithful emissaries. We have the information. We know.”
To read the whole thing go HERE. His newsletter is always thought provoking and frequently wonderful.
5. The reason I believe people seek non-traditional healing….I posted this on social media this week and there was a lot of resonance so I’m sharing it here too! After an interview with me, this was written by Trudy Vrieze for a project called “The Human Fabric of Duluth”
I remember sitting in a weekly breast care conference. I was a pathologist and my part was to share the diagnosis and prognosis. There were many specialties there: social workers, nurses, surgeons, oncology doctors, etc. – all of these specialties were necessary. The woman we were discussing had a totally unsupportive husband. In fact he was abusive. I started thinking. “What if we had gotten to her sooner. What if we had intervened 5 or 10 years ago? What if the community had circled around her and protected her?” I began to be much more interested in what makes people well (rather than in characterizing disease) in a soulful and spiritual way.
I took a 3 month sabbatical. I thought that being a stay at home mom would be really fun. Ha! I was totally overwhelmed. I read a book about attention deficit disorder and thought, oh man, do I relate to this. It’s like a hypersensitivity, an overwhelmed feeling, like when someone sends you that sports schedule and a set of 20 maps with all the different locations where the soccer games are going to be held. I took some courses in life coaching which I absolutely loved and that same summer I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. That diagnosis really led me to understand myself, my creativity, my kind of irrepressible nature. I felt like I’d had to squelch a lot of that by being a physician. At least that’s what I told myself. I thought I had to do that to become the most respected pathologist I could be. I took a 3 month extension on my sabbatical and eventually quit altogether. It was a huge relief.
In all of this I stumbled onto the idea of shamanism. Shamanism is a really old way of healing people, healing the soul. At first I thought it was the wackiest thing ever. But it eventually started to make sense to me because I had always felt so at home in nature. I do that work now. I don’t call myself a shaman but rather a shamanic practitioner. I want to honor the true shamans. I think that one thing that has helped me do this work is my background in traditional medicine. People tend to give my unusual work more credibility because of my medical background. Shamanic healing is really a science in its heart. I think we give traditional medicine too much credit simply because it’s “scientific”. In our culture we worship science. Science in medicine is an evolving thing. Science in shamanism is an evolving thing.
When I bring my kids to their doctor I’m aware of how much the computer has taken over. It’s not the practitioners fault. They’re all under a lot of pressure. In shamanism there is sacred listening and we’ve lost that in traditional medicine. That’s a huge part of healing. I think people are turning to alternative forms of healing because they want to be heard. – Sarah Bamford Seidelmann
Originally posted by The Human Fabric of Duluth
I’m taking NEW clients again on Thursdays!
You can go here to book your shamanic healing or coaching session.
with love,
Sarah
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