Transcript:
Hey mama. Welcome back to Follow Your Gut with me. Sarah Bennett, founder of ōNLē ORGANICS as a mama of four. I've gone through the ups and downs of sleepless nights. Undiagnosed symptoms gotten a complete runaround from the medical system and I've found a different way. No more waiting out your child's symptoms, endlessly Googling in the middle of the.
And feeling lost and alone in your family's wellness. This podcast will empower you to take leadership of your family's wellness. So your family can experience that deep level of health and happiness. You so greatly deserve. I'm so happy you're here. Let's dive into today's episode.
Welcome to episode 22, creating space as mama's. Our must do list is so long. I hope this episode provides you with an action plan of how to get really clear on what you want in life and what you can either get rid of altogether or. Whether you are living a life of passion and intention, or you currently feel stuck in the monotonous grind and you aren't at all satisfied with your life.
This episode is for you. We are going to talk about creating space by getting really clear on what you want in life. And it all begins with your gut. So let's start there and then move into some valuable practices that can help you create more space in your life for what you want. Your gut bacteria impacts every part of your being from the quality of your sleep and poop to your mood focus and your ability to show up every day as a woman, you.
A balanced gut helps optimal hormone production and immunity. It creates clear communication between your gut brain and nervous system. When your gut is balanced, your inner voice of wisdom speaks to you really loud and really clear. So take away. Number one, prioritize your own gut health. This is the starting place.
When it comes to creating space and living with intention, there are a few different ways you can get started on this. I'm gonna cover them toward the end of the episode. because right now I'm excited and I wanna jump right into some practices that you can do right now today that will help you become really clear on how to create space.
The idea of this episode came to me the other day because I hit a point just last week of needing to evaluate my own life and create more space. I'm going to share. With you, what is going on in my world right now? So you're able to really grasp what I mean, when I say the words, creating space. I want you to leave this episode, feeling inspired to create space for yourself no matter what your life looks like right now.
So when my second child was born, my world was tipped upside down. I was personally born a very conscientious person. I've always gravitated toward health, food stores and midwives. I felt like I was doing everything right in motherhood from eating healthy to natural childbirth, to being very protective of my chemical free home and everything in between.
So when my son was born with a whole slew of symptoms, like colic, eczema, reflux, sour, smelling, poop, developmental speech, and growth delays, and the hardest of all behavioral issues. I was completely stumped. I had to battle for his health for two and a half really long and hard years. It was lonely and scary.
And on top of it all, he literally couldn't sleep because he was so uncomfortable, which meant, obviously I too was utterly sleep deprived. I lost myself during this. When he was 18 months old, I couldn't do it anymore. Neighbors telling me he was fine. And to just accept him, because that's just how boys are family members telling me to relax.
Doctors telling me that he was healthy because his blood work came back normal. Yet his diapers were full of mucus and undigested food. And every part of my mama's soul knew that if I didn't help him quickly, he was on the fast track to disease. His symptoms were getting worse yet. No one even understood that anything was wrong.
I needed space. My husband was a traveling salesman at the time. And , I don't know if you can hear our cat meowing in the background. This is kind of funny and ironic that I'm creating an episode. About creating space, but it is nearly impossible for me to escape to a quiet place to record this podcast uninterrupted.
So yes, this is real life. You will occasionally hear my children coming to visit me and the cat meowing and things getting tipped over in this podcast. But this is real life. I'm a real mama right here, living my motherhood right alongside you. So I hope, uh, you can appreciate. Um, unprofessionalism here.
okay. So my husband was a traveling salesman at the time, and I remember it all so vividly. Being at home solo parenting are two children, tears running down my cheeks. As I lay in bed between my two sleeping children and the bitter cold Montana, winter wind threatening to shatter a window. I was lost. I had put my own dreams and desires completely aside because one, I jumped head first into motherhood.
I wasn't expecting to become a mama at the young age of 22. The universe surprised me with the world's greatest gift, but I was naive. I didn't know that I mattered. I jumped all in. Thinking that when you become a mama, you are supposed to table all of your own desires until your children are grown up.
That that's the selfless thing to do. I'm not sure where this silent conditioning came from, but it was so deep that I never even considered. There was a different way. And second, every bone in me was consumed in figuring out how to help my son heal. As I lay there that night. So utterly depleted, I fell into a restless sleep.
I vividly remember startling awake from a dream. My answer came to me in my sleep that night, the way all of my best answers always do. I messaged my husband right then and there I'm burned outta our life. I don't wanna do this. I wanna travel with you. Let's buy a motor home and we can travel around your different sales calls as a family.
He thought I was crazy, but I didn't let up. I wanted to go for a year. He half-heartedly agreed to a few weeks, so we compromised on four months. We found short term tenants to rent our home. We packed up and we hit the road. Those four months changed our lives. They were incredibly challenging, but they opened up our eyes for the first time in my motherhood.
I pushed to pursue my own dream, a dream of living my own life. Our old life wasn't bad. We were living the American. A new house in a new neighborhood, a working husband and a stay at home mom, nice cars and a good school down the street, but it wasn't my dream. And those four months gave me a taste of what life could be.
If I actually prioritized my dreams, I started taking care of me. And this is when magic happened for our. Me taking care of me, gave me the confidence to listen to my inner voice. I knew all along that my son's symptoms were all connected. I knew it had something to do with his gut. But when I was stuck in the muck of our monotonous life, I was shut down.
I asked his pediatrician once, if all of his symptoms could possibly be caused by a kind to overgrowth. And she so quickly shut me down saying that everyone has KDA. There's no such thing as an overgrowth. She told me that I was just a pretty new mom and completely overreacting that my child was fine. I was defeated and I trusted her.
So I shut my inner voice off, but fast forward to me nurturing my own self and my inner voice spoke to me louder and clear. I decided to listen and scheduled an appointment with a natural path who had been on my mind for over a year. He confirmed that. Yes. All of my child's symptoms were indeed connected to his gut.
He had a significant gut bacteria imbalance. I committed myself to learning how to heal his gut. And I'm pleased to tell you that by healing, his gut, all of his symptoms went away. His healing is directly connected to me, stepping away from our life creating space so that I could get in tune with my.
Inner voice of wisdom. Simultaneously as a family, we decided that suburbia wasn't the life for us. We were big fat hearts trying to fit into little square boxes and it was time for us to own our life. So after those four months were up, we sold everything. We owned, including that old motor home. And we purchased a little Airstream.
A little traveling home that felt soulful to our hearts. We came to life for the first time in my adult life. I had space to listen to my own heart while out there on the road, my husband and I made a commitment to one another. That every decision we make. For the rest of our lives will be dream based.
There is no more settling for anything less. We have now spent most of the last seven and a half years living and traveling in our Airstream. It was out there on the road that I acquired. These sole care practices that I wanna share with you in just a minute. These are practices that changed my life and helped me understand the importance of creating space.
Our glory, motherhood years are too fleeting for us to let them slip by us. It's time for you to create space for your desires and to let the rest gracefully go. Now, this doesn't mean that you have to physically create space by packing up your life and hitting the road. This isn't a desire for everyone, nor is it practical for everybody.
These are practices that you can do right now in your own home. As you listen to our story, I need you to know something. We aren't rich with money. We have never received an inheritance nor is there family money. We have just shifted our visions. There was a time where I dreamed of an adventurous life. I was a state home mom in a beautiful neighborhood, in a beautiful town.
My husband was a traveling salesman, as I just told you all about. We thought we were stuck in that life. We didn't know there were different options. It was a good life. It was the American dream, but it wasn't my dream. And I had to shift my perspective to see what was possible for our life. At that time.
These are the practices that I'm going to share with you in just a minute. What happened in my head? The shifts that I made that helped me see. How I could create space for the life that I desired, even in the thick of a really, really hard time in our life. This was the beginning of us learning what it meant to shift our visions.
We are committed to always saying yes now to our desires and we fully trust that the universe will create space for whatever we want. So when we decide on something, we don't necessarily have any of it figured. In fact, we never have anything figured out. We just leap with full faith that it will work out.
We now have a little home base here in Montana, but our wander less hearts belong on the road. So actually, as I'm recording this podcast, we are packing up our home to prepare it for Airbnb and moving it back into our Airstream. We'll be heading east where we are ready to switch things up a bit after.
Over seven and a half years in our Airstream, we're ready for a new adventure. We are renovating a little bus with some of our dearest friends in Asheville, North Carolina. And when the renovation is complete, we will ship our bus to Europe and travel abroad for the foreseeable future. Sure.
Really quick mama, if you are wondering where your family's got health stands right now, if you or your child or your partner has an imbalance of any severity, I have created a really quick and simple quiz where you can find out in less than 60 seconds. If you have a minor imbalance, a significant imbalance, or if your gut is beautifully and perfectly balanced and no matter what your results show.
There is no shame. Gut imbalance is incredibly common, but when you know where your gut health is right now, you are empowered to create your best healing path forward to live your happiest and healthiest life. I have attached a link to this quiz in the show notes below. So you can scroll right down there and follow that to find out today where your family's got health.
Now let's jump right back into today's episode.
So this brings us to my present life. We have committed deeply to living a life full of dreams and nothing else, but something ironic has happened. We have built a life that is almost too full of too many dreams. I didn't know that that was possible, but here we are on the opposite end of the spectrum from where we once were, this is almost hard for me to share here, because again, my life, as you see it today is very different than where we once were when we were living in pure survival mode.
But too much of anything. Isn't good. So the other day I was laying in bed after a long day of homeschooling our children flipping our Airstream Airbnb, because we rent it on our property. When we're here at home, I was filing our overdue taxes. Feeling super annoyed that I had to waste my time doing them because it was getting late and I need to feed my commit sourdough mama and record a podcast episode and respond to several DMS and get back to my team about some product label questions and redesign my custom boxes and edit a bit of my cookbook and make sure that the new mamas who enrolled in my course were being sent the right packages from my warehouse.
I need to find a new cleaner for our home because our first house, Airbnb guests arrive in two weeks and our old cleaner just fell through. In that moment, I felt paralyzed the same way that I did many years ago, laying between my two children who are now my two older children feeling completely paralyzed with our.
So here I was the other night, again, sandwiched between two of my children. And while we do co-sleep, my children typically sleep really deeply after I snuggle them. I usually get up and do some of my own things, work on my business, or hang out with Thai. But because I had gotten to a point of feeling spread so thin.
They have been exceptionally needy. Our children are amazing like that. They are the first ones to tell us when something is off, but sometimes we're so consumed with whatever it is. That's spreading us so thin that we miss our children's communication. So my children were not sleeping deeply. They felt my every move.
And if I tried to slip out of the bedroom, they woke. Mama mama, I need you right here. So there I was laying in bed, texting Ty, the exact same conversation that I had many years ago. I don't wanna live like this anymore. I don't want the pressure of fulfilling all of these dreams. Something needs to give.
I. Okay. So this is the story that turned out to be very long, but what inspired this episode? Because that night I drank my own medicine. I put my practices to work and literally went from feeling paralyzed, to energized and so darn excited for life. Again, these can be used no matter where you are in life and are valuable to come back to time and time again, the way I used them this week is the same as I did back when we were living in pure survival.
Now I'm gonna share with you two practices, a few tips of advice, and then an action plan. Again, this works every single time, no matter your situation. So come back to this. The first practice is something called brain dumping. Maybe you've heard of it, or maybe you've even attended my free master class.
And have the workbook that has this practice in it, or maybe this is new to you either way. It is extremely powerful. Brain dumping is the practice of giving every negative feeling out of your mind. It is always okay to feel however you feel, but our feelings don't always serve us in positive ways. This practice is absolutely magical.
What you do is write down every fear. You have resentment, loneliness, guilt, confusion, write it all down, getting it out of your head does not mean it will make your fears real. Take just a minute to write it all down. Don't hold back. You can burn it or shred it. The di idea is to get it all out of your dear mama head so that you can start fresh with hope.
Here are a few examples that are burned in my head from when my child was really struggling. I'm so tired. I'm scared outta my mind. I feel like I'm losing my sanity. I'm so lost and alone. No one understands my baby. Just pooped. Mucus. Why is everyone telling me he's fine. Do healthcare professionals not even care about my child?
Here are a few examples from just a few days ago. I have too much on my plate. I don't wanna do anything for anyone. I just want to be, what have I gotten myself into? How can I do all of this? I'm only one person. I want my life to be simple. So write down whatever on your mind, whatever is burning and taking up head space.
Again, you can burn this paper and tear it up. No one is going to see it. Brain dumping is a way for you to clear your Headspace. So that you can create space for clarity and positivity. The second practice I wanna share is called clarity. This is where you are going to get really clear on your responsibilities and what you want versus what you can delegate and get rid.
So I want you to write a list of all of your personal responsibilities. What are you currently in charge of in your life? I'm gonna share a few of mine just in this example, to inspire you, to like really get going on your list. Mine. My responsibilities are menu planning, home making. So things like laundry budgeting, homeschooling our four children, managing our Airbnbs, running my business, only organics and creating a life and adventure for my family.
Obviously with a whole bunch of other little things attached to each. After you write them all out. I want you to circle the three that fuel your soul, the top three things that you never want to sacrifice what's left. You probably have a lot of things on this lift that you are responsible for, but something's gotta give, so I want you to cross off three things that you can somehow either completely get rid of or delegate.
It might feel incredibly hard. But I promise you commit to figuring out how you can really do this. This is how you create space. So to recap these two practices and join them together so that you can really see how powerful they are. Start with a brain dump and let everything out, then get clear on your current responsibilities circle your favorite three, that you never wanna sacrifice and cross off three that are weighing you down because I shared my list above.
I wanna share with you what I circled to keep and what I crossed off to either get rid of completely or delegate. I circled homeschool my business and adventure. I crossed off our Airbnb bees, budgeting and laundry. I immediately got to work. I asked my husband to please find a vacation rental management company to take over our home on Airbnb.
I asked him to please take over our budgeting and I sat down with him and taught him the efficient method that I've been using for years. Lastly, I decided that I didn't need to fold my children's clothes anymore. I now shove them in a dresser drawer and guess what? They are thrilled because now they can grab and stuff, whatever they want.
And mama, I feel free as a bird. I have created space so I can dive deeper into the things that matter most to me. So here is your creating space action plan. First prioritize your gut health. If you have a limited capacity right now, adding in some balancing supplements, doesn't take time, but makes a huge difference.
The supplements that support gut balance are cleanse, nourish, and balance. I'm going to link them in the show notes for you. If you are wanting to dive deeper while making your gut health a priority, and you want to get really fired up about why it should be your top priority, my course happy and healthy from the inside.
How is your ticket? It is the fastest and simplest way to learn all there is to know. And while this course is designed to support mama's in. Their child's gut imbalance. It is all applicable to whole families and will 100% take your life to the next level. Second, do a brain dump. Or two or 10, let all the junk come up.
When you feel lighter from letting that built up negativity, go dive into your clarity practice, commit to creating space. The hardest part is allowing yourself to admit that you are spread too thin. You don't have to do it all and you shouldn't let go and create space. When you create space to pursue your desires and to dive deep into what fuels your soul, you actually become.
The most selfless mama there ever was, you invite your children into your heart, and that is what they want. They want to be part of your life and your desires and your dreams. And the more you nurture yourself, the more you have to give. If you loved this episode and you want more practices that will empower you as a woman and a mama, I teach several more in my soul care routines for mama's minicourse and they are also an included bonus in my happy and healthy from the inside hub course.
I'm gonna link everything that I mentioned in this episode, in the show notes for you, if you're interested in exploring any of them. I'm not here to sell you anything, but just to share tidbits of what has made my life, my dream life, and what allows me to show up every day as the woman, I desire being your life.
Mama can be good. It should be good. And it starts with you creating space for your desire. Thank you so much for joining me today here is to creating space and living our best motherhood together. I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Before you go, something you should know is that everything I share on this show is also applicable to you, not just your child.
And did you know, I started only organics as a way to create and share the absolute best quality supplements and products that support gap balance shop onleorganics.com. That's www.onleorgaincs.com. Lastly, I always wanna be very transparent that I am not a doctor nutritionist or dietician.
I'm a certified family health coach, and most importantly, a mama with a passion sharing my story and the products and practices that have brought abundant health and happiness to my own family. Please always listen to your own inner voice of wisdom and your healthcare professional. I'll see you next time.
