CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE: TAPPING INTO YOUR POTENTIAL ENERGY

In this episode of Unsided, we’re diving headfirst into how we can direct and redirect our energy at any moment.  And gently reminding ourselves that have the right to choose our happiness first, regardless of the noise in our heads or pressures from the world around us.

Together, we’ll explore letting go of limiting beliefs and the obligations we feel to please others over ourselves; of leaning into being intentional with where and how we focus our energy. And I’ll share my personal journey of reclaiming the power to change my own life and how I found my peace again on the other side of the chaos of that change.

If you need a gentle nudge to reconnect with your potential energy and a reminder that you can always choose your own adventure, this episode is for you.

Let's get into it. 

Transcript

Speaker 2 0:00

This is Unsided.

Speaker 1 0:02

Unsided. Unsided.

Speaker 2 0:04

Hey everybody, it's Kristofer. Welcome back to another episode of Unsided. I am always happy to be here in conversation with you. I want to ramble a little bit today. You know, I've I was telling a friend this morning on the phone that I probably have, I don't know, I don't even know how many episodes I have that I've recorded, and then I don't put them out because I feel like I was trying really hard to go in one direction with one thought. And that's not actually how my mind works. I mean, that may be obvious to those of you who've been listening, but I tend to think on an idea, and then it takes me on a thousand different tangents, kind of like you know what I think a normal conversation is. So the seed thought that I have today is about energy. I was laying on the couch last night watching, I don't even know, I think Peaky Blinders. And out of nowhere, I had this thought, which is that we are all born with this energy, with all of our potential energy within us. And we're born into a pretty small environment, generally. I mean, people have different sizes of families, but you're born to a mother, perhaps a father as well, but you're you're in a small group. And then those people start wiring you, start using this physical body that we have, start teaching you uh patterns, you know, and this is all psychology, right? We go back to our childhood and to the behaviors we learn. But I was thinking more on a spiritual level, kind of in a in a comforting way, that we all kind of have this slate. We have genetics and all that, but we have this energetic slate. And depending on the tools we are given and how we walk through life and what we nurture around us, we create extensions of that energy by the people that we choose to spend time with, by the rituals, the routines, the habits that we choose to engage in, by the focus that we give to certain things. And all of that is variable depending on, again, our genetic makeup, our mental makeup, our physical ableness, what we have, the tools that we have in our physical body and our 3D surroundings, the advantages we are given, or the perceived disadvantages, and I guess I should say perceived advantages too. We have the ability to make choices based upon those variables, some to greater degree and others to lesser degree, but free will exists. And if you take religion out of it, if you take morality out of it, if you take laws out of it, we are all moving through life with some goal. Certainly, there are some people who give up, who don't know how to do that, who don't move through life using that energy. And then there are others who either do it in a very balanced way or really overcompensate, using their energy, giving their energy away, using their energy to dominate. But if you take all the religion and the morality and the laws out of it, it's all just an experience of extending that potential energy that we're born with. I feel like often I say on this podcast, this is nothing new, or this is not my idea. And I want you to understand that when I say that, it's because everything that I'm saying is an example of this. It is because I have read books. I have chosen to spend my energy and my time reading books and taking in thought energy from other people. I have some things that just feel like a knowing to me, but here at this point in my life, I've had enough life experience, it's almost hard for me to know what I've learned, what I've chosen to give my energy to, and what I just kind of know. But even in the just knowing part, we still choose to nurture that. We choose to nurture our intuition, our guidance. And again, don't get tripped up on those words because I think sometimes people shut down either if it feels too scientific or if it feels too spiritual, if there's a trigger in there. I'm talking about really the fact that when a human being is born, they're full of their potential energy. And from there, based on choices and surroundings and environment and variables of different degrees, we extend our energy and choose how to represent that energy. And taking kind of like uh all things into consideration, the majority of people at any time can choose to redirect that energy. And one of the most fascinating questions of my life has been what is the difference between two people, all things being equal, who have basically the same makeup, the same environment, the same whatever, perhaps even the same family, so the same genetics. What is the difference that allows some people to realize and understand that they can make a shift and change their energy, change where they're giving their energy, where they're giving their focus. As a somebody who had uh an issue with prescription medication in my 20s and who came from a long line of addicts, I mean, my own father died in part because of his addiction. And I don't say that with any sort of malice. In fact, I say it with great compassion. I love my father. I didn't understand him for a lot of my life. But towards the end, I think our relationship shifted, even though it wasn't always easy. There was a respect and an understanding that we were each living our individual lives, and that was our choices. When he came to the end of his life, it was the sum of his choices in many ways because of things that he had done uh in order to, I don't know, numb the pain because of genetics or whatever, he had addictions to things. And I and I don't want to get lost in that word either, but it's just that that frame of thinking, if you think of someone who is addicted or really likes something and does it to excess, it's a lot of energy going towards something. And this can be thoughts. It can be actually, you know, drugs and alcohol, it can be food, it can be relationships, it can be love, it can be whatever. And we in the West are really interested in digging in and trying to define what everybody's Achilles heel is, if you will. Particularly around addiction and blaming it on genetics and blaming it on shame and blame, and I say blame because often it comes with that kind of, well, it's it's that, you know. My grandmother used to say, well, your dad's not an addict, he's an emotional drinker. Well, I know now as someone who has overcome addiction, I actually didn't overcome addiction, I overcame shame and disconnection from understanding that I could assert my energy in a different direction to create a purpose for myself. Rather than just responding or following a pattern that I had seen played out for me from my earliest days when my world was small and when I had all this potential energy. And going back to that question that kind of, I don't want to say haunts me, but it's I'm so curious about it. I walked through a lot of fires, like so many of you, but always pulling me forward was something, some kind of knowing that there was more and that I could make another choice. And I certainly attribute some of that to the people that I was around. I wasn't living in a vacuum. But for the number of people that I was around who had their act together, so to speak, who were actually aligning their energy with their purpose and finding fulfillment and looking at patterns and breaking them or shifting them, I had 10 more people who were doing just the opposite, who weren't shifting or changing anything, who were blaming the world, blaming their childhood, blaming their whatever. It would have been very easy for me to just do that. And to be honest with you, I did start doing that in my 20s. And I did it a little bit again in my 40s when I finally got up the nerve to leave the marriage that was destroying my soul. And I say it that way on purpose because I wanted to want you to feel how momentous that was. That was a major shift, and that was just uh four years ago. But I really started going through it for the first time in my 20s. Really suddenly, the idea of what it meant to break a pattern, to break out of something that I felt was binding me, was so overwhelming that it was just easier to do what I had seen to escape. I wasn't really a blamer and I'm not really a complainer, but I certainly started, I well, I certainly started blaming myself more than ever. I didn't really blame other people around me. I would just isolate, blame myself, and then I moved into addiction. That's what I knew. Right? So for pushing all the way through up into that point, being so uh driven to succeed and to break out and to not be my family. I think that's what, you know, or to to repeat patterns in my family, rather. I think that's what drove me even beyond the addiction, allowed me to overcome that. And that is a thing that is just within me. And I naively perhaps believe that that exists in everybody. And I think that, you know, I've been told by therapists, by other people, as I try to look at people in my life who can't break out of a pattern. I I've been told, well, for some people that's just not possible. And I I understand that in theory there's a spectrum, of course. But it does feel to me like it's just that it's not as easy. There's comfort in patterns. Again, like I said before, this is not new, but maybe some of you don't think about that. So I'll share with you what I have learned. And the saying, nothing worth doing is easy, I think can be double-edged. It can make us really feel like life is hard, and then we'll create that for ourselves, or we can understand that what that actually means is probably actually limited by the word easy, because even as I was about to say that there's effort involved in creating something and breaking patterns can turn people away and it can cause strain in relationships, and it can literally make you lose a whole community of people. That part's tough. But when you actually get to the new pattern, if you will, to the new way to focus your energy, it actually comes with a lot more ease. Because when we are aligned, when we are aligned with our inner knowing, with that inner vibration that tells us this is what I meant to do with my life. And when we are taking action towards that, there is a peace that comes into your life. And I think without fail, almost everybody listening to this, and probably almost every person has felt that in some way. You may not recognize it, but that moment when all of a sudden you realize, oh, this is a beautiful moment. It could be in nature, it could be with your family, it could be with your work, whatever it may be. And it's not to say that every moment needs to be that, but when we recognize, ah, I don't actually want to live in a big city. I like the peace of the country. My whole family lives in a big city. I'm supposed to live here, I'm supposed to be making a lot of money and driving an expensive car, but really I'd like to live simply in the country or simply in a little one-bedroom apartment and have whatever life I have, or I'd like to be a nomad and live all over the place. That's where I feel most peaceful. When you do that and you do that with intention, then other things along the way are just life. And you can handle the twists and turns a little bit more. But that is something that it has to be cultivated. And some of us, when we're born into that space with all our potential energy, we have people around us who know how to cultivate that. But probably those people who are able to nurture that energy and that understanding that life is how we focus our energy, broke that curse along the way somewhere. And if someone hasn't done that before you, then you're doing that. And put a different word there if that word feels, if those words feel weird to you, generational curse. I mean, I guess generational is fine, but the idea of curse. Pattern, generational pattern. It's really easy to get lost in the emotion of life. Trust me. I understand. I I would never sit here and pretend to say that I had in any way had this figured out, other than that knowing that there was something more and something guiding me. And I've only really started to understand it in the last six months. You know, or at least be at peace with it. And I think the journey started long before that to getting to this moment now. And I think it really started when I filed for divorce. Because without going into the details, I was putting all of my energy into something that was not only not filling me up, it was draining me. It wasn't right. It wasn't aligned. I'm sure we hear that word a lot. It's kind of a buzzword, but it's real. It's just literally, if you just think of the word itself, the alignment of energy was off. And we have an energetic signature flowing through us. You can feel it when you meet somebody. And if you're really perceptive, you can probably understand people just from their energetic signal for the most part. You'll have a feeling. And when that is aligned with creating the life that brings us that peace, we experience great change. And once I realized I needed to make that shift, I started some of the hardest days of my life. You know, I think it's a microcosm of childhood and life. But here I was in this marriage that was at that point, I don't know, it fell apart a long time before, but by the time I filed for divorce, we were 13 years in. That's 13 years of a series of patterns I had been living that were so misaligned by the time that I left that I was sick, I had terrible eczema, I had plantar fasciitis, I had stomach problems. I was so out of alignment. And the decision itself was terrifying. It was terrifying. Two months before I made the decision, I wasn't sure if I could continue with my life. This was in 2021, the end of 2021. And then when I made the decision in a very bold way, life started aligning because I started paying attention to where I was putting my energy. I started making decisions about how I wanted to shift that energy. And then it's taken me all the way up until this spring to have my final moment of, you know what? I literally cannot give any more of my energy to that part of my life because I've shifted so much and I like the peace over here. And maybe it doesn't look like what I thought my life would look like, and maybe it doesn't look like what my friends thought my life would look like. And maybe there are people judging me. And that was really hard for me for a while. I mean, divorce itself is tough. When you live a life that is is different and outside of the patterns perhaps that your family have lived in, it's not that dissimilar. How could you do this? Why would you do this? I remember having my father or my sister say something to the effect of, who do you think you are? You're just like us. Don't pretend like you're special. I think it was probably my sister. My dad didn't really speak to me like that. And it didn't make sense to me even then because I've had that knowing, which was I am so much more than what was handed to me or what I chose a decade ago or 13 years ago or 20 years ago. If you want to be a new version of you tomorrow, that is nobody's business but yours. And I know that's not a super popular opinion, but when it comes to divorce, when it comes to not being with your family, you don't have an obligation. You feel a tightness in your chest or anywhere in your body when I say that? Because society would have us believe that you do. But your free will exists in every moment. If you have responsibilities, if you have people to take care of, if you have children, of course. But I have to tell you, even in that, if the relationship is so dysfunctional and so out of alignment, you don't owe anything. And that is something that I know for sure. Great unhappiness, misery, spiritual, mental, physical death come from people living out of obligation and not living in alignment with their purpose, with their joy. And if you are not hurting others, and I'm not talking about subjectively, emotionally, I how could you leave me? How could you not be with your family? That has no weight. As harsh as that may sound, it's rather irrelevant. Because if you're dying inside, or if you're out of alignment, or if you're not, even if it's not that dramatic, if you just feel the tug and the pull, your obligation, your responsibility is to yourself. And even greater than that, your responsibility is to be aligned, to take all that potential energy that you've carried your whole life and make choices that allow you to offer that possibility to others. And that only comes from alignment because then you don't carry shame and guilt and anger, and your energy flows freely outwards, and so others can experience it. I started a life very young in situations where people wanted to control me. Control my light. That's my specific situation, but I know a lot of people can identify with it in a lot of ways. So I spent a lot of time trying to be what everybody else needed me to be to keep them happy. And me asking for my divorce and going through this last big, huge, the biggest shift of my life was about no longer doing that, even though it caused the greatest upheaval of my life. And frankly, in some ways, an upheaval that continues, I just put it off to the side and I don't give it the energy. Because my responsibility to my children, my husband, my family, my coworkers is to be the most aligned version of myself. It's nobody else's concern what that alignment looks like, as long as I am walking through life with integrity. And that's the other thing. You will find very few people, if any, who walk through life and everybody around them is happy about the choices they make and where they put their energy. Because people very often are not in alignment themselves. They've got that blame going on. They've got some part of their worth attached to some identity or someone or something outside of themselves. And, you know, this starts to sound critical and holier than thou. And I want to, I mean, I feel like I give all these qualifiers, but I never know who's listening to me for the first time. This is just how my mind works. And probably it literally for sure, everything I'm telling you, I've played all of these roles at different times. And I'm not faultless if we're looking at fault or this or that, but I'm talking about something that is so basic, so fundamental, which is that why I said if you take the emotion and religion and all of that out of it, a human being is born with this potential energy. And then we walk through all of these experiences and we make our choices. And then if you're a criminal, it's because you continued to give your energy to criminal activities. You continue to surround yourself with people whose vibration was at that same place. And you may say, well, Christopher, I didn't have a way to get out of that situation. You always have your mind. And I know there's mental illness. I understand there are different capacities. I get it. We all have mental health challenges, if we're being honest, but we still also have free will. And even when you're in your darkest place surrounded by nobody, you can find a way to rise above if you can get clear enough to recognize where you're putting all of that potential energy. Why do I think this is so important to talk about today? Why is it something that I sat up on my couch to think about yesterday? It's not because it's new, but it's a it's a different kind of perspective and understanding for me. And therefore, maybe you too. This is the point in the conversation when I would hopefully I wouldn't have talked this long without you talking, but when I would get really curious about how you've processed all of this, you know, how you see it in your life, because I'm gonna learn from your experience. I'm gonna give my energy to you, which is why I talk about being curious a lot, which is why I talk about connecting through conversation and really listening. Maybe that's the key to all of this potential energy, to learn to listen, to nurture our children, to teach them to listen to themselves, to their intuition, to teach them by listening to them. That's something I'm definitely learning right now with my children. And in life in general. And I'm gonna share something with you that you know is uh it's not something that I'm ashamed of in general, but I want to be really honest and say that it is a shame-releasing process I had to go through. I started recently to take an SSRI. And even as I'm talking about this, I'm thinking, am I gonna edit this out? But I have done so much work in my life on myself. I've walked through some pretty intense fires, like I said, but I have been very intentional with that work since my 20s. And I got to a certain point with my psychiatrist and therapist, where I said, you know what? Maybe I should be open to allowing myself to take this thought energy that really ruminates. And I can ruminate, especially if I'm afraid or maybe someone thinks I've done something wrong. You know, it goes back to that trying to be something. Everybody else, and I thought maybe I could use a little help, so I'll try. When I tell you, and I am not a doctor, I am not recommending this, I am not promoting it to anyone, but I'm sharing my experience with you. But when I tell you that when the noise quieted down, I realized how much more energy I have to give to the things I love, and I kind of came out of this functional freeze. Even though it looked like I was doing a lot, there was so much that I wasn't really allowing myself to experience. And I I guess I say that because it's another piece of being intentional. I'm not pro-medication. I am pro really doing all of the things that I can possibly do so that I am clear-hearted and open-hearted and clear-minded enough to focus this energy. Because I think that that energy, you know, with the with the understanding that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, I think that same potential energy I was born with exists within me today. In fact, I I I'm not a scientist, but I think that must be true. And I get to choose every day what I want to do with that. And some days it's easier than others. But just the knowing, just the knowing that, you know, I don't have to get caught up in the idea that, well, just because that person had a uh this kind of family or that or that that that's just their lot in life and this is my lot in life. No, I get to make a different choice every single day. And I will say that my children, and my husband can attest to this, but I'm I'm not much for complaining. I've never been much for complaining. That's never made sense to me. I'm learning to make space for different ways that people communicate and work through their emotions. But I do believe that there's very little forward motion, there's very little uh energy that propels us that is based in complaining. There is a lot that comes from saying, Whew, I am not feeling good. And this is why. And I understand I can make a change. And that change may be terrifying. I never thought that I would be able to change my life in the way that I did. And I never thought I'd be able to endure the terrible things that came my way or were said about me, or the way that I felt. I never thought I could endure putting my children through that. But now we're coming to the other side where my children are seeing me lead by an example that I wasn't given. And for a while there, if I'm being honest, I wasn't giving them the greatest example. I was in the middle of trying to figure it all out myself, but I never stopped understanding that I could. And maybe it's just because I had people around me to remind me. So if you don't, I'm reminding you, I'm telling you right now, it may feel like you can't make any changes, but you can quite literally change the way you think. And when I tell you that once you commit to changing the way you think about something, you will trust yourself differently. You will have a different intuition about people and situations, and then life will start to show up differently for you. When I tell you that, it is a promise. Does it mean that suddenly you're gonna be living in a fairy tell I I I'm not pitching the secret, you know, that movie, that book that was just about people getting Corvettes or whatever it was, very materialistic, and that is what it is and what it was. I'm talking about the happiness, the contentment, whatever word you want to give it, that feeling. If you're religious, you might call it the Holy Spirit. It doesn't matter what you call it. That is the thing that I think we can universally agree we love. For me, it's being with my family or with my children, with my husband, with my mother. It's also being in nature. It's also being at work with people and getting to see them do what they love to do and create something beautiful. It comes from the moments, the experiences, and that's that's relatively new, my understanding of that. Because it's taken me almost 52 years from that moment of birth and potential energy to now to feel like I can even have the audacity to speak about this in a real way. Because I've walked through all of it. And now I see the potential to take all this stored energy that I was holding for other people or letting other people hold on to, or it was being held by ideas of inadequacy, or because I was worried about what someone else thought of me, I can take all of that potential energy that was unused, and I can focus it not just in achieving something, but in making dinner for myself. Because I want to, in going on a walk when maybe I should be working, but because I understand that I get the choice to go be in nature because that's what gives me that feeling. That replenishes my energy and it gives me more when I come back to do the things I need to do, those responsibilities. Responsibilities aren't gonna go away. You're not gonna love every minute of every day of everything you have to do. You're not gonna love every interaction you have with the people around you or with your family. It's not always going to feel so warm and cozy. But a knowing, an understanding, a core belief that can get you through all of those moments. A core belief that you exist with a purpose, and that purpose is yours to define at any moment in relation to anyone or anything else. And whatever they think or whatever the world thinks, it really is none of your concern. And it's only gonna get in the way. It's noise. So if you're a ruminator like me, I'm sorry that you have all that noise, but I I'd like to reframe it for you. It's also a power. You're thoughtful, you're probably empathic, you probably have your whole life also been trying to dodge and weave and figure out who you were. I think that's probably a pretty universal experience. In some capacity. It's not a bad thing. And if you need a little help from wherever, I encourage you to seek that help. However your resources allow you to. And maybe that's just listening to a podcast and going, oh, someone else too. That's also your choice. And if you choose to do nothing, there's great power in understanding that that's your choice too. Life shows up based on how we share our energy. And pretty much we're all given the same kind of energy. There have been plenty of people who don't have the same physical or mental abilities who still have lived a life that they call fulfilled, where they live a purpose. There are plenty of people with a lot materially, and plenty of people without a lot materially who have done the same thing, and vice versa. Anyway, thank you for letting me ramble about that. And thank you for letting me share. And wherever you are, wherever you've been listening to this, I I hope that it's left you with something that makes you feel less alone. And if you've never had anybody to remind you or tell you that all that potential energy that is yours is a beautiful thing that you can direct and redirect and redirect and redirect your whole life, and that that is quite literally the point of life. If you've never had that, I'm telling you and reminding you. All the other noise about what we're supposed to do and achieve and supposed to be and relationships and feeling stuck and like we have to stay somewhere now just because we decided we wanted it two years ago. None of that's real. It's just conditioning. Be kind, be respectful, honor your responsibilities, be good to the people you love, be your best. And even if it's hard for others, make those changes so that you can be your best for them. But more importantly, for yourself. Okay. Until we chat again, I'm sending you a lot of love, and I'll talk to you real soon. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 30:06

Unsided.