Season 2: Episode 001

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Script*

*Note: The script has been edited for readability and will stray from the original audio recording.

Welcome to the Plan for Wonder podcast. I'm Crystal, the Talking Head founder and creator of MyLifePlanners. Ca.

In these moments together, I want to explore and understand my struggles to find focus, break clarity, live with intention, and ultimately how to plan for wonder, which brings me to today's guest series.

[00:00:22] I'm here with Eileen March, founder of My Luminous Life. She's an intuitive coach and energy healer for women.

[00:00:31] Hi, thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:34] That's a classic intro acceptance. Everybody says, Oh, I'm so for having me.

[00:00:40] It is. It's the only polite thing to do, and it feels a little bit less.

[00:00:47] It's A little more strange when we're sitting together at a table than when it's at a distance.

[00:00:54] Yeah, exactly. And I thank you. I had her make sure she drove up north and sat in my air-conditioned house.

[00:01:01] I'm appreciative.

[00:01:04] The smoke is outside, and we're comfortable inside.

[00:01:07] I met you through Women Belong, a networking group, and got to know your business. I love that you have a podcast called The Woo Curious. Yeah.

[00:01:19] So it's evolved a little bit. When I first started it, it was with a fellow WG woman, and we talked a little bit more, like teaching about various.

[00:01:30] It's part interview and part solo episode. And in those solo episodes, it's whatever is coming up for me and my clients. I just recorded an episode on surrender yesterday, explaining what that means, why it's so hard, and why it's important. And then when I have guests on, it's been primarily women who are in some sort of business where they incorporate their spiritual journey, or the woo, as it were.

[00:01:56] I talk about their journeys and life trajectories following that spiritual thread and how it's impacted their lives and businesses.

[00:02:05] Awesome. I did a little bit of reading and learning about your business. Overall, correct me if I'm wrong. Your mission is to help your clients Move beyond fear, guilt, and overwhelm and take charge of their own life journey.

[00:02:21] Yeah, that's very true. It's this idea of reclaiming our inner power, defining our boundaries, which is really hard, stepping away from people-pleasing and good girl syndrome, and finding the courage to rest.

[00:02:34] Ultimately, that's why I've made the connection with you here today. It ties in with my life vision and perspective on what productivity is and isn't.

[00:02:48] And yeah, we're going to talk about your perspective on things in the next four episodes. Yeah, so today, what I wanted to dig into is just giving people a sense of who you are. Your business is rooted in your journey, apparently. You were feeling stuck in a relationship and a career burning you out. So, do you have a quick kind of?

[00:03:10] Summarize that for us.

[00:03:11] There were two parts of the same kind of awakening, so the relationship piece was a long unwinding from society to put other people's feelings and needs ahead of mine.

[00:03:28] And so this was happening in my relationship. It was; it's borderline psychologically abusive, though I didn't recognize that until I was out. But I spent a lot of years feeling miserable, feeling unhappy, and feeling like I couldn't leave because that would hurt him.

[00:03:45] Yeah.

[00:03:45] Yeah. It was all about him. It was all about him and making sure he was okay, and on the other side, this recognition that, Oh, I was hurting both of us by staying. There was the big pain of leaving, but then what was on the other side was the ability to heal and grow and have a happier life and stay in this situation that was so draining.

[00:04:07] A lot of that was me finding my own self-worth and realizing, recognizing that my happiness was as important as his—not more, but as.

[00:04:16] Exactly. Yeah.

[00:04:18] And then I was a midwife. That was my career. It was amazing. It was fulfilling and beautiful and full of wonder. And it was also exhausting.

[00:04:30] I can imagine any hour, all hour, out of the blue, and it's a tense time.

[00:04:37] Yeah, regardless of the situation.

[00:04:39] Yeah, it's a beautiful time, but it's also the person; as a midwife, you are the one tasked with keeping a woman and her unborn infant safe and alive. And while there are lots of moments of absolute wonder and joy. There were also a lot of hard moments, and the hours were, in the end, what made it difficult.

[00:04:58] That unknown, the number of times I'd tell friends or family I'd be there, baby's permitting. I'd love to be at Christmas, but I might not be at Christmas because a baby might be born.

[00:05:09] I didn't know if, if you get the call at 2 AM, I'll be gone for six hours or 36 hours. And so it was just taking its toll on me.

[00:05:18] And then COVID came along and really hurried the end of my career, and that's when I discovered the Life coaching program. A friend was going through this center for applied neuroscience coaching program, and I was looking for support. Another retired midwife had this holistic witchy woo.

[00:05:39] It was outside my comfort zone regarding what she taught in her practice. But I just had this calling to work with her on a year-long energy healing trainer program called Wild Medicine Energy Healers Training.

[00:05:54] I dove into that at the same time. And it was this really beautiful transition out of that hustle that all was being on that toxic relationship where I didn't have any boundaries for me into helping women also find and cultivate that joy, wonder, and love of the life that they have.

[00:06:15] So when you, from a woo curious mindset, what comes to mind when you hear the phrase plan for wonder?

[00:06:23] Oh, it fills me with delight because one of the things that I learned, and I help my clients develop, is the ability to find joy and wonder in the every day, in those mundane moments.

[00:06:41] I often talk about the magic in the mundane. Wonder is a lot like awe. We were speaking about a book about awe, and it evokes a feeling of presence and imbues life with meaning. Yeah, planning for it is perfect.

[00:07:01] I was going through some of your blog posts, and I wanted to touch on one because it is part of the structure of the tools that I have. I have my version of a list.

[00:07:09] You had some tips about how we have so much to do, but there's so little time. What's your advice for people when it comes to creating a list?

[00:07:17] I think the first step is really like dumping everything that you think you need to do or know you need to do onto a page.

[00:07:25] Don't worry about the order or the priority; just get it out of your brain. Our prefrontal cortex has so much work to do, and if it's also keeping track of everything you need to get done in the day, you're adding a huge mental load to an already hectic day.

[00:07:42] Yeah, so on that aspect, I know that's what I incorporate into myWeek system, that download page, but what have you traditionally used?

[00:07:53] I usually use a spiral-bound notebook or whatever I write my notes on.

[00:07:57] You're not particular about it.

[00:07:58] I'm not particular. I love your planners and have used them since we first connected and chatted about doing this series. And I do; I enjoy that like a dumping ground place.

[00:08:08] From there, you can take it, prioritize it, and decide what needs attention. Or, there's the question in Kate Northrup's book, Do Less does this need to be done? Does it need to be done now? And does it need to be done by me? And that last one is huge, especially for women, because we feel like we're the only ones who can do it right, or it's almost more hassle to ask somebody else to do it.

[00:08:33] I will have to explain it to them, and they might not do it the way we like. I can't handle when my partner cleans the bathroom because he uses a

[00:08:39] whole roll

[00:08:40] of paper towels, and I'm like, what are you doing in there?

[00:08:42] Speaking of cleaning bathrooms, budget-wise, I've put a pause on our monthly house cleaning, and I'm like, it's me, my husband, and two adult children.

[00:08:52] And so between us, let's teamwork it out, and once a week, we won't do everything, but maybe one floor at a time. So, over the weekend, it was upstairs. There's not too much to do. It's bedrooms and vacuuming floors, and there's one bathroom and my daughter's bathroom. So you're responsible for that this weekend.

[00:09:10] It's Thursday. She did do it last night. She finally said before she went to sleep. I'm sure it was like two a.m. I don't even know, so I peeked in this morning and looked in the bathroom, and I'm like, She has her definition of what clean is. Yeah, and I have mine. Yeah, and it comes back to that all the time.

[00:09:30] It's the mental labour of understanding what and all those because here's the thing. It's not even downloaded. Is it ingrained in your head? Do I need to sit now and make little sticky notes and show a list of what an actual clean bathroom is? It just falls to us all the time that labour of understanding things.

[00:09:55] And often, it is our problem desire or perceived need to have done precisely the way we like it done that gets in our way. Does it need to be cleaner than it is? Are you in there? And obviously, at some point, it does. Yeah. Some things, but often it's 80 percent done by someone else, are 100 percent great.

[00:10:18] That was one thing that went through my head. I don't use this bathroom, so I don't use it. But on the flip side, I'm like, I want to teach my kids what self-care is. And self-care isn't always going to the spa and relaxing. Oh, of course. Self-care is actually tidying your space and making it healthy and safe.

[00:10:38] So, to tie things up and give you a little bit of a heads-up on what is happening on our next episode, I think overall, we touched on the idea of how much we have to do and how little time we have to do it.

[00:10:50] It's being aware of what we have a capacity for. I think we aren't machines, right? And we don't constantly have to be doing it. So, being aware of what capacity is for a whole and healthy kind of life is important. With that, thanks so much for spending time listening to Plan for Wonder with Eileen. I will be back with you next week.

I want you to remember that the space you take up in the world matters to me, but even more importantly, you matter the most in your life.