The Season of Self Love
Healing Through Writing: A Conversation with Leigh Shulman
In this transformative episode of The Season of Self-Love Podcast, your host Nyomi Banks continues the Healing Beyond Betrayal series with a special guest, author and writing coach Leigh Shulman. Together, they explore the profound healing power of writing, discussing how storytelling, journaling, and self-expression can be a pathway to emotional freedom and self-discovery.
Leigh shares her personal journey, diving into the therapeutic aspects of writing, offering valuable advice for those who may feel blocked or overwhelmed by their past. Whether you're looking to keep your writing private or share your story with the world, Leigh explains how writing can help you release pain and grow through self-discovery.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How to use writing as a tool for healing.
- Practical steps to overcome resistance when writing about painful experiences.
- The importance of finding your story’s deeper message.
- How to balance sharing your story without revenge while maintaining personal growth.
Plus, Nyomi leads us through her daily guided meditation, setting the stage for a calming, reflective conversation. Ready to heal beyond betrayal through writing? Grab a pen and start your journey to empowerment!
Guest: Leigh Shulman
Find her at leighshulman.com and on Instagram @theleighshulman.
Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review our podcast to stay up to date with more empowering discussions.
Tune in and embrace your journey fiercely.
#HealingBeyondBetrayal #SelfLove #WritingForHealing #Empowerment #NyomiBanks #SeasonOfSelfLove
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-season-of-self-love--6003379/support.
- Broadcast on:
- 27 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
After investing billions to light up our network, T-Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus, right now, you can switch, keep your phone, and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and AT&T at tmobile.com/keepandswitch. Up to four lines via virtual prepaid card, a left 15 days qualifying unlocked device credit service poured in 90-plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required. There's access and expires in six months. American giant makes great clothing, t-shirts, jeans, and more right here in the U.S. creating jobs in towns and cities across the country. Support America's workers and get 20% off your first order at american-giant.com with code staple20. You can expect insightful discussions, practical tips, and inspiring stories, plus we occasionally walk on special guests who will share their unique perspectives on self-love and personal work. So, get comfy, grab your favorite beverage, and let's embark on this journey together. Because it's time to embrace the beautiful person that you love. So, let's elevate our lives one episode of time. Now, let's get started. Welcome back to the season of self-love podcast. I am your host Naomi Banks, and today we are going to continue our series of Healing Beyond the Trail. And I'm so thrilled to have with us an incredible, inspiring lead showman. She's an author, a writing coach, and she's just been a beacon of light that anyone that is looking to heal through writing. But before we bring our guest to the stage, let's take a quick break, right? First, you've already got his Naomi Banks here on the season of self-love podcast, and we'll be right back. Washington wants me to focus on healing always. For me, if I look good, then I feel good. If I feel good, then I share the good. If I share the good, then I celebrate the good. If I celebrate the good, then I live the good. So I can be paid to be my greatest, but I have to learn the good to be the good. So, what does it take to be the greatest? It's as simple as a free 15-minute consultation. Be kind to yourself and heal always. Are you ready to embark on a journey toward harmony and balance? Join us for our exciting new challenge, the 21 Days Living Balance Challenge on the Season of Self-Love Podcast, as part of our monthly series, The Act of Balancing Life. This challenge will guide you through dayy practices designed to help. You harmonize your mind, body, and spirit. Whether you're juggling work, relationships, or self-care, we're here to support you every step of the way. Don't wait sign up now to take part in this transformative experience starting October 1st. Together, we'll build a community of balance. Seekers ready to embrace joy and self-discovery. Visit our website or click the link in our bio to join the challenge today. Let's find our balance together. How about we're welcome back to the Season of Self-Love Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi. Thanks. And today we have such an incredible inspiring guest. Lee Shulman. How are you, Ms. Shulman? Am I saying the last name right? Shulman. Yeah. Shulman. Yeah. Yes. Well, welcome. Thank you so much for having me here. And I'm doing well today. How are you doing today? Good. Good. So, before we do this, before we get in diving to our topic today, we're going to do a nice little guided meditation, all right? Nice. I love it. Please find a quiet place to seek comfort. Close your eyes. Now, take a deep breath in through your nose, then exhale out of your mouth. Take a deep breath in, hold for a moment, and exhale slowly. Now, as you continue to breathe deeply, I want you to imagine a warm light surrounding you. Feeling you with peace in calm. Let this light remind you of the love and the compassion that you deserve for and yourself and from yourself. Now, as we start our discussion today, I want you to carry this sense of centerpiece with you, right? Now, when you are ready, please open your eyes. Thank you. All right. If you are new here to the season of self-love podcast and something we do every day, Monday through Friday, here on the season of self-love podcast, Leah, welcome back, Leah. Thank you. And that meditation was just what I needed right now, Tara. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. First of all, again, it is such a pleasure to have you on here. And as I talked before we got on, I was telling you about this as our series, we towards the end of our series of healing beyond betrayal. And within our 30-day, we've been doing a challenge and a few other challenges that we've been having have been writing, whether it's writing in our journal or writing a letter to ourselves. But that's something that you do, that's something that you've been able to do. So can you share a little bit about your journey and how you discovered the healing power through your writing? Well, the healing power of writing, first of all, I believe in it 200% because I've seen how writing helps people. And I've also used it for myself. I've been writing in a journal for as long as I can remember. And I think there's lots of different levels of how you can heal. And so some people might want to write and they want to keep that writing to themselves and keep it private, and that's 100% fine. And other people want to share their story, they want everyone to read it, also 100% fine. And a lot of steps along the way, and I think there's different kinds of writing and different ways of diving into what that means when you're talking about healing and you're talking about really accepting your story, where you've come from and the crabby things that might have happened to you in life that nobody wants to hold on to. We want to let go so we can live our lives and really enjoy our lives. So when you're talking about journaling or writing a letter to yourself, or sometimes writing a letter to someone else where you can maybe get out all that stuff that is sort of stuck with you, and often burning that is a great way of doing it. And when I'm talking also about when you want to share your writing with other people. So if that means a short essay that you publish or you write a memoir and you want to publish that whether it's self published or traditionally, there's something really interesting that happens when you write a book about your life and about things that people have done to you that have deeply hurt that when you do that and you share it because the thing is when you're writing a book, you never want to write for revenge. You never want to write a story for other people that's about revenge. And I have a writing mentor that says the best thing to do is trash yourself. Well, that's how she said that I wouldn't necessarily use those words. But what it is, it's about self discovery. It's about looking at yourself and saying, what did I do wrong? Not necessarily from the person who hurt you, where can I improve? Where can I grow? Because any book you write, any book you read, whether it's fiction or nonfiction or memoir, characters and the people in it, they have to grow in order for the book to feel complete. And if you want to go through this, here I am, I have this issue, these are the obstacles that get in my way. And then step by step, what are the things that I faced, the challenges that I overcame, the challenges that I stumbled on, and how I learned until I was able to change my obstacles and understand them and see the world in a new way. And going through that process is incredibly, incredibly powerful because it's not easy. It really requires you to remember things that you may not want to remember. There are many times I work with people on memoir where I say, we'll be in the middle of something, and they're just like, I can't do this now, and they have to take a break, and that's okay too. So private healing is really nicely done when you're working on a book. And then you share it and other people can join in in that healing with you. Yeah. So thank you for sharing that. So I want to say, because when you say trash yourself, I know you see my face, but if the audience could have seen my face, I was like, oh, I was like, oh, I think she meant, and you can correct me if I think she meant, she even said self discovery. So it's meaning to, you remember how I tell you all to be real raw and uncut with yourself, you know, and that means going through and sharing your emotions on how you feel. Then from there, then you start to grow because now you know what you don't want to feel or don't want to do anymore. So you see your growth. So when, because when I heard that trash, I was like, absolutely. Now I had the same reaction to trash yourself, but I, and it is a harsh way of saying it. But I think in a sense, it's being honest about who we are, the mistakes we make where we went wrong, you know, and, and I think sometimes that's really difficult to do, you know, particularly when somebody has done something, that's really painful. You know, there's this balance between, I'm setting a boundary and I am no longer going to allow you to do these things that hurt me, but not that person, not anybody else. And it's a different way of sort of interfacing with the world. And then there's the part where you're like, oh, but I did do things that led to that process. What are those things? What are the things that I'm doing and how am I, how am I engaged in what ended up happening whatever it is? And I say that very broadly, so that I can shift away from that, shift my mind, set shift my words, shift my actions, shift my boundaries, so that I head in the direction that I want. Because you know, I guarantee you, if you're writing a book about something that happened to you, there's, there are a lot of people out there who have gone through something similar and will read it and they'll be nodding the whole time. Yes, I get it, I get it, I get it. And you know, humans are funny, I find you like we're funny in that we all kind of make the same mistakes and we do the same things. And that's like a really powerful source of community also. Yeah, I had this guest on earlier this week, amazing book. I actually went and got her book. Her name was Julie, I believe that's her name, I've been talking to so many people, that's so bad of me. But the name of her book is too brown to keep, too brown to keep. She was born right after World War II in Germany. And so her father was, her birth father was, he was an American, a black American soldier and her mother was a white German woman. Her and her sister were given up for adoption. I think she said it was 690 something children that were put up for adoption during that time. But I think she, I believe she said it was like over 10,000 babies that was born during that World War II from soldiers, American soldiers in German women, you're there. And so in her story and just as you said over this weekend, I was listening to the story on my audible and it was amazing just even to hear her emotions come from the writing. You know, I write too. So I knew exactly what she was doing, but that's exactly what you said. It's like as you listen, you know, as you reading the pages from people books, you get a movie going in your head and you're like, yes, like that, that, that's the same thing, you know, that I'm going through that I recognize and I real life. That's why even doing this podcast, the season of stuff, love, and we kind of taking each month as a different series and this one right here is more of healing beyond the betrayal because we look at be trolling so many different ways that we said before, it's so many levels to betrayal on how we see betrayal. But then the ultimate thing is how can you get beyond it? How can you go through the healing process? How can you take to use your story as a transform for your healing process, but not only that, but to help others to be able to serve others. So for you, what have you found to be some of the most therapeutic aspects of your writing? You know, when you, it's when other people read it, the writing process is very much so therapeutic for me because, you know, as you're figuring it out, it forces you to think things through and because I don't, because I never want to write something that's getting revenge on somebody because I don't want that out in the world forever. I don't want revenge to be the person that I am and I certainly don't want to share that. So in order to, can I actually, could you explain to my listeners, what do you mean by revenge? So when I said trash yourself, revenge is literally trashing another person and saying, oh, look at the bad things they did and sort of putting their story out in a way that puts another person in a bad light because you see them in a bad light. And in order to write your story, you know, it's your story and you, that's not to say you need to, you know, what is whitewashed it or turned it into something that's not, but there are different ways of seeing something that allow you to say, hey, this is what happened that allows your readers or the people who hear you to say, yeah, that was the wrong thing to do without putting your words in their mouth and without putting hatred or anger or negative emotions that I think come up very naturally when you are betrayed. And again, there's so many ways of being betrayed from small to big resentment, anger, sadness, sort of all of those things that come up and A, being able to put them into words, put them on papers so another paid person can not see it, feel it, understand it is an incredibly powerful experience because it really requires you to say, like, where is this in my body? What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? What actually caused it? Because so many times, you know, I know in my life, I'll have an emotion or a reaction to something and I might think that the cause of it is one thing, but really when I think about it, it's something else or it's more complicated, you know, oh, like this person on the street bumps into me and I'm angry at them, but I'm not angry at the person on the street. I'm angry because I got in a fight with my husband in the morning, you know, and that's sort of underneath it and being able to tease out all those different pieces without making my husband the bad guy because he started the fight and he said something really rude instead of like, why are we fighting? What do the fights do? How do we move past the fights? And that's a very, very small example, having a fight with a husband which is sort of like a normal thing that happens to all of us as opposed to, you know, like I've worked with people, you know, where their stories are, their stepfather is them and the mother let it happen. Well, that's very, very different than, you know, I have a fight and that impacts us in our bodies and our souls and the ways we relate to other people also could be broken down into a lot of different levels and when you write about it, you start to see it differently because you'll put it on paper, but then you have to edit it. And when you go back to read something you wrote, you'll see it differently or you'll use a word that one day that's the word that you wanted to use, but maybe you come back a month later and the word you wanted to use, you're like, oh no, I don't see it that way anymore. And as you move yourself through the story and you start, you know, I always talk about what, what is your story about? And when I say that about, I don't mean the plot, I mean, what is it that you want your readers to understand and feel when they're finished reading your book? And about tends to relate, as far as I, the way I use them relate to basic human truths. Everybody makes mistakes, but you don't have to forgive them for hurting you. You can let go of the pain and you can let go of what happened, but that doesn't mean you have to remain open to them again for them to hurt you again. And there aren't that many abouts because there aren't that many basic human truths. There's not a million of them. A lot of the ones that I, a lot of the books that I've worked with are the power of sisterhood to heal. That has been a really big one that has shown up and if I showed you the plot or talked about the plots of these different books, you would not believe that they have the same message because they're so different. But when you can distill your story and as you tell your story, you know, when you first write it, you may not exactly know what it's about or what you want people to feel. But in my experience, you know, we have an innate knowledge of what we want people to understand about us, about our stories. And when you pull away, not pull away the anger and the other things that go with it because those are part of telling our stories and when I get angry, I can't just pretend I don't get angry. You know, I can't just pretend that, that I never get angry at everything and I'm always a calm person because then I'm lying about myself. And that's also what it means to trash yourself. Be honest about who you are and, you know, if I don't want to be an angry person, then anger is a mistake as far as I'm concerned or it's something I didn't want to do, but that doesn't mean I can't make it not part of me that I got angry. So you know, if you look at your story, you look at your book and then, you know, when you ask, well, what is the most important part for me, what is what was the most meaningful? Once you've been through all of that and then you share it with other people and once you let go of your story and someone else is reading it, it is no, this is a hard thing to kind of get your head around and it can hurt, but it's no longer your story. You have now shared it and it is open to interpretation and some people are going to interpret it in ways you do not like and I just let them do what they're going to do. But then there are going to be people who read it and you are going to touch the, touch their hearts. Yeah. Like I say, it's like, I say heart, but it's not just heart. It's like, you really connect with another person and authors will often say, you know, people they've never met will read their books, their memoirs and act like and feel like they know them. And that's because if you can tell a story and another person reads it and can say, oh my God, this person understands me or can come to you and say, oh, that happened to me, but here's the difference. I once wrote a short story about being, I was when I lived in Panama and my sister-in-law there and the family that happened there, it's sort of, it's sister-in-law, but kind of in a very Latin American way where everyone's related, but we don't actually, we might not actually be related, but we're related. My sister-in-law, my cousin, everybody's sister-in-law's and cousins and I actually love that. I think that's really beautiful, you know, and somebody, I connected with somebody who knew the family and, and my, you know, unfortunately my sister-in-law has happened quite a few, quite a few years ago, she, she ended up ending her life and, you know, there are lots of, there are lots of things around that and ultimately I think, I mean, that's, it's, it's difficult and I love her and I'm sorry that she felt that way and that she was in that place in her life. But meeting this other person who knew her from a different perspective and in a different way allowed me to know her better, so, and it's not just people who connect because they know the people in the story or it, it, you know, there's so many different ways and you never know how people are going to show up for your story and that is really magical and you, you have to be open to it also because it's not always comfortable, it's not always comfortable but the discomfort and, and I'm not talking about the criticisms or the negativity, I'm talking about sometimes things are uncomfortable when you're talking about difficult things in your life and betrayal and someone comes to you and might see that betrayal in a different way, you might, you might want to push against that but it gives you an opportunity to explore it from many different, many different vantage points. Right, so all of that was fantastic that I really love all of that. So for, so let me do this, let me do this. So I have some more questions that I want to ask you kind of like break them down because you already talked a little bit about with the writing and stuff like that but I want to break them down like this. All right, so exploring resistance. So this was the first one we're going to talk about exploring resistance. So Lee, many people find themselves that very resistant in writing about their deepest fears and painful experience. So what advice would you have for someone who wants to start this journey but feels blocked or overwhelmed by the thought of confronting their past and writing? What I would say, if you feel overwhelmed by sort of going on that journey to write it because I've been talking a lot about writing a whole book, it doesn't have to be a whole book, it could be a poem, a short story, it can be whatever you want it to be, like you are in charge. You know, sometimes the writing takes over but you're the one in charge, they'll start there. And one really good place to start is I always recommend just write a timeline of your life and just write down the events but you don't have to just write the so-called important events, write the things that stick out to you or that even they feel good to you or you or just things that you want to put down or that you think are important or they may be traumatic but you just write down what it was and you don't have to dive into it yet. You may not choose not to dive into it. Having that timeline is a really great place to start because I think also what you'll find is when we think about life events, we think we have to write about only the important really deep things. When those are not necessarily what shaped us, they're not always the things that shaped us. I'll give you an example. The first time I did the timeline, the dot on the timeline that I ended up writing about was about the first class I ever taught. I didn't think of it as when I first put it there, it was just something like it was fun but I never expected my entire story to come out of that. It ended up being a story that to this day is deeply meaningful. It talks about the lesson I learned and when you teach that teaching isn't, you know, I'd always grown up thinking teaching is a hierarchy. Teacher up here, students down here and when I taught the first time I taught with no experience and I had no idea what I was doing, I found out that no, there has to be a give and take and the people you teach need to be open to you as much as you're open to them and that is my life philosophy and it doesn't seem like it's that important. When I started, it didn't seem that important but you can explore, take a moment and explore it and let that moment be one that you enjoy exploring and let so the writing can be enjoyable to you and then the more you do it, then you can pick up other parts if you choose to. The other thing, if it's difficult, you don't have to write graphically. There are many, many ways to write that suggest or that hint to it but people know what you're talking about so you can skip years of your life if you want to and use one sentence to say what happened during those years and then if you choose to go back and talk about it, you can but if you choose not to, you don't necessarily have to. I really, everything is one small step at a time and writing a book, a story, whatever it is that you're writing, something that's difficult for you is all about just take one tiny step. Let that be enough. You don't have to do everything. Thank you, thank you for that. Here's another one that I want to ask you about. We talk about mental health a lot. In your experience, how does regular writing affects one's mental health overall over time? Well, there are studies that talk about how writing affects your mental health and there's specific types of writing. There are studies that show if you write a gratitude journal, I'm blanking on the name of the psychologist but he's three good things. If you do a search online for three good things, if you write three good things every day, basically the list of how that helps for mental and physical health is too long for me to even remember to repeat now. But a gratitude journal and I felt this, I keep a gratitude journal and in the gratitude journal, I purposely only focus on the things that are good and then I can sort of see one of my mind wanders into, oh yeah, but this man, no, no, this is just for gratitude. That lets you see how your mind works. It lets you see and it helps you train yourself to accept things in a more open way that has more gratitude. I want to be very clear that is not to say we just were grateful and we ignore the bad things that happen to us. I think that is the opposite of what I mean. I think it's really important to be honest and clear about the difficult things that happen to us but we don't want to get stuck in them. And gratitude helps move us out. And then how writing difficult things can help our mental health. That is going to depend on the person and it depends what's going on in your life and where you are in the process of moving through it. And in that sense, what I, you know, the self love podcast, I mean, the season of self love, self love and what that means, I mean, you have a podcast on it, like you could talk about it forever. The way I use that, what is it that I really need right now? What do I need? I'm dealing with this, this, things are going crazy. I mean, you know, I mean, last week my mom fell, she hurt herself, I was in another, I was visiting her, I ended up extending my trip, I was running back and forth to the hospital, I was taking care of my kid at the same time. And that's what I had to say, like, well, what, what do I need? So because all of us have these busy, busy things in our lives and it's not, it's not just busy, they're difficult. And you can pour your, your entire self into them and forget about yourself. Yeah. But I don't think we should ever do that. What do I need to do right now? What is it that I need? Do I need to sleep? Do I need to eat? Do I need to say, you know what, I'm not going to the hospital right now. I'm going to hang out and have breakfast with my kid. Or, you know what, letting me on an iPad for four hours, and I'm just going to zone out and stare at the wall. And I think that is crucial to getting through those really difficult times. Yeah, you know, I hear you. First of all, thanks for sharing that. Thanks for sharing that, Momo, because I knew even with you were writing me, I knew that that was hard, me being a caregiver of my mother, you know. And I'm going to share this just recently. I actually really, really just got back home yesterday, because I had a family emergency as well that I had to fly out of state. My oldest daughter was found with clots that were in her legs and in her boat for her lungs as such a young age. So we're her not being able to breathe and stuff like that. When I got there, I kind of went through the same thing that you went like, okay, what's happening here? Was, you know, such and such, and all of these different things and emotions that you go through, especially when you're on this track of success and you're moving and all of a sudden, there's something that's not playing happens. And I remember telling my oldest daughter, I remember telling her, I said, you know, we have to pay attention to what's happening to us right now. One thing that's just telling me is that we both need to slow down. We need to slow down. We're being set down for some reason. All right, the second thing is that what are we learning from this? What do we get? What experience are we getting from this? What lesson, what gift are we getting from from this from this whole thing? Human nature of us, we do think about, Oh my God, I'm a mister. Oh my God, I ain't gonna be able to do this. Oh, I'm a mister in view. Oh my God, I have this thing. You know, I mind or the kids or this, this, this, this. And sometimes it's like slow it down. I need you to breathe. I need you to breathe and I need you to trust this process what is happening. And that's what us as and I say, I am a recovering perfectionist. So, so I have to step back. And I have to allow myself to get out the driver's seat and just go, you know, and just let it just let it go. And I felt as I was there with her during this week and helping her with things and stuff like that. I sat down and took me a break when I needed to take a break because I knew I couldn't do nothing for her if I didn't take care of myself. So if anything take away from here, you have to take care of yourself. You can't take care of your mom and you can't take care of your kids if you ran down. That is one lesson that truly did learn this past week like because they hit me right in the face of something that happened like we were good one day the next morning, I get a phone call from a hospital. And I'm like, oh, but then that we have to remember, okay, we're not being selfish because we're taking care of ourselves. We have to take care of our mental and our spiritual so then we can show up at best self for them. So you can show up as your best self for your mother. You can show up your best for your child. You know what I mean? Yeah, a hundred percent. And I have to say, I always say anyone who worries that they might be selfish, people who are selfish don't worry about that. They don't worry about that. So most likely somebody listening to you, me, if we think, Oh God, I'm being selfish. And it doesn't, it doesn't usually come out like that. It usually comes out more like, Oh, but this person needs this and what I have to do this and I have to do that and I have to do that to do lists. Yeah. And you know, that's when that's when it's like, okay, be selfish. I wrote a post on that one. So it's like, just be selfish. Let people call you selfish. Let people do what you want, what they what they're going to say. You've got to take care of yourself first. You have to, you know, and I thought about that all the time on the plane as the, you know, as they were doing the, the like safety thing, you know, and just going through my head, you got to put your safety. You're, you, you have if there's no questions. Yes. Yes. Put your mask on first. Put your mask on first. And another put your mask on first is a really great mantra. I'll figure it out isn't either great mantra because you don't have to know everything. You don't have to be everything. You don't have to do everything. And then the other thing is I am enough. I am not. It doesn't, you know, doing those other 40 things on your list is not the thing that's going to make you feel enough. It's not going to make me feel enough. And that that was, you know, you know, I, because when, when stuff happens with family and I definitely felt this when I was with my mom. And when I got back also, because I got back on Friday and I completely took the weekend off. I did nothing. I didn't go out. I didn't call anybody. I didn't see anybody. And then Monday when I was like, Oh, starting work. And I, I love what I do. You know, and I often will say, like I, you know, the fact that I love what I do makes it easy to sit down and do my work. But when I got up Monday morning, all I could think was like, uh, I just felt completely devoid of confidence. I was like, how am I going to do this? You know, and so much of what I do is rejection. If I send out a book to be published against, it's rejected far more than it's accepted. Most of the things that I do are like that. So I, I realized I needed, I needed to focus on confidence. And the confidence isn't I can do it all. The confidence is I am enough. I don't have to do more in order to be enough. So when you were saying slow down, yeah, I often feel like some version of slow down is exactly the answer to the stress, the betrayal, the upset, the anger, you know, and then be selfish. Someone also call it selfish, but it's not taking care of yourself is, is not selfish. And I have a line in my book that says, you know, because there's a section in my book where I'm saying, like you got it, if you're trying to figure out what you want to do in life as a writer, or whatever, you're going to have to, I recommend like writing a whole list of everything you do, and then go through the list and figure out what you can cut. What doesn't, what doesn't feed you in some significant way. And then you have to go in some, some of those things are easy to cut and you never have to do anything. Sometimes you have to go to people and say, Hey, I can't do this thing that I thought I was going to do, or that I have been doing. And one of the beta readers of my book, so a beta reader is somebody who reads your book before you publish it to give you feedback. She said to me, she's like, you know, if if somebody doesn't like it, if somebody's not happy with that, their happiness is not your responsibility. And that, yup. Other people's happiness is not your responsibility. No, no, that is so big. That is so big. When you come to that realization, yeah, it's freeing. But then it's difficult when you go to apply these things in your life, particularly with people you've been around for a long time, you know, and you're in these habits with them, you know, it's, it's difficult to be like, to tell them like, no, I'm not coming. No, I'm not coming this time. No, I need to do this other thing that may not look productive or right or whatever it is to you, but sorry, it's that's what I need right now. Yeah. And you don't actually have to say that you just have to tell it yourself, not to other people one way or another. This is what I'm doing to yourself. It's what you're doing is fine. It's fine. You are enough. You are enough. And you do enough. Yeah. So, you know, this is beautiful. Thank you. This is truly it hasn't truly has been beautiful. So before we go, because we have to wrap up, but before we go, could you please tell my listeners, what can I find your book? I know you do coaching as well. You know, just let it all out. Let them have it. I do that. Okay. So the two best places to find me are on my website, which is Lee Shulman dot com. And I have a sort of a special, I guess, a gift for your listeners. So if you go to my website, Lee Shulman dot com forward slash podcast, and you won't find it if you go to my website, you have to put in the podcast, there will be a little form that will allow you to, when you fill it out, I'll get the email directly. If you want to talk about your writing, what you want, we'll have a little session to talk about you, what you need, what you want. And then the other place to find me is Instagram and I'm, I'm at Instagram at the leash woman dot com, sorry, no, the leash woman, no dot com for Instagram. And Instagram is the social media place where I chat with people. I talk a lot on there. I put a lot of videos, all the events, workshops, free events, you know, writing tips, they're all there. And if you comment or write, I always write back. So, and I would love to hear from people. And you know, if anything gets to a place where they're like, I want to set these boundaries or I want to, I want to be selfish or I want to say no, you know, I am a great person to talk to about it. And so I talk about that a lot on my website and then my, my Instagram feed. So anything you have to say, I would love to hear it. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Lee. Thank you so much. Thank you. You know, let me say this again. Thank you for sharing. I say this. I've been saying this for the whole month and a half that I've been having guests on this show. And you all have been truly amazing. Every time every single one of my guests have been able to confirm some things for me as you as well has been confirming. So I want to thank you for that. And just giving us these empowering words for today, truly, truly. And to our listeners out there, I hope, well, we hope that today's episode that it inspires you to pick up a pin and start writing your way to healing. All right. So don't forget, if you have not already to subscribe, rate us, we view our podcast, you know, in the next time for more empowering, make sure you tune in. All right. So until then, embrace your journey in yourself fiercely. Have a good one. Thank you for joining us on this journey of discovering an empowerment here at the season of self love podcast. Remember, embracing self love is a continuous journey and we're so glad to have you with us. So if you enjoy today's episode, please leave us a review and don't forget to join our community on Facebook at season of self love. Connect people to like minded individuals who are also on their self journey. Now, if you have any questions or topics that you like for us to explore, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at season of self love@gmail.com and let your voice be heard. So until next time, take a moment for yourself today. And remember, you are worthy of love, joy, and all the beautiful things that life has to offer. Owning a rental property sounds like a dream until you realize how much work goes into getting it ready. Determine a competitive rent price, market the property, schedule the showing screen, tenants, draft at the lease at a rent collection, handle maintenance, request maintenance, and communication. Sound complicated? Runners warehouse is here to take the hard work off your rental to do list. Qualify tenants, check rent collection, check maintenance coordination. You got it. Go to runnerswarehouse.com for a free rental analysis to find out how much your home can rent for. Or call 303-974-9444. Because from now on, the only thing you need on your to-do list is to call runners warehouse. At Sprout's Farmers Market, you'll always find fresh at the center of the store. Come in to discover a huge selection of the season's best produce bursting with flavor in every bite. Explore thousands of better-for-you products for every dietary lifestyle, from plant-based and organic to gluten-free and keto-friendly. Scoop up your favorite bulk nuts, fruits, sweets, and more. Perfect for baking or snacking. Visit your neighborhood Sprouts today to explore healthy products down every aisle.