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Pre-S: I’ve re-opened the doors to one of my online self-study courses, Embrace Your Inner Child, a self-guided journey to connect with your inner child and reclaim your power. Paid subscribers to my Substack receive 50% off access to this and all future online courses.
A couple years ago, I had a podcast. Many of you have been around that long, and are already familiar - or perhaps were even regular listeners - to The Unraveled Life. But when I wrapped up recording, silly me also stopped paying for the platform I had been using to host the podcast. And when my payments ended, all the podcast episodes also disappeared.
I didn’t even realize this had happened for several months, until I received messages from a few devoted listeners looking for past episodes to return to (which honestly meant the world to me). The podcast was good. It contained a wealth of content about mental health, and detaching ourselves from the oppressive systems that have such a grip on us. And yet, for the past year, I’ve done nothing to remedy this situation.
Every time I thought about trying to figure out the technical fix for this problem, it brought up so much anxiety. I felt embarrassed for having lost the episodes in the first place. I made assumptions about what a huge undertaking this problem would be to fix. And, perhaps most impactfully, I told myself no one would listen to the archives of an old podcast anyway. And so I just didn’t bother even trying.
Sometimes, it is important to let something go. To close a chapter fully, to lay to rest an old body of work. And yet, in this culture of constant creation of new content, we may jump to the conclusion too quickly that anything “old” isn’t worthwhile. But I don’t think that’s true. We read books from years, or even decades ago, and still find value in them. We watch movies and shows that bring us back to our childhood. Not everything needs to be fresh and new to be worthwhile.
So, with my husband’s encouragement, I’ve brought all those old episodes of The Unraveled Life podcast back. You can either listen to them directly through my Substack, or you can search for “The Unraveled Life” wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you weren’t around to listen to them before, there’s a lot of really fantastic content there (if I do say so myself) that I’d love to invite you to explore.
Here are a few of my personal favourite episodes if you’d like a place to begin:
Unraveling the Expectations of a Modern Life with
- On this episode I chat with mother, writer, and creative dreamer Kristina Franziska about how we can shift our expectation of what a modern life “should” look like. We explore what ancestral homekeeping is and why it’s an important component of unraveling busy-ness and stress and how we can begin to incorporate it into our lives.Unraveling Pleasure with Kait Scalisi - Sex educator and pleasure coach Kait Scalisi joins me on this episode to talk about what pleasure is (turns out, it’s not just about sex), all the different facets of pleasure, and how to have more of it. We talked about pleasure as a revolutionary act and a daily practice. It’s a juicy one!
Unraveling the Fitness Industry with Hannah Husband - The fitness industry sells us all sorts of ideas about how we “should” move our bodies and what kinds of exercise is healthy. Our bodies naturally crave movement, and yet we try to fit that movement into a tiny little box that for so many of us doesn’t feel good. In this episode, I talk my dear friend, and Body Liberation Coach, Hannah Husband about how we can unravel the narratives of the fitness industry and return to moving our bodies in a way that feels good.
Speaking of bringing back the old, I’ve also decided to re-publish some of my past online courses on my website beginning with a mini-class all about connecting with and re-parenting your inner child.
Our inner child is the part of us that we have carried with us since childhood. In many cases, the inner child shows up whenever we are reminded of pain or wounding we experienced growing up. Our inner child often carries old fears or stories from the past that can show up in our reactions to the world around us in the present. It’s important to enter into a relationship with our inner child so we can understand the intricacies of our reactions and responses to the world around us and tend to the young parts within us that still carry old hurts.
However, our inner child is also so much more than these wounded parts. The inner child can also be a fantastic source of joy, play, creativity and possibility. Tapping into the energy of our inner child can open doors to wonder and magic that we might not otherwise allow ourselves to experience as adults. Returning to the ways we connected to the world around us as children can help us navigate our lives as adults now.
Combining these two elements is how I approach inner child work in my therapy practice with the clients I work with, and it’s how I approach inner child work in my own life. We get to know our inner child by exploring the ways they may feel afraid, hurt, hesitant, scared, curious, excited, or joyful. We get to know the inner child’s emotional responses, and learn what that younger part needs from us as the wise adults we are now. We re-parent that younger self by giving them what they might have needed in the past, but didn’t always receive. We help our inner child to feel safe, so that we can in turn invite their creativity and playfulness forward. And accessing those parts of our inner child can lead us back to our own joy.
If you’d like to spend a few minutes re-connecting with your inner child, here’s a visualization I’ve recorded for you to help you drop into that space:
And if you’re interested in diving more into inner child work, the doors to the self-study course Embrace your Inner Child are now open. Paid subscribers to my Substack will receive 50% off this course, and all future online courses.
So excited to dive into these podcast eps!! Thanks for sharing ❤️
Oh Kelsey, I loved that conversation so much! So glad you decided to bring them back. 💜💜