Welcome to The Daily Ascent. I'm Molly Carmel, and this is the podcast I always wish existed, a bite-sized, on-the-ground spiritual note that can shift your thinking and your outlook on life to help make us all a little bit more awake, alive, and ascending. So today I want to talk about something that happened on a phone call with one of my best friends that honestly caught us both off guard. And it has to do with the very human impulse of trying to fix ourselves instead of feeling what's actually going on.
So I was on the phone with one of my besties for the resties, and if I'm honest with you guys, we were kind of in a terrified, moaning, groaning kind of space. We were just, like, talking about the state of the world and, I don't know, sitting in that disbelief that I think many of us are feeling right now, and just kind of, like, heavy with it. We were not living in the solution, for sure. And so right in the middle of all that heaviness, my friend said to me, like, kind of apropos to nothing, she was like, do you think we should look into this new supplement that I've been reading about?
Do you think we should maybe add this to our repertoire? Like, let me send it to you. And something in me just went, like, absolutely not. Absolutely not.
And I just, like, I was gentle and generous. And I said, babe, I cannot add one more thing to my repertoire. My repertoire is at max capacity. I cannot buy into one more fad or one more thing to fix me.
I don't even care what this thing does. I just can't do it. And, you know, like, I've been talking about this on the show pretty nonstop, right? The healer band, the fixing cycle, all of it.
So this was, like, very on brand for me. But here's what was really interesting about it. After I said that to her, there was just this kind of sacred pause on the other end of the phone. And then she said, you know what?
I think I just don't want to be thinking about the state of the world right now. And I think I'm diving into anything that might fix me instead of just, like, being sad and scared and, like, in disbelief or, you know, whatever it is that I actually need to be feeling. And I just sat there because, honestly, like, she nailed it. She caught herself in real time.
The supplement was not about the supplement, right? The supplement was an escape hatch. It was a way to redirect all that uncomfortable emotion, the fear, the helplessness, the grief about the world, you know, being able to funnel all of that into something that you could research and optimize and control, you know, because researching a supplement feels really productive and it feels like you're doing something. And being sad about the state of the world, I mean, that just feels like sitting alone in the dark.
And I know this pattern inside and out from my one of my many jobs as an eating disorders and addiction therapist, because I have sat with people for years and had to say to them this quote, right? In the absence of obsessing about blank, what would you have to be thinking about? So in the absence of obsessing about your body, what would you have to be thinking about? In the absence of obsessing about your food plan, what would you have to be thinking about, right?
Or what would you have to be feeling right now? And, you know, it's a really great question that can restore sanity to those of us that can get into these trances, myself included, because the answer is almost always the thing that they're most afraid of, that I'm most afraid of, right? Well, then I would have to think about my marriage or about my loneliness or about my grief or about my fear. Like, and a lot of times that's the stuff that doesn't have a fix or the fix feels like a super heavy lift.
And so that brings me to today's pocket sage. And it comes from Janine Roth's book, Woman, Food and God. And Janine Roth has been writing about food and feelings for decades. And, you know, she's a really, really good writer.
And it's a really, really quick quote from this book. And she writes, all any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story.
Let me read that again for those of you in the back. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story.
And, you know, that is very different from what we usually do with our feelings. I feel like we're not so good at welcoming them with tenderness. We shove them into a supplement research spiral, right? We bury them into a new diet.
We smother them with a plan, a protocol, a product. We start, we obsess about other people's problems and our family instead of ours. We just really do literally anything to avoid sitting still long enough for the feeling to tell its story. And so the word of the day today is still.
I mean, I think we're really running from stillness a lot of the time, right? Every time we're reaching for a fix, and I mean a supplement, a diet, a program, a person, a new routine, like a dupe, a hack, like you name it, right? We're running from stillness. We're running from quiet, uncomfortable, unglamorous experiences of being with what is.
And that reading is really saying that feelings don't need to be managed or fixed or optimized. They just need some room and some tenderness and for us to stop moving long enough to hear what they're trying to tell us. And my friend didn't need a supplement. I mean, she even knew that.
Like, she probably just needed to be sad about the world or take a nap, right? She needed to be allowed to be scared or sit in the heaviness without trying to convert it into a to-do list, like we all do. And once she saw that and once she was able to name it out loud, I mean, the urge to take a supplement dissolved for sure. And maybe the urge to fix got lessened too.
And again, it's not because the sadness or fear went away. It's because she stopped running from it. And I just need to say, we live in this culture that has really turned self-improvement into an avoidance strategy. Think about it.
There's always another supplement, another protocol, another morning routine, another hack, another thing you can be doing to optimize yourself. And I'm not saying that none of these things have value, but when does fixing become the problem itself, right? When you're reaching for a new supplement in the middle of a conversation about how scared you are, that's not wellness. That's avoidance.
That's wearing like a lab coat. And I think about what I know from sitting with people who struggle in their relationship with food and drugs and people, right? The obsession with the body, the person, the plan, the next diet, the alcohol, whatever it is, it's almost never actually about that. It's about what you would have to feel if you stopped obsessing.
The obsession is the anesthetic. And if you take away the anesthetic and suddenly you're sitting in a room with your grief and your fear and your loneliness and your rage, there's nothing between you and it. And that can be super terrifying. I get it.
But it's also where the real stuff lives, the real healing and growth and the real you, right? So my friend's sacred pause on that phone call was one of the bravest things, right? Because she stopped mid-trying to fix and said, Oh, I think I'm running. Right.
And that level of self-awareness doesn't come from a supplement. It comes from stillness. It comes from being willing, even just a teeny tiny amount to sit with the uncomfortable thing long enough to see it clearly. So listen, the next time you feel the urge to fix, to research, to optimize, to add one more thing to the repertoire, I just want you to pause and think about what it might be like to stop fixing right now.
And just see if you can sit with that even for a second or a half a minute or a minute, even like ugly, right? Even if it doesn't look good, right? Even if you're uncomfortable, because the feeling that's underneath the thing you're trying to fix is the thing that's waiting for you. And it, all it wants is to be welcomed with tenderness.
And so our reflective question for today, what are you fixing right now so that you don't have to feel something? And honestly, if this episode is hitting close to home, you know, especially the part I'm talking about with cycling through diets and plans and protocols and cleanses, because and knowing that the problem is not the food. I mean, my stop starting over system is just for you. We just don't do that.
We don't give you another thing to obsess over. We don't hand you a stricter plan so you can avoid your feelings. We do the exact opposite. We help you stop fixing and start feeling because that's where real freedom is, not in the next supplement or plan, but in the stillness you've been running from.
And so, you know, if you want to stop fixing and start living, you can go into the show notes and schedule a call with me, or you can go to MollyCarmel.com and learn more about the program. And I am right here with you. Ascenders learning that stillness is not the absence of doing something. It's the bravest thing you can do.
And, you know, if you're loving this episode, feel free to share it and post it and like it and subscribe to it