Living Your True Passion Even with a Hectic Schedule [Episode #594]

This week’s topic is: Living Your True Passion Even with a Hectic Schedule

This is something that I think we can all relate to. There are times when we struggle to feed ourselves healthily and maybe exercise and get to bed at a decent hour. How are we supposed to tune into our passion, into our heart?

This is something I am very honored and excited to talk to you about today because I have been there. There were periods of my life specifically after getting back from backpacking where I was hustling and I was doing many different jobs to make ends meet. I was going back to nutrition school. I was teaching yoga, doing yoga privates and working at this raw food cafe in the East Village.

Today’s show is dedicated to you, my dear listener who may be struggling a little bit, or wondering how you’re going to figure it out, don’t worry. We have some tips and ideas for you that I hope will be encouraging and also practical, so that you can start to apply it into your own life.

Have you been wondering about this very topic? If you want to know the answer to this question and 3 more sent in by Beauties just like you, listen now to find out!

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Questions Answered]

Sara – Tennessee

How do you keep it all together with running your business while being a mom? I’m completely overwhelmed.

Darcy – NH

I work two jobs and have little time to work on what really makes me happy, which is my art. I’d love to sell it one day but am feeling discouraged. Any tips you can share on how to have balance with the work side of things and what our true calling is?

Rachel – Louisiana  

How can I know what my true passion is when I feel like I have no time to figure it out?

Sondra – Michigan 

Kimberly – can you share how you found your passion or if it found you, and what your first steps were to get things moving in the right direction?

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Listen to your heart first, not your head, to determine your true passion and your path.

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:10 Hi Beauties and welcome back to our Thursday, Q and A podcast, our community show where all the questions come directly from our beautiful, amazing community. And our topic today is Living Your True Passion Even with a Hectic Schedule. So this is something that I think we can all relate to. There are times where we just feel like we’re struggling to get through the day. We’re struggling to feed ourselves healthily and maybe exercise and get to bed at a decent hour. So how are we supposed to tune in to our passion, into our heart? And this is something I am very honored and very excited to talk to you about today because I have been there, as I will get into in the questions. And there were periods of my life specifically after getting back from backpacking where I was hustling and I was doing many different jobs to make ends meet. I was going back to nutrition school.

Kimberly: 01:12 And then I was teaching yoga and I was doing yoga privates. I was working at this raw food cafe in the East Village. I was doing all sorts of things. So today’s show is dedicated to you. You, my dear listener who are listening to this and maybe struggling a little bit, or just wondering how you’re going to figure it out, don’t worry. We have some tips and ideas for you that I hope will be encouraging and also practical, so that you can start to apply it into your own life. And even in the midst of a very busy life. And I am here right now in a very busy life, you can still find the way and if I can do it, you can do it. So I think about my life back then when I was just really living month to month, as far as paying my rent and paying for groceries.

Kimberly: 02:05 And now my life is very hectic in a different way. I have a one-year-old and a five-year-old and I do this podcast, which is twice a week, and I’m running Solluna, a lot of the content and the creative side. And I just wrote my sixth book and I also want to carve out meaningful time for my husband and I to share together. And then there’s time with friends, right? And there’s stuff with the house. There’s just so much going on, but I have some real guidance that, again, I’d be honored to share with you today after having gone through it. And I’m in the midst of it now, and things that really work and help me.

Kimberly: 02:45 So I’m going to say this for just a little while longer. I am so excited that our podcast is now available on video. So if you’re a visual person or you just want to dip in and out, sometimes please check out our podcasts now on our YouTube channel.

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Kimberly: 02:59 And another quick reminder, before we start the show, please leave us a review on iTunes to help support the show. And what you can do is screenshot your review and email it to reviews@mysolluna.com. And we will mail you this wonderful self-love affirmation program that I created for you absolutely free. And this is a chance to go deeper into your self-acceptance and your self-love. And that opens the door to so much heart opening opportunities, attracting more in, just feeling more peaceful and fulfilled in your daily life. So that’s my gift to you. Thank you so much in advance for your review. And while you’re over there, please be sure to subscribe to our show and that way you don’t miss out on any of these Q and A podcasts or our Monday interviews. And we have such amazing, awesome people for those as well. All right.

Question #1 around the topic of: Living Your True Passion Even with a Hectic Schedule: How do you keep it all together with running your business while being a mom? I’m completely overwhelmed.

Kimberly: 04:01 All that being said, let’s jump right in. Let’s get right into our show today about living your true passion, even with a hectic schedule. So our first question comes from Sarah, and she lives in Tennessee. And she writes, “How do you keep it all together with running your business while being a mom? I am completely overwhelmed.” So Sarah, thank you so much for your question. I completely understand. And I just want to say right off the bat that I don’t always have it all together. I have moments of stress and I have moments when I cry and I break down and I go in the closet or the bathroom. So first of all, this illusion that sometimes we have of other people having this perfect setup or this perfect life, it’s not reality. We all are working to keep it together and we’re working on juggling many different things.

Kimberly: 04:53 I will say this though. One thing that was difficult for me in the beginning, but became more and more clear and more obvious as super important is to outsource what you can. And I always say that I can have two jobs, but I can’t have three. Right? So my number one job is being a mom to these beautiful boys. And I want to be here for them always. And in the pandemic, Bubby hasn’t been in school. He was just starting school, my gosh, at the beginning of the… Almost two years ago now. So he hasn’t been in school. So it’s been even more… Now he’s in nature program a couple of times a week, but it has been a lot. But I’m with the kids. That’s my first job. And then my second job is all of this, which I don’t like to call work because for me, it is my passion.

Kimberly: 05:48 FYI, I’m excited about you finding your passion as well, where it doesn’t feel like work. But the genre of… Umbrella of creating let’s say, which is book writing, podcasts, Solluna, Solluna circle, and our app, and all of that is my second job. So the third job that I do not have time for and that I must outsource is all the house stuff. So that means cleaning, cooking. We have someone that helps with that and she’s able to come. She come for a few hours a day, which is enormously helpful. She does the dishes, she follows my recipes and she just helps to organize things. Now I know this is a huge, huge luxury, and I’m so grateful for this. And I know not everyone can have access to this, but I bring it up to say that those hours that I pay, which of course is a cost, but it frees up my energy so much so that when I’m with my kids, I’m really present with my kids and I’m able to work so much more when I’m working on work, which ends up making back a lot more revenue and resources than what I’m paying Miss Elena.

Kimberly: 07:04 Who’s the amazing, beautiful, wonderful woman that helps with our household. So for me, Sarah, it’s taking a look at what’s possible. Maybe there is some sort of… We were also in a pod and sometimes we would take turns watching each other’s kids. So maybe it’s something like that, where you rely on friends and neighbors to share where you can share things, whether it’s cooking meals and doing drop-offs or with the kids or carpooling for school pickups or whatever it is. I encourage you to go to the larger community and the larger resources outside of yourself. We can not do it all on our own. And we need to call on friends, family, community members, other parents, neighbors, like minded people. Everyone needs to help that you can call on. And so that has been really instrumental for me because there have been times where I have tried to do it all.

Kimberly: 08:13 And once I started having kids, I realized I had to make a lot of big changes. I needed to get this help. Otherwise, I would go crazy. I couldn’t work with clients in the same way, and I had to make that decision to say no to that, which is… There were times where I would live with them for three or four months at a time for different films. And obviously that was not feasible anymore once I got pregnant with Emerson, with Bubby, with older son. So what I would encourage you to do is to look at your day and really look at all the different parts. From when waking up, getting the kids to school, doing the dishes, getting the lunches ready, cooking dinner, cleaning up, whatever it is, just look at all the different tasks, doing your work and start to really write it down.

Kimberly: 09:00 This is what I did and see where you can collaborate with your husband or your partner, with your child’s friend. There’s a mom that you really like or resonate with at your kid’s school. Babysitters that maybe even for a few hours a week, you could have them come in or have a cleaning lady come and free up those hours on the weekend so that you have more time for yourself. But it is really important that we look at what we can outsource. Certain things you don’t want to outsource, and certain things may not be possible to outsource, but usually there are some things. And of course from a financial cost perspective, what I say is my time and my energy is worth so much. So I don’t really… I haven’t bought clothes in I don’t even know how long. I would rather… If I looked at our budget, I looked at the things that we spend money on. We don’t eat out a lot in restaurants.

Kimberly: 10:05 It’s just been a crazy time. But what I’m trying to say is, I would rather cut back on restaurants and shopping and certain things and prioritize that money towards freeing up my time and energy with again, getting the house cleaner or the babysitter, whatever it is. So take a look at your schedule, take a look at your time and your priorities, Sarah, and see where you can free up space. And I could almost guarantee that if you really look at your schedule, you’ll be able to find a few areas that hopefully you can outsource. And that if I didn’t do that, I would be a frazzled mess. And I wouldn’t get anything done. So this is a biggie and keep in touch with me. Let me know how you do my love, all the love in the world.

Question #2 around the topic of: Living Your True Passion Even with a Hectic Schedule: I work two jobs and have little time to work on what really makes me happy, which is my art. I’d love to sell it one day but am feeling discouraged. Any tips you can share on how to have balance with the work side of things and what our true calling is?

Kimberly: 10:54 All right, next question comes from Darcy who lives in New Hampshire and she writes, “I work two jobs and have little time to work on what really makes me happy, which is my art. I’d love to sell it one day, but I’m feeling discouraged. Any tips you can share on how to have balance with the work side of things and what our true calling is.” All right, Darcy, thank you so much my love for your question. You are taking me back to that period when I was back from backpacking, before I moved to LA and it was a very hectic time. I had to come back running, so to speak because I had very little money left in the bank. I really insisted on backpacking so long, so there was this level of, let’s say pridefulness, but I just couldn’t, I didn’t want to ask for any help from family members, I didn’t want to borrow money.

Kimberly: 11:54 And they weren’t really in this position to lend me all this money anyway. So anyways, I was doing many things. So there was this period where I was really focused in that survival mode. And I remember just walking all around New York city. I couldn’t even buy an unlimited subway ticket. I want to put money towards that. It was like groceries, subway ticket. Right? And like I’ve mentioned before, I was doing many different things. Working at this cafe, teaching yoga, yoga privates were my highlight because I made a lot more money that way. But I worked in an office for three months, that didn’t really work out so well for me because I realized very early on that my body and just me, I’m not really built for office work. It’s just hard for me to sit that long.

Kimberly: 12:44 But anyways, the point is I tried many different things. And even in the midst of that Darcy, what kept me going was I would tell myself every night, as I dropped into my Murphy bed, I did have a Murphy bed back then. I kept the light alive and I would listen to music on my headphones, really inspiring music. Music that felt really good to me. That was a mix of different things and it certainly included Krishna Das and Cureton music that I listened to even back then. And Krishna Das was just on the podcast by the way, which is amazing.

Kimberly: 13:25 I kept that that candle lit about, for me at the time it was freedom and expansion and creating. So I didn’t know exactly what it was going to look like, but I started to feel like, okay, I don’t want to work in an office. I want to feel free. I want to write. Writing was always a passion of mine and I want to help people. So those were sort of my guiding principles and it all just started to unfold. But when I felt tired at night and I would be exhausted because it was physical exhaustion from walking around miles and miles, 10 miles a day, sometimes more, working with people’s bodies, adjusting them in yoga. Life could beat you down when it feels that physical and you’re that tired. But I would remember that I would get home and sometimes I would listen to that music and I would get into bed and I would let myself imagine, and I would just close my eyes and I would feel in my heart what it would feel like to be free, to be writing and to also be helping people.

Kimberly: 14:36 And there’s a lot of research around this now. There’s actually science to this. I remember it was like 20 years ago when that book, The Secret came out and I never actually read it, but I’ve heard about it. My mom read it at the time. And some of it got a little poo-pooed because woo-woo and oh, with the science to it. But now there’s a lot of great work out there by people like Greg Braden, who’s a wonderful scientist and others. Deepak Chopra who has studied some of this at the Chopra center, in conjunction with different organizations like Duke and Scripts. And of course there’s the whole field of quantum physics and quantum mechanics, which I’m very interested in that talks about resonance. It talks about coherence. It talks about attraction on a magnetic level, literally. So when we have emotions and we pair them with thinking about what we want to create, it does things in our body.

Kimberly: 15:34 It does things to our brainwaves. And for me, putting the science aside for a second, what I know is that I would feel so excited that more energy would come. And so what I did at night was I would start to research, how do you get a book published? And I would literally go online. I would read about it. And I do love actual hard copy books. I would go to Barnes and Noble. I remember I bought a book about how to write a book proposal. And it was hard sometimes, I’m not going to lie. I know what it’s like to have multiple jobs and you just want to go home and chill. But this is the time Darcy where you have to ask yourself, do I want to make my dreams happen or not? And you already have something that you want to create.

Kimberly: 16:31 So a lot of people aren’t there yet, but you are at that step where you love your art and you are passionate about that. And there’s something inside of you that’s wired to create that because why would that passion be there in the first place? I really wholeheartedly believe that. What I would say is stay connected to your passion and also how your passion is going to help others, how you are going to serve others with your passion. Because to me that adds a whole other element. When we’re working for other people, when we’re working for the higher good, we call on energy and resources that aren’t there when we’re just thinking about our limited small self. It gives us the energy to keep going. I know when I’m exhausted, but one of my sons looks at me and wants me to read that book again for the 12th time, or wants me to build another Lego tower.

Kimberly: 17:30 And I look into his eyes. I want to serve my child. I want to be there for them. I want to really show up as a mom. And that gives me so much energy. And right now, as I’m recording this podcast, it’s actually Saturday night, but it’s one of those times where the boys are asleep and hubby is watching a UFC fight. And it’s one of the moments I have. And I could literally sit here and read, which is good for me maybe. And I love to read, but I stay connected to this energy of I want to serve. I want to be part of something bigger than myself. And so to me, that is the fuel that keeps us going. So Darcy, I know you have little time, but what I would encourage you is in the in-between times, when you’re driving to your jobs or walking to your jobs, listen, I would pick two or three tracks, songs, that you sort of program for you.

Kimberly: 18:33 Meaning when you listen to these songs, it reminds you of your dreams. You start to visualize yourself selling this art and people see the art and they feel so inspired or joyful or whatever, however you connect that to helping them. So keep that vision. Listen to your music, the songs that really trigger that connection. Again, maybe while you’re doing the dishes or maybe while you’re cooking dinner, but keep that spark alive, which is what I did. And I had to really use my will and my concentration to do that. And you can do the same as well. So use those in-between times to keep your inspiration up and then look at your weekly schedule on a practical note and notice, where can I work on my art more? What are the things that I can cut out? Maybe it’s an extra hour of TV that you cut out here and there. Maybe it’s another hour here and there of useless, like internet scrolling or too much time on social media or whatever it is.

Kimberly: 19:32 But when you have that laser sharp focus and you stay connected to your dream and you stay connected to helping other people, I promise you that energy comes in and things start to open up in ways that you might not be able to see from the perspective you are now, but just fuel it, put energy into it. Intention, love, keep it going. And then things will keep opening up. Even in the midst of a very hectic schedule, even the midst of multiple jobs, which again, I completely relate to. I’ve been there and if it’s possible for me, then it’s definitely possible for you my love. So I can’t wait to hear how things unfold for you. I can’t wait to see your art one day. You’ll have to send me a snapshot or your website link with your art pieces. I believe in you. And again, it’s there. It’s in the field. It’s something you’ve already conceived of. So the possibility is very real. Just keep it alive. Keep the love flowing and watch how things open up.

Break

Kimberly: 20:36 All right my loves. I love these questions so far. I love this topic. Thank you so much for being with me so far, we’re going to take a short break. And when we get back, we have two more questions for you guys on this topic.

Kimberly: 20:53 All right my loves, we are back from our break and we have two more questions on living your passion, even in the midst of a very hectic schedule. So again, I know what it’s like to feel like, oh my gosh, there aren’t enough hours in the day. How am I supposed to do everything? But if I can do it, you can do it. We all have these innate qualities within us. Concentration, focus, calmness. I want to get into the questions now, but one thing that I will say, maybe it relates to one of these questions, but I’m going to say it right now because, it’s top of mind for me is that one thing I’ve learned along this journey is that our energy can get burned out very easily when we are frazzled. Exhaustion sets in, inflammation increases, and then we just get more and more worn down.

Kimberly: 21:54 It’s this cascade effect where we just start to feel more stressed and we get more worn down. And then our will for following our dreams and our passions starts to slip a little bit more and a little bit more. So one thing that you can do, one thing that you can work on is to center yourself and to do your morning meditations and to make a commitment that no matter what happens, you are going to do your best to stay calm, to take a few deep breaths before you react, before even you respond. Before you take action, you’re going to tune in and work to settle yourself down. Ah, easier said than done. But if one of my kids is wailing or something’s happening, I have made it a customary habit now to just… I put both of my hands down on my knees, if I’m sitting and I just say ground, or whatever one word mantra. Peace, be calm, whatever it is, one or two words.

Kimberly: 22:54 And I just take that moment. And then I relax my shoulders, because I notice if I’m getting tense and frazzled and it really is reflected in our body. So I just relax. And what that does is it just allows your energy a little bit by little bit to be contained. It’s like a container where we’re plugging some of the holes in some of the leaks. So it means that you will have more energy, even if you are not necessarily sleeping more, even though you’re still doing the same work and the same tasks, and you still have the same amount of kids throughout the day. You can still build up your energy reservoir. So this is a very similar parallel to what I wrote about in the beauty detox solution. This concept of beauty, energy and food combining. So what I mentioned there, which is true, is that with some clients that were really attached to their food, I didn’t necessarily take all of their food away or change everything.

Kimberly: 23:57 I just made some adjustments in the order and the combinations in which they were eating. And that alone increased energy in a lot of people because there was more efficiency. So in a similar manner, one thing that we can all work to do as we move through the day is to work to conserve energy, by staying more calm. These big emotions, they just flare up and then we feel so depleted afterwards. So it’s really important to just really, I know it’s easy to get swept up in the moment sometimes and people can be really annoying or piss us off, or ugh. We get that feeling, but remind yourself that this is for your energy and only you can protect your energy in this way. And remind yourself as well, that the more energy that you protect, you have more energy to funnel towards your dreams and your passions.

Kimberly: 24:54 You have more energy to help other people. So it’s something that I highly recommend as a practice, just to focus on from this moment starting forward. So you may have thought about being calm for other reasons, but think about it in this way. It’s really valuable energy and energy that you can utilize in this context, in the context of pursuing your passions. So if that is your goal and I encourage you to really make that commitment with all the things we’ve been talking about so far and also with calmness.

Question #3 around the topic of: Living Your True Passion Even with a Hectic Schedule: How can I know what my true passion is when I feel like I have no time to figure it out?

Kimberly: 25:29 All right, so now we’ll get into our next question, which comes from Rachel and she lives in Louisiana and she writes, “How can I know what my true passion is when I feel like I have no time to figure it out?” Okay. So this is a great question, Rachel, thank you so much my love. So I love these questions because they’re sort of hitting on different junctures in the timeline, so to speak. So Darcy knows what her passion is, but she feels like she doesn’t have time in the last question. And then with Sarah’s question, she has her kids and her job and she’s trying to stay centered. And with this question, Rachel, you’re saying, well, I don’t really know what my passion is yet.

Kimberly: 26:18 So this is what I will say to you, Rachel. I know that in our minds sometimes we tell ourselves that we don’t have time. But again, what I would like you to do is to look at your day and… Well, let’s get to that in a moment. The best time to figure out what your passion is, is the open space after meditation, because that’s the time where you go into a different plane of existence so to speak. You kind of leave this surface world with your senses being pulled constantly in all these different directions, where your full focus is on the senses and on the external for a lot of us. And it’s the time where we tune the energy. We turn it back in. We tune in, we attuned to ourselves. So if you can carve out, let’s say if. I would like you to carve out time for at least one meditation a day of at least six to seven minutes. Our guided meditations are about six to seven minutes, which you can find at our website, mysolluna.com, also in our free app, the Solluna app that is in the app store. It’s free. So you go in there, it’s really easy to find and then there’s a whole… I’ll show you guys on YouTube. There’s a whole section for meditation.

Kimberly: 27:47 So this is what the app looks like right here. And then you can scroll down in the buttons and then there’s the meditation section right there. So I would like you to carve out, let’s say 15 minutes. And honestly, Rachel, I believe you can do that. We’ll talk about the practicalities of that in a moment, but let’s say you do your meditation for six to seven minutes. That means you have seven, eight minutes to journal. To tune into your heart. Or maybe you meditate and you just put your hand on your heart and you ask the simple question. Where’s my path going? What am I passionate about? What is my life’s calling? You can also introduce it at the beginning of your meditation, and I will actually… This is a wonderful idea. I will do a meditation for this soon for the app that will really open up the space as a life’s calling meditation.

Kimberly: 28:51 It’s a really great idea. But it’s really potent to actually ask yourself the question because the wisdom is inside of you and no one else can answer that question. And what happens is the heart, I find it’s non-linear and also kind of speaks in its own language. So for me, it’s not this auditory booming sound like God’s like talking English or anything for me. Maybe other people have that experience, but it doesn’t come through as your passion is to go to… Create the best organic children’s clothing. That wasn’t my experience, but how I experienced it was, like a few things I would take those steps and more would unfold. And what I experienced was this lighting up feeling, this knowing, this experience of tingling, then things like what I call downloads, little thoughts, little ideas would be dropped into my head.

Kimberly: 29:54 And then I would feel lit up about it. An example of this was I was going along and just talking to people about my round the world trap and then one of my neighbors, and I used to live in the west village. It was my neighbor, Adam, that said to me, “Hey, why don’t you start a free blog?” And I was like, well, I don’t really know how to do that. I’m not a tech person. And he’s like, well, you can do it on WordPress. And he literally came down from the apartment upstairs and helped me set it up one day. And so that came about very organically. I think when we allow that space, I was going deep into my meditations. I had started doing Kriya yoga in India and I came back and I was meditating. I was really doing the practice.

Kimberly: 30:41 And so I was in this open field that I didn’t even know existed before I started meditating. Before that I was very linear. Like, this is what I see, this is what I know. And I realized that when you meditate, you really open up to a whole different energy. So that’s what I’m saying Rachel, is after you meditate, now is the time to ask your body, your wisdom, what is my calling? And you ask over and over again, and maybe it’s just one little flicker comes up or nothing, but you keep asking. Maybe it’s one step forward.

Kimberly: 00:00 I’m really inspired to research this field or take a class in this, or I’m really drawn to this person that is this amazing real estate agent and I want to try to do what she does, or whatever it is, right, we start to create that space, but you need to create that space, which is back to the practicality, which is for me in the morning. You may have to wake up 15 minutes earlier, and you know what? 15 minutes to carve out the space to really discover your life’s calling is not that big a deal. This may entail, though, going to bed or getting into bed half an hour earlier, or 20 minutes, whatever.

Kimberly: 00:48 It’s like this, right, it’s like this cascade. We got to go a couple steps back. That means the night before, maybe turning the TV off a little bit earlier, or whatever you do at night, just really starting to dial in your schedule so that you’re okay waking up earlier and you’re okay going to bed a little bit later. Remind yourself, as we mentioned in our question with Darcy to really keep tuning into that light. The times where you don’t want to wake up and you hear your alarm go off, you say to yourself, “I want to discover my life’s calling. I want to live a life of passion that’s so fulfilling, it doesn’t feel like work,” so remind yourself what your true goal is.

Kimberly: 01:29 Otherwise, what happens is we just drift along. We hit snooze. We say, “We’re going to do it the next day,” and life just keeps going and going and going and getting more and more away from us. We don’t want that. I don’t want that for you. I want you to wake up to this amazing life now, so try it. Try it, Rachel. I will create that meditation inspired by you over the next few weeks or so. But also, just any of our guided meditations that you feel drawn to or any meditation, of course, that you feel drawn to, try meditating. You can even introduce it at the beginning, just an intention at the beginning or after a meditation. For me, it’s usually after, but you can say, “My intention is to discover my life’s calling. Spirit, what do you want me to channel in this lifetime?” or whatever words resonate with you, “How can I be of service?”

Kimberly: 02:24 It’s another way to reframe our life’s calling. We are here to serve each other, we are here to help support each other, and we do that by living a life of passion because we are lit up. We are healing ourselves. We are rejuvenating ourselves. We can transfer energy, and in turn, most all passions and jobs can also be reframed to how they serve others, so if you work at UPS, you can say, “Well, how can I make every customer that comes in feel a little bit happier, feel a little bit more peaceful?” If you are a dentist, you say, “Oh, how can I best serve my patients to really not just do the actual work, but to really feel like they had the best experience and they had the most trust?” Whatever it is, so on and so forth. We can do this. We can break down any position, any job to be reframed for service.

Kimberly: 03:31 If you stay connected to service and you stay connected to this commitment that you really do one discover your life’s calling and you’re dedicated to that, you will take the time to really carve out that time, which is literally to open up to your real wisdom. Now, I say we meditate first before we ask that question because otherwise, we’re in beta brainwaves, and we are constantly evaluating and being pulled in different directions and we don’t have the clearest answer and we don’t have our highest inspiration, so it’s really beautiful to meditate and create that openness and then more clarity can come forward.

Kimberly: 04:12 Try it in the morning. Try really carving out that time, make it a practice for yourself, make it part of your rhythm. I encourage you to also get a fresh journal that is specifically for this purpose, where you really start to journal and jot down notes and you write about what comes up when you ask that question about tuning into your calling. Let me know how you do, Rachel, my love. I understand, but know that you do have a specific purpose. You are unique essence. You are completely unlike anyone else and therefore you can bring something to this planet that no one else can bring. You are here and it is your job to find your life’s calling, so I do encourage you to make that a real commitment, and then again, watch what unfolds. Sending you so much love, my sister. Keep in touch with me. All right, I do absolutely love, love, love this topic so much.

Question #4 around the topic of: Living Your True Passion Even with a Hectic Schedule: Kimberly – can you share how you found your passion or if it found you, and what your first steps were to get things moving in the right direction?

Kimberly: 05:14 We have one more question for you guys. This one comes from Sondra who lives in Michigan. She writes, “Kimberly, can you share how you found your passion or if it found you and what your first steps were to get things moving in the right direction?” Oh, so Sondra, thank you so much, my love. I’m so grateful for you being part of our community. We did answer this a little bit, but I like what you’re writing here. Let me go a little bit further.

Kimberly: 05:45 As I mentioned, it started for me, actually, if I’m really honest, knowing what I didn’t want to do, and that can be really helpful and useful. Sometimes we need to see what we don’t want to help clarify what we want, right? That’s true in relationships and all sorts of things. I thought I wanted to be a doctor early on and then I interned in a hospital and I realized that I didn’t want to be a doctor, but all along, there was this interest in biology, in the body, in helping people. I had no idea, right, but I knew that I didn’t want to get locked into something that felt rigid, which is pretty much everything at that point. I wanted to explore freedom, so for me, that was backpacking. I did backpack for three years.

Kimberly: 06:51 First, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, right? I thought I knew and then I didn’t want to be a doctor, so then I ended up backpacking and I was in a very open space because I was a seeker. I went out with that question: What is the purpose of my life? What am I doing? I was trying to understand myself. A lot happened on that journey, a tremendous amount that would take years and years to process.

Kimberly: 07:14 Then when I came back, as I mentioned, I didn’t really know what my passion was, but I did know, as I said before, I knew that I didn’t want to work in an office. I knew that I wanted to help people, it was this burning desire, and I knew I wanted to write. I’ll be honest with you guys, I didn’t know that… This is the funny thing, things come full circle. The Beauty Detox Solution came out exactly 10 years ago and it was at that moment that I started being pegged primarily as a nutritionist, but all this stuff that seems like, “Oh, my gosh, she’s new. She’s talking about spirituality,” that was there from the start. When I worked with clients, I was always working with them on a holistic level with meditation, some of them yoga. We all pretty much, I won’t say all, but a lot of them, emotional processing, sitting with feelings, body, and food.

Kimberly: 08:14 It’s so interesting to me that the path unfolded for me first with food. That was a very tangible way that I could help people get going and help people. But it became obvious after a few years that that was not all that my life’s calling was. It was this real pull of my heart that said, “You can only help people so much with food,” but when we talk about this holistic lifestyle and we talk about connecting with spirit, having more awareness, processing our emotions, some of the stuff that’s like, “Yeah, yeah, push it away,” this is the stuff, guys, that really helps and really works.

Kimberly: 08:57 For me, it’s been this journey of unfolding where we don’t need to know all the steps. In fact, if we try to figure out all the steps, then we can often get stumped because then we think, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t know how. If I start this, what about when I grow so much? I don’t know how to do all this technical stuff. I don’t know how to manage a warehouse,” so then we don’t do it, but it’s like, no, no, no, that stuff keeps unfolding and the resources and the people continue to come when we have our intention.

Kimberly: 09:30 For me, it is taking it one step at a time. In the beginning, Sondra, it may be literally helpful to know what isn’t your passion. If you don’t like working in an office, like me, then that eliminates a lot. If you know that you love to work, or you don’t, you tried being a nanny or you tried being a teacher and you really don’t like working with children, that helps, too. It’s all information.

Kimberly: 09:58 That was the beginning. I was kind of just like, “I don’t know what I want to do, but I know what I don’t want to do.” What lit me up was the travel. That was really the first step in finding my calling because the travel wasn’t directly related to my calling per se, but I saved money and I traveled, and when I traveled, I had that space to really introspect and to write and to explore and to look at other cultures, which did lead to my philosophy, actually.

Kimberly: 10:30 I think we put all this pressure on ourselves to figure everything out, but really, we want to keep tuning in. Keep tuning in. Our head can have all these different ideas and biases and these people-pleasing skills when we want to please our parents or friends or do something safe, but we just keep tuning in to the heart and your heart has so much wisdom and your heart will start to speak to you if you open up the space for it, like I was just speaking to earlier with all the questions like we said with Darcy and with Rachel about really carving out that time for meditation and stillness. Even if it’s just one meditation a day, it’s still very impactful.

Kimberly: 11:16 I would say, Sondra, the same thing to you is all along that way, I was meditating and there was times that I was scared and I was fearful that I would mess up, that I wouldn’t find my passion, that my life would suck. All sorts of things happened, but I kept the faith. I kept tuning in. I kept staying open and then I had this inkling, “Oh, yeah, the writing really wants to come forward,” and then I actually, and this is a true story, I knew that I wanted to a book. My first proposal was called Catching the Fire. Now, I know that Catching Fire is part of that Hunger Games series, but this was 10 years ago. I didn’t know about that series. Maybe she wrote that book at the same time. But my first proposal was a book called Catching the Fire. It was actually a travel memoir of this young girl that was 21 years old, me traveling around the world for three years, and all the adventures and all the near-death experiences I had.

Kimberly: 12:23 I shopped it around. I found a literary agent that liked my writing and then we took it in and it was she, Sarah, my first editor, that said to me, “I like this book a lot. Maybe we do it next. Your blog is really growing and I see you talk about food a lot, so why don’t we actually do a food-focused book?” I remember sitting there and thinking, “Huh. Huh. That’s an interesting idea. Okay, and then I’ll write the travel memoir next,” and life so didn’t turn out that way.

Kimberly: 12:57 That book would go on to become The Beauty Detox Solution, which I hadn’t planned. I hadn’t thought, “Okay, I’m going to just write about food.” I was interested in food and I was a nutritionist, I had done this training, but I didn’t think that was what the book was. Again, I was still in that travel space and I thought I would teach yoga, work at this cafe, and go back to nutrition school and do all that. But it really just unfolded that organically. That book would go on to sell hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies. I don’t know if it’s a million yet, but a lot of copies, and change people’s lives.

Kimberly: 13:45 What I’m saying is I didn’t know the exact way it was going to look, but I had my core truths, which always, always included serving other people, so that’s what I would say, Sondra, is tune in. Don’t worry about the next 10 steps, but maybe take the first step, stay connected to your heart and stay connected to serving others, and then more and more will continue to unfold.

Kimberly: 14:11 Oh, I love this question. Please, please ask more questions around this topic. I want to do another show related to this. There’s a lot of depth in this topic and I could go on and on and on. Actually, one of our circle themes two months ago was discovering your life’s purpose, so there was so much we went into with the four cornerstones and specific foods to support your body and physical practices and journal prompts and the meditations, and of course, the community support.

Kimberly: 14:43 When we did our Zoom circle that month, there was a lot of crying, I will say that. There was a lot of opening up and that happens in space when we are present and we hold space for each other, so I want to invite you personally, this spontaneously arose, to join our circle. If you’re listening to this podcast right now and you are feeling moved in any way, you will love the circle because we take this and we really expand it and we have that face-to-face time, we have daily support in the app.

Kimberly: 15:16 It’s like if you’re drinking the Glowing Green Smoothie® every day, just being part of that program keeps you on track because you’re accountable, you’re part of the group, we’re all chatting, and connecting to each other, and so it can really help you focus on your dreams and going deeper into your self-knowledge and self-awareness, so check it out. It’s also on the app over on the Solluna app, which is free in the app store, you’ll see the membership section. It’s like 14.99 a month. It’s less than one yoga class and you have so much personal support from me, so I encourage you to join.

Thought of the Week

Kimberly: 16:03 Before we sign off the show, I also want to leave you with our quote of the week. As always, I wrote this right as the show was starting right when I got the topic idea, which is: Listen to your heart first, not your head, to determine your true passion and your path. It’s really important that we tune in here. I didn’t talk about this so much on the show, a little bit, but if we start to determine our purpose and our passion from our thoughts in the mind, we get very muddled and very confused.

Kimberly: 16:41 The thoughts, let’s be honest, the Zen Buddhists call the monkey mind the constant patterns of being pulled in different directions. Are our thoughts reliable? No, and we all know that. Otherwise as well, we can get pulled into fear and we can start comparing ourselves to other people, and we get led very far away from our heart’s true wisdom, so I encourage you not to try to get out some Excel spreadsheet or do this very linear pro/con approach to finding your passion, but let it be nonlinear, let it arise from your heart, which is what I was saying about really tuning in, meditating, and in that open space where you’ve settled.

Kimberly: 19:23 When you’ve settled your mind to an extent after meditation is a time where your heart message and your passion can really start to speak to you and that may feel very foreign because a lot of us don’t really think about it that way. We feel like, “Oh, well, I’m running around and I don’t determine it, so I can’t really tap into it. That’s just how it is.” But it’s just that we haven’t given ourselves the opportunity to create that beautiful space where our thoughts can actually start to quiet down and this wisdom, which is beyond thought, starts to rise up.

Kimberly: 20:00 When I started reading Eckhart Tolle years ago, I didn’t really know what he meant when he kept talking about, “Go beyond thought, go beyond thought.” I just thought, “Well, how is it even possible to really stop thinking?” But now, I’ve been meditating over now 12 years and I can tell you guys that it is possible to go beyond thought. There is deeper knowing. There are parts of our brain that get lit up and activated that are not activated when we are just in linear thought patterns and beta brainwaves. There’s a lot that we don’t understand, there’s a lot that scientists don’t understand, but one thing that I know for sure is that after we meditate, there is an experience of being more open and receptive, and that is the most potent time to take advantage of tuning into your heart and tuning into your passion and tuning into your true life’s calling.

Kimberly: 20:54 I love you so much. I love these questions. I love our community. I’m so honored to be here with you. Please keep the questions coming. I’m going to create a way for us to collect them on Instagram as well soon, but for now, please go to mysolluna.com. It’s a great way to submit your questions on there. You can also check out our articles, our products, our meditations, lots of offerings on there. Also, the circle and the app, as I mentioned, and I am on social at @_kimberlysnyder. Sending you so much love. We will be back here on Monday for our next interview podcast. Until then, take care, and again, so much love.