บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ Write Your Story: This is for AFTER You Follow Your Bliss

nowhere, the act of creation comes directly from pleasure. It comes from two people following their pleasure, following their bliss, following something they would have done Anyways, even if they weren't trying to create a human being, they, in fact, many people across history have created human beings by accident because they simply are following their pleasure, following their bliss. So there has to be something to this idea of following our bliss. And yet we also can recognize the truth that life is not all pleasure. Life is not all bliss. So what do we do with the rest of life? Do we discard it simply because it doesn't feel blissful? I don't think so. So where do we fit that inside of the equation? I want to share a perspective today that I'm guessing you have not heard yet. And I think it's going to be really helpful to you, both as you think about how to shape your life and also how you bring your creativity to your artistic projects. I started thinking about this concept after I watched an interview with Rick Rubin, who is an amazing music producer and who also wrote a book on creativity called I'll link to his book in the show notes. It's an amazing book and an awesome read if you haven't read it yet. But Rick Rubin is very practiced in the art of creativity. He is a great teacher on creativity because this is what he's been doing for his entire career is learning how to get into the creative process to make something that's really otherworldly, something that's special, not just something that you dreamed up or invented in your own brain, but something that came from these amazing creative minds colliding together, creating this creative space and making something that's so different it's never been heard before but it's really really special really yeah like otherworldly and so I was listening to this interview where Rick Rubin is talking about his creative process and something that he said stood out to me and I'll remember this forever he was saying that when he gets a call about a specific musician or group or whatever that wants to work with him he always knows immediately whether or not this is a project for him so think follow your bliss he he hears about the opportunity and he immediately can feel in his body, it's either a yes or a no. I'm sure you've heard people teach on this before, like a full body yes or a full body no. And this is something I think as creative people, it's really important for us to practice. When you hear about an opportunity, it's either like a resounding, like excitement, you know, pleasure, joy in your body. You feel yourself kind of like sit up a little straighter, feel excited about what might happen. You feel a sense of opportunity, a sense of possibility. That's a full body yes. Or you hear about an opportunity and you immediately can feel in your system, in your body, in your physicality, that it's a no. You can feel yourself kind of like shrink down or sit a little lower or just like your stomach will sink or you're just like, ugh, ugh. Like you feel it almost like a noise. It's like, no, I don't want to do that. Maybe your stomach kind of twists into knots. That is a full body no. So he was explaining this process by where he'll hear about an opportunity and all of a sudden he's like, yes, this is a full body yes. I'm going to say yes to this. And he says yes instantly on the spot without having to ask any questions or know any more details. And then he explained how almost always, and I thought this was so important, almost always when he wakes up on the morning that he's supposed to go do this specific project that he said yes to, There was a full body yes to him almost always when he wakes up and it's time to go do the thing. He doesn't want to do it. And I really started to think about this. I was like, man, I can really resonate. There is an element with all things in life where it requires to accomplish anything in life requires some measure of duty, obligation, responsibility, discipline, kind of coaching yourself or coercing yourself to go do a thing. that you might not really feel like doing in the moment. It's like getting to the gym or sitting down and doing your morning pages or eating the healthy food, skipping the sugar, whatever it is for you, skipping the alcohol. There are choices that we make often in life, not because they feel really exciting in the moment, but because over time, those choices add up to something. And so there has to be some measure of discipline, some measure of responsibility, obligation, duty that we we fulfill, that we stand up for, that we show up for. And yet if our entire life is built off of duty and obligation, then it can have this tenor to it. That's just like, oh no, over time, I don't even want any part of this. I don't want to, I don't feel inspired. I don't feel excited. I don't feel lit up. I don't feel like getting out of bed in the morning. And that over time can become really heavy. It And so how do we find the balance between these two? I loved the way that Rick Rubin explained this because it resonated with me and I feel the same, which is that when you hear about an opportunity, you'll feel in your body whether or not this opportunity is for you. 00:08:04 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:08:04 Speaker 1: It's like a yes. That sounds so fun. Yes. I love that idea. Let's do that. I'm excited. And then for many, many, many reasons, when it comes time to actually follow through with the thing, you might not really feel like it. You might not really want to go. You might not really want to get out of bed. You might have other things that you feel like doing that day. And this I thought was such a nice way to bring these two things together. It's like follow your bliss. 00:08:30 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:08:31 Speaker 1: And then after you follow your bliss, here's how I want to contextualize this. This is important. After you follow your bliss, almost always there will be an experience of meeting

your shadow. And when I say shadow, what I mean by shadow is you're going to meet your own resistance. That's what Steven Pressfield calls it. You'll meet your own resistance. So you'll meet your fear. You'll meet your insecurity. You'll meet your just, your wandering brain that would rather go do something else. You'll meet your flightiness. You'll meet your own attachment issues, right? You know, you'll meet yourself after you say yes. So you'll say yes to a thing. And then the closer you get to it, you will meet yourself. So let me give you an example of this. So let me give you an example of this. My husband and I got a phone call out of nowhere shortly after we went into lockdown. We were living in LA at the time. We'd gone into lockdown. My husband had shut down his business. If you've been here a while, you might know parts of this story, but my husband was working in experiential marketing, which is basically like building these massive builds for brands at cultural festivals. So he would go to South by Southwest and Comic-Con and Coachella and he would work for entertainment brands and build these massive experiences so that the brands could go and have a presence at these cultural festivals. So when COVID happened and when we started to see festivals shut down, immediately Matt knew that this was going to be really bad for business for him. In fact, in a matter of a couple of weeks, I think he lost over a million dollars in business because because South by Southwest was canceled and then Comic-Con, San Diego Comic-Con was canceled. And so all of these brands had to scramble and figure out, you know, something new to do. So Matt had seen the writing on the wall really early and let his staff go. He'd moved out of his office space. He was basically just trying to stop the bleeding so that they weren't going to go into any kind of debt. And we were trying to figure out what he was going to do next. I was still working. He was not working. We were like, okay, Matt, you know, has just kind of an open calendar now. What is going to happen next? Are we going to, is the lockdown going to end? Nobody knew at the time. It was just this big, massive question mark. And we got a call from one of Matt's friends with an opportunity for Matt to try something brand new that he had never done before in Tennessee. Now, I had ties to Tennessee. I had been living in Nashville when I met Matt. He was in Pasadena. I was in Nashville. We met when I was on a business trip in LA. We dated long distance for a long time. Then I moved to LA. We got married. We had my daughter. And we were living in LA when the pandemic happened. So we already had ties to Nashville. Believe it or not, his mom had lived in Nashville. Matt owned a house in Nashville. It was like really weird how many ties we had to Nashville. So when he got this call about a potential development opportunity in Tennessee, it was something brand new, something he'd never heard about before, but it was

weird for both of us. This opportunity was like a full body yes. It was like, oh my gosh, how exciting, how cool, how unique, how different, how maybe this is exactly why all of this unfolded this way is so that we could step into this new opportunity. What a gift, what a miracle that Everything happened the way that it did, that Matt's business fell apart so that he would have all this open space so that we could be a part of this really cool, new, exciting opportunity. So we made the move to Nashville. We settled in here. He started working hard on this project. I've talked about this a fair bit before, but we met a lot of people along the way who were like, wow, this is a really big project. Are you sure you want to take this on? you have never done anything like this before. This is like a really heavy lift for someone who's brand new at this. It'd be a heavy lift even for someone who has years of development experience. And Matt was just feeling up for the challenge. It was like a full body yes for him and a full body yes for me. And there were moments in the beginning, especially when we would be confronted with people who were really experienced in this world who would say like, are you sure? Here's kind of the pitfalls. Here's where things could go wrong. We even had people who were just, downright naysayers who would say like, this is never going to work. And Matt and I both would check in with each other and we would check back in with the idea, with the concept. And over and over and over again, I'm telling you, our answers were always this full body. 00:13:02 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:13:02 Speaker 1: It was always just like, I don't know why I can't explain it. I feel so optimistic about it. I feel compelled in this direction. This is just a yes for both of us. And yet, and yet, as we moved through this process, which ended up being about four years long, as we moved through the process, there were so many moments where we both met our fear or we both met our shadow or we both met a feeling like, oh, I'm out of my depth here. I have no idea what to do next. Like, or we're at an impasse. We have no clue how to resolve this obstacle that's in front of us. And so as we moved through this, we were forced to confront our shadow. There were a handful of times where we would have these kind of come to Jesus moments where we'd sit down, we'd look at the finances. We'd be like, you know, we're kind of in at this point. Like we've really invested a lot. You know, are we willing to keep on moving without a guarantee that this is going to pay us back in the long run? And there were so many moments where we thought about quitting, where we wanted to quit, where we almost quit. And for one reason or another, we would always come back to that full body yes. We would always just feel compelled to keep moving. I don't know how else to explain it. And this just does a really good job of painting the picture of what it looks like to feel compelled forward by

a full body yes, and yet to be meeting your own resistance, meeting your own shadow, meeting your own fears, meeting your own insecurities. And Many of you know this story. If you've been listening for a while, you know that the story doesn't end. I wish the story ended in this very hopeful way that it was like, we kept going, we persevered, and at the end, we got paid back every penny that we spent, you know, times 10. I wish that was the story. That's not the story. The story is still unfolding in front of us, but I will affirm and confirm that what the story has done for us, what this creative project has done for us, while it hasn't paid us back tenfold of what we invested, It has forced me to confront every deep fear that I have held in my body and to make peace with it, to confront these fears and to really come to terms with the fact that these demons that I've held as obstacles to stand in my way are not really as scary as I thought they were. like one for me was bankruptcy. Bankruptcy was like the scariest thing you could possibly imagine. I had so much shame around bankruptcy. I still kind of feel my system respond to that word in such a way where it's just like, eek, like that's definitely not a thing that I'm wanting to experience in this lifetime. It's not a story that I'm inviting in. And yet we had many moments where, because we were so far out over our skis with this massive project that we took on, that that began to toward the end of the four years in like the later part of 2024, that started to become a real possibility that perhaps we or the business would have to file bankruptcy. And let me tell you the way that I came face to face with that fear of bankruptcy and realized that bankruptcy, while not ideal, while not something that I would ask for or wish for, or would hope for, for anybody that I love in my life, or even anybody that I don't really like that much, is also just a thing. that doesn't hold the weight or doesn't hold the power that I thought it did. And the beautiful thing about facing your fears and resolving them in that way is now they're no longer this, it's no longer this looming, horrible, possible outcome that's out there. Now I've really faced it down. It's like I've faced down the monster. I've faced down the demon. I've realized, okay, there it is. It's bankruptcy. Bankruptcy might find me at some point in my life. And if it does, I'm going to be okay. Let me tell you the way that facing down your fears like that and making peace with them makes you feel powerful. Okay. It is like, oh, okay. I'm okay. No matter what happens, I'm okay. Another fear that I faced down in all this process that was not necessarily directly related, but was partially related to this was the fear of death. And I think the fear of death is built into all of us, built into our psyche. We're wired to survive. And so None of us want to die, but having two little kids, being a mother, feeling that responsibility, duty obligation, speaking of duty obligation, is a really unique cocktail of like, all I want, the thing I want more than I want anything else in this life is to just to be here for my kids, to be there to both to support them and take care of them, but also just to witness their lives unfold. Like this is the most exciting thing I've ever done in my life. It's the most full body yes I've ever had. So I want to be here for them. And something about the combination of postpartum anxiety, the way that your brain shifts, that was what initially introduced it for me, this idea, the fear of something might happen to me, something might happen to my kids that will separate us. There is a brain shift that happens after you have kids that you really can't comprehend until you're in it, where... These fears that you didn't know were there, but were always buried in your body start coming up. It's absurd fears. It's stuff that's not even, couldn't even be possible or couldn't even be real. Like, you know, I'm holding my baby close to my chest as I stand next to a second story railing. And even though I'm feet away from the railing, I worry about like the baby squirming out of my arms and flipping over the railing and falling to its death. It's like absurd stuff like that that could never happen. And then what happened for me is because of the mold exposure I experienced in our home, I started to have wild symptoms that really put me into contact with what felt like a very real fear of death. I would be going to the ER with heart palpitations. I'd be sweating. I'd be feeling short of breath, having a hard time breathing. My legs would be completely numb from the knees down. And I would be like, I'm dying. I guess this is it. This is how I go out. And really having to come face to face with my fear of death, of my fear of leaving my kids behind. And this is one where I can't say the fear is completely resolved, but I do know that facing that fear head on, coming face to face with my own fear of dying has helped me to loosen my grip around the need to make it go a certain way. It's like the need to stay alive was almost... creating more stress and tension for me than... the fear of dying was, if that makes sense. The white knuckle grip that I had around the need to be here for my kids. If I'm not here for my kids, then no one will be, you know, or, you know, just a desperate need for things to go the way that I wanted them to go Having these experiences helped me to loosen my grip around that, to come face to face with this fear, to realize that it wasn't as scary as I thought it was, to face that shadow and to find some resolution for it and to move forward and move through it. There is the full body activation, that full body yes, that compels you toward something that you want to do. And then on the other side of it, there is fear, there is panic sometimes, there is dread. There is shadow. There's resistance. There's you. There's all the things about you, the other side of

you that you've been avoiding, that you've been resisting, that you wish wasn't there, that you have been ignoring, that you've been pushing down, and it all comes to the surface. Maybe your anger comes to the surface. Maybe your yeah, fear comes to the surface, maybe, um, your own, whatever demons that you have that you've pushed away that you've, when you have control over your life, when your life is sort of under your control, you also are able to project this illusion of control to the world. It's like, I'm such a nice person. 00:21:25 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:21:35 Speaker 1: When your life is sort of under your control, you also are able to project this illusion of control to the world. It's like, I'm such a nice person. Don't you love me? I fulfill all of my obligations. I show up for everything with a smiling face. I'm such a happy person. I'm such a nice woman. I help people. I'm very helpful. I'm When life starts to spin and spiral out of your control, that's when the parts of you that you wish weren't part of you show up and get to join the party because they're also part of you and they're welcome here. And so those parts of you start to come online and we get more of a full picture of who Allie Fallon really is, more of a full picture of who you really are. Even though those parts of you are parts of you that you would prefer to have banished, when you banish those parts of you, it's only a partial picture of you that we get. And when you welcome those parts of you, we get the fullness of you and the fullness of you might not be quite as likable, I guess, but actually oddly at the end of the day, the fullness of you is more likable because she's real. She's real. And we want the real version of you. We want the whole version of you. We want your real opinion, your real ideas, your real perspective on things. And this is one thing that I'm coming to learn. The reason why I will die on the hill of follow your bliss is because until you follow your bliss, those shadow parts of you almost never join the party. Sometimes they can join the party through, um, like losses that you didn't choose. That definitely happens too. But I will say in my experience, most often, um, Those experiences of loss and of failure and of setback that force me to bring my whole self to the table are experiences that come from me following my bliss. They're experiences from me getting so excited about something, chasing it down, running it down, and then realizing I don't actually, in the partial version of myself that I'm presenting, that version of me does not have what it takes. The version of me that does have what it takes is the fullness of me, the rest of me. It's like, where's the rest of you that you've left behind in order to make your life so manageable? Where's the rest of you? And the only way that we really come into contact with the rest of us is when we follow our bliss, when we chase down that idea that's really ill-advised. It's really, you know, like plenty of wise people were like, this is a really big project. Are you sure you want to take it on? And they were in some ways right, and yet, and yet, and yet, I believe with every fiber of my being that we were meant to chase down that dream, that we were meant to follow that path, that we were meant to fail in the way that we failed. Because until we got there, we were only operating with partial versions of ourselves. Let me give you a smaller example of how this could take place, because it doesn't always have to be something so crazy like hurling yourself into bankruptcy. It could just be as simple as someone asks you, to share your story on stage. Like they could, you could be asked to deliver a keynote presentation at some kind of gathering or to share your story in front of your book club or something like that. And originally when you are asked, it could be like a, Oh my gosh, that sounds kind of scary, kind of exciting. When you feel that full body, yes, you say, yes, I'll do it. Because it's a lot easier to do that in theory than it is to do it in practice. And then once you say yes, in theory, then your body has to get involved. And the closer that you get to it, the less hypothetical it becomes, the more you are asked to face your own shadow. This happens to me almost every single time that I teach a yoga class. I'm still a fairly new yoga instructor. I've been I've been certified for a little over a year now. So I've been teaching for about a year and a half. And I started teaching free classes before I was certified, officially certified when I was in the middle of the process. And every single time that I'm asked to teach a class, it's always like, yes, ooh, yeah, that sounds fun. Let's do that. And then every single time that I'm like, my body is moving into the space to teach the class or sometimes even when I'm like planning the flow, it's like, okay, do I have what it takes? Am I really qualified for this? You can feel that your body is saying something almost different than what your mind is saying. Your mind is like, yes, let's go. Let's do it. This is going. 00:26:12 Speaker 2: To be great. 00:26:13 Speaker 1: And then your body needs a little more coaxing to get on board. And so what I'm talking about with following your bliss is this idea of, yes, follow your bliss. Feel the full body, yes. Your body says yes to this invitation that life has given you. And after you follow your bliss, there are all these opportunities to really meet yourself, to really meet your shame, to meet your pain, to meet your shadow, to meet the parts of you that you've excommunicated, that you've exiled, that you've banished from your life, to meet your rage. Oh my goodness, the way that I have met my rage since I've had kids, since Matt and I took on this you know, this big project. And since we failed at it, there have been so many ways. I thought that I was this really polite person who didn't really get mad at things. And let me tell

you the way that I have met my own anger and rage. And it's uncomfortable, especially if you're someone who's banished your anger over the years, which I think a lot of women have. If you've banished your anger, then to come into contact with your anger is uncomfortable because you're like, whoa, what is happening to me? This is like a volcano that is coming up from inside of me. I'm not used to this. And I don't like this feeling. It feels very out of control. And yet when you meet your rage and you meet your anger and you allow it to come online, you also come into contact with your greatest power. I mean, anger and rage are powerful tools that we have to learn how to hone and And so when we banish those parts of ourselves, then we aren't in contact with the fullness of our power. So this is something that has really happened for me recently is I'm like, ooh, there it is. There's my anger. There's my rage. I'm really, really, really mad about this. And I've learned to welcome that. But maybe for you, it's not even anger. Maybe that's not the most uncomfortable emotion. Maybe for you, it's shame. Shame is uncomfortable for a lot of us. When you follow your bliss, you will come into contact with your shame. Because when you have control over your life, when your life is like a chessboard and you are moving the pieces around and you've got it under control, you never have to come into contact with your shame. When you follow your bliss, when it takes you out of your comfortable world into the new world, as Joseph Campbell says, it takes you into that call to adventure. That's when the hero really realizes, oh my God, I'm out of my depth. I have no idea what I'm doing here. I am not in control of this situation. And therefore I meet these other parts of myself. When you meet your shame, then you're forced to confront it. You're forced to make peace with it. You're forced to welcome it in. You're forced to cradle it like the little child that it is and say, it's okay. You're allowed to feel shame. You're allowed to be here feeling shameful. So whatever it is for you, there is following your bliss. But the piece I really want to focus on for this episode is what happens after you follow your bliss. What happens after you follow your bliss is you meet the fullness of yourself. And that sounds nice, but it doesn't feel so nice in the body. And so yes, I believe the answer is to follow your bliss, to listen for what excites you, listen for what wakes you up, listen for what gets you out of bed in the morning, to chase down the thing that is just like the most pleasurable thing that you can imagine, the most exciting thing that you can imagine. And also be prepared on the other side of that for the proverbial shit to hit the proverbial fan, because that will be what happens. And you will meet these other parts of yourself, you will meet your own shadow. And actually that's the whole point. It's the whole point is to meet yourself on the other side of it. So be prepared to meet yourself, follow your bliss. 00:30:08 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:30:08 Speaker 1: And then after you follow your bliss, be prepared to meet yourself, be prepared to support yourself, to soothe yourself, to meet yourself with compassion because it will get really, really messy. Harkening back to the episode I recorded before about aligned messy action. The whole point is to take messy action. The whole point is to make a mess so that you can see things from a different vantage point so that you can learn so that you can meet the fullness of yourself. We need the fullness of you here. We need all the parts of you, all the messy parts, all the hard parts, all the angry parts, all the shameful parts, everything. We need it all to come into the light so that we can experience the fullness of who you came here to be. I welcome every part of you. Thank you for listening and I'll see you back here next week. on the Write Your Story podcast.