You Can Wake Up Now; September Is Over

Welcome to Q4. 2020 will be over before you know it. The days are getting shorter as darkness overtakes the light. So what now? For the rest of October, I will be giving you homework assignments to answer that question.

Key topics:

✔️ How do you want to spend the rest of the year?
✔️ The holiday season will be here soon... probably not the best time to start family battles and drama.
✔️ Are there any projects you've left undone? This is a good time to finish them.
✔️ What habits would you like to reinforce and which habits would you like to break?
✔️ If you haven't done any shadow work before, this is an opportune time. You don't have to dwell on negative things or spelunk into the sadness. But you should take the time to drag your gremlins out in the cold light of day.

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Transcript

Unknown Speaker : 0:15

Hello, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Causey Consulting Podcast. I'm your host, Sara Causey and I'm also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at Causey ConsultingLLC.com. Today I want to talk about the fourth quarter. If you've been relentlessly listening to "wake me up when September ends" by Green Day, cockadoodledoo, here's your wake up call, you can go ahead and get up now because it's October 1st and we have made it to the fourth quarter of 2020. Even though it felt like a crazy year at times, and and it was like being on a really weird roller coaster. I don't think anybody's gonna be sad to see it go. The truth is that by the time we make it to this part of the year, everything just flies by. And I have mixed emotions about that To be honest, because fall is my favorite season. I love that first little nip of cold air sweater weather, being able to go outside and have a bonfire and really enjoy it, watching the darkness slowly overtake the daylight.

Unknown Speaker : 1:22

Now I don't really get into like the winter months when it's dark at 5pm. That's when Seasonal Affective can start to become an issue for me and I have to use my UV light. It's like basically the daylight is your work hours from about 8am to 5pm. It's daylight outside, and then it starts to get dark. But this time of the year when the dark and the light are, you know, they stand equal at the equinox. And then the night starts to slowly overtake the day, the evening start just a little bit earlier. And they're crisp. And it's enjoyable to be outside. I really love this time of the year. So I don't relish that it goes by so fast. But the truth is it does. They're all holiday seasons, kids activities, getting things lined out about who's going to travel, where for the holidays, and so on. And I think probably even with COVID going on, there's still going to be family gatherings, there's still going to be people getting together. So I would be willing to bet that you will blink and it will be Halloween, you'll blink again, it'll be Thanksgiving, and you'll blink again. And it will be Christmas in New Year. And we can all say goodbye to 2020. So do what you can to get some enjoyment out of this season of the year. I have a friend for example, who does not get along with her mother in law. And she has been itching to pick a fight with this woman. And she was calling me and telling me all the latest scoop of how this woman has offended her. I was like, Dude, it's October, you're gonna blink and it's going to be the holiday season. Do you really want to get a cold war stirred up between you and the mother in law? and get all of this bad blood going this close to the holidays? Like No, no, you really don't this, this would not be the time to lob a Molotov cocktail over in her direction. So I suppose one piece of advice would be not to borrow unnecessary trouble for yourself, especially with people where you're going to be cloistered away together at grandma's house to celebrate Thanksgiving, or Christmas, probably not the best time to start picking family battles. This time of year is really conducive to introspection. It's conducive to indoor hobbies. So if there's a home improvement project inside that you've left half finished, this could be a really good time to finally finish it. I'm speaking to myself on that as much as I'm speaking to all of you I've got I've been on a quest to repaint the interior of my house this year. And the only room I have left is the living room. It's a large space. And so you know, I've kind of out of necessity, put it off till the end. And I'm like, you probably need to go ahead and finish that up. during these times when it's dark and it's cold. That could be a project that you could finish and go into 2021 with the whole house being refreshed and repainted. It's a time to look inward. So instead of going well my mother in law's really pissing me off and I want to sit here and figure out how to pick a fight with her. Let's examine what we can do for ourselves. What what has not served us well in 2020 what would we like to have a burial for and not take with us into 2021? What would we like habits that perhaps we have that we'd like to break or new habits that we would like to cultivate. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the typical New Year's Day vs New Year new me I'm going to lose 500 pounds and Yeah, I'm not talking about these like, typical superficial goals where, by the time Valentine's Day rolls around your head, you don't even remember what new year's resolutions you even set. It's like how gym owners talk about the gym is packed full of people in January. By Valentine's Day, about half of those people are already gone. And by St. Patrick's Day, not a single one of those new year new me, people are still in this gym working out. So I'm not talking about getting into that kind of BS. I'm speaking more in the sense of mental, emotional and spiritual work. Do you have a regular meditation practice? Are you able to carve out time throughout the week for solitude? Does the idea of solitude and really being alone with yourself and your own thoughts terrify you? For some people it does, some people think that in order to be alone with themselves and their own thoughts, they have to really go spelunking into the depths. And I guess I would say I have a sort of warning about that. Because you know, when Nietzsche said that when you when you go off to fight monsters, you need to take care of that you don't become a monster yourself. When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you, kids, that's really true, I can tell you from personal experience, that when you when you decide to really go spelunking down into the depths of your own soul are the depths of the universe, if you don't come out of that experience the same way that you went in. So I don't want you to think that Shadow Work necessarily has to be this psychedelic bizarre experience where you you come out of it feeling like you've really been on a vision quest. It doesn't have to be that complicated. And frankly, it doesn't have to be that deep either. So don't if you are the type of person that you constantly go 90 miles an hour, it's hard for you to stop and slow down and have any degree of solitude, I don't want to scare you off from it by making you think that you're going to get into your own psyche and find all kinds of terrible things that you wish you hadn't district. Shadow Work can really be an excellent opportunity for personal development and growth. And, of course, it's also personal discovery. But it doesn't have to be scary. It doesn't have to be you conjuring up all kinds of scary monsters and dragons out of your psyche that you think oh my god, this would have been better left unknown. I should have never messed with this. No, you don't have to take it that far. You can simply think about things that you want to change. So here, here are some potential examples that you can take with you. If you're journaling. If you're having some quiet time. If you want to really think about making lasting changes for 2021 and not the superficial, I'm going to go to the gym every day and lose 10 million pounds. This is the kind of content I'm talking about. Think about your emotional triggers. What are some things that really punch your buttons? You know, is it something like a guy cutting you off in traffic? Or maybe you have a neighbor that's like obsessed with their lawn and so every time they mow they intentionally make two or three passes over into your grass is like a passive aggressive FSU type of statement. If that's it, think about those kinds of things that trigger you what pisses you off what gets under your skin and starts grinding your gears and write about those things. How do you respond to stress? If someone or something is irritating you Why? Why is it Why does that irritate you always think about it this way something that you find irritating, somebody else finds to be totally blocked or unimportant. So take the time to ask yourself okay, I got really upset by this event. Why? What was it that made me feel this level of upset so to use my friend's example like okay, what is it about your mother in law and and for those of you that have testy relationships with your in laws you're I'm sure you're laughing right now like Oh god, what isn't it with the with the in laws, but like, Okay, well, when your mother in law says this, or when she does that, like what? What is it that triggers you? How is it that you are interpreting the event that's making you get so upset with her? Are there good habits and good ideas that you've cultivated in 2020 that you want to build on further? Maybe this time of being at home and cloistered away during the pandemic has helped you to give birth to some new ideas or new concepts and you want to build on those things. Shadow Work doesn't all have to be about you looking for things that are and I'm using air quotes here negative about yourself or negative things that might be lurking in your psyche. You can also bring positive ideas and positive strokes of good fortune out into the light of day too. So please don't think that this is all like me suggesting that you journal about Debbie Downer topics. But with that being said, again, as we get into this time of the year, when the night is overtaking the day, it is a great time to plumb those depths a little bit, as much as you feel comfortable with, to take some things out and make them not so scary. You know, if we can blow something up, if we can laugh about it, if we can find humor in it, if we can, you know, if we've got some little Gremlin that's lurking in the back of our mind, so often we make that little Gremlin bigger and stronger than he actually is. But when we drag him out into the light and say, Okay, I'm looking at you, I am eyeball to eyeball with you Gremlin, what's the deal, he's not so scary anymore, the more that things lurk about in the dark, the more they stay in the unknown, and we start to get worried about what they are. So there's an area of my property that's wooded, and a creek runs through it. And there's there are certain times out of the year when it's really beautiful. I mean, it's it's a very peaceful and idyllic type of setting, it's a great place to go to have like an outdoor meditation, or do some outdoor journaling, or to just sit on a rock and be in nature to forget about technology to forget about other humans, frankly, and just be in nature, in the animal world, and decompressed and unplugged. But at night, that whole area takes on a different dimension. There have been times where, especially when I worked outside the home, I would get home from work in the winter time. And I'd have to go out with like, I have this big lander and I call it a coyote lantern, I'd go out with my coyote lantern, and a big flashlight. And there would be times that I would hear things rustling around in the woods, I wouldn't know what it was, or I'd shine the flashlight out there. And I'd see a pair of eyes looking back at me. But I had no idea what those eyes belonged to. That can be pretty creepy, because it's the unknown. It could be some very small, innocuous animal, or it could be something that could overpower me and bite my head off. You know, when you don't know what it is you don't know. But when you take those Gremlins out, and you look at them, and you can see them for what they are, you typically find that they're not nearly as big and scary as you initially thought. So throughout the month of October, I'm going to be giving you a little homework assignments, things that you can do to really enhance this time of the year and get the most out of it that you possibly can. And obviously the assignment that I want you to work on until we meet again, is your shadow work. Take out a journal or a piece of piece of paper and a pin somewhere and really get into some of those questions that you've been avoiding. If things are triggering you, if you are itching to pick a fight with a relative so close to the holidays, or you're dreading the holidays, okay, why what what do you feel like is going to happen at Thanksgiving? Are you worried about a big political battle? Are you worried about who's going to stay where and people fighting with each other, get all of that stuff down on paper so that you can begin working out, stop being afraid of the dark. Take a flashlight, mill around in there and see what you come up with. You can always tie a rope around yourself so that in case you realize, Oh, I went a little farther down into the cave than I meant to you can always use that rope to pull yourself back up on level ground again. But the earth itself this time of the year is telling you this is the time for more rest. It's a time to be indoors more. And frankly, it's a time to be inside yourself more than you probably have been over the summer. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it. If you haven't already. Take a quick second to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai