Visiting the ghosts of relationships past with a flower remedy and a few first crush stories. If you have any comments or would like to send a voice note of your own you can find me on Instagram @rileyroth__ or reply directly to this email. If you’re reading this in the podcast app show notes you can find me on Substack and sign up to receive an email with the full post when a new episode in this series is released. The idea for this podcast series is layered. On the surface, yes, it’s about love & pursuit. But it’s also a way of expressing the cultural pressure I’ve felt to constantly treat myself as a work in progress. I imagine I’m not alone in this feeling, and I’ve also resigned to it never ending. But I’m growing more critical of my reasons for self-development and inner work, the end goals I actually have. Because as Mark Manson said in the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, “The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.” Which I take to mean, don’t do anything with the hope it will bring you a gift or some ultimate euphoria, or even love. You don’t get to choose the lesson from the journey. I see it also as an invitation to feel all the happiness and love and presence you want to right now. Your ideas are the only thing in the way. I definitely didn’t understand this at the time I’m talking about in this episode. I was still going to try and complete a workshop and seek the breakthrough for quite some time. But more and more now I’m trying to identify the really niche feelings and experiences that I think I’m really longing for, and try to recreate them. A small example is this feeling I remembered when I was a kid in elementary school, and it was the first day of summer. At the time I probably couldn’t even comprehend how much time 2 months was, so it felt like a lifetime was ahead of me to do Whatever I wanted. When I woke up and realized I had no school, homework, bedtime, bus to catch, just snacks and swimming…when is the last time you felt this way? I bet it wasn’t on your last two week vacation at work. No, we don’t allow ourselves to Actually relax and do nothing, we need to show something for our vacation! We need to go somewhere and Do something that’s worthy of working all those hours and saving up money. But the Feeling! The feeling that I can pinpoint. Of having the whole day/week/summer ahead with nothing to do, was the closest thing to freedom I’ve ever felt. Silly how we teach kids that doing their homework, getting good grades and a good job to buy a car and house etc will bring them this feeling again. Silly because we already had it. Part of this obviously entails having loving parents in a safe home who take care of all of your core needs- I recognize that itself is a luxury. But as we will talk about in the next episode, we’re a lot closer than we realize to the child we used to be and we’re a lot more equipped now to care for ourselves the way our best caretakers did. And why shouldn’t the reason for that maturity be to create that really beautiful safe space for us to wake up and feel like we have the freedom to do whatever we want? Even for just a day. I’ve tried this, and found a neat way to try and replicate this feeling. It’s weird but if you try nothing else from any of these exercises and journal prompts, please give this one a shot. Exercise: * Before you go to bed the night before you have a day off. Cancel all your plans if you can, take care of anything urgent, and decide that for the next day, you have no to-do list. This is harder than it sounds so you may have to try a few times. * Next, this is the important weird part, cover every clock and time face around you. I took sticky notes and hit the microwave, car, and even the top half of my phone and laptop. * Let whoever needs to know that you’ll be out of touch for a bit and go to sleep without an alarm and on airplane mode or do not disturb. * Wake up whenever you want. And do whatever you want…. Tips: don’t reach for your phone to give you any clues about what to do or who to answer to. This will be the hardest part. Because we have Habits! And habitually we look externally for our cues about what to spend time doing. Who needs me? What’s good on tik tok? Where did I leave off on this task? Not today. When I did this I sat uncomfortably looking at my phone for a bit. And then I thought about how I felt, what I needed, and then what I wanted to do. This was how my day played out: First, I was hungry. So I cooked, and put on music (yes I managed this with the help of Siri since my phone navigation was stifled). Then I wanted to go outside, went to my favourite trail system and just walked, for how long – I have no idea! Came home, made more food, picked up a book, took a nap, went to the ocean, painted, and then once it was dark I made tea and put my favourite movie on. Why can’t you just do all these things and still have access to your phone and time? Because the feeling of being a kid, is not keeping track of time. Because kids don’t look at the clock and say, “oh its 12 I need to eat lunch”, they say, “I’m hungry”. They don’t say, “oh it’s 9am I need to check to see if anyone has texted me overnight”, they say, “I want to go outside”. Maybe I’m working hard to make money to get to a point I feel like I’m as free as that first day of summer. But the struggle to get “there” definitely isn’t making me feel free. And sure, it isn’t realistic to feel summer vacation free all day every day. But I’m starting to believe there’s a shorter distance between never feeling that way, and feeling it next weekend. Much love, Riley Links: * The ‘In Love’ remedy by Alexis Smart and the testimonials * The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson If this email is not making it to your primary inbox you can move it out of promotions and into your main inbox on gmail, or flag it in your email provider as not spam. Sometimes the best way to do this is respond to the email and say hi! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyroth.substack.com
