Nancy: What if I no longer restrict fun and instead really feel into the hunger and the craving and the longing and the satisfaction and the fulfillment of fun?
Nancy: Welcome to the Nancy Levin Show. I’m Nancy Levin, founder of Levin Life Coach Academy: best-selling author, master coach, and your host. I help overachieving people pleasers set boundaries that stick and own self-worth, anchored in empowered action, so you can feel free.
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Let’s dive in.
Nancy: Welcome back to another episode of the Nancy Levin Show!
This is going to be fun. Full disclosure: this is not one of those podcast episodes that is all polished and smooth and figured out ahead of time. Instead, this is a podcast episode where I’m going to share with you what is happening for me in hopes that you find yourself inside my story.
So, by the time you hear this, Levin Life Coach Academy enrollment will be closed, and right before enrollment opened, I had an opportunity to go spend the weekend with two very dear friends in LA. And I should say I had the invitation and took the opportunity because a previous version of myself would not have said yes to this.
I would have felt that it was really essential that I stay nose to nose with my computer, that I not leave my home turf, and that I be 100% available to my team at every moment as we were heading into launch week. However, a different part of me said, “Hell yes, I’m going to LA to have this weekend with my friends.”
Now, a couple of things you need to know. One is when I was born, my older brother was significantly disabled. Incapacitated, really. And when I was two, and he was six, he died. And at that moment, the belief that was imprinted on me was: if I am imperfect, I will die.
And thus began my quest for perfectionism.
And there is, in my mind, a correlation between perfectionism and responsibility. I have had several astrology readings, psychic readings, you name it—readings. And each one has some flavor of… and one psychic once told me this, “you were born with an ‘R’ on your forehead for responsibility.” And this feels very true.
My younger years and even my not-so-long-ago years were completely rooted in my being responsible, my being hyper vigilant, my being on high alert. And I know that this stems from this experience of not being able to save my brother, not being able to heal a grief in my parents that could never be healed. And this turned me into a person who didn’t want to be out of control, who didn’t want to do anything that was frivolous. And ultimately, that meant not doing anything spontaneous.
So, I had lived my life quite calculated, I would say.
I had lived my life projecting this image of perfection to the world, managing the perception of others, only wanting to be seen a certain way.
Here’s what happens when I am holding the pole of control and rigidity and fear and responsibility, hyper-responsibility. Vigilance. I’m going to attract toward me the people who possess the other qualities.
So, this is Shadow Work in a nutshell.
Any quality I disown, like play or fun, will be reflected back to me by others.
And so, no surprise. The man I married was all about recreation, fun, play on steroids. That was his whole jam: fun, play, recreation. And it triggered me because those are qualities that I saw as being frivolous, careless, irresponsible, lazy. And because I had disowned those qualities, I wanted no part of the fun.
Fast forward to post-divorce.
I am attracted into my world yet another man who is all about the fun, all about the recreation, all about the play. And I continue to be triggered because I can’t see the value in fun or play. I’ve never been driven by happiness. I have been driven by meaning, satisfaction, or fulfillment, but happiness has not been a driver, nor has fun.
I have never considered doing something or not doing something based on a scale of one to ten of funness. I’ve certainly decided what to do and not to do based on the scale of responsibility. So, post these relationships, I have really been sitting with this inquiry around what drives me.
What feels most important to me? And what are the elements of responsibility or ambition that have me feeling in control? Whereas fun and play feel out of control.
So here I am last weekend, in LA.
The weekend before my enrollment opened, rarely on my laptop. My team is fabulous. They had it all going on without me.
And I gave myself permission to play, have fun, laugh, let loose, let go, and not hold on so tightly. One of the things that really landed for me was that there was something about play in the past with these men I just mentioned, specifically. There was something about play in the past fun in the past.
Fun meant this is going to cost me, whether that means financial or energy. Fun is time. Fun is going to cost me. There’s going to be a cost to my fun. This past weekend, what I really got was that fun is going to make me money. Fun is going to create more success.
Fun is going to make possible living a life that is alignment with me.
So this was mind-blowing because I had, for so long, identified with not being fun, not having fun, and not having fun be important. And it literally was not until this experience that I saw the profound value and worth in fun because I was no longer relating to it as something that was detracting or subtracting or depleting or pulling away some part of me. I actually was able to relate to fun as an infusion of energy and as an illumination of something inside of me, that is craving to get out.
I wonder if you relate to this even around fun?
But I wonder if you notice that there is something that you have vilified your whole life, that you have identified as bad or wrong or frivolous or unimportant. And you have deprived yourself of it.
In my latest book, Embrace Your Shadow to Find Your Light, there is a whole section—one of the alchemical steps of shadow work is on nourishment. In there, I share about our shadow desires—the desires we do not give ourselves permission to fulfill. This has me thinking now about being so young and being thrust into the trauma of my brother dying and the impact it had on me. I clearly made fun wrong. Fun was unnecessary. Fun was a distraction.
And what I’m stepping into here is “what is possible when I give myself permission to fulfill the desire of having fun.”
What if I no longer hold myself back and instead give myself permission?
What if I no longer restrict fun or deprive myself of fun and instead really feel the hunger, craving, and longing for having fun and the satisfaction and fulfillment of fun? What’s possible, then? If I think about the deprivation, it’s like a dried-out sponge, and when I think about giving myself permission to fully feel nourished and nurtured by my desire, I feel alive. I feel juicy, I feel bright, I feel luminous, and I feel free.
And that’s really it right there: freedom.
It’s funny to me how freedom has been my number one value, yet fun has had no part in the picture. Many people, I imagine, would equate fun and freedom. But for me, freedom was really about being out from under anyone else’s scrutiny.
So, in an adult conversation, my mother let me know that when I was born, she didn’t want to attach to me because she was waiting to see what was wrong with me because of my brother.
Again, another limiting shadow belief that got embedded was that there must be something wrong with me if I am under this level of scrutiny. And what I came to believe was that love equals criticism. And because I felt that way growing up—love equals criticism. That’s what was familiar to me, so I sought it out in the man I married.
I sought out the criticism because I thought that was love. And so that’s when I was at the height of my people-pleasing, peace-keeping, conflict-avoiding, the loop in my head of: What do I need to do or say to make everything okay? That’s when I lost myself completely.
And this journey of reclamation has been a long one.
My divorce, my leaving my position at Hay House. Another relationship that ended really settling in with myself and my needs and my wants and my thoughts and my feelings and giving myself permission to activate my desires instead of shut them down. And I share all this to say that, you know, there’s the old adage of we teach what we need to learn, but I’m also sort of building on that in terms of—we’re always learning!
So, yes, I might be a master coach. I might run a coaching academy and train and certify coaches. I have written seven books, I, I, I, I, the list goes on, and I’m still in my own process of doing my own inner work, my own self inquiry and discovery every single day. And I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So when something like this happens, I want to share it with you because I want to invite you to find the seed of what I’m sharing within yourself and what it might unlock and unleash for you.
I have also been sharing with my friends, primarily, and my students and my clients—I don’t know if I’ve shared it here—that…
I’m going to be 60 on my next birthday in February.
So it’s still a little bit away, but not that far away. And I have had this feeling inside of me that’s that 60 is going to be my best decade. I’ve had this feeling inside of me that crossing that threshold into 60 is going to open the floodgates inside of me. And I always think about Louise Hay starting Hay House at 60.
So, I’m on this threshold right now between the end of my fifties and my sixties. And there’s something inside of me that knows that turning 60 in February is an initiation. It is a reckoning with myself. It is a reclamation. It is the true reinvention. The reclaiming and return to the essence of the truth of who I am before I began packaging myself to be digestible and palatable to everyone else around me.
And I feel it happening in real-time.
When I was in LA, there was a moment when my two friends looked at me and said, “You seem like a little girl. You seem like you’re ten years old right now.” And they said, “and you’re really bossy,” which is true. I was a really bossy kid, but they saw the child me. What happened was that when they could see it, I began to embody it
So much so that we played Jacks! I haven’t played jacks in decades, and I loved playing jacks when I was a kid. And I was really, really good, and I played jacks. I literally went out to the store to buy a set of jacks, and I got to play like a kid. I got to play in a way that I never let myself play as a kid because I needed to be on high alert. I needed to be hyper-vigilant. I needed to make sure that nothing was going wrong.
And so this shift is profound for me.
And it has led to seeing fun as a way to prosper as opposed to fun coming at a cost. So, I just wanted to share this in case it opens up and unlocks anything inside of you. And I kind of like doing this kind of an episode where I didn’t 100% know what I was going to come on and say, but I also want to be respectful of you listening. I don’t want to come on without a sense of where I’m going because I’m taking you with me.
But there’s also something here right now for me, entrusting that if I share what is most on my heart for you, it will in some way move and inspire you. So there it is. Let me know. Hit me up on Instagram, email me. Let me know what you think about what I’ve shared today. I’m really curious. I really want to know, and we will continue.
All right, my friends, until next week, bye-bye.
Nancy: Thanks so much for joining me today. I invite you to head on over to www.nancylevin.com to check out all the goodies I have there for you. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a rating and a review.
I’ll meet you back here next week!