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Have you ever wished that you could just skip the messy parts of life and get straight to the good stuff? You know the joy, the comfort, the ease. I get it, but here's the truth. You're listening to relish the podcast for people ready to stop chasing self-improvement and start savoring their lives. If you're tired of the hamster wheel of healing and hungry for more joy, presence, and meaning. You're in the right place. Hello, relish, it's Alyssia, and today's Quick Bite episode is one of my favorite reminders about being human. Inspired by the
beautiful metaphor. No mud, no lotus. If you are new here, welcome! Please tap, follow or subscribe so that we can keep exploring ways to live with more presence, joy, and authenticity together. I called this podcast relish because my intention is to help you savor your life more, to be more present for the moments that matter. But here's the truth to savor your life, to truly savor it, to make it meaningful. We have to be willing to be with the discomfort. It's the full range of our experience, the light and the dark that gives life its depth, its richness. This metaphor that I'm sharing
today, it's one of my favorite reminders of that. So the lotus flower. You might have seen it or you might know about it. It's a symbol in many cultures, often representing rebirth or renewal, spiritual awakening. And what is so special about this is that it blooms in all its beauty at the top of the water, but its roots are buried deep in this thick, smelly, nasty mud. And what I love is that bloom could not exist without the mud. The mess and the beauty are inseparable. They are two sides of the same coin. And isn't that also true in life? It is, but so often it's like we tried to skip over the mud entirely. You know, we want the blossom. We
want the joy, the pleasure, without having to really get our hands dirty or to get uncomfortable. We want to feel the good without having to touch into the pain. When I first found my own path to growth, into healing my awakening, as I call it, which it's kind of crazy. It was like ten years ago now. You know, I didn't think my life was that bad at the time. I didn't think my suffering was as bad as I now realize it was. I thought I was just fine. Looking back, I realized I was very much numb. I was stuck in kind of the middle of the continuum of feeling where I thought nothing was really that
bad, but nothing really felt deeply good either. And again, I look back now and I realize a lot was actually bad, but I wasn't aware. I was extremely unfulfilled. I was very nihilistic. I kind of felt like, you know, what's the point? Is there any point to all of this? So I thought at the point of my awakening that doing the work was about feeling good. But what I discovered was that my willingness to actually feel the harder stuff, my willingness to touch into the sadness, the pain, the grief, the fear that directly impacted my capacity to feel the good stuff, the beauty, the joy, the meaning. And I started to see a sort of
spectrum in my mind with numb kind of right in the center. And as I expanded my window of tolerance, my capacity to go toward those feelings of discomfort and pain that also expanded my range so that I could experience more joy, more delight, more of the good stuff. And research in positive psychology backs this up. It shows that our capacity for joy actually grows when we are willing to be present with the discomfort, you know, and I do want to clarify that now, I don't necessarily think it's numb at the center. I think it's more like ease or contentment. But I started to
see there is a fine line between equanimity and indifference, and I think we will have to save that exploration for another episode anyway. I think it is so human with our binary brains to sometimes believe that the goal, even implicitly, is to live in a permanent state of joy, of feeling good. But joy isn't meant to be constant. It's meant to be savored, relished. Nothing is constant. That's one of the core truths of mindfulness. Everything is impermanent, and so nothing is perpetually satisfying. Think about it. Ice cream. Okay. It's delicious. But there actually is
a tipping point. If you eat ice cream all day, every day, you would feel sick. That hedonic pleasure, as we've talked about, it's fleeting. It doesn't last. But even eudaimonia, we've talked about eudaimonia. Joy that, you know, more fulfilling sense of flourishing purpose. Meaning it wouldn't have the meaning that it does without having gone through the pain. Think about something hard that you've gone through. What meaning came of it? I can think about this in my life in kind of micro and macro ways. You know, at a high level, we are all conditioned. Of
course, we all take on patterns to survive. We all experience pain. I experience some pain, some painful conditioning and childhood, as everyone does. And yet, as I've healed, I realize I wouldn't change it because it's part of why I am the way I am. It's part of why I'm so passionate about mindfulness and meaning and being human. And at a more micro level, I can see specific examples. So an example I was diagnosed autistic and ADHD as an adult about six years ago. It totally threw me for a loop. I could really do a whole podcast on this. Um, but the
sentiment is that it was hard. You know, it was hard growing up, not knowing, finding out was hard. And yet now, because I have been willing to go to that pain and explore it and heal it, I'm in the process of healing it and to have compassion for it. I now can see that so many of my gifts are actually related to it, to these divergent ways, this atypical experience of my brain and you and everybody have their own examples. We hear about it every day, challenges that humans face, people who go through really intense pain, terrible, deep, you know, losses of loved ones or awful experiences of abuse or assault. You know, things
you wouldn't wish on anyone. And yet their courage and their resilience allowed those experiences to become something really, really meaningful and actually a part of their purpose. Sweetness becomes meaningful because we have tasted what's bitter. We have a reference point, and when life inevitably hands me a messy, muddy moment, I find that this no mud, no lotus metaphor has been really helpful to remember it. This isn't forever, and this too can and actually will be a part of the beauty, because it is shaping the capacity of my heart to hold more joy when it comes. So if there's one thing to take away today, it's that joy becomes more meaningful because we've been willing
to face what's hard. So here's a reflection for you today. What past muddy experiences have led to powerful lotus moments in your life. And are there any areas in your life where there might be some mud that you're avoiding right now? And if so, that's okay. We look at it when we're ready, but I'm curious if you leaned in even just a little. What beauty could eventually grow from it? So if this metaphor resonates with you, I would love to hear how it lands Please message me. Find me on social media, @alyssiasheikh. Share this episode with someone who could use the reminder. And if you
haven't yet, please hit follow or subscribe so that you don't miss any future episodes. Please help us grow. Give us five stars. Leave a review. I really appreciate it and I hope you will relish your life, both the mud and the lotus. thank you for being here and for your kind attention.
