Happy Birthday Taylor! In this Deep Stretch episode, Taylor leaves us with a beautiful message and birthday blessing for us to carry out the year. As she reflects on her year of 28, she encourages us to allow things to be and go with the flow. Although the year is coming to an end, this episode is great for those who could use a reminder of trust, love, and light.
Welcome to Inner Warmup where your inner work begins. My name is Taylor Elyse Morrison, I'm the founder of Inner Workout and you as always are our expert guest. Thanks for being here. If you're new here, we like to start off episodes with some type of activity. Today, what I want you to do is just shake it out. I am always reminded whenever I see my dog do this, that animals when they're feeling anxious, when they have a lot of energy, they just physically shake it off. And so I before I hit record, I did a little shake, and just used it as an opportunity to let go of something. But I also like shaking things off, because you could be let going, letting go have some negative energy. But you also could just be like, building up some joy and momentum, so you can take it whichever direction you need it today. Today is a Deep Stretch episode. So normally, we have this built in time for you to pause and reflect on deep stretch episodes, I just get to share my heart. And I'm recording this early, obviously but on the time that you're listening to this, if you're listening it to it the day that it goes live, it’s my birthday. I am 29 or I will be by the time you're pressing play on this. And this episode is coming out on November 28. So if you did some quick math, you might realize, okay, she just turned 29, her birthdays on November 28.
She's just coming out of her golden year, her golden birthday, and yes, you would be correct. I was told at the beginning of this year, that part of what I should do, as in my golden birthday, and also going through my Saturn Return, it was going to be really, really important for me to seek support. Support and people but also just support and feeling really comfortable in my physical environment. And in some ways I did that. We have this tiny team that supports the work of Inner Workout. And I've been getting better at asking for support from not my partner and from my friends and from my family. But I'll be honest, it's been tough, it's very much a work in progress. And as I am now 29, this is the first time I'm practicing saying this. So if it sounds weird, it's because I'm not used to saying it yet. But as I enter into my 29th year, and as I still have a couple months left of my Saturn Return, I feel like this, this tension, this kind of like ripping apart or opening, this pull to let go of certain things still that I'm trying so hard to hold on to.
But also this pull to settle in and to embrace the parts of myself that I would rather ignore, or change. And I started sketching out another idea for an episode. But as I thought, like what do I want to say to other folks on my birthday, but also what do I want to say to me on my birthday as I enter into my 29th year, and what follows are the words that started to flow. So it's not quite a poem. Maybe it's a little spoken word vibe but I'm going to read it to you. It's kind of like this permission slip or this reminder note that I wrote to myself. I'm going to read it to you as is and then I'll kind of break down and peel back some of the layers behind why I chose the words that I did and why it felt important for me to remind myself and to remind you of these things as well. So let's start by just reading what I wrote.
Allow yourself to be known. Allow yourself to be seen. Allow yourself to be supported. Allow yourself to be celebrated. Trust yourself, and your people and the universe. Let it be simple. Let it be joyous. Let it be love. Let it be.
So those are the words that just started coming up as I was writing down notes in preparing for this episode. And like I mentioned, I'll just kind of break it down for you.
So the allow yourself to be known piece. I remember I was at a women's event, this is probably five years ago, and an author said, “Would you rather be admired or known?” Do you really want to be admired or do you want to be known? And I realized that in this culture of getting Instagram likes, and posting our latest accomplishments on LinkedIn, and winning awards and accolades, and just for me personally, as an Enneagram three and a generator, it's so easy for me to just default to the wanting to be admired and wanting to achieve more, and to forget about this deep seated need to be known. And so that's a reminder that I need. Am I putting all these things in place just so people can admire me? Or do I have people who know me, who know all of me, who know the good, the bad, and the ugly? I'm really grateful that I have a partner who I've grown up with in the adulthood sense, who knows me and sees me, even in ways that I'm not always able to perceive myself. And I'm trying to get better. And I guess I'll have to ask my friends this, but I'm trying to get better at sharing those cracks, at sharing the things where I don't have the answers, or where I'm not feeling perfectly put together, where I'm struggling.
I am realizing I have a lot of what we're kind of playing around with talking about in Inner Workout, is like the strong friend conditioning. And it shows up in different ways. But basically, I, for many reasons growing up, have felt that I need to be as independent as possible. And I need to have it together. And I need to have the answers and I need to achieve and God forbid, I mess up in any way. That means I'm not worthy. That means that I'm less than and it put myself in a position to be competent, and to be useful and to be helpful which doesn't always mean that I've put myself in a position to be known. And as I go into my 29th year, and really, for the rest of my life, I want more of that more people who know me.
And I guess I don't even know if I want to say more people in a quantitative sense, but I want people who know me, I want the right people to know me. I'm not particularly concerned if every person in the world feels like they know me, I don't even think I want that intimate of a relationship with everyone in the world. But I do want for the people that I consider to be my close circle to feel like there's this deep sense of knowing and that I'm not, I'm not hiding or not defaulting into some of that strong friend conditioning around the allow yourself to be seen peace. This is where I really started to call myself out. So you probably know, Inner Workout launched this Instead Card Deck for scrolling less. I've been on this journey of really figuring out how I wanted to interact with social media but beyond that, some people may know this, some people may not. But part of why and how I started Inner Workout was because I didn't want to be seen. I didn't want to be the face of a company, I wanted something that could grow and expand beyond and outside of me. And so I created the Instead Card Deck, I structured Inner Workout the way that I did so that I could have some space between me and being online or running a business. And I'm realizing that some of that was valid and some of that was actually an excuse. Some of that was me hiding from myself and from the world really, from the impact that I want to create, from the conversations that I want to start. So this one has been really uncomfortable for me. If you could see my body language right now as I'm talking about this, I'm like do I really have to allow myself to be seen? Do I have to do that? Can we still, like do some other stuff and just pretend I haven't had this realization, but it's true.
I need to figure out ways to share my voice and rest in my gifts in a way that still feels balanced and not like I'm getting in weird codependent relationships with social media. But I'm having to navigate this line between having healthy boundaries and hiding. And yeah, it's just gonna, like everything, it's gonna require me to be in conversation with myself a lot. So that's where that allow yourself to be seen comes from just realizing, oh, yeah, Taylor, you're doing a lot of hiding, and you're able to spin this whole story around why this hiding is valid, but really, you're still hiding. And yeah, I'm not gonna do that in my 29th year, at least not as much as I did this year. And I think I had to do some of the hiding to realize that I wanted to be seen. And now the next part is figuring out what is being seen mean, what exactly does that look like? Where does it feel like too much? Where do I need to lean in? Where do I need to lean back? So it gets to be this unfolding.
And up next, allow yourself to be supported. So back to that conversation around the strong friend stuff, I really like to be the person to share a resource or being a listening ear or drop everything for someone else. And I have all these stories around why people don't want to do that for me, and they're just that, they’re stories. They’re stories that I have told myself but this year in doing the Kickstarter and in navigating things with the business and in my personal life as well, I have just had people show up for me in ways that I did not expect, like writing this Inner Workout book. There was some miscommunication around a deadline, and I was really, really stressed out and one of my friends from a business group that I'm in, just stepped up and said “hey, I have a free night at a hotel, do you want to go and write?” Like what? I would have never thought that people would want to be there for me in that way and yet, there they were. I still can't believe it. And so I want more of that, I want more of allowing myself to be supported and to let things be an exchange. I feel like I could do a whole episode just around this idea of giving and receiving support because I've been doing a lot of thinking about it and how I personally, but I also would argue a lot of us, can get into these kind of martyr complexes.
And again, it's where we're, we're saying the right things for talking about how we and I'll switch back to the I, I'm saying the right things, I'm talking about how I want to be of service and I want to use my gifts to help others. And so I use that as an excuse to only offer support and to extend, and extend, and extend myself without acknowledging that I need support too. And that if I'm actually giving support, but never receiving it, I’m not in alignment with my own values and I'm not creating something that is sustainable so that I can continue to give. So this support piece is, I know I keep saying like these are big, but they all kind of feel big. That's why these words just started flowing out of me because they were the things that came to mind. And some of them surprised me a little bit.
The allow yourself to be celebrated piece, I even wrote in my notes “whew” that's what I wrote after allow yourself to be celebrated. This is why I struggle with birthdays. So I'm not a huge birthday person. I'm trying to think of the last time I was like really super excited for my birthday. It's not that I don't enjoy them but I really like low key things like going to dinner with family or just ordering in from a favorite restaurant. Just like chill, nice things. I'm one of those people who doesn't like to decorate for Christmas or watch Christmas movies because that's what I celebrate, until after Thanksgiving. And so my birthday is sometimes where I'll just like chill and then watch Christmas movies because a bunch of them have popped up on all these different platforms. But beyond being relatively low key when it comes to birthdays, it comes back to this whole feeling of being uncomfortable, being celebrated, and I love celebrating other people. I love sending random notes to people and just encouraging them and reminding them that they're doing a really good job because I do a lot of work where you may or may not get feedback. And so I understand how hard people are working and what goes into it.
Even now, as I'm writing this book, I'm like man, I just want to send thank you notes to so many authors and be like you did so much work to create this book, this resource that I continue to return to. And so I love doing those things for other people. But then it's a different thing when I receive it. I'm really uncomfortable with people celebrating me, even though it's this duality. It's like I want to be acknowledged for the work that I'm doing and also, I don't like being celebrated to the point that when I do get encouraging notes, if they're emails or DMS, I'll find myself almost like exiting out of it right away. And then I have to take a deep breath and be like, Oh, someone said something nice. Let's prepare ourselves for this Taylor. And now open up that DM again, or now open up that email again, but it's like I almost can't handle it at first, and I have to create space to process. And so I'd like to feel more comfortable receiving celebration, receiving compliments, and knowing that those things don't define me. Other people's opinions don't define me, but being able to receive them, they're a gift, any type of feedback is a gift. And I want to be able to receive it all.
And then we get into this piece of trust, trust yourself and your people and the universe. And what I've been realizing is trust is really what creates space for all of those opportunities to allow that I mentioned. Trust makes room for the allowing. I can't allow myself to be known in relationship with other people or to be seen, or to be supported or to be celebrated if there isn't a trust in myself. Like if I don't allow myself to be celebrated because I'm afraid that I'm going to get a big head, that's me not trusting myself. Or if I don't allow myself to be supported because I don't think someone else can do it well, or will be there for me, that’s me not trusting my people. And for all of these, there's an element of like not trusting the universe, not trusting something bigger, and me trying to take back control of perceptions and timelines, and how everything will work. And so if I want to allow, it means I have to be constantly and consistently cultivating trust. Then we get into some of the let it be’s. So fun fact, I only have a teeny tiny tattoo, my dad refers to it as a pen mark, but when I was probably 15, and first thought of getting a tattoo, I wanted to get a tattoo of “let it be” because I love that Beatles song and so many of the covers that have been done of Let It Be. And the first let it be statement that I put here was let it be simple. Let it be simple. I am realizing as I plan for 2022 that there are so many places where I want to make it more complicated and more layers and all these different things and everything has to be new, new, new and complex, complex. And it's just like no, it doesn’t Taylor. What if it were the simplest, the most ease filled route possible? What if you let it be that simple?
And in personal life, too. So we just bought a car and it was going to be like more and more complex and over time we just narrowed down like okay, what do we have to have in a car? What's important to us in a car? It turns out, really not that much. We don't care that much about what our car is as long as it can get us from point A to point B. And for me, I wanted to think of something, of getting a car that's more environmentally friendly than the one that we had now. And so it started as this really complex process and then became really, really simple. And I think there's more room for simplifying. I think I make a lot in my life complicated that doesn't have to be. So I just I want to ask myself and encourage you to ask yourself, what if it could be that simple? How simple can you make it? And then let it be joyous. I just “put have fun, yo” that was the notes that I put for that one. Have fun. I've always been pretty serious, and actually, I don't even know if I want to put it that way. I think I felt like I had to be serious because I felt like being serious would make me seem more competent. And I'm slowly caring less about that. I just want to have fun and be impactful and experiment and grow. And I think some of the best ways for me to be impactful and to grow and create space for others to grow is to find out how to make things fun, that we've written off as being too serious or being rigid or fixed or has to be this way, because very few things have to be any way.
So yeah, I just want more fun, I want more moments where I'm dancing in my living room, and laughing and working. Pariss, who's our content lead, and I, we did our first co working session where we were just working on content together. And it was so fun. It was so fun to be looking at trends and things and getting excited and I want more of that, in work and in my personal life.
And then the last line was, let it be love, let it be, just a reminder. Every year I have a mantra, or a phrase that kind of defines the energy and the intention that I'd like to cultivate for the coming year and because my birthday is so late in the year, it becomes like my mantra for my my own solar return, and then kind of for the year to come as well. And oftentimes, the mantras just kind of come to me, I don't have to choose to work on them a lot. I'll just be journaling or I'll be doing something else and it’s just kind of gifted to me. Like oh, yeah, this is what we're focusing on this year. And mine came to me, I want to say last month in October, and it's “cease striving” which ties together so many things that I put in that poem, or whatever we want to call it, that piece, is just to stop striving, to cease striving. I don't need to be more “successful” and any arbitrary markers of success. I don't need to build a new program or launch XYZ number of products. I want to create things that are in alignment, that are really fun, that are really impactful but I don't want to have to force it. And to me, a lot of striving is forcing a square peg, round hole type forcing. And when you're letting go of that striving, you're just allowing things to be, you're noticing what it is, and you're interacting with it. I’m doing coach training right now and there's a quote, we'll have to look up who it's by, that my my coach turns to a lot that says, “I exist in perpetual creative response to whatever is present. I exist in perpetual creative response to whatever is present.” - Yogi Amrit Desai And that idea of seeing what's present and existing in perpetual creative response to it sounds like such a fun way to live. It's the opposite of striving and saying, like, what are people saying, what do people need? What do I need right now? And how can I creatively respond to it? So that's, that's my vibe, that’s my mood as I head into my 29th year, I guess, as I'm in my 29th year as you listen to this. So I’ll read this piece one more time.
Allow yourself to be known. Allow yourself to be seen. Allow yourself to be supported. Allow yourself to be celebrated. Trust yourself, and your people and the universe. Let it be simple, to be joyous. Let it be love. Let it be.
So that's my birthday blessing of sorts, words that I spoke to myself and that I'm speaking to you as well. Thanks for listening in. Thanks for celebrating part of my birthday with me. As a reminder, there's 15% off on the site all month long, code is HONEST HOLIDAYS. And if you're in Chicago, we'd love to have you at our pop up. Thanks for listening and take care!
