What Kind of Relationship Do I Want to Have With the Life I'm Actually Living?

What is your relationship with your body? Your mind? Your environment? Your time?

We spend a lot of time talking about what we should do for our health, but rarely stop to consider how we relate to the things that shape our everyday experience.

In this episode, we take a more philosophical look at holistic wellness and explore the relationships we have with ourselves and the world around us. How we speak to ourselves. How we listen, or don't listen, to our bodies. What our environments ask of us. And how the way we relate to time can shape the way we experience our lives.

There aren't a lot of answers in this episode. There are questions and some of them may be a little uncomfortable.

Because maybe living more holistically isn't about fixing every part of ourselves. Maybe it's about paying attention to the relationships we've already been living in all along.

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 Website: https://oliviabellco.com

I hope you find some time today for some peace, some plants and some paws!

☮️🌿🐾

Jo

Transcript

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Speaker 0:09

Welcome to Untamed and Unfiltered Wellness, the podcast where we bridge the gap between modern life and ancient roots, cutting through the wellness noise so you can stop guessing and start building a lifestyle that actually works for you. I'm your host, Jo Swensson, herbalist and founder of Olivia Bell.

Intro

Speaker 0:28

I'm going to take you down a little bit of a rabbit hole today. And I want to talk a little bit about relationships. Not the ones that we have with other people, but the ones that we have with ourselves.

Speaker 0:55

I was recently listening to Rich Roll share somethings about his recovery from spinal fusion surgery. And if you don't know who Rich Roll is, he was a former collegiate athlete and later became an endurance athlete. He actually reinvented himself at age 40, but he hosts a podcast and has written some books. He's a very interesting man and he has some interesting guests, but he brings a lot of thought-provoking questions to his podcast. And as I was listening to him share about his recovery, it really started to invoke some personal questions that I had about my life. I'm going to share those with you today because I think it's important that as we are all navigating this part of life, this midlife, this change, that we can sometimes feel overwhelmed and stressed.

Speaker 1:34

Let's be honest. Our bodies are changing. The relationships that we have with other people are changing. Our home life is changing. Many people are becoming empty nesters. And they don't need a big house anymore. So now they're thinking about downsizing. Well, what do you do with all the stuff and how do you get rid of it? And then there's work. Okay, work is changing. Do I want to keep working? Am I ready for retirement? Then we talk about our body. Everything changes. I can't eat the things I used to eat. Oh my god, my sleep sucks. Oh my god, I can't, I can't do this anymore. Everything becomes overwhelming. We can't move the way we used to. We can't remember things the way that we used to. All these things start coming at you left and right. And I say all of this to start asking us some questions. And this is where what Rich Roll shared really affected me in a way of taking that step back, that 10,000-foot view of me, my body, my life, my environment, and really had me asking some questions. So I'm gonna share with you what he he said when he was talking about his inability to move and do the things that he used to do. It's impacted his mental health and his relationship with his body. So that's where the rabbit hole starts. And this is what he shares. "When you've put so much distance between yourself and the things you enjoy, you are kind of disconnected from who you are. You start to forget those things are crucial in order to feel like yourself."

Speaker 3:02

So, of course, I start asking myself these questions. What is my relationship with my body? What is my relationship with my mental health? Am I doing things that I enjoy doing? Do I feel like myself? So this is where I want to take

Relationship

Speaker 3:15

us today. The first thing I want to do is define what I mean by relationship. Relationship is just how one thing exists in relation to another. We are constantly in relationship with ourselves and the world around us, not to mention the people, the places, and the things that are in our world. But we rarely stop to examine the quality of those relationships. So how is your relationship with those things? The things that you're not ever actually separate from? I'm gonna break this down into three sections. I'm gonna ask you three questions and I'm gonna share a little bit to help get you

My Body

Speaker 3:50

thinking. So the first question is what is your relationship with your body? Do you ignore it, put up with it, consult it, apologize to it, negotiate with it? What kind of relationship do you have with your body? There's the concept of interoception, it's something that I've spoken about before, and it has to do with your ability to sense, interpret, and integrate signals from inside your body, kind of like another sensory system. But the reason I bring that up is because there's a philosophical difference between something that we care for and something that we try to control. And if you're just trying to control your body all the time, how you look, what size clothing that you're wearing, what you're eating, and instead of actually caring for the body that you have, it will directly affect your relationship with your body. If you have demoted your body to the background noise or something that you've forgotten about as a relationship altogether, what happens to the mind inside of that body? And this is where question number two comes.

My Mind

Speaker 4:51

What relationship do you have with your own mind? And I want you to push back good versus bad. I don't want you to think on that. I want you to dig a little bit deeper. And I want you to frame it into ownership versus outsourcing. And what I mean by that is do you treat your mental state as something that has happened to you or something that you're in a relationship with? Because I think it's important for us to know the difference between ownership versus outsourcing. If we are allowing external things to affect our mind, then we are not in a relationship with our own mind. This is where ownership comes in and being responsible for our own thoughts, for the way that we think about ourselves, the way that we see ourselves. This directly affects our relationship with food, with how we see our body and whether or not we're doing things that we enjoy. Because if my relationship with my body affects my mind, and the relationship with my mind affects my body, where does one end and the other begin? And I think that's an important thing to think about because we all know, I believe truly, that everything is connected.

My Environment

Speaker 6:03

So if the mind and the body are connected, how does this affect our relationship with our environment? When we think about our environment, I don't want you to think just about nature. I want you to think about it in the full sense. Your home, your workspace, the people that you're regularly next to, the noise that you let in, the air quality, all of that. Your environment reflects a relationship that you're going to choose or one that you've inherited and never examined. So, what do these relationships tell me about the way that I'm living? That's the third question. Your environment that you are currently living in. And if you're thinking about changing it, that's gonna affect your mind. That's gonna affect your body.

Wholeness

Speaker 6:45

This is why I say these things are all connected, but I want us to focus more on a wholeness, about our whole life, our mind, our body, and our environment. And it's got me thinking about holistic health. And I am a holistic wellness practitioner, and that is what I do. I have a relationship with the environment in the herbal sense, as well as making time for meditation and prayer and hanging out with the dogs and doing all those things.

Speaker 7:12

But I've always looked at it as a puzzle that we need these different pieces to put together in order to create something that's whole. But maybe I've been looking at it wrong. Maybe it's about recognizing that there was never really a puzzle in the first place, that we as a society, as living in 2026 right now, maybe we're the ones that broke up that wholeness into different pieces. And that's why a lot of us are struggling.

Speaker 7:40

So if we stop trying to fix ourselves for a moment, what would we notice about the way we're relating to ourselves? And I think that's important to ask, and this is where this rabbit hole has gone, is taking it deeper. I mean, yeah, asking the questions. What is my relationship with my mind? What is my relationship with my body? What do these relationships tell me about the way that I am living? Those are three really important questions. And I encourage you to ask yourselves those questions and journal about them, but marinate with this for a while.

Ending

Speaker 8:13

Because maybe the work isn't always about finding something else to fix, to change, or to improve. Maybe sometimes it's about becoming more aware of the relationships that we already have, the ones with our bodies, our minds, our environment, and ultimately ourselves. We are never separate from those things. We are living in relationship with them every single day, whether we're paying attention to them or not. So perhaps the more interesting question is, what kind of relationship do I want to have with the life I'm actually living? And maybe there's a more holistic way of living that begins right now.

Speaker 8:54

If this episode stuck with you today, join our Substack community where we can explore this idea a little bit further. You'll also find some reflection questions, herbal remedies, and a community of like-minded people. It's free to subscribe. The link is in the show notes.

Speaker 9:08

I hope you make some time today and every day for some peace, some plants, and some paws. Thank you so much for listening to Untamed and Unfiltered Wellness.