Ep 88: Part 1/12, Janelle Says: We'll Never Break Up: How To Build a Relationship with Yourself Series

Andrea interviews Janelle about building a relationship with herself. They cover the catalysts, the crises, the discomfort, the tools and the deep courage required. She was scared to look at stuff! Her optimism actually prevented self-honesty! It’s NOT neat and tidy! There’s a nod to Glennon Doyle, Human Design, The Gene Keys, Michael Pollan and Jamie Wheal. You’ll hear:

-Just how many baths Janelle takes!

-How your productivity gene may turn relaxation into a “to-do”

-Why the mind should be a tool--NOT the truth

-How to discern between true pleasure and instant gratification

-The importance of the elusive morning ritual

-How clothing (!!) supports Janelle’s inner state

-Why you gotta spend time alone. No, really. No excuses

-The difference between caretaking and genuine affection

TRANSCRIPT:

Janelle Orion 00:01

Struggling to discuss sex and intimacy with your partner, not feeling met, seen or heard in your relationships. I'm Janelle And I'm Andrea. We're two midlife Mavericks sharing our own experiences, messy AF and no regrets with marriage, divorce, polyamory and pleasure. We've learned that when you're brave enough to figure out what you want and ask for it, with partners, friends, family and most importantly, yourself, you'll feel more alive and free question everything, especially your mother's advice. There's no rom com formula for this. But don't panic. Being alone matters, honey, I can't miss you if you don't leave, what if your breakup could be your breakthrough? Our podcast is for brave hearts. Anyone who seeks or has found the courage to confront their fears and limiting beliefs about breaking societal norms in the spirit of finding their truth. If you're seeking permission to be brave in your relationships and want to feel left alone along the way we got you. Hey, Andrea, hi, Janelle, here we are Yes. Hi, brave hearts. We are so excited to be starting season four. We have gotten fantastic feedback on our season three, which is our 12 part series on how to talk to your partner about sex and intimacy. So for season four, we're gonna dive into another question, which is how to build and maintain a relationship with ourselves.

Andrea Enright 01:38

A big part of the Braveheart journey is understanding who we are as a reminder we call our listeners brave hearts. Our brave hearts are defined as anyone who seeks or is found the courage to confront their limiting fears and beliefs around breaking societal norms.

Janelle Orion 01:57

What does it mean to build and maintain a relationship with yourself. What is that? Oh,

Andrea Enright 02:02

yeah, it's complex for us. It includes two parts, inner work and outer work. The inner work is being honest with ourselves and discovering what we want, while the outer work is really about expressing and living our truth as a daily practice and building a relationship with yourself is a never ending dance between Yes,

Janelle Orion 02:25

yes and Angie and I are excited not only to like share our stories, so we're going to interview each other, but we are also going to interview experts and other brave hearts so we can fully understand and explore this question. Yes,

Andrea Enright 02:40

and Janelle is going first, so we're gonna talk to her today about how she built a relationship with herself. So Janelle, what were the catalysts for building a relationship with yourself? That's one and like, did you know that you had to build a relationship with yourself, or did you call it that at the time?

Janelle Orion 03:04

Yeah, absolutely not. Really. What I knew was that I was unhappy. Right when I was 40, I had been working at my job for 15 years. I thought I was gonna be there forever, and yet I was increasingly unhappy, but I had never even used that word. And finally, I acknowledged that I was unhappy, and that was a catalyst for me to leave. And at that moment, though, I didn't know who I was, and so I took a year off to travel and to essentially, you know, find myself, if you will, like, who was I going to be after spending much of my adult life in that career. But then it kept going. Right at 41 my partner was curious about ENM ethical, non monogamy.

Andrea Enright 03:54

Okay, so it sounds like you were just hitting a midlife crisis where you weren't happy with your job and something felt off, and you know you needed to dig deeper and figure out why you were unhappy. I think a midlife mess situation that lots of us can relate to. Yes, that's

Janelle Orion 04:10

actually a great pointing that out makes a lot of sense. Because if anyone, if any Braveheart, is listening and is like, ugh, like, I feel like I'm having a midlife crisis, that is probably a really good signal that it's time to go inward and to build a relationship with yourself, right? That's a catalyst for building a relationship with yourself. Okay, great. So what happened next, or what were the other catalysts for building a relationship with yourself? Yes, the other catalyst is at 41 my partner and I decided to stay together. I had we were not together while I was traveling during this year off, and he broached me about being in a non traditional relationship ENM or ethically non monogamous. And I didn't know anything about that, but I said, I'm curious, and that sent me down a wild personal growth journey. Ernie, which was very much focused on building a relationship with myself.

Andrea Enright 05:04

Okay, awesome. So, I mean, there's two big, big events in your life, and I think there's more, right?

Janelle Orion 05:09

Yes, they keep coming. They keep coming. This is kept coming. After that. Say anything about building a relationship with yourself is that you're always in relationship with yourself. You never, it's never like, oh, that face is done, right? Great. Box checked. It's not like, it's not a soul, like a soul contract you have with someone else, really. That was like, you know, five years we've done that now I've moved on. Like, I'm never moving on for myself. I'm always just getting deeper.

Andrea Enright 05:33

That's a good point. If your relationship with yourself is never over, there's no breakup, there's no breakup with myself. Yeah. Okay, great. So what was next? A couple years later,

Janelle Orion 05:44

my partner and I were now married, but our sex life was essentially very unfulfilling and non existent, and I was sad and I was hurt, and so then I went down a path of learning about my pleasure in my intimacy through Tantra and again, that was like really building a relationship with myself regarding pleasure and

Andrea Enright 06:08

intimacy. Wow. Okay, so I'm hearing something that happened just you, a couple things that happened with you and your partner provoked this relationship with yourself. And it seems like both times, building a relationship with yourself helps you resolve these situations. Is that right?

Janelle Orion 06:27

Resolve seems very neat and tidy. Yeah, that's too

Andrea Enright 06:31

easy, right? Hey, I didn't resolve anything. But obviously, I guess what I'm trying to get at is like you did it once, and you thought, oh, that worked well, so I'm gonna do that again.

Janelle Orion 06:42

No, I didn't even think that. It was really just like, I didn't have a choice. I was really unhappy, and so I was just trying to figure out how to navigate that. And all of these catalysts always ended up pointing me inward. It wasn't like, intentional, it wasn't my mind like, Oh, I know what I'm supposed to do. It was just like this, like spirit going, Go in, go inward, look at yourself. What is it that you want? What is your truth about this?

Andrea Enright 07:12

Okay, got it so that that really is, like, constantly pointing you inward, is what these events did. Yes, so you did

Janelle Orion 07:19

right? Because, no, basically, I wasn't finding my answers and talking about it with anybody else, right? I could you and I were talking all the time, but we didn't have answers. We were just like processing super important, yet it was still me going inward and then telling you what I discovered when I went inward.

Andrea Enright 07:38

Right, right. Absolutely. Okay. Janelle did these catalysts which helped you turn inward, help you be more honest with yourself.

Janelle Orion 07:48

They absolutely did as an outcome, but I didn't know at the time that I wasn't being honest with myself, because again, like being honest with yourself really does require this relationship, which we're gonna, like go more into. And just for example, right? Like with I thought I knew about my pleasure and intimacy based on what I had been raised to believe, through culture, through movies, through books, right, and novels, Danielle Steele, like, whatever like, and then having to actually through Tantra practices, going inward of understanding, like, what is, what is my heart saying? What is my body saying to me, helped me realize that I actually hadn't been honest with myself, not because that was an intentional thing. I just didn't even know that was a thing, right? Like, when I was in it, I was like, Really, I'm, like, very positive and optimistic person, and I believed everything would work out, right? Like, oh, like, there's struggles in our relationship, and we're gonna solve the problems, and we're gonna do all these things, and I just believe it's gonna be okay, right, in this, like, in a way of, like, beautiful naivete, right? But it was still based on, like, oh, what I thought my life should look like, not how it felt inside my body. So

Andrea Enright 09:31

I think this taps into an important topic that we probably don't talk about enough I don't hear about it enough is that sometimes we're not honest with ourselves. We don't mean to be, but we're not. You think that being optimistic was one reason that you weren't being honest with yourself, right? You're like, Oh, it'll work out. It's fine. Why else are we not honest with ourselves?

Janelle Orion 09:56

I had a fear of change, like I there was a lot of comfort. In what I knew, right? And in each of these situations, like in the like the job that I had had for 15 years, right? I knew it well, and like my best friends, my life, my social life, everything about my life was was tied to that job and leaving. It meant not just leaving a quote, unquote job, it meant leaving my life as I knew it.

Andrea Enright 10:25

Yeah, that's huge, and that's so scary, right?

Janelle Orion 10:28

And so I didn't want to look at that for a long time.

Andrea Enright 10:32

Yeah, okay, I think that was the key there. You didn't want to look at it, right? We didn't. We don't want to look at the scary stuff. And so we don't we just look away. There's lots of other things to

Janelle Orion 10:42

look at. Yeah, there were also beliefs that I had that I was not willing to look at. I refuse to consider divorce as an option for a long time, out of fear of failure or a judgment, and I just assumed that we had the skills to solve the problem of our sex life. I also saw myself as a go with the flow kind of person which prevented me from knowing what I wanted because I so easily accommodated everyone else's desires, it didn't seem I really used to take pride and being like, Yeah, I'm good with whatever, like, whatever you want, whatever you want. It's fine, like, and it was easy for me. I took pride in not having strong opinions. That's huge, yes, instead of recognizing or going again, going inward, to be like, Oh no, I do have an opinion about this, and I want to take a stand on that opinion and not be so accommodating to everybody else. But then, of course, being accommodating to everyone else tied into my people pleaser, because I was afraid of disappointing myself and others. I think I'm

Andrea Enright 12:00

hearing your preferences just didn't live at the top. They were they were smushed down, and you were comfortable with that. You loved the idea of this image of Janelle as being someone who was super easy and flexible and accommodating, and you really didn't have a lot of resentment about that either. And so why dig for these preferences that don't really matter. And

Janelle Orion 12:22

then another thing for me was I really valued productivity, right? I filled my time. I remember, even when I would take it would be very rare if I was take a nap, like, meaning, like, a couple times a year. But I remember being like, okay, but I'm so tired I want to I'm gonna, like, this is essential, and I'm gonna check the box of taking a nap, right? I mean, I just, I was always in doing mode, yeah, yeah. I can relate. I remember someone telling me once about taking baths, and she described how much she loved taking a bath, and then I tried to do that same thing, and I explained it to her, and she's like, it seems like you're just trying to do way too many things in the bath. She's like, it's just about relaxing. And I just like, really didn't get it. I was just like, oh, you know, I was like, trying to set up like my book and the candle and the incense and, you know, the music, and get the music right. But this is that productivity gene of turning relaxation into a to do. Okay? So this is why you weren't honest with yourself, which completely makes sense. So what did you learn about that? Like, what were the lessons and how can you now be more honest with yourself? So this journey of going inward and being honest with myself showed me that I was listening to my head instead of my body, that I was honoring other people's feelings and boundaries and abandoning my own. It also showed me that I was numbing my feelings through alcohol. Alcohol was something that I just did socially all the time, and it also showed me, I that I had to build my capacity for discomfort.

Andrea Enright 14:25

Yeah, let's say more about that, because I think this really comes up. I hear myself say it to my clients, and then I I experience it myself and run away from it. And what does this look like, you know? What does this look like at a simple level, and what does it look like at a cost? Look like at a complex level?

Janelle Orion 14:44

Somehow, we've been told to believe that, like comfort is a goal Absolutely, and that can be by always being in, you know, a house that's 69 or 70 degrees, right? Never too hot, never too cold. Is that if someone is upset with me, that I want to fix that as fast as I can, or if someone's just upset in general, that I want to fix their emotions, that I want to fix my emotions. If I'm angry or frustrated or sad or grieving, it is, oh, something is wrong. How can I suppress or deny that? But there's also this was a wild one to figure out that as I went on this journey of learning about my pleasure, that I had to increase my capacity for the discomfort of my own pleasure

Andrea Enright 15:36

at a more trivial level. I can relate to this and that I am constantly seeking the next comfort is that food? Is that Instagram? Is that whatever, whatever the pleasure is, right? Is it seeing someone I love? When do I get to get the next pleasure? Because that's what I'm like. We're constantly like, okay, that's my goal. Okay, that's my goal. And as our society has changed and we can instantly have retail packages on our doorstep within two hours, we're just ratcheting up our capacity to get that comfort faster and faster and faster. And when we can't get it fast, we think, Well, why the fuck not? And so we have less patience for the discomfort. And what's

Janelle Orion 16:26

fascinating about what you're saying is true for me as well, right? Like some of this, like instant gratification, but then I also discovered for me is that I denied myself pleasure a lot of time. Like one of the things that I realized that in not being honest with myself is that, oh, I'm hungry, but I'm not gonna eat food because I'm out and I've got food at home, and I don't want to spend money, or, Oh, my body's hurting, and I would like to get a massage, but, oh, that's the luxury. And I didn't earn that. I didn't make enough money this week, or whatever it was, so I'm gonna deny myself that. And so in the other way of the instant gratification, I found myself also denying the needs of my body that were pretty basic. I mean, I have a crazy story, which is that I rarely get headaches, and every once in a while I get a headache. And when I like, when this happened, I would go inward and I'd be like, Oh, I actually have to poop. But I had been not paying attention to my body, and so it was like the poop had filled all the way up to my head to give me a headache. Is what it felt like, in order for me to recognize that my body was telling me something. Wow.

Andrea Enright 17:40

Yeah, an unusual symptom for something that you usually pay attention to. Okay? So I hear two things there. Then we have to be able to sit in the discomfort, but also we need to pay attention to our body. Yes, two important messages.

Janelle Orion 17:56

And I also know now that you know, to invest in my radiance. And I kind of touched on that with the massage and the food. Like, what are the things that are going to make me feel really good? And this requires discernment, because it can go into the instant gratification of like, oh, let me just like, be in excess. But I'm not talking about excess. I am like talking about the things that truly fill me up, so that I am radiant and joyful, which is part of my contribution to the world, right? This comes back to like, the doing versus being like, just me being in my joy and radiance is a contribution is enough.

Andrea Enright 18:46

How do we discern, though? Like someone says, Well, I like buying clothes. I want to buy flowers. I want coffee every day from Starbucks. Like, I think it's a pretty blurry line of of deciding what is in excess and gratification and pleasure, and I want it now versus investing in your radiance.

Janelle Orion 19:06

It has to do with a feeling state like, oh, is this thing? Like nourishing me, like filling me up inside, and whether, whether it's a coffee or whether it's clothing, like, do I feel more full, like, fulfilled, like, like that, versus the feeling of grasping, like I need this thing because I'm not enough without it.

Andrea Enright 19:40

What I'm hearing is is there's a desperation and a trance of scarcity around the gratification and the pleasure of something in excess or needing it now, versus really thoughtfully considering what contributes to your rate. Experience and what's a sustainable way to find joy?

Janelle Orion 20:04

Yes, I like that. Like, what is sustainable way to find joy? I would also say it applied to how I viewed sex for a long time, like in my relationship, right? I was in a sexist marriage, and I felt like I was grasping for sex, like energetically. And for a long time, I was like, Okay, I want sex. I want sex, right? And then what I realized through Tantra and through these, you know, retreats that I went on, that what I thought I wanted, which is my mind was telling me, Well, you're not getting sex, so you must want sex. So now, like there's this graspy energy that actually what my heart wanted was eye gazing, presence and making out. And so that's an example of, oh, my mind was telling me something, I want sex, and then my body was telling me what I want is this, and this is what it looks like, and looks different than what my mind is telling me.

Andrea Enright 21:09

Okay, so it feels like this is a result of you building a relationship with yourself and discerning between those two things. So what are the pillars for being honest with yourself. How did you achieve this? Like, let me just not say achieve, but like, how did you come to know yourself better? What are the practices?

Janelle Orion 21:32

Number one, spending time alone.

Andrea Enright 21:36

Yeah, of course,

Janelle Orion 21:39

checking within rather than seeking outside of myself. You know, the phrase is, everything I need is inside of me, listening to my body and using my mind as a tool, right, like, rather than a truth. Right? Like, my mind is still a very important part of my body, I'm not just discounting it all together, but I can use it to gather information, but not necessarily to make decisions.

Andrea Enright 22:11

Okay, that's those are pretty specific. Actually spending time alone, listening to your body, checking inside and using your mind as a tool instead of the truth

Janelle Orion 22:23

and yeah, checklist, go for it very hard, like a nice checklist, 1234, but like, I will say, right, just that first one, of being alone, like all of these required unlearning because I used to think as, first of all, I'm an outgoing extrovert, right? I like being around people, and so I thought something was wrong with me. If I wanted to be alone, I thought it felt lonely. It felt uncomfortable. Oh, does that mean people didn't like me? Even if I was the one who's saying no, I would be like, Oh, what am I missing out on? Is there FOMO? I mean, it required a deep unlearning to find the pure joy

Andrea Enright 23:12

of being alone. Yeah, for sure, I would agree with that, too, and that's right back to the discomfort, right?

Janelle Orion 23:22

So some of the ways that I built alone time was when I was married, my husband, who was an introvert, right, and I was an extrovert, he asked for what we called off duty nights. And so twice a week, it was Sundays and Wednesdays, from six to 9pm we, each one of us, had a night at home, and the other person was out. Now, the person who had our house like didn't have to be in the house, but it just meant that the other person was not there. So we each had dedicated time alone in our house, and I was in such resistance. When he suggested this, I was like, What do you mean? You don't want to be with me all the time. It

Andrea Enright 24:07

is so funny to think about now that you would have like that. You would have been in resistance to that. Like, that's fucking crazy. I know I was Wonder if I would have been like, yeah, because I just so want to be alone now, yes, or I value of my alone time. You weren't resistance,

Janelle Orion 24:23

because you were processing this with me when I was Ha, when it was happening, right? It was just like, wait, what? Or no, maybe, maybe actually, this started before you and I met, like, a year before. But what I will say, brave hearts, is that within six months, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is the best thing ever. It was a practice for a little bit, but then suddenly I started to feel this alone time. I was, you know, going out with nights, you know, with my girlfriends, by myself. Like it was, it was like, Oh, someone wants to do something great. I can do it on Wednesday night, because I knew I didn't have plans. But you had to check in with one another, right? There was. So many benefits that came through pretty quickly that I was the one that, like, if life got in the way, and like, we skipped an off duty night, I'd be like, Oh, we skipped, let's make it up. And was the one to always really making sure that we were enforcing it. So started implementing a morning ritual of cacao, which didn't mean I was always alone. If someone was around, I would share the ritual with them, but it was I used to go to bed being like, Okay, I'm gonna wake up in the morning, I'm gonna have my cacao, and then in the morning I'm like, Okay, I'm awake, and now it's time for cacao. And it was, there was a real joy and pleasure in this ritual that was the first time I'd ever established a morning routine and had a really big impact on the joy of me doing something for me.

Andrea Enright 25:52

Mm, hmm, yeah. It reminds me of Glennon Doyle. You know, she goes to bed, it's like only eight hours until coffee.

Janelle Orion 25:58

You're right, right?

Andrea Enright 26:00

Yeah. Yeah. So funny. Morning Ritual is so much I can't remember a time when I didn't at least attempt it, like, I'm trying to do it right now, and it's really hard, and I'm struggling, but it's like, I know it's so important, and it's even hard to think about a time when I was like, getting up and not doing something in the morning for myself. So, yeah, you, I mean you, and you really taught me

Janelle Orion 26:25

that I've been doing morning cacao now for four years. I had maybe the year before that, I was journaling, but prior to that, like I was not a morning person, and so I was, like, sleeping as long as I could to, like, go and start my day. So I did not have a morning ritual for a really long time. I do believe, especially for women, I do believe morning rituals are important. I think for women, having pleasure associated to the morning ritual some way is great. I know a lot of like masking. Like to have a structure. It starts at a certain time. It does something like, like, but that for me, I don't have anything around my ritual and I have no structure other than it's happening.

Andrea Enright 27:05

And how else do you spend

Janelle Orion 27:08

time alone? A really profound thing that happened to me a couple years ago as someone who was an avid reader, especially in like personal growth realms, is that I stopped all input. I stopped reading for an entire year. I stopped reading and listening to podcasts. And so when I was alone, it actually meant a lot of time in silence, and I don't listen to music very like always, either. So sometimes it also meant no music. There was just something in me that was like, I have the answers within. I don't need anyone else giving I don't need to learn anything else. I don't need to be taught anything else. I don't need to seek an elder or a teacher or a mentor like I just need to spend time with myself and figure out what's inside.

Andrea Enright 27:57

Mic drop. That's awesome. I think definitely there are times.

Janelle Orion 28:03

And then I started taking a shit ton of baths. I was someone who never had any desire for baths. And then I when I moved into the goddess temple, my bedroom has this incredible bathtub that just happened to coincide. But there are times where ice can spend three hours in a bathtub at a time, many times a week.

Andrea Enright 28:25

So what other tools did you use to build the relationship with yourself and to, I guess, listen from, listen within?

Janelle Orion 28:35

So in terms of listening to my body, something that actually helped, even though I don't do it now, but I did for many years. In the beginning of my journey was journaling, and what I how I described it was I had so much noise, so much so many thoughts inside my head that whatever thoughts could make it from my head down my arm, into my hand, into the pen, onto the paper, then those at least, had some relevance. It didn't actually mean I had to do any action on them, but it was like I felt like this, like siphoning happening as I was journaling, so that helped reduce noise. I also in terms of like getting into relationship with my body, I did psychedelics, whether it was mushrooms or ayahuasca, that gave me a sense of my body as the other interesting things was human design. Human Design is a modality that is a synthesis of several different things, including the itching and astrology, and it's a practice that helps you understand how you make decisions, and it's based on your birth date and your time and location. So Woo, factor is. And yet, the first time I heard about it, I was like, Oh, it really gave clarity. It never told me what decisions to make. It just told me how my body was helping me make decisions.

Andrea Enright 30:18

Do you feel like it took courage to do any of those things, like something new, something different, you're not sure. Oh,

Janelle Orion 30:24

yes. Like, I was a hard no to anything, woo, for a really long time. And so it was, like, hilarious, yeah, can you imagine now, right? But, yeah, like, the first time I saw a psychic, I was like, Oh, what am I doing? But I'm like, okay, like, I does the person who's referring me the psychedelics, like, I grew up in the just say no generation like Nancy Reagan totally fucked us all. Where I just assumed that, like, heroin and meth and mushrooms were all the same thing, and that you were gonna get addicted. And it took a lot. I mean, I read different books. I mean, this is so cliche, but like you know how to change your mind by Michael Pollan and stealing fire by Jamie Weil, all showed me that psychedelics are not the same thing as cocaine and meth and heroin. So then I just started exploring and ended up, ended up diving deep, because I just those things actually are what helped me release my grip on alcohol. Along the way, I also figured out that for me, clothing is an outer expression of my inner state. It's not about having fancy clothes or like like looking perfectly all the time, but for me, it's an alignment feeling of, do I feel aligned with like? Does like my inner world and my outer world feel aligned? And a really funny story is that I was in Finland a couple of years ago. My friend touch was in July, and I thought Finland was going to be warm in the summertime, and I was totally wrong. It was cold and it was rainy, and we were in the forest and there was full of mosquitoes, and I had only bought dresses. I had no socks, I had no warm clothes, and I was like, short circuiting. I could not, like, pay attention to, like the workshops, like the reach that we were in, I was like, like, collapsing upon myself. And then my friend touch was like, you know, you could just ask me for clothes and socks, like, I have so many extra because I'm always cold. And I was like, oh, and I ended up looking like a leprechaun, like I was like, in his like, totally mismatched outfit. And but it didn't matter, because I was now warm and I was was not getting bitten by mosquitoes, and so now I could be in greater presence. I could pay attention to what people were saying. I could be open to learning. I could be open to laughing. It had such a big impact on how I interacted with the world. So it sounds like this. This is one unexpected tool for building a relationship with yourself, aligning yourself with your outer expression, with your clothing, with your jewelry, with what feels good on you, what you feel like yourself in what makes you feel free, right? Yes, and this is tangible for like, all of us wear clothes, right? None of us are living in a nudist colony. And so it's not even necessarily about like, Oh, you have to get a whole new wardrobe. But like, can you notice? Take a look at your closet. One thing I did once years ago now, right on mushrooms, I went through my closet and ask myself the question, what is worthy of meeting the divine? And how do you define the divine? That, for me, was like an expression of, like, basically meeting God, right? Like, if I was gonna, if I was gonna die that day, was my outfit, like, worthy of that, right? I mean, I think in the lingerie world I used to be in. We used to joke that, like, you know, if you got in a car accident, were you wearing a lingerie set that you wanted the firemen to see?

Andrea Enright 34:08

Oh, my God,

Janelle Orion 34:11

right, so. But this was, like, at a different level, right? Like, you know, taking it to more of an ascension stage. But in going through that, I just went through my entire closet, was like, Oh, this feels amazing on me. This does not. This feels amazing. This does not. And there were some things that were like, Oh, this was so like, I used to feel amazing in this, like, this piece of clothing that I was holding onto because I loved it so much, I was now like, oh, but that's no longer me. Like, I still love it, and I want now someone else to love it, because it's past this time for me, and that actually helped me release a lot of clothing.

Andrea Enright 34:48

So what are some other tools, I think, in helping bravehearts build a relationship with themselves? Did you see a therapist? Did a coach help you do this? Did you go to retreat? Yes, like if people are struggling to listen to their inner whispers, you know, are there people that can facilitate that path or hold your hand along that journey? For sure,

Janelle Orion 35:14

there are like somatic therapies, and somatic is like of the body. And so there's lots of coaches and therapists. Tantra is like somatic work. So there's, you know, is I've talked about ista retreats. I mean, I can't even mention all the different people who are teaching you how to pay attention to your body. Another modality that I followed that doesn't require anyone else to accept time for yourself to contemplate is the gene keys, which is channeled by Richard Rudd, and we'll probably have someone talk about this on the podcast. But it's it gave me a lot of vocabulary, again, based on your birth date and time, it gave me a lot of vocabulary to understand what my body was feeling, because I didn't have words for it, but I could like it like it resonated deeply. And then something else that has been newer going in the past year on my journey, and this is thanks to damasa, the woman who I've lived with for the past year, is to build a relationship with my ancestors and to start praying to my ancestors and to give offerings to my ancestors as a way to know myself, right? It's recognizing that I'm not alone in this world. I'm actually, I have my ancestors walking with me, and I will say, as a white women in this culture like this. This wasn't intuitive to me. This is like being around especially black women who have a deep relationship with their ancestors, is what taught me how to do this. And there's different practices. And so I believe that this is an area that we can all benefit from, that's not talked a lot about in our culture. And we're going to have damasa on on here to talk about this. And then the other key, and you mentioned, like, Who have I worked with, right? Is you do need to discern who to trust to give the message that my body needs, right? So, like, in a way, like not hiring, like the famous like Tantra coach, like doing your interviews to find the people who are like, Oh, they're like, there's I can tell my body's saying I'm a yes to working with them. Right in this time, there are so many coaches and practitioners and people saying hey, like follow me, and I can teach you, and I can take you, get you home to yourself, or whatever their phrasing is, and it's so important that you have enough of a relationship to be able to discern who it is to trust on the journey home.

Andrea Enright 38:05

So here is following your instincts when making these decisions about who's going to be with you right on this journey.

Janelle Orion 38:14

So just something else in terms of the discernment, right and like, support is to like, find a relationship home to yourself, is finding people who can reflect back to you and call you out. Angie and I are blessed to have that with each other, and I have that with a lot of different people. And one of the things that I've also done, and I encourage this for everybody, is to be either in a women's circle or in a men's circle, so that you can get reflections on to help you discern between like the mind and the body, because other people can be like, Oh, I think maybe you're off.

Andrea Enright 38:52

Janelle, I know that we've discussed that when you build a relationship with yourself, it can be a little shocking or a little disruptive, because you're finding things that don't match who you are today, or that you didn't think you actually believed. And this can cause a shift in your life and a shift in your beliefs and a shift in your actions. What was your experience with that once you began building a relationship with yourself.

Janelle Orion 39:23

Yeah, all that is true, and it also it can be painful and require a lot of forgiveness of myself. So like one of the things I discovered is that I was conditioned to choose pain for the sake of pain. You know, as an athlete, growing up, playing volleyball in college, at a college level, racing mountain bikes for eight years, that I was just very accustomed to, like, you know, no pain, no gain. Like, there, like, there's pain, and there's always a goal on the other side of that. So just like, push through it to get to that goal. Whether it was a win, whether it was a a finish line, no, whatever that, whatever that was, and what I realized was that I had taken that attitude into my emotional states as well, and I realized how much pain I had put myself in my relationship with my partner, right? Like there was pain I couldn't avoid. He did not desire to have sex with me. That was really fucking painful. Not in my control. But what was in my control was how I worked through that, and realized I put myself in a lot of situations where I was causing myself a lot of pain and saying, Oh, if I can just endure this, if I can just get through this thing, this relationship, this woman, this whatever, then there'll be something success on the other side of that. Oh, wow. So you were overestimating the value of pain, yes, especially emotional pain, emotional pain that I was that I was causing myself, right? There's emotional pain I can't prevent, but there was a lot that I was causing myself. I

Andrea Enright 41:10

see you were choosing to endure. You were accepting as Okay. Instead of saying no, right? Because

Janelle Orion 41:17

I was because I had told myself no pain, no gain. Oh, there's gonna be I'm gonna learn something through this pain. Let's just keep doing that.

Andrea Enright 41:24

Wow, that's interesting. What else did you discover

Janelle Orion 41:29

that I equated caretaking to love, and which means I put other people's needs above my own?

Andrea Enright 41:38

You mean for yourself. So you felt like, if you loved someone, you needed to care take them. Yes, okay, so not in what you were receiving, but in what you were giving. Yes, right?

Janelle Orion 41:51

Okay. Like, in a way, you could look at it through archetypes that I had this like mother archetype, which is appropriate for a child, like, oh, I want to care to take my child if they're sick, and I want to make sure that everything's okay for them, but that is not actually appropriate for a husband or a partner all the time, like it's just not the right energy to if I if you want polarity and intimacy, yeah, but I just didn't kill The chemistry, exactly. It kills the chemistry. And I didn't know another way, like I just, I didn't I just thought love and caretaking were the same thing. I mean, they definitely overlap, but there's lots of ways to love. There's so many ways to love, and I just equated them as the only way I equated caretaking is the only way to love.

Andrea Enright 42:40

Yeah, I think I'm just still struggling with that. It's not, it's not the, I know it's not the only way to love, but it is a, have a preference for it, I guess, right?

Janelle Orion 42:51

And if the preference is like, you want to fix things for everyone and caretake them, right? And you have a daughter, right? So it's again, it's appropriate to a certain point, right? But actually,

Andrea Enright 43:03

no, it's that that's what I want. That's how I want to be loved. Oh, Mm, hmm, which is why I thought that's what you're talking about at the beginning. That's I want people to love me this way, right? And like people love different ways. You know, you can't always choose. Obviously, you can, you know, choose your partner and you want to love how they love you. It's funny. That's what my parents have on the inside of their wedding rings, is i L, H, y, l, I love how you love me. Wow, that's like, a profound

Janelle Orion 43:39

statement. I feel like we could, like, we could, like, do a whole episode on that, because I do think that you're like, in being honest with myself is, how do I love and how do I want to be loved? And discovering that

Andrea Enright 43:52

huge, huge, that's a huge question, okay, okay, we'll do another podcast episode on that.

Janelle Orion 44:01

What else I discovered that I was in a co dependent relationship that I had, like, basically merged myself. I had a hard time distinguishing my needs, my desires, from my partners. And so had to navigate that through help of a therapist and books and yep, all the things

Andrea Enright 44:21

absolutely very common. Yeah,

Janelle Orion 44:25

I discovered, when I was honest with myself, that I had associated my worth to how much money I was making, that I valued my masculine qualities and disrespected my feminine qualities.

Andrea Enright 44:42

Yeah, and can you define masculine and feminine in this respect,

Janelle Orion 44:47

it is this idea that like this doing part of me of accomplishing, right? And all of us have masculine and feminine. So what within us is how i. Believe it. And so it's not that I'm like, Oh, my masculine qualities are bad. What I and if you're if you're seeing this in a video, right? It was that I had put the masculine on a pedestal externally. I had put my husband on a pedestal, and I had devalued myself, right? Because he held the masculine qualities. I did that to himself, and I did that within myself. And then I so in on this journey inward, I discovered that, and it wasn't that, oh, my feminine qualities went above. It was like, Oh, I just needed to value them the same as my masculine qualities, right? Value the chaos and the beauty and the indecision and the beingness and the creativity and the joy and my radiance, all of these things that I associate to the being in the feminine being like these have really a lot of value in the world. They have a lot of value within me, and then outside of me, too beautiful. And then I also discovered, when I went inward, that I wanted to experience my full sexual expression. And, you know, I didn't know what that meant. I'm still actually discovering that to some degree. But, like, that's been a year, many year, process of like, No, this is what I want. I'm not willing to be in a situation where that's not

Andrea Enright 46:27

happening. Uh huh, that's huge, right? Because I think that we do often say, Oh, well, this is enough. It's good enough,

Janelle Orion 46:34

yeah? But once I knew what I wanted, then that changed the external outside of me. Yeah, exactly. Building a relationship with yourself is not for the faint of heart. It's true. This is massive transformation and personal growth. Brave hearts, yes, yeah. And I think the end part of that was still saying that, like when we're honest with ourselves, we realize then what we have been doing to in a way I don't want to even like, say, sabotage, but it's like, Oh, I did this to myself. There's no one else to blame except me. Right? Like, oh, I now that I know what I want. There's no one else to blame if I'm not getting it

Andrea Enright 47:19

big, so big. I think I hear that building a relationship with yourself is really taking responsibility for yourself. Yes, it is, yep,

Janelle Orion 47:29

yeah. And that has both the like, Oh my gosh. That feels really scary. It feels like a lot, and I want someone to help me instead, to like, those feelings are there in moments, and then there's also like, Holy fucking shit, anything I want, everything I want, is possible because I'm the one who's in charge of it. Do

Andrea Enright 47:56

you think some people are more predispositioned to build a relationship with themselves than others. I think

Janelle Orion 48:02

you have to, you have to have courage and bravery to go inward, because you might not like what you find, and so are some people more. I mean, yes, like, right, but like, there's, there's reasons not to, and it's okay if you don't want to. Our culture is numbing ourselves. Is a reason, because it's, it's extraordinarily vulnerable, like you're getting naked in front of yourself at every level.

Andrea Enright 48:32

It's funny that, like that part for me is like, oh, like, it's hard, but I can do that. It's the taking responsibility and being fully responsible in that masculine role for myself with no one helping that I sometimes am just just too afraid of. And so I think that's what prompted the question. Thank

Janelle Orion 48:53

you for bringing that up. Because I what I'm not saying is that building a relationship with ourselves means that we then navigate life alone. This is not the feminist, independent. I don't need anybody else. It's not that at all. And so in that way, right? Like, I'm really clear now on, like, what I'm seeking other men outside of me masculine to support me and how to help me. I'm just really clear on it. And then they say, yes, I'd love to support you in that, right? And so in my case, it's more than one man for someone else, right? It could be one person, but you're really clear on Hey, this is the part that I'm asking for, because you're clear as yourself, yeah, right. Like hearing you say, like, I want caretaking qualities, you get to then find the man who has caretaking qualities, and it's okay to want that. There's nothing wrong with that. You just now know that you want it because you've got inward and then you get to make it. Inward state, that's your outer state is the next, is the next part of the journey, which is what this next episode is going to be about. Brave hearts is how once I became clear and all these things, and once I was honest with myself, how do I maintain that? And what does that look like on the outside?

Andrea Enright 50:15

How did she live it, practice it and express it in the world? Okay, thank

Janelle Orion 50:19

you for joining us for our first part of our new 12 part series, How to build and maintain a relationship with ourselves. Hey, Bravehearts, looking for permission. Work with us. Andrea offers permission coaching, and Janelle offers erotic wellness sessions. Follow us on Instagram, meet us in real life at permission to be human workshops in Denver. Subscribe to our newsletter. Do all this and more at our website, permission to be human. Dot live you.