Episode 2: The Problem IS the Portal
Portal, doorway, rabbit hole, Stargate, hero's journey — however you choose to term it, there are times we just have to go through change, good, bad, or indifferent.
Change, even for the better, can be difficult and disruptive, so how do we re-learn our approach to it? How do we move through that door, hop down that rabbit hole, knowing the process may be painful, or worse, not having any idea what lies beyond? In this episode, Emergence Coach Wendy Sloneker is helping light the way. No matter what obstacles you're circling around, struggling to get over, having to bend yourself like you're doing the Limbo to get under, there's help to get to the other side of that transformation. Wendy would love to support you with your Emergence. Get more information on her website wendysloneker.com or visit goinginside.me for more on her group coaching program. |
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Full Episode Transcript
Wendy Sloneker:
You are listening to the Emergence from Life's Biggest Obstacles podcast with Wendy Sloneker. This right here is episode two. Thrilled you, here. Hi.
Let's talk about how we get into what we need to go in to go through what we need to go through very meta starry. Sorry, not sorry, it's gonna happen. I want to talk about the idea the prospect that the problem or the perceived problem is the actual portal. What do I mean by that? Perceived problem is the portal. When we go through what we think is the problem, we change, and we emerge into new information, new understanding, new perspective, new identity sometimes, and I want to talk about one of the most famous portals in all of literature.
My first instinct secret, I will tell them myself right here was going to be to offer a sci fi version of a portal that comes to mind very easily. So use what you'd like, take what you'd like, but I'm going to use the most famous in all of literature, because I think it's a little bit more recognizable, and understandable. The rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's at Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the rabbit hole is the portal and conveys Alice into this new world where things are upside down, things are going real strange. There's a talking Dodo, who smokes a pipe, like lots of weird stuff, lots of pipe smoke. And by the way, in that story, Lewis Carroll, I noticed, so the hunters the portal.
Now, did Alice know she was going down this portal, when she like snuck into this rabbit hole. And after chasing the White Rabbit, who's got the watch and a waistcoat, she didn't know it was going to be that she just thought it was going to be a regular ol rabbit hole, like a burrow. Or maybe she wasn't even at school to know that rabbits live in burrows. It was a portal into Wonderland.
No, we humans, in this day and age, and I'm totally counting myself in this often spend a lot of time arguing with ourselves or others in front of the thing we need to go through in order to get through it to the other side to the results, we want to just not be standing still in front of this thing we have to go through. I've spent a lot of time arguing in front of a portal, something that was going to radically give me more in my life give me more than life and aliveness in my life. Even though I didn't know what at the time, I felt like it was just the worst thing that could possibly happen to me, and I was just mad about it. So I stood in front of it and throw a tantrum, sometimes for years. That's okay. That was my choice.
I don't know if I would do it differently, because this is what I got this time around. Right? So this is not an opportunity to judge or shame or beat ourselves up or go hand with an emotional baseball bat. Oh, put it down. We're talking here. Here's what happened for me to be able to talk about my experience without shame, without feeling bad about it or judging it. Could I have made other choices? Yeah, but I made this one, there must have been a reason for that. That must have been the best I could do.
So I want to give a lot of compassion and care if it resonates that you may be arguing in front of a portal. This is very, very common and very natural given. The upstairs computer we have in our brains, the wiring we have, how we have been socialized in our cultures and societies. It makes a lot of sense.
We often don't want to go through things that we perceive as problematic or painful. That's part of our brains protective security system, if you will, their threat assessors plus, you know, to go inside of ourselves. It's kind of dark in there, don't want to really go. And so there's a lot of resistance that can come up. And it has come up for me and I've still gone through a lot of portals. Some of them were thrilling, and some of them were devastating. I'm here to normalize life experience.
Arguing in front of the portal or the door or But Stargate, if you will, this is 100% a valid option. It's 100%, your choice and your opportunity, whether or not you want to spend your time and life, how much of it resisting, going through and experiencing a process of emergence, where we don't always really know what's gonna go on or happen or not happen on the other side. We only know, this is the path, there is more life. I guess I'm, I'm gonna do it.
If it keeps coming up as an opportunity for you to go through like, maybe divorce or a breakup, or maybe somebody that you loved or were challenged by has died. These are also variations on a portal, something to go through. That will give you a new experience, life just does it automatically. We don't always know or have a choice, when we will be called to move into new life territory. We just don't have a book, none of us for all times, for all of our past lives. If you believe that for all of our now times, we don't know what's going to happen next.
And we have a lush, beautiful, complex, sometimes exasperating thing called life experience, including our inner world, which is often what we need to go through, or go into at least a little bit. When we are experiencing change. Not easy. I'm not always willing. And I don't have to be and neither do you.
I do want to offer that when you're ready to move through change. And to go into what could be considered a shadow season or a time of transformation. There are pluses and minuses on that Hero's Journey 100% with things moving so fast, and with changes sneaking up on us in plain sight. Like kids are growing up, like parents are getting older, like careers are getting spent in days. Time is passing. And it seems really fast sometimes. And it seems really long. And like forever. At other times, it's just a wild experience to be here on this planet. So all this to say, in these last nine minutes, you get to decide how much you want to argue with what you want to do. You have this thing to go through. You don't want to go through it.
One of the things I'll just like, catch up, I wasn't so sure that I wanted to make a change at 50. From going from copywriting into grief and end of life doula work, I didn't really have a strong sense of like, Yeah, I'm super all in. I had a oh dear. I keep having this. Pull. This idea, this instinct, this intuition that is tugging at me. My whole self, heart, body, mind, spirit, creativity, imagination, eagerness to learn.
I seem to be going in this direction. I am pulled in this direction do I want to go and I like I have a lot of talks with a lot of people about really at 50 You're making that kind of like industry and you know, significant perspective change. You're going to start a whole business all over. Yeah. Did I love it? Not every step. No, I did not. Was it still the right thing for me to do? Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
And then three years later, emergence arrives to me somewhere in my clavicles and says, Hey, Wendy, let's buddy up. And I was like, really? Another change? Another specific, maybe esoteric, kind of approach really. And emergence as a word and a process said, Yeah. You've been doing this your whole life. Let's talk about it. Let's support about it. And so welcome. I'm about a month in and I'm all in. I'm discovering. I don't always love it. But I'm still taking the walk. This is much better than standing in front of a door and arguing that it even exists.
And I get it that that, you know, some of the biggest obstacles that life is handing to you right now is very, very challenging. Your world may be completely rocked. And it's awful. And it's a portal it takes a lot of energy and a lot of courage to just take that one step to open the door. Or even crack the door, or even put your hand on the knob of the door. We're calling the portal a door now.
Thanks for Thanks for being here, because there's no doors on a rabbit hole. And still hard. Still the path. It takes enormous heart, and tenacity, and perseverance, and courage to take a step into any unknown. We have so many conveniences right now that make life very comfortable for many. So much so that we think that challenge and suffering and this sort of thing should should not be part of our experience. But it is, we get range to live in, we get contrast to live in.
We're also working with lots and lots of other souls here on the planet. So it's not all about us, except for the fact that it's all about us, as a community, here on this world. This is where I'm coming from. I'm going to just keep going. You are welcome along this journey. I'll be talking a little bit more about emergence from life's biggest obstacles, because that's the title of exactly what this is. But I want you to consider as you move into your day or the rest of your week, what do I think, is a problem? And how could that possibly, possibly, .0003% be a portal? It's a valid question, and you have every choice. None of them are moral choices, these are just your choices you get to decide for you may not be the right time to move into a new space or a new identity.
It may be the exact right time to take a tiny half of a baby step toward that door toward that new life that will give you more meaning and more aliveness. 100% up to you, I support you, no matter what it is. You need to do, whether it's stay where you're at, or take a step toward transformation. And into that new cocoon. Because remember, we get more than one this time around. Such a wild ride this life. I'm so glad to be here with you. I'm so glad you're here. And I will be talking to you again very soon. Thank you for being with me, and for being with you.
Okay, listen, it's already hard enough. It's plenty hard enough. And support is available in my goinginside.me program. That is actually the web address as well. If you're finding that you would prefer to be more responsive and less reactive. This is the place for you. This may seem obvious, but I'll share it anyway. We humans take most of our actions based on feelings. So this includes reactivity. This includes distraction, this includes numbing out, it includes all of it, mostly we just don't know how to do it. So goinginside.me is where we practice and normalize what's actually happening in your life and world. It's a group coaching program as well as a course of modules. This is available. I'd love for you to join me. Go to goinginside.me and check it out. You are 100% invited and you deserve to be supported. Now
You are listening to the Emergence from Life's Biggest Obstacles podcast with Wendy Sloneker. This right here is episode two. Thrilled you, here. Hi.
Let's talk about how we get into what we need to go in to go through what we need to go through very meta starry. Sorry, not sorry, it's gonna happen. I want to talk about the idea the prospect that the problem or the perceived problem is the actual portal. What do I mean by that? Perceived problem is the portal. When we go through what we think is the problem, we change, and we emerge into new information, new understanding, new perspective, new identity sometimes, and I want to talk about one of the most famous portals in all of literature.
My first instinct secret, I will tell them myself right here was going to be to offer a sci fi version of a portal that comes to mind very easily. So use what you'd like, take what you'd like, but I'm going to use the most famous in all of literature, because I think it's a little bit more recognizable, and understandable. The rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's at Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the rabbit hole is the portal and conveys Alice into this new world where things are upside down, things are going real strange. There's a talking Dodo, who smokes a pipe, like lots of weird stuff, lots of pipe smoke. And by the way, in that story, Lewis Carroll, I noticed, so the hunters the portal.
Now, did Alice know she was going down this portal, when she like snuck into this rabbit hole. And after chasing the White Rabbit, who's got the watch and a waistcoat, she didn't know it was going to be that she just thought it was going to be a regular ol rabbit hole, like a burrow. Or maybe she wasn't even at school to know that rabbits live in burrows. It was a portal into Wonderland.
No, we humans, in this day and age, and I'm totally counting myself in this often spend a lot of time arguing with ourselves or others in front of the thing we need to go through in order to get through it to the other side to the results, we want to just not be standing still in front of this thing we have to go through. I've spent a lot of time arguing in front of a portal, something that was going to radically give me more in my life give me more than life and aliveness in my life. Even though I didn't know what at the time, I felt like it was just the worst thing that could possibly happen to me, and I was just mad about it. So I stood in front of it and throw a tantrum, sometimes for years. That's okay. That was my choice.
I don't know if I would do it differently, because this is what I got this time around. Right? So this is not an opportunity to judge or shame or beat ourselves up or go hand with an emotional baseball bat. Oh, put it down. We're talking here. Here's what happened for me to be able to talk about my experience without shame, without feeling bad about it or judging it. Could I have made other choices? Yeah, but I made this one, there must have been a reason for that. That must have been the best I could do.
So I want to give a lot of compassion and care if it resonates that you may be arguing in front of a portal. This is very, very common and very natural given. The upstairs computer we have in our brains, the wiring we have, how we have been socialized in our cultures and societies. It makes a lot of sense.
We often don't want to go through things that we perceive as problematic or painful. That's part of our brains protective security system, if you will, their threat assessors plus, you know, to go inside of ourselves. It's kind of dark in there, don't want to really go. And so there's a lot of resistance that can come up. And it has come up for me and I've still gone through a lot of portals. Some of them were thrilling, and some of them were devastating. I'm here to normalize life experience.
Arguing in front of the portal or the door or But Stargate, if you will, this is 100% a valid option. It's 100%, your choice and your opportunity, whether or not you want to spend your time and life, how much of it resisting, going through and experiencing a process of emergence, where we don't always really know what's gonna go on or happen or not happen on the other side. We only know, this is the path, there is more life. I guess I'm, I'm gonna do it.
If it keeps coming up as an opportunity for you to go through like, maybe divorce or a breakup, or maybe somebody that you loved or were challenged by has died. These are also variations on a portal, something to go through. That will give you a new experience, life just does it automatically. We don't always know or have a choice, when we will be called to move into new life territory. We just don't have a book, none of us for all times, for all of our past lives. If you believe that for all of our now times, we don't know what's going to happen next.
And we have a lush, beautiful, complex, sometimes exasperating thing called life experience, including our inner world, which is often what we need to go through, or go into at least a little bit. When we are experiencing change. Not easy. I'm not always willing. And I don't have to be and neither do you.
I do want to offer that when you're ready to move through change. And to go into what could be considered a shadow season or a time of transformation. There are pluses and minuses on that Hero's Journey 100% with things moving so fast, and with changes sneaking up on us in plain sight. Like kids are growing up, like parents are getting older, like careers are getting spent in days. Time is passing. And it seems really fast sometimes. And it seems really long. And like forever. At other times, it's just a wild experience to be here on this planet. So all this to say, in these last nine minutes, you get to decide how much you want to argue with what you want to do. You have this thing to go through. You don't want to go through it.
One of the things I'll just like, catch up, I wasn't so sure that I wanted to make a change at 50. From going from copywriting into grief and end of life doula work, I didn't really have a strong sense of like, Yeah, I'm super all in. I had a oh dear. I keep having this. Pull. This idea, this instinct, this intuition that is tugging at me. My whole self, heart, body, mind, spirit, creativity, imagination, eagerness to learn.
I seem to be going in this direction. I am pulled in this direction do I want to go and I like I have a lot of talks with a lot of people about really at 50 You're making that kind of like industry and you know, significant perspective change. You're going to start a whole business all over. Yeah. Did I love it? Not every step. No, I did not. Was it still the right thing for me to do? Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
And then three years later, emergence arrives to me somewhere in my clavicles and says, Hey, Wendy, let's buddy up. And I was like, really? Another change? Another specific, maybe esoteric, kind of approach really. And emergence as a word and a process said, Yeah. You've been doing this your whole life. Let's talk about it. Let's support about it. And so welcome. I'm about a month in and I'm all in. I'm discovering. I don't always love it. But I'm still taking the walk. This is much better than standing in front of a door and arguing that it even exists.
And I get it that that, you know, some of the biggest obstacles that life is handing to you right now is very, very challenging. Your world may be completely rocked. And it's awful. And it's a portal it takes a lot of energy and a lot of courage to just take that one step to open the door. Or even crack the door, or even put your hand on the knob of the door. We're calling the portal a door now.
Thanks for Thanks for being here, because there's no doors on a rabbit hole. And still hard. Still the path. It takes enormous heart, and tenacity, and perseverance, and courage to take a step into any unknown. We have so many conveniences right now that make life very comfortable for many. So much so that we think that challenge and suffering and this sort of thing should should not be part of our experience. But it is, we get range to live in, we get contrast to live in.
We're also working with lots and lots of other souls here on the planet. So it's not all about us, except for the fact that it's all about us, as a community, here on this world. This is where I'm coming from. I'm going to just keep going. You are welcome along this journey. I'll be talking a little bit more about emergence from life's biggest obstacles, because that's the title of exactly what this is. But I want you to consider as you move into your day or the rest of your week, what do I think, is a problem? And how could that possibly, possibly, .0003% be a portal? It's a valid question, and you have every choice. None of them are moral choices, these are just your choices you get to decide for you may not be the right time to move into a new space or a new identity.
It may be the exact right time to take a tiny half of a baby step toward that door toward that new life that will give you more meaning and more aliveness. 100% up to you, I support you, no matter what it is. You need to do, whether it's stay where you're at, or take a step toward transformation. And into that new cocoon. Because remember, we get more than one this time around. Such a wild ride this life. I'm so glad to be here with you. I'm so glad you're here. And I will be talking to you again very soon. Thank you for being with me, and for being with you.
Okay, listen, it's already hard enough. It's plenty hard enough. And support is available in my goinginside.me program. That is actually the web address as well. If you're finding that you would prefer to be more responsive and less reactive. This is the place for you. This may seem obvious, but I'll share it anyway. We humans take most of our actions based on feelings. So this includes reactivity. This includes distraction, this includes numbing out, it includes all of it, mostly we just don't know how to do it. So goinginside.me is where we practice and normalize what's actually happening in your life and world. It's a group coaching program as well as a course of modules. This is available. I'd love for you to join me. Go to goinginside.me and check it out. You are 100% invited and you deserve to be supported. Now