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To unlearn being busy takes a surprising effort. I seem to accumulate stuff to do at an alarming rate and constantly add more tasks to my days and weeks with an apparent intention to keep myself occupied. I never really think about why I feel so compelled to be occupied, though. Is being occupied all it’s cracked up to be? Making lists and categorizing tasks might be unique to the last few centuries, or perhaps it’s a human need that’s morphed into something a bit unhealthy in our modern age. I think it’s important to learn how to peacefully and happily exist without needing to prove how much I did at any given moment or justify why taking time for enjoyment is deserved because I accomplished so many important things before I relaxed. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

Restarting a daily practice I once had is taking more effort than I initially anticipated. My procrastination and obstacles are shedding awareness on how I have spent my time, and how quickly I filled my time and space, which inadvertently led to losing parts of my day that I really gained a lot from. Now, I am learning how to let go of what hasn’t been contributing a lot of joy to my life, to make space for something that really does bring me joy. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

Encouragement and being seen at the right time in your life can change the whole way you see yourself and where you end up going from there. I have a great memory of a professor from art school noticing the way I attacked problems and assignments, and the way he acknowledged my process was so empowering it’s not exaggerating to say that he changed my life that day. Join me as I reminisce, and let’s wonder about what we need to be seen and understood about us today, so that we can go powerfully into our futures, too. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

Getting older isn’t so celebrated in the West and dealing with aging and my own mortality is much on my mind these days. It’s inevitable that we change as we live and grow and age. Nothing is constant but change, and we know this – and yet, the push for me at least has been to outsmart this natural process and keep the youth culture alive. I’m questioning my assumptions about beauty in a way that has a bit more depth than it did when I questioned this in my 20s. Let’s talk about beauty standards, body shame, and aging – and what we might be able to do to help us feel better about ourselves, no matter what age we are. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

We need to talk about anger and frustration. It’s there to give us the energy to change things and move in a different direction. Our emotions are our feedback system. When you’ve passed through being hurt, overwhelmed, or tired, what happens next is a space of emptiness. It’s a great clearing and calm, a clean slate after that energy is gone. We don’t have the energy to care as much about the thing that just had us wound up and freaking out. Sometimes we are so drained and empty that we don’t have anything left to give. When we have reached that stage, it’s difficult for us to care and have compassion for anything else going on. It’s why it’s so important to leave enough space to process our feelings so that we can leave enough space and room to keep compassion and caring in our hearts for others, and ourselves, too.  It’s important to take that space because otherwise, we end up giving the very least of ourselves to others, because we are so depleted, and we receive the very least of others because that’s all they have left to give, too. When we take time to be in our emptiness without forging on ahead prematurely, we have a chance to nurture genuine feelings of joy and care.  Sharing these feelings is what has the power to restore us even faster, and heal others along with us. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

Overwhelm feels like drowning in too much input. It’s too loud, too bright, there’s too much activity and demands on your senses. And there are also too many thoughts and disconnection from why we do anything because we feel like we aren’t getting anywhere and we’re too tired.  When we feel this level of bone-weary depletion and we want to do more, it’s time to listen to our exhaustion. It’s time to stop and let ourselves rest. It’s so important, and we shouldn’t be in a race against others or life itself to get over it the fastest. Can we stop collecting trauma and celebrating how much trauma we have and still function through anyway? I propose that as humans, we need to stop our endless march forward and take a break where we aren’t trying to achieve anything, and instead focus on healing and restoration and kindness towards ourselves and each other. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

What is the difference between being kind and being polite, and can we do both? How does this attempt play out in real life, and how do we tackle it and deal with the screwed-up ways we make things more complicated by dancing around our fears and needs?This week we talk about our belief in being able to solve conflicts, and the messy ways we go about it because messy is better than rejecting our needs or refusing to address uncomfortable situations.  Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

Our bodies are a remarkable expression of what we do and feel. Learning a new skill takes so much effort and coordination of our minds and bodies, and it’s so cool to realize just how much goes into each basic skill that we have. In this episode, I share my observations from teaching my daughter how to swim, and the marvel I have at how quickly we progress from one level to the next even as we master dozens of nuances and demands along the way. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

The reality of dealing with gun violence in my country is taking a toll on me, and I’m pretty sure I am not in immediate danger of dying of a gunshot wound. And yet, the threat of possibly being shot is a constant low-level alert and dread that runs in the background of my life whether I am taking my child to school or going grocery shopping or heading to the bank, or getting gas.Assault weapons have no place in our civilian society as far as I am concerned, and we shouldn’t be selling them to anyone, let alone kids under 21 who can’t even buy a handheld pistol. But sure, let’s let them buy a weapon that can fire off 45 rounds of potential murder a minute, because – cool.I’m traumatized by the DAILY mass murders in the US carried out using assault rifles. This is not a freedom to be upheld, it is a handicap and a cultural shame that we need to correct. I recorded this after the Uvalde shooting, and since then there have been 20 mass shootings in the following 14 days. I’m sure by the time this goes live there will have been another dozen or so because that’s who we are as a society right now. F*** this. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

The way my feet changed when I stopped wearing shoes with arches in them has filled me with awe at how our bodies adjust and give us feedback in our everyday lives. And, even though we do our best to behaviorally adjust our bodies and our minds, there is still a biological component that is going to do what it does. I find a lot of relief in that, too. Because none of us need additional stress trying to change ourselves beyond what is possible for us. Rather, we can appreciate all the ways our bodies can and do show up, just as we are. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

Most of us will go way out of our way to avoid conflict or making someone uncomfortable or angry with us. But there are times when we simply have to speak up and stand up for ourselves and how we are feeling. Today’s podcast talks about those uncomfortable feelings that arise when conflict is inevitable, and ways we can feel more secure in stepping up for ourselves, and ultimately, in the interest of the long-term effects on our relationships with others. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

I love learning new languages, and I don’t mind learning them slowly. I take my time. My tips for learning a language and keeping it fun are to:  Think about the vocabulary you picked up every day. Like if you’re looking at a table, see if you can just think the new word as you gaze at the table. Ah! Taberu desu! When you go somewhere, think “I’m going this place” but use the new words. “Ei de ikimasu!” Watch videos about stuff you already like and know a lot about in the language you are learning. It’s easier to pick up the words and concepts when you already have an idea of what they are talking about and don’t need to rely on the subtitles so much. Practice writing or reading or listening to the new language every day, even if it’s only for two or three minutes. Immersion is always the fastest and best way to learn, but you still will learn even if you are just taking it a baby step at a time and repeating a lot every day. For me, it’s not about perfection or mastering a skill, but I am doing to just figure it out, see what I can learn about it, and see if I can understand it more. I love to understand the underlying purpose, meaning, and concepts of a new skill. Language is fun for me, but lots of other things are fun to experiment with, too! The lighter and more playful I am with learning new things, the more fun I have, the more likely I am to continue, and the more I eventually learn and understand. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

I recently bought a fountain ink feather pen to slow myself down and see if I could master cursive again. It is for me a lost skill. It’s been fun to learn how to write clearer by slowing down, and to notice how the brain synapses learn to fire together as I pick up a new body/mind connection. Slowing down to go faster is a theme in my life. I first learned this in tattooing, and have had to learn it again in parenting, cooking, painting, and business building. This month, it’s learning how to slow my mind down enough to write slower and more clearly. I discovered that as a result, this process of learning cursive with a pen that will splotch, drip, and flow has improved my regular everyday handwriting. Which is cool. Bringing in a new skill that isn’t gravely important to my life is like hitting an upgrade button on my life. I get to enjoy a process, level up a new skill, and bring in more beauty and an immersive all-body experience for mundane tasks. I highly recommend doing something like this! I love conscious moments for delight.  Investing in yourself and your everyday mundane experiences is a great way to honor your aesthetic, your enjoyment, and your time. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

I have an Oura Ring, and I must first say that I love it and it’s been giving me lots of useful data and is the most comfortable wearable smart device I have ever used. But I’ve noticed that it’s goals for me give me some feelings. I noticed I have resentment about what the ring decides is a good goal for me, as well as comparisonitis about how I think other people live, and even about myself on my best days and how I can’t maintain that best day every day. It’s teaching me a lot about my internal motivation as well as what externally motivates me. But also it’s enlightened me that I have my own natural rhythm. I now know that when I am pushed to my highest goal mark on a daily basis, assuming that the best I can do is what I should be doing all the time, I get angry and worn out very fast. I appreciate the data that these devices give me, and I need to look out for how I interpret or self-judge that data. It’s just information. The ring is not god. When I look at it as a useful assessment of my overall daily movement and health markers, I love this thing. It’s when I try to push myself to be something other than what I am that I get down on myself. My experience of noticing my feelings about my own data has given me a lot of insight into my personal judgments about movement and health, the ways I want to be admired or praised, and that I even look to technology to provide that praise when I don’t do it for myself. The best thing I can do is keep going, not being extreme, and appreciate that I have a body that can do lots of things, that also gets tapped out at around 7 miles of walking per day. And that’s OK. At the end of the day, I don’t have to prove my worth to a ring. I just need to love myself. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

The houseplants I care for have once again erupted in gnats. I don’t know how else to take this but to just face it with calm and surrender. This year I must find a more effective way to handle the bugs than the very effort-intensive cleanup I did last year. It’s incredibly frustrating to inhale small bugs in your sleep, find a floating gnat carcass in your water glass, and find your zoom meetings interrupted by pesky flies that your attendees can’t see but make you look like a lunatic as your eyes dart back and forth and you swat the air every five minutes. How can we deal with life’s annoyances? We recognize that it’s not personal. Sometimes bad things happen and it’s not anyone’s fault or on purpose to make you upset. We recognize we have a choice in how we be with it. And sometimes, we open ourselves to the possibility that what we thought was a bad thing, like a spider in your bedroom, was actually an answer to a yet unknown trouble, like the gnats that appeared a week later in my office and in every potted plant I own. Isn’t there a saying that goes, “Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows?” Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

Saying yes too many times to things I don’t really want to do builds up a lot of resentment. When someone taps into my desire to belong, take care of people and be of benefit to those around me, it’s easy for me to say yes before I’ve even processed their request. I like my brain space to be mellow these days, and I like simple matter-of-fact decision-making. One of my clues that I haven’t maintained a boundary is that I think about it all the time, and it clogs up my mind and creates tumultuous emotions. I have to own my own emotions and my involvement in becoming the person who is solving someone else’s problems. To stop overcommitting, I have to first be honest about what I want to accomplish and do for myself. What do those goals require of me mentally, timewise, financially, socially, and physically? I can only stop overcommitting if I assign value to my own goals and KNOW what they take so that I know how much a new project might overwhelm or derail my plans and desires. And that makes it a lot easier to stand by and let others resolve their goals without me taking it over or managing it for them – because I am managing myself really well instead. When you want to please everyone, you don’t even realize you have a limit of your own until you’ve gone so far past it that you are overwhelmed, tired, and resentful. We have to stop that! Being yourself and doing your stuff is enough. We don’t need to get love by solving other people’s problems. We are worthy of love simply when existing, as we are, with no strings or favors attached. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

A worry we have when transitioning environments is that the same problems we had in our last experience might follow us to our new one. We often externalize these fears and blame our troubles on the outside circumstances rather than on ourselves. But we also have a deep worry that the situation will repeat, because we know on some level that it’s us who have the problem, and running from our problems can’t actually solve anything. To solve the problem, we need to get honest with ourselves about the part we play in our current woes and commit to changing how we behave, feel, and think about it. And that is SO scary for us that most of the time we keep ourselves too busy to have enough time to realistically do that. Here are some strategies for coming to terms with conflict and setting boundaries that allow us to set the security and peace that we are hoping for, even when it feels really hard. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

Confidence is a sliding scale of belief in ourselves and our ability to get something done. Most of us have a variety of beliefs about ourselves in different areas of our lives. If you rate yourself highly in an area, you are confident that you can get the job done, and no matter what it’s going to get done. And if you rate it very lowly, you don’t believe you can complete the task and you believe things will get in the way of you achieving that goal. When we look for things that we 100% know we can do, like brushing our teeth in the morning, it’s a way we can find proof that we can do things. Confidence doesn’t have to look like a heroic movie with you dodging explosions while saving puppies – it often looks like doing regular stuff and not even noticing that we did it because it’s so easy and obvious for us. When we practice the feeling of knowing we’re capable and what it feels like when we do things we just assume we can do or do well, it gives us a taste of what it will feel like when we accomplish the huge thing we’re scared that we can’t do yet. Practicing this experience of being with yourself during simple easy tasks gives you the fortitude to keep trying until you are competent and feel great about a new skill that feels hard. Sometimes building up resilience and through that, confidence, is a science of eliminating excuses. So many of us want all of our goals to be achieved overnight, but the reality is that increasing our confidence takes time and we need that confidence to keep going and complete our goals. I try as much as I can to figure out how I need to feel and what do I need to believe about myself, in general, to get going doing the thing I am avoiding.From there, the goals begin to be accomplished. But it takes showing up again and again, and that takes building my confidence daily on each of these tasks. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

What does overstimulation look and feel like and how does it cycle in our lives? It feels like everything is too loud, too bright, too demanding, and overwhelming. It can look like snapping at people you love, like wanting to scream and pull your hair out at the drop of a hat, or like staring at an email for twenty minutes without being able to bring yourself to respond. The way I deal with it is finally admitting that I am overwhelmed and need time and space for myself to process all the input that’s coming in. Often I realize that I get to this space of overstimulation because I felt like I have done so much without getting all the love and appreciation I wanted to get for doing so. When this is the case, taking time to spoil myself with words of gratitude and kindness helps way more than I could have anticipated. It takes the entire experience down five notches and fills up the parts of me that were drained. Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.

What does it mean to be an excellent receiver of gifts? Does it mean I am able to accept a gift and say thank you instead of saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” I had to work on my ability to receive, and for a long time, I could only conceive of this as receiving gifts. It didn’t occur to me that you can also receive money, fame, praise, love, surprises, friends, rest, and time. I had to learn that I didn’t always have to be the first one to give to a relationship, but I could also allow people to come to me and receive them instead of always delivering myself. We sometimes feel we have to fill our time and have difficulty with resting and receiving rather than doing.  I uncovered a lack of appreciation and feeling appreciated. Receiving was difficult for me at first because I had trouble appreciating myself and being able to receive appreciation from others. As I learned to open up to this, it allowed much more love and receiving to be possible, and for more experiences to open up that I hadn’t had before. This showed up in my finances when I noticed I was ok with trading and offering free work but had a hard time receiving money. I had to figure out why I was experiencing that, and what I could do about it. Resolving this had a lot to do with being willing to show up vulnerably and share from my heart and have it reflected back to me. Where am I thinking what I already have isn’t enough? The feeling of not being able to get what I want no matter what I do leads to being closed off, unwelcoming, and not open to receiving.  Welcome to the full Spectrum Feeling Podcast. I'm your host, Blaze Schwaller, life coach and former tattoo artist. I help people heal their past, speak their truth to those they love, and learn how to feel ALL their emotions, so that they can live lives they love no matter what comes up. Join me here every week for conversations on how to live an imperfect but fully engaged life that embraces all the feels, so you can stretch into your best life while enjoying the you that's here now.