I love my mom - but, you know, your mom always seems "older" to you. You always think of her as WAY ahead of you in age and stage of life.
When you realize that you're starting to look like her...let's just say it gives you "pause".
But that's not the only thing we FEAR as we age.
Sometimes life is filled with surprises and hard things that make us simply want to put our hearts to sleep instead of having to face them or live through them.
But the question is this...how do you want to live the last phase of your Path in this life? Scared or Brave?
In this episode we're talking about the Wonder Woman way of the Inner Hero - what it takes to LIVE this life with courage. And there's really ONE THING you need the most.
Would love it if you'd join me.
____________________________________________________
Are you in the struggle of navigating midlife with grace and power? I hear ya!
How about a daily injection of "Beautiful Warrior wisdom" injected into your day?
"The Way of the Beautiful Warrior." Our brief daily emails provide insights and inspiration, turning the challenge of midlife into an empowering adventure.
Click this link and embrace your journey as a Beautiful Warrior today.
I love my mom - but, you know, your mom always seems "older" to you. You always think of her as WAY ahead of you in age and stage of life.
When you realize that you're starting to look like her...let's just say it gives you "pause".
But that's not the only thing we FEAR as we age.
Sometimes life is filled with surprises and hard things that make us simply want to put our hearts to sleep instead of having to face them or live through them.
But the question is this...how do you want to live the last phase of your Path in this life? Scared or Brave?
In this episode we're talking about the Wonder Woman way of the Inner Hero - what it takes to LIVE this life with courage. And there's really ONE THING you need the most.
Would love it if you'd join me.
____________________________________________________
Are you in the struggle of navigating midlife with grace and power? I hear ya!
How about a daily injection of "Beautiful Warrior wisdom" injected into your day?
"The Way of the Beautiful Warrior." Our brief daily emails provide insights and inspiration, turning the challenge of midlife into an empowering adventure.
Click this link and embrace your journey as a Beautiful Warrior today.
(1s):
So what scares you about getting older? Is it those chin hairs that poke out a, your chin, like your mom? Is it just ending up looking like your mom? Is it the saggy baggies and the parts of us that are, are falling toward the earth without our control. There's a lot to scare us in this life, but there's also a lot of reasons to be brave. Find our wonder woman. I'm talking about it here today in this episode.
So don't miss it. This is the podcast that walks you down the path from not enough to brave enough for love for life, for making a difference in this world. However, that looks for you. This is where the secret inner hero society is alive and well. And you are going to be inspired by the stories of women who are doing it, being brave enough to love, again, to live this life with courage. I'm Bernice McDonald and I am excited to have you here. So get on in here and let's do this.
(1m 28s):
This is your great-grandma. And great-grandpa told my grandson as I handed him a photo of my parents.
Do you think I look like them? He shook his head. Not yet. Not. That is a cute little story I came across and I just had to share that with you didn't actually happen, but it could. We often are shocked when we look in the mirror or when we see pictures of ourselves and sometimes we're starting to resemble our parents. I just shared a real on Instagram about finding my first chin hair. Now that was quite a while ago, but I do remember that moment because my mom always struggled with chin hairs on her chin and she would shave them off.
(2m 10s):
Now I pluck, but when I discovered that first long black curly chin hair coming out of my chin, I had this sinking feeling inside like, oh no, I am becoming my mother. There is a lot to consider as we get into this last phase of our journey, right? And it can last for 25 years. It can last for 10 years. We never know when our journey is going to end. The important thing though, of course is how we face it.
(2m 50s):
There's so much in this life lately. That is scary. We need so much courage, not just to face the signs of aging, but also just to carry on as things happen to us, right? Life happens. And there is a lot that happens. I can understand why some women, when they prick their fingers on the spindle of pain, like sleeping, beauty, dead. Remember, I love that story. And I think of it often because she pricked her finger on a spindle of pain and it put her to sleep.
(3m 37s):
We just want to fall asleep inside our castles and connect coast through to the end of our lives. So we don't have to face a lot of the scary stuff we hide. We get away from it by putting our hearts to sleep. And we let that fiery fear, dragon roar, here's fear stories at us, outside of our castle, allowing him to scare us more, to tell us all the, what ifs to make us think about all the things that could happen as we go, all the things that have happened and what they mean.
(4m 19s):
Ah, heavens I, you know, I've been thinking a lot about this whole thing about becoming fearless after 50, is that really possible? I mean, listen, I made a list of the things that happened just this week. The things that I became aware of that were very scary situations about the things that can happen to us in this life. Remember as you're walking your path, you are an individual. Yes, you are that sleeping beauty that can go to sleep in her castle, her life put her heart to sleep, but you are that individual walking along your path of life.
(4m 60s):
When you enter it, you begin the path. When you die, you end the path. And in between all this stuff happens to you and you get to decide how you handle it. You, you, with your beautiful, incredible heart, the heart that's filled with your little quirks, with your personality, with your choices, with your beliefs, with your way of looking at life, with how you interpret things with your gifts, that heart is full of your gifts of your talents, of your skills. There is all kinds of things that you hold there.
(5m 41s):
And that's you the real you, when you strip away all the pain, when you strip away all the fear, there you are standing there in the spotlight, just you, beautiful individual unique. You. I love that. I love that thought. However, in the midst of this, we have to think about the scary stuff that's going on around us. The bombs that go off unexpectedly shocking us in our lives. The boulders that drop out of the blue, that flatness for a while, other people on their paths, throwing rocks at us, their expectations, the words that they use that come out of their own stories and they aim them against us.
(6m 32s):
We have to counteract all of that kind of stuff. Not to mention. Now listen to this. These are some of the things that I realized. I knew about fatter, scary situations right now across the street from us. We live in a condo. There's another building, an apartment building and the door is open into the entryway. We often see homeless people sleeping in there at night. Imagine that that's a scary scenario. If you had to find a place to shelter for the night, I just heard about a friend who attended a funeral of a 63 year old woman who died of ALS a terrible disease.
(7m 20s):
I know another 65 year old woman who is fighting cancer in her liver and her brain. She has lesions all through her stomach and she's alone. She has friends who support her, but she lives a long way from family. And she's living through this alone. That scary. I just spoke with a diabetic woman who has $2,000 in medication every month to worry about she needs to keep the job, which she doesn't enjoy in order to have the benefits to pay for that medication.
(8m 1s):
I also know a man who's a very dear friend of mine. Now he's in his forties and his mom was just fighting through COVID. She had to be moved hundreds of miles into a hospital and he couldn't even go and visit her. He could only hear and talk to her. Those who are caring for her about how she had been put in a medically induced coma and had to be flipped every few hours from her stomach to her back in order to help her lungs to breathe properly. This week, I remembered that four years ago, we, I hate to say celebrated.
(8m 45s):
I don't. We mark the day. It was four years since my mom left this earth, my mom had amazing strength, but she faced in the last 10 years of her life, a lot of challenges with her heart and it was too late for her. And there are all kinds of questions about the care she had earlier on in her life. If she had been diagnosed earlier, if a doctor had been paying more attention, could she have been spared? The kind of, of suffering that she went through in the last few years of her life?
(9m 25s):
My sister, my dear sister is adapting in her to her two years of widowhood. Two years ago, this same week, she lost her husband suddenly in a massive heart attack, but with a massive heart attack, he, his heart basically one chamber exploded and it took him instantly. She was laughed after 40 some years of companionship with him of marriage, where he was her rock. He took such good care of her. She was laughed now suddenly to be on her own, to deal and to come to terms with the fact that he's no longer there.
(10m 13s):
All of these scary things happen to us as we walk this path, it's no wonder that we need to focus, not on the fear, but instead on how to be brave, how to be brave enough to handle all these things, how to be brave enough to face the possibility of looking like our moms, all the things that happen to our bodies and break us down as we get older, but also how to face all of the situations that come to us as we're walking our path.
(10m 56s):
I was just reminded again by Lee, my husband and I were watching TV last night. And, and we caught the tail end of the wonder woman movie, the first one, which I absolutely love because there's so many messages of courage in that movie. And in this final scene, she's facing the great villain. And she says, she's tempted to go over to the dark side because she realizes how difficult life is, how impossible it would be to save the world when there's so much darkness around her and darkness, even in the human heart.
(11m 41s):
But as she stands there, debating what is going to be her decision about how she goes forward. She suddenly remembers the love she had for the man that she just lost, who gave his life as a hero. She suddenly remembers the hearts of those people that are precious to her and how she wants to fight for them. And she says, it's not about deserving. It's about what you believe. And I believe in love. Then she rises up into the air and all of this power fills her up on this light comes out of her and it shoots down and it destroys the evil.
(12m 36s):
She uses the power of her love to destroy the power of hate. She overcomes the love. She, she overcomes the evil, the, the negative, the, the terrible consequences of the things that happen. All of that negativity. She overcomes with the power of love. That's the theme of the wonder woman story she fights for love because love always conquers love, always wins.
(13m 16s):
Love, overcomes fear. Love is greater than fear. And if you focus on the love, if you let your heart be brave enough for love, instead of fear, then the, these things that happen to us in life, they begin to shrink. We begin to see that the fight is to stay soft and to stay strong. We begin to understand that we can fight against the fear by growing into our soft, no matter our age, if you're 50, if you're 65, if you're 78, if you're 92, if you allow love to be stronger than fear, love to be your driving force.
(14m 13s):
Then you learn to step into your strength. Like your warrior. You become open to that love and to life. By stepping into your magic, you find the feeling side of you that is your feminine by stepping into your lover. And you become that sovereign in your life, who is true to you, to your standards, to your beliefs, to who you are as a person. I, this whole entire reason getting older on this path, moving beyond 50 into that last half of our lives.
(14m 59s):
What we need is courage. What we need to prevent us from shrinking is to learn, to be brave, but not just brave to face everything brave enough to love instead of fear. That's why I want to create a community of women who are in this phase of life who say, yes, I want to be soft and strong. I want to live this last part of my life powerfully. That's why I'm calling them the secret inner hero society, because we all have a wonder woman inside of us who makes that decision to love instead of being overcome by fear.
(15m 47s):
If you want to know more about the secret inner hero society, go to my website, www.braveenoughforlove.com. That's where I'm creating this community. This group I knew are going to be able to join very nominal fee because I want us to walk together for a year at a time to go forward and to become stronger, to focus on love, to be softer, to be stronger, to be, to find that hero inside of us. So we're not afraid to look like our mothers.
(16m 28s):
We're not afraid to face whatever happens within our bodies. We find ourselves training to be stronger, to be softer, to be more loving, to change the world, like Wonder Woman. Okay. Follow me on Instagram. I'm always talking about this. There. Look me up on Tik TOK. Look me up on Pinterest and come and visit my website. And please drop me a line and tell me that. Yes, you are right here with me. Let's do this together and I will talk to you in the next podcast.