91. Meditation Even When You Can't Stop Overthinking, with Lauri Stern

Hook And Why Meditate

Cheryl Fischer 0:00

Has somebody recommended to you that you should meditate? Quite frankly, if you are listening or watching this podcast, you probably have heard me recommend to you that you should meditate. And I'll admit at the same time, I'm not super consistent with my own meditation and I've worked it in in some creative ways. The cool thing is there are some documented benefits to meditation that will kind of blow your mind. And during this period of upheaval and change and stress, those benefits make a big difference. Let's talk about it. Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time. Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast.

What Meditation Really Means

Cheryl Fischer 1:16

Meditation is about calming your mind and being in this present moment. And I feel like when I say being in this present moment, that's a phrase that gets sort of misconstrued or overused. Think of it this way: we often are running through our days a mile a minute. And even if you've sort of passed that phase of life where you have to run a mile a minute, our brains often are running a mile a minute. And we don't necessarily pause and check in and say, why am I thinking about how my shoes look terrible over and over and over half the day? It's checking in and noticing that is part of the power of meditation. And it's also giving yourself some time to rest and not rest as in take a nap, although you may fall asleep. That's okay. But rest as in calm, calm the nervous system, calm the mind, take a breath. And so I wanted us to be able to hear from a meditation expert today.

Meet Lari Stern

Cheryl Fischer 2:30

So Lauri Stern is joining me on the podcast. She is a podcast host herself. Her podcast is called The Real and the Woo. She offers custom designed wellness. She's an energetic wellness strategist as well as an author and a yoga teacher. So working with her client, custom designed wellness, a piece of that is meditation. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So welcome, Lauri. Thanks for joining me. Hi, thank you for having me. I'm so grateful to be here. We're going to be talking about something that we all kind of know is probably good for us. And we think maybe we should do it. And we feel like we can't. And that's meditation. So you have this technique that you call chaos meditation. And

Chaos Meditation Explained

Cheryl Fischer 3:26

I want you to tell us more about what that is. Because I feel like we do always feel like we're we can't stop our heads, we're too busy, all that stuff.

Lauri Stern 3:34

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Whether we're in midlife or any point in the middle of our life, in the middle of a task, in the middle of anything, especially in the middle of waking up. So I work with a lot of clients who cannot get off the crazy train, the hamster wheel. You know, when I was a young mommy doing all the things with my four kids and going here and there and everywhere, I wish I had this practice because all I knew in the moment when I caught myself looking at myself in the mirror, and I look like a monster, really pissed off, aggravated mom. Uh all the shame, all the guilt. Why am I so angry? I should love this life, kind of thing. Um, I wish that I had this. And what the chaos meditation does for us is it lets us go crazy. It lets us welcome in all of the thoughts so that we don't push them aside with anger, shame, or guilt. We give them space. Like think about your kids, think about yourself. You want to be validated, you want to be heard and understood. And our thoughts want to be heard and understood. Now, the difference is we are not our thoughts. We're also not our emotions. So when we're getting carried away with either, we're not in our center of ourselves. And the word meditation is such a turn on to a lot of people, but also a turnoff. Because A, especially if you're a high-functioning, overwhelmed midlife woman leading in any way, shape, or form, you don't want one more thing to do. And so, right. And so saying, Oh, you need time to meditate, people are like, Are you kidding me? When am I gonna sit on a rock and contemplate my navel? Did you know how much I have to do? And in fact, yeah, I do, because I've been there and I'm still there, right? We're all busy. And so the chaos meditation really came about, like everything else, um, from a client session. And it's just an opportunity. Give yourself uh time. So whether it's five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, the idea is to create a boundary by setting an alarm or a timer so that we're not always just going on the train and then it's been an hour and we are not being productive and now we're angry at ourselves because we wasted time. So if you give your chaos a container and you let yourself go there, it's like sometimes I think about Batman and Robin with all the talk bubbles, you know, bing, bang, pow, pom. Let them come. Let them be big and bold and colorful and loud, feel all the feels, think all the things, and when the alarm goes off, stop. And just like running a race, you might have to take some deep breaths to re-regulate the nervous system. I highly recommend that. That's part of the meditation too. But that's really what it is. It's letting your mind give itself its chaos.

Cheryl Fischer 6:27

Yeah.

Lauri Stern 6:28

And for some clients, they have to do this a few times during the day. They might excuse themselves to go to the bathroom if they're at work, for example, um, or go on a walk. And just again, but set an alarm because if you don't, then you will get carried away.

Cheryl Fischer 6:45

Right. And and I think for any type of meditation, the alarm is the key, or at least it is that way for me. And just to step back for a second, meditation my experience can be kind of anything where you're taking the time to center yourself and be present. And typically, and this is why we're talking about what we're talking about, typically, people will say you want to kind of empty your mind and allow the thoughts to come and it's okay, and then just let them go. And as you say, we feel guilty, we feel stressed, we can't just allow the thoughts to come and let them go. So this is an intriguing twist on that. You're almost encouraging them all to come, right?

Lauri Stern 7:39

Um yes, because I find too um, and I'm in this category. I I also teach yoga, and one of the hardest things I see in students, and one of the hardest things for myself for probably two years was to really not just stay for Shivasana, the end of class, but enjoy it. I would start immediately knowing class was ending when I was a student. And, you know, here in Chicago, we had something called jamba juice, which is like I guess orange Julius, and I was obsessed with this drink. And I would be like, jamba juice, jamba juice, jamba juice. And then I'm like, when I'm after jamba juice, I have to go to the store and I have to get this, and I have to get this, and I have to get it. So I would just start making my list. It took, listen, yoga is called a yoga practice for a reason. It is not called yoga perfection, and neither is meditation. Meditation is a practice, and so if you can empty your mind for any period of time, brava, bravo. But what meditation does is it trains our minds to come back to center. Okay. Now, for me, I learn by doing. And one of my best ways to meditate, I just did this, which is why I look like I do. I rode my bike for an hour and a half this morning. I get the best downloads. I clear my mind, whether I'm listening to music or podcasts. Sometimes when you're moving, that's your best meditation. So taking a walk can be a meditation. Shopping for a yellow shirt. Let's just have a goal. I'm gonna get a pair of shoes today, go through the racks, try on the shoe. It's just bringing you into the present of whatever you're doing. And then it doesn't become something you have to perform or something you have to do perfectly. You just give yourself a chance to just be in the zone.

Cheryl Fischer 9:34

Yeah. I like that. One of the things that I do, because I do believe meditation is really powerful and at the same time, don't always do it. So one of the things I do for my circulation is um legs up against the wall, which I assume you'll know because that's a yoga thing. And so now I combine them finally to get myself to do a little bit of meditation, I'll go do that for five minutes and I'll put a timer and then I'll try to just, you know, let my mind calm down as well. But sometimes it really doesn't work. So I like this idea of let me just woo whatever's going on, and then the timer goes off. And what do we do at the point when the timer goes off if we're allowing all this chaos to go on in our brain?

Lauri Stern 10:18

A

Regulate After The Timer

Lauri Stern 10:19

couple things. I want to go back to your legs up the wall. Um, it's also really good for digestion after a big meal. I know my daughter does it. She sends us pictures of her legs up the wall and her dog's legs up the sofa next door. It's really cute. And and the other thing too is when you're fine. Do you ever use mudras when you meditate? Do you know what mudras are? I don't know what that word is now. So if anybody out there, if you ever practiced yoga, uh, and people, the teacher like I do, says, bring your hands into Anjali mudra, which is prayer pose. Mudras are anything we do with our hands. And there's a number of mudras that connect with the chakras, which is the lens I use for the coaching and the strategies I offer. But um Gien mudra, when you connect your index finger and your thumb, it connects the individual to the universe. So if you're ever, I use this a lot in traffic, or you can do it under the dinner table, especially at family meals when there's too much going on. It just brings you into a state of mattering to yourself. And just that little bit of a connection might be a good reminder. Come back to my thoughts, come back to my breath. Sometimes I know tapping is a thing, but you can do this and no one sees you. And it's just again, like a little, like a little bird tapping on your window, like, hey, you've gone off the path, come back to the path. So that might be helpful for you or anybody else. Uh, hand on heart, hand on belly. Touching the body is a really good way to bring you into any sort of meditative state. It's comforting, it's nurturing. And when you're coming out of that chaos meditation, I was going to say that's the first thing I do, hand on heart, hand on belly, because you do then come back to the body. And taking deep breaths puts the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system from fight and flight to calm, right? Yeah. So when we do that, it's like a Polaroid picture. Alarm's gonna go off. And for some of you, you can be like, okay, done, let's go. Some of you really need to take some time to re-regulate. And that will be different each time you try it. So give yourself uh grace and humor for sometimes how long it takes you to really come back.

Cheryl Fischer 12:37

Right. Yeah. I can see though, even having not tried this idea of allowing everything to go nuts in our brains, maybe not nuts, but go kind of crazy. I can see how it could what is the word I'm looking for? I could see how it could feel kind of freeing and maybe give us a feeling that we've sort of dealt with all these things and now we can go do something else. I can imagine that that could be the case. So it's interesting.

Lauri Stern 13:12

Yeah. Well, yeah, you know, when we like I said, when we validate and we give our mind permission to think, right? We want our brains to work, but we want our brains to work efficiently. And negative thoughts, uh thought loops, hamster wheel patterns really clog up the system. And so if we can give those parts of ourselves a chance to shine and get the spotlight for a period of time, they tend to quiet down because they've had their turn.

Cheryl Fischer 13:46

Interesting. Interesting. I want to try.

Lauri Stern 13:50

Yeah. And yeah. And the other thing too is when you touched on, okay, when you come out of a meditation like this or any other meditation, the important thing also is to notice where else are you noticing you might be feeling something in your body? Because our bodies are our best barometers of truth. So if you're really letting yourself go down, let's say a fear train, lots of things to be afraid of, unfortunately, and fortunately lately. I say fortunately because it gives us a chance to see really what's true, what we're really afraid of, uh, and what we can sort of set aside in our own reality. Um, but when we come out of a meditation, is our heart still racing? Do we have a little bit of a headache? Does our stomach feel funny? Those are messages from your body that you've got some work to do in your energetic internal systems.

Cheryl Fischer 14:45

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that completely. And it could be a decision we've made that we don't really think we've made the right one, or something we didn't do that we should know we should have done, or who knows what it is. But yes, I agree with that completely. We do feel it in our bodies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Journaling To Spot Limiting Beliefs

Cheryl Fischer 15:03

Now, another thing that you've talked about is that meditation can help us figure out what our limiting beliefs are. And this intrigues me because, gosh, if we could all just find the limiting beliefs and retrain our brains and get rid of them. I mean, we could do anything, right? But they're hidden. And so it's not super easy to do that. So talk to me a little bit about how you help people with limiting beliefs.

Lauri Stern 15:36

Wow. Um well, meditation will reveal what needs to be healed a hundred percent if we allow ourselves to get real about it. When you come out of a meditation like that, let's say your your stomach's a little upset, uh, you're in anger or fear or worry. And so that work is to notice is it the same worrying thoughts you typically have? Worrying about your kids, worrying about money, worrying about the state of the world, worrying about gas prices, whatever it is. Any really good practice, too, that's also meditative is journaling. So after meditation, and I'm again, it's it's not like you're gonna be doing this for an hour out there, you guys. This takes really some time. It can take as long as you want or as little as you want. If you can notice when you come out of that, what were your consistent thoughts? What was your consistent chaotic, you know, uh memory or energy or whatever, and write it down. And you keep a journal like that, even just for just a couple of days or probably a week, you begin to notice there's categories that are consistent. So is it family? Is it money? Is it myself? Is it health? What is it? And then, you know, the limiting belief stuff is such a catchphrase. And what is a limiting belief? It is a belief that we own, that we may not know where it came from, but it's in us, and it truly does limit us. So scarcity mindset is a huge one. And when we talk about abundance mindset, people wig out too because that's too big of a category. Uh, I was listening to this one, she's like, well, be careful what you wish for. If you just wish for abundance, then you might get a delivery of 25 live chickens because isn't that abundance of chickens?

Cheryl Fischer 17:27

And now you have an abundance of chickens.

Lauri Stern 17:29

Exactly. You asked for abundance, here it is. An abundance of irritation. Right? So when we're creating containers for abundance, it's like a menu. When we go to a restaurant, do we say feed me? No, we say I would like this, I would like this, I would like this, I would like this. Unless you're going to like one of those expensive places and yeah, surprise me for a thousand dollars. Okay. But you're signing up for that. In general, if you look at your thoughts like a menu, you get to choose an abundance we were just talking about. Choose your abundance category. It doesn't make you selfish, it doesn't make you greedy, it makes you empowered and accurate.

Cheryl Fischer 18:10

And I've heard this kind of similar advice in other uh in other formats as well about being specific and given it, quite frankly, to coaching clients in slightly different formats. So yeah, I agree. If we if we just want more success, even sometimes that might come in a funny way that we weren't expecting. If we just want more money, maybe it won't look like what we thought. So yeah, the more specific we can be, the better.

Lauri Stern 18:43

And that's when the limited beliefs come up. Because I've had this happen with clients. They can't think of the first thing, even just abundance or what brings you joy, you know, which is why I have Joy on the Fives in my own podcast. But right there, when you get stuck in a fact and you can't get over the hump of whatever it is, that's the alarm going off. That's a limiting belief. And the insidious thing about limiting beliefs, they're like weeds in our garden, and we pull them up, but then something else crops up. Thistle. I'm dealing with thistle right now. It is, I've written about thistle, thistle's the bane. It's worse than a thorn on a rose. It never goes away. You can't kill it. Oh my gosh. So bamboo like thistles. Yeah, right. You'll take, you'll take a you'll address one thing, but then the other little offshoots come up too. And the fun part, if you can get to the fun part, is learning where the thought came from in the first place. Where did that belief come from in the first place? Is it really mine? Is it my parents? Is it my religion? Is it my community? And so we really get to parse and weed out the belief. How did it happen? Where does it reside in my body? Can I get rid of it? And how many more offshoots from this belief are also limiting so it's like a flow chart.

Cheryl Fischer 20:20

Yeah, I'm curious. What if uh and I ask this because I've had some experience dealing with this, but what if someone is thinking, you know, I can see that I'm limiting myself in this particular area? I know there's a limiting belief in there, but I can't figure out where it came from. I don't know anything in my life that would have created this, and they it's very frustrating. But we can also get stuck in trying to figure that out. Is it is it possible to just say it came from somewhere and I don't agree with it anymore? Let me see what I can do now. How can I figure a way forward? Absolutely.

Lauri Stern 21:00

We're in charge. If that works, if you recognize it and you're like, I'm done, be done. It can be that simple. You know, we don't have to get on the crazy trait of figuring out limiting beliefs if that's just a nonsense exercise. Sometimes, you guys, it's just that simple. Recognizing, releasing with love and gratitude. How we let go is really important too. Um, because if you let it go with anger, that's gonna still stay in you. So we want to again acknowledge and validate in order to release uh in a positive way.

Cheryl Fischer 21:42

Yeah. And this is where I find that it's it seems to really help people, and if you're listening, maybe this is true for you, just to realize that we all go through these things, and I'm not unusual because I held myself back in some way. You're not unusual because you held yourself back in some way. Because sometimes we do get very hard on ourselves and we almost get angry at ourselves. And of course, that is taking us nowhere good.

Lauri Stern 22:12

Yeah. Yeah. The self self-talk, the negative self-talk, the inner dialogue that we're running, that's really also where this chaos meditation came from. Because and I wrote about this uh when I

Releasing Beliefs With Compassion

Lauri Stern 22:28

turned 60. I was in Hawaii with my husband, and um I'm happy to share the substack with you. But basically I was slathering sunscreen on myself in Hawaii in a bikini, just criticizing every little thing about my body as I'm slathering on the sunscreen. And Claire Isabelle, my mom, who's on the other side now, had stopped talking about my Lauri Annie like that, because that's what she called me. And I stopped and I immediately Googled how many thoughts do we have in a day? And I think it's like 80,000, let's say, or 70,000. And 80% of 80% of them are negative.

Cheryl Fischer 23:07

Yeah.

Lauri Stern 23:08

And it just hit me. It's like water to a stone. If it keeps dripping and dripping and dripping and dripping, it alters the stone. And so we really need to pay attention and contain our negative thought patterns because they're not doing us any service at all. It gives us something to do, but it doesn't get us anywhere.

Cheryl Fischer 23:29

Yeah. Yeah. I I yes, yes, yes. And at the time we're recording this, I just had an episode on the podcast about body image and how to get out of the negative stuff. And there will be many episodes about that because we get stuck in it, especially now when our bodies are changing and they don't always necessarily look like we used to, you know.

Lauri Stern 23:54

Yeah. So much, so much going on there. There's a lot going on there. And we are our own worst enemies about that. You know, for every my friend calls them what the fucks. You know, she'll look in the mirror and she's like, what the fuck is this? And what the fuck? What's wrinkles on my shoulder? Like, what the fuck? And it's like, you know, we're gonna write a book about it. Um, we're our own worst enemy with that. Nobody notices what you think. It's like, it's like we're walking around with the hairiest zit or wart that's taking up our whole body. And it's infinitesimal, but to us, it's this huge thing. And so how we deal with our changing bodies and changing minds, because menopause does a number on our brains too. Again, it's about grace and forgiveness and humor and gratitude that we're noticing what we're noticing. You know, we can't live our lives on autopilot as much as we like to. So true. So true.

Cheryl Fischer 24:54

And I guess if you come down to it, that's what meditation is, is a way to keep us from living on autopilot all the time. A way to help us pause, breathe, think or not think, rest, something like that, right? It's just it's like a pause button. Maybe that's one way to think of it.

Lauri Stern 25:16

Yeah, it is. It's it truly is. And when we allow it to be, really getting in touch with your mental patterns and coming into a place of feeling healthy in your mind is really what meditation is about. Any form of meditation for any period of time. Pausing is a great way to look at it.

Cheryl Fischer 25:39

Yeah, I like that a lot. And I I think people I think we as busy women in our 40s, 50s, whatever it is, recognize that we need to pause and we need to rest, but we don't always know how to do it and we don't always take the time to do it. So you said in many forms, and that was a perfect segue into what I want to just circle back to, because you also said riding your bike as a form of meditation. So give us some kind of creative ways that we could include movement and meditation sort of together.

Lauri Stern 26:11

Gardening, walking, walking your dog, walking yourself, riding a bike, going to the gym, doing all of those things, taking a yoga class or seated meditation. I lay down a lot when I meditate. I put stones all

Moving Meditation And Joy Tools

Lauri Stern 26:27

over my body. Sometimes I listen to guided meditations, sometimes I listen to nothing, or just instrumental music. So for a long time, I really liked the guided meditation. Except I'm a little type A. And so I didn't notice this until I started teaching yoga. Um, but one of my friends, the the my what the fuck teacher friend, whenever I take her class, she always knows I'll know what side we're supposed to be on because I pay attention. I was a dancer, so it makes sense to me. But some of these guided meditations, I was listening to you, they'd be like, and bring a light up your left side. And I'm like, okay, where'd the light go? Like, what are we doing now? Or they'll like, they'll do everything on the left, but like nothing for their right. And like, hello, hello, you know, McFly, you forgot the right side. So I tossed those. Um, and then I realized I was sort of getting, I was going squirrel too much, trying to pay attention to what they were saying versus just get into the feeling. So that's when I tossed the guide of meditation, but it is a great way to, then I offer this to my clients too. I'll record things for them. But yeah, that's that's a great tool, or just music, music that you already know is a great way to meditate because you already know the lyrics. You're not trying to catch what the words are meaning or saying, and it just lets your mind be free to focus on something else.

Cheryl Fischer 27:53

Yeah.

Lauri Stern 27:54

Dancing. Oh my God. Put on some music and dance your pants off. Any kind of music. If you're feeling rageful, put on some nine-inch nails. If you're feeling like you want to love yourself, put on some, you know, uh love songs, whatever. So music is a great tool.

Cheryl Fischer 28:08

And so you're saying basically those types of activities, we potentially are getting the same benefits as if we sat still and and tried to meditate for however long.

Lauri Stern 28:20

Yeah. I mean, raise your hand if you've gotten in your car and you get to the store and you have no earthly idea how you got there.

Cheryl Fischer 28:27

Right? Absolutely.

Lauri Stern 28:29

You you pretty much meditated on your way to the store because you were mindless. Unfortunately, because you should have paid attention to driving. But that's what meditation does. You know, so anybody out there who doesn't think they can meditate, if you've gotten to where you're going and you don't know how you got there, you kind of just did a little medit of a meditation. I like that. In my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. Just give yourself a break. You'd be like, oh yeah, I meditated. I don't know how I got here, but boy, I feel better.

Cheryl Fischer 29:02

I know. I hope I followed all the traffic laws because I have no idea.

Lauri Stern 29:06

No police cars behind me. I must have been okay. Yeah. Happens to everyone. Laughter. I mean, laughter and joy, right? Spending time, and this is so huge. Joy. Oh, you know, this is why I cultivate it. This is why I believe in it. It's a birthright just like love. And we forget we deserve to experience joy, especially when we're busy and especially when we're in midlife, we're having a hormonal problem, whatever it is. Yeah. If you can just again get in some sort of present moment where you are noticing what is bringing you joy, a flower, a bug, a smell in the air, something you like about yourself, that raises your vibration. And so meditation is a tool that's wonderful because it does raise your vibration from murkiness to clarity and expansion, but just on its own. It's nothing you have to try to do. But if you find it difficult, then exercise your muscle of love, joy, laughter, because that will also put your mind in a different state.

Cheryl Fischer 30:18

I love that. And I will link in the show notes an episode I did last year uh with a laughter yoga teacher. And it was fascinating. And she was saying, even if you're forcing yourself to laugh, ha ha ha ha, it's still, it still has the same benefits, which is really interesting. So I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah.

Lauri Stern 30:41

Yeah. It's it's also a Snapple fact. I bring this up in class uh and with clients a lot. If you're member of Snapple, you'd unscrew the lid and there's no snapple. So the one that stuck with me is it takes more muscles to frown than to smile. So why are you working so hard?

Cheryl Fischer 30:57

Oh.

Lauri Stern 30:58

And when you smile, whether you mean it or not, just like you said with laughter, your body thinks you're happy. Absolutely true. Try it. Yes.

Cheryl Fischer 31:08

Yes. Absolutely true. And I love the idea of walking around and just kind of smiling at people, as long as it's not a scenario where it's going to be too wacky to do that. I love the idea that maybe that starts spreading it. Maybe they'll smile at someone else. Exactly. This is fascinating. Tell us where can people find you or learn more about what you do?

Lauri Stern 31:31

Okay. Well, first of all, thank you again for having me. And I hope this was helpful. And I am Lauri Stern from Custom Designed Wellness. So that's the name of my website customdesigned wellness.com. And you can go ahead over there. There is a free energetic assessment that you can just check in with maybe where you are energetically, whether you understand chakras or not. I understand you and speak in the language that you will understand. So I speak the woo language and I also speak very factual and practical language. I am on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, and my podcast is called The Real and the Woo Podcast with Lauri Stern. Perfect.

Cheryl Fischer 32:11

Thank you.

You Matter Grounding And Next Steps

Cheryl Fischer 32:12

And so the last thing that I always ask, because I know that everybody's listening to podcasts while they're walking, doing laundry, washing the dishes, whatever. And we can't remember everything at the time. And one tip, of course, is to save the episode so you can go listen later. But what's what's one thing that you really want somebody who is listening to this episode to remember, or maybe one tip to help them kind of get started with meditating?

Lauri Stern 32:43

My mission in the world is to help women especially understand they matter. So my hashtag is you matter. I have a bracelet that says you matter. And if I can help one person matter, it's just what you said earlier. Then it's like Fabriger Organics. Then she will tell two friends they matter, and so on and so on and so on. So when we ourselves understand we have every right to be on this planet in the skin we're in, for all of our wonderful parts and all the what the fucks that come up along the way, full stop. You matter. And then for anybody who's interested in getting in touch with mattering more through a meditation practice, take off your shoes, go stand in the grass. Earthing and grounding is such a profound way to connect and reset your nervous system just by standing there or sitting in the grass, laying in the grass. You can take some deep breaths, you can put some music on, and I promise you you'll feel better. Andor just find a way to meditate and practice a bunch of different kinds. Like I said, it's like a menu. And some days you're gonna want an appetizer. Some days you're gonna want a full course. The other day I had a 55-minute meditation. It felt like 20 minutes. I don't know that I've ever meditated that long. I was like, wow, right? Sometimes five minutes feels like an hour. So just have fun with it. Try a bunch of things, journal what comes up. And first thing I'd love you to put on the page is I matter. You know, hi, my name's Lauri. I matter and see how that feels because that's the first indication that you have some work to do inside. If you can't even really believe and say and look yourself in the mirror, I matter, please reach out to me because I've got you, I've seen you, I've been you, and you deserve to matter.

Cheryl Fischer 34:35

I love that. And you know, at this phase of life, there's so many things going on that potentially can be hard. At the very least, so many changes happening. And it's really important that we don't lose ourselves in that. I agree. Well, thank you, Lori. Well, thank you so much for having me. You matter. I matter. You matter. Wow. Lauri hit it on the head with that because doesn't it feel sometimes like we need to take care of everyone else and we forget that we matter. Now that doesn't always mean we get to always come first, of course, but we matter in the difference we're making for other people as well. We matter in all those different ways. I find that to be such an empowering phrase, and I very much appreciate that that's our one thing to remember. So I would love to hear if you start meditating a little bit more often and whether you see any change in your

Host Wrap And Share Request

Cheryl Fischer 35:44

ability to kind of take a deep breath throughout the day, your ability to calm yourself, your ability to focus and stay on task. So find me on social media, cherylpfischer Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever. Send me a message and tell me how it's going. I would love to hear from you. And then if you found this episode to be useful, send it over to a friend. Let them know that they might enjoy it. Or post it on your stories or post it on your socials and let women know that this might be helpful for them, and that is amazing. And of course, in the meantime, keep remembering, midlife is your time to take just a little bit better care of yourself. On the inside, that's mind, mindset, meditation, if you will, and on the outside, healthy habits take care of your body. Just a little bit better. Makes a big difference.