Crafting Your Life

Tonya Dawn Recla:

Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the Science of Superpowers. I’m so delighted that you’ve chosen to join us again. We love you here. We love the company. We love the fact that you’re listening and you’re sharing and you’re choosing hope, choosing bigger conversations, choosing connection, choosing love, choosing to remember that things aren’t always what they appear. And I get it. I get it. For some of you, they’ve appeared crappy lately. I understand, and it’s hard to see beyond that at times, to see past the fear that invokes the constriction in the body. It’s easy to get sucked into other people’s fear, right?

 That’s why we talk about superpowers, and what you’re predisposed to, and be careful whose thoughts you’re thinking and whose emotions you’re feeling. And just remember that you always have mechanisms to pull yourself up out of the murk and mire and connect into that frequency of love, not bypassing what’s happening, but allowing yourself to get a different perspective on it and really integrate it and work through it and move it through you in a way that’s actually helpful and doesn’t create further restrictions or programs or traumas that you have to go back and re-imagine later, right?

 The work isn’t just in the past, right? We also have to be willing to really gauge our in-the-moment behaviors and choices, and by choosing to listen to the network, to witness love and consideration in big conversations and realness and transparency and how we present that here. And then remember that no matter what conversations are happening around you, there are other conversations going on that are filled with hope and filled with love. And from that vantage point, I got to tell you, things look really, really good folks. We are seeing really amazing movement and creative advances in all kinds of arenas. And if you simply can get that vantage point and open your eyes to it, it invites you in, as well. Doesn’t mean you’re going to get to skip over any of the growth or the pieces that might be frictioning you right now, sandpapering you a little bit, but it’s there, too.

 And so that’s the space that we’re inviting you into now. And we appreciate the fact that you joined us here. And today, we’re so excited to bring you another amazing, amazing guest. We’re talking today, all about this topic that’s so near and dear to my heart, crafting your life. And this idea, what does it look like to go against the grain, to swim upstream, to dance to your own beat? We dance around all of those phrases, and ultimately what we experienced in this amazing flow space is yours, right? You’re really the only one having this journey that you’re having, and other people are playing their part in your journey, but they’re also the lead actors in their own journey. And so how we meet up with each other and where we synergize is wholly by our connections and by our willingness to look at each other through love first and see each other as an aspect of ourselves.

 And in that, we get this beautiful, miraculous existence that we get to share together. Not always unicorns and rainbows, right? Let’s be clear. But it is an opportunity to have a really rich and robust and amazingly, phenomenal existence. Our guest today, Ginni Saraswati is the perfect person to chat with about this from many different perspectives and her experiences of just willingly stepping into spaces that weren’t necessarily innate to who she is and being able to stand in them as herself and say, “Wait, wait, wait. This doesn’t feel right. This isn’t quite how I see things.”

Certainly, I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but I know that so many of you have had similar experiences with looking around, going, “But this isn’t true for me. I get that it’s real. I see that it’s real around me, but it just doesn’t feel true.” And so I’m really excited to have that conversation today and just aluminate for all of us the reminder that we get to be in choice in every moment about how we’re looking at things. And so please join me in welcoming Ginni to the show. Welcome so much. And thank you for joining us today.

Ginni Saraswati:

That would be a really cool power to have, but I guess energetically, we can also put invisibility cloaks on the right when we want to trick ourselves or that sort of thing.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

That’s right.

Ginni Saraswati:

But I would guess my superpower is, I think for me, I can transmute most things. Most things, I’m not saying all things. I can transmute most things into a lesson, into a teaching, and into something that is to me, I guess, a guiding post for growth. I think that is my superpower. And I think people find that extremely annoying or extremely refreshing. I don’t think people ever have a balanced or a neutral feeling on that. It either annoys the hell out of people or people are so appreciative of that superpower.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

And I think it depends on the moment too. Yeah. It doesn’t make me really popular at cocktail parties. Like, I’m not going to lie. It’s like, “We don’t really want that right now.”

Ginni Saraswati:

And some people are, “Can’t I just vent for like half an hour with you providing a solution or a lesson or a teaching about this?” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” So, you know the timing.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

I suppose. Well, it became really refreshing talking about crafting your life and sort of swimming upstream when I remember very clearly from a communication standpoint when I chose to face the aspect that was responding to other people’s requests that I co-sign into that frequency. And that was where I really had to draw the line because I couldn’t continue on with my work if I was allowing anything about who I am, what I was saying, or what I represent to give them any sort of reflection that said, “It’s a good idea to stay small.”

 And so I do remember a lot of conversations, and certainly, we listen, and I can completely understand it, just listening is helpful, and being okay saying, “I understand that that’s how you see things, but I’m not going to add to your hell loop that you’ve created. I’m not going to continue to reinforce the fact that you should stay there and suffer. I am going to shine a light out.” And if that’s something that’s not desirable, then it does create an opportunity for people to say, “Just no thank you.” But for you to really be able to stand clear in your strength and say, “And I’m no longer going to agree to things that I don’t agree to.”

 And I do think that that was sort of a pandemic-powered experience for a lot of people, right? We see a lot of strife in even just the vaccine conversation or social justice conversations. Really a big difference between the perspective of the world happens to me versus I feel like I have some sort of creative input into the world. And I think that those are really disparate conversations, so when you’re talking about that superpower, being able to shine that light, it does bring up a lot of questions about the receptivity and people’s readiness and everything else. And I know so many of you who listen are in that quandary of how do you walk your path and be a teacher of certain things when you meet up with that resistance? And did you have that experience, as well?

Ginni Saraswati:

Absolutely. So is a question, Tonya, the experience around the pandemic, or showing up as you and staying as you, even though you’re met with different responses or receptivity?

Tonya Dawn Recla:

I think yes is the answer. I think it’s purposely huge and big and vague. And so I think however you’re guided to respond.

Ginni Saraswati:

Yeah. I think for me, one thing I’ve learned, you mentioned the vaccine conversation and the pandemic, being indoors, having our freedoms restricted. Freedom’s something for me that’s one of my biggest values. It’s something that I value and cherish and I’ve built my entire company around the value of freedom. And for me, with the pandemic, when we’re told, “You can’t do this. You can’t go here. You can’t travel here. If you do travel here, this is what you have to do.” When you have that freedom taken away, I think people don’t realize how suffocating that can be energetically, spiritually, connection-wise, with anything really. It is literally like you have to go indoors or inside and literally go within, and whatever crap that you’re facing, excuse the French, you’ve got to look at it.

 You can’t run away to another country. I remember during the pandemic, I was processing a breakup. I moved to New York City because I fell in love with the city. And then I fell in love with a New Yorker. That four-year relationship had ended. And I had no choice but to sit with that heaviness and that grief. If this was not a pandemic year, I probably would have got on a plane, traveled somewhere, and dealt with it through some form of escapism or expansion in a different way. But this was a different level of processing that I was forced to go through.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

Interesting.

Ginni Saraswati:

I had to sit with it. And this is what you were talking about, circling back to showing up as who you are. My superpower, transmuting that into a lesson, was a lesson. It’s like, “Ginni, you can’t do anything or process this or start a business or do some high achiever BS to overcome this. You actually have to sit with it, look at it, and deal with it because this is going to keep coming up otherwise. So I know some people are either going to be people who will complain about something or vent about something. It’s two very different things, right? When you vent about something, get it out and it’s done, right? You just need to get it out of your system, and it’s done. Complaining is this cycle of venting and venting and venting, and the cycle becomes a spiral. So there are two very different spaces that you’re in, right?

Ginni Saraswati:

Because when you’re venting, you can hold space for someone who vents because they just want to let it out. But if you’re venting about the same thing over and over and there’s no change, that becomes complaining. So for me, from the other end of what I said about my superpower of, “Okay, I can transmute most things into a teaching or a lesson,” when someone is venting, you know to be like, “Okay, they’re just venting. They’re letting this out.” And eventually, they will find the lesson, the teaching, the meaning, or the solution themselves. But the complainer is a one that I constantly struggle with because that also rubs up against, like, what you said, “Showing up as who I am,” but also, how do I put in boundaries so my energy or I guess the way that I want to expand, isn’t affected. That has been a challenge, obviously, post-pandemic and during the pandemic. I guess. I don’t think this pandemic’s specific, Tonya.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

No, I just think it got a little fuel thrown on it, was what it felt like. It just amped it up a little bit. This is beautiful. So we’re going to take a quick break. We’re talking today about crafting your life, and I love, Ginni, what you were talking about with this idea of whether we’re complaining, whether we’re venting, knowing how to dispel your discomfort, I think, is really, really important. So we’ll touch on that when we come back from this break. Ginni, before we go, where can people go to find out more about you?

Ginni Saraswati:

Ah, head on over to ginnimedia.com, and you can contact me, find my socials, but yet, that’s the place to say hello.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

Beautiful. And of course, with our folks, we invite you into even more conversations with us through the Superpower Universe Plus Membership. You can join our community call each month, but you also get access to the masterclasses, our book releases, and all kinds of fun stuff. We know many of you are enjoying that. And we thank you. Share it with a friend. Bring them in where they can connect, and they can meet other people. And they can vent, right, where they can talk about things that are challenging them right now. And mostly where you can feel that connection and that hope and evolve yourself. And so we invite you to join us there. Right now though, stay with us, and we will be right back after this break, talking all about crafting your life. Don’t go anywhere.

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