This episode is on the art of the empty cup in many ways. We begin with the breath. So many times we're told to BREATHE! This may be advice that may be causing you more distress. The true way is to NOT TAKE the breath, but ALLOW the breath. This "allowing" works not only with the art of breath, but the art of friendship, and the art of life and creating a happy and fulfilling life.   Baby Step - Allowing for Emptiness to Fill the Cup [00:00:00] Fawn: Welcome back to our friendly world. Hi everyone. Welcome back. Bonjour! Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Remember we used to go through the whole spiel when we first started recording. Anyway. Hi everyone. Welcome back. We have a baby-step for you today, a short, quick one. You ready? A baby step towards a better friendship, a better society. Are you ready? Okay, it's funny. How, um, I'm just going to get into it. All right. Here it is. Are you ready? Ready? Ready? Here it is. Don't take the breath. Allow the breath. It's interesting. How things come? I was so turned off by the whole yoga world. I was teaching it. I was teaching yoga. I was so done with the environment and the white fragility, I saw that I just, I had to be away from that group, but yoga has been so coming back into my life and I know that I'm going to be teaching again on a massive scale. I've been getting these messages, this one, guess where the message came from. I'll just tell you. You'll never guess it. Well, first of all, I want to, okay. I'll tell you for us where it came from, it came from The Society of Children's Book Authors. They're called SC BWI society of children's book authors. There was an author that was speaking. Her name is Meg Fleming, so lovely. So she was saying that someone was telling her this. It was beautifully woven into the lesson of the day, talking about writing children's books, but that was the message. Don't take the breath, allow the breath. I'm going to get into that in just a second, but I want to say it's really interesting how artists and artists and by artists, I mean, I include the whole family painters, writers, singers musicians, photographers, you know, the whole crew. [00:02:10] Matt: Right. I thought you actually meant our family, which is apropos as well. [00:02:14] Fawn: It's all family, but yeah. one of the classes I was taking with Vanessa, Vanessa Brentley-Newton, who is a beautiful friend of our show, a beautiful friend in our family, one of the classes I took with her one day. She was saying, you know, like when you draw, sometimes you can get really tense holding the pen or the pencil or the tool in your hand. Right. And sometimes it's even hard to draw a straight line because you're so intent on perfection or whatever you get so tight. And I remember her saying specifically, and she's she spoke as a true yoga teacher. She said, remember to breathe when you're drawing. And I thought that was so perfect because in moments like that, in moments where you're trying to achieve perfection, whatever perfection is for you, which is great, which is a great thing to do. We tend to hold our breath. Like we just hold everything and you just gotta go with the flow. You have to breathe in to it. And that's just such beautiful advice. Thank you, Vanessa. And thank you, Meg Fleming. Don't take the breath. Don't take it. Allow the breath. You know, whenever you get into stressful situations, you always hear people say breathe, but if you're already holding your breath, if you're holding so much in already, to take another breath, I mean, it's like, you're a balloon that's about to pop. Like I can't take another breath. So you have to be mindful of that, mind that and realize I have to let it out. So let it out. Be empty. Get that out of you and experience the emptiness, so the new can come in. It is really beautiful. And if you think about it, there's so many aspects to it, like to heal, you have to exhale first. "Take a deep breath," continues the fight or flight mechanism. But to exhale what is there and allow the clear breath to come in; that is key to a reset that really needs to happen. So Baby step for today, make sure you exhale. If you think about it, it works in martial arts. And no one actually taught me this, but I figured it out. But didn't you find? Well, there was no hitting at your school, Matt, but like when I would get a punch in the gut, I instinctively knew to exhale at that moment. When you're getting a gut punch and you exhale, it doesn't affect you. But if you're taking a breath while you're getting punched, you you're just you're on the ground. [00:04:56] Matt: Babe breathing is so important, certainly in martial arts, in life, in everything. Obviously, if you don't breathe, you've got problems, but literally, there are styles of martial arts that have you do a ferocious exhale as you strike. If you were to do Japanese archery, which is called Kyudo, even your breath, every motion, every breath is factored in. And it's like, I want to say you shoot the arrow, quote unquote in between breaths, but you don't hold your breath to make that happen. It happens naturally in between breaths. So, yeah, there you go. [00:05:36] Fawn: And you may be thinking, what does this have to do with friendship? Right. Also works with people with friends, allow yourself to be empty, allow yourself to feel lonely, allow for that total nothingness of having no one in your circle. Don't just have anyone, just anyone in your beautiful circle. Be choosy. It's okay to be empty. It's okay to be without. It's like when I was a kid, I had older friends and one of them said to me, life is like a garden. And your friendships are like a garden. You have to constantly weed it. (Matt remarks with a noise that conveys that he thinks that was a hectic thing to say) I have told you this before, and it sounds terrible. And that was my reaction. I was like, that's terrible. First of all, weeds are good. You know what I mean? They have medicinal value everything has value. So, the thought of just plucking your garden for you to have it look a certain way, to me was like completely disrespectful, but it is important for certain things to thrive, to separate one plant from another cause one plant can overtake another one and choke it to death. [00:06:55] Matt: Absolutely. I, sorry. I was just thinking about the scotch broom. [00:06:58] Fawn: Uh, so in Washington state, There was a season where these beautiful yellow flowers would pop up everywhere. They were beautiful, bright, yellow. And we thought they were like, wow, beautiful flowers. But once we went into the community, we realized that there was a whole fleet of people that were in charge of getting rid of this, this flower, which is, which was called Scotch broom. It came from Scotland. Right, honey, is that right? [00:07:27] Matt: Legend. Has it. Uh, Scotsman moved to the Pacific Northwest and missed the scotch broom that would bloom in Scotland. And so he imported some. And then they kind of started taking over. [00:07:40] Fawn: They take over guys. And so, [00:07:43] Matt: so you see them by the side of the road because the seeds get kicked up by cars and moved down the road. So [00:07:48] Fawn: I always thought it was beautiful, much like mint, like people always say, oh my goodness, do not put mint on the ground. Well, I would put mint in the ground. For anyone out there, who's a total green thumb person, please, can you reach out to me because I want to learn. For years, most of my life of wanted to have a green thumb. So I planted and it doesn't work by the way. Not yet. So I planted like lots of mint because I'm Persian and I want mint. Like, I can have a mint sandwich. I can't get enough mint. I can't [00:08:21] Matt: yeah.It's not about putting it in your mint Julep, It's about putting it on all kinds of stuff. [00:08:25] Fawn: Much like rosewater, watermelon. I can't get enough of this stuff. Right. And I wish I could grow my own. So I would try to spread mint and it wouldn't spread (Laughter from Matt and Fawn) Remember that day. We tried to plant sunflowers because, because those people came in to get rid of the scotch broom. So they sprayed all these nasty chemicals on our property. Our property was on the edge of a stream. And I was so angry with these people. I was yelling. I'm like, how dare you come onto our property and spread poison. Like, this is not okay for the environment. It's not okay with me. I was so upset. So I thought of Chernobyl and I remembered how they would plant sunflowers. Right. So I'm like, honey, let's just go plant some sunflowers, like a lot of them. And we spent the whole afternoon planting meticulously the sunflower seeds, and we were so tired. We were newly. [00:09:26] Matt: Homeowners? [00:09:27] Fawn: No, we were newly. What do you call it? Newly parents. [00:09:30] Matt: Oh my goodness. Yes, we had that parental exhaustion. [00:09:32] Fawn: Right? So yeah, we were exhausted to begin with, but we took the whole day to plant these sunflower seeds and we were done. We padded the earth. We said, thank you. We were like, oh, yay. We're going to have a field. We're going to have our own Tuscany over here. Right. And then we went inside. And we had no curtains. We, we like to have a beautiful view. We were in the forest. So all of a sudden we noticed all this commotion outside and all these birds were flying around and I'm like, oh, that's so nice. And then months, and months, and months later, I'm like, what happened to the sunflowers? Where are they? Is it like, is it like the apple tree or the pear tree that takes maybe three years for it to bloom. I thought maybe it has like some sort of cycle I don't understand. When we put it together months later, we're like all those birds we saw, came to eat those seeds. They were all watching us plant them, [00:10:33] Matt: They all watched us plant plant. [00:10:34] Fawn: So anyway, I have totally digressed once before we talking about planting, weeding your garden, you know, it's okay. It's okay to be empty. It's actually quite necessary. And [00:10:48] Matt: let's, let's be careful with that. "It's okay to be empty," makes it sound like it's okay to be, not necessarily understanding who you are, where you are and where you're at and where you're going, which is altogether different, because empty has a certain negative connotation to it; at least to me. [00:11:10] Fawn: Well, I think that it's also good to realize you don't know where you are. You don't know who you are as long as you become aware of that and start asking yourself or start noticing that you are in that state is when you're actually coming out of it. [00:11:25] Matt: Correct. [00:11:25] Fawn: So I think it's a good thing, but I think it's really important to release everything out of you, so that way you can get filled up and you don't take the breath, you allow for it to come in. Because when you take everything out, like when you completely exhale, your body naturally absorbs the breath. It's like a water getting filled up in a cup, right. It just, all of a sudden starts flowing in and it knows where to go. The water always finds its way. And so same with life and same with friends. It's good to at times, have a clear slate and be quiet. It's good to, if you talk about other relationships, it's good to be single. It's good to be in your own company. It's good to be quiet and not speak for a while. All that stuff is really important because once you get there, you know, they, I never understood the term until recently, you know how they say nature abhors a vacuum. I never understood that. I didn't, I seriously didn't understand what it was saying, but it's true. Like water goes where it knows where to go, right? So when you have empty space, it will be filled. And when you're conscious of that, it will be filled with what you want because as long as you focus on what you want or what is best for you; for your highest good, they say, it will flow in. So that, that is the baby step for today. Stop taking the breath. Don't take. Allow, and be okay. Know that it's beyond OK to empty it out and allow for things to flow [00:13:09] Matt: sounds good to me [00:13:10] Fawn: and doing that. You know, when you take a breath, I just want to reiterate, reiterate that when you take breaths, there are certain I've been to breath workshops where you hyperventilate on purpose. [00:13:24] Matt: Oh, dear. [00:13:24] Fawn: It's horrible. It's horrible on so many levels. Like I felt like I was going to pass out, so I was scared, but what happens to people, What happened to other people around me actually terrified me because I don't know if I ever told you guys this story, but I went to a breath workshop where they were doing this particular breath of like constant exhales, but really fast. So hyperventilation kind of. And so throughout this whole week, there was this one woman that was a total Yogi. And she seems so peaceful and so together. And I always tried to say hello to her and she would ignore me. Like I'm like, okay, all right. Maybe she just, maybe she thinks I'm some crazy person and she doesn't want my vibe around her because she's so peaceful. I don't know, but I thought maybe I'm not her cup of tea. I didn't realize that well, maybe she has her own problems or her own pain. Right. But anyway, she always walked around with such, dignity. I don't know how to explain it. She had this vibe about her. Like she even dare I say, she seemed like she was better than, you know, she carried around that attitude. I am above you. I don't know. And she was also teaching yoga classes everyday to our group. Sorry, my phone, um, she always was teaching. She was always teaching yoga classes. And so anyway, total Yogi. And so one day when we were doing this major breath workout, she, we were all laying down on the floor. [00:15:01] Matt: So you're doing a major breath workout and you were all laying down on the floor. [00:15:05] Fawn: And so, you know, I'm freaking out because I'm like, I can't breathe now. Like all of this breath is taking my breath away. Like how much longer? It was painful. And then things got heightened. Next to me was this woman that I'm telling you about. And she started howling with pain and screaming and crying. [00:15:29] Matt: Wow. That sucks. [00:15:31] Fawn: She took away my mellow, then I was starting to get, cause after all that breath work, I'm like this better be good for something, because this is not okay with me. So I'm like, I'm sure that there's a happy ending. Like I'm sure that there's going to be a moment of calm because why are they making us do this? So I was like, okay, I think I can achieve some sort of peace because I'm getting out all the toxins out of my body or something. Right. But no, this lady started screaming bloody murder. Like she was being tortured and you know, you don't mean like it's like being a mom and hearing your baby cry. You can't take it. Like you want to help and you want to make sure your baby's okay. When you hear someone. When I hear someone crying like that, that's why I can't watch most movies. That's why I can only watch a romantic comedy. I can't hear or see certain things. 'cause then I I'm not okay. I can't just see something and just leave it at that and be non emotional about it. Right. You know, I can't distance myself from it. So anyway, she. She was not okay. Like screaming, mad. It was, it was making me shake. Like I was no longer in this workshop. I was right now sitting up. Everyone else is fine. [00:16:48] Matt: You're in survival mode. [00:16:50] Fawn: Everyone else was still lying down and doing their breath work. Now I'm sitting up staring at her like scared, like are what what's happening, you know, can we do I need to call 9 1, 1 what is happening? Right. And, um, People coming to help her, the people that worked in the workshop, like the teachers. [00:17:09] Matt: That's good. [00:17:10] Fawn: Yeah. But it went on forever. I can't, why am I telling you this story? I totally forgot .It had something to do with breathwork but now I don't remember. [00:17:21] Matt: You guys were hyperventilating and attempt to get to a different state. Like there was a woman who was, seemed so in control and. Then she freaked out. [00:17:33] Fawn: I seriously don't remember what I was trying to tell you, but I think what led me down this path was talking about, [00:17:40] Matt: if you start doing breath work and start screaming, maybe you should stop doing it. [00:17:43] Fawn: No, no. I think she needed to get it out because it was suppressed. You know what I mean? I was stuck in her body. She needs to get it out. I understand. Um, but so. I'm just trying to say it is what helps you get out of survival mode when you, oh, this is why, what I was trying to tell you. Okay. When you breathe fast like that, when you're constantly taking in breath, it actually puts you in a state of fight or flight. [00:18:08] Matt: I can see that, [00:18:08] Fawn: You need to have a controlled exhale. It's really important. And I think we put too much emphasis on taking the breath take, take. Release. Give, let it go. That's the baby step today. And once again, going back to friendship, allow for that space. Space is good and space will not be empty forever. Once again, it's the natural thing for things to fill up. A body of water that has gone dry, eventually it will rain and you'll have water again. That's the baby step for today? [00:18:48] Matt: Sounds good. As well As now, perhaps I take us in a completely different place, but in my mind, there is a proverb that involves a student going to a master and saying, "yes, I've learned, I've read all of Confucius, I..." that listing all of his accomplishments and the masters, like, would you like some tea? And the student says, yes. So the master pours the tea and he doesn't stop pouring it. And he doesn't stop pouring it. And it overflows the cup. And the student is like, what are you doing? You're spilling the tea. The cup is too full. And the master says it is your mind that is too full. Empty your cup. [00:19:30] Fawn: Nice honey, see, I love it. When you do stuff like that. Good job. [00:19:36] Matt: I'm going to get a pat on the head. [00:19:40] Fawn: Thank you. Well, that's all. Okay. He wants me to pat him on the head baby. All right, everyone love you so much. Make sure you go to our website. We have a gift for you there. It is a free workbook. I'm writing a book on the Ikigai of friendship. I'm writing several books. And they'll be coming out soon, but the workbook is out and it's free. So make sure you go to our friendly world podcast.com and sign up for our email list. And I don't email you often actually. But you will get the book when you click, when you sign up, when you sign up, it's called the "Ikigai of Friendship - The Formula" on how to have true joy, true friendship and value in your life. I want to also shout out to everyone who is listening. Thank you so much. Thank you for this beautiful community. Thank you for helping us grow our friendship circle. We love you so much. We'll talk to you soon. And in between talking, reach out to me, if you need. If you need Matt, we're here. Just email us. Thank you. Love you. Be well, bye.