MELODY GODFRED ON THE PLAYGROUND PODCAST

In this episode Shanila Sattar of The Playground Podcast and Melody Godfred dive deep into the world of self-love and self-care, with an angle on motherhood. What does it mean to learn to take care of yourselves through different seasons? How does self love change and what does it do to our authenticity? How can we learn to hear and honor your intuition through different seasons of self-love?

Self Love Philosopher Melody Godfred is an entrepreneur and author who is passionate about empowering women to choose themselves through daily acts of self-love and self-care. After starting her career as a litigation attorney, Melody shifted into entrepreneurship, first founding career development company Write In Color and then self love movement, Fred and Far, through which she created the Self Love Pinky Ring, a globally recognized symbol of self-empowerment. She is the author of three books, including her 2020 release, Self Love Poetry for Thinkers and Feelers, which was a #1 Amazon new release and remains a bestseller.

Shanila: You have this book out, you have three books out, you have a self love pinky ring. It says to me you have a self-love messaging going on over here. I would love to hear your own journey into self-love and what that actually means for you.

Melody: I didn't even think about self-love until I was in my mid-30s. I think growing up, for me, you didn't really think about yourself. I mean, it was all about thinking about yourself too much is selfish. Instead, think about other people, take care of them and also achieve, achieve, achieve because I'm child of immigrants. I'm an immigrant myself. I came to this country when I was a year old and we had to hustle to make a life.

There wasn't a big emphasis on, "Slow down and be in the moment and get to know yourself." It was really, "Let's survive." It was like a very fight or flight start to life. That was what carried me through my adolescence and my early adulthood. It was all about, "What can I achieve? How can I prove my worth?" A lot of searching to make my place in the world and conforming with the expectations around me, whether it was social or in school or whatever.

Then I got to the top of this mountain that I had constructed for myself. I reached the peak. I was a lawyer. I was married. I had a house with no picket fence, but I mean the quintessential dream. I had twins. I had these two beautiful baby girls. I was working for myself and I even had a dog and I was not happy. I think it's a really jarring realization, and I get emotional right now. I still feel that in my bones. That feeling of, "How can you have everything you want or you ever wanted not enjoy any of it?"

It was because I was so deeply disconnected from my authentic self and my life was not in alignment with who I was. No moment in my entire existence was devoted in nurturing myself. It was 100% about continuing to climb the mountain and taking care of everyone else and achieving, achieving, achieving. I reached my breaking point and that was really where my self-love journey began.

Shanila: There's so many pieces to resonate with that, especially as you mentioned you're an immigrant. There is this part of you that watches, whether it's your parents or caretakers have this role to play. This survival role. Whether they meant or not, you absorb that energy too. I'm curious, you mentioned that you have twins and that is such a big part of a self-love journey when you are able to demonstrate self-love for yourself. How do you feel that the way that you practice self-love translates onto the kids that you're raising?

Melody: I have three kids now. My daughters are eight and a half and my son is three. It's fascinating because they've been on this journey with me. They've been such an integral part of me learning about myself and deciding how to be an intentional parent and being intentional about how I'm modeling. It really does trickle down in so many ways. For example, we oftentimes talk about how perfection, not only doesn't exist, it's not something we aspire to.

We in this family really focus on what makes you, you. You were born you and you're glorious in that uniqueness. It's not about being perfect. It's not about being like your classmates. It's not about being like your sister. I mean I have twins and there is this immediate habit that people have to just lump them together and be like, "Oh, you're just like your sister." We take a lot of pride in being like, "No, you're two individual people. How do we honor and really embrace that?"

One of my daughters is an artist. We nurture that in her. She plays the piano, she sings, she makes art, she plans these festive celebrations with flowers and handmade artwork for every person. My other daughter is more in her physical body. She's a rock climber, a rollerblader, a bike rider. My husband in quarantine really took it upon himself to explore all of that with her and taught her how to do things that are just astounding. Like to watch this eight-year-old girl climb 50 feet up a mountain. My other daughter would never do that.

Being in tune with myself and being someone who really understands how important it is to nurture someone's authenticity, I've never lumped them together and been like, "You both have to climb that mountain because it's more convenient for me to only have one activity." It is hard as a mother sometimes to make space for who they are, individually. Three kids is not a joke. No one warns you how much work it is to be a parent and a working parent at that. It's really the only way in my opinion is to honor the individuals that they are because they are born who they are.

My job as a parent is just to help them nurture themselves and to nurture them and to create an environment that space for their authentic selves. It's beautiful because when they saw that I write self-love poetry, they started writing self-love poetry, and they model it. When they saw that I created a self love pinky ring. They started making little self-love products. They made a self-love perfume, and they want to help me ideate. I always have trouble with that word. They want to help me and be part of this beautiful community that I've cultivated.

If you go on my Instagram, you'll see I've stolen some of my best material from them because they are so pure and they are so free of a lot of the limiting beliefs and thinking, and constructs in society that dampen authentic creativity. They're not susceptible to that just yet. When they say something, it resonates so deeply and so beautifully that I immediately have to write it down and share it with the community, because that is what it's all about. How can we all strip away the years of conditioning, the dust of shame and regret and fear to get back to who we were underneath all of that. My kids are a constant reminder of how possible that is to be purely ourselves and at home with ourselves.

Shanila: Beautiful. It just reminds me of, when we're on our self-healing journey or on our self-love journey, it's a practice of remembering who we were rather than adding to ourselves. It's about doing less about that. When we look at kids and I often talk on the podcast all about my little nephew. I just made a move to Austin, Texas, because I'm a brand-new auntie and I have auntie duties and he's like 10 minutes away from me.

You watch a new human being, a new human soul come into this world where they're not jaded or tainted or they don't have the systems of thoughts and the processes. They don't have the limitations and the fear. That's the part where I feel that us as adults or young adults and whatever process we're in we have that fear that isn't innate, but is built through life. Is built through experiences. You mentioned earlier, right? You were a litigation attorney. You were in the space of law and doing your thing there. How do you feel that when you left that world, when you shifted from that world into the space of self-love, what were you coming home to? What were you leaving behind and what kind of fears did you have in that process?

Again, what you say, like speaking of fear, I was fearful. I was fearful that this industry that I was so passionate about was going to fall apart. Again, immigrant family, there is such an emphasis placed on higher education, which is an amazing thing. I mean, both of my parents only have high school degrees. For me to have gone to college, I'm a first-generation college graduate. Then for me to have the opportunity to continue my education, it felt like a no brainer for my family. They're like, "Go to law school. You're smart. You're a great writer. You'll do great." They were right. I did great. The ego driven part of me was having a field day because I did--

Shanila: Success.

Melody: Yes, success. I got into a great school and I was cum laude, top of my class, top 10%. I got a job on campus interviews at a flashy firm. It really was like the dream situation. Again, I got there, and I was doing the work and I was being recognized and praised, but a funny thing happened which is my body caught up with me. Your ego has all kinds of ideas of who you are and what you should be doing, but your body will always keep it real. What happened to me is, after about six months, every night, I started hallucinating. In the space between waking and sleeping, I would see spiders on my pillow, I would see people in my bedroom and it was getting worse and worse and worse.

I realized it was because there was this utter disconnect between my life's work, which is our careers. We spend the majority of our time at work. There is this disconnect between what I was doing and who I was, and who I am is a creative collaborator, and in law, you're neither creative nor collaborative especially in litigation. It's all about having a winner and a loser and following the law and not getting too creative with it. I physically could not continue down that path.

I also looked at the people ahead of me in line and I thought to myself, "Okay, this is my first year. Let's see. What does someone look like who's at the 2-year mark or the 5-year mark or the 10-year mark or the 30-year mark? Do I aspire to be any of those people especially the women? Is this how I want to make my imprint on the world?" The answer was no. It was very scary especially telling my parents who had invested so much in me. I was like, "I just physically cannot do this. I'm going to end up in an insane asylum." It was just a bad situation.

I went to my hiring manager and I told him I needed to leave and I knew I needed an excuse to help him understand. I said, "I'm leaving to write a book. I've spent my whole life dreaming of writing a book," which was true, and that, "It's now or never. If I don't get out now, the golden handcuffs are too real. There's too much here. The salary, the prestige, the security. If I don't leave now, I'll never leave." That's what I did.

Let me tell you, the hallucination stopped the very first night that I was no longer an attorney. I have learned ever since then that you should always listen to your body because your body will tell you whether it's a ache and your hip, hallucination that keeps you up at night, anxiety that races through your body when you're not in alignment with yourself, even if you want to fool yourself for a while, your body will always catch up with you.

Shanila: I love that you said that, Melody, because we are always getting physiological clues. We have some really obvious stuff, and I'll speak from my own experience of being somebody in research science. I experienced something very similar to you, Melody, where it showed up in my body. I was a generally healthy person of mid-20s, later-20s and I would get panic attacks. My hair was falling out. I was fainting and insomnia and all these different things were manifesting in our bodies.

Honestly, it's really a disservice in our culture where we throw these things under the rug especially for women. I remember going doctors and going to get seen and it was always pushed aside as stress or hormones. This must be your period. It's always let's deal with this later, instead of acknowledging what is the root of these symptoms, what are the root of why these things show up?

There is these intuitive punches. We're getting all these gut punches, but we are not necessarily taught how to listen to that. We're okay when it manifests as illness. We're not okay when it manifests an illness, but we accepted when it manifests as an illness. Where did you feel it in your body? Aside from the hallucinations, where do you find that intuition is speaking to you?

Melody: It's funny. When I wasn't listening to my intuition and I wasn't speaking my truth and speaking is a really big part of it. I was raised in a family where people don't yell, they just separate. If people have a problem, they just-- in Farsi, which is my native language. It's called [foreign language], which means you ice someone out. I'm trying to think of how to put it in English.

You don't talk to them. You separate and you give them the-- it's the silent treatment. That was how I was raised to understand as like, that is how you deal with conflict. The silent treatment. That meant that for 30 years, when I was upset, instead of talking about it, I would swallow it. What happened after years of swallowing it? I developed a thyroid condition, which is called the thyroid nodule, which is literally a growth on your thyroid.

This is something that affects women way more than men and every decade of your life your chances of having it go up and up. You have a 20% chance in your 20s, a 30% chance in your 30s, a 50% chance in your 50s. By the time women are 50 years old, half of them have this thyroid condition. Why? Because we do not speak up for ourselves. We do not speak our truth. We swallow our feelings and bury them in our bodies.

For me, the past five years, since I got diagnosed with this condition, not only have I learned how to actually speak up and feel and process and communicate and connect, I've also had to learn how to advocate for myself in the healthcare system because like you said, you went to the doctor and they were like, "Oh, this is just this or this is just that." There wasn't that deeper digging. My intuitive self knew that there has to be a solution here.

There has to be something more than just, "Oh, sit and wait and live with it," and then eventually have them take your thyroid out, which is what I was being sold. What I have found is, the only way I can hear my intuitive nudges, that gut punched, that just internal knowing that you're talking about is when I stop being so busy. When I strip away this constant need to fill every moment with productivity or destruction. These are the two things that I at least find myself falling into.

I either need to be busy, busy, busy. Checking those emails, doing the work. Or I'm distracted on Instagram or my newsfeed or reading articles and I do not quiet my mind enough to hear this intuition that's dying to give me information and I shut it off. I think that really what the pandemic brought to ahead is it made it a little less hard to be as busy. I wasn't leaving the house.

I was home and I wasn't so interested in reading disheartening news every five minutes. I stopped reading the news as much and even on social media, I tried to part down. What I found is, I have this robust inner dialogue happening and all I need to do is create space for it and it will guide me and it will tell me things that no one could ever tell me. It's always so eerily right.

I think we all have that guide. We've just layered it with productivity, busyness, distraction and then on top of that, add fear, shame, guilt, anger, this obsession with uncertainty, like being so uncomfortable with not knowing exactly how things are going to play out. When you're so obsessed with that, with, "I have to know," the part of you that actually knows can't tell you anything.

Shanila: That's such a lesson of being in the moment too, right? A human condition where we're bound to ruminate about things. We're about to think about things in the past. That is absolutely part of it, but then the bigger part of it is that we're chronic worriers of the future. "What's the outcome? How is it going to be out?" It's like, we've never known. In our life like never anything worked out the exact same way. Something always went up.

Melody: I state that all the time. It's like I've spent my lifetime worrying and the one thing I know for sure is nothing I ever worried about happened. Other things happened. Other things that were maybe even worse than what I worried about happened, but-- Brené Brown talks about this and one of her books. It's called Dress Rehearsing of Tragedy. That's what we do. We have this dress rehearsal of tragedy because we're so consumed at the idea that things are going to go wrong.

We're certain. That we use our creativity and our intuition and all of these things to manifest and construct these terrible outcomes that 99% of the time never even happen. I think recognizing that, "Okay, look, that's not a bad thing. Look how creative you are. Look how powerful your mind is that it can come up with these really disastrous situations, what if we now use that same power, but push it in a new direction? Use that to envision our most beautiful, authentic futures." We are all creators in our minds, we just need to choose what it is we want to create.

Shanila: Yes, and I always think that if we're only worrying, and we haven't prepared for the other side of that, then we're only 50% prepared. What you just said dress rehearsing for the wrong, dress rehearsing for the disaster. It's okay to think about what could happen so that you have time to prepare and do a little bit of that. If you only prepare for that, you've only prepared for 50% of what can happen. In which case, it makes you unprepared. You're not as prepared and perfectionist as you thought because you forgot the other part.

Melody: I learned this lesson in my business. This was a really wonderful learning. When I first created Fred and Far and the Self Love Pinky Ring at the beginning, there were no sales. It was one ring a week. We kept our production really small. I didn't have a bunch of supplies laying around. I certainly didn't have any inventory. Everything was super tiny and minimal. Then all of a sudden, we got an unexpected piece of press that led to hundreds of others of pieces of unexpected press. Then we went from having one order a month to 100 orders in a day.

Do you know what happened? We did not have enough ring boxes. We had to scramble around the world to find more of these very unique ring boxes that we use. We were paying $10 for the packaging, just because we didn't have it. We were not prepared. That has always stayed with me. As a business owner, as a human, as a mother. Leave room for things going very right, right beyond your wildest dreams. Plan for that, prepare for that because it happens.

When that happened to me, I thought, "This is it. This is my once-in-a-lifetime success. I'm never going to get press again, nothing's ever going to happen to me like--" because we're so conditioned to think that it was luck and it could never happen and to play small. Then last year, a poem I wrote went mega-viral all over again. They talked about it on the Today Show, and everyone from Oprah Magazine to Kim Kardashian posted about it. It was this lesson of stop telling yourself, "This can't happen again." Stop telling yourself you got lucky. Stop telling yourself you're so small.

It happened because I've been writing poetry for 20 years of my life and putting it out there over and over and over again. That, for me, is the epitome of what self-love is. It's this daily commitment to honoring yourself. For me, honoring myself is writing. That is what ever since I was a child I was so passionate about. Now as an adult to be able to do it with this awareness that, in doing it, I'm honoring myself, it has changed my whole life. I think we all have that divine purpose and calling that we're born with that thing that makes us us that contribution we are all looking to make the world because we all inherently want to be of service.

I don't believe that we are only here to fend for ourselves and survive. Once you can stop trying to be who you think you are, and you start embracing who you actually are, that's when you can start giving your gifts to the world and that's really what this past year and few years has felt like for me. This, "I'm coming home to myself, I'm going to stop being who I think I should be, I'm going to embrace who I am. I'm going to receive the blessings that come with that," because they do come and not just for me. I've seen it in our community that that moment of, "I'm going to choose myself," always yields a tremendous transformation in life that brings people deep joy and fulfillment.

Shanila: I love that and it's such a lesson in receiving because especially women tend to be these incredible givers. You take on this nurture role, we have expectations to be nurturers or societal assignments to us for being nurturers and you're givers, givers, givers, givers. You're a giver to a fault to a part where it's just detrimental to your health in so many different ways. That part that you mentioned about the thyroid too, oftentimes in the podcast we talk about energy centers in which part of your body, that throat chakra has a high correlation to hyperthyroidism. You'll start to notice that the more that you don't express yourself, the more that you're not even allowed to receive your own truth, the more things are going to start hurting in your body, right?

Melody: I had a very surreal experience at the end of last year. I had a treatment done on my thyroid, where there was a cyst, and they had to drain it. Sorry, TMI, medical stuff. I was awake for the procedure. As they were draining the cyst, I had this out-of-body experience. I had been doing deep breathing to keep myself calm. I had gotten myself into this very heightened state, just through my breath, and they were draining the cyst and it felt someone had had their hands around my neck and they were releasing it.

As they were releasing it, I started crying tears of joy. I was flooded with feelings of happiness, love, and connection. I felt as though all the bitterness and resentment and anger, especially towards a few close people in my life, I felt it just leaving me. It was really an out-of-body experience. I told the doctor. I'm like, "I don't know what you experience with other patients but there were feelings trapped in there. You've freed me from some really deep, unspoken pain."

I think we all have that. We have it in our bodies because we were not taught to own our emotions and process them in real-time. I do this with my kids now. If they get upset, I don't tell them don't cry, I don't say it's okay. I say, "It's okay to have big feelings. Let me know if you want to talk about it." We create space for all the feelings, not just their happiness.

As a result, they are so emotionally intelligent and they can speak to the root of their emotions and their thinking. Even after, there was a big tantrum, there's this immediate moment of clarity after where my eight-year-old daughter will be like, "Mom, I'm sorry, I blew up. I realized that when this happened, I got really hurt about it." She was able to take ownership over her feelings. I hope that that means she's not going to wake up with a thyroid nodule in 30 years, or some other physical representation of her pain because she's not carrying it. She's feeling it, processing it, releasing it. I think if we can teach all kids to do that, our society as a whole shift.

Shanila: Beautiful. That is so related to generational healing. You can probably look at other members of your family who have had similar ailments, whether it's in your throat, your thyroid, or diabetes, that's also in your root chakra, this is in your pancreas, this is in your stomach. There might be energy that's collected in some part of your body. It's really inspiring to hear you, Melody, showing the young people this too, because what I would have done to have these tools a long time ago, when it's like, you can't blame anybody for not knowing what they didn't know, you can't be mad at caretakers and parents and whoever raised you for all of that.

It's like, "Okay, what is your practice going to look in the present?" Everything that you're mentioning is reminding me that self-love isn't just the version of the good. The love and life version of that. There is a whole other side. What we were mentioning about preparing only for the best or preparing only for the worst, you're only ready for 50% of it. Can you lead us through what other parts of self-love, what does that actually encompass? What does that mean?

Melody: I think of self-love as a cycle. It's a journey that you take, and it's cyclical and you keep moving your way through it. I think the first part of it is self-discovery, making the effort to get to know yourself and explore yourself from there is self-care. Once you discover who you are and what your needs are, caring for yourself through daily practice. Once you do that, so you know who you are, you're willing to care for yourself, you start cultivating self-worth, which is when you fill yourself up, instead of seeking external validation or acknowledgment in order to feel like you are worthy, whole human being.

It's your commitment to these things. Self-discovery, self-care, owning your self-worth, that ultimately, is your cycle of self-love. Because for me, self-love is the integration of yourself. It's like you said, it's not about just love and owning your best parts. It's about embracing and integrating all parts of yourself because, for a long time, I felt like I had this duality where I had the good parts that I was really proud of and willing to put on display, and then I had the bad parts that I was so ashamed of that I wouldn't even speak them, or let anybody see or know them. All we end up doing when we compartmentalize ourselves like that is fracture ourselves. Without wholeness, we can't ever feel free or worthy. That is for me self-love. It's this commitment to knowing yourself, being yourself, and caring for yourself each and every day.

Shanila: I bet Self Love Pinky Ring is for that reason to look down and say, "Regardless of what is happening, I am still one person integrated in this experience. I'm not a good person experiencing the good things, and not a bad person experiencing the bad things. I am still this one experiencer."

Melody: Yes. Having that physical reminder is really powerful. I always tell people, I'm like, "Look, I created a ring, like a piece of fine jewelry, because I love jewelry. I love the idea of taking what was traditionally a symbol of commitment to another and owning that for ourselves." Regardless of your place in life, whether you're married or single or young or old, wherever you are, you can make this commitment to yourself and use the ring as a daily reminder of translating that commitment into practice. It doesn't need to be a ring. You can use a paperclip, you can use a favorite coffee mug, you can have a mantra that you put as the lock screen on your phone. I just think that taking this and making it physical has been really powerful, not just for me, but for the thousands of women who join me in making with commitment.

Shanila: I'd love to circle into your love for writing and poetry, especially as you mentioned, even when you were talking about your back in the day lawyer life litigation, your family said, "Oh, you're a good writer." I just want to reflect to you, like that part was already there. That was probably one of the greatest qualities of what created "success" in that version of yourself back then. How did you get into creating your book, especially your Self Love Poetry book, which is number one on Amazon?

Melody: I had a really beautiful experience putting this book together. It is 100 pairs of poems, all on themes related to self-love and the way the book is laid out-- the book is called Self Love Poetry: For Thinkers & Feelers. The 100 pairs of poems, each reflect on one theme. On the left side of every page is a poem that speaks to the left brain. It's short, it packs a punch, it is more analytical. Then on the right side, the poem speaks to feelers. It's more emotional, it's more of a sensory experience. When you read them together, they work together to activate the whole brain experience as a reader. Again, it speaks to that idea of integration.

The reason I use this format is because I've been writing poetry my whole life, and when I decided I want to take some of that and make a book, I was like, "Who's going to buy this book? It doesn't make any sense. Some of the poems are really short. Some of the poems are really long. It doesn't make any sense." I was judging myself, like, "Why would anybody buy a book when the poems aren't cohesive?" Then I realized, they are cohesive, because I'm a dual person. I am a Gemini. It's in my nature to have these two parts. Instead of saying, "This one's good," or, "That one's bad," or cutting half the poems, I used this convention to be able to not only integrate within myself, but hopefully inspire that integration in the reader as well. That's how the book functions.

I've been so proud to see how it has resonated with readers because I've had reviews on Amazon from people as young as 14, and then people way later in life. A friend of mine said that she sent the book to her grandmother and her grandmother reads one passage every day. I think it's a reminder that it's never too late to come home to yourself. It's never too late to start your self-love journey. That there are people like me and you and so many others that are really invested in creating nurturing safe spaces to do that self-exploration.

Shanila: Melody, this resonates so much, especially because it's in a time and space where there's so much going on, how do we just take that moment? It's not always about having two weeks off for vacation and having all this budget and money and having a showy sense of what self-love is. Sometimes is just reading five lines of poetry.

Melody: Yes, the poetry is really designed to reset your perspective. It's about taking things that you've looked at or thought about your entire life and realizing that you have a choice, and you don't have to go with the obvious inherent answer, you can choose a different way. I think a lot of my writing is devoted to that, like the unlearning, the undoing, getting back to the roots of who we are.

Shanila: I love when things are just not so complicated like that because sometimes when we need something the most, when we need to do a little bit of rest and relaxation, that's when we're the most resistant to it. That's when your brain finds the most amount of excuses and procrastination. You're so creative, you'll be able to create like 30 other tasks for you to do, instead of you just sitting on your porch for 10 seconds. I love how you put together the thinkers and the feelers portion because I think we lean into and admire one part of ourselves more, but forget that we're this whole person at the end of the day that does both. We think, we feel, we are, we be, and all of it.

Melody: I actually just read a book, speaking of resistance, called The War on Art. For anyone who's a creative that feels like they've been blocked, and they procrastinate, and they just don't get to creating their craft, I highly recommend this book. It's very short. Every page just has like a paragraph on it, and it's all about identifying the resistance within ourselves and getting over it.

I think, for me, writing Self Love Poetry was an act of overcoming resistance because as someone who runs a business, who has three kids, I have a lot going on, and it's really easy to just relegate my creativity to the bottom rung of my priority list, but when I do that, I get back to where I was before I started my self-love journey, which is always ending up last. We weren't put on this earth to be the last ones on our list.

For me, I have identified that my greatest gift is creative writing. How can it be that everything else gets done in the day and this thing that is most central to my worth, identity, passion, all of it, oftentimes doesn't even happen? We all have to just again, for me, self-love starts with self-awareness, knowing what is your desire? What are your wants? What is your talent? What tickles you? If you don't know what delights you, how can you create a joyful life? I don't think that there is enough emphasis placed on cultivating our joy and knowing the unique things that make us delightfully happy. I think that is something that everyone should be focusing on. At least for a few minutes a day, "What delights me?" What delights you, Shanila? What is your delight?

Shanila: My delight is dancing. My delight is play. My delight is just not taking myself so seriously. Melody, this leads me to my last and final question. How do you love to play?

Melody: My play most recently was laying on a beach in Miami for my birthday a few days ago. The most magical thing about this is that three years ago exactly, May 21, 2018, I text a friend of mine, my dream is to be on a beach with warm water, that's clear, with beautiful music, people I love, a cool drink, and no internet. That's what I text her because at that time back in 2018, we would text each other our dreams every day.

At 5:00 PM, we would stop and say, "What is your dream today?" On that day, that's what I wrote. Three years to the day later, May 21, 2021, I was in Miami on the beach, with a cool drink, with people I love, staring at the ocean that was clear and warm and beautiful. That I think is how I have learned to play, is to make space for my dream, and welcome as they manifest and come true because we all have that capability. My hope is that, through my poetry and my business and my work, I can help other people experience those moments of dreaming and manifesting, and enjoying the outcome.

Shanila: Spoken like a true self-love philosopher. Thank you. Thank you for sharing all of this, and thank you for all your wisdom around creating and cultivating self-love. I'm curious, where can people find you and connect with you?

Melody: You can find me on the web. I have two websites, one is fredandfar.com and the other is melodygodfred.com. You can find my book on Amazon, just search for Self Love Poetry. If you want to connect with me directly and chat, just find me on Instagram either at fredandfar or at melodygodfred. I reply to every DM, so reach out, let's chat, let's play.

Shanila: Let's do it, and I'm going to be leaving all the links and connections in the show notes description so you'll be able to click through, connect with Melody. Grab yourself a self love pinky ring, read some books, feel the self-love, thinkers and feelers welcome. I will thank melody for being here today. Thank you.

Melody: Thank you with my whole heart. This was beautiful.

Shanila: All right friends. Today we have self-love philosopher Melody Godfred, who is an entrepreneur and author who is passionate about empowering women to choose themselves through daily acts of self-love and self-care. After starting her career as a litigation attorney, Melody shifted into entrepreneurship. First, founding career development company Write In Color, and then self-love movement, Fred and Far through which she created the self love pinky ring, a globally recognized symbol of self-empowerment. She is the author of three books, including her 2020 release, Self Love Poetry: For Thinkers & Feelers, which was number one Amazon new release and remains a best seller.

Before we say hello to Melody and get to know a little bit about her and her journey, I always like to let our listeners know where I've connected with my guests. Why we're even friends and how collaboration happens to kind of put a realistic perspective on how people actually know each other. Basically, in the beginning of quarantine, pandemic, all the situations that we're going through, a few years ago, I contact Melody to create a sleep series sound bath for her community. For her Fred and Far community, which is all about self-love, taking care of yourself.

It was just a really beautiful collaboration of the sound bowls to help people just chill out and relax before going to bed without making it so complicated and having to go somewhere, and having to be anywhere. Since then we've kept in touch, and now we have Melody on the Playground podcast. Thank you for being here.

Melody: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be with you.

Shanila: Oh, yes. You have this book out, you have three books out, you have a self love pinky ring. It says to me you have a self-love messaging going on over here. I would love to hear your own journey into self-love and what that actually means for you.

There wasn't a big emphasis on, "Slow down and be in the moment and get to know yourself." It was really, "Let's survive." It was like a very fight or flight start to life. That was what carried me through my adolescence and my early adulthood. It was all about, "What can I achieve? How can I prove my worth?" A lot of search for making my place in the world and conforming with the expectations around me, whether it was social or school or whatever.

If you go on my Instagram, you'll see I've stolen some of my best material from them because they are so pure and they are so free of a lot of the limiting beliefs and thinking, and constructs in society that dampen authentic creativity. They're not susceptible to that just yet. When they say something, it resonates so deeply and so beautifully that I immediately have to write it down and share it with the community, because that is what it's all about. How can we all strip away the years of conditioning, the dust of shame and regret and fear to get back to who we were underneath all of that. My kids are a constant reminder of how possible that is, to be purely ourselves and at home with ourselves.

Shanila: Beautiful. It just reminds me of when we're on our self-healing journey, or on our self-love journey, it's a practice of remembering who we were rather than adding to ourselves. It's about doing less about that. When we look at kids, I often talk on the podcast all about my little nephew. I just made a move to Austin, Texas, because I'm a brand-new auntie, and I have auntie duties and he's 10 minutes away from me. You watch a new human being, a new human soul come into this world, where they're not jaded, or tainted, or they don't have the systems of thoughts and the processes. They don't have the limitations and the fear. That's the part where I feel that us as adults, or young adults, and whatever process we're in, we have that fear that isn't in age, but it's built through life. It's built through experiences.

You mentioned earlier you were a litigation attorney. You were in the space of law and doing your thing there. When you left that world, when you shifted from that world into the space of self-love, what were you coming home to? What were you leaving behind? What fears did you have in that process?

Melody: Me becoming a lawyer was very much like me not having the self-awareness to do something else. I was graduating from college. I studied music industry because I'm a lifelong musician. I really wanted to go into the music business, but that was 2000 and the music industry was collapsing at that time because of digital music becoming a thing. God, I feel so old right now saying this. Back then, people thought it was going to be the end of the music business. Like, "Oh, my God, no more CDs. What are we going to do?" Again, what you say, speaking of fear, I was fearful. I was fearful that this industry that I was so passionate about was going to fall apart. Again, immigrant families like, there is such an emphasis placed on higher education, which is an amazing thing.

Both of my parents only have high school degrees. For me to have gone to college, I'm a first-generation college graduate, and then for me to have the opportunity to continue my education, it felt like a no-brainer for my family. They were like, "No, go to law school. You're smart. You're a great writer. You'll do great." They were right. I did great. The ego-driven part of me was having a field day because I did--

Shanila: Success.

Melody: Success. I got into a great school and I was [unintelligible 00:54:58] top of my class, top 10%. I got a job through on-campus interviews at a flashy firm. It really was like the dream situation. Again, I got there and I was doing the work and I was being recognized and praised. A funny thing happened, which is, my body caught up with me. Your ego has all kinds of ideas of who you are and what you should be doing, but your body will always keep it real. What happened to me is, after about six months, every night, I started hallucinating. In the space between waking and sleeping, I would see spiders on my pillow. I would see people in my bedroom. It was getting worse and worse and worse.

I realized it was because there was this utter disconnect between my life's work, which is our careers. We spend the majority of our time at work. There was this disconnect between what I was doing and who I was. Who I am is a creative collaborator. In law, you're neither creative nor collaborative, especially in litigation. It's all about having a winner and a loser and following the law and not getting too creative with it. I physically could not continue down that path. I also looked at the people ahead of me in line and I thought to myself, "This is my first year. Let's see. What does someone look like who's at the 2-year mark, or the 5-year mark, or the 10-year mark, or the 30-year mark? Do I aspire to be any of those people? Especially the women. Is this how I want to make my imprint on the world?" The answer was no.

It was very scary, especially telling my parents, who had invested so much in me. I was like, "I just physically cannot do this. I'm going to end up in an insane asylum." It was just a bad situation. I went to my hiring manager and I told them I needed to leave. I knew I needed an excuse to help him understand, so I said, "I'm leaving to write a book. I've spent my whole life dreaming of writing a book," which was true, "and it's now, or never. If I don't get out now, the golden handcuffs are too real. There's too much here. The salary, the prestige, the security. If I don't leave now, I'll never leave." That's what I did. Let me tell you, the hallucination stopped the very first night that I was no longer an attorney. I have learned ever since then that you should always listen to your body, because your body will tell you. Whether it's a ache in your hip, a hallucination that keeps you up at night, anxiety that races through your body. When you're not in alignment with yourself, even if you want to fool yourself for a while, your body will always catch up with you.

Shanila: I love that you said that, Melody, because we are always getting physiological clues. We have some really obvious stuff. I'll speak from my own experience of being somebody in research science. I experienced something very similar to you, Melody, where it showed up in my body. I was a generally healthy person in my mid-20s, later 20s. I would get panic attacks. My hair was falling out. I was fainting, and insomnia, and all these different things were manifesting in our bodies. Honestly, it's really a disservice in our culture, where we throw these things under the rug, especially for women. I remember going to doctors and going to get seen. It was always pushed aside as stress or hormones, or, "This must be your period." It's always, "Let's deal with this later," instead of acknowledging, what is the root of these symptoms? What are the root of why these things show up?

There is these intuitive punches. We're getting all these gut punches, but we are not necessarily taught how to listen to that. We're not okay when it manifests an illness, but we accept it when it manifests as an illness. Where did you feel it in your body? Aside from the hallucinations, where do you find that intuition is speaking to you?

Melody: It's funny. When I wasn't listening to my intuition and I wasn't speaking my truth-- Speaking is a really big part of it. I was raised in a family where people don't yell. They just separate. If people have a problem, they just, in Farsi, which is my native language, it's called [Farsi language] Which means you ice someone out. I'm trying to think of how to put it in English. You don't talk to them. You separate. It's the silent treatment. That was how I was raised to understand that is how you deal with conflict. The silent treatment. That meant that for 30 years, when I was upset, instead of talking about it, I would swallow it.

What happened after 30 years of swallowing it, I developed a thyroid condition, which is called the thyroid nodule. Which is literally a growth on your thyroid. This is something that affects women way more than men. Every decade of your life, your chances of having it go up and up. You have a 20%-chance in your 20s, a 30%-chance in your 30s, a 50% chance in your 50s. By the time women are 50 years old, half of them have this thyroid condition. Why? Because we do not speak up for ourselves. We do not speak our truth. We swallow our feelings and bury them in our bodies.

For me, the past five years since I got diagnosed with this condition, not only have I learned how to actually speak up, and feel, and process, and communicate, and connect, I've also had to learn how to advocate for myself in the healthcare system. Like you said, you went to the doctor and they were like, "Oh, this is just this," or, "This is just that." There wasn't that deeper digging. My intuitive self knew that there has to be something, a solution here. There has to be something more than just, "Oh, sit and wait. Live with it." Then eventually have them take your thyroid out, which is what I was being told.

What I have found is, the only way I can hear my intuitive nudges that got punched at, just internal knowing that you're talking about, is when I stopped being so busy. When I strip away this constant need to fill every moment with productivity or distraction. These are the two things that I at least find myself falling into. I either need to be busy, busy, busy, like checking those emails, doing the work. Or I'm distracted on Instagram or my news feed or reading articles. I do not quiet my mind enough to hear this intuition that's dying to give me information. I shut it off.

I think that is really what the pandemic kind of brought to a head is it made it a little less hard to be as busy. Like, I wasn't leaving the house, I was home. I wasn't so interested in reading disheartening news every five minutes. I stopped reading the news as much. Even on social media, I tried to part down and what I found is, I have this robust inner dialogue happening and all I need to do is create space for it, and it will guide me, and it will tell me things that no one could ever tell me. It's always so eerily right.

I think we all have that guide. We've just layered it with productivity, busyness, distraction, and then on top of that add fear, shame, guilt, anger, this obsession with uncertainty, like being so uncomfortable with not knowing exactly how things are going to play out. When you're so obsessed with that with, I have to know, the part of you that actually knows can't tell you anything.

Shanila: That's such a lesson of being in the moment too, right? That human condition where we're bound to ruminate about things. We're bound to think about things in the past. That is absolutely part of it, but then the bigger part of it is that we're chronic worriers of the future. What's the outcome? How's it going to pan out? It's like we've never known. We've never in our life, like never anything worked out the exact same way, something always went up, right?

Melody: I say that all the time. It's like, I've spent my lifetime worrying and the one thing I know for sure is nothing I ever worried about happened. Other things happened. Other things that were maybe even worse than what I worried about happened. Brene Brown talks about this in one of her books, it's called Dress Rehearsing Tragedy and that's what we do. We have this dress rehearsal with tragedy because we're so consumed with the idea that things are going to go wrong, or like certain that we use our creativity and our intuition and all of these things to manifest and construct these terrible outcomes that 99% of the time never even happen.

I think recognizing that, okay, look, that's not a bad thing. Look how creative you are, look how powerful your mind is that it can come up with these really disastrous situations. What if we now use that same power, but push it in a new direction and use that to envision our most beautiful, authentic futures? We are all creators in our minds. We just need to choose what it is we want to create.

Shanila: I always think that if we're only worrying, and we haven't prepared for the other side of that, then we're only 50% prepared. Like what you just said, dress rehearsing for the wrong, dress rehearsing for the disaster. It's okay to think about what could happen so that you have time to prepare and do a little bit of that. If you only prepared for that, you've only prepared for 50% of what can happen. In which case, it makes you unprepared. You're not as prepared and [crosstalk] perfection as you thought.

Melody: I learned this lesson in my business. This was a really wonderful learning. When I first created Fred and Far and the Self Love Pinky Ring, at the beginning, there were no sales. There was like one ring a week. We kept our production really small. I didn't have a bunch of supplies laying around. I certainly didn't have any inventory. It was like everything was super tiny and minimal.

Then all of a sudden we got an unexpected piece of press that led to hundreds of others of pieces of unexpected press. Then we went from having one order a month to 100 orders in a day. You know what happened? We did not have enough ring boxes. We had to scramble around the world to find more of these very unique ring boxes that we use. We were paying like $10 for the packaging, just because we didn't have it. We were not prepared. That has always stayed with me as a business owner, as a human, as a mother. Leave room for things going very right, like, right beyond your wildest dreams.

Plan for that, prepare for that because it happens. When that happened to me, I thought, "This is it. This is my once-in-a-lifetime success. I'm never going to get press again, nothing's ever going to happen to me." We're so conditioned to think that it was luck, and it can never happen and to play small. Then last year, a poem I wrote went mega-viral all over again. They talked about it on The Today Show, and everyone from Oprah Magazine to Kim Kardashian posted about it. It was this lesson of stop telling yourself this can't happen again, stop telling yourself you got lucky, stop telling yourself you're so small.

It happened because I've been writing poetry for 20 years of my life and putting it out there over and over and over again. That for me is the epitome of what self-love is. It's this daily commitment to honoring yourself. For me, honoring myself is writing. That is what ever since I was a child I was so passionate about. Now as an adult, to be able to do it with this awareness that in doing it I'm honoring myself, it has changed my whole life.

I think we all have that divine purpose and calling that we're born with. That thing that makes us us. That contribution we are all looking to make to the world. We all inherently want to be of service. I don't believe that we are only here to fend for ourselves and survive. Once you can stop trying to be who you think you are, and you start embracing who you actually are, that's when you can start giving your gift to the world. That's really what this past year and few years has felt like for me. This, I'm coming home to myself, I'm going to stop being who I think I should be. I'm going to embrace who I am and I'm going to receive the blessings that come with that because they do come and not just for me. I've seen it in our community, that that moment of, I'm going to choose myself, always yields a tremendous transformation in life that brings people deep joy and fulfillment.

Shanila: I love that and it's such a lesson in receiving. Especially, women tend to be these incredible givers. You take on this nurturer role, we have expectations to be nurturers or societal assignments to us for being nurturers and we're givers, givers, givers. You're kind of like a giver to a fault to a part where it's just detrimental to your health in so many different ways. That part that you mentioned about the thyroid too, oftentimes in the podcast we talk about energy centers and which part of your body. That throat chakra has a high correlation to hyperthyroidism. You'll start to notice that the more that you don't express yourself, the more that you aren't even allowed to receive your own truth, the more things are going to start hurting in your body, right?

Melody: I had a very surreal experience at the end of last year. I had a treatment done on my thyroid, where there is a cyst and they had to drain it. Sorry, TMI, medical stuff. I was awake for the procedure. As they were draining the cyst, I had this out-of-body experience. I had been doing deep breathing to keep myself calm. I had gotten myself into this very heightened state just through my breath, and they were draining the cyst and it felt like someone had had their hands around my neck and they were releasing it. As they were releasing it, I started crying tears of joy. I was flooded with feelings of happiness and love and connection. I felt as though all the bitterness and resentment and anger especially towards a few close people in my life, I felt it just leaving me. It was really like an out-of-body experience.

I told the doctor I'm like, "I don't know what you experience with other patients, but there were feelings trapped in there. You've freed me from some really deep unspoken pain." I think we all have that. We have it in our bodies because we were not taught to own our emotions and process them in real-time. I do this with my kids now. If they get upset, I don't tell them don't cry. I don't say it's okay. I say, "It's okay to have big feelings. Let me know if you want to talk about it," and we create space for all the feelings, not just their happiness.

As a result, they are so emotionally intelligent and they can speak to the root of their emotions and their thinking and even after there's a big tantrum, there's this immediate moment of clarity after where my eight-year-old daughter will be like, "Mom, I'm sorry I blew up. I realized that when this happened, I got really hurt about it." She was able to like take ownership over her feelings and I hope that that means she's not going to wake up with a thyroid nodule in 30 years or some other physical representation of her pain because she's not carrying it, she's feeling it, processing it, releasing it and I think if we can teach all kids to do that, our society as a whole will shift.

Shanila: Beautiful and that is so related to generational healing. That you can probably look at other members of your family who have had similar ailments whether it's in your throat, your thyroid, or diabetes, that's also in your root chakra, this is in your pancreas that is in your stomach. There might be energy that's collected in some part of your body so it's really inspiring to hear you, Melody, showing the young people this too because what I would've done to have these tools a long time ago and it's like, you can't blame anybody for not knowing what they didn't know.

You can't be mad at caretakers and parents and whoever raised you for all of that, but it's like, okay, what is your practice going to look like in the present? Everything that you're mentioning, it's reminding me that self-love isn't just the version of the good. The love and light version of that. There is a whole other side, what we were mentioning about preparing only for the best or preparing only for the worst, you're only ready for 50% of it. Can you lead us through what other parts of self-love like what does that actually encompass? What does that mean?

Melody: I think of self-love as like a cycle. It's a journey that you take and it's cyclical and you keep moving your way through it. I think the first part of it is self-discovery like making the effort to get to know yourself and explore yourself from there is self-care. Once you discover who you are and what your needs are, caring for yourself through daily practice. Once you do that so you know who you are, you're willing to care for yourself. You start cultivating self-worth which is when you fill yourself up instead of seeking external validation or acknowledgment in order to feel like you are a worthy whole human being. It's your commitment to these things, self-discovery, self-care, owning your self-worth that ultimately is your cycle of self-love because for me self-love is the integration of yourself.

It's like you said, it's not about just like love and light, owning your best parts. It's about embracing and integrating all parts of yourself because for a long time, I felt I had this duality where I had the good parts that I was really proud of and willing to put on display, then I had the bad parts that I was so ashamed of that I wouldn't even speak them or let anybody see or know them. All we end up doing when we compartmentalize ourselves like that is fracture ourselves. Without wholeness, we can't ever feel free or worthy. That is for me, self-love. It's this commitment to knowing yourself, being yourself, and caring for yourself each and every day.

Shanila: I like that self-love pinky ring is for that reason to look down and say, regardless of what is happening I am still one person integrating this experience. I'm not a good person experiencing the good things and a bad person experiencing the bad things, I am still this one experiencer.

Melody: Having that physical reminder is really powerful. I always tell people I'm like, look, I created a ring, a piece of fine jewelry because I love jewelry and I love the idea of taking what was traditionally a symbol of commitment to another and owning that for ourselves. That regardless of your place in life, whether you're married or single or young or old, wherever you are you can make this commitment to yourself and use the ring as a daily reminder of translating that commitment into practice. It doesn't need to be a ring, you can use a paper clip, you can use a favorite coffee mug. You can have a mantra that you put as the lock screen on your phone. I just think that taking this and making it physical has been really powerful, not just for me, but for the thousands of women who've joined me in making the commitment.

Shanila: I'd love to circle into your love for writing and poetry and especially as you mentioned even when you were talking about your back in the day lawyer life, litigation, you know your family said, "Oh, you're a good writer," I just want to reflect to you like that part was already there. That was probably like one of the greatest qualities of like what created "success" in that version of yourself back then. How did you get into creating your book, especially your self-love poetry book which is number one on Amazon?

Melody: I had a really beautiful experience putting this book together. It is 100 pairs of poems, all on themes related to self-love and the way the book is laid out. The book is called Self Love Poetry for Thinkers and Feelers. The 100 pairs of poems each reflect on one theme and on the left side of every page is a poem that speaks to the left ring. It's short, it packs a punch, it is more analytical, and then on the right side, the poem speaks feelers. It's more emotional, it's more of a sensory experience. When you read them together, they work together to activate the whole brain experience as a reader. Again, it speaks to that idea of integration.

The reason I use this format is because I've been writing poetry my whole life. When I decided I want to take some of that and make a book, I was like, "Who's going to buy this book? It doesn't make any sense. Some of the poems are really short, some of the poems are really long and it doesn't make any sense." I was judging myself, like why would anybody buy a book when the poems aren't cohesive? Then I realized they are cohesive because I'm a dual person. I'm a Gemini, it's like in my nature to have these two parts, and instead of saying this one's good or that one's bad or cutting half the poems, I use this convention to be able to not only integrate within myself, but hopefully inspire that integration in the reader as well.

That's how the book functions and I've been so proud to see how it has resonated with readers because I've had reviews on Amazon from people as young as 14 then people way later in life. A friend of mine said that she sent the book to her grandmother and her grandmother reads one passage every day. I think it's a reminder that it's never too late to come home to yourself. It's never too late to start your self-love journey and that there are people like me and you and so many others that are really invested in creating nurturing safe spaces to do that self-exploration.

Shanila: Melody, all of this resonates so much, especially because it's like in a time and space where there's so much going on like how do we just take that moment? It's not always about having two weeks off for vacation and having all this budget and money, and having a showy sense of what self-love is, it's like sometimes it's just like reading five lines of poetry.

Melody: Because the poetry is really designed to reset your perspective. It's about taking things that you've looked at or thought about your entire life and realizing that you have a choice and you don't have to go with the obvious inherent answer. You can choose a different way. I think a lot of my writing is devoted to that, like the unlearning, the undoing, the getting back to the roots of who we are.

Shanila: I love when things are just not so complicated like that because sometimes when we need something the most, when we need to do a little bit of rest and relaxation, that's when we're the most resistant to it. That's when your brain finds the most amount of excuses and procrastination. You're so creative, you'll be able to create like 30 other tasks for you to do instead of you just like sitting on your porch for 10 seconds. I love that, how you put together the thinkers and the feelers portion because I think we lean into and admire one part of ourselves more, but forget that we're this whole person at the end of the day that does both. We think we feel we are, we be, and all of it.

Melody: I actually just read a book speaking of resistance called The War on Art for anyone who's a creative, that feels like they've been blocked and they procrastinate and they just don't get to creating their craft. I highly recommend this book, It's very short. Every page just has like a paragraph on it. It's all about identifying the resistance within ourselves and getting over it. I think for me, writing self-love poetry was an act of overcoming resistance because as someone who runs a business, who has three kids, I have a lot going on and it's really easy to like just relegate my creativity to like the bottom rung of my priority list.

When I do that, I get back to where I was before I started my self-love journey, which is always ending up last. We weren't put on this earth to be the last ones on our list. For me, I have identified that my greatest gift is creative writing. How can it be that everything else gets done in the day and this thing that is most central to my worth, identity, passion, all of it, oftentimes doesn't even happen.

Again, for me, self-love starts with self-awareness. Knowing what is your desire? What are your wants? What is your talent? What tickles you? If you don't know what delights you, how can you create a joyful life? I don't think that there is enough emphasis placed on cultivating our joy and knowing the unique things that make us delightfully happy. I think that is something that everyone should be focusing on. At least for a few minutes a day. What delights me? What delights you, Shanila? What is your delight?

Shanila: My delight is dancing. My delight is play. My delight is just not taking myself too seriously. Melody, this leads me to my last and final question. How do you love to play?

Melody: My play most recently was laying on a beach in Miami for my birthday a few days ago. The most magical thing about this is that, three years ago exactly, so May 21st, 2018, I text a friend of mine, "My dream is to be on a beach in warm water that's clear with beautiful music, people I love, a cool drink and no internet." That's what I text her because at that time, back in 2018, we would text each other our dreams every day at 5:00 PM. We would stop and say, what is your dream today? On that day, that's what I wrote.

Three years to the day later, May 21st, 2021. I was in Miami on the beach with a cool drink, with people I loved, staring at the ocean that was clear and warm and beautiful. That I think is how I have learned to play, is to make space for my dreams and welcome as they manifest and come true because we all have that capability. My hope is that, through my poetry and my business, and my work, I can help other people experience those moments of dreaming and manifesting and enjoying the outcome.

Shanila: Spoken like a true self-love philosopher. Thank you for sharing all of this and thank you for all your wisdom around creating and cultivating self-love. I'm curious, where can people find you and connect with you?

Melody: You can find me on the web. I have two websites. One's Fredandfar.com and the other is melodygodfred.com. You can find my book on Amazon, just search for self-love poetry. If you want to connect with me directly and chat, just find me on Instagram, either @Fredandfar or @melodygodfred, I reply to every DM. Reach out, let's chat, let's play.

Shanila: Let's do it. I'm going to be leaving all the links and connections in the show notes description. You'll be able to click through, connect with melody, grab yourself a self-love pinky ring, read some books, feel the self-love, thinkers and feelers welcome, and well, thank Melody for being here today. Thank you.

Melody: Thank you with my whole heart. This was beautiful.

Shanila: Friend, if you're not already subscribed to the podcast, definitely hit subscribe so you get a notification anytime I upload a new episode to the playground. We talk so much about spiritual exploration, personal development, intuitive entrepreneurship, the mysticism, the woo, all the fun stuff. Basically, we talk about it on here. If you are interested to come train in healing arts, you want to learn about breathwork, sound healing, embodiment coaching, you can go to alwaysplay.org for all the details. The link to that is also in the show notes. If you want to just click through it and get to the healing arts portion of it, you can do that as well. You can also catch up with me on YouTube. It's a fun you playground. Maybe I'll see you in there. There are so many different places to keep in touch and be in the playground together. Friend, until next time, I will catch you soon.

MELODY GODFRED ON THE PLAYGROUND PODCAST

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