Childhood Experiences, Spiritual Narratives and Hope

The shortest days of the year can sharpen our sense of what’s sacred. We lean into that seasonal stillness to tease apart religion as a set of rules and spirituality as a living, breathing experience, then explore how stories shape who we become. Our guest, spiritual guide and facilitator Kristen Swan, shares how a childhood of opposites—chaos and structure, permissive adventure and reserved expectations—sparked a lifelong curiosity about identity, control, and creative freedom. Together we look at why so many women carry invisible labor, over-function in relationships, and deflect simple compliments, and how those reflexes keep us small.

From there, we introduce a grounded practice: the spiritual autobiography. Think of it as a living document that traces where you’ve brushed up against the more-than-self, written not to impress but to be true. Kristen walks us through defining key words on our own terms—spirit, prayer, sin, hope—so we can swap borrowed scripts for felt meaning. Through memory prompts and group sharing, this process turns snapshots of life into a map, revealing patterns, resilience, and the places where purpose actually lives. We call it “mapping hope,” the moment you recognize you’re still here after every twist and break, and your story is still unfolding.

We also talk practical tools to make reflection stick: small, in-person circles that build community across differences and a prompts journal to declutter the mind, notice patterns, and support better decisions. If the holidays feel heavy or hollow, this conversation offers a gentle reframe and a path back to what matters—your nature, your voice, and your definition of success. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs encouragement, and leave a quick review to help others find us.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Solstice Framing
• 1:15 Religion Versus Spirituality
• 2:07 Introducing Guest Kristen Swan
• 4:02 Chaotic Childhood And Opposite Influences
• 8:30 Control, Structure, And Creativity
• 12:05 People-Pleasing And Disappearing
• 15:34 From Business Coaching To Inner Work
• 19:40 Family Secrets And The Stories We Share
• 23:18 Limiting Narratives And Women’s Self-Image
• 27:05 Compliments, Deflection, And Mixed Messages
• 31:05 Safety, Appearance, And Staying Small
• 33:52 What Is A Spiritual Autobiography
• 37:10 Language, Definitions, And Meaning-Making
• 40:05 Mapping Hope And Remembering You’re Still Here
• 43:20 Reinvention After Disappointment

Transcript

Kristan: 0:00

If we're paying attention to something and something's catching our eye, it usually means that it's it's good information that we need to be reflecting on. And so I really had to go through that journey of valuing my uniqueness.

Mary: 0:20

Welcome to No Shrinking Violets. I'm your host, Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist and certified integrative mental health practitioner. I've created a space where we celebrate the intuition and power of women who want to break free from limiting narratives. We'll explore all realms of wellness, what it means to take up space unapologetically, and how your essential nature is key to living life on your terms. It's time to own your space, trust your nature, and flourish. Let's dive in. Hey Violets, welcome to the show. The holidays have always been one of my favorite times of the year. My family celebrated Christmas. My mom was Catholic and my dad was Protestant. Under the rules of being married in the Catholic Church, my siblings and I needed to be raised in the Catholic faith. The way that that informed my childhood, that's a story for another day. But after my freshman year of college, during which, believe it or not, I got up to walk a mile to Mass every Sunday, even if I was partying the night before, I decided to leave the church. One of the things I've pondered since then is religion versus spirituality and how they, at least to me, are truly different concepts. I've taken courses on religion, and I've learned much from my clients over the years. It always felt to me, and perhaps this is the Catholic history of my life, that religion is a construct, a format, like the rules of engagement for a higher power. Spirituality, on the other hand, feels expansive to me, open and free, like it's the whole world. And we get to decide how we feel it and allow it to be present in our life. I feel a higher presence the most when I'm in nature, and I'm really connected to the seasons and the changes in light and dark. So I'm delighted to talk with my guest today near the winter solstice because first, it feels like a time of reflection and stillness, and I think she connects with these aspects of spirituality in her work. And also the feelings around Christmas for me have changed quite a bit over the years. It's become more challenging for a number of reasons, but I try to connect to the aspects of celebrating that feel spiritual to me or that symbolize a sense of spirit. The twinkle lights, the piece of instrumental music, finding gifts or sharing experiences with the people that I love, the tradition of recipes that can be traced back generations, and the stories we tell, and the events that are woven into our collective memory. These stories are what really seems to color our experience of holiday time. My guest today, Kristen Swan, uses our narratives of life to explore our deepest truths, question the beliefs we've inherited, and reconnect with the inner wisdom we may have been taught to ignore. A business coach, turn life, and spiritual guide, Kristen is devoted to helping people come home to themselves. She believes that curiosity is one of the most powerful tools we have, a way to approach our lives with openness, creativity, and compassion. Welcome to No Shrinking Violets, Kristen.

Kristan: 3:22

Thank you so much, Mary. It's a pleasure to be here. And I am just, yeah, I'm so excited to dive into all these topics today because it is, I as I was listening to you, I was like, yes, yes, yes.

Mary: 3:38

Yeah, I think it's a perfect time for it. So I thought, how fortuitous. Like when I really started to think about what I wanted to talk about today, I think the timing is really perfect. So I wondered if you might start with telling us a little bit about sort of the parts of your life that you feel really informed, who you are and how you show up in the world today.

Kristan: 4:02

I'm an only child. And I was also an only grandchild for over 12 or 13 years. And then my cousin came along. And as a result, it's funny because I had this really chaotic upbringing. On the one hand, uh my parents were only married um for a very short time before they divorced, and which led to a lot of moving around, a lot of different homes, a lot of different schools. Things never felt very certain, right? There just was a lot of uncertainty. Um, and then on the other hand, I grew up spending so much time with my grandparents on both sides of both my my dad's parents and then my grandmother on my mom's side. And and they were such a source of consistency for me, right? And but and they were completely different people, my grandparents. I mean, they they really their kind of their approach to life was very different. They had very different upbringings. And so I think that one of the things has that has always informed my life is I feel like I am very much kind of this melding in the middle between these kind of really opposites, right? I I love that about me. I love that, and I think that that has allowed me to also be a lot more understanding of different people and different situations. I think that that allows for me to have a, I think it allows for this curiosity that I have. And it also, I mean, for a long time, my reaction as a teen and young adult was to attempt to control uh my life. And the things that I still love are reminiscent of kind of that chaos and then that that time of really trying to control things. Um, I now have a new understanding of what I can control and what I can't control. Um, however, I still love having a schedule. I still love having some structure to my life. And I actually think for myself, and I think this is true for a lot of um both artists and just generally creative people, I think that creativity really thrives within some sort of structure, right? Um, sometimes there's this idea that creativity just loves kind of that free form, that chaos. And I don't know that it does necessarily. So I still embrace structure. Um, I am less controlling, you know, it's it's a work in progress. And I I think because of the time I spent with my grandparents, it's funny because I I it's again, it's kind of this polarity, right? It's I'm not a very sentimental person and I'm not necessarily, I'm not really a collector of things. Things are not that important to me as representative of, you know, a person or a memory. Um, on the other hand, I can be very old-fashioned in that I love to fix things. Like I always lament that we live in kind of a disposable society now, right? I love to cook. I mean, I hate throwing out food. It's like my depression-era grandparents, you know, it's like you need to use every last little bit, right? So I'm very creative that way. So it's it's this funny um, again, kind of this balance between these seeming opposite ways of being.

Mary: 8:08

Well, and that came from your grandparents, right? The one set of grandparents was a bit more, well, maybe much more permissive. You got to sort of live like when I read your paragraph, it was like a little bit of hedonistic lifestyle for a kid. And the other set of grandparents was more um, what's the word, organized, or they had more set expectations for behavior.

Kristan: 8:32

So my grandmother is the one who was just like a in some ways like a big kid. Yeah. And so she loved having kind of a partner in crime, right? And we would go on all sorts of adventures and we we did a lot of road trips. So it was usually my mom and my grandmother and I, and my grandmother and I would share a room, and my mom got her own room. And the first thing that we would do, my grandmother and I, is jump on the bed and test it out, right? I mean, yeah. And and then as she got older, she'd encourage me to jump on the bed and and test it out. And, you know, and so we had all sorts of fun things like that. My other grandparents were much more reserved. Um, in a lot of ways, they were very um, they weren't necessarily bound by the rules of society. I mean, they they were very open-minded. The other thing about my upbringing is it spending some being an only child and spending so much time with adults. I became very adept at mirroring my behavior, picking up on the cues of what was what was gonna be okay and what wasn't gonna be okay. And also just with this chaos of um, you know, just different elements is being someone who was not gonna rock the boat. I I was also very good at disappearing, right? Of not being not drawing attention to myself and not being that thing that was going to be disruptive. Yeah. I mean, I think that again, kind of one of those holdovers is that I I can, you know, I still work with it is, you know, the people-pleasing nature that um I developed to kind of navigate these rough waters.

Mary: 10:32

Yeah. It sounds hard having to go back and forth between the different sets of expectations, but um I'm so good at it.

Kristan: 10:41

And it's funny because I'm so good at it that it it didn't even it didn't even register because when you're brought up that way, you don't you're not thinking, oh, it's hard or it's easy, right? It's just the way.

Mary: 10:55

Yeah. It's the way, right?

Kristan: 10:57

Yeah.

Mary: 10:57

And I think it's also interesting that you started your work doing business coaching. And I don't know if you still do that, but you sort of segue into this other kind of well, kind of work, the other other themes in your work.

Kristan: 11:15

Yeah. The thing, I've done so many different types of jobs and I've had so many different professions. And when I finally took some time to kind of reflect of what are those through lines for me, really what became evident is I love supporting people. I really believe that our uniqueness and our individuality is to be celebrated. And I love supporting people in having successful lives. And I'm very careful to pause and say every single person needs to spend a little time with themselves on a regular basis to say what is my definition of success, though, right? And and to be very careful because we can easily adopt other people's definition, right? And I've done that myself, you know, and I and you could argue that this is an outcropping of people pleasing. Um, but it's it's more than that. It's it is really kind of having watched people struggle, both in my family and and just friends and and colleagues, and kind of my heart just breaking essentially because, you know, it's like I I just wanted these people to see themselves because they're so wonderful and had so much to offer and and do have so much to offer. And I had to go on that same journey for myself. It I mean, usually, right? If we're yeah, if we're if we're paying attention to something and something's catching our eye, it usually means that it's it's good information that we need to be reflecting on. And so I really had to go through that journey of valuing my uniqueness and and myself and and saying that it was okay for me to think about what a successful or a meaningful or purposeful, all those things, what purposeful life, right? What those look like for me, and being willing to just value the whole of myself. You know, I I still work on that. I mean, I the again, it's a a work in progress. And I think really, you know, that has really informed my recent work that I do in supporting people in in group settings, um, small groups in person for self-discovery and reflection. And you mentioned stories earlier. I mean, that is such a powerful means of learning, both learning about ourselves and learning about others and the world, right? Is is stories. And I always think about, I think about the stories that are we are telling ourselves. This this um a lot of noise up here sometimes and or in here, um, the stories that we've inherited or that have been kind of given to us from our family or our our upbringing, um, our culture, and then also the stories that we choose to tell or that we choose to share. And I think that that also can be so informative too, because you know, for instance, what I haven't, I mean, and I'll I'll share it now, but I as I was kind of giving you some of the background and I'm mentioning, oh, we're going on all these road trips. Well, the context for those road trips is my uncle was in prison for pretty much the majority of his life. And he would get out and then he'd do something and he'd end up back in prison. And so a lot of our road trips, we would go and drive around California to visit my uncle in prison. You know, my mom, I think um, this is her brother. She obviously was sensitive to the fact that I'm a little kid and I'm, you know, doing this thing. So she'd always make it kind of fun. Like we'd always like do something, you know, go go see, you know, go to the pier in Monterey or go to the aquarium and then, you know, go visit my uncle. And yeah, so I'd, you know, I'd come back and I'd go to school and oh, what'd you do this weekend? Well, you know, I went to the aquarium, right?

Mary: 15:56

Yeah.

Kristan: 15:57

But I never, I mean, in that moment, I wasn't gonna share that I was visiting my uncle in prison.

Mary: 16:04

Yeah.

Kristan: 16:05

Right. I mean, because that degree of vulnerability was not available to me as a elementary school age child or a as a even as a middle schooler, or I mean, I may be told a couple of people in high school. So I think also, again, kind of paying attention to the stories that you're willing to share with others.

Mary: 16:32

Yeah. Well, one of the things that it really fascinates me about stories, narratives, it two things. First, I talk often about limiting narratives because I think that especially women see a lot of things that happen in a way that diminishes them. So that's one thing maybe we can explore. I think the other thing that occurs to me is every kid in a family grows up in a different family. Yeah. So, and to explain that a little bit, because of course, as a therapist, that's a common theme. Your birth order really determines what that experience was like. You know, you have different relationships with your siblings than any of your other siblings do with each other. Your parents are at a different place. And it's only been recently that I've shared some stories with my siblings. And even though I know all this, I'm like, that's how you remember that. And it's just so fascinating that we hold on to these things and they are our truth. They define what we know of ourselves, how we think about ourselves, how we think about our relationship in our family. And then when you hear one of your siblings tell it, or even you talk to, I talked to one of my dad's sisters recently, and my dad would be 98. He's passed away since. Um, but talking to her, hearing those stories made me see my parents entirely differently. So that idea of stories, I think, is endlessly fascinating.

Kristan: 18:08

Oh, it is. You know, being an only child, one of the few things that I I knew as a young adult, I wasn't that sure about that much, but I knew I really wanted to be a parent. And I have been very fortunate. And I have three wonderful children who are young adults. And, you know, it's it was so fascinating for me to experience this being a mother. And in particular, one of the most, and I had spent a lot of time babysitting and and taking care of kids. So I mean, the the mechanics of it, I was pretty adept at. I mean, from the get-go, right? I mean, it's like they're born and they are these very unique individuals. And and so I think that that's kind of interesting. And then, yeah, then you add on the layering of kind of sibling dynamics. And as you said, you know, as a, you know, at the time, my husband, um, you know, just who we were as parents. And so it is so fascinating. And going back to your point about memory too, I I have a family that I I know and I I love. So there's like 12. It's a family of 12 kids. And talk about, I mean, literally, you can bring up a a, you know, a situation or a instance, and you've got 12 different memories of that, yeah, that event. It is so interesting what we each hold right from an experience. And I agree with you that there is so much, um, particularly for women, there there is this tendency to limit ourselves to to also, I think, I don't know if if you have felt this. I've been married now three times, and I I tease myself that I am with my third, my last, and my best husband. And I truly mean that. He is a wonderful man. And my first two marriages, which both ended in divorce and and divorces that I initiated, there was a time when I was in the marriage that I felt like the issues that we were having were mine to fix. And I have seen myself do this in other instances where I'm kind of taking more of the responsibility for the situation than really is mine to take.

Mary: 21:14

Yeah.

Kristan: 21:14

And I think that that is also something commonly that we do as women, right? I mean, it's it's I think kind of that kind of a maybe a bit of an unhealthy stretch of our nurturing or our caretaking that we often do, you know, out of love and and genuine desire to be caretakers, but then yeah, that where it can go awry when we are, you know, taking all the responsibility. And and I think that that we, you know, one thing that helped me to move away from that type of behavior was that there was a little bit of hubris in that. Not only was I assigning myself more of the responsibility in fixing this thing, that also wasn't really giving room in the relationship. And this is whether I, you know, a personal relationship or a professional relationship, it wasn't giving room for the other person to step in and and kind of and bring what they had. And so, you know, it's it's funny because in on the one hand, we we kind of take on that res all that responsibility because we're saying, oh, you know, I'm gonna fix it. I I'm the one who, you know, made this bad, I'm gonna figure this out. And there's something about that that's like, yeah, no, it's not all you. So just slow down here a little bit and allow for the fact that there's other people, allow for them to be part of this, you know, part of the solution. Or in and maybe the solution is that, you know, in the terms of my marriage that you don't necessarily end up together, but allow room for that other person to to have some space and some say into this.

Mary: 23:07

Yeah, we take on a lot. I think it's partly socialization. And then we do hold it tight because, you know, it's kind of that catch 22. It's like, why isn't anybody helping me? And it's like, well, I kind of told them, like, I don't really need help. So that is that interesting thing of moving from that sort of sense of control, or I'm gonna own this, do all this invisible labor. And then when the resentment sets in, it's really like you gotta look in the mirror and like, well, we do teach people how to treat us. So yeah, I think that's interesting. And as far as the limiting narratives, I'm always still fascinated by we can have 17 compliments and one criticism. And the criticism is not only in red, but it's in 38-point font in our brains. And so that is really something that holds us back, focusing on.

Kristan: 24:03

Well, it's interesting. I for the very first time I did a group specifically designed just for women. There have been plenty of times where I have offered groups that have ended up being just women. Um, but this was the first one that was designed for women, and it was a four-week thing where we met once a week. And I think it was maybe the second or third week. And I I like to kind of start each of my groups with not only some breathing just to kind of get ourselves in the room, so to speak, but also just kind of a little bit of an icebreaker or something and question. And again, to kind of get us out of our wherever we were rushing from, or you know, whatever else is on our brain. And so I I asked this group of women, I said, I'm gonna have us all share a what is a compliment that you recently received.

Mary: 25:05

Was it crickets? Did you get crickets?

Kristan: 25:07

Oh my goodness, we got crickets. And it was funny because everyone is looking at me like, what are you talking about? Right. And so I finally shared, and I was like, Well, I said, you know, this came to me because I had just been on the phone with a dear friend of mine, and she was so sweet because she was um, we were about to hang up and she said, Oh, do you have just a couple more minutes? She said, I just want to tell you how great my daughter was the other day at her sporting event. And I was like, Yeah. So, you know, she told me about her daughter and and she goes, Thank you so much. She goes, I love that you're one of the few people that I can just brag about my daughter with abandon. I don't have to censor myself at all. And I was like, Oh, I love that. I love being that person anytime. I mean, you can call me up and just do that, you know, and then you can we can just talk about that and we'll catch up another time. And I shared that with the group because I said that just meant so much to me. And then conversely, though, just I don't know, a day or two ago, I was wearing, I don't know, maybe a skirt or something, and somebody said, I like your skirt. You know, and the first thing I I wanted to say was, oh, this old thing, like, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, this is like wearing pajamas, you know, this is this is just nothing. And and I caught myself and I thought, oh my goodness, what are you doing? Just say thank you. Just say thank you. So I think for me, like there are certain compliments that I can really latch on to and I can just bask in the good glow that I get from it. And then there are those other ones that are like, I'm, you know, the minute the compliment is, I don't even let it land, right? I'm like, whoo, let me brush this off.

Mary: 27:16

Yeah. Deflect. Yes.

Kristan: 27:18

And I think a lot of that for me is specifically because my one of my grandmothers was so had so many mixed messages about appearance. She grew up very, very poor. She was very poor when she had my my mom and my uncle. And cleanliness was going to be kind of the the way that she could prove that she was poor. Kind of it would it would be horrible to be poor and to somehow, you know, that there be any dirt anywhere, any dust, any dirt. So I mean, like your house had to be spotless, you had to be spotless. And so there was always this emphasis on presenting kind of spotless, right? As a woman, I think specifically, your hair better be brushed and you're this and that, but you can't draw too much attention to yourself. I will never forget one time I'm picking her up. This is later in life, and I think the kids are in the car, and I had some lipstick on. And I don't wear a ton of makeup, but I just had lipstick. And she was like, What it, what is that? Like, what is what are you wearing? And I was like, I'm just I'm wearing a little lipstick. And she was, oh and then it like a couple of minutes later, she's like, she said, Well, I guess it looks okay. And you know, it was kind of like, Who are you trying to, you know, and I wasn't trying, I mean, I was just I was just hanging out with her. I mean, I wasn't like I was I wasn't trying to draw any attention to me. I just I liked it. I thought it was a pretty color, you know, and it was just such a funny, you know, so many messages though about who you can be and who you better not be. And we can tend to carry those for much longer than is necessary. And I know that for her, there was an element of worrying about a young woman getting too much attention, right? Or being subject to you know, violence.

Mary: 29:42

Yeah.

Kristan: 29:43

Yeah. And that's the benefit of gaining wisdom through time and experience, is you realize she wasn't necessarily trying to be hypercritical, right? I mean, she just so much of this messaging that we get, you know, it's it comes from a Place of being worried about us or trying to keep us safe.

Mary: 30:05

Yeah, and it ends up kind of it keeps us small. I mean, I think those messages really keep us small. So let's take a little side route now and try to get to wrapping into what I started with in my intro, because you work with spiritual autobiographies. So what first of all, can you explain a little what does that mean?

Kristan: 30:28

Yes. Discovering your spiritual autobiography is a workshop that I recently developed, although the spiritual autobiography as a tool or exercise is something that I came across many, many years ago. And I was facilitating small groups at a church. And it was one of the activities that I was meant to do with my group. The church provided the curriculum and it it always struck me as a really wonderful exercise because it was asking a question that was a little bit, you know, different than a lot of the questions that we get. And I think what is helpful is when we are asked questions that are a little bit outside of the day-to-day, it gets us to think, right? I mean, we kind of were like, oh, I'm not gonna just pull out my my regular response response for this, right? I I actually am gonna, oh, okay, let me think about this. And so over a year ago, I was transitioning out of business coaching and um had completed a master's of education and had been assisting in writing a book with a local nonprofit in my town. And I was just really, I was like, oh, I'm so ready to do my next thing, but I don't know what my next thing is, which is highly, highly unusual for me because I usually am like, oh, I know right what my next thing is. And I actually told myself, I said, okay, Kristen, you are going to just sit with this uncomfortable and unusual feeling for yourself of you don't know what is next. So what came to me was I wanted to provide something that allowed for people to connect, connect with themselves and connect with others, and by extension, could possibly build community, especially in a you know, increasingly polarized and fractured society. And I thought, okay, so what is the what's the little thing that I can do? And I thought, you know, I'm gonna create a workshop discovering your spiritual autobiography. So I put together a curriculum and I've massaged it a little bit over time now. And your spiritual autobiography, in the terms of my workshop, it is a thousand to 1500 word document, and we share them aloud with each other. So, and the way that I describe it to people is I consider this to be a living document. In other words, that this is not the final say, because I see spirituality as something that is continuingly changing, growing, evolving, right? And so this is just allow this to be your snapshot in this moment. And for me, there have been times where I am reflecting on a specific incident that has kind of informed my understanding of that which is bigger than myself, right? And and then there have been times where it's more of a story of a series of experiences and and happenings. I mean, for instance, one of my spiritual autobiographies is I talked about having children. And I was saying that one of the things that really surprised me about my eight children is is in becoming a mother, a parent, is how uniquely themselves they were when they arrived. The other thing that completely upended me was how much, well, I expected to love them. I did not expect to be so in love with my children. And I remember when my first son was born, my first child, I mean, it was like my heart just the expansion that happened, it I mean, it took my breath away. And I remember on the eve of my second child was gonna be induced. And so I I the night before, I remember looking at my my first child thinking, oh my gosh, I love you so much. And I'm about to just completely rock your world. And I love you so much, like I don't know what it's gonna be like to have this second child. And so then I have my second child, and what I learn in that moment is our capacity for love is is infinite.

Mary: 35:33

Yeah.

Kristan: 35:34

And that to me is a deeply spiritual moment, a a spiritual lesson and foundational to my understanding of spirituality.

Mary: 35:48

Yeah. So when someone is thinking about what is my spiritual autobiography, do you start that with a question? Or how do they think in terms of beyond like I was born and then this happened, and then this happened. So, so the spiritual part, explain that. How do you how do they get to that? How do you help people conceptualize that part of it?

Kristan: 36:10

So it is a workshop. Either it is done over the course of several weeks where you're meeting once a week, and or it is more of a retreat style immersive workshop. So I am not throwing people into the deep end and saying, write your spiritual autobiography, right? So where we start is we really start with, and as you mentioned at the beginning, there is a lot of um commingling sometimes in terms of our language and also even our understanding between religion and spirituality. So right from the get-go, we are within the group for each of ourselves and in the group, we are really investigating, you know, what it what do we consider religious and what do we consider spiritual? I have led groups where people are religion and spirituality for them is hand in glove. And that's just the way it is. And I would say more often than not, as we get into it and we start thinking about it, it's kind of it's like a Venn diagram, right? I mean, there's you've got your religious bucket and you've got your spirituality bucket. And there's moments where they, I mean, prayer, for instance, prayer often can be part of both. So there are these places where there is the overlap, but we really dig into what the differences are so that people can begin to, for the purposes of this workshop and this investigation, maybe let go of the religion piece of it and lean into the spirituality piece of it. But I do think that language is very powerful. So we do look at one of the exercises we do is I I love for us to pick words. And sometimes we pick spirituality, sometimes we pick religion, but we even pick words like sin or heaven or prayer. I have a list of words that I to get people thinking, and I have people look up kind of the academic definition, right? What is the dictionary definition of this? And if they're super curious, they can kind of do a little digging and look up where it came from and even kind of what that um, you know, in other languages, is there nuance to it? And then I have people reflect on what is their understanding of that word. Because as I mentioned earlier, with success being one of those words that we need to define what that means for us outside of what the societal or cultural definition is. It would be limiting to only think about the definitions that have been delivered to us.

Mary: 39:18

Yeah, yeah. So you help people go beyond that and you kind of call it mapping hope.

Kristan: 39:22

I do. I do so we we do a series of different exercises. And so we're we do, we dive into the words to start with, and we kind of start digging around into people's religious backgrounds. I mean, even if you have not necessarily been raised in a very specific faith tradition, I mean, we live in a society where religion is around us. I mean, it's it's in art, it's in literature. So so even if you're saying I'm not a religious person, it still is it you've you've bumped up against it somewhere. So we do that. We also then do some different exercises reflecting on the you had mentioned kind of, well, when I was this age, this is what happened. And so I have an exercise where we we do a little bit of a chronological, but it's a little more free form just to allow for memories to be brought forth without the structure of a strict kind of chronological um sequencing. But what ends up happening when you go through these different reflections and sharing, because we're also sharing out as a group, is you kind of you realize I'm still here. I'm here. And I've had these experiences, I've had these heartbreaks and heartaches, and they're still part of me, right? But I'm still here.

Mary: 40:58

So that's the hopeful part.

Kristan: 41:00

Yeah. Yeah. And I I feel like as long as for myself, as long as I am still living and breathing, and this is also what I attempt to share with my participants, is your story is never oh, it's not over. And I think that when you take the time to reflect on your past and your stories and the emotional landscape, you do realize that there have been these twists and turns to your story that you never could have anticipated. And I think that also that is a place where we can recognize hope as something to hold on to.

Mary: 41:46

Yeah, because so often things that we would say were a failure, or I don't like the word mistake. I don't really think there are, I think there's misjudgment. I don't know about mistake, but I think that's often the point where something changes because you're challenged. You, you know, something you thought was going to be a certain way was not a certain way. And then it's like, oh, what do I do now? And that's where reinvention happens. And I think that's very hopeful. But so many interesting themes. So let's wrap up with you telling us where to find you. And if there's anything other than your spiritual autobiography workshops that you do, just share with us how you can help people.

Kristan: 42:30

Yeah, absolutely. Happy to, Mary. You can find me on my website, kristanswan.com. I do focus primarily on in-person workshops and experiences. So, and if you are interested in doing that where you are, just let me know and we can figure that out. And on my website, there are a list of events that are upcoming. Um, one of the other things that I do is I sell a journal that's called Spaghetti on the Wall. And this is a journal with prompts. And I really love this as a means of developing a habit of discernment. I think that one of the best things that happens when you use spaghetti on the wall on a regular basis, and I I do it every day, is really decluttering your mind as well as really getting some awareness and um some recognition of patterns and decision making and things like that. So I always say that I am not in the business of changing people. That's just not what I do, but I do think that awareness is a wonderful thing. And then you get to choose what you do with that.

Mary: 43:50

Yeah, I love that. Well, thank you so much for being here. And I will put all those, I will link everything in the show notes so people can still have access. But thank you for being here, Kristen. Thank you, Mary. You're welcome. And I want to thank everyone for listening. If you enjoyed today's show, please take a second to scroll to the bottom of the show page and leave a quick review. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.