Show Summary:

• In Episode 24 Mel and Beth discuss the challenges and benefits of establishing routines and the resistance to structure in their lives.
• They explore personal experiences with morning walks, breathwork practices, and attempts to become early risers.
• The conversation delves into the struggle between maintaining flexibility and adhering to routines.
• The role of identity in forming new habits, and the influence of societal expectations on their schedules.
• They also touch on the importance of community and accountability in sustaining beneficial practices.

00:00 Morning Greetings and Weather Chat

00:15 The Benefits of Walking and Breathwork

01:01 Struggles with Routine and Structure

03:14 Insights from Breathwork and Energy Practices

06:28 Challenges of Creating and Maintaining Habits

10:38 Exploring Identity and Routine

14:41 Sleep Patterns and Natural Rhythms

22:31 Identity and Personal Growth

28:52 Conclusion and Next Steps

Connect and Subscribe to the Podcast at:

https://soul-inspired-you.captivate.fm/

More from Beth and Mel

More from Beth Hewitt

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Social Media @gratitudeandvision @visualiseyou @Bethhewitt80

More from Melissa Amos

Get Mel's Book - Memoires of a Mystic in Training

Social Media @themelissaamos

Music Credits: Laura Mitchell of LauraMitchellSings.com https://www.facebook.com/laura.mitchell.1232

Good morning, Mel. Good morning, Beth. How are we today?

I'm good. Don't know what the weather's like where you are, but it feels very

still today outside. It's. Yeah,

warm ish. Yeah, I think it might get warm later

today. Yes. So we've just had school

holidays this week, and so it was

nice for me this morning, it wasn't so nice getting up, but it was nice

for me this morning to come. When I take the kids to school and I

walk, and then I take a little bit of a longer walk.

And I don't know if you find this, Beth, but like, when you're walking and

there's nothing else to do and there's no phone, there's nothing you're listening to,

it's like where things start to get clearer

in your mind. And so it was just nice to get back

to this. And then I came home

and I've started a breath work practice. And so now

my mission is, after anything we do, is to keep it up.

So that's my, that's been my hour and a half or so of my morning.

Do you find having a routine is helpful? I

resist routines. Yeah, me too. But I also see,

I also find the benefit of them as well. Like whenever I'm consistent and I

keep something up, like doing the podcast, like, well, we've got a dedicated time every

single week and we do it. There's benefits to having that consistency. But I

also resist habit. And because

I like to be in the flow, I like to be open and

available too, but we can have a mixture of both. And I think it's finding

that. Yeah, and it's interesting, especially as a

business owner, I've always really resisted structure, and I

think that part of that is because of my working life and

being told where I had to be and what I had to do all of

the time. And then having kids, but three kids, and when you have

a baby, routines all just go flying out of everything.

And so I resist structure. But what

I found interesting is both in my human

design, which I don't know that much about, I understand bits of

it, and my astrology, which also, despite

the thousands of readings I've had, I'm still like, I don't know.

But in both of these, it talks about how I

flourish in structure. Yeah.

And I get it. I resist it. And this is,

it's like a self sabotaging behavior. It's to do some

amazing things. If you just had a bit of structure and then this like, child

means no, you will not even I will tell me

what to do. It's interesting because I also find it

hard to have structure. So at the minute, I'm trying to

get up earlier and do, like,

marketing in the morning, like at the beginning of the day, and I'm just like,

okay, so between six and seven or seven and eight is

going to be my time to do this. And I'm just resisting

it. Like, I know that it's good for me, but I'm also like,

nope, I don't know. It's a funny

old one. But I do know that when I do it, that I reap the

benefits of it. So I think it's a very similar thing. And I can see

that structure is good for me, but also, it just

doesn't. Just not the natural order of things for me to do

that. No. And so this weekend,

I was at a, I don't know what you'd call it, but there was a

lot of breath work going on. And

actually, that was the point is that we've been

given this incredible series of

breath and mantra and affirmation and

brainwave things and all the things and the

experience that I had this weekend and the

understandings that I had about that I have about the energy

body and the electromagnetic field and the brain

and law of attraction and the universe works and our

purpose and all of these things. It's okay. This seems to

be a key, one of the

keys or one of the numbers in the code, if you like, to

assist in all of that, because breath work

can clear physiologically, it can

clear energetically, we're connecting to our chakras,

we're working with the different energy centers and how we

respond to that, as well as this creating

this routine, which I think sends a big

signal out into the universe to go. Obviously, she finds this very

important, because if breath work, and if you've ever done it, it's not

comfortable, it's not that pleasant. Until it

is, there's pleasant bits. And so I, and then

I came away from there. Yes, I'm going to do it.

And, no, I'm not. And so yesterday I

didn't, and today I

was like, I went for my walk, and I'm like, oh, and I've got, now

I've got this thing with you, and am I going to have time to do

it? And actually, I sat here before you came

on, and you were just the right amount of late. Yeah, I

actually, like, the universe was like, here we go, Melissa. And it was ten

minutes. Here we go, Mel, you weren't ten minutes late. But it was. I had

ten minutes. Yeah, I'm going to open this space for you, and what are you

going to do with it? And I could have

responded to all the messages that are on my phone. I could

have written an email, but no, I did. And

now I'm like, well done, Mel. Well done, Mel.

It's really strange because as I was being late, so I'd got everything set

up, and then I realized that I didn't have my headphones and that my headphones

were in the car and my house and my drive is quite a walk away.

It's like a separate bit of land. And so as I'm walking down the side

of the house to the car, I'm thinking, oh, I'm late. Mel's going to be

like, upset that I'm late. And then I was like, no, everything has its divine

time, and I will appear when I

appear. I tried to be late alarm, but I was

like, okay. It was like literally three minutes, wasn't it? And then I came back

up and I thought, oh, she's not even here. When I turn the computer, she's

not here. Where is she? And then you're like, 2 seconds later, you popped up.

So divine timing. Yeah, it was

perfect. And I don't get upset with people being like, I think time is

fine, and these things. I look like Bart Simpson. I've just put my head in

the bun and it's like, not like Bart Simpson.

Yeah. I think it's interesting what we do and

how we move through the world. And I think even when you know what you

know, we still go back into habits, like

creating habits. Isn't that one of the hardest

things? Yeah. Why is that? It's a funny old thing. Is it? And

it's probably one of the things that we do most of,

if you think about in terms of habits that imprinted on it. We go to

school, we've got an assembly at the same time, we take the register at the

same time, we get to school at the same time, the bells go off at

the same time. So it's not like it's a concept that's alien

to us, where we go all of a sudden, we've got to make our own

routines. But yet we still. Maybe that's part

of it. Maybe that routine that is,

was forced upon us, is that start of that. I

actually want to be creative and I want to do things my own way. It

would be chaos, right? If we all just rocked up, if teachers, like, were just

like, randomly waiting for all the kids to turn up at random times between eight

and 09:00 but I wonder if that's part of the

puzzle. I think also, as you're saying this, it's

this, we as children, we don't really have the

opportunity to create our own routines. Yeah.

You get up. I had this conversation with my kids. They're like, oh, I don't

want it. We were up late watching Britain's Got Talent last night, and

they would then go to bed till 10:30 and they're only little and they were

tired and they've been off. And it's, no, we need to go. I don't want

to go yet. We need to go. And so these, they're imposed.

And so I don't remember having an opportunity to build my own

routine as a child. And then you go into work life. Then I remember

going into uni and we were at uni, what, 15 hours a

week or something. And then it's, you need to manage your own time to

make sure you get your homework done. And what did I do? I bet you

were the same 2 hours before the

course was meant to be handed. Oh, my

God. I need to do it because I didn't have the skills, I don't

think, to set my own routine. And then you go into

work and depending on what it is that you do, but if you're in an

office again, it's you come in at this time and you leave at this time

and the morning meetings at this time and whatever,

and I'm not sure we're given the skills.

And so we end up defaulting to habits that are either

deeply ingrained in us or

comforting to us or self soothing to us,

or they seem to be the path of least resistance. Or it's like we

default back to what we know, but when we create, like you

do, the 30 day gratitude, you

begin to foster a habit. Yeah. And then the

real thing comes when we leave the container or

the place, and it's now you're on your own. Now what do I

do? Yeah. And I think that's why it's important to have

community around you, maybe to have an accountability

buddy or somebody who's doing

the same thing. Like, I set up a WhatsApp group with the people that were

there this weekend so that we could. I'm going to go in there and

be like I did my birth web practice because maybe it will motivate them

to do it as well and we can celebrate each other. I think

it's finding the right balance, isn't it, around all of this around

having structure and also having space to

play and be creative. And it's the same with, like, accountability as well. It's that

right level of, we don't want to be the person who's come on, everybody.

We all need to do this together because everybody's on their own timeline. Everybody's going

to be ready to do something when they're ready. And it's that balance of being,

I'm here to support this, what we're trying

to create. And I think that's the beautiful thing. When we create the space

to allow things to naturally unfold, it's almost having the

group vision around, okay, this is what we're trying to achieve. And we know these

are the steps that are going to allow us to do this. But within this

space, let's have the ability to be

creative and just see what comes up and through and all of that. So it's

a really interesting topic, and I think it

sounds like there's only us two here, but I think all humans

experience this on some level. And I think it depends on how much

you like something. If you like routine and structure or what you're doing is,

like, really lights you up, then that's going to be easy, isn't it? But when

it becomes. When it's something. I

don't even know if that's true either. Something that's easy.

So, like, to have a coffee in the morning, that's easier. I press a button,

I sit there and enjoy. I don't have to do very much, like, yoga. Like,

I suppose for me, yoga was one of those things. Like, I never could imagine

that I would have such a strong practice

even five years ago. Like, it just wasn't in my thing.

And there's times when I'm there

and I'm like, what am I doing? This is horrible.

I find myself every day booking on so that I have to

book on three days later. Like, I find myself every day booking on.

And I literally revolve my life around

this yoga practice that

is at the gym at this certain time now when I can't

get to the gym. And I have 10,000

videos thanks to YouTube, with some incredible

teachers, and I have recordings that I've done with other

sessions, especially in my memberships and things.

Do I do them? No, because then the day just flitters away. So having

that anchor point has helped me.

I think I digressed a bit. But, like, having that anchor point really

anchors me into, I'm going to carry on. There's something like

this breath work that I know with every cell

of my being that this is good for me. And the feeling that

I feel at the end of the breath work is

like nothing else yet.

I'm envisaging into the weeks and months and I'm,

like, not sure I'm going to keep it up. Yeah. What is that about?

I wonder. And they talk a lot about, don't they? 30 days

to create a habit or something. But I wonder if there is like a sweet

spot or if it's different for everybody, where it starts to become part

of the routine and the anchor, whether we have to do it so many

times before we get to that point or if it's a.

A belief that we. Something in the mind

has to change for it to anchor into

place. Maybe it's an identity thing. Maybe I have that

identity because I had an identity

that I didn't really. I'm not a gym bunny and all of

this. And then something happened at some point as I

was going to yoga, and I put a lot of it down

to my teacher, one of my teachers who

is very. She loves yoga.

She's not like an Instagram yogi.

She's just incredible. And I think something being in there

that I started to take on this identity as a yogi,

I'm like, this is what I do. And it suddenly

landed in, this is what I do. Yeah. So now it's

like one of those non negotiables. There's days where I don't go

because life, it's a priority. And

so maybe for me right now, I'm not in the identity of.

I'm a breath work. I don't know what you'd call it. I'm a

breather. That maybe that's it. Maybe we.

It's that point where it turns from something that

I do into something that I. Not that I am, but

something that I identify with. Yeah, maybe that's

the. I think you may be onto something there

because it is identity of who were becoming.

We talk about. It's a lot of the reason why we don't do something is

because maybe somebody said something in the past, or you're not good at math, so

therefore we're not good with our accounts. Whatever. I think it does come back

to identity. Who's to say we're not gym bunnies? Who's to

say that we're not amazing breathworkers? Who's to say

we're not early birds? I think the whole early bird,

night owl debate is, where does that come from?

Because I know that I've always identified as a night owl, but I also

know that if I get up really early, I can be super productive. So

is it that I'm both? It's just that I have identified as being a night

owl. And it's interesting to say this because I was

reading something a little while ago, so I'll be paraphrasing terribly,

but, yeah, there's been experiments where they've basically

taken people in the west who identify either as early birds

or night owls, basically taken them out of society and

put in the middle of a desert or something and gone back to this

nomadic lifestyle. So, yeah, fire, and you're

eating fire and there's no phones and there's no blue

light, there's no electricity. You're just in there for a week, like,

not even very much time. And they found that in

that time, and you'd have to look up the thing because I'm paraphrasing, and it

was a while ago, but in that time, they found that people would

naturally fall asleep an hour after sunset. And the

rhythms and the circadian rhythms just picked in really

quickly as we just completely

detoxed from any outside

light, especially light influence. I think it also had to do with the food

and when they ate. But when there's nothing else

to do, apparently we will all default. Our natural

rhythm will default back into moving with

the sun. Yeah, I can totally feel that. It's like now, isn't

it? But I think we've got. Because we've got curtains drawn and the blinds drawn

and we're in a dark room, then we do. We're just not aware of what's

going on outside. When I was away, I don't want to miss anything.

And so I sleep buttons open this this year,

I've been away quite a lot for different reasons, and

I have the curtains open. And when I was on a business retreat,

I was up at 06:00 a.m. like, I am never up at 06:00 a.m. but

I was up, like, up

and getting in the shower and then going out for a walk and getting myself

ready at 06:00 a.m. and I'm like, who am I?

And I wasn't too tired. And then, and I'm saying to my

husband, I'm up at six, he's, who are you, woman? Like, are you going to

come home and come? And I'm like, no. And then I came home, then I'm

like, oh, stay in bed. And I did. And then a month later, I

went away again and I had the curtains open. And the time, it was 2

hours later, but I was up at UK

time, 06:00 a.m. yeah, every day or even

before 545. And I'm like, who are you,

woman? And then I come home and then I'm back in. I just want to

stay in bed and I've got more to do at home than I have when

I'm there. Yeah. And so

what's that about? And then I was listening a couple of weeks

ago to a webinar thing

with Robin Sharma. Yeah, he's the 05:00 a.m. club guy. And

I play. He's talking about getting up at 04:00 a.m. and I'm like, who are

you? But the way he was talking about it, I'm like, I get it.

He spends an hour doing his visioning and his prayers, all of this.

And then an hour going for a walk in the forest. And then

he works from eight till one. He has a nap. And then, oh, he

has a nap. That's a bonus in the middle of the day. And then I

think that's what he said. That's what I heard.

I think I really. And then I think he said he goes to

bed at like between nine and ten. And

I was like, that actually, that sounds really lovely.

And I wonder, I always think that when my kids are no longer

children and I'm not responsible to help them

forge their routines. Like, I'll probably be in bed, I won't wake up

till ten, I'll have nothing to do till eleven. Like, that's my dream. But I

think maybe I'm gonna be up 06:00 a.m.

gonna be in bed by nine. I do think. Because on the times

where I have got up at 06:00 a.m. in the morning, I'm less tired.

I think sometimes we get, and I don't know anything about the cycles of sleep,

but I know that we go through different stages of sleep and I think sometimes

we're awake about 06:00 we might look at us watching at 06:00 and we're like.

But we're actually alert and awake. And I think if you actually got up at

that point, that might be a good thing. But what we do is we go

into a sleep again and then we go back into cycle and then we wake

up at 09:00 super tired or whenever we wake up. So I

think that there's definitely something in that. And

I'd love to be. I would actually like to be in the 06:00 a.m. club.

Maybe not the 04:00 a.m. club. That sounds a little bit too

perverse for me, but it would be quite nice to get up at 06:00 a.m.

every day. I think I'm the same. Yeah, I got a friend in the

states, and I was talking to her, and then the other

day, and I worked out what the time was there, and

I'm like, why are you upset? And the whole house was, like, awake,

and they were popping around, and I'm like, in our house at that time?

No, it's. There's exciting, there's nothing going

on. But then at night, I slept in my kids room the other

night because my husband wasn't feeling well. At

555, the alarm went off, and I'm like,

I turned it off before anyone woke up. But I'm like, what are you

doing? Like, why? But actually,

that's probably quite healthy. They

like to go to bed late, but maybe if they got up early, they'd go

to bed earlier. Like, I don't know. I also noticed, because I'm trying

out having one of the watches

which detects your sleep. And I have noticed the earlier

I go to bed, it doesn't actually matter how many hours sleep I have, but

the earlier I go to bed, the more deep sleep I get. Yeah.

Which I actually. I need to look into it more,

but I always think I sleep really well. Like, I

put my head on the pillow, fall asleep. Yeah. Turns

out I have a lot of REm sleep, not a lot of

deep sleep. Deep, deep sleep. Yeah. Interesting.

I feel we need, like, a sleep specialist to let us

know what's going. On, get in touch with us, because we'd like to talk to

you about our sleep pattern. So what

we've discovered is we feel better if we wake up at 06:00 a.m.

sleep better if we go to bed early. It's our natural rhythm. We don't

like to be structured yet. We push through our body

to go to bed late and get up late, which is not unnatural with

them. Why do we do it? I don't know. I'm

feeling like we need to do some identity work. Like, just create a whole new

identity and script and write out that this is,

I am an early bird. I do get up at 06:00 a.m. i do enjoy.

I enjoy and reap the rewards of getting up at 06:00 a.m. and I'm so

productive and my day just flows. I feel like I need to do that

kind of work instead of I'm a night owl. I like my

bed thinking like all. The resistance as you say that.

Yeah, I know, it's like crazy, isn't it? But we actually want to do it.

That's the annoying thing. I tell you what's going on. You do? I think. I

think you do. I think you do. I think you're like me. I think you

do. I think you're just denying yourself of this amazing time in

the morning because. Actually, when was it? I don't know. There was a

day whenever it was and last

week and I just had stuff I was launching last week

and I was like, when we were going out all day, so I was

like, I need to write these emails. So I got up early, down like wrote

like loads of emails because no one's up, so there's no distraction.

And I wrote loads and then I was like, oh

no. And then the day came and it was fine and I wasn't knackered

and whatever. But yeah, I think we're on to

something. I think that this is our

identity and it's been something for, I think

for both of us. Identity's been coming up quite a lot

and maybe we'll talk about this on the next episode.

I've been working a lot this last couple of weeks with business owners,

healers, mentors,

gogies, you know, all the, all, they're amazing.

And I asked that question to somebody and I

said, do you see yourself as a business owner?

And she said, no. Interesting. It is

interesting. And I asked this question really

also for my research because I'm promoting,

course and I'm targeting business owners,

but those words aren't reaching the people that

I can help because they're not understanding that

they're business owners. And I think that as we land into that, like, I've

seen this with me, that as I landed into that

identity of I run a business, then my business became a

business rather than a monetized hobby. It was really that

this is what I do. Yeah, yeah. I think

it comes back to all of the things, all the labels that we've

had and all the past experiences and all the conversations we've had in the

past. And it's a lot of work, isn't it, to unpick and unfold

that and to, I know we talk a lot about knowing thyself

as to use your words. And I think

it's part of all of that. But then when we start to strip back all

of these layers, is the person that we thought we was, who we

are, or who will become it. And we work

at it at all levels, energetic. So that's what we were doing this

weekend. It was really on this energetic,

physiological level with the breath. And we

work on it on a psychotherapeutic level,

and we work at it on a conscious level. And there's not one key, I

think it's a code to this, and then we do this. But we've got to

keep on doing this work. It's not like we wake up

one morning when I thought, I'm here, I am now. 06:00 a.m.

multi millionaire. Like,

it's happy and nurturing and

like all the things, but maybe underneath that's what we

are. Yeah,

we've just. Maybe that's our purpose, right? That we've got all of

these identities. And in the holy fire language, they call

it the. What do they call it? There's that. There's the

dormant self and there's the authentic self.

Like maybe it's just awakening

those aspects of us so that the, what they call the culturally

created self, which is what many

of us, I think, identify as. Maybe it's as we

begin to heal, not dismiss, not let

go, not out the park. But as we heal

that culturally created self and understand that,

then we get closer and closer to this authentic

part of us. It's not that when we're in the culturally creative

self, we're not being authentic. We think we're authentic. But

then there's these disparities that we don't understand.

And I well, this is me. But then we keep coming

back physiologically, energetically,

spiritually, emotionally, mentally, all of the

things. And then, who knows?

As you were saying, all of that. And I don't know why Madonna

seemed to jump in my head a number of times when we've had these podcast

interviews, but I look at Madonna, who is somebody who has changed

identity so many different times and made it look so

easy, and each time it's just.

I'm assuming she's authentically the same person,

but she's a different iteration of herself, but also is expressing herself in a slightly

different way each time. And so we look at somebody like my daughter, who has

gone through numerous

Personas. It's almost like that could become.

It could be an easy thing to do. We're here talking that maybe it's like

a deep rooted difficult. I think we have to go through that and we need

to understand who we are. But also, what if we also set that intention of,

actually, this is who I'm going to be today, and this is how I'm going

to express myself. And then all of a sudden. Because people reinvent

themselves all the time, don't they? And we reinvent ourselves all the time, whether we're

conscious about it or not, whether it's getting a new job or being in a

new relationship or getting a new. All of these things are expressions of some aspect

of our identity. So I think it's. I think it'd be interesting to explore

this more, and this. The merging of the energetics

and the healing, as well as the creative stuff that, like, I get

to choose what hat to wear today or what words to use. I think it's

a real merging of all of those things is.

And it comes back to know thyself, because then we get scared, like,

oh, I'm changed. I've. She. Oh, she's changed.

Yes, she's changed. She's meant to change. And that can be scary,

too. And we don't know. And then we. And then imposter syndrome, when all of

these things come up, because we're like, oh, hold on a minute. I don't know

myself as that, but maybe this new

identity of ours is what we've been building up to. And then

it comes into that allowance, and there's courage in there and. And

to be difficult. It can be

like, with my Yogi thing, it can literally be a moment where

you're like, oh, you don't even know that it's

happened. And then suddenly it's happened, and

then it's okay now. That's just who I am. And I literally

think it can happen in a moment. And I've seen it through, like, hypnotherapy,

especially. I've even seen it through, like, tapping. I've always been scared

of whatever, and then we do these interventions, then it's

all, I'm okay.

And it's. That's clean and that's simple.

And so, yeah, I think we should discuss. We could

discuss a little bit more about

identity and. And some of the ways that we can

foster that, because I've definitely got some thoughts around that.

We shall leave that for another day. We shall. We're going to bed early tonight,

and then I'll be getting up at 06:00 a.m. tomorrow morning. Now, should we record

at 06:30 no. We'Ll be recording

tomorrow's episode, next week's episode tomorrow. So we will be able to tell you very

quickly whether we have achieved. 06:00 a.m. club. Hold your

account. Thank you very much.