Solo Travel & Mama Self Love Journey🪽

Self~Love journey is lovely becoming an empty nested mama of 4 
As I move through the rebirthing of myself like never before, learning, growing, sharing injoying the process.

This episode I explore how I living in Cali sustainably with high means takes its toll on one income as a single woman establishing her career after 30 plus years..
Going into debt while juggling endless expenses.  What do I do in the midst of the rising debt?  Welll, the brave hearted Leo I am just leapt into the fire to go on this expanded journey to test the waters of time...

Returned to US & changed my number!  Bankrupt & Don’t regret my choice one f'ing bit(;

How did I feel now???  Returned stronger entering into the Lions~Gate Portal that was awaiting me!

Grateful🦋

Can't we all just love ourselves & one another already??

Like to read?👉🏼Blog Post: https://consciouschoicesforwellness.substack.com/p/solo-travel

Thank You All so very much for listening today!  I genuinely hope you learned something & I invite you to join me each week, so you never miss a conscious wellness beat!  This podcast holds a special place in my heart, dedicated to my evolution here, my passionate mission to spread more consciousness for the much needed wellness on Earth.  Come join me as a guest as well, let’s collaborate making change for future generations.. 

Thank you so much for joining me today!  I strongly Believe that we are all Connected and want to Share our gifts with One another.  Remember how amazing you are, Never Give Up, We can help and Support each other along this Crazy Journey...I'm going to keep Sharing what I can with all of You, just wish I could do more each day, Life is passing by too quickly!  This podcast is new and will be ever-evolving & improving as long as possible...Please share this with others who could benefit from this information(:

Questions?  Please don't be shy🌻

5-Star Reviews are Welcomed & Kindly Appreciated
-Helping to Support this Show for Future Gens~

Note: I am a One Woman Show, juggling many hats, simple, growing slowly as I can only flow with the time, trust in the organic divine process...ALGORITHM?

 
Here are links to my other Offerings:

https://consciouschoicesforall.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@belovehealingapothecary/videos

https://www.instagram.com/consciouswellbeing/

https://www.tiktok.com/@beluv73

https://poshmark.com/closet/belove73

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hello, and thank you for joining me. I am back. I'm going to take my headphones off. I am so happy to be back. I was gone for, gosh, I think it's probably been almost six weeks. I was on a break. I had mentioned I was going on a self-love journey for about three weeks. This is the Conscious Choices for Wellness podcast that I created. This September will be two years since my first episode. And I am doing bi-monthly or every other week recordings and writing before I record as to what I want to share with you. So I thought I'd share a little bit about my trip that I went on. I'm calling it solo travel, a mama, freedom, self-love journey. And I got back two weeks ago today. I was gone for almost three weeks. And this was my first experience traveling this far away from California and my first solo travel experience. So becoming an official empty, quote unquote empty nester this last year has begun a new journey for myself to find who I am now. I was a mother for 30 plus years. My oldest child is 31. In case you don't know, I have four children, two boys, two girls, ages 18 to 31. Started becoming a mom when I was 21 years of age. I just turned 53 two days ago. And I actually three days ago now. My birthday was Friday. Today's Monday. And oh my gosh. It's um it's just like time to recreate and really find out who you are without having your kids. Um obviously, I'll always be a mother of four amazing humans that brought me so much joy, growth, beauty, and yes, even pain at times. When children become independent and move away, it's difficult to know how to move on in ways. This is a process that takes some sustainable preparation to flow into gracefully. I'm sure that there are other podcasts talking about this. I would love to listen to them. Um, because obviously, you know, there's many mothers in the world, and we all have different experiences and circumstances when our children move away, when they, you know, get old enough to become independent. And all of a sudden we're like, okay, like my life is totally different. And who am I? And what am I going to do for the rest of my life? So this is a process, and it's like losing a very long relationship that is now a long distance and really feels like a real time of letting go in a good way, though. It's it's a good way for me. Um, you know, like I said, all moms have different experiences around this, um, especially if your child is strong enough to not need your support anymore, and there is a sense of peace and that they are going to be okay or more than okay. I guess I raised very independent kids. Sometimes I wish they reached out more and needed even a little support from me because, you know, having four of them, you know, like it was my birthday on Friday, and actually screenshotted it on my phone because it was, it's just like a moment that doesn't happen very often, except for like Mother's Day and my birthday, where I don't necessarily see them on those days. Like maybe I might get a chance to see one or two of them. But it's like they call, you know. Um, and all four of them called me. And, you know, like from a certain time to a certain time, and it was interesting to see which one called first. And and it's just, yeah, it brings so much joy to know that they are very amazing adults and that they're on their own and doing well. And, you know, of course, I wish I saw them more. They are not living even in the same town as me, but we are all in California. So we're all within like five or six hours of each other. And I'm very excited. I get to see them all this next week because I'm going to have grandchild number two from my son and daughter-in-law, who had a son who's three. And when he's turning four, they're going to be having their second son this October. So the baby shower is um this next week or this week coming up this weekend. And so I will be able to see, you know, the all the family, the, you know, all my all my kids, which is my my family. And so I'm very excited for that. Now in my 50s, right? Like well into my 50s now. Oh my God. Um, feeling like I'm playing catch up career-wise, because I was not a woman who got to establish her career in her 20s and her 30s, and then started having a child or two. I did things very differently. I know I'm not the only one that did things this way, but we all have different lives, we all have different destinies. And um I am now struggling to support myself alone in my home in the state of California, my home state, where it's very expensive to live on your own, unless you have an established career where you make a decent income. And I choose to live where I do. It's familiar, it's beautiful, it's close enough to my family, like my kids, and it's where I want to be. And so does everyone else, it seems. So prices are high to live on one income, if you can imagine. I feel like a lot of people that live on one income in California, especially in certain areas. Um, you know, there, of course, there's certain areas that are less expensive to live in, but most of California is very high priced. And I I know some of these people that live alone and live a pretty, you know, decent life. And they are doing very well in their careers. They either don't have kids or they had kids later in life. And uh it's just not the case for me. And I I have expensive taste, y'all. I um I just do. I've I've always had expensive taste. And um, you know, not not like totally bougie, you know. I just I like to eat good. I I like quality items, and um I've got taste, I've got style, I, you know, I I live sustainably though, and well within my means. Um, so if you have higher standards, then you don't want to just settle for less, but sometimes you have no other choice. Um, learning to, you know, live in that way. And so it's been over the past decade that I've run up over 50,000 in debt, struggling to survive. And I was always saying, many people probably heard me say this, that I'm grateful for my credit cards because I wouldn't be living the life that I lived in the last, you know, over a decade without credit cards. But it got to be a time where it just was running out, right? It was like sometimes I could pay them off or I could pay them down enough and just keep like juggling them and living and like, you know, it always like worked out. Um I guess I could see that it was getting to a certain point that it had never been at before. But let me get let me get to that. Let me explain. So in the midst of the creeping credit card debt, okay, first I want to say if you know what I mean, you know. Okay. If you don't, please don't judge. You have no room to. But in the midst of the creeping credit card debt that I was incurring, and that's what happens when you're trying to live sustainably. You know, you're thinking about your purchases, you're buying things that are on sale, you're not buying too much, you're not buying like more than you need, but you also have a quality of life that you're trying to maintain as well as maybe not making as much financially as it costs to live. Like when you're paying all of your own living expenses, all your rent, all your utilities are all on you. You've got a car payment, you've got all the other stuff, right? And then you've got your credit cards that you're juggling so that you can do the extra. Sometimes I'm using my credit cards for gas and food, actually, a lot of the time. And then I end up probably paying some of that down, but maybe not all of it. So then it just keeps like creeping up, creeping up. And I even tried investing. I thought over a year ago, I was like, I need to do something because I could tell that it was starting to get a little out of hand then. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to invest. And then maybe in a year I'll make money on my money, right? And nope, that didn't work. I gave it only six months, but it really I was not making any money, actually almost losing money. And so I just pulled that money back out before it. I just don't trust. I don't trust some of the system. And you really have to be investing the right way, which I tried to. I tried to get like a coach for a little bit and ask questions and do all the right things that felt good to me. But in the end, it it didn't work out that time. So the only time I've successfully invested was through a job that I had with a company I worked for for seven years. And that money made money through, you know, it was a larger pool because they had 500 employees. And so I just feel like the money grew a lot faster. And I did get penalized. I pulled the money out, but I still made money on my money just in like a year and a half of a small investment. So that kind of like made me have faith in the system of investing. And then I tried to do it again on my own as just a single person and was investing every month. And then after six months, I was like making nothing. And I'm like, I can't really, you know, afford to do this. So I'm I'm taking my money back. So um yeah, I could go on and on, but um obviously I'm going off on a tangent that I didn't write about in my blog. But in the midst of all of this, what do I do? What does B decide to do? I go on a fucking solo vacation halfway around the world. Something in me just said, do it. Deep down, of course, I knew it was not a reasonably sound, financially responsible choice. I just didn't care. After being a mostly single mother for my entire adult life, I just didn't give one fuck. My intuition just screamed, go. Like I knew I had enough to go. And so I was like, I'm going. And I just didn't really look back. And part of me knew that it probably wasn't the best decision because I was using this money and there wasn't a whole lot of it, and it's credit cards, not like a savings account, which I've never been able to maintain a savings account ever in my entire life. So I planned my three-week trip to Europe that I'd been waiting to go on forever. It was a lot of work planning day and night by myself, not knowing exactly what I was doing for a few months and navigating it all on my own. I felt brave, like the Leo I am, and stepped into the unknown. I called this excursion my self-love journey, which I mentioned probably in my last podcast. So I bought a special new journal on Etsy. I trusted in the process of whatever was going to come my way. I learned more about myself. I knew it could only be a positive growth experience, one that costs money. And sometimes there is a price to pay in life, right? We all have learned this by now. So I returned almost, well, like I said, it was two weeks ago today, and I immediately started feeling the financial imprint that it had that had been left behind the scenes while I was gone. Because when I was gone, I had a different e-sim. I didn't have my my phone number. I was using a Europe e-SIM so I could use WhatsApp. And I wasn't getting outside calls of all these, you know, loan debt consolidation companies that had been hounding me. I thought they were hounding me then. But when I got back, holy fucking shit, my phone was like blowing up and I was like, whoa, because I wasn't used to it. And I was like, oh my gosh, like, how did this just get so much worse? And it, yeah, it's it got so much worse because it it got so much worse because I was just using up like any anything that I had, right? Anything that was stashed in those cards that I could use. And I'd never done this before like this. But again, after, you know, having over 30 years of just not being able to be free and and not, you know, go to places I wanted to go to. Like Italy is um a heritage place for me. It's a homeland. My mom even called it the homeland. She's half Italian. She's been there twice, but I was never able to go before because I couldn't leave for two or three weeks when I had my last child. She was younger. The last time I was invited to go by my mother and my older daughter was in 2019, the end of 2019, right before the pandemic. And I was like, I can't take even two weeks off of work. Like, what? Like, is somebody else paying for this trip? Um, you know, plus, you know, my daughter um was much younger then. And anyways, so I'm sure you, you other mothers out there can understand. And so I returned home, and this was such an impact that one may have to change a number that they had had for over 25 years. Yeah, I had the same phone number since I had a cell phone. Yep. So, anyways, I don't regret it one bit. I experienced things I had wanted to experience and see for decades what did solo traveling for the first time feel like as a 52-year-old woman. Well, I felt like a student. I felt strong, I felt confident, I felt independent, I felt open, I felt vulnerable, I felt humble, I felt brave, I felt raw at times, I felt seen seen in a different kind of a way. I felt small, I felt bold. I tried to feel clarity because that was an intention that I had given to myself upon leaving. Like, why the fuck am I doing this? Okay, well, there's some clarity that I need in my life right now, and this is going to help me, I thought. So, what I really yearned to achieve more of was clarity in the end. And what I found was the way I traveled wasn't going to bring me the deep clarification that I desired. Maybe if I was in the same place for 20 days, grounding out in nature without the noise of the outside world completely, which explains why there are silent retreats for this. This was a mini retreat that I gave myself one afternoon. I have a photo that I put in the blog and Substack. I will link it in the show notes. I just wanted to feel into what it is like to be truly free. And I did. Grateful for my credit cards for so many years. And that time has ended, though. Unfortunately, but it's I'm I'm taking it as a fortunate thing. And um it needed to happen. So the new chapter has to begin with a fresh slate, starting new, going forward, no more credit cards. Ironically, the clarity came through upon returning home after the jet lag had settled and the Lions Gate portal had opened up. So, yeah, it was a little rough getting back the first several days. But after about day four or five, I started like feeling like, okay, I'm going to be okay and um I'm gonna get through this. And I just started feeling a little bit more clear, a little bit more empowered, and just like grateful for what I do have, because that's really what we need to do every day when we wake up and anytime in the day we can think about it. And before we go to bed, that we're just grateful for being here and spread the love. Do what you love, love one another every day. Love yourself first, because when we love ourselves, so many ways to do this, then we can love everything else that we have in our life. Everybody else will feel that love, but we have to fill our own cup first, right? So thank you for listening, and I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day wherever you are, and I will talk to you soon. I will be talking about something that is more herb health related. I have an herb that I want to feature very soon that has to do with menopause, but it also that also helps with other hormonal imbalances in the body. And I just stumbled across some notes that I had taken on it this last week. And I thought, hey, this will be a good little podcast I can do on this herb because I've been trying to incorporate it and I believe that it is helping me. And so I'm going to share you the details on that next time I post, which will probably be in a couple of weeks. All right, many blessings to you. I will be posting some little short yoga videos and some shorts on my channel. Be sure to follow and never miss a conscious wellness beat.