Lisa Marie Rankin [00:00:00]:

Hello, beautiful listeners. In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Emily Reuschel, a soul expansion coach who guides women who are ready to break free from inherited limitations and rise boldly into their truest selves. Emily empowers women to shed societal expectations, reclaim their power, and disrupt generational cycles with unapologetic truth. In this episode, we talk about romantacy, one of my favorite subjects, self help culture, and connecting to your inner wisdom. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Goddess School podcast, where Eastern wisdom meets Western mysticism. I'm your host, Lisa Marie Rankine, author, teacher, and Ayurvedic wellness coach here to help you reclaim your feminine superpowers, and I am so glad you're here. Listen, women are magical.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:00:53]:

They are intuitive, creative, wise, and magnetic. However, in today's fast paced world, these gifts often get buried under a more masculine way of life. Together, we'll awaken those powers. In each episode, I'll take you through sacred teachings like Ayurveda, shadow work, and the mysteries of archetypes and rituals so you can live with more clarity, synchronicity, and joy in all realms of life, like relationships, health, money, and more. So let's dive in so you can make the most of your one mythic life, The veil is parting. Let's begin. Hello, beautiful listeners. And welcome back to the Goddess School podcast.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:01:39]:

Today, I am very excited to speak with Emily Rushall. So I actually came across Emily maybe about a year or two ago in my woman who run with the wolves book study. And she is a woman's leader, coach, speaker. She lives out in the rural area and I can't wait for our conversation today. Welcome, Emily. Thank you for joining us here.

Emily Reuschel [00:01:59]:

Thank you so much for having me here. I am so excited for this conversation.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:02:03]:

Great. Emily, could you just share before we dive in? I know we have some juicy topics that we want to explore just a little bit about yourself, your journey, and what brought you to doing the things that you're doing.

Emily Reuschel [00:02:15]:

Actually, I think that my journey lends really well to the conversation we're going to have today and what it really looks like to break out of the expectations of what you thought life needed to look like, pursue growth from a place of really love and self fulfillment and not needing to achieve or do or fix or be. And then, you know, pivot along the way. Like you said, I live in West Central Illinois on my husband's family farm. We are raising the sixth or seventh generation depending on who you ask, depending on whether you count the farmland that one family was on before. Anyway, it's a whole thing. Anyone who's in, like, the rural ag space is nodding along laughing. So we just absolutely love our life here on the farm. And, you know, when I moved back to my husband's hometown, I came in expecting to be an elementary school teacher for my career.

Emily Reuschel [00:03:08]:

They write country songs about that. Right? Like the farmer and the teacher, how picturesque, how cute. And I came into education really as so many dude wanting to make the world a better place and really wanting to do purposeful impact driven work. And I did, and I loved it until I had a moment where I knew it no longer fit. And I very much had the choice to double down and stay in this box I had created for myself. Right. I had worked so hard in college to finally figure out what my degree was gonna be in. I had done all of the right things to find the job that I thought was going to be forever.

Emily Reuschel [00:03:43]:

As I know so many women in my community and likely years also identify with, but I had an opportunity kinda come up out of nowhere. Although looking back, like, does anything really come up out of nowhere? It was totally some sort of divine intervention. And I ended up leaving my school for a nonprofit position at a local YMCA as a director of youth and family development, overseeing summer camp after school, basically anything that had to do with kids that didn't involve sports. And it was a place where I can really attribute to my rapid expansion in the world of personal growth, professional growth, and really just starting to see, wow, there is so much more that's possible for me professionally than I ever gave myself credit for. What else could be true? What else could I do? After my second daughter was born in that place, I had reached this really deep high level of burnout. As so many women I know identify with, I was, like, giving so much of myself to my job because I wanted to do a good job. I loved it. I was doing really impactful work again.

Emily Reuschel [00:04:46]:

And I had this toddler, this baby, and I'm trying to figure out who I am as this new farm wife. Like, right. I was like the epitome of the self sacrificial for the benefit of everyone else's good and realized, wow, like I'm so far on the back burner. I'm not even in the kitchen anymore. And so I have this really defining moment sitting on the couch, holding my baby girl and realizing I would be devastated if someday she felt the way that I feel right now. And so that's the moment where I began a health journey that was rooted in love instead of like shame or needing to be skinny as we all grew up in the diet culture we did, which opened up my world to, you know, personal development and goals and habits and really wanting to be the best version of myself, which is important for the conversation we're gonna have today. But I went through this really rapid fire expansion again of starting to like nurture myself for the first time and understanding that there was so much more available to me than I ever gave credit for. And so about a year into that journey, I started having this really deep craving for other women in some communities find space.

Emily Reuschel [00:05:56]:

I was kinda following all of these farm women and then following all of these personal growth kind of habit people online and had this very much like why not me moment. And so I did what any sane person does in a pandemic, and I started an Instagram account. Right? And that's really where the journey of what I do now began, just from this intention of wanting to foster community and find more people who were on similar paths and journeys. To make a long story short that ended up with me taking a leap of faith about a year later to leave the job that again, I thought was gonna be by forever home into the total unknown of entrepreneurship. Again, with the intention of, I don't really know what this is gonna look like, but I think maybe I could speak. I think I, maybe I could coach. I think I could just bring people together and, and have an impact in a different way and really take a bet on myself for the first time. And so over the past four years, that has gone from talking about goals and habits and personal development from now what I can see was a very like masculine kind of energy that really pushed me into confronting long overdue therapy to untangle my addictions to approval and achievement and accolades as a means of defining my self worth, which then brought me deeper into healing.

Emily Reuschel [00:07:13]:

And really, as I sat in more and more stories with women, starting to understand, like, how do we get to this place? Why do we do the things that we do? What are kind of these like underlying threads that have created so many situations I see where women have a decimated self trust, total desensitization to who they are and from their power and from so much more that we can get into, which led me into, you know, deeper healing journeys and then really just starting to ask harder questions over the last year of religion and politics and these systems and structures and cycles that ultimately have got us at this place, which has I feel like for a long time, I had a hard time of putting a finger on what I'm what am I doing here? I know I'm doing really meaningful work. I know I'm having really good conversations, but what is it? And, you know, through my own journey of the past year, it's like, wow. Okay. I'm really passionate about helping women wake up in whatever way makes the most sense to them. Like, have the bravery to ask really hard questions, to be curious, to be open and empathetic and students of life, and then really ultimately use that to step into their power and reconnect with who they are and their soul expression, which has then just deepened into like a whole new world of spirituality that I feel like I'm a baby in, but just really finding my home in. Yeah. So that brings us here today.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:08:38]:

Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. And I know that's going to resonate with so many of my listeners as well, too, who many of my listeners might be a little bit older. They're kind of maybe more midlife considering retirement, but it's still kind of that threshold moment where it's like, well, what's next? Like, how do I want to show up now? And what's my life all about? What do I want to create? Yeah. One thing that you said that I really loved, you were like, I didn't know what it was going to look like. I think, you know, when you were talking about starting your own business and I love that so much because I see women often, they want to have everything laid out. They want to know exactly what it's going to look like. And it's always like, no, take a little step forward, follow your interest, follow your curiosities.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:09:27]:

We, we have no idea what it's going to look like. And yet it can be really scary not to have like, this is exactly what it's going to be like in two years, or, you know,

Emily Reuschel [00:09:38]:

to make, to make

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:09:39]:

a decision. What would you say to, like, how do you coach women who might have some ideas or interests for where they want their life to go or be, but yeah, there is an unknown. We don't know what's gonna happen.

Emily Reuschel [00:09:56]:

Yeah. I would say just about every woman I coach has navigated this in some capacity and myself included. I think then we immediately go to this place of shame of like, well, why can't I just do it? I see this girl online going after it. Why can't I be like, we turn it all internal. So one thing I really like to acknowledge with my clients and even within myself is, well, of course, we feel this way. Right? So many of us internalize that that fear of the unknown as another reason to kind of sit in in the shame of, like, why am I not enough? Why am I not brave enough? Why am I not smart enough? Why am I not competent enough to figure this out? And so I like to even just acknowledge so many of us have been raised through this system of always having the steps laid out for us, like whether in public school education or private in the corporate workforce in so many job environments. Right? We have these smart goals laid out. We know exactly what the expectations are.

Emily Reuschel [00:10:49]:

Someone else is telling us how to get there. We're, like, graded on this rubric of of our performance of achievement. And so, of course, when we're stepping into the unknown, first of all, that, like, lack of a map can feel unsettling. And then second of all, I know for me, a lot of times when I start feeling that uneasiness of the unknown and kind of that fear that creeps in, a lot of times it's coming from when I know something is really important, whether it's going to be like a big upgrade for my soul or a big change in my business or something. Right? Like the the closer we get to the, the things that we want, sometimes those little those stories can come back and there's so many different reasons for that. But as far as how to move through it, one practice I really like to take my clients through is kind of removing a pressure and expectation of having to jump straight to the goal and then the steps attached to it. And I like to take a step back and just have the women I work with answer the question over and over and over again in a journal prompt. Like, wouldn't it be cool if, like, if you could wave a magic wand, what would you love to be true? And this could be tomorrow, five years from now, you know, little old lady in a rocking chair.

Emily Reuschel [00:12:05]:

Like, what would you love to bring to fruition? And then from there, like, removing the expectation of having to jump to the steps can feel like, okay. Now I'm really starting to conceptualize, like, the reality that I wanna create. Cause so often, like, the goals that we wanna achieve, the big steps we wanna take, the things that we wanna move through might be things that happen a moment in time, and our life is everywhere in between. Yeah. So once we really ground into an intention or a goal that we wanna pursue or or stepping into the unknown, you know, I compare it to climbing a mountain. Right? We don't start at the bottom and then fly to the top magically. It's like a matter of taking one step in front of the other. And so I work with my clients on, like, what are the next like, almost thinking about them like little dominoes.

Emily Reuschel [00:12:50]:

Right? It doesn't matter if you have one or 1,000 dominoes laid out. If you knock the first one down, it's like the, you know, the law of motion. Like, they all do do do do do do do do. So I like to bring it back to, like, what is the one tangible thing that you can do today to get closer from where you are to where you wanna be? And then let that be the guiding principle of, like, not having to look at the project as one whole overwhelming, daunting, fearful task and just like, okay. What's something I can realistically do today? And it might be a really brave baby step. I have a toddler who just learned how to walk. Baby steps are not insignificant. They may be small and they may be tedious, but they are big and brave and audacious and they stand back up and keep going even when things don't go according to plan.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:13:38]:

Oh, thank you. And I love that inquiry that you said, like, wouldn't it be great if, because one of the things that I've noticed, like working with women is sometimes, and I think we all do it, is we downplay what we want. I think part of it is fear of disappointment. Well, what if I don't get it? Or maybe I should be happy or, you know, things are good enough. And I'm really always encouraging people like, no, like imagine dream, like what would you really want? And can you step into more of these big audacious desires? It doesn't mean you're going to necessarily get it, but it's, it gives you like a breadcrumb of who, who your soul is guiding you to be because these desires come to you for a reason. And I really, you know, I feel like we tend to dilute them as opposed to amplify them.

Emily Reuschel [00:14:24]:

Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, in my experience, a lot of times we we set goals or desires based on what we have seen other people be successful in. And so I love the wouldn't it be cool if because it taps into more of, like, your soul desires versus, like, what's the arbitrary goal that you think is going to make you feel a certain way? When in reality, it's like so much of building the stream life is like the way that we feel on a day to day basis, like our relationships on a day to day basis, like our energy on a day to day basis. And so we when we root our pursuit of what we want in like, what's your average Wednesday like. Right? Like, when you wake up, how do you feel? How do you move through your day? What do you wear? What do you eat? Like, what are you working on? How are you spending your time? Where are you pouring your energy? That's where I feel like we remove the pressure and the fear around, like, one thing being the magic solution as the key to our happiness. Like once I lose weight, then I'll be happy. Once I get the promotion, then I'll be happy. Once we buy the farmland, then I'll be happy.

Emily Reuschel [00:15:29]:

Once I have the baby, once I retire. Right. We like live in this arrival fallacy. And it's not to say that those things are bad, but it's really like the life that you build working towards those that actually change your reality, not the end result that really happens at a moment in time.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:15:49]:

Oh, I love that you said that Emily too. And I think that's really important for women to understand, because I think we can get very caught up on the outcomes. Like I need this to happen, but often it's the process. It's just the act of moving towards that. That's where their transformation, that's where the growth and the joy are from. Especially, like, if we are, like, I have a lot of women who might be working on a creative endeavor, you know, whether it's writing a book or doing a piece of art or, you know, looking to shift their career. And if we just focus on the outcome, you know, it can seem too intimidating, but it's like, it's the process. That's where all of the magic gets created.

Emily Reuschel [00:16:26]:

Right. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I shared in my story, like so much of my expansion has been in untangling those moment in time goals or that achievement or the approval as a means of defining my self worth. Like, who am I at my core in the way that I move through my day and then everything else that I get to do or achieve or bring to fruition, like, that's the beautiful icing on the cake. But, like, I have cultivated that inner knowing, that self love and that, like, radical self trust that ultimately helps me move through all of these other rabbit holes and journeys and desires and expansions and curiosities that get to go down.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:17:10]:

Yeah. I love that. Can you talk a little bit too about the permission to pivot? So it sounds like you've had some pivots in your life from being elementary school teacher to the director at the Y to what you are doing now. And I think that that's really important. I always like to say that, like, life is not a ladder. It's more like a jungle gym. You know, we can go over our curiosities and our interests and, and there's always time to change. And hopefully there always is because we're always growing.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:17:40]:

We're always evolving and there's gonna be different things that interest us at different times. Why do you think it's so hard for people to pivot?

Emily Reuschel [00:17:48]:

Yeah. I think if I look back at my journey and so many women I've coached, well, this is going to be a multi part answer. First of all, there's this while I've invested so much time and energy into this thing, it would be such a waste if I stopped doing it, which is to some extent how I felt in leaving the classroom. Well, you know, my degree's in education. Like, what did I get a degree in education for if I'm not a teacher anymore? Like news flash, I'm still a teacher. Right? Yeah. Or this, like, really big identity shifts. And that's what I have found is, like, some of the biggest things is so much of our identity is in in in what we do or who we're with or where we live or how we spend our time.

Emily Reuschel [00:18:28]:

And so to make a pivot, so to speak, or some sort of change really requires letting those pieces of us transition out, which is its own form of grief and kind of a death in itself. Right? Like, who am I if I'm not a teacher? Like, I always thought I would be a teacher and now I'm a teacher. Who am I on the other side of that? And, you know, to your point of having a listenership in various seasons of life, I think sometimes we see that in when the kids are graduating college and transitioning to, you know, empty nesting or the season on the other side of that, that part of motherhood or approaching retirement. Like there's a lot of excitement and joy in, in the changing jobs or even the evolution in your business or your thought leadership. Like, my goodness, the work that I'm doing now, it's it's funny. I joke, like, everything's the same and nothing's the same. Like, there are so many through lines and threads in there, but I have changed so much and I hope that I continue to change. Like if I'm saying the exact same thing in the exact same way, five years or ten years from now, like I have made a decision to not grow and expand.

Emily Reuschel [00:19:42]:

Like, I hope that I have new ideas. I hope that some of the things that I say contradict what I know and believe now because I've taken in new information and had different experiences and gone to different depths of, of healing and self actualization. Right? But I think a lot of that has to come with this willingness to, to grow and to be different and let those pieces of ourselves that we worked so hard to nurture and love them for who they are and the roles they played in our life. And also acknowledge that it's good and beautiful to to grow and to change and to try new things. And I also think specifically when we're talking about career, but maybe this can apply to a physical move or a change in relationship is when we move from one big thing to another, there's like this fear that, like, am I making the right choice? Like, okay, I'm I'm leaving this for this. Like, okay, I'm gonna be in that forever. Is it right? And I have released the expectation that any decision I make really has to be forever. Like, I can continue to move and change and pivot and grow at any point in time.

Emily Reuschel [00:20:51]:

And so I let that lead me into following my joy and my curiosities and what I feel really called to say and do and spend my time on in the season that I'm in and to know that when the time comes that I meant to explore something different, like I can do that too. And that's okay.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:21:11]:

Yeah. Oh, thank you. As you were talking about that, one of the things that was coming up for me was really the concept of life death life cycle, which was a lot in women who run with with the Wolves. And I think a lot of my listeners are very familiar with that, that there are seasons and we need to let go of things. Like you were talking about different personas, different identities, and that can be really hard to let go of that. But it also gives the opportunity for something new to arise. And even though I think people are very much, especially my audience and even myself, we're familiar with this concept. It can be really hard because as humans, you know, there's there's a safety in the status quo, but there's something in our soul that's always calling us to evolve, to shift, to change perspectives.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:21:57]:

And, you know, I love, I can very much relate to what you said about your business too, because I can even see how mine has changed so much over the last couple of years and, you know, things that I used to teach or suggest are not even what I would do anymore. And that's because I have different information. My perspective has changed and the way that, you know, the way that I feel I can best serve women, I feel has changed too. And I think it's really important to always stay open to that.

Emily Reuschel [00:22:22]:

Well, and I think we kind of see that on a grander scale in our country right now, where we hold people, like, even politicians specifically. Well, back in 1993, they voted for this and they said this, and now they're doing that. So they must be leaky and inconsistent and a liar and wrong. And, obviously, this is so different person by person. Right? But we have, like, we have kind of systemically held people to this, like, standard and perfection and, like, always having the exact same thought, ideas, convictions, beliefs as they used to. And I'm like, you know what? I hope I hope that the people in leadership, whether in in companies or women or anything, I hope that they are evolving and growing and learning and expanding. Cause when we do that together, it's like beautiful things happen. But I think we also need to give each other permission to be different.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:23:20]:

Yeah, for sure. One of the things like speaking of one of the things that has changed in my perspective is, you know, I did a pretty extensive life coaching program, which I learned a ton. It was definitely well worth it. But more recently, I would say within the last year, I've really started to think that there is a shadow side of like self help and coaching, where there's a sense of like you're wrong. You can't really begin until you've healed all of these human things that we have all, you know, that experienced. And this is not just to, to dismiss the various traumas people may have experienced, but it's also to normalize them that, that they all exist and they're not necessarily something that you have to overcome before living your life. And, you know, I'm really been trying to like push people out of like, there's nothing wrong. There's nothing to really heal or fix.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:24:15]:

It's really just kind of really discovering other aspects of yourself and getting the resilience and confidence to know that you can handle the inevitable ups and downs of life. And I know that, you have some thoughts as well too on, like, the concept of fixing. Would you like to share a little bit of that?

Emily Reuschel [00:24:34]:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even when I go back to my early Instagram days and my first year or so in business, like I said, so much of it was rooted around habits and goals and being the best version of yourself. And, you know, at the time, that felt really good because I was taking in so much information and really taking radical accountability for the direction of my life and how I wanted to show up. But I think there, like you said, there is this really toxic, harmful cycle that we can get trapped in in the world of personal growth and development of, like, always needing to fix. And so much of that I can see is putting so much weight on someone else's expectation or ideas of how we should do it. Well, I read this book, and she said that I need to get up at this time and do this thing. And then if I do that, then my life will be great.

Emily Reuschel [00:25:24]:

Or I read this book and they said to meditate this day this way every single day and you gotta get it. I read this book and it's it. And if we're not careful, it's kind of just another way of absorbing everyone else's ways of moving through the world and trying to apply them to our own life. And then we do that, you know, 500 times over, and no wonder we feel so lost and disconnected than ever. And so pretty early on in my coaching practice, I intuitively, like, stopped trying to do anything other than helping women understand who they were, where they were at, ultimately, what changes they wanted to make in their life or where they wanted to go and, like, really bring them home to themselves. And, sure, we can bring in new ideas and information from a lot of different places, but, you know, the work that I do now very much looks like, like I said, like this awakening and kind of coming back to yourself and, like, who you would be in the absence of of anyone else telling you otherwise. And so I think when I even am pursuing information or, like, nonfiction reading up until this point, it's less about, like, books for the purpose of self development and more like, what am I really curious about right now? Like, what are some different ideas that I wanna explore or add to my repertoire? Like, what am I being called to even if it doesn't make sense to help me connect the dots to build an even deeper understanding of the world and myself and how I move through it?

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:27:01]:

Yeah. It's so funny that you brought up the books because I feel like within this past year, you know, I've really kind of shifted. I have a beautiful community of women in my divine feminine mystery school, and we would read a lot of like, not always self help, but some self help. And then it kind of dawned on me, like, I I think we know this. I don't think we need someone to tell us, you know, what we need to do when we need to meditate, how we should approach this different problem. Like, we have that inner wisdom, and I just started to feel like we're kind of outsourcing almost everything to these, like, you know, self proclaimed experts. And it's like, first of all, we have no idea, like, how I mean, what would be the best approach you, you would know that, like how to talk to your husband or how to talk to your boss. And it's like, be creative.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:27:46]:

Like, yes, sure. There's great tidbits that we might be able to get from some of these. But I also feel like it's, it's outsourcing our power. That really what we need to do is turn inward. And how do I wanna show up? What is it important for me to communicate? I don't need to ask other people how to do that. I don't need to read endless amounts of self help books. I actually have this wisdom already within me. I just have to figure out how to get to it and how to access it.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:28:13]:

And it's gonna look different for all of us as well, too. Like I might have one style of communication. You might have another style and maybe they're both great for us. And I think that's what, as women, we really need to get back to is really understanding our own power, our own magic and, and how to wield it. And, and, you know, it's interesting. We've actually went from self help to romantacy. Like we're reading a Court of Thorns right now. Like, and I actually feel like that is so much more inspiring.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:28:40]:

And I mean, we do look at it through a Jungian lens, so we can kind of see like, you know, aspects of our psyche, but it's just also like, oh, again, like what's possible. Like where's my inner warrior? What about my inner high lady? Like, how are these, how are these parts of myself ready to come online?

Emily Reuschel [00:28:57]:

Yeah. Which was like, I am so with you on that. I, so like I said, in in part of my journey a few years ago, I started therapy for the first time. And my therapist was like, oh, what do you do for fun? And I'm like, oh, gold star for me. I love to read and listen to podcasts. And she's like, that's great. But, you know, books and podcasts are great. What do you listen to? And I'm like, oh, I love this personal development book and this author and this podcast.

Emily Reuschel [00:29:19]:

And it was all rooted in, like, very personal development heavy stuff. And she's like, Emily, like, that that's great. That's not relaxing, especially because that's kind of what you do for work. What if you read a fiction book? And I was like, I I don't understand what you mean. She's like, like like, something that's not nonfiction. And so I literally had to post on Instagram and be like, what fiction books are people reading? And it was my college roommate who called me and told me about the series called ACOTAR and I should read it. And I'm telling you, I have like a a very easy, like, add to cart. Not problem.

Emily Reuschel [00:29:55]:

It's a blessing. I love books. But when she recommended ACOTAR to me, I researched this thing like I was picking out newborn diapers. I don't know. This is weird. I don't know if I'm gonna like it, blah blah, whatever. I finally picked up the first book at Walmart, read, like, three quarters of the book the first night, and was like, what just happened to me? And that just opened up this whole gateway to this world of romantic seed that I feel like I did more for my self expression and my power reclamation and coming home to myself than most personal growth books that I've read. So I'm That's interesting.

Emily Reuschel [00:30:31]:

Yeah. I completely agree. Like, totally, totally radically changed my life. Yeah. For me, it was like, because it was the first. Right? It was just like, here's this really big permission to take time for something that is just for creativity and fun. And that was some a part of myself I had not accessed in probably over ten years, if not more. And that was, like, such a big part of my life today here a few years later.

Emily Reuschel [00:30:58]:

But, like, what a little permission slip in the fairy realm that just made my life so much richer.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:31:08]:

Yeah. And I love how thinking you've even as a permission slip, like I can actually just read things just for fun because I enjoy reading them. I can let my mind wander. You know, one thing that I feel like we've really lost in our age of infotainment, where in some ways it's great. We can always be learning, you know, twenty four hours a day, there is a podcast or a program or a book or a course. But again, if we kind of take it back to what we were talking about self help, like, where's that opportunity for me to imagine, to daydream, to create, to think about other realities or maybe other ways to even handle situations, you know, with my children or with my partner, like, where do I get that? Like kind of that creative magic. And I think that we need time to play, to read fiction, to walk about aimlessly and have an opportunity to imagine these like alternate realms and alternate scenarios that will help us in our day to day life that we don't need to always be looking for a solution.

Emily Reuschel [00:32:05]:

I think we really need to kind of tap back in to our imagination. Yeah. And our just creativity and presence and so much so much more. Color and joy and all of the above. So many of the things that I care so much about now that I was just completely turned off or disconnected from at that time. Like, even right now from, like, some so simple example. Like, my husband and I are in the process of turning our beautiful white and gray farmhouse into just an explosion of, like, color in life. And I think it's so representative of, you know, when we renovated our house the first time around, we didn't know who we were, and we were just trying to to play by the rules that everyone else was doing.

Emily Reuschel [00:32:47]:

Right? Like, the Joanna Gaines, like, no color. Beautiful. Right? But, you know, just kind of void of anything that resembled our personality or really life in general. And as we have come alive and deepened in our own journeys, we're like, why is our physical space, like, so not us anymore? And so it's just fun that once you start allowing that place for play and for adventure and creativity and fiction and fantasy and joy, like how that starts to just ripple effect throughout your life.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:33:20]:

It really does. And I I love how you said that about your house. I wanna see a picture after you're finished and have the explosion of color. That sounds amazing. I will. But our environment is a reflection of how we feel inside as well, too. So it's like, I always encourage people too. Well, think about what are the energies that you're looking to invoke, and is your environment supportive of that? Like, if you wanna be calling in love, like, are there flowers? Is the bedroom clean? Or, you know, if you're looking for creativity, there shouldn't be piles of bills and clutter everywhere, but we really do create like sacred space with our environment as well.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:33:54]:

And I think

Emily Reuschel [00:33:55]:

that's an important part. And it

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:33:57]:

also aids to play, right? Because you can actually

Emily Reuschel [00:34:00]:

Yeah. Last August, I built myself an office for the first time and the wall behind me is like an ombre rainbow. And my bookshelves are all, like, organized by color, and there's a bright orange and pink rug on the ground. And I just have so many beautiful things when typically my go to workplace was like the kitchen table, which was fine. It got me to where I am today. But when I get to walk into my office and just feel like, I've created this with, like, intentionality and it's beautiful. And I feel really good when I'm in here. Like, it changes the work that I do.

Emily Reuschel [00:34:40]:

And so now getting to bring that into what our bedroom looks like and how we are painting the living room and putting bright, colorful wallpaper in the bathroom. And those are pretty big changes. Right. But like you said, bringing fresh flowers in, swapping out a sign for a piece of art or whatever it might be. It really changes things.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:34:59]:

Yeah, it definitely does. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. So, how can people find you connect with you? Or is there anything you wanna share or tell us about that you have going on?

Emily Reuschel [00:35:10]:

Absolutely. So I'm kind of in this, you know, speaking of expansion and pivoting, I'm kind of in this micro, like, refresh of my website and my brand and everything up until this point for the past almost three years, I've been hosting a podcast called Gather and Growth that I am renaming for this new expansion and evolution as the wild and waking podcast. So depending on when you are listening and when that transition happens, which will be very soon, that's the best place you can find me if you enjoyed this conversation. And we have explored growth from so many different aspects and curiosities, really going down different rabbit holes of nervous system regulations, somatic healing, religion, politics, stepping into your power, all sorts of things like that. My website is emilyruschel.com, also under construction right now, but just about done, depending on when this comes out. And I'm the most active online on Instagram at emilyruschel. So that's e m I l y r e u s c h e l. Great.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:36:10]:

I will put all of that information in the show notes for folks as well too. So it's just easy for easy for everyone to get to, but thank you so much for joining me today. And I loved our conversation. Thanks for tuning in to The Goddess School Podcast. I hope today's episode inspired you to reclaim your feminine magic. Now don't forget to subscribe to the show. And if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple. If you wanna dive deeper into divine feminine archetypes and reconnect with your power, check out my book, The Goddess Solution.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:36:44]:

It's packed with ancient goddess wisdom for the modern woman. You can find the book on Amazon, and the link is in the show notes. And if you are ready to embrace these practices alongside a global sisterhood, I invite you to join my Divine Feminine Mystery School, Enlivened. It's a supportive space to embody these teachings with a fantastic community of like minded women. You'll find the link in the show notes. Remember, the Goddess isn't a deity outside of you. She's an aspect of your highest self. You are the Goddess.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:37:14]:

Until next time, my friend.