You're listening to episode 94 of the baggage reclaim sessions.

I'm your host Natalie Lou, writer of baggage reclaim.com,

where I help people to increase their emotional availability so

that they can move on from the past for confident and happier within and show up

for the relationships and opportunities that reflect their best selves.

Hello, hello there.

So what's been on my mind this week?

Well, I've been thinking about this I guess phrase

that I have said to quite a few people over the last few months which is you are allowed to grow and the

reason why I've been saying that to them is because these are all people who felt

really guilty about making what might actually be some pretty simple changes in their life.

They are afraid of leaving people behind, of being fought up as uppity, of creating a wrong impression.

And when you think about your own childhood and what the norms and expectations were for your family, peers,

other authorities and even the community.

The life that you live today might seem really far removed from it. And this in itself, I think, really gives

some clues as to why we as humans can actually struggle with things like that sensation of waiting for the other shoe to drop like okay what's the catch should I really be allowing myself to feel this good? You know, okay, like,

where's a trick? Somebody's gonna pop out in a minute and say, you know, give me a life back.

But we can also find that we struggle with imposter syndrome. So even though we are miles away

from that time in our life, we will be at work or around certain people and

feeling like a fraud even though we're not.

When I took time off a few months ago after my father passed away, I had some big chats with Salvio. Now you may recall that Salvio is my long time

acupunctist. I've actually been seeing him for over a decade and he is just this really sage person that I can

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