Guard Your Heart ~ 2nd Episode

Hey Mama, welcome back, Okay. I have exciting. I don't know if I would call it exciting actually. It's a really good topic. It's a topic that I was going to save until later, but I decided to move up because of timing, right? Timing is everything. And this week, September 11th was this week, right? And a lot comes up for many people around September 11th, and it reminded me of something really important that I wanted to share with you today. And that is about guarding your heart. So this episode is going to be all about guarding your heart. Why that's important, How you can do that and I don't know. This is not scripted. So this is a podcast where I just talk to you like you're my friend and like I'm sharing, you know, some advice. We'll do life together and you can kind of glean from my experiences what I've learned, what I've walked through and use it to help you on your journey so that you know you can do you. But you can learn from not just me because I'm going to pull sources you guys. I as I, as I said in my pilot, I have been studying just self development, the brain, the body, how we think, how things work for a long time. And I have all this like random knowledge in my head that comes out at different times. So who knows what I'll be spouting at you today. But I just feel like this is a really important topic and it's something that if we take, if we take what what I've learned, and we use 

it in our own lives, that it really can have a huge, huge impact. So I'm going to start with a quote, and I looked up all these quotes about guarding your heart. But the best one, and the one that I think that is really where all the other quotes stem from is a Bible quote, OK? And it's Proverbs 423. And it is above all, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. And y'all, it's so true. But how do we do that? How do we guard our heart? And I'll tell you why September 11th brought this up for me because like on Sunday nights we all go over to my parents for dinner. Every week my family goes to my parents house for dinner. We have dinner and a lot of times we all do something like active after after dinner. But sometimes my parents, like, go with my kids and do something with them, and my husband and I just kind of chillax and have some downtime. And a lot of times I plan my week at that point in time. Or I do something with my planner, or my week or jazzercise or something. If you didn't know, I'm a jazzercise instructor and so I plan my set for the week or something. I get something productive done typically on Sunday evenings, but this past Sunday it was September 10th, the day before September 11th, which as you know 20 some years ago. You know how old you were at that time. But I think everyone knows what happened on September 11th, right? The World Trade Centers were attacked and there was a special on 60 minutes and we always have the television on typically like some kind of sports is on at my parents house. Like they always have their television on. Like it's just something that they've always done. Like my whole life they've had their television on almost like 24/7. If they're not in the room, they turn it off. But it's on in the background almost always. And there were sports on, but 60 minutes came on afterwards and there was a special about 9-11. And 

it was a lot of the, you know, survivors that had actually gone in, whether they were firefighters or policemen or first responders of some way, shape or form. And it was about, you know, those who had actually fallen, those who had been lost during 9/11 honoring them and just about the people that were there, their experience of the people and just a lot of what happened that day. So you guys, instead of like my planning that I had started doing and that came on, I was like fixated on it, right? I was in it. I was watching it. I was getting caught up again and I was crying, like I was, you know, just having all those feelings because I don't know about you, but I was old enough to where I was. I was out of. I was working at the time, but I actually saw the towers hit. I was working in television. And so we had the television news stations on and I watched that plane hit the towers and then we turned off the volume. We were actually, we didn't know what it was at the time. My sales manager wasn't even in the room at the time. But I'm sure you all remember all of the way that that day went. And I'm not going to go into what my experience was with 911. That's not what this is about. It's about guarding your heart. And what happened to me on Sunday night was I got all caught up in those emotions again. I got all caught up in it. And there's a couple things you can do with that, right? You can sit in it, you can ruminate in it, you can, you know, you can take that and let it affect you, which it is going to. We're human, right? If you watch something like that, you are going to be affected most likely, and especially if you had an effect before, if it's something that has happened to you before, which this is an event that actually, you know, affected me at the time. My uncle was actually in the Pentagon that day. And so he's fine. He was fine. He's 

since passed. But he was there that day and you know it he he got out and everything was okay that day. But it was just, it was very emotional for anyone, whether you had someone that you thought could be involved or not. It was super emotional to watch everything that unfolded that day. And those emotions, you know you're going to feel them and they make things happen in your body. So fear is real. And so you can go into fear, you can go into sadness, you can go into all of the things that that happened to you. You know, there's so many motions that can come up with an event like this, or you could just say any. There's a lot of different events like let's take a school shooting, like a mass school shooting or a shooting that has happened, not even in the school, but it has happened, you know, at a nightclub, at a movie theater, at a mall, at a. You know, there's lots of shootings that have mass shootings that happen right now that we know about and that we're exposed to. And this is the problem, Okay. So when I say guard your heart, it's because we are exposed to so much now. Not necessarily the news story that was, you know, recounting what had happened lot of years ago, but let's think about a mass shooting or really any news event that happens on a given day. But any news event now, like the last mass shooting that happened, it happened in Nashville. It was in a small town, at least the last one I remember. I believe it was the last one. It happened a couple of months ago and it was in Nashville in a small town. I think 6 people passed that day from the shooting and it affected a very small community and it was something where it was 

like I made the decision that day. Like I saw it, I heard about it, I went online, I saw it on Facebook. So one of my friends, friends knew someone that was in the school. I can't remember now if her friend was one of the ones that actually passed. I think she was so her friend's friend. So it wasn't even, you know, it wasn't her friend. It was her friend's friend that had that was in that school and had passed. And so of course I commented on her on her post and you said I was praying for her. And I did. And I went to the news story from there and I read the story and I immediately started praying for the people. That's what I can do, right? I can do that. I can pray, but what else can I do? Probably nothing. Right? Like what else can you really do in that situation? And I'm not trying to be insensitive. I am literally asking you to think about the amount of news you're exposed to, the amount of things that are intended. They are intended to trigger fear in you. These, and I, and I know this, I have a husband who is in media. I used to be in media. I know they know what your brain. They know our brains better than we do. The advertising agencies, like these people have spent lots and lots of money to figure out what makes us interested, what gets our attention, what will take our focus. And it's fear, y'all it's fear. So it's the thing that will get us to look it. It's it's curiosity. You know, there's a lot of different things, but fear is one of them. And so that's why when a story happens, everyone wants to break it and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to talk about it, 

and it's immediately going to go everywhere. Because now we have that type of access back in the day. Back when I grew up, if something like this had happened in Nashville, in this small town, it would have probably taken it, could have maybe made the nightly news that night. But we knew about it. We knew about it within an hour, like everybody was commenting within an hour of, you know, said story. Because of the way that technology is nowadays, the way that media is nowadays, Lots of different reasons that we now knew about it. Back in my day when I was growing up, you would have possibly, it possibly would have made the news that night locally, but probably maybe not. You know, it may not have even been able to make it to the nightly news that night. And then if it might have made the paper the next day, it wouldn't have been something that would have been that much focused on because at that point, the situation would have been resolved. And, you know, there would have been, like, something happening and maybe it would have been reported as something that had happened, but it wouldn't have been this big. Like, look at this almost like, you know, when you're involved and you're maybe not involved in a wreck on the highway, right? Like, but, you know, let's just take when you're going down the highway, right? And there's a wreck and it happens on the other side of the highway and your side of the highway, though, it still slows down, right? Like, So your side of the highway, everyone wants to look and see. It's human nature to want to look. It's something that is innate that makes us want to know what happened. You know, we might be thinking, could we have known somebody in that rack could you know, oh gosh, how bad is it? Like, we want to know, like what happened, right.

Like in some part of our brain might be thinking, oh, could that we we see that and we think, could it have happened to us like, oh gosh, that's what happened there, could it happen to me? Like, our brain is so complex. It's going through all of these different things, emotions, feelings, releasing chemicals, hormones in our body. But this is not just, you know, that happens on the highway. And we look at it and it slows down traffic, It affects everything. But then we keep driving. Maybe we say a prayer for the people that were in the rack, but most of the time we keep driving and we keep moving on, right? Why? Because we don't have all the details. If we had all the details, if we were sitting there, if someone was standing there reporting it and telling us all the details all the time, we would then think about that all the time, right? We would think about what's going on there all the time. Like we would be like, oh gosh, what happened to the person? But we have no way of knowing. So our brain tells us, OK, it's not a real threat to you, so you need to move on, right? And we do. But when it comes to a story like this of like, let's just say what happened in Nashville, people are there reporting. It's the real time. Like things are still happening. We don't know where kids are. You know, they took the kids out of the building, They had them cross the street. They get them away. They didn't know where the shooter was right away. Like all of these things. And you're reading about it and you're seeing it happening. But you can totally get, you know, drawn in. You're drawn into the story. You become emotionally invested in something that you can do nothing about, something that you can do nothing about it then and there. If this just was a one time thing, and if it didn't happen a lot, and if there weren't all these other things that are happening. If you turn on the news at any given time, if you look at any of the news stations, they are reporting on things that are tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. They're taking them from all over the world. They're taking them from everywhere, trying to get you to give them your attention. 

But what it's doing to you is not healthy. It's not. It is not healthy. What I have done in my life is I have shut out all the news. I don't get a news. I don't, I don't have any of the news channels on my, like social media. I don't have them on. Like I don't look at Twitter anymore because I had some of that stuff on Twitter that I had followed. And I don't even go to Twitter anymore. No Twitter for me. I've, I've taken it off my repertoire. Like I get, I do Facebook. I like people. I I But you know, and the people, half the time it's how I hear about these other things. Like that's how I heard about Nashville. It wasn't because I had the news on my radio. It wasn't because I had the news on my television. It wasn't because I I had heard it reported somewhere. I literally saw someone post about it on Facebook. And then I read the story. I prayed. But that is all I can do, right? And if, and we're going back to that, what happened in Nashville, like, I actually know people who were so upset by that, that it was like affecting their sleep, affecting their health, affecting everything that whole week, you know, they were crying about it like they were. This wasn't just one person either. It was like a group text of friends that I have that were all upset about this group, this mass shooting. And yes, it's upsetting. I am not, you know, I have an empath. I feel a lot, which is one of the reasons why I had to do this for myself. But you cannot stay healthy and fixate on all of these things. I'm saying as a functioning person in this world, as a mom, you have a responsibility to your family, right? And to yourself. And if you let all of these things in, if you allow yourself to get caught up 

in these things that are fed to us all the time nowadays, then it can make you unhealthy. Like it is proven they're scientific. I should probably like actually find data on this because I am not a scientist. But there is a part of your brain that it takes these things. It's I think it's the amygdala. It's like of this whole thing of nerves and it sends out signals and it produces like epinephrine and neuropinephrine and I don't know all these things that I can't pronounce, probably cortisol. Your body produces all these things. It takes what it does, fear, and this is what fear does. Fear takes and it puts you in a like fight or flight. It takes your heart rate up. It takes the blood away from like your your internal organs and takes it to your extremities so that you can fight it literally or run fight or flight right. Like a lot of times people freeze too right and situations and that's like a whole other like protection mechanism and your brain starts to work differently like your the the blood flow goes to certain different parts of your brain that are made for like decision making. Like it is. It is amazing what our bodies are doing on a constant basis and our bodies were not designed to be in fear all of the time. And when we're being fed that from all different directions, this isn't even just about like a mass shooting or 911. But my point is, if you can't do anything about it, then there's no point in fixating on it. And there's no point in even allowing this to come into your brain in the 1st place. To read is what you're reading, what you're looking at, what you're listening to. Be choosy, who you hang around, right like they say you are.

You become the five people that you hang around with the most, right? And it's it is. This is kind of like that. But I am saying guard your heart because everything you do flows from it. It is so important as a mother because what happens is we're now not just affected by this, but what if we're in worry all the time? We then project that onto our kids. They may, you may not even say anything about it, but they know if you're worried, if I'm upset if something is going on with me, my kids know it, right. And if you're at a high alert state of worry and and fear and you know anxiety all the time, this transfers and your kids will start to be worried, fearful, anxious. They tend to pick up on your it's not just something that you're putting out there and it doesn't affect them. You know, I have heard specifically from multiple people that I know that are in the neuro field, like whether they're psychiatrists or, you know, licensed professionals, that all of them licensed professionals. I've asked them because I've read it before, but you literally, if you're anxious, your child is most likely anxious. If you're depressed, your child is most likely going to be depressed. It is something you pass on to them and you can change that by what you take in. Now I'm not saying and if you listen to my first episode that that this is anything. Anxiety and depression are not something to take lightly. If that is something where you live in that state and it is, it is something that you need to get help for. But I'm saying if the things that you're taking in are making you anxious or worried or depressed or whatever, you can change what you're putting in. Change what you're listening to. Change what you're reading, change. Just don't refuse to let yourself listen to things that you know are going to make you anxious or worked up. You know, if politics makes you worked up, try not to listen to it. Try to tune it out. Turn off the. Fox News or the CNN or the, you know, I don't watch any of it, so I don't even know which party is which side or whatever. But I implore you to guard your heart, because everything you do flows from it. And this is never been more important than when you're a mother, because it will transfer onto your kids. And I know that we don't want our kids to be anxious and depressed and worried and all of these things. We want them to be happy. And so we need to do, and I'm not saying turn a blind eye to everything or just stay positive all the time. Like I am far from I know that that is not a realistic view. however, I can always take something and somehow find something that I can do that I feel like. You know, what can I do about a situation that is a mass shooting that is not anywhere near me? I can pray. I believe in God. I believe he has all the power. And what can I do? I can pray for the families. I can pray for the people that are involved. I can pray that God go help them feel loved, help them feel safe, help them feel, whatever. But I cannot personally do anything. If it was something that was somewhere near me, I might be able to do something a little bit more than what I can do from here. But that is the only thing that I can do, and it is not going to be healthy for me to think about that. Fixate on it, ruminate on it. I hope you've gotten my point today.

I hope you do not find this as I'm being insensitive or unrealistic. I promise you there are things that you can tweak that you can take out of your life that you are exposing yourself to now. I guarantee it that you can tweak and you will find this huge huge shift in your heart and the way your body is functioning. It can literally cause you. One of the things that could cause it could be causing you to be sick is literally what you are in taking. And I don't just mean your food. That's a whole another topic for another day. I mean what you're feeding your mind, what you're listening to, what you're reading, what you're watching, all of those things. So please guard your heart. I will do more episodes on exactly how to do this because I feel like I've talked too long. I hope you guys take what I'm saying and put it into practice. Let me know what you're thinking. Let me know if you have questions. I would love to talk to you further about this.