347. Do You Need a Little Empty in Your Life?

"Learning to say no to good things so we can experience better things may sound easy, but it can feel really hard - hard to know when it's the thing to do, and hard to do it. Yet there's a healthy vulnerability that comes with saying no."

-Dr. Arianna Molloy, Healthy Calling: From Toxic Burnout to Sustainable Work

Silence and emptiness emerge as surprising allies. Drawing on Thomas Moore, we treat emptiness not as failure but as space for meaning and healthy detachment. Emptiness quiets overcontrol, loosens ego-driven giving, and clears room for wisdom. In today's episode, I offer practices you can start today: guilt-free hobbies, shorter lists, pauses between tasks, and a single-page heart journal.

Join our growing community that prizes thoughtful dialogue, empathic listening, and actionable hope. Connect on Heartlift Central (Substack) and our private Facebook group to share your reflections, your haiku, and your next brave step. If this ad-free work serves you, consider a tax-deductible donation at janellrardon.com to help spread the influence of the podcast. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a gentler pace, and tell us: where will you create space this week? 

Chapters

• 0:06 A Call To Reimagine Motherhood
• 1:08 Welcome And Community Foundations
• 2:20 Guarding The Heart As Core Practice
• 4:44 The Air Of Ideas And Growth
• 7:11 Autonomy, Voice, And People Pleasing
• 9:10 Tools, Books, And The Heart Journal
• 11:26 Four Guiding Questions For Reflection
• 16:46 Slow Productivity Principles
• 22:00 Working At A Natural Pace
• 24:26 Obsessing Over Quality
• 25:19 Emptiness, Silence, And Meaning
• 29:23 From Overdoing To Ease
• 31:15 Practicing Healthy Detachment
• 31:48 Community Support And Donations

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

As I've listened to the stories of thousands of women of all ages, in all kinds of stages through the years, I've kept their stories locked in the vault of my heart. I feel as if they've been walking around with me all through these years. They've bothered me, they've prodded me, and sometimes kept me up at night. Ultimately, they've increased my passion to reframe and reimagine the powerful positions of mother and matriarch within the family system. I'm a problem solver, so I set out to find a way to perhaps change the trajectory of this silent and sad scenario about a dynamic yet untapped source of potential and purpose sitting in our homes and churches. It is time to come to the table, heartlifters, and unleash the power of maternal presence into the world. Welcome to Mothering for the Ages, our 2025 theme here on today's Heartlift. I'm Janelle. I am your guide here on this heartlifting journey. I invite you to grab a pen, a journal, and a cup of something really delicious. May today's conversation give you clarity, courage, and a revived sense of camaraderie. You see, you're not on this journey alone. We are unified as heartlifters and committed to bringing change into the world. One heart at a time. Hello and welcome to today's Heartlift with Janelle. I'm Janelle, your guide for today's conversation. If you're new here, I want to extend a warm heartlifting welcome. Thank you. Out of all the podcasts in all the world, you have landed here. Maybe with intention, maybe by accident. However, I am glad you're here. Here on today's Heartlift, we bridge the gap between faith and emotional and mental health practices. We're adding this year a huge conversation on mothering for the ages, including specific intentional strategic conversations concerning the mental and emotional health of mothers. Mothers of all ages and all kinds of stages. A long time ago, a wise woman named Edith Wharton said this. Since starting the podcast many moons ago, it has evolved, it has taken new shapes, and it has shifted in many ways. The core remains the same. We here, as heartlifters, are committed to being the wise woman in the center of all of our spheres of influence who operate and practice a healthy sense of self, healthy behavior patterns, and healthy communication skills. That is our foundation. Proverbs 423 has and will always serve as our anchor. Above all else, guard your heart. Absolutely. Everything in your life flows out of your heart. And it flows out of your heart and spreads in your spheres of influence. We all have a sphere of influence. The size and scope of our influence is critically important in the sense that we are moving in it. So whether it's five people, ten, fifteen, thirty, fifty, a thousand, a million, what's critically important is that we're moving through those spheres committed to these practices that we adhere to in this heart-lift community. If you are new to the community, welcome again. I want you to connect. This is all about connectivity and speaking into each other's lives. As Edith Wharton said, the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. Well, we're adding that to our beautiful anchorage in this community because we are here to share ideas, to grow in our knowledge of God, our knowledge of self, so that we can then move through our spheres of influence with greater capacity. Vixquote.com writes this about this knowledge quote of Edith Wharton. It encapsulates the value of intellectual engagement and the nourishment it provides to the human spirit. We're here to nourish one another's mind, soul, spirit. Breathing is essential to physical survival. But Wharton draws a powerful comparison, suggesting that ideas, thought, creativity, intellectual discourse are just as vital for the mind, the spirit, and the soul. The air of ideas evokes an environment that is saturated. Love that word, with curiosity, debate, imagination and learning. And I add unconditional love, where safety and security is first and foremost, and empathic listening is activated. We are a community that has a beautiful mental and emotional health toolkit, spiritual toolkit, and we practice atunement, we practice autonomy, we practice affirmation, we just practice all the beautiful virtues and qualities that make us become the women that God breathed his life into. Wharton continues and uses this metaphor that the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing, for living a life enriched. And here is the new foundation I'm adding. Let's let's call it a new brick that I'm adding to our foundation. For living a life enriched by the exchange and growth of ideas, rather than one governed solely by routine, material concerns, or unexamined traditions. We know that an unexamined life is really not worth living. And so we're committed here. We invite you, if you're new, to join this community. Something that's very important to me as your leader, as your guide, is to help you develop that sense of autonomy and really enabling you to grow in your capacity to think for yourself, to hear for yourself, to use your voice in your spheres of influence for decades. Yes. I'm that old. Yes, you might think that's really hard to wrap your head around. I think I appear to be very outspoken, uh extroverted. But in truth, there were many factors that helped form me into someone who became a people pleaser, who became a fawner, as we are learning about that, uh, addition to the fight, flight, freeze fawn survival mode. Just many factors came into my life that shaped me to be someone who shape shifted quite a bit. I'm an Ennegram too, a very strong three-wing. So if you're familiar with the Enneagram, that'll make sense to you. I just became someone who needed approval and applause so badly that I would just do pretty much anything to get it. I have come a long way thanks to our heartlift method and this heartlifting community, and have written a lot about my transformation, especially in my second book, Overcoming Hurtful Words, and then given you lots of tools and practices in my third book, Stronger Every Day. In this new trial formatting that I'm putting forth, today is all about really specific quotes that have meant a lot uh in these last three, four weeks on the podcast, and the questions that we have posed to talk about over on Substack at Heartlift Central. So you're going to want to make note of where to connect. And the first place you want to connect, yes, is on the website JanelleRarden.com slash podcast. And second, at Heartlift Central, which is on a platform called Substack. All of this information is in the show notes. You just have to read it and all the links are there. My hope is that we will begin to have really great exchanging of ideas, just like Edith Wharton said. Let's have an exchange and growth of ideas because we all have wisdom to bring to the table. I don't like to sit, even though I'm sitting alone at this table in my podcast studio to record this for you. I wish we were all sitting in a room together, and maybe that will happen. But I want to have an environment saturated with curiosity, debate, healthy debate, imagination, learning, intentional thoughts, affirmations, prayers, meditations, spiritual formation practices. That's why we're here. And I'm happy to say that the expanse of the podcast is growing. I have seen growth over the last few months, which makes my heart skip. Nope, I don't want to skip a beat. I want my heart to pitter patter on a steady rhythm, don't I? And so I've just been very excited to see growth because you make this happen and you make this happen, heartlifters, by your thoughtful donations. I appreciate every donation. If you're new, let me tell you, this is a member supported podcast. I don't have ads, I don't have commercials. I just love the fact that we're ad-free. And in order for that to continue, your donations of any size, one dollar a month, five dollars a month, I thank Colleen and Gina and Jan and Lucille and Gail and Jeff and so many of you. Kathy, oh my goodness, Glenn. There are just so many of you that have been so generous and donated. One dollar a month would make a huge difference and enable me to be free to really do the creative work that is necessary to make this podcast really expand to the ends of the earth. That's what it's for. And so you can do that on JanelleRarden.com. If you just go to my website, you will easily see the ways that you can donate. And even on the Apple platform and on BuzzSprout, which is my platform for this, and on Spotify, you can make donations of any size. There is no small donation. And it just equips and enables this podcast to grow, to develop materials, resources. And that's what Heartlift International is all about, my 501c3. It's a nonprofit dedicated to curating, crafting valuable, valuable resources via the podcast, via books, writing, certification course. You can read all about that at JanelleRarden.com slash HeartLift International and make a tax deductible donation in the name of the podcast. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for enabling me this privilege to do this work. It is supported by you, viewers and listeners, and I appreciate it so much. Okay. Today I'm bringing to our table, our beautiful, bountiful table, a beautiful bounty of questions, the four questions we've been asking this past month, and some great thoughts that I have been writing in my heart journal. I write all about a heart journal in Stronger Every Day. And it seems that when you slow down the pace of your life, which I have been forced to do, after a lot of rest, many naps, I'm getting some energy back. And it takes a lot of energy to journal, as I have said before. You've heard me say that quite a bit here. And so I have filled almost one whole journal. I am almost done with it. Thankfully, I have another one in the wings waiting. So I thought I would open my journal today and I would just read some of the incredible thoughts that have been coming my way and give us some time to think about them. And I would love, love, love, I'm begging here to hear what you think over at Heartlift Central on Substack. You can also find me on Facebook today's Heartlift with Janelle. Podcast community, it's private, and I am there as well. So the four questions that we have asked this month have been number one, do you know your story matters? Do you know your story, Heartlifter, matters? Number two. Have you heard of calling burnout? Have you, Heartlifter, heard of calling burnout? Number three. What is healthy humility? What does healthy humility look like? And our last question, what did you learn about rest growing up? What did you, heartlifter, learn about rest in your childhood? I want to hear your answers. So I'm opening my journal, my beautiful journal, and I'm gonna read some beautiful thoughts that I've captured via movies, TV shows, Hallmark, Christmas movies, and on all the books that I've been reading and perusing over these last four months. In August, I watched a beautiful movie called The Map That Leads to You. If you're a journaler, you're gonna love this movie. The characters, Jack and Heather, have this exchange, and Jack says, I really believe that your thoughts create your future. The universe or God, or whatever you want to call it, wants for us what we want for ourselves. So all we have to do is think it as often and as hard as we can. The 49th minute of the movie, Jack says to Heather, if you could ask God, the universe, whatever you call them or the powers that be, one question, and you get a direct answer. What would it be? In the book Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, he defines slow productivity like this: a philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner based on the following three principles. Do fewer things, work at a natural pace. Obsess over quality. To embrace slow productivity, in other words, is to reorient your work to be a source of meaning instead of overwhelm, while still maintaining the ability to produce valuable output. Think of this in terms of your life, a vocation, a job, household duties, raising children, mothering. It can be applied in many different ways. This lesson that doing less can enable better results defies our contemporary bias toward activity, based on the belief that doing more keeps our options open and generates more opportunities for reward. But recall that busy Jane Austen was neither happy nor producing memorable work, while unburdened Jane Austen, writing contently at quiet Chawton Cottage, transformed English literature. Indeed, simplifying is so important to our emerging philosophy that I'll enshrine it here as the official first principle of slow productivity. So he has these principles. Well, principle number one is do fewer things. Right? I read three of them. Do fewer things, work at a slower, natural pace, obsess over quality. Principle one, do fewer things. Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matters most. We've established, Cal writes, that overload is not fundamental to knowledge work. Remember that knowledge quote? The only air worth breathing is the air of ideas. It's instead largely a side effect of the crude ways in which we self-manage our work volume. We further establish that toiling at maximum capacity greatly reduces the rate at which we accomplish useful things, as it chokes our schedule in administrative kutsu and splinters our attention into fragments too small to support original thinking. In the side, I have highlighted chokes. Original thinking. I wrote, I know this, my head knows this, but it still hasn't worked its way into my heart and out into the way that I live my life. These are my words. One of the most astounding affects, AFF E-C-T, of this four-month enforced rest that my heart has invited me on has been to get comfortable once again, like when I was a child, with empty space, with an emptier calendar with additional beautiful fun things to do, like knitting again without feeling guilty. I'm becoming reacquainted, I think. I know with being a human being. It's really hard to admit, but it's so true. Principle number two, work at a natural pace. Don't rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline with variations in intensity in settings conducive to brilliance. So I write this. Today his stepfather shows up to paint the entire area with a phone blaring. Rob resists my attempts to understand this inconvenience, and our master toilet broke again. I find this daily interruption inviting upset. But I'm trying. Rob said he could just paint, but it would have taken him longer. And then I had. But without all the exhausting interruptions, we can't get to our master bedroom. So it's inconvenient. First world problem, I write, most assuredly. But frustrating nonetheless. I love that. So I just read on Cal Newport page 134. There will be periods of intense busyness and effort. Don't think there won't be. But as an overall goal, we can work at a calmer speed. I just write, I love that so, so much. Principle three that he talks about. Let me get to that. Obsess over quality. Obsess over the quality of what you produce. This is relevant, heartlifters, on so many different levels. Even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term. This is the glue that holds slow productivity together.

unknown: 24:58

I love that.

SPEAKER_00: 24:59

Quality demands you slow down. I just love that so much. I'm in the middle of my journal now, and I am reading from a brilliant book recommended by fellow author Emily P. Freeman, Thomas More's The Eloquence of Silence. Surprising wisdom in Tales of Emptiness. So it's addressing the themes of emptiness and silence. I write. More writes. You might notice ordinary instances of emptiness in every aspect of your life and see through to the literal fact, to the mystery, the poetry of an empty box, an empty theater seat, or an empty silence in a crowded room. You may allow emptiness in various forms into your life as you wake up to unexpected sources of meaning. Heartlifter, I pray right now, maybe you can close your eyes, put your hand over your heart, and pray with me that unexpected sources of meaning will come into your life this week particularly. We're approaching Thanksgiving, and I pray that unexpected sources of meaning will take your breath away. He continues. Emptiness is not a popular idea in modern life, which wants to fill any sign of ignorance with information and stuff the world with new products. Emptying seems useless and counterproductive. I repeat, emptying seems useless and counterproductive, which it is in a certain sense. Emptiness eases excessive control, literalism, and egotism. Meaningful emptiness equals healthy detachment. I write this. I can't help but sense this A-Fib Flutter season is all about meaningful silence and emptying, forcing me to face yet again my unhealthy attachments to worldly ideas of success and productivity. I pose this question as he poses it in the book to myself: can I just be? In the dark emotions of emptiness, you may find a hint of light. A hint of light. He writes, number one, learn to appreciate emptiness and make it part of your daily experience. It balances out any tendency to do too much or even think or feel excessively. This I write, this is my words. I do this on a regular basis. I suppose it is muscle memory. I do this all the time in my relationships. I overthink, I overdo, I overcare. I may have mentioned I've been working on a book project for many years called Moving Day. Leaving the Land of Over to Live in the Land of Ease. Well, I am in that place. So that foreshadowing of years and years of thinking about that book project is now what I'm living. I am in the moving process. Moore writes, resist any temptation to be hyperactive. Enjoy the calm that comes from letting things take their course. He writes a little story about Nasruddin's rule on page three the missing ring. Let the other person find meaning in the emptiness that comes from you not giving too much and keeping what is important to you. Giving can be outwardly generous and inwardly selfish. You can get great emotional rewards. From giving away too much. But in the end, the hidden egotism may ruin the friendship. Appreciate emptiness wherever you find it. I wrote a haiku, a holy haiku, as I say. Emptiness is here. All around me I feel it. Help me learn to be. I would love for you to put your hand to writing a haiku, a beautiful Japanese way of getting to the point. Five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. And I'll meet you, you know where, at Heartlift Central on Substack, and at today's Heartlift with Janelle Podcast community on Facebook to read your answers, your thoughts, and we will exchange ideas and grow together. Thanks for listening today, Heartlifter. Be sure to hop over to Substack at Heartlift Central, Instagram at JanelleRarden, and if you would be so kind, make a tax-deductible donation to keep this podcast ad-free and spreading its influence all over the world. You can make that donation on my website, JanelleRarden.com, Heartlift International. Everything you need to know is right there. Remember, Heartlifter, you have value, worth, and dignity.