There's No Shortcut, Easy Way OR Hack

The Susan Beth Podcast - Live The Life You Were Designed + Created To Live - Intentional Living

Winter Journal: - https://amzn.to/48baCCC Instagram: https://bit.ly/SusanBethInstagram Pinterest: https://bit.ly/SusanBethPinterest The SHE IS Podcast: https://susanbeth.com/thesheispodcast In the last episode which was our Sunday episode that runs parallel with the weekly focus from the She is Awakening Seasonal Journal the weekly focus was Solitude. And I mentioned wanting to continue some of the thoughts started there in this week's episode that you are listening to now :) In case you haven’t listened to that episode yet I’ll recap on a few things but you can go back and listen to that episode later. Solitude can be an intimidating even scary word for some of us. But as complicated as the word might sound to us… solitude is simply where we show up with God simply as ourselves That’s it. Pure and simple. A sacred space for us and our God I shared how I think solitude has become a foreign and intimidating idea for us because we live in a culture that is addicted to noise. Our lives are filled with one distraction after another. We have the world in our fingerprints. At any moment we can reach out to a friend across the world or be made aware of the latest news of the moment. It’s a gift AND it’s a lot!!! It’s a gift in that we can stay connected to people in a way that was never possible before, but it’s a lot in that we weren’t designed to have constant stimulation and dopamine hits… and it’s addicting. It literally changes our brains. Because of the opportunity we all have for constant distractions, we are the ones who have to be intentional about how we want to live. How many of you have found yourself opening apps on your phone without any known thought that you want to once again check any email updates or see any latest posts on social? We mindlessly do these things because we’ve done it so often that it's a natural impulse and response within us. It’s scary but no one is going to take our phones from our hands. It’s something we must intentionally make a choice to do. And when I started trying to intentionally not be so connected to a device in my hand. I found I had to take baby steps… walk downstairs and leave my phone upstairs. This past week I shared a screenshot in my stories of my “weekly report” that pops up on my phone each week informing me of the hours spent on this little device. It informed me that my screen time was down 53% in the past week. So I was asking if anyone else feels like they’ve failed when they get the message of a lower percentage for the week haha I think it’s just how it’s worded that it always makes me feel like it is a negative which is really funny since it’s actually a positive and usually intentional. But it doesn’t just happen…we have to be intentional about changing our relationship with our phones or continue being led by its influence and impact in our lives and the way we think. our instinct is to reach out to someone …something … to ease our discomfort of being alone or give us the answer to the question when I think we all know the real answer to that scenario anything we reach for to ease any pain or discomfort in our lives is only a temporary fix this looks different for each of us… it can be shopping, pornography, or a bag of cookies… it looks different, but the roots are all the same. we do the same with people and there’s nothing wrong with processing but even with that, I think we can push it just like sharing personal details about someone else life in the name of concern or we need to be praying for them. How about we use the oxygen and energy we just used to personally do just that? Because here’s what I’ve found when I do that FIRST, I don’t find the need to share it with someone else! We all have this desire to connect and express our needs and desires we just need to keep that in order And sometimes we do need to have a conversation with someone else about I’ve found that after ‘processing it with Holy Spir