Ep 01: What it Means to be Living Elemental

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Full episode transcript below

 

Episode number one. I have a podcast! 

Have you ever done something so random? Like, you didn't even think about it. You just knew it was a step you needed to take? That's what this podcast is for me, honestly. Launching a podcast was not a life-long dream. This was not something that's been on my list of things to accomplish. Of course I have a business, but it wasn't like I was in the mindset to utilize a podcast to market it or whatever it was nowhere near that. 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I understand now that I have the podcast, I can certainly use it as a tool for that. But, that was not the way this story started. It was only three months ago, back in October, that I was inspired by the idea and it caught me really off guard. It seemed to literally come out of nowhere. But, at the time there was also this knowing that I needed to go all in. 

It caught my husband by surprise. He was like, wait, what? With all the other stuff you have going on, you're now starting a podcast? And, I'm like, yeah, that's what I do, you know, it, it's what I do. And so, here we are. I do a lot of things at once, and for a long time, I didn't really like that about myself. I would start a lot of projects without following through. I would tell people about my ideas and speak about them with great enthusiasm and then never get things off the ground. However it took a lot of years of self-development work, spiritual exploration, my Feng Shui practice, questioning who I was and who I wanted to become and asking myself, am I ready to step it up? And so I came to the realization that like most human beings, I'm probably not going to change. I'm always going to be engaged in multiple things and coming with more and more ideas. But what I did need to be okay with was that some things just might not be pursuable and some things might not take off. And so I started to just embrace that concept and more importantly, embrace myself, and who I am, and how I want to show up in the world. And so here it is. Here's the podcast! This one got off the ground and I'm having so much fun with it. 

When I started sharing with other people what the podcast was going to be about, and that I was calling it living elemental, I realized quickly that there was a lot of explaining that I needed to do, because I guess the word elemental is a little foreign for people, and so what a better way than to launch the first episode with some insight about what it means to be living elemental. So I've mentioned that I'm a Feng Shui practitioner. I'm the founder of Jade Scott Design, a boutique interior design studio based in Pennsylvania. I've also founded Shoppe Elemental, which is an e-commerce site that sells spiritual tools created to create more sacred space at home. And in the spring, we're going to be launching the elemental collection, which will consist of art and decorative accents as they relate to each of the elements found in Feng Shui. These elements, they originated from Taoism, and Taoism is a philosophy or a school of thought that originated in China. And it teaches that we should be living in balance with the universe. So, I'm building this whole brand around this philosophy and the five elements. And so it only made sense, to me at least, to name the podcast, The Living Elemental Podcast. 

So, to go into it a little deeper, in Feng Shui the five elements and their cycles essentially work together to balance space. Just like in acupuncture where your practitioner will balance your body's energy map based on any elemental imbalance. So, to be living elemental simply means to be striving for more balance. 

So, what I'm hoping to do is start to convey this concept of home being just as essential to our well-being as is the mind and body. 

We have control over our mind, body and homes and even a sense of responsibility as humans to tend to what we can control so that we can better contribute to our world through our homes, our relationships and furthermore, this planet that we all call home. And so looking more through the lens of balance, what else can we be balancing better? I mean, you hear it all the time - I'm overwhelmed, I'm drained, I'm doing too much, there's not enough time, there's not enough money, there's not enough fill-in-the blank. Right? 

We as humans need more balance in our lives period. So it doesn't matter what we're talking about. We could be talking about parenting and balancing screen time with our kids. We could be female business owners trying to balance our careers and families. We could be striving for more financial stability or relationship stability or balancing our time and how we spend it. 

These are conversations I want to have within this podcasting container. So we can create more balance in our homes through Feng Shui. We can go get acupuncture or any other physical modality to tend to our bodies, but what are we doing for our minds? What are we feeding them? What are our beliefs that are keeping us from feeling so out of balance? That's what I hope to provide through this podcast. 

Through interviews, I want you to feel inspired. Through my solo mini episodes I want you to gain some education. I want to just crack open a little space that could possibly encourage you to take any action towards bettering yourself. And so I want to end today's episode with reading just a short paragraph from the book, Mind, Body Home. 

This book was written by Tisha Morris, who was also my Feng Shui instructor and her work as a writer and practitioner has been so influential in my own work as a designer and practitioner, as well as in my business branding as a whole, because we both truly share a love of working with the five elements. 

So in her book, it starts with; “Mahatma Gandhi said, quote. ‘Our contribution to the progress of the world must consist in setting our own house in order’, end quote. Regardless of whether he was referring to our house literally or figuratively, the message is that we each have personal responsibility for taking care of our individual lives, represented through our living spaces. 

If we each put our own home in order, whether it's using Feng Shui principles to bring about peace and harmony, or decorating our home to where we love coming home to it, we are bettering our lives and the planet. If we each take care of the plot of space we take up on the earth, it will be an even more beautiful world in which to live. 

This of course carries over to businesses and municipality spaces as well. But the change has to start in our personal spaces and how we treat and love ourselves. This is consistent with Gandhi's more famous quote ‘be the change you want to see in the world’. Our spaces are so important to our overall health and wellbeing, and have been vastly overlooked in their importance.”

 So, I'm going to end today's episode with that. 

This podcast is quickly becoming a really fun outlet for me, and I look forward to sharing more episodes with all of you. But, if you have any suggestions or comments or you want to be a guest on the show, or you just have a guest recommendation, please feel free to reach out to me personally at jsd@jadescottdesign.com 

A lot of this information can also be found on our website at www.jadescottdesign.com, but I'll put all of that in the show notes for easy access. And just a reminder that new episodes are released on Mondays.

Next week is bonus week. I'm going to be dropping six episodes Monday through Saturday to talk a little bit about each element. I thought that would be a great way to open up the conversation about them, so you can start gaining some understanding of how they work on their own and also together in a way that supports you. So be sure you are following us on your favorite streaming platform  that way you know when those episodes are released um  with that i look forward to seeing you all next week!