SPEAKER_02: 0:00

But the real story is every single minute I have to decide what am I going to do now? Who am I going to be? What am I going to do for myself or what am I going to surround myself with now? Is a question whether or not I'm going through Empty Nest. We think that that's an a special occasion, but when you really just reduce it down to truth, you're asking that question every single second, anyways. What are you doing now?

SPEAKER_00: 0:23

Welcome to this Empty Nest Life, the podcast dedicated to helping you embrace this transformative season with purpose, passion, and joy. In each episode, we explore stories, strategies, and insights to help turn your empty nest into an exciting new chapter. Whether you're redefining your identity, pursuing new passions, or finding peace in the paws, you're in the right place. Here's your host, the empty nest coach, Jay Ramsden.

SPEAKER_01: 0:45

Hey there, my emptiness friends. Are you wondering how you can transform your empty nest life into one without judgment and fear and into one full of authentic, creative expression? Today I'm talking with Dr. Fred Moss, whose books Creative Eight, Healing Through Creativity and Self-Expression, and Find Your True Voice just Might Be What You Need to Kickstart Young That the Kids have Left the Nest. Dr. Moss, welcome to this Empty Nest Life. It is really great to be here. Thanks for having me. I look forward to our conversation. I'm excited to see how the work that you do translates into some of the things that I do with empty nesters. What I'm curious about, you you've been an advocate for mental health and wellness for almost 40 years. More than 40 years. Okay. What's the number one thing you see in people facing life transitions like the empty nests that might keep them stuck from moving forward?

SPEAKER_02: 1:37

Yeah, I the one thing that really we all are subject to is taking life circumstances and collapsing our sense of self into those circumstances. So stuff happens on the outside, whatever that is, this or that, or this change, or that disappointment, or this loss. And when that happens, uh, we collapse ourselves and describe and define who we are as people and what our moods are and what our impression is and what our behaviors are with like our inner well-being. And instead of that, we have an opportunity to see that we are not our experiences, we are not our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our sensations at all. And we have an opportunity to have go through life changes without altering to the core that who we are. But we that isn't how most of us roll. The default is to become very attached to our external circumstances or our internal thought processes, and then describe our life based on that after collapsing those experiences with our inner self. And there's a real opportunity through uh the exercises and tools and strategies and practices that have been developed and compiled over the years to separate ourselves from the experiences and be able to live a full life no matter what's going on in the outside world.

SPEAKER_01: 2:58

Okay. So just to frame it for folks, sometimes we feel angry or another feeling, but we're not necessarily an angry person, I think is what I'm hearing you say.

SPEAKER_02: 3:09

Yeah, something like that. I've heard people make that equation before. I think what I'm really saying is even if you're an angry person, it doesn't have to it doesn't have to interfere with what you say, who you be, and how you do. You can be angry. It's oh it's completely okay to be angry. It's even completely okay to have angry anger sweep over you such that you get the experience that I'm an angry person. But even through that, even if angry, it doesn't necessarily define your next action, your next interaction, or your next thought processes.

SPEAKER_01: 3:43

Ah, okay. So that makes sense. And tying it to the empty nest and the emptiness transition is, oh, I'm sad that the kids have left, but that doesn't necessarily, because it's an external circumstance, doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be sad for a long time or you don't have to let it define you. You can choose to think differently, you can choose to feel differently in something like that. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02: 4:05

Yes, it does. And if as I think further on this, I get to see that the experience of that last child being set free, to call it empty nest, empty nest has a connotation there. I used to have something that I cared for, and now it's empty, and I somehow don't have the same life function. I don't have the same job description, I don't have my same purpose anymore because I'm not at home with my with or without my partner in full care or in a full observation or in full witness of whoever it was that's just left my house. And so now I'm, oh my God, left would be with me. Like when I'm left to be with me, that seems like it's traumatic. But it seems to me that if we called it something different than empty nest, we wouldn't have to go through that. The the words itself to find the pathway of what we have to go through when that last child or that last caregiving unit uh leaves our home.

SPEAKER_01: 5:04

Yeah. Oh, that makes perfect sense. And and there's lots of people who want to call it something different, open nest or a launching pad or something. Launching pad, yeah, I like that. Exactly. Exactly. It's what what it brings back. So it brings to mind for me there's a lot of chaos and things that happen during that transition because so many things happen in such a short amount of time. You, your methods focus on finding balance and peace in midst life's chaos or a transition like that. And you use creative and effective tools to do that. What are some of those tools and why are they important of finding peace? Maybe that might help some of the folks.

SPEAKER_02: 5:42

And so, again, I think with the object being that I don't have to collapse myself, I don't have to conflate myself with my outside experiences and then define who I am based on that. Because after all, there's enough outside, there's literally an endless supply, truly, of outside experiences that I could latch myself onto and then become that person. I I could choose anything from some of the global challenges that we're facing in the day these days, or from even a small thing that happened across the community, or maybe a memory or a thought. And I could absolutely collapse my whole well-being into whatever that experience is that I'm having, and then have that mood defined, or have that interactive pattern defined by whatever it is that I just collapse into. But what we really have here using creativity and using what I call the Moss method, which is 20 things that I didn't design any of them, I just compiled them that can help us keep our ground and uh keep our focus and keep our point of view solid and consistent with our core values. Things like meditation, things like getting outside in nature very early in the morning. I've already been outside, it's only six something in the morning right now. And uh I've been outside and I've done some stretching outside already today. And I find that getting outside and getting a taste or a smell or a feel of what's going on out there in the other world. Of course, we're we're all trained to think that the world takes place in between these two ears or in between these four walls, and that that's or in front of this pixelated screen. And that is not where the world takes place. That's just one place that we plant ourselves, and then we get the world that's fed to us in those places. But when we fed, when we go outside and we get a taste of how nature really goes, the natural flow of nature, we can see that we are nature and we are proud of that flow. If we allow ourselves to be, we can be really transformed in the beauty and wonder of what nature has to bring, which by the way is not all roses and unicorns, after all. And so we get an opportunity of really seeing what life is about and enjoying ourselves using these practices of meditation, of movement, of nature, of creativity, of spirituality, of service, of nutrition, of hydration, of having authentic uh conversation, of pampering ourselves, of monitoring our sleep hygiene, of being very careful who we are in the world and what we surround ourselves in and what we take into ourselves. So not only ingesting food and drink and drugs, but also who are the people that we're spending our time with? What are we putting ourselves in when we're looking at that screen? There are some things that are a little bit more conducive to growth and development than other things which are more conducive to going down rabbit holes or disempowerment. And so what we feed ourselves and then how we take care of ourselves can literally alter how we see the world in the face of the same calamities or the same outside disruptive circumstances that we might be experiencing. Like they don't have to shift our basic core self and the point of view and who we get to be, who what we get to do, what we get to say. So when we start looking at that and looking at the process of creativity, we can start maybe getting ourselves aligned with where does healing take place? We all have wounds, so we all have wounds that go back to our early days, or even in some people's uh way of thinking, in the either earlier lives that we brought into this life. And those wounds have to be addressed. And one of the ways to do that, like the best way that to do that over time, is through this amazing process of a human connection. And one could say that that's what me and you are doing right now, in fact. That's the whole point of being up at six something or being on here staring at the screen and meeting you for the first time and having powerful conversations, is we get to display and model what it means to be in a dyad in creating some sort of connection between two humans so that we can make a difference. But in that process of being gotten, in that process of being resonated with, being harmonized with, being connected to, that's where healing in its most profound level takes place. I've been in psychiatry, as we've already mentioned, for well over 40 years, 46 years to be exact. If you include my, I've been a psychiatrist itself for 36 years, but after that, I was a childcare worker for the 10 years before that in a in adolescent facilities, adolescent mental health facilities for adolescent boys primarily. And in that process, have really learned that through creativity, through human connection, there's nothing more powerful. And I've never really seen any kind of diagnostics or therapeutic interventions or any kind of medications that even rival in any way the overwhelming healing power of a human connection.

SPEAKER_01: 11:29

I love that. So I it just popped into my head is like we're talking about empty nest full life, right? Like that's like you we say don't just focus on the empty nest. Now it's time you can actually have a full life. We spend so much time giving, putting into others as parents and being so focused on raising the kids and making sure they're launching. It's literally time to launch ourselves. If we look at the 20 things that you just mentioned, that's the power. That's the power of this time.

SPEAKER_02: 11:56

Yeah, for sure. And it's something we can do. The if we look at these 20 things, and we don't have to, I don't know anybody who does all 20 things every day. You don't have to choose to do 20. Uh, there's just a list here of pick and choose. And normally what people do is they look at this list, they get a handle on the list, and then they choose at some level, almost naturally, which ones are going to do today and which ones are going to fall into their routine, and which ones actually I have a set that I don't do all 20 every day. But like I said, there's something about waking up with gratitude. There's something about actually doing a little bit of stretching, a little bit of moving. There's something about being outside of nature, there's something about meditation, which my meditation has not yet occurred today, but will occur short. I when you said how long the conversation was, like, oh, good. I have 20 minutes at the end of the hour, and in those 20 minutes, I already know exactly what I'll be doing, which is essentially sitting silent and still and doing nothing. But that's what's here inside of my daily meditative practice as well.

SPEAKER_01: 12:59

Yeah, it's and I think that's a key point. You you said it, and I think people could gloss right over it. It was like, now I know exactly what I'm doing. And sometimes when we get into the emptiness life, we just don't know what to do because we spent so much time being focused on others, we don't know how to set our daily pace. Yeah, we lose the rhythm.

SPEAKER_02: 13:17

Yeah, you get well, you could say, you know, it words are so powerful, right? So when we say we lose the rhythm, that feels like we've lost something. Or you could say the stanza came to an end and it's time to create the next measure. And the next measure is no longer a trauma, it's actually a freedom and an invitation to step in and create a life that works even better, or even even better is a very real possibility given the circumstances that I have. Yes, it can be, I suppose, if you want to look at it through the lenses, it and it's pretty likely I too went through the phase with my second child leaving at the time. And it can look like it's a trauma. It can feel like that it's a massive disruption in how I see myself and my purpose and my routine. But there's just by shifting the actual point of view and perspective, the same exact data can be translated into a gift of massive freedom or massive possibility, an opportunity to create a new rhythm, an opportunity to create a new measure, a new stanza, a new launching pad, if you will, from this day moving forward.

SPEAKER_01: 14:34

Yeah, I love that you said that words matter because how we speak to ourselves, how we think about the circumstances that affect our lives, the external circumstances that affect our lives, we then take action based upon how we think and feel about those things. So you're it you're so spot on with the idea that, yeah, how we talk to ourselves, how we look at things is such an important concept. For sure.

SPEAKER_02: 14:55

It's a the context is they say in landmark education that the context is decisive, and there's something really important about that, that how we see the world then actually sources oftentimes what we're what our next action are, what our next statements are, or even what our next thoughts are, which then lead to whatever life experiences that we're having at any given time. Because we bring context to whatever circumstance we're talking about. If I see myself as having just gone through the trauma of having, oh, my last child, the one I love so much, the one I cared for so much, be sent off to school or be sent off to their own um effort of independence as being a traumatic experience, then I will think that I maybe just got punched or just got injured or just got just got intruded upon, or I'm now faced with some circumstances and challenges that might be overwhelming. And it can look like an uphill battle. It can really, and I think that's a natural way that people generally look at it. Not only does it empty nest, because another implication of emptiness isn't so much that I get to be here with myself, it's that I get to be here with my partner. That's another thing. It's oh my God, we don't have the disruptions that used to separate ourselves, separate our ability to look at our own intimacy, for instance. And now we have an opportunity to be intimate much more frequently, much more available, because the disruption or the obstacle, the hurdle, or the challenge of being intimate has now left us because we were not, in fact, like co-co-leaders in the growth and development of our offspring. And now we're like, oh, look across the room. Uh who are you? Who are you? What do we get to do now? And can we re-spark a valuable relationship, maybe in the form of intimacy? And when I say intimacy, I'm not necessarily specifically talking only about the bedroom, but how do we really get an opportunity to step in, be our true selves, and explore what this other person or this other cohabitant now has to say, or now has to be, or now what they want. For some people, empty nests is a I think that you probably discussed this in previous shows, but it's an opportunity to finally break up with your partner that you've been thinking about breaking up for like years and years and years, and now the last bird has left the nest. And it's like, okay, let's get this shit done. Now we're out of here. Let's stop. Absolutely. That happens for some people. Yeah, it does happen for some people. And maybe that's what's time is here. It's like, okay, now you really get now. But before you do, take another look across the room and make sure that's really what your intention is. Make sure that's really what you want to do. Make sure that just because you've been upset with each other or just because you're no longer feeling fulfilled in recent activities, that doesn't mean that it's permanent necessarily. And yes, you look across the room, you're like, I don't want to spend the rest of my days with this person. I don't even want to spend the rest of the months with this person. And it's time for me to leave. And that is another possibility of leaving or leaving gracefully without even violence. What do I get to do now that I know how no longer have the responsibility or accountability to stay home, be home, and care for this usually young adult? I I now get to look at what is this relationship that I've developed, this co-partner relationship with my home mate, my cohabitating homemate. And uh, do I is it worth is it worth sustaining? Is it worth containing? Is it worth stepping in and improving or boosting? Or is it worth really start thinking, okay, we don't have to keep doing this anymore. We we don't have that shared functional purpose anymore. And it's like there's a sense of freedom rather than feeling uh constrained to the job, if you will, of being a parent.

SPEAKER_01: 19:10

Yeah, oh absolutely. I I think it also raises the question for lots of people is what now? They actually have to look inward, whether it's with your partner or your spouse, or just in your own life, right? Everything can be hunky-dory with your partner or spouse, but also looking at like how do I want to live my life now that the kids are grown and flown? I've dedicated so much time to what's going on, raising the kids and making sure that they're launched. That when I start to shine the light inward, I'm not sure what the next right step is for me.

SPEAKER_02: 19:38

Yeah, exactly. And we we that's if we look at it, by the way, that's the question that we have to face every minute in life, anyways. I love that. Yeah, say more about that. Well, it's just because something's going on, and it like I it whatever is going on, my next minute or my next several minutes, or the way my morning unfolds, or maybe my day unfolds, or who I talk to, or how I talk to them, or what I'm pursuing, or what I'm interested in, or what I'm curious about, or what deflections am I going to take on today, or what possibilities, what am I going to create today? What kind of food am I going to make? What kind of activity am I going to take care of? What kind of do things am I going to do on my downtime or my rest time when I'm not already predefined to do what's ever here? These are challenges that we really face minute by minute, anyways, and they're they're amplified if my last child leaves a home. But the real story is every single minute I have to decide what am I going to do now? What am I going to who am I going to be now? What am I going to say and who am I going to talk to now? What am I going to do for myself or to myself now? When who what am I going to surround myself with now is a question whether or not I'm going through empty nests. So when we go to what now at a seemingly um overarching global scale, now that our offspring or our dependent has now left the nest, if you will, or left the home, we think that that's an a special occasion. But when you really just reduce it down to truth, you're asking that question every single second, anyways. What are you doing now?

SPEAKER_01: 21:21

Yeah. That's just such a great reminder. Is like we do every every turn in life, we're wondering like what's next, what's next, what's next. Yeah. What, you know, now what, now what, however, you wanted to say it. Yeah. Ooh. That's a great way to frame it. Is like this is just another stage in life. And now you get to focus on yourself and what makes that look like. What's the biggest motivator in your life right now with the work that you're doing?

SPEAKER_02: 21:45

The biggest motivator is that I'm finally aligned with who I get to be in the outside world. My persona is consistent with who I've been and what I've learned over the years. Over the last 40, 40 plus years, the um much of that time has been spent being misaligned with the activities that I find myself doing, especially inside of my business. So I'm not very aligned with the approach of the uh modern psychiatric industrial complex, the idea that when someone is sick, they should go to a therapist or go to a counselor, go to a social worker, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and uh get the kind of care that us professionals have learned how to give you, as if that's the highest level. So I don't have it that way at all. When I give you a diagnosis, or when I'm asked to, or usually actually forced to, when working for someone else's company, most people don't realize, for instance, that when you come to see a psychiatrist, you're walking out of the door with a true and honest diagnosis guaranteed. So most people do not realize that. You don't get to go to a psychiatrist and not pick up a diagnosis. A psychiatrist is actually compelled in some ways, forced to give you a diagnosis on that first visit, one that isn't like transient. Like it stays with you. Whatever they say you have on that first visit, you now have it in your chart and it's irrevocable. It's just there, it can't be removed. I don't really like that. I find diagnoses to be very traumatic in their base and uh really limiting in the possibilities there's then in front of somebody. Now, I really get the value of diagnosis as well. People come in and they want a diagnosis in psychiatry. People come in not to find out if there's something wrong with them, they come in to find out what's wrong with them. And uh when people come and it's like they're already sure that there's something wrong with them. Otherwise, why would they be sitting in a psychiatric office? And there's very interesting that they walk about with a diagnosis then, and then get to walk into the identity of whatever they think that that diagnosis entails. And when I give them treatment in any form, including like weekly visits or CBT or DBT or EMDR or whatever alphabet super treatment that's out there, and give them a diagnosis, such as OCD or NPD or MDD or ADD or anything, ASD. If I give them all these diagnoses, this is who they now become in their own eyes. I find that to be very limiting and very concerning, especially when the treatments don't really work to heal anybody. They're not even advertised to heal anybody, they're advertised to contain or slow down the deterioration. And that I suppose you could say that the outward outcome looks like that's what it does. But in reality, what if these medicines or these therapies are actually perpetuating the conditions they're marketed to treat? And this was a question I was asking myself for over 40 years. There's nothing good about that. And am I really in some ways on the edge of or directly harming my clients in the name of healing them or mean of not of uh maybe alleviating whatever their uncomfortable symptoms are. So when I now step in, what's really here is the opportunity to see that with that trauma, with the trauma of diagnosis or the trauma of the treatments in the form of medications or in the form of therapies that perpetuate the dependency between us two. Um, I don't have to do that anymore. So I'm much more aligned with who I am. The undoctor reset is what I'm up to these days. And I get called the undoctor, which is someone who helps people get off their diagnosis, undiagnose, get off their medication, unmedicate, and get out of the system, undoctrinate. The idea is you don't have to walk into this system when you're uncomfortable, coming to the realization that in fact life is difficult, right? Life is difficult. You get that? Are we allowed? Are we allowed to say that to say that life is difficult? Yeah, at this stage, yeah. Absolutely. It's pretty difficult. It's it's hard being a human. It's hard. It's it's work. It's waking up in the morning and getting through life, even sleeping through the night, though, like it's difficult to be a human. And uh, when we can start seeing that that doesn't mean that just because you're upset or scared or uncomfortable or in an unpleasant state or even miserable, doesn't mean that you have a condition. It means more than likely that you're just a human. And that welcome to humanity is the overarching brand that I developed. And we start really looking at, well, if we can embrace the fact that being uncomfortable, very, very uncomfortable, is just another component of this life experience and doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. Even if you are sure there's something wrong with you, doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. In fact, almost every human is pretty sure, if you push down a little bit, that there's something wrong with them, that they're different than the rest of the world. You might have experienced that in the past. Most people do. Absolutely. Yeah. And maybe there's nothing wrong with you. Maybe this is just another example of the overriding a truth of the matter, which is being a human is difficult. Being uncomfortable is part of being a human, and welcome to humanity. I like being highly uncomfortable. I don't mean to say I definitely don't mean to diminish the experience. Some people mishear this as me saying, get over it, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, chill. This is just another experience. You don't have to show up so charged. That isn't exactly what I'm saying. What I'm saying is the whole experience of being a human is a complicated one. And you're going to be left feeling uncomfortable and you're going to be left in unpleasant state. Then, what I get to do now is really step into my true and honest power. I don't find myself with 45 years in the field or 30,000 patients that I've had, or literally 100,000 prescriptions that I wrote, none of which was I truly aligned with. Yeah, this is what the industry and my clients wanted from me. And I have the license and the access to give it, so I don't get to withhold it. If that's you come to my office and you tell me you want medicine, and that's all you want, and that's the only thing you want, and I'm a provider of medicine, whether I like it or not. I'm I'm not allowed to be like the cashier at the front of Whole Foods telling you to take that, take the fried chicken back or something. I'm not going to be doing that. I'm going to be at some service. And but finally now I get to by by stepping into the undoctoral, really uh step into what my heart's purpose is, step into what these 45 or 67 years have really been about and be aligned with what I know is correct so that I no longer have to walk that way razor's edge of whether or not I'm harming someone.

SPEAKER_01: 28:42

Yeah, and I so I like the undoctoring piece because I think that there's a parallel hill to the unempty nesting piece where people, it's almost in reverse, right? People feel a lot of a lot of people feel shame and shame that they're not adjusting to the emptiness transition. But because of social media, because they see all these things out there, it's supposed to be this glamorous thing that they struggle. So they don't talk about it. We are in this situation where nobody's talking about that. People do struggle, going back to the humanity piece and the human piece. So I think I appreciate where you're coming from with that information.

SPEAKER_02: 29:18

Yeah, we really do have an opportunity. If me and you were set out to let's find a hundred reasons to be uncomfortable right now, it would take us about four minutes to come up with a hundred. And if we're like, how many, how about a hundred reasons to be afraid? Yeah, but take about four minutes. How about a hundred reasons to be really sad? Maybe four minutes or really nervous. Yeah. Another four minutes or so. If we took a break. And if we start seeing that there's countless reasons to be uncomfortable in the world, and how the lens that we put on this whole experience, how we see the world, because all these things are just constantly happening, and we get to latch ourselves on to any of the so-called traumas that we're experiencing and call that the center of our life. And in fact, respond as we're injured, or respond like we're overworked, or respond like we're overwhelmed, or respond like we're disoriented. We get to do that, but disoriented from what? I what were you oriented to before you were disoriented, after all? You you created your own sense of orientation. So this idea of being disoriented of not having a purpose or not having a stated purpose or an obvious purpose, maybe that steps in instead of the default of being a caregiving parent, we now have an opportunity to step in and be something different if we want or not. If you want to, if you want to hang on to that role because it provided some comfort, you're allowed to continue doing that. If you if you know if you want to delve into it and just swim in the oh so difficult trauma of losing that last uh member of your family before you now have to face yourself or face your partner or both. Um it's one way to look at life is to see that as a trauma, is to see that as a hardship. And yeah, it can literally be overwhelming or discombobulating it somewhere, disruptive, or it can be just a sheer gift. And I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm really not. I'm really seriously not. You're allowed to choose here, and I'm not calling you wrong in any way for seeing this as an overarching stress when the possibility of seeing this as an invitation is available. You're allowed to do either of them, and you're a grown person, you've been through life, you understand that what I'm saying is true, you're allowed to take on this neck minute um in any of many different ways. And uh, when you get that opportunity to see that you get to design the way you look at life based on your uh circumstances or internal states, this is an opportunity to see that as the author of my life, as the choreographer of my life, as the trustworthy agent of my life, the sovereign adult that I am, I get to choose the world that I'm living in based on the experiences that I'm having or not having or want to have. And the the freedom sits here all the time, by the way, not just before and after your child leaves. You always have to be asking yourself these kind of questions, minute by minute by minute again, like our previous example. And in that process, we get to live the life that we that we create for ourselves. And maybe it's not so simple as the words I just gave. It's probably not, but on the other hand, I'm probably resonating with most of your listeners and most of your viewers. This is one way to look at life, and and any given moment, it could be like, oh, it rained, or oh, I have I got in a car accident, or oh, oh, I uh I have a full schedule today, and therefore my mood is established in some way, some predefined, pre-designed way. And then I go through the world with that, justify that I've been hit with a trauma, like I got a trauma. I don't have any spaces on my schedule today, which by the way is true. And but that's a whole different story. I don't have any spaces in my schedule today, and I have no idea how I'm gonna bumble, stumble, and tumble into my life. And I can look at that with a smile, like I got this, which I think I do, or I can look at that with fear, like what if I'm late, or what if I double schedule, or what if I don't make it, or what if they don't make it, or what if I say the wrong thing, or what if I don't have time to go get lunch or go to the bathroom, or what if I don't spend enough time with this or that or this or that? Uh, I can get pretty excited about the challenges of life and call that a stress. Like I'm looking through a lens of stress, or I can get, yeah, so I have a planned out day today and the things that I'm doing. And if you look at my schedule, I looked at my schedule yesterday, it's very colorful and it uh butts up like a like a jigsaw puzzle on my Google Calendar. And it's like, okay, the next 12 hours or so, it's actually I think it's 13 hours till 7 p.m. tonight. I'm I'm pretty locked in. I I know what I'm I know where I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing. And yay, cool. I have something to do. I could say that tomorrow or at seven o'clock tonight, I have to face the trauma of the freedom now of trying to figure out what to do with my life because seven o'clock came and I have nothing on my schedule. That's like a form of empty nest at that moment. Like I no longer have my predefined life at 701 tonight. All of a sudden I'm left with okay, what next?

SPEAKER_01: 35:02

Yeah, I love so the biggest thing I took from that is like you always have the option to choose. Yeah, you always get to choose what you want, what your life looks like, and every single moment. I love that. And that might be a great way to even wrap up this episode. Just remind people, yes, in this moment of empty nesting, in this moment of your life, you get to choose what it looks like.

SPEAKER_02: 35:21

Yeah, yeah. And in fact, you have been choosing moment by moment, anyways. So it's not even a new experience. You've already been doing this moment by moment. You have accepted the default choices or made one of your own. And that's just another example of accept a default choice. You can do that. You've got some design default choice, like I need to be, I need to feel like uh concerns about abandonment or concerns about rejection or concerns about adequacy or purpose. I can do that and have that be front and center in my life, or I can realize that I can take my life experiences and shuffle them any way I want and create the life that I want to do, just like I have been doing minute by minute by minute up until now, anyways. Such a great reminder.

SPEAKER_01: 36:11

Such a I love that. Before I let you go, Dr. Moss, what's one thing you've learned about yourself through your work and your process?

SPEAKER_02: 36:23

That I don't know anything. I I I used to hear wise people. I used to hear people, sages or wise people, or elders, or learned learned, we'll say learned people, teachers, facilitators, mentors, say something like the magic happens when you realize you didn't know anything in the first place, or something like that. And I think the thing that's happened, I just spent a weekend in a in a men's retreat looking at sex and intimacy in my life. And I was a sheer student in there and a kind of a massive contributor as well, given my experiences in life. I start realizing, okay, well, I've been around enough. I have these 30,000 clients who have called me their doctor one at for one second or another. I have lived in so many different cities and so many places and been with so many people and uh had so much life circumstances thrown upon me. And ultimately what I've learned about all of this is that I literally don't know, especially the things that I think I know. Like even those things. Like I literally don't know anything, and that there's massive, massive freedom inside of just recognizing that I don't know anything because that allows me to learn second by second from whatever's coming here. Drop everything that I think I've known about anything. Like drop every and not see that as a trauma. So it's not a trauma that I don't know anything. It's just a truth.

SPEAKER_01: 37:57

I love that. And I think that that ties nicely into the emptiness life. I don't know what to do next, and that's okay. It's really okay. You didn't know what to do next this whole time, anyway. Yeah, so good. I appreciate it. Dr. Moss, thank you so much for being with me today and shedding a little bit of life on how we might look at this emptiness life a little bit differently.

SPEAKER_02: 38:16

My deep pleasure. Thank you for having me. Great conversation, great way to start today. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00: 38:22

Thank you for listening to this emptiness life. Remember, this chapter isn't an ending, it's an invitation to redefine, rediscover, and reignite your life. If today's episode sparks something in you, don't forget to take that first step and visit this emptynesslife.com and click work with me to get the conversation started. Until next time, keep your heart open, your mind curious, and your spirits shining.