Breaking Open

In this debut episode of Beauty in the Break, hosts Foster Wilson and Cesar Cardona invite you into their world, where deep conversations, raw vulnerability, and the beauty of transformation take center stage. They introduce the heart of the podcast—exploring the moments that break us open and how we find light on the other side. 

Through personal stories, honest reflections, and thoughtful discussion, they dive into the experience of fear, uncertainty, and taking a leap of faith into the unknown. With humor, depth, and a willingness to be truly seen, this episode is both soul-nourishing and deeply relatable.

In this episode, they explore: 

• What it really means to “break open” and how transformation happens
• Listening to your body’s signals—how Foster knew it was time to leave a 17-year relationship
• Why fear is a sign of growth (and how to work with it instead of against it)
• Cesar’s leap of faith: moving to Los Angeles without a plan, and the unexpected lesson he learned
• Grieving old versions of ourselves while stepping into something new
• Why Cesar slept in his car (and how a stranger changed everything) 
• The power of vulnerability—why being open is the key to deep connection
• And introducing… Words of the Week!

If this episode resonated with you, check out Episode 2: The Beauty of Letting Go where Foster & Cesar dive deeper into surrendering to uncertainty. You can also watch the episodes on YouTube.

If you enjoyed this episode, take a moment to follow Beauty in the Break on your favorite podcast app and leave a review—it really helps! 

Connect with us! We’d love to hear from you. Send an email or voice note to beautyinthebreakpod@gmail.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram @beautyinthebreakpod.

Cesar Cardona:

• Attend his upcoming speaking engagements
• Listen to Cesar + The Clew on Apple Music and Spotify
• Subscribe to his newsletter Insights That Matter

Foster Wilson:

• Buy her poetry book Afternoon Abundance
• Learn about her postpartum doula services
• Subscribe to her newsletter Foster’s Village

Created & Hosted by: Cesar Cardona and Foster Wilson

Executive Producer: Glenn Milley 

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Beauty in the Break. I'm Foster…

And I'm Cesar. 

This is the podcast where we explore the moments that break us open and how we find beauty on the other side. 

So whatever you're carrying today, you don't have to carry it alone. We are here with you. 

Thanks for being here, and enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome to the beginning of Beauty in the Break. My name is Foster, and I'm sitting here across the table from Cesar, my partner. I am sitting here at this wooden table in his living room, a place that we share, a place that is often quiet with sunlight streaking in on our faces, a place that is sometimes overwhelmed with the not so quiet pattering of our children's feet on the wooden floors, overrun with voices clamoring for attention and validation.

A place that is at times a safe haven for our intimate circle of friends to gather in whatever blooming or broken state we are currently in to break bread and share our truth. We actually do this. We invite friends over and pass around soup and ask deep questions of each other and cry and heal and learn and celebrate and be happy.

We just exist and hold space for each other in that messy place that feels not put together in a place where we don't have to have everything figured out just yet, but we are deeply curious. We are wanting to know more. We are wanting to say more. And sometimes it's because no one ever asked us to say more.

That is what this space holds. The curiosity, the desire to express and be our authentic selves. So we invite you in here, into our living room, where we are all allowed to break, to break down, to break apart, to break open. You can break into a million pieces if you want to. And both of us promise to do the same.

We will break open our stories to you. Times when we were broken down, times when we felt anything but beautiful, but we both believe that in this breaking. In those cracks is where the light shines through your light, your unique light, shining brighter and more true. And that to us is more beautiful than almost anything in this world.

The beauty of the human experience. Cesar and I have very different backgrounds and upbringings, very different, and we will dig into a lot of those stories here. Cesar is calm, diplomatic, very peaceful, and a deep thinker. He moves slowly and is quite patient. Most of these are things he learned how to be, by the way, self taught.

I, on the other hand, am moving a mile a minute. I always have 17 tabs open in my head and I'm spewing ideas and thoughts like a volcano. I like to be around people all the time and get a lot of things accomplished, which is cool. And also a lot. So we make a pretty great team in that way. And we're both really working on growing into the other side of all of our natural traits, because we really believe in growth and expanding both as individuals and together.

And I'll be the first to admit there's a lot of benefit to just moving a little slower. Cesar is a musician and a public speaker, and he speaks on unity and growth mindset to kids and adults. I have had a long career in entertainment as an independent filmmaker, and now I work as a postpartum doula, and my creative expression at this moment is poetry.

Cesar and I discovered early on that each of us is quite comfortable being vulnerable and open about everything in our lives. Our stories and our feelings and the messiness of our minds, what we're working on internally and why we feel triggered about something in that very moment. And we're not just open with each other.

We feel fine sharing these things with pretty much anyone. So we'll do that here. We promise to be real with you and open and true. And we hope that you will connect with us in the same way. Reach out to us, share your vulnerable truth. Our hope for this podcast is to break open with you and to give you peace that you are not alone in this world.

We are all connected, breaking and blooming together. Thank you for being here and welcome to beauty in the break. 

And now that we're here…

I'm really excited, I'm super nervous. 

Are you nervous? 

I am nervous. Yeah. Yeah. I'm more excited than I am nervous. I'm also really good at not showing nerves. 

You are really good at hiding that from me. 

Everybody else. I tell them I'm nervous. I heard it from you now. I've just been really good at not showing nerves in particular, but I feel it. I definitely feel the nerves. I have all these thoughts in my head of like, what if I can't be helpful to somebody? What if I sound dumb?

What if what I say is wrong? What if we put all this time in and, uh, And then, and then it doesn't, you know, resonate with people. There's all of that stuff. 

We had those fears too, a month ago when we really started talking seriously about the show, we had those fears. And then I remember saying to you.

Okay, but what do we do with that? And you're like, Oh, we do the show anyway. Of course. Clearly, because no part of me didn't want to do it. I mean, we just run into that. 

My favorite, one of my favorite things is when people quote me to me and I go, I said that, that sounds like I would say that, but I said that, that doesn't make sense.

You do it anyway. 

You do it anyway. 

You do it anyway. That’s, like, the archetypal leap of faith in the world. 

Right, but how? Because that's, that's easier said than done. Oh yeah, just do it anyway. How do you, how do you know, how do we know we were ready to do something this scary for us, like, in our own personal creative world?

Yeah, I mean do we ever know we're ready for anything. Do people ever know that they're ready to be put on stage or to start their first job or? 

Have a kid. How do you know when you're ready to have a kid?

and does that infant stand and say you know what? Time for me to walk. 

Yeah, 

No, they get up and they go ‘Oh, these things are actually they're stronger than I thought’ and you take one wobbly step and the next thing, you know. You know, you're Usain Bolt and you're running.

Marathon. You're running, the Olympics. 

He was an infant when he did that, wasn't he? He was an infant

That’s right. Yeah. Usain, um, what's that? I couldn't think of anything quick enough. Not Bolt. What's that? Usain Spark. 

The little baby, golden baby shoes. 

But they were still puma shoes.

They were still in there. He still had a deal already when he was born.

The leap of faith is that like, we think about how many movies you've seen where the person is running from a group of bad guys and there's one of them, but there's like 30 bad guys chasing him and they get to a point where there's a peak, an edge, a cliff overlooking a mountain, overlooking traffic, overlooking whatever it is and they stop and the first thing they do is they turn back. And look at all the people chasing them because there's a realization of if I stay here, I know what's going to happen I'm stagnant and over time I'm Whatever's coming for me Whatever is working against me will catch me because i've been still in a world of nature where everything changes and moves forward. So you have to participate and the person turns back and then they jump.

All right.

Okay. So can we talk about that moment right there where they stop and they turn back? That's the moment of fear I mean, I like Sweaty palms right here sweaty palms. My armpits are sweaty. I'm You My stomach is churning. I'm like, but I'm not a nervous person, but this feels Doing something new, brand new, this is a new beginning, like it feels so, like so much in your body.

What do you do with that? I mean, look, we want to run away from that, right? I do. I don't want to feel this way. 

I don't want to go to there. I'm sure there's some like sage advice that if someone's listening into is waiting for it to be said, but you don't do anything. Those are signals that you're alive.

Yeah.

That you're sitting in this position and you have the choice to make the step of whatever it is. It can be something as simple as an emotional thing, like you and I have taken on this project Beauty in the Break to do a multitude of physical things in the world, to have people hear this audibly to be seen online, to share thoughts and comments.

These are all physical things, but there's something as simple as someone just admitting to themselves I was wrong. Like that is, in my opinion, a bigger leap than what we're doing here. Um, so when you have those feelings, that's, those are body signals letting you know, oh, you're getting close to the edge, the circle of what you can comprehend, right?

Your circle of comp of competence for, for lack of a better term. And it's not like you leap off of that edge, and you fall into, you know, a continuous void. You land somewhere. And what you learn there, if I'm going to follow the metaphor of jumping into the ocean, you swim. And now that circle actually, The ledge where you jumped off of is now expanded to fit for where you need to go.

Yeah 

That's how it feels for me and I remind myself of those little things. 

There's yeah, there's like There's first of all, there's your physical body I mean, it's amazing that even though we're not standing on a ledge as human beings the Doing something new that's starting the new job the going on a date with somebody for the first time the getting married They're about to have any of those big things or just a just a small pivot in a different direction It's brand new and it starts In the body, like we literally physically feel ill.

I swear to you this morning, I thought I was going to throw up all morning. I mean, last night in the middle of the night, I woke up with a migraine. My whole body was like, don't do this really scary thing tomorrow. And I had a migraine and. And you know, if anybody gets migraines, it's like you want to shut down completely.

Um, but that's not typical for me. And that's, that makes my whole body go on alert and look around for something dangerous. Right. That's my body. And then there's my mind that's going, you're not. You're not good at improv. You need a script. Please don't try, don't try to just improvise things. You failed that class. I did. I really failed it.

You failed improv?

I was terrible. I dropped out 

It's so hard to fathom considering you and I “yes, and…” each other so much 

I maybe got better at yes and-ing but I was not good at getting up on stage without a script Um, but you said to me one time. I don't even know what we were I was about to go do, but I said, I'm so nervous.

And maybe it was one of the first times I ever expressed to you how nervous I was about something I was going to do. And you said, good, you should be nervous. That means you're doing something right. If, if it's new and you're not nervous, that's when I would be worried. 

I said that. 

Yes, you did. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. Once again, it sounds like something I would say, 

But do you feel like that?

Yeah, every day, every day of my life, every day of my life. First thing, first thing, first, what I want to do in my life is lay on the couch and watch documentaries and just like experience the war from the laying position.

You do that too. 

And I, and I do that at the end of the day, but my initial wanting to do it is so I don't have to participate out in the world, but I realized what that gets me. And I realize who in my mind is telling me that thing to just lay down and don't do anything don't participate It's the scared voice, you know You and I have we've taken on this podcast show and in doing that It's our turn to Face our own fear of rejection If no one likes it of embarrassment, if we say something wrong or incorrect of being called out by the other partner in front of people, I'm probably not making it better for you right now.

You're like, Oh, I didn't even think of that one 

Vomit. 

And I feel all those things, but I realize two things. One, the leap of faith happens. You do the thing and then you. Um, you either win or you learn either way that's expanding you and then you redo that again. You share what you, what you've got from that.

And then the cycle continues because it's always going to be a new leap to make. But once you get about five to 10 leaps, you realize, you know what, I've been pretty good so far at this stuff. What have I learned? And I'm still here. 

Yeah. 

Let me, let me find out. If I take the leap knowing the water is going to be cold when I land knowing it's going to be ice cold in there, but dipping into it little by little is not gonna work.

It's a trust… trust is a muscle.

So to get to this place where we can take on something like this together and not run from that fear there has to be experiences of trust in our past of doing these You Difficult, what did you call it? Circle of competency, working on that growth edge. We've, we've done it before and it's not this thing, but we've done these things before enough to know I can do that.

I've given myself that trust. I've built that muscle up enough, but now this is going in another direction. It's, it was, it was peaceful when you told me. That I should be nervous because I am ultimately after growth, I am here to expand in the world and knowing that, putting that piece together, putting together the piece of if you're doing something new and different, you should feel nervous.

That is the natural thing. Then I could go, okay, then I'm just going to live with these emotions. I'm going to sit in these emotions and know ultimately I'm on the right path. 

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I did that. That is a thing that you can reiterate. Like you said that it's a muscle itself to work out over and over again.

There is a study they did in UCLA. With these animals that they were exposing them to a sound and then a mild shock To test I know I know um but they do these studies to understand more of like human behavior chemistry chemicals a lot of times they do for mice is because mice and us have a similar brain to body mass ratio.

So it's for - to learn about one is to learn about the other and at some point those mice were or those animals were responding to just the noise without the shock right? Because they associated it, right? Pavlov's dog, so on and so forth. Over time, when they kept doing that without the shock, the quicker they gave them that sound, the quicker they got over the fear.

They didn't get away from the fear. They overrode the fear. Um, but if they prolonged it, like gave them the sound and then waited two minutes and then sound again, it took them longer to get through it. So, and, and the, the goal of that, like, like short burst of fear is called massing. And, to, and, and I'm saying that to say that there's a metaphor of massing.

Again, the water. Right. You everybody's put their toe in a pool and they're like, oh my God, that's freezing cold. And everyone says, just jump all the way in. 

Just get in. Yeah. They just get in. They don't say just tiptoe into it. 'cause you're prolonging it. The massing is you leaping into the pool.

That's a leap of faith, 

A leap of faith, a literal leap of faith. 

Have you ever taken a giant leap of faith? What was the biggest one you've taken in your life? 

The biggest one for me. There's a ton of them. The one that comes up for me the most often I think about is when I moved here to Los Angeles 10 years ago, August 12th, 2014.

For a while, that was the code on my phone. Open my phone up like that date just mattered so much. Cause August never lets me down. And I was 24. I was about to turn 25. I knew I didn't want to stay in Jacksonville, Florida. I knew as much as I love New York, I didn't want to go there because I had family there. 

And both of those places, I had relics of just not great memories. Memories that were tied to another memory. All these, again, relics of pain that I had. And, um, I needed to go somewhere else. I never even thought to go to New York. Los Angeles,  it wasn't even a thought in my head. I had never been here before.

I didn't know anybody here. I knew nothing about Los Angeles. At the time, if someone said, uh, I live in Hollywood, not Los Angeles, I would go, okay, makes sense. Totally. Cause I didn't know they were the same thing. I knew nothing about the place. And it was like way down the line for, on the list of places to go.

Anyway, I woke up one morning and there was this thought right in my head. You have to move to Los Angeles. 

A voice in your head 

Voice complete like you got to do it And at this time I wasn't a spiritual person. I was a complete materialistic reductionist atheist So for me to listen to that is an interesting note. Different time different conversation. And I said, okay fine.

I'll do that. I I had a house that I owned for a couple years for about four years at the time I rented it out Um the woman i was seeing at the time i was staying with her And I packed up my car You Luckily enough the 10 is in Jacksonville as is in Los Angeles And I'd never driven by myself more than three hours in my life Again, I didn't know Anybody here and never been here before I didn't even necessarily know how to get here I just had the GPS and just typed in Los Angeles.

The whole city?

The whole city and when I got here took me to Koreatown. It took me to Brentwood for a little bit and it took me around as a tour because it was like we don't know where you want to go?

Just kidding. So, I get in the car, 6am, I think it was a Friday, I forget, and I drove through. Now, side note, there's a story in there of, speaking of fear, where I was running out of gas in West Texas at like 11 o'clock at night. West Texas, if anybody's been there before, there's nothing there in West Texas.

It's empty, and it's dark, and I'm fearful of my life, because if I broke down, who knows who's out there. Coyotes. Wolves. Um, you know, the dude with the weird haircut from the Coen Brothers movie. What's the movie called? No Country for Old Men. Could be out there. That dude. There's a beautiful note that happened in there.

I pulled over to the side of the road. And I finally found a gas station. I pulled up there. The guy looks at me and he says, You. Look. Exhausted and I told him I've been driving since 6 a. m. And I was really tired. I said to him, I am tired. Yeah, is there a place that I can sleep, a rest stop coming up soon? And he says no, there's nothing anymore.

This is West, Texas young man Again, I'm 24. I'm in this 2010 Hyundai Santa Fe. It's 2014 and he says Do you see out in the parking lot here that white truck under that streetlight? That's my truck. I'm here till noon tomorrow. Park next to my car. You sleep all you want. I'll watch after you.

That's an angel really. 

That's an angel. 

Yeah. 

And in the story of life, you always find your allies. That man, and again, I'm branching off here, but that man knew he would never see me again. And all he had to give me was generosity of spirit. 

He's one of the pillars of you being able to do what, what you did.

Yeah. Going into that tract, beginning that tract, how did you know you could do it? How did you, how did you get over the hump of, I'm gonna move somewhere where I know no one, I don't have a place to live. I'm just gonna go. What was the Pivoting point there?

Yeah, you know I will say a good percentage of it is also naivete. Not realizing like what it's like here I got here and I realized oh, this is why most people don't just move somewhere. There's so much to get used to you know, and so but that means that the fear didn't end when I got to LA It just it found another way to iterate itself. But what got me through that fear was, truthfully, it's the motivation of where I am right now is not where I want to be.

If it was, I wouldn't have the thought to want to go somewhere else. 

So you, so you had that angel on your side, you made it through the night. You get to LA, what is your first day there like? 

Yeah, yeah. So I got there at night in Koreatown. And the first day, I looked at places online for rent apartments on Craigslist.

I was in Koreatown, and I saw one that was in North Hollywood. I go to North Hollywood, I drive through North Hollywood. I'm like, you know, it kind of seems kind of cool here. I dig it. It felt like a movie, like, I don't know how to explain it, but it felt like a movie. And I walked into the apartment, I looked around, and I said, okay, I'll let you know in like a day or so.

Not realizing LA is so quick moving. I get to my car, and he messaged me. I gave it away to somebody else. And I realized right then and there, all right, got to move quick, got to move really quick. Fast forward to me sleeping in my car in North Hollywood multiple times. 

I went to bars a lot and met people. I met women. They were like, you can stay with me if you want. I'm like, okay, I appreciate that and I found ways to repay them. I find that over time there's more generosity of spirit of people helping out saying this is where you want to be. This is where you want to go, but my fear consistently was with me the whole time.

It never left. I think at some point I just packed fear along with me and went anyway. 

Yeah. 

And I feel that if I can make that happen for myself every day in life, then I can get done every single thing I want to do because all the micro fears in the world, there’s way more of those and there's one big large fear of driving across the country. We've got a million decisions to make it every single one of those are packed with micro fears. So that fear now is not necessarily the person stopping me in the car I let them talk and say what are you saying you want here?

And they sit in the back seat and they open up the map and their fear lets me know where the speed traps are. And where the where the dangers in the roads are because that fear can be used. It's also just letting go of control at some capacity. Also, that's a huge thing for me too. Sometimes i'm a Buddhist, so there's a lot of letting go You don't throw it away you don't squeeze it you just allow it to be and then of course over time whatever's in your hand will be moved It will change and that's okay because you're not holding on to it to stay the same The letting go is a huge thing 

It's so interesting all of your like fear that was in you. With the idea, with the moving, with getting here was still fear that you're still here and yet I know you LA is a part of you.

You got here and particularly in the Valley and you're just like, this is me. Like it embodies you in a way. It makes me wonder if you were just pulled here sort of magnetically and to be pulled here, like, Oh, this is my course that like, this is the right course for me. And still have the fear to know 10 years later, this was the perfect choice for me.

And I still had that fear. What does it tell us about fear itself? Because fear is. We want to run away from it, but it's, it's linked right in there in the suitcase, coming with you. Constantly. Constantly. If you try to spend all your time getting rid of fear, you're going to exhaust yourself before you can even take a step out that front door.

You just pack it with you and you listen to it and you have to decipher it. It's just a cabinet member in the presidency of your life. It isn't the president. You are the president. Your awareness, your consciousness is the president of it. That's, that's how you, you go forward there. And then me getting here, and still 10 years later, I'm like, this is the best place I ever chose to live in.

I'm proud of myself for being here as a self made, Black, self employed, business owner, public speaker, Buddhist, peaceful, clear, calm, generous, happy man. All of the things that happened in this time were rewards for me. foregoing and working through my fear for making that leap. 

It just so happened. I leaped off, fell into the ocean, learned to swim.

And then the Island I ended up swimming to happen to be a paradise because just behind what you're worried for, what you're scared of is the best version of yourself. 

And then, and then it appears again, you get all those rewards and that next thing, the next edge has fear. living in it as well.

And you just have to keep moving through it. Before fear, I feel like Is this idea of uncertainty or discomfort? It's really, really hard for us as human beings to sit with uncertainty, lack of clarity, discomfort. Um, when I work with clients, postpartum clients, birthing clients, they're going into labor, going into this idea of birth, is there's going to be a lot of discomfort.

There's going to be a lot of unknown amount of time where we're, trialing labor contractions and all of that. And one of the exercises we can do to prepare for labor is to sit with an ice cube in the palm of your hand. Not that this is the same feeling, but there's going to be discomfort if you let it sit there for a minute, two minutes, what comes up for you when you are that.

Uncertain and uncomfortable. I promise all those little triggers start to come up, all those feelings bubble up. And then what is soothing to your body? This is still here. This is still happening. It's not going anywhere. We're not throwing the ice cube down. We're holding it there in our hand, gently open.

And we're going to just move through all of those. Uncomfortable feelings. How can our partner support us? How can we soothe ourselves in that time? I think that My experience that comes first that uncertainty and then the fear really can set in after that 

I would agree to that I would totally agree to that It's in doing that that you're transcending the fear I don't know that there's things in the world that you're supposed to really push away I think you're supposed to be made to transcend You In my opinion, um, and then again, like you said, you gave the same hand image that I gave.

We're talking about the same thing, right? The ice cube in the hand. Which, by the way, I want to make a point, giving birth is the ultimate sacrifice, is it not? Because that transition from where you were to where you are is completely different. Every bit of you internally, externally, and all metaphysical stuff completely changed.

I think you said this before that certain clients are trying to get back into their previous body.

Yeah, or or back to their previous self you know society will offer up the idea that You should get back into your previous body. But also just internally we want to get back to ourselves, to the the person we were before having this baby and and I actually think we have to sort of embrace the new self and learn that this time after giving birth is a grieving period.

We have to grieve the loss of that person who was completely independent and had no responsibilities in terms of other human beings. And now you have an entire life. That is sometimes feeding off your body or you are completely responsible for that. That's a loss of who you used to be. 

There is no going back either.

Right. 

There's no revisiting the previous time. 

Yeah, that's hard. That's really hard. It's hard to admit. 

And how do we admit it? How do you let it go? 

We honor it. Who you were, who you, who this new person is, because if we honor, we grieve the person that we were. And this is not just birth. This is every day a year ago, I was a person who did this, and I no longer do this, right?

I'm a sober person now, right? I don't, I don't partake in alcohol anymore. Okay. So I can also grieve the loss of what I used to, who I used to be. We honor the new self and the old self by grieving. And then there opens up an opportunity for excitement about, okay, well, what's, what's to come with this new sense of self that I'm going to try to let go of things every day because there's something new out here.

Yeah, as someone told me once, there were a psychologist told me once that, no matter what the change is, your brain still sees it as stress because it's not the thing you were holding on to. There's letting go again that you got to release the control. And I think in this show, for example, we have to in doing this episode here, episode one, we have no clue.

What comes up for the next episode. We hit record on this one and we had no idea where it was going to go. There's a letting go that we have to have a understanding of Less control than we want to have and also there's just less control than we think we have to begin with 

Do you think there's a time when that leap of faith is too big? When you're the character and you stop and you turn around and look at the people chasing you and you look at the over at the rooftop and you’re like, I'm not gonna make that if I jump?

That's a very fun one to think about I don't know the answer to this of course I would think that if the thought is i'm not gonna make this leap that might be the most truest statement If you say I will i'm gonna make this leap that is probably when you fall because that's ego.

Yeah. 

It’s the faith part. It's the leap part  The faith is a participation with what you have in the unknown of the future. If you just know something that's not a leap of faith. You're still in your circle There's a letting go of control there's the again the releasing of that 

I think maybe we have to take a, maybe there's a babier step we could take if that leap is too giant.

Can we take the, the small, is there another ledge, like a side ledge we could go off of? Because that one is just too damn scary, you know, 

There's nothing wrong with pivoting. 

That's for sure. 

We can pivot.

There's nothing wrong with pivoting. Do you have something like that? What's your version of that? 

I If I think about really leaping into the unknown, which my whole life, I was trying to avoid that. I was really trying to avoid the unknown.

And of course, if that's my, that's my method, the universe, whatever is going to show up in all kinds of ways to help me break out of that. So I think that when I. When I left my marriage, uh, I have been together for 17 years with this person. Like that leap was the most terrifying for me. I w I was, you know, I had gone from living at home to college, living with roommates and then moving in together with my partner at the time and had been Just going, you know, we had two small children at home.

It was the middle of the pandemic. And a lot of things began to surface for me that I was just not in my true self. I was not in the right place. And I had started to consider this, that this was not the right marriage for me. And that is a terrifying thought. It was just a terrifying thought. And I was.

All alone in this, because I did not feel like I could share this with anyone. And when it's just you and your mind, there was no way I was going to make any leap, just me and my mind. I didn't have the strength to do that. I didn't feel my mind said over and over again, stay, stay right here. This was safe.

This was familiar. This was what I wanted. Of course, wasn't that what I wanted? I wanted to marry this person. I wanted a family. I wanted this life here in LA. I felt like I chose all of this. So why was I not happy? There's a safety in being happy. Being, staying where I already was. I remember so vividly that time where I was in inner turmoil and I felt so alone in the thoughts about it.

It felt like it was me and my mind. And in that being alone, um, I, I didn't feel like I had anything to stand on. I didn't feel like I could make this leap on my own. My mind said, stay. My body said leave. And that had never happened to me before. I don't think my body ever spoke to me so clearly. If my body says that I have to listen to it, right?

It was the first tactile piece of information I had that was like, I can't deny that this is my truth. This is living in my body. I want to run away. I want to be out. And. That was a really big moment for me to listen to my body. I imagine it was giving me more subtle cues all along the way, but I was not in the habit of listening to it.

So once I decided that I was not going to deny my body that anymore, I needed like a support system I needed. People to, to almost give me just a little sliver of permission to do what was going to be, you know, complete. Change up of my entire family, I, one friend who had been through divorce and I confided in her where I was, what I was, was on my mind, what was going on for me.

And she gave me one of those pillars. I went back to my therapist. I started telling her what was going on for me, and she gave me another, and I still felt. Like, that's not enough. Like, I don't know where I'm going to land. And then there was a turning point where I decided to confide in my dad. And when my dad said, if this is what you want, I've got you a hundred percent.

And I could just cry now thinking about it. I just, that, that was the release I needed. That was the last little bit of strength that I needed to make this choice and move forward. Once I did and I moved out and was on my own, this was the first time I'd ever lived alone in my entire life. I was 37 years old.

If that's not terrifying. I don't know what it is. And I remember going for a short walk to go have coffee with a friend who hadn't seen me in like a year and he, you know, I expected to tell him all these, you know, things have been going on. And I looked at him and he just goes, you look so light.

You've seemed so light in your energy. Congratulations. And that sense of lightness and freedom. that I felt like honoring my body and honoring what was true and what was my truth that was so clearly going to upset so many people. And it did. It was very upsetting to many people, but I had to be selfish in that way, which I had never done before.

I'm wondering if you, first of all, you said yourself, you had to override your mind by way of your body. Do you feel like your, you were, you feel like your body, not forced is not the right word, but your body said, Hey, I'm taking over. Or was it more like, oh, my body's just speaking loud enough, I should really listen to it?

Having never listened to my body before, I lived with disordered eating almost my whole life, so I don't listen to my body very much. I think it almost took over me. But, now that I have been through an experience that took me that far, I listen to my body's more subtle cues earlier now. Because I know where it took me.

It took me to a really, really good place for me. And so that's the trust muscle. 

That's your gift shop moment, for lack of a better term. Like, you go through this terminal of, terminal of like, Oh my God, this, or this city or this town of body feeling, right? And then before you go on and keep your journey, you take something with you.

So now you can always know, Oh, this is from there. This is from there. And someone like me, a very cerebral person, it took me 30 something years for me to realize that I could feel anything in my body and I'm still kind of trying to work that out.

So when you felt that feeling, where did you feel it in your body?

I felt it in my neck, my throat and my chest and I felt it in it was a whole body feeling of just be outside, get outside, move in physical space, be in another room. It was was almost a compulsion. 

Well, like I was being pulled almost like being pulled away from Jacksonville to LA.

Right. That just kind of from the center tug. And I knew that to resist that feeling was to feel really, really bad. I just felt really sick to my stomach. It was just, it was a whole body feeling. It was impossible to ignore anymore. I hadn't ignored it long enough. 

Yeah, it sounds to me like that for me from my perspective listening to it sounds to me that you Saw that leap of faith and said it's a little too much intellectually.

Yeah cerebrally, but then your body was like legs Let's go. Yeah Or let's go girls. Like, you know what? I mean? We just took the leap, you know and it actually did it for you. It actually pushed you through that You I'm just getting more and more familiar with body stuff. I previous relationship Was supposed to be for a long time and it didn't last for a long time And for like Three or four months after the breakup I would have any sort of thought that said Cesar you're going to be alone for the rest of your life or any thought that implied that I would feel this electric shock right in the The right corner of the bottom of my throat, you know, your two collarbones meet. Right there was like a little electric shock.

It was like a zap I'd never experienced that before. It was so repetitive. It just kept happening over and over again. You are so much attuned with what's going on in your body. Whenever I'm feeling something, you ask me where it is in my body. The first part of me is like, why did she ask me what's going on in my body?? Why is she asking what's going on in my body? She's right. She's right. I should check and see where this is. 

You know, that's a good sign of what needs to happen here. If we're going to follow the metaphor and say, you got to leap, you got to use the body to do the leap. You know you got to jump. And I think both for both of us in those respective leaps, yours and mine, you know, I look back on that time multiple times a week, because.

I knew where I was, I knew what it took to get me through and I knew where I ended up on the other side. And that is my trust muscle. That's my reference point. So when I get to the next leap, I look back at that and I draw my courage from there. Like, okay, well, it got me there. Here we go. 

That's the exact note because you've, you've kind of built up examples of times from the past to look forward to the future.

Yeah. You and I are. Very much doing all this work of leap of faith of doing this show and then we've done this first episode and that was the leap itself. 

And now we have the chance to lean towards the forward a little bit more now. Some of these things are done, some of the things that we worried about like the first response of a first episode first recording and being bad at improv.  

Being apparently being deceptively bad at improv now we can look towards the future now because we have a little bit of proof of, oh this can be done! And that comes from us seeing leap and leaping anyway. 

Well, I'm curious about our audience. What is your biggest leap of faith? That you've either taken or that maybe you think you're gonna take And what's that ledge right now where when you're up against something and you're wondering whether you're gonna leap or not people can email us he can send a voice memo to our email address, which we like because that's voice.

We are voice memo people. 

We could tally our voice memos of the last year plus. It would probably be epically long. Yeah, it's like a double album, like Tupac's double disc of All Eyes on Me. 

So our email address is beautyinthebreakpod@gmail.com. Your leap of faith. 

What breeze do you feel across your face as you look over the ocean that you want to leap into?

Um, you can sum it into a phrase, a sentence, an imagery, a metaphor. Poem if you want whatever text it or send a voice message. We have a good habit of always, asking each other word of the day.

Yeah of word of the week Depending on what's going on. 

We've been doing that for a long time. 

That was one of my favorite things that we started I think. We've decided to bring it into this show for that reason as well.

Yeah. Do you know I wrote down every single word? That you ever said, what I ever said?

Are you serious? 

What? Where's this list?

On my phone. 

Oh my goodness. Are you serious?

I have every word we've ever shared with each other. 

I mean, that can be a whole episode on its own, dissecting what these phrases mean for us.

Probably mine was calm, like maybe 10 times. I'm like, I'm gonna stick with calm again today. 

What's your word of the week this week? 

The word of the week for me is calm. Kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. My word of the week is understand.

Everybody knows something. Everybody knows this thing. I'm less interested in what you know. I'm more interested in what you understand. I'm trying to get to the basic fundamentals of anything I'm picking up. What's being said here? What am I reading here? What information is coming across to me? I want you to understand it.

I could also give you a whole disquisition on the etymology of the word understand because it's really cool, actually, but I'll save you the boredom. Uh, what's your word of the week? 

My word of the week is freedom. And I think what I'm most curious about is seeing where I already have freedom. Not focused on where I don't and need more of, but where do I already have so much freedom and potentially being grateful for that or what?

I don't know. I just want to lean into that because it's been such a core part of how I've gotten to be where I am today. So yeah, if you want to share a word of the week, you can email that to us as well. I like these words. It's just something to kind of. Think about in the back of our minds right as we go about our day. 

Words are the candlelight to the cave of our psyche.

Joseph campbell?

No, Cesar Cardona, actually. I said it once in passing to Rebecca Armstrong and she goes. “Oh…you gotta write that one down!”

He quoted himself right here.

Technically I’m always quoting myself. Right now I’m quoting myself. Even in this moment i'm quoting myself.

True. All right. That's all for this week.

Thank you so much for listening to the first ever episode of Beauty in the Break. Have a wonderful week. 

Take care, be kind to yourself.

If this episode spoke to you, take a moment and send it to someone else who might need it. That's the best way to spread these conversations to the people who need them the most. And if you want to keep exploring with us, make sure to follow Beauty in the Break wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time.

Beauty and the Break is created and hosted by Foster Wilson and Cesar Cardona. Our executive producer is Glenn Milley. Original music by Cesar + The Clew.