Surpassing Labels

Become the woman who already has what you want.

Think like her.
Decide like her.
Be her.

And the results will follow.

Most of us have heard some version of this. But what happens when an approach that works for some people gets handed to everyone as the way change happens?

And who is this future version of ourselves we’re being asked to become, anyway?

In this episode, I’m exploring the idea of embodying a future self and why the certainty attached to it stopped me in my tracks.

I also share a piece of my own story. For a couple of years, I worked hard to become the coach I thought I was supposed to be. I built everything I believed she would have. Eventually I realized I’d been imagining her through so many other people’s eyes, and I’d never really looked through my own.

What changed wasn’t that I stopped wanting things.

I started listening differently.

And that opened a direction I couldn’t have imagined at the start, one that became The Spiral Current.

This isn’t about dismissing future-self practices or offering a new formula in their place. It’s an invitation to get curious about the pictures we carry, whose voices shaped them, and the person who’s already here, living the experience.

Because maybe we don’t have to become someone else to begin moving toward something different.

Maybe we can begin right where we are.

Explore The Spiral Current
Website: https://spiralcurrent.com
Read and reflect on Substack: https://thespiralcurrent.substack.com

Music Credit
Intro and outro music composed and produced by Hudson Sheline.

Have you ever walked away from a conversation wondering whether you heard what someone actually said or what you were already expecting to hear?

Sometimes the smallest comment can land in completely different ways, depending on the day, the person, or what we’re carrying into the moment.

And most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re bringing anything.

In this episode of Surpassing Labels, Felicia explores the space between what someone says and what we hear. From the assumptions we make about others to the answers we sometimes hope to hear from ourselves, she follows a question that opens into something much bigger:

Are we listening to discover something, or to confirm what we already think?

A conversation about expectations, interpretation, capacity, and the experiences we carry with us into every interaction.

Because we’re never really listening from nowhere.
We’re always listening from somewhere.

And sometimes, recognizing that leaves a little more room for something unexpected.

✨ Continue the Conversation

The Spiral Current
Life in Relationship. Experience in Motion.™
Explore the writing, podcast, and experiences that make up The Spiral Current.
https://spiralcurrent.com

The Spiral Current on Substack
Essays, reflections, and ongoing explorations of the human experience.
Read and subscribe on Substack: https://thespiralcurrent.substack.com

🎶 Intro and outro music composed and produced by Hudson Sheline.

Surpassing Labels is brought to you by The Spiral Current.
How we meet life shapes how we experience it.

How much of what we think we know about ourselves have we ever actually questioned?

In this episode, Felicia explores curiosity not simply as something we use to find answers, but as a way of meeting ourselves and our experiences.

What changes when we approach what happens in our lives as information instead of evidence? When “I don’t know” doesn’t mean we’re behind, disconnected, or failing but simply becomes something else we can notice?

From the stories we carry about who we are to the questions we ask when we’ve already decided what the answer should be, this episode explores what becomes possible when we leave a little room for something we didn’t already know.

Because maybe a good question doesn’t always need to give us an answer.

Maybe it just needs to leave enough room for something else to show up.

Continue the conversation

The Spiral Current: SpiralCurrent.com

Substack: The Spiral Current on Substack

Surpassing Labels is a podcast from The Spiral Current.

Intro/outro music composed & produced by Hudson Sheline.

How much of what you believe about yourself is based on who you are now and how much is old information?

In this episode, Felicia explores what it means to be in an ongoing relationship with yourself when you’re continually changing.

From the way we respond to money and uncertainty to the identities and expectations we carry forward, sometimes we keep meeting ourselves through an understanding that no longer quite fits.

Maybe knowing yourself isn’t about finally getting the description right.

Maybe it’s about staying in contact with yourself long enough to notice what has changed, what hasn’t, and who is actually here now.

Old Information is an exploration of self-relationship, self-leadership, and what becomes possible when we stop assuming we already know who we’re going to find.

Continue the conversation

The Spiral Current: spiralcurrent.com

Substack: The Spiral Current on Substack

Surpassing Labels is a podcast from The Spiral Current.

Intro and outro music created and produced by Hudson Sheline.

We know our experiences shape us.

But when does what has shaped us start becoming the edge of who we think we are?

Sometimes it happens through the obvious labels we carry.

Other times, it's hidden inside the smallest things we say about ourselves:

I'm not good at that.
I've always been this way.
I'm the one everyone depends on.
That's just who I am.

In this episode of Surpassing Labels, Felicia explores the quiet ways our experiences become conclusions about who we are and how even identities we're proud of can become restrictive when they no longer leave room for us to move.

This isn't about getting rid of labels or questioning everything you know about yourself.

It's simply an invitation to notice:

Does this description still have room to move?

Because the shape something leaves behind doesn't have to become the container we spend the rest of our lives living inside.

Explore more from The Spiral Current:
spiralcurrent.com

Surpassing Labels is brought to you by The Spiral Current.

• Original music created and produced by Hudson Sheline.

When does something we experience become something we use to define who we are?

A role.
A pattern.
Something someone said about us.
A version of ourselves that made sense once.

In this episode of Surpassing Labels, Felicia explores the subtle distance between recognizing something about ourselves and turning that recognition into an identity.

Through her own experience as a stay-at-home mom, caregiver, and former microbiologist, she considers how easily one part of our story can begin to explain the whole person and what becomes possible when we allow what has shaped us to matter without requiring it to contain us.

Maybe knowing ourselves isn't something we finish.

Maybe it's a relationship we keep having.

Explore more from The Spiral Current:
spiralcurrent.com

Surpassing Labels is brought to you by The Spiral Current.

• Original music created and produced by Hudson Sheline.

How much should you be able to handle?

We often treat our capacity like a measurement of who we are.

If something was easy yesterday, why is it difficult today?

If we handled something before, shouldn't we be able to handle it again?

But life doesn't meet us under identical conditions.

In this episode of Surpassing Labels, Felicia explores the difference between what we're capable of and what we actually have available to us right now—and why those may not be the same thing.

What we're carrying, what we've experienced, where our attention is, and even the things that bring us joy can change what's accessible to us from one moment to the next.

Sometimes something that requires energy can even leave us with more available than we had before.

So instead of asking:

Why can't I handle this?

Maybe there's another question worth noticing:

What do I have available right now?

Not as a judgment.
Not as something to fix.

Just as information about where we're standing.

Because right now doesn't have to mean tomorrow.

Read and explore more from The Spiral Current on Substack:
The Spiral Current on Substack

Surpassing Labels is brought to you by The Spiral Current.

** Original music created and produced by Hudson Sheline.

Why can essentially the same experience feel completely different from one day to the next?

In this episode of Surpassing Labels, I return to a season of hospital rooms, uncertainty, and waiting, and notice something I couldn't see clearly while I was living it: I wasn't arriving at each day empty-handed.

None of us are..

We bring yesterday.

Exhaustion.

Fear.

Hope.

Love.

Old conversations.

Expectations.

The things that haven't had anywhere else to go.

And sometimes, understanding our experience begins not with trying to change what's happening, but becoming curious about what arrived there with us.

What are you bringing into this moment before it even begins?

Read the companion writings on Substack:
https://thespiralcurrent.substack.com

https://www.spiralcurrent.com

🎵 Original music composed & produced by Hudson Sheline.

Nothing around her had changed.

The dishes still needed to be done.

The emails were still waiting.

The responsibilities hadn't disappeared.

And yet... something felt different.

In this episode, we explore the quiet truth that our experience of life isn't shaped only by what's happening around us, but by the relationship we're in with the moment we're living.

Sometimes the smallest shift isn't in our circumstances—it's in the state from which we're meeting them.

Read the companion writings on Substack:
https://thespiralcurrent.substack.com

https://www.spiralcurrent.com

🎵 Original music composed & produced by Hudson Sheline.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that being emotionally strong meant pushing our feelings aside.

We smiled through the hurt.

We stayed composed.

We kept moving.

And after enough time, that automatic push became so familiar we stopped noticing we were doing it at all.

But what if your emotions were never the problem?

What if they weren't something to overcome, suppress, or fix—but signals pointing toward something honest beneath the surface?

In this episode, we explore what begins to change when we stop treating our emotions as obstacles and start listening to them as information.

Not to be ruled by them.

Not to react to every feeling.

But to reconnect with the relationship we have with ourselves—and the quiet truth our emotions may have been trying to reveal all along.

🌀 The Spiral Current
https://spiralcurrent.com

✍️ Substack
https://thespiralcurrent.substack.com

** Intro and outro music composed and produced by Hudson Sheline.