Laurken (00:02.2)
Hello, welcome to the MoFo podcast. It's I, Larkin Kendall, your host for the time being and your partner in Creative Anarchy. And just, I'm generally gonna encourage you to foment insurrection in your own life. In the MoFo school currently, we are going through the first live class of the year. And it's called The Shift and it's basically like a kick in the ass.
to start your 12 month calendar. In the dark part of the calendar, the mid winter here, we are uncovering old stories about ourselves, rewriting them, being honest about the cycles that we engage in that are super harmful, how we get in our own way, how we view limitations. We've gone through and added new habits into our lives, like neutral time, which is something I'm extremely addicted to. And I do it multiple times a day. It's essentially...
a time when you do not input and you do not output. So you do not wear headphones. You are not listening to anything at all. You're not listening to Netflix. You don't have music playing in the background. You're not engaging in conversation. You're not researching. You're not writing. You're not creating in terms of like sitting down and writing out a course or really anything that you have to actively focus and engage your brain. You're literally you're letting your body go into autopilot. So what I like to do during neutral time is I like to
organize, clean, go for a walk. My car rides are neutral time. They are done in silence, which I really enjoy now. There's so many ways that you can spend neutral time. If you are, it's a great way to have it stacked too in so far as you can clean your house and also get your neutral time. And the point of neutral time is to hear your own genius, to access your own thoughts.
We live in this world where we constantly have to be stimulated. It's such a bizarre thing where you can't even spend time with yourself. And what you're missing are so many ideas, so many downloads that are going to next level you in your life, improve your life, bring more freedom to your life, enrich your life, help you expand yourself and step more into your individuality and into the direction that you're going to be going. If you cannot hear yourself and your genius as it comes to you,
Laurken (02:26.924)
then you're missing out on so many things. So that's what we worked on. And I think a lot of people were really surprised by the benefits that that introduced into their life. That was one of the greatest teachings that was handed down to me was the concept of neutral time. There's actually three parts, three types of time. There's active, passive, and neutral. I'm not gonna get into it, but we're leaning into the neutral time. We also talked about living. We learned how to live in a daytight container, and a daytight container is where you have no past, you have no present for the moment. I mean, sorry, you have no future. You do have a present.
You have very much have a present. That's really all you have. You have no past. We're not thinking, you know, past now. And so far as looking back, we're also not thinking about tomorrow. The future quite literally doesn't exist tomorrow, quite literally doesn't exist. So why are we worrying about all these things we can't control? We're focused on small inch forward motion every single day toward our big juicy goals. And living is fully expressed beings.
and whatever iteration we are going to be for the time being, seeking that iteration of ourselves. So as part of that, we moved into week two, each week is themed and this week is icon week. So we're going all about, you know, how to embody icon energy. And that's not being famous and that's not being beautiful and glamorous and rich, no. It's that aura baby. It's that, as my kid always says, max aura. He's got max aura mom.
And basically that's that thing, that it factor that you can't put your finger on about a person, but you're like, I don't know what it is about you, but you are magnetic as fuck. And by the way, just as a reminder, this podcast is not for the precious, okay? I'm not going to self-censor for you. There are plenty of people out there who will fit the mold of that for you. It's not gonna be me. So just so we know going forward, I love you anyway. I respect your right.
to expose yourself to whatever makes you happy. It doesn't have to be me and I'm okay with that. But speaking of, actually that's a very good segue because as part of last week's work, we're moving into icon week as I said, but last week, I became very inspired through the process to pull the rip cord on several projects that I had been wanting to do and putting off, one of which is the Heretic Mother. One of which is actually this very podcast that you're listening to, but the other is something that's
Laurken (04:53.102)
a project. I look at it as my art project, The Heretic Mother. And it's basically just me having a weekly newsletter at this point. And I also have my first podcast episode being released to accompany that this week. I feel very called to do this, but I have for a number of years and have chosen not to execute on it multiple times. Over the last year, I think that I have posted to my social media three times that I was going to do this.
weekly newsletter and then I never did it. And people would write me and say, Hey, I signed up. Did I miss it? And I'd be like, no, I'm going to get to it. I promise. And then I just wouldn't do it. kept making excuses and I built it up in my mind to be a thing. And you know, when you have something and you let it loom, the looming creates the growth into an even bigger loom. And suddenly you're lost in the shadow of this looming thing that you wanted to do. And at one time was a tiny pebble and is now
in Everest and you don't know how to get from base camp to the top. And most of the time, like really, it's still a pebble. You just have created an experience where it's in Everest. So that's what I did with this heretic mother thing. And so last week I was inspired after going through the process with my students, a process, by the way, that I thought I had already gone through and wasn't going to get anything out of because this whole class is an amalgamation of the greatest teachings that have ever been given to me.
and also things that I've created on my own over time that have helped me really rise from the ashes of a very self-sabotaging version of myself. So that's where the class came from. But I decided about Tuesday, day two, that I was gonna go through and do the process with them. And through that, I just decided that I was gonna pull the rip cord on this heretic mother thing. So I put the newsletter back out there.
I was like, hey, if you want to sign up, I'm going to release the first episode on Sunday. And I did. And on Sunday, I sent out the first, not the first episode, the first edition of the Sunday Heretic Mother Manifesto. And basically it's the same sort of thing. It's just me unfiltered, but the topic, the format is all about talking about my dogma as a mother, my homeschool life, my marriage, sex, all that kind of stuff, just unfiltered living, but long form writing.
Laurken (07:17.102)
And I didn't really analyze the part of it where I hadn't been wanting to fully send it and why that was. So I just decided to pull the rip cord without really thinking too deeply, which is great because I execute it. But imagine my surprise when I logged in about an hour later to see that of my, I think it was 444 subscribers exactly. Of my 444 subscribers, 28 had unsubscribed in the first hour and
Four had reported, I think it was four, reported it as spam. And I knew that those things happened. I knew that that was gonna be part and parcel to this situation. I didn't expect it to be so many and I didn't expect to be a gummy bear about it. I didn't expect to be squishy and feel rejection. And I totally felt rejection for like seven minutes. I was like,
And my brain started to replay these old stories that said, we shouldn't have done this. You can quit right now. You never have to do another one again. Let's crawl back to the safety of how we've been existing and not do this. This is not good. We don't want new. So I ran that story for a little bit and I texted one of my dearest friends and I was like, this is what's going on. And she pulled me back to myself and was like, no, this is a good thing.
this absolutely creates space. have to remember that this creates space for the people who are gonna love what you're doing, who are gonna wanna hear from you. And I was immediately brought back down from floating in delusion and was like, yes, that's absolutely true. And that's part of it. That's when you're living as we're discussing over this week and in the shift, when you're living so fully expressed in your own individuality, you should absolutely expect people to not like it.
They're not going to like you. They're going to unsubscribe. They're going to unfollow. And that's a beautiful thing because you don't want them there anyway. You probably heard that in several places, but you really don't because there's no benefit to you and having people there who don't appreciate what you do, who are never going to buy from you. They're never going to support you. They're never going to get anything out of what you're offering. So other than agitation. So what's the point? You know, like don't let them go. And if they're going to be pissed, let them be pissed. That's their own thing. That's a whole other podcast.
Laurken (09:40.494)
of accepting, you know, dealing with the words of other people, but let them be pissed off. Let them be disappointed in you. Let them. That's the easy route.
Laurken (09:53.966)
But what's so interesting too is I might talk for this morning with mother photographer, yeah, in the mother photographer school to my live class on Mondays, we were gonna talk about how you absolutely have to embrace both sides of the coin. So if you're gonna put yourself out there, you need to with open arms say, give it to me. I bring on those who hate me and think I am absolute garbage and shit at what I do.
And bring on those who think I'm absolutely living genius, who love everything I do. Give me both sides of the coin. Give me the people that think that I'm genius and give me those who think I'm absolutely insane and those who think that I am a revolutionizing and those who think that I am an absolute fraud. You have to find them both equally as sexy. And you have to be like, yes, baby, give me both sides of that. You cannot have one without the other. If you have,
If you're trying to close yourself off to criticism, then you're not living fully expressed. So we must not lie to ourselves about that. And maybe it's time to do a little analyzing as I had to do yesterday because I didn't realize that I wasn't ready to live fully expressed in this new regard. I didn't realize how squishy I felt about writing and how that newness was going to walk me through the process of getting used to being criticized all over again.
I've taken criticism through my photography career on social media, of course, because I tend to just say what I think and people don't like that, especially if it doesn't conform to their worldview. But the quickest way to feeling free in life is to realizing that number one, nobody's coming to save you. And number two, nobody has to understand you. Nobody owes you understanding. And so going through the process and realizing that I felt rejection.
from people unsubscribing to my newsletter was actually a very freeing experience in the end and I'm really grateful for that.
Laurken (12:07.576)
So basically what we wanna do and what I'm striving to do is create a life for myself where I can zig while everyone else is zags and I can be whatever iteration of myself that I'm currently wanting to be. If you think about, I use this example this morning in class, if you think about David Bowie, he had Ziggy Stardust, but not forever. It was just for a period of time while it served him creatively. So look for your next Ziggy Stardust and lean into it. So many people feel like they can't
do what they want with their photography or in their business, that they have to do it a certain way. And just once you understand that there is no certain way, that there is no right way, you can define success on your own terms. You're going to live a much freer existence and you're going to feel a lot more gratification and a lot more satisfied in your life. It's going to really open up the world to you. those are my thoughts for today. It's funny because I get on here and I have no idea what I'm going to talk about.
But apparently that was the message. So there it is. Get out there, pull the rip cord, try new things, but make sure that you're opening yourself up to both sides of that coin. Bring on the love, bring on the haters, baby. I'll see you next time. If you want to interact with me, you absolutely can on the Mother Photographer, at the Mother Photographer on social media or at Lark and Kendall. All the links are in the episode description. I just love you. Bye.
