When Your Life Works… But Something Feels Off

Melanie Mishler (: 00:00

Hello love and welcome back to the Manifest with Melanie podcast. If you have been here before, welcome home my love. And if you're new, I'm really, really happy that you have found your way here to my little place on the interwebs. And I'm even more excited to welcome you into 2026. And I want to start off by naming something really honestly.

p this podcast midway through: 2025

All summer I was feeling really badly because I love doing this podcast. But what I didn't realize at the time was that I needed that pause. I needed that reset. It was actually necessary because my nervous system was overloaded. My life was really, really loud with change. We were preparing to move from California to Belize, closing businesses, opening new ones and

I did not have the capacity to give when everything inside my life was so unsettled. So instead, I chose quiet. And the break wasn't really about disappearing. It was about retreating long enough for me to take care of myself and for something new to form, almost like a a hibernation, right? Or when a caterpillar goes into a cocoon. That's what I felt like. I just felt like completely

⁓ quiet. And I took that space to regroup so that I could come back with this renewed clarity and vision and real excitement again. And I definitely have that now. So I'm really excited about the year ahead. I've been spending the last couple days really focused on my goals and vision for the year. And over the last six months, let me just tell you a lot has happened. So let me give you the Cliff Notes version.

of what was going on behind the scenes when I was quiet. So Andy and I captured a full season of weddings in our photography business. We transitioned out of the wedding venue business. We basically sold or gave away almost everything we owned in California, traveled back and forth to Belize a bunch of times, rented out our California home, sold all our vehicles in California, then bought a new RAV4, packed it with my

favorite little bits of things and drove south to Belize. I navigated customs and importing and taxes and travel across three different countries, finished the cabana here in Belize, which is one of those all in endeavors. So now that's ready to be rented. But most importantly, that I found the most beautiful home here in Belize, just me and Cooper alone.

separate from my husband. this is very different from the dream that we had planned for years. Our dream was to move to Belize together for a season, then head off into the sunset to Mexico, surfing, slow days by the ocean, all that.

So yeah, a lot has shifted in six months. A lot have shifted really unexpectedly. And I will talk a little bit more about this as the months go on, but I feel like it's the kind of massive change that happened like when the continents rearranged themselves and moved or an entire era, like the dinosaurs came to an end. That's what it feels like in my life.

The version of the dream that we were living in is changing. It's still changing and still evolving. whatever comes next, I honestly have no idea what it is, but I do know it won't be built on the same ground. It won't be built on the same continent. Like I shared in my last podcast, sometimes everything has to fall apart so that it can rebuild itself in a way that's

more beautiful and more structurally sound. And that's what my life feels like right now. A complete foundational rebuild.

So now I am recording this from my new beautiful home here in Belize. It's surrounded by jungle, has tons of natural light. I'm right on the creek and I'm experiencing a level of calm in my body that I haven't felt in a really, really long time. It feels like a long, deep breath. And here's the part I want to be really honest about.

No matter how self aware you are, no matter how much inner work you've done, this level of change, it doesn't happen without grief. It doesn't happen without fear or tremors in our body. There's no perfectly graceful way to move through the unknown, no matter how much we try and project like a clean empowered transition, right?

Because even when the decision is right, even when clarity eventually comes, your body still has to cross that threshold from the known into the unknown. And let me tell you, stepping into the unknown is scary, as we all know, because we've all done it at times. And so that's why today's episode isn't really about my move to Belize or the pause from the podcast. I want to talk about something much more important.

something I see many, many women stuck in. And it's a pattern that I lived in for longer than I want to admit, honestly. It's this. It's a pattern of knowing that something isn't working in our lives and continuing anyway. And let's just be clear, that's something. It can be anything. It could be your eating habits, your relationship with your body, your job. It can be...

numbing with alcohol or drugs, could be your spending habits or your relationship with money, your marriage, a business, way of life. It can be anything. And it's so common for women, honestly for men too, but more so for us, to know something isn't working.

We can feel it in our bodies, but we stay anyway. We just kind of continue down the path because the other option is stepping into the complete unknown. And we don't yet know what will work. We might not have that full path or the full map ahead of us already. So instead we stay, we tolerate, we adapt, and we become comfortable with discomfort.

I've shared this before on the podcast. I share it a lot because it's one of my favorite passages, but one of my favorite books is A Course in Miracles. And I've been studying that material for decades. But one of my favorite passages says, your tolerance for pain and discomfort is high, but it's not without its breaking point. And isn't that so true? Right? Because what happens is we are currently living in a world that keeps us completely disconnected from our bodies.

from our presence, from our pleasure, from our truth, because everything is moving so fast. And so we've kind of all collectively become comfortable in discomfort because we numb it, we numb it with scrolling or media or shopping or drugs, alcohol, just this constant busyness that doesn't give us the time or space to feel, to be present.

I know when I was growing up back in the 80s and 90s, which I just have to say it was the best time to be living. If you went to the dentist, for example, and you were sitting in the waiting room waiting for the dentist, there was nothing to do. You just sat there. You just were. You were just present. Maybe you had a magazine, but mostly what you had is you had space and quiet.

But now today, no one's ever just sitting and being, right? If you go into any waiting room anywhere, every person is on a device, being fed information at this pace that keeps us too busy to ask the real questions. And those real questions are important. They're questions like, what do I really need? How do I actually feel? What do I really want?

what is working and what isn't working? because let's be real, at the end of our life, who cares how many followers you have or how many likes people had on a post, We want to get to the end of our lives, I would hope, and have had rich experiences with the people that we love. And those experiences don't happen.

while scrolling through mindless reels. They just don't. So here's the part I really want you to feel, not just to understand, with your brain, but to feel it in your body.

The problem isn't that we don't know what's wrong. Most women do know what's wrong. We feel it because it shows up as tension in our chest and a tight jaw and heaviness when you wake up. It's that quiet, persistent sense that something is off. Even when your life looks good on paper, even when everything looks fine, everything looks successful,

And loves, I am here to testify to this firsthand from lived experience. What we've lost isn't awareness. It's permission. It's permission to slow down long enough to listen. Permission to stop overriding our bodies and our desires just because they're not practical or convenient or part of the plan.

Right? They go against the grain of how our life is going.

What we've lost is

permissioned to stop pretending we don't feel what we feel, pretending we're fine, everything's fine, everything's fine here, nothing to see, right? Or pretending we're not exhausted or we don't want something different.

the next step reveal itself after our nervous system has a chance to settle down. Not before. Because when your body is braced, when you're in the constant or you're just going through the motions of life, or you are always stressed out, or always busy, clarity is not available to you. Actually, I'm gonna take that back. I wanna rephrase that. ⁓

always available to you. Your intuition and clarity is always there. It's just that we don't have the space to allow access to it. We're not allowing it in because we're just in survival mode all the time, our nervous system's always ramped up. And so my love, I want to invite you to something different this year. Not a new

goal, not a whole set of new strategic goals, or another year of white knackling your way through a life that technically works. Everything looks okay, but you feel anxious all the time. I want to invite you into a different relationship with yourself this year. One where you trust yourself again. One where your desire, it isn't treated like a liability or an inconvenience.

And I want to invite you into a life where you stop staying in situations or staying in habits or patterns that drain you just because you don't know what comes next or you don't know what to do next.

because I'm here to tell you, you don't have to know the full path. You just have to start with what's not working sometimes. So I want to invite you into a year where you don't override your inner wisdom

just to keep things reasonable. And a year where you let honesty lead, even when it's inconvenient and maybe when it goes against the plan. And even again, if the next step isn't fully clear, Because here's what matters. You don't need to know the next step. You get to create it, but creation requires honesty.

honesty about what you really want, and honesty about where you really are, what's working, what's not working. Like that's the most important thing to start with. We have to know where we are before we can get on a path to go anywhere. And so love, this is what I want you to know. When you stop overriding your body and you start trusting that somatic wisdom, the wisdom that's in your cells,

It will never ever lead you into chaos. will always lead you into alignment slowly, sometimes gently But unmistakably

Because clarity does not come from pushing harder. I fucking promise you, you can take for that. I have tried it and it does not work. Clarity comes from settling in and listening and allowing your body has to feel safe enough to tell you the truth. And when it does, when you stop and you settle in and you can start to listen, the next step reveals itself.

of change I'm choosing now in: 2026

And starting today, the podcast is back. I will be releasing weekly episodes every Wednesday morning. So the timeline's shifting a little bit earlier, but with that will also come my sub stack and the newsletter. So if you want all the good stuff, be sure to head over and subscribe.

And until next week, keep manifesting an epic life.