Explore your environment ✨

Hello, everybody. Happy Sunday. Happy Mother's Day. Just gonna hang on for a quick second to see if somebody comes in. My name is Jean Mitchells. If you're listening on replay today, I hope you're somewhere sunny and warm. Excited to be here with you as we let people come on in. Hello, hello, hello. Happy Sunday. Hi, Chris. Nice to see you guys popping on in on this beautiful day. Where are you joining from? I would love if you typed in the chat where you're coming in live from. My name is Jean Nichols.

I'm coming in live from Minneapolis, Minnesota. And specifically, I'm coming in live from the salt caves in Minneapolis. And on today's exploration, we talk about experiencing or exploring our environment. And what I mean by that when I put that out there. Oh, St. Paul, amazing. Well, you have to come over to the Minneapolis side and come to the salt cave sometimes. I was here on this beautiful Mother's Day. I facilitate sound baths as one of my many hats that I wear. Sound bath meditation. So I'm at the salt caves.

So I thought that I would take it this livestream from the salt caves. And in the back here, you can kind of see a little bit of what this looks like. I would love to take you inside the salt caves. I'll post a photo in the comments later, but I can't because there's people in there today enjoying their time inside the salt caves. So when I think about in, you know, exploring our environments, exploring our spaces, how many times in our day to day world we drive down the same road to get to the same coffee shop or the same job.

And, you know, the only time we maybe detour is if there's road construction, which it's summer in Minnesota right now, so there's road construction everywhere, or if there is traffic. And we want to try to find a faster way by creating a shortcut or a different path somehow. I myself have driven down the same road to get to one of my jobs. Every two days I drive down this one road. And I didn't know that a brand new restaurant in the neighborhood, literally around the corner from where I work, opened up until I was talking to some people on my team, and they were talking about having gone to this new restaurant called the Breakfast Club, and they said all these really amazing things about it.

And I was like, gosh, this sounds like a great place. Where is it? And they're like, jean, it's right around the corner. Where have you been? They opened up a couple months ago, and it just reminded me that we get into our habits, we get into our patterns, and we go down those same paths, traveled all the time. I don't know where you live in St. Paul, Cris, but I know that in St. Paul there's some really beautiful architecture, there's beautiful restaurants, yummy restaurants, Grand Avenue, but even in the different neighborhoods.

So how many times have you driven down that same path and not realize there is something there for you to see? So on Sundays, what I try to do and what I've been practicing for a few months now is Sundays are my day. And if I commit to something, I'm doing it with very much intention. So I committed to doing sound bass today because it's mother's Day and I lost my mom a year ago or six months ago. We had her celebration of life last Sunday, and I couldn't think about a better way for us to celebrate her, all the mothers, fur babies included, than to give a gift to mothers and daughters or mothers and sons and families of sound and sound baths.

So I have three of them today, and I'm very excited. But when I go back to that topic of exploring your city, the number of times I've been here, and I ask people, before I start a sound bath, how many of you have never been to the cell caves? And a lot of times, over half the class will raise their hand, and the class size is roughly 13. And then the next question they'll ask will be, how long has the salt cave been here? They've been here for over eleven years. Almost eleven years. So think about how many times people have driven down the road, on the street, right in front of this beautiful building and never even knew that this beautiful space where they could come.

Relax, heal. Frost. Pink Himalayan Sea salt is available. Now. I am going to offer in also a concept. So after my brother lives in California, he hasn't lived in the midwest for over 30 years, maybe longer. 40 years, I think it's been a long time. And he is older than I am. 1011 years older than I am. He's retired and retired early. He was lucky. Hi, Jules. How you doing today? And after our mom's celebration of life, he took the next six days and he did a tour in Iowa. And typically when he travels with his family, he creates a lot of structure.

And so he decided this trip that his number one goal was to see relatives he hasn't seen in 20 or 30 years and to discover what was unique about things in Iowa. Now, I don't know about you, but I was like, you're gonna what? And you don't have a plan, which is very unlike my brother. It's more like me than it is like him. And so what he did, and he explained to me when he came back to Minneapolis before he flew home, he would create kind of a list of all the things that he thought were interesting.

So he did some Google searches, and he found roads that weren't on highways, and he made a list. And before he did that, before he went to bed, and in the morning when he woke up, he picked a couple of things off the list that really stuck in his mind as something that he was curious about. And he would go have lunch with a relative or dinner with a relative, and then on his journey to get there, he would stop to find something. Now, he did not choose to stop to see the biggest nickel in the United States.

Apparently, there is the largest wooden nickel in the United States and Iowa. But what he did discover is some museums he never would have seen. And my brother loves art. He went into Des Moines and he found their art museum to have pieces that he was shocked by, that you would expect to see in New York or LA or Chicago, but not in Des Moines, Iowa. He learned that the executive director of this new museum left New York to come to that particular museum because of the art that was curated there.

And there's so much that's not even on display because they don't have the space. And he was one of three people in the museum that day, and that doesn't include stadium. And so he started talking to the two other people. They were an elderly couple somewhere in their seventies, I think he said, eighties. Between seventies and eighties, he said. And they started to ask where he was from. And so he just held space and had a conversation. He discovered that they live in Florida now, and they are out just kind of touring a bunch of different places.

When the wife was in her twenties, she went to California. One time when she was in her twenties, she got arrested and ended up in jail with some very fascinating characters for, like, a night. And it was like she was jaywalking or something. It was like, a long, long time ago. This lady's in her late seventies, I believe, and ended up being, like, a catholic school teacher or principal in Florida for the rest of her career in life. Like, things that you discover, crazy things that people will share when you're just out exploring and you're not looking at time, you're not planning everything, you're just finding space to explore.

He made his way into Minneapolis, and I was working in that morning. So he took a detour and went to a sculpture garden. And as he was leaving the sculpture garden, he found this. Looked at this really cool house. He's a big fan of architecture. It's one of the things that he's very passionate about. And he saw this house that looked really interesting. And he walked by it because he just wanted to see the landscape, see what the house looked like. And what he discovered is that this little green house up on a hill from the sculpture gardens in Minneapolis was a little art museum.

And so he walked in and started talking to the one person working there, and he was the only person inside. And he found a piece of art that he really liked. Then he purchased to send home. So when we think about exploring our environment, I want to invite you to consider, how often have you just been a tourist of your own city? We don't have to go on a big trip to explore and find something new that might resonate with us, that might inspire us. We could go for a driver on the block, drive within a mile radius.

We could go out into Yelp, do a Google search for top tourist places in the city that you live, and take a day and go explore and see what you might discover. So when we think about taking self care and on self care Sunday, my question might be, maybe you could spend a few minutes today looking for what is available in your city that you've never done before. Whether you've lived there an entire lifetime or you've lived there for a year. What is something that you've never experienced? Today I am going to experience something new.

I'm going to a restaurant with some friends that I haven't seen in a long time to the restaurant that has been one block away from one of my jobs for the last two months that I haven't even seen until somebody on my team said, hey, jean, it's just around the corner. Are you an idiot? Have you not seen it? You drive right past it. And they said that the idiot part jokingly, but I'm gonna go to this restaurant, I'm gonna check it out with some friends and try something new today on self care Sunday.

And then I'm going to go a couple of blocks farther down the road and go see a local art fair that's happening in Minneapolis, in St. Paul. One of the really cool things in the summer that happens. Our little art furs pop up all over the city. So this morning as I was driving, I saw that there was an art fur happening, and I was like, you know what? Today is my day, I'm just gonna spontaneously jump into that and walk around and see who I meet, see what I see, ask a few questions, meet a few people, and just experience a beautiful, sunny Sunday in Minneapolis.

So if you're a mom and if you're playing on replay, happy Mother's Day. If you have animals, happy Mother's Day. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your Sunday, and I would love to hear from you where you discover or what you discover on your journey today or this week when you open your eyes and you look around and you see one thing different about the environment that you're in that you can check out. Have a great day. We'll see you soon.