SHANNON CURTIS | THE POWER OF OUR EMOTIONS: THEY CAN EITHER FUEL US OR WRAP US AROUND THE AXLES
Welcome back as we take the helm. There are lots of ways to manage our emotions and work through our trauma, and Shannon Curtis has been doing it through her own music. She's been a musician for over 25 years, and she's joining us today.
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Are you facing a crisis in your life or business? It's time to steer yourself in the right direction through the real experiences, passion and courage of our guests. Were taking the helm with your host, Lynn McLaughlin .
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Now, allow me to introduce Shannon before she joins us. She has been touring for the last decade and has quite a following. She has an album based songwriting style that is centered around taking her audiences on intentional journeys of personal growth, connection, and healing. Her newest album, called good to me, has just been released. It's all about her quest for self healing and nurturing and nurturing a personal sense of peace and agency while living in this world on fire.
All right, Shannon, welcome as we take the helm. We're so happy that you're with us today.
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Thank you so much for having me.
Shannon, you are a night owl. I can't imagine what your life is like performing on stage until the wee hours of the morning. What is that like? That are nine to fivers.
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Well, it's just when you are a self employed working artist, the hours do sort of tend later when you're doing performances, but creative time tends later for me, too. It's nighttime that I come alive with all my creative juices for songwriting and production and recording and stuff, too. So even when we're not, like, in touring season, even at home, my husband and I, and we're both naturally night owls anyway, so we are thwarting conventions left and right and doing things differently than the normal waking hours of the population.
That's wonderful. I love it. Okay. I want to go back because we're starting to hone in on children's emotional well being. Right. And you've been through so much on your life, but let me first go into the musical talent. When did you first discover that you had it? How old were you and what was that like?
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Gosh, okay. Well, I started doing music when I was very young. My mom put me in piano lessons when I was four years old, and so I studied classical piano all through my youth until I graduated high school when I was in my teenage years. And I always loved singing also. That was always part of my life. In my teenage years, I started sort of experimenting a little bit with songwriting. I didn't have really any confidence, though, that I was any good at songwriting or singing. There were a couple of people who sort of gave me nudges that as I look back now, I realized how significant those nudges were. I grew up going to church. I'm no longer a religious person, but the music minister at my church when I was in high school, I showed him this little song I had written, and he was a really good musician, like, studied at a conservatory. He printed up my song on sheet paper as sheet music, and I saw it there in black and white, my own song. And he ended up teaching the song to our congregation, which was a massive endorsement of, I think this is good. Right. That was a really pivotal moment for me. And then before my senior year of high school, my choir teacher at school had said to me, hey, I'd like for you to audition for the small 16 voice choir. And I'm like, Me, are you sure you're talking to the right person?
Me?
And he's like, you're going to have to quit cheerleading, but you can audition for our choir. And that was just such a big as I look back on that now, I didn't have a lot of confidence. I think it stemmed in part from the codependency that I was learning as a young kid. Growing up in the environment that I was growing up in, I didn't look to my own strengths. I didn't know how to look to my own strengths or to make decisions that I wanted to make as a kid. Right. Because I was so focused on the needs of others and keeping the peace and all the things that you do when you develop codependency as a young person, really. It wasn't until after college that I began exploring what it would look like to do music in a semi professional way. I started a band with a friend, and we learned together how to make recordings and book shows and perform live and eventually go on tour. It was in my 20s, really, that I began to sort of understand that I had talent to do this. And a lot of people have talent, but I also had a real drive to do it. I really had a calling or a passion for it as well. Like, I really wanted this to be my life, and turns out that's pretty necessary because it's a hard life. It's a life that requires being dedicated and recommitting yourself to it over and over and over and over again. So that dedication, that sense of calling and passion really comes in handy when you have to recommit as you do.
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I have a different perspective, but it's just so intriguing to me because my father is a musician for years and years and years.
Right.
Yeah. He just wrote a book about it, actually, for the family. Kind of a private thing, but absolutely incredible to me. And the way he explains it. Shannon, you can explain it. And I'm so much more eloquently, I'm sure, is the adrenaline, the energy that you must feel from the crowd drives you. I can't imagine what that must be like.
Yeah. There are times where it's adrenaline and it's that thing. What I have learned for myself, and I'm now 48 years old. I've been doing this for a very long time. Over 25 years, I've been doing music. What I have learned sustains me and keeps me wanting to come back is that music and shared art experiences in general, but music specifically, because that's what I do is it's a wonderful door to connection. It's a really wonderful door to making deeper connections with ourselves and with other people. And so that's what keeps me coming back to it. To be able to be in a room with people and to share the music that I've made and share the stories behind it and all of that. The real juicy part for me isn't so much like, this feels great. It's a, wow. Aren't we doing something cool together and making something in this space that is unique in time and space forever and ever, right. That connection that we have together is really neat.
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And your songwriting is personal stories, stories of pain and suffering and growth and healing.
Yeah, that's also a big driver for me. There is room in the world for broken hearted love songs, and I have done those, and there is room in the world for just songs, for entertainment sake. But what I'm interested in doing as a songwriter is writing about my real experiences as a person who is constantly learning, healing, growing, and wanting to share that experience with people in my community again, hopefully as a door. As a way to hold the door open for other people who want and need those kinds of experiences in their lives, too, to be able to walk through and access that for themselves.
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My gosh, what's the word I want right now? I've got goosebumps. People connect in different ways. Right? I want to go back to what you said earlier, just a little personal experience about each one of us, every single one of us who's listening and watching right now. The difference you can make to one person by a sentence, by a word, by an affirmation, by some time, cheering them on. I got my love for writing in grade seven when I entered a book contest in elementary school. It was called my family house. My mother typed it on the old typewriter. I did the illustrations that I won first, second, and third place. I don't think anybody else entered, honestly. But that teacher librarian took me to lunch and she just made me feel like, wow, I am a writer. I can do this. That person, one person. Look at the difference they've made to you, to me. And I'm sure everyone who's listening out there has a story to tell. And if they don't, then let's do the reciprocal. Pay it forward, and you'll make that happen for someone else 100%.
Yeah. So important.
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Now, you've been touring for ten years, so how has that changed for you over time?
Right, well, for the last decade, for the first part of the last decade, my husband and I did exclusively house concerts, so we would travel around the country for three to four months every year. I live in the United States, so we would travel. We actually did a couple of shows in Canada. I should mention we were in Vancouver. Yeah. But we would go and we would do set up shows in people's living rooms and backyards. I just mentioned how I love music as a way to create connection with people doing music in people's homes, with their communities of friends, neighbors, family, colleagues in their living rooms, in their backyards. It's a magical setting for sharing that kind of experience with other humans. And so we were very fortunate to be able to do that for the first part of the last decade. Prior to that, I had toured in regular venues clubs, coffee houses, things like that. I've did laughs around the country in my little Volkswagen Jetta, doing that forever and ever. But the pandemic sort of put a screeching halt to the house concert touring. And in the last couple of years, we had to reinvent what our model looked like at first. We did one summer of virtual house concerts, essentially house concerts on Zoom. We did 50 of them with people who hosted and invited their friends. It was needed for that time. It was unique to 2020, and I hope you never have to do it again. And after that, we found ourselves in sort of the cocoon of pandemic time, being sort of awakened with new imaginations of what we wanted our touring life to look like after the pandemic was over. And so we've been redeveloping sort of that whole thing. And we're doing, actually, our very first the debut concert of the Good to Me show in a theater in Sacramento, California, next month. Yes. It's the dream. That is what we have been imagining for the last couple of years, and we've been iteratively making it happen step by step, and the first one is actually happening next month. I'm very excited. So we're looking to make a big shift in our touring life and pulling the shows out of backyards and into proper adult theater spaces where we can just do some wow stuff for our audiences, which is going to be a lot of fun.
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All right, well, I got to find a way to get to Sacramento in a month. Oh, my goodness. I want to support you in any way I can. We'll talk about how we can do that at the end of the show. All right, let's talk about your newest album, Good to Me.
So a little background. I've been writing and recording a full length studio album every year for the last decade. It's just been a lot of we would make an album, go out on tour, tell the stories, sing the songs for people, do it again for ten years in a row. And so I was approaching time to start writing my next record at the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, and finding myself absolutely sapped. I did not have tapped was that the right word? Sapped. I didn't have any creative energy at all. And the reason for it is that I was at that time, consumed by the state of the world. I was dealing with so much anxiety, fear, anger, and it would keep me up at night. Just all the stuff that's been happening. We were still pretty deep into the pandemic at that time. I think the Almacron variant was making its way around North America in here in the United States. We had just previously that year had an attempted coup on our government. Insane. And all of the attendant divisiveness and strife that goes along with that. Not to mention there's news left and right about changes happening with the climate. And here in Washington State, we had weeks and weeks of smoke. We couldn't go outside and breathe the air in 2020, you know, like and yeah, floods, fires, you know, like and so I just was inundated with all of this news and information about the state of the world and feeling all the feelings about that and had nothing left inside of me to make music. I couldn't figure out how I was going to create anything from that state of my spirit. And it occurred to me I have a long background in Twelve Step Recovery and in a program called Codependence Anonymous, and it's a program that saved my life some 18 years ago when I began it. And it occurred to me, while Twelve Step Recovery is a part of my daily life and has been for all of those 18 years, it occurred to me that I was not living with the kind of serenity that I know is possible when I'm really digging into that work. And so I decided what I would do is get into an intentional deep dive back into some of the principles from my Twelve step recovery specifically centered around this saying that we have at the beginning of all of our meetings, which we call the serenity Prayer. And I know prayer can be a tricky word for some people, and it was for me when I first joined the program because I was leaving religion and wanting to seek healing elsewhere. But it's the serenity Prayer and God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And I didn't have serenity in my life. And I knew that I wanted to take a deeper dive into those concepts to figure out how to get back in touch with my own sense of peace and how to get back in touch with my own sense of personal power in these circumstances in which I felt so very powerless.
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And God can let's call it the universe, let's call it whatever we call it, whatever works, whatever brings us peace and joy and serenity in each of our lives, we have to find it. And I just want to jump in and say there are so many of us that are right there with you during that time, Shannon. I mean, all of the negativity and the craziness, I think we're in a better place. We're getting there. But it's because of people like you, the voices that we're hearing that are rising us up and saying, enough of that, enough of that.
That is in the past. We're moving forward. It is so sweet of you to say that. I honestly want to say, though, I think it's because of people like us and people like us who are reclaiming our lives from this crazy time that we've been in, who are reclaiming our own healing who are reclaiming our own peace, who are reclaiming our own power to make something better here. Because it doesn't have to be this way. We can do so much better and.
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We can make changes for ourselves.
Yes. And that's where it starts. That is where it starts. Yeah.
Okay, so oh, wow, this is going to be tricky. But everybody continue listening because at the end of our conversation, we're going to play one of the songs from Shannon's album, good. To me. It's going to be tough to choose, but we're going to pick one for you.
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We can do it. We can do it. Yeah. And so when I mentioned that, I went into that sort of like intentional deep dive for myself, that's where the songs on this album came from. So I actually wrote this album in chronological order. As you listen, if you listen from song one to song ten, you will be taking a musical journey through my own personal journaling, journey through topics of okay, what are the circumstances I'm facing that are robbing me in my piece? Let's really name them. Okay. What are my coping, my go to coping mechanisms? To deal with the sorry.
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Yeah.
There you go. Good for you. It's the word that I can't think of to deal with emotions. Okay, so what are my go to coping mechanisms to deal with that stimulus? Are those coping mechanisms working for me? Are they failing me? How are they what do I need to do in terms of acknowledging what is in my power to change and what is not? Let's make a list of things I don't have the power to change, and then let's practice radical acceptance around those things which frees me then to focus on the things I do have the power to change. Let's make another list. Turns out that list is pretty scary, actually. When you realize that there are a whole bunch of things that you do have the power to change in your life and in your circumstances, it requires a lot of courage to actually act on those things, right? So that's where the summoning courage comes in. And so the journey of the album is the journey that I took in my own spirit to reclaim that sense of peace and power in my life. And my hope is that when people listen to it, that it will give them an opportunity to reflect on their own circumstances, reflect on their own lives in a way that helps them get access to their own peace and power too.
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But it certainly has done that for me.
That's wonderful to hear. Thank you.
And I love differentiating between I can't control this, I can't put it aside. Put it aside. And focusing I call it conscious decision making. I'm consciously deciding that this is where my energies are going to go. This is where my focus is going to go. And I can't wait to share your music, Shannon.
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Thank you. Thank you. Well, what you just described there, that's power, right? When you have a direction, I'll say we because it's something that we all do, right? But when we can clear out, like, there are so many things that I think I was trying to in my my failed coping mechanisms of of staying in that place of anger and fear, I found that so much of them, so much of my coping mechanisms were about sort of stoking that anger and fear. Because if I'm not angry about all this injustice, then maybe I'm not doing enough, I'm not engaged enough, right? But who am I angry at? I'm angry at these other people whose actions really piss me off.
But it turns out I can't do anything about what another person comes back to, doesn't it?
Right. So that was on my list of things I had to let go of, right? Once I could let go experience that or choose, really that radical acceptance of things I don't have the power to change, then there is space to listen to what I need, what is important to me, and to choose to act on those things, that's power. It's what you just described. When we choose to act, we choose to direct ourselves in this way on this path because these are the things I do have the power to change that is so powerful. And I really believe that when we act in our power, when we stand and act in our power in that way, it's not a matter of belief. I know it because I've experienced it. That brings me peace. That brings my spirit a sense of serenity. When I am choosing to focus on the things that I can change in my life, when I'm listening to the needs and values of my own spirit and acting according to that, that brings me peace. I'm living in harmony with myself. I'm doing things actively that meet needs that I'm feeling in my life. I might not be able, and I'm not going to be able to change the broad strokes of the big problems that are happening. Right. Those are still going to persist. But the really cool thing is that the more of us that do this small, quiet work, I think we start to see each other, we recognize each other. I see you over there doing your work. Let's join forces. And honestly, I really believe that that moment is the smallest little building blocks of actually changing the bigger, broader picture.
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I want to jump in because the synergy here is really remarkable to me. I think the he double toothpick, I could probably say the word, but whatever that we went through, all through COVID, and even prior to that, the mental health and everything that was on the rise, people really, really struggling, the fear mongering, the stuff that happened over those two years, I think we're on the opposite side now. And saying, all right, we got through that. That's never happening again. And as you said, Shannon, if we take back personal control, that synergy of all of us coming together, you call it intuitiveness, call it spirituality, call it that connective energy, whatever it is, is going to rise us up and put that in the past so it never, never happens again. And it's going to take some time. But I think the power of us all united, those voices, those positive powers, powers, positive voices that are saying, enough is enough. This is what I have control of and this is what I'm going to do, has the potential to take that pendulum and throw it out the can a pendulum be thrown out a window? Okay, whatever.
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I think it can today, for sure.
Anything is possible, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
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Well, and I think about specifically the work that you're doing in helping people understand how to best help children with their emotional healing and their emotional growth. I don't have children. My husband and I are blissfully childless in our middle age. But I love children. But when I think about the power that parents have, the power that teachers have, the power that any adult person who has a younger person in their life has to help influence and teach them how to access their own peace and power as little people, then we're growing a new generation of people who will be able to do that with more efficacy than maybe we have been able to in our generation.
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The Power of Thought. Oh my gosh. And I think about little people and you know what? The feedback I've gotten from the children's book series that I've written with my niece around, giving those kids, just like you said, those tools, is we don't know them ourselves. When I grew up, okay, I'm older than you, but yes, sad, happy, mad. We felt emotions but one or two at a time. My niece, who's a social worker, describes it in an amazing way. She said it's like a power box and everything's all coming in at once and it pops. The fuses are popping because the kids can't manage it. So how do we help them unless we learn some of these new strategies ourselves and model for them. So that's the power of the synergy and this younger generation that's going to come up. And they already are the 20 year olds. My gosh, what they're learning to do and what they're saying no to and what that? They're taking charge of the majority of them. Wow. Look out, look out. I'm thrilled about it all.
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Yeah, as they say, the kids are all right.
But yeah, we’ve got to get them really challenging time in this world.
And what I mean by that is that the kids are doing great. They really have a lot to teach us. They do. Absolutely.
My niece is in her early thirty s, and I have learned so much in co writing these children's books series with her self compassion. I don't even know what that word meant prior to working with her. It was like, I'm a type A personality. It's got to be this way or that way. But anyway, I digress. Okay, Shannon, how can we support you? What can we do to push you along and give you the synergy and the voice and the energy and the following that you already have, but let's rise it up even more.
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You are so sweet to ask. I mean, first of all, listen to the music everywhere you stream music. My new album is out there in the world, so I can give you a link to sort of a clearing house of all the streaming services if you want to share that with your people. If you listen on Spotify, Apple Music, wherever it is you'll find it. Listen and enjoy. And it's a gift to me every time somebody invites the work that I've made into their ears and into their heart. So that's the number one way that you can be supportive. If you want to dig a little deeper. I have written a book that goes along with this album as well. The book is really just my journal entries that I wrote that became the songs on this album cleaned up so that it's not just cat scratch in a journal, but they've been turned into essays for this book. So for each song on the album, there is an essay and a set of journal, the same journal prompts that I gave myself to write. Those entries are available to readers of the book as well. If this is a journey that you feel like you want to take for yourself, you'll find those in the book. So the Good to Me book is available on Amazon.
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What a beautiful way to share the journey from the first time you write it and then the editing. I'm envisioning some of this. You can see the process, your thinking process as you took the song to publication, if that's the word or the book. The book, the song together. I think it's brilliant.
Yeah. So those are two great ways that folks can engage with what I'm doing. And feel free to drop a line and say hi anytime. I've got a website, Shannon Curtis net and there's a contact information there and I'd love to hear from you.
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And we can look forward to more touring dates being added on, maybe some closer to Michigan.
Yes. We're doing this first pilot show and then we hope to bring this show to theaters around the North America and Europe. Actually, we're planning some shows in Europe later this year.
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Oh, wow. That's awesome. I love the term pilot show. Right? Because that's what you do. You try it, you see what works, what doesn't work. But my guess is, and tell me if I'm wrong, you're the one who's been performing for all of these years. Every place has a different kind of atmosphere and tradition to it, does it not? You kind of have to figure out
Yeah. There's a lot of adaptability required to come into a space and figure out how you're going to perform your stuff in that space. Yes, for sure. So we're on our toes all the time.
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OK Shannon, I wrote down something that I reminded myself I have to share. And this is a quote from you and I when we were having our get to know you call. I just thought it was so powerful. You said, the power of our emotions, it can either fuel you or it can wrap you around the axles. And you were talking about your own self. I thought, wow, fuel me or I'm wrapped up in the axles. How powerful. What a great visualization. Yeah.
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Wrapped around the axle is how I felt at the beginning of facing this. I have to write an album of songs. How am. I going to do this because my feelings, my reactions to the world, the state of the world, were they were wrapping me around the axle. I couldn't get myself unwound from them. And the the continual motion of, like, more bad stuff that keeps happening.
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Right.
However, when I haven't gone through this process, it occurred to me again, I relearned this idea that my feelings are the most powerful force in my life. I can choose to let them wrap me around the axle, or I can choose to listen to them in a way that helps me know how I should act. What do I need to do to meet needs I'm feeling? What do I need to do? How do I need to act in order to live according to the values that I hold and so rediscovering that my feelings are the most powerful force in my life. But for good was one of the most healing moments in this journey for me. Because so often those feelings, like when they wrap me around the axle, they feel like they're out of control or that I am at the tail end of a whip, that they are just whooshing around in space. And that feels so jarring. I feel completely powerless in my life. And when that's the mode or the relationship I have with my feelings, but when I can view them as these beautiful little messengers who have very important information for me, little bursts of emotional Morse code that say, hey, Shannon, you're feeling this because you need this. Hey, Shannon, you're feeling this because this is really important to you. That is valuable information. When I can identify the feelings, what is that decode? The message that they're bringing me that gives me power to act in ways that strengthen me, that heal me, that make me feel more at peace in myself in these circumstances, that are still out of control and make me feel more powerful in my life.
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And imagine children can do that. We can teach children to do that. It's fine to see I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm mad, I'm frustrated, I'm angry to increase that emotional vocabulary. But it's so much bigger than that. First of all, why am I feeling that way? And that's hard. We have to teach them how to do that by modeling it ourselves. I am really angry right now. And then you look can you tell that I'm angry? Look at my face. Look at my I'm really angry. And then why? And then model for them. What you said decoding is now what am I going to do about it? So there's a positive outcome to it. I think it's brilliant what you're sharing with us, Shannon, and wow, the power of what you can help children learn how to do through their parents, through educators, through anyone who will model for them. I thank you. My goodness.
00:31:01
Thank you. Thank you so much for letting me share this with you. It's been really special.
So it's not over yet because we're going to share one of Shannon's songs. Shannon, based on our conversation today, which one do you think is the most powerful and most relevant to what we've been talking about?
I think given just this most recent conversation, the song the silence is what I'd love to share with you and your listeners. It's a song about not being afraid to get still and listen to what you're feeling and to know that you can trust those messengers that are coming up in the form of feelings. I wasn't taught to trust my feelings as a kid. I was not taught that I could trust myself as a kid. That is something that I've had to learn as an adult, and it's a muscle that I keep needing to exercise as an adult to keep it in shape. But The Silent C is a song about just getting still and tuning in to what it is that I'm feeling to get those messages about what I need and what's important to me and that that's the root of my power.
00:32:22
All right, so we'll put a link in the show notes. You're going to be able to find Shannon, follow her, cheer her on with all of her music and support her in any way that you feel that you can. So with that, here’s The Silent Sea.
The Song, “The Silent Sea” is playing from Shannon’s Album, “Good To Me”.
Very inspirational. We are honing in now on the topic specifically of children's emotional well-being, which means ours as adults as well. Our guest in two weeks’ time, Anna Esparham, is a certified physician in pediatrics at Mercy hospital. She runs a sleep clinic. She helps children with headaches and youth with headaches. And she's going to teach us some specific strategies that we can begin to use for ourselves and model for our own children. Stay healthy and safe, everyone, and we'll see you in two weeks.
Thanks for tuning in and posting your review of taking the helm on your favorite platform. We'll give you a shout out in a future episode to be inspired by people who are steering us in the right direction. Go to https://lynnmclaughlin.com/ where you can search previous guests by the topic of your choice. And while you're there, download Lynn's gift. There's more than one way to get through a crisis.
