Living Lucky® Podcast with Jason and Jana Banana

Finding Hope Amidst the Flames: Cultivating Resilience During Times of Crisis

• Jana and Jason Shelfer • Season 8 • Episode 2

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Facing Life’s Fires: Turning Adversity into Growth

🎙️ Imagine waking up to skies shrouded in smoke and the chaos of a wildfire inching closer to your home. This week, we dive into the harsh realities of the California fires—a powerful metaphor for the unexpected challenges that disrupt our lives.

As ranked #6 on the Top 100 Happy All-Time Podcast Chart, we’re more than just quirky fun. This episode takes a deep dive into resilience, exploring how to navigate life’s uncertainties without losing hope, joy, or the belief that better days are ahead.

🔥 In This Episode, We Explore:

  • Adversity as a Catalyst for Growth: Techniques to maintain your spirit and perspective when faced with devastation.
  • Breaking Free from the Doom Loop: How to shift from despair into an empowered, upward success cycle.
  • Reframing Catastrophe: Finding purpose, transformation, and gratitude even amidst destruction.
  • Tools to Keep Moving Forward: Strategies we’ve personally used to overcome obstacles and create new beginnings.

💡 Whether you're grappling with personal loss, unexpected setbacks, or feeling stuck, this conversation is packed with actionable insights, encouragement, and wisdom. We’ll show you how to rise above adversity, rediscover your strength, and begin crafting the life you crave—even when life feels impossible.

Join us to discover the light in the darkness and the lessons in life's wildfires. 🌟
self-help, personal development, positive thinking, mindset, resilience, gratitude, adversity, overcoming challenges, finding hope, life transformation, Self-help strategies, Personal development tips, Overcoming adversity, Resilience techniques, Transformational growth, Shifting mindset, Moving through life challenges, Finding hope in despair, Life coaching principles, Gratitude after disaster, Pacific Palisades, pacific palisades california, Fire in California, 

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The 4 pillars of Living Lucky
Believe in yourself
Believe in the people around you
Believe in your circumstances and
Believe that God is working through you, for you, and always conspiring in your favor.

*Previously Recorded

Jana Shelfer:

Are you ready to create a life you crave? Let's spin that doom loop of negativity into an upward success cycle and start Living Lucky®. Good morning. I'm Jana, I'm Jason and we are Living Lucky® you are too.

Jana Shelfer:

Before we go any further, we just have to celebrate our wins. We have been elected, nominated, voted the sixth.

Jason Shelfer:

Number six in the top 100 happy all-time chart.

Jana Shelfer:

So I guess we best not start with a mamby-pamby.

Jason Shelfer:

Good morning. We got to live up to our title Number nine in the top 100 joy all-time chart.

Jana Shelfer:

Joy. I got joy, joy, joy, joy Down in my heart. Where Down in my heart?

Jana Shelfer:

Where Down in my heart. So congrats, congrats, jason.

Jason Shelfer:

I was excited to see that I mean I look at the four million podcasts out there and to have a ranking of this magnitude, really it made my heart sing our podcast is a godsend.

Jana Shelfer:

It is killing, and I just have to say thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who is listening right now and I feel like it's a little different than other podcasts just in the sense that it's a.

Jason Shelfer:

It's a conversation between us and it's the way we work things out and the way we think things through and how we do life.

Jana Shelfer:

And it's just quirky. It's quirky, quirky and fun.

Jason Shelfer:

And fun. That was the next thing I was thinking about. It's fun for me.

Jana Shelfer:

All right. That being said, now let's dampen the mood a little. We're talking about-.

Jason Shelfer:

Let's just move into the reality of what's happening in the world.

Jana Shelfer:

So, even though Jason and I show up happy, optimistic, with enthusiasm, we have faced a lot of adversity in our life. Is that true?

Jason Shelfer:

Yeah, well, I mean, things are going to happen Like there's a I think Forrest Gump said it Shit happens. He did.

Jana Shelfer:

He did.

Jason Shelfer:

Or he stepped in dog crap and then he goes, it happens, and then the shirts came out. And I know it's a movie, it is. But in life we run into challenges, obstacles, anytime we grow into newness or grow into anything different, or there's.

Jana Shelfer:

It's called transformation.

Jason Shelfer:

Circumstances of change.

Jana Shelfer:

So this morning we woke up and California is on fire.

Jason Shelfer:

Crazy what they called apocalyptic fire.

Jana Shelfer:

And if you watch the footage it is heartbreaking. People are leaving their cars on the highway. They actually had to have a bulldozer this morning come in and clear the evacuation routes because people's cars started setting on fire. And what do you do when your car sets on fire?

Jason Shelfer:

You get out and start running. Well, there's a lot in that Like. I get goosebumps when I think about it. Not the great goosebumps.

Jana Shelfer:

It's hell on earth is what I picture.

Jason Shelfer:

You have to imagine what you are going through to abandon a vehicle on the side of the road and hope that you're going to be able to survive.

Jana Shelfer:

As of this morning, 200,000 people were without power. Evacuations all throughout there were three major fires happening, some in the Pacific Palisades.

Jason Shelfer:

That was a big one, 3,000 acres.

Jana Shelfer:

Which is an exclusive neighborhood. There's also two other fires that have started and the wind is that condition where the embers are just spreading.

Jason Shelfer:

Yeah, they said hurricane force winds and I saw on one of his reports that the winds were dusting up to 100 miles an hour currently.

Jana Shelfer:

Close to five football fields a minute are burning. Wow. So that is very, very rapid. And then you start hearing people's testimonials about just trying to get out. So what I want to talk about today is life happens.

Jason Shelfer:

Yes.

Jana Shelfer:

Shit happens Like you, just like Forrest says. And so how do we not fall into that doom and gloom? Because at the time it feels very heavy and dark. And so when you are in the midst of despair. How do you keep your mind and your spirit from also going down there?

Jason Shelfer:

Yeah, and as much as our hearts and thoughts and prayers are open for people in California, this is, I think, something that happens on different levels for all of us across the world, where that disappointment everything. I've worked my life for seems to have disintegrated in a moment and it wasn't in my control.

Jana Shelfer:

Yes, the feeling that you feel is powerlessness. Yes, powerlessness, powerlessness and Hopelessness, and it also becomes the day before the fires and what life is like after All. Of a sudden, your life has changed.

Jason Shelfer:

Yes, Am I correct Outside of anything that you ever wanted, hoped for or expected?

Jana Shelfer:

And this happens to a lot of us, sometimes not on such a massive scale. Sometimes it's, you know, something happens during your day and it puts you in a mood, and then that mood lasts, oh, a few days. We hold on to it we hold on to it for a few days. And now we have now sunk into a funk. And then that funk lasts a few weeks and people start saying, you know what, I don't want to be around negative Nancy.

Jason Shelfer:

Yeah, funky Frank, I don't want to be around. Negative Nancy, funky Frank.

Jana Shelfer:

I don't want to be around Funky Frank. So they kind of they sense your energy and they start distancing themselves and then that funk becomes a blue period or a depression. One point in.

Jason Shelfer:

That is, people distance themselves from you when you're in that funk, but you also you're setting up barriers and isolating yourself because you're like. This happened to me.

Jana Shelfer:

Yes, it happened to me. Is the term that people use.

Jason Shelfer:

You may do it in a group, like if it's a group of you that had something happen like that. What's happening out in the Palisades's, like we are the quote-unquote victims of life and this is what happened to us and the natural tendency there is to look up at the universe and say why why why?

Jana Shelfer:

is this happening? Why is this happening? And even though it may be so tough to hear, I just want to zoom out and I want to say it's a circumstance. Yeah, and I know that death may be involved. We don't know exactly how catastrophic this is and, at the time, we don't understand why. I mean, we just don't understand the bigger picture. However, in order to keep your soul alive and your spirit moving forward, moving forward, there's some techniques that Jason and I have learned because, like I started this, we have also faced Everyone has been through adversity.

Jana Shelfer:

Everyone has been through adversity.

Jason Shelfer:

We've been through some very deep dark times.

Jana Shelfer:

And we are also at this point very, very appreciative of those times, because when there is destruction, there is also birth and renewal and transformation. New understanding Unity and transformation, new understanding, unity. It feels like sometimes, in those darkest moments, we find depths to ourselves that we didn't even realize existed, and if we weren't tested, we might never discover those places.

Jason Shelfer:

Right, and we also wouldn't know how much resilience and grit and determination we have. And tenacity. Yes.

Jana Shelfer:

Perseverance. I mean there's so many characteristics that start evolving when you are tested.

Jason Shelfer:

They're muscles that get built when you're tested, and then you become unstoppable. Yeah.

Jana Shelfer:

So I guess where I really want to direct this is when you feel powerless, because right now I mean even the people that have evacuated. You hear them on the news and they're saying all I can do now is just watch the news coverage of my house burning down, and it's easy to go into that catastrophizing mode where you're like, oh my gosh, worst case scenario, I've lost my business.

Jason Shelfer:

I've lost everything in my house At any moment in life, we have the opportunity to look at what we have or what we don't, and we could have a list a mile long of the things that we don't have, that aren't like that, we don't feel like are readily available for us to grasp or for us to work with. We also have the opportunity, at any moment in life, to look at all the resources that we have. Yes, and it's depending on where you focus, like I hear people on the news and I get it. They're in the wound right now, they're in the what's happening right now, and I hear a lot of I'm so grateful that I'm out, but it's usually followed up with a but, which is understandable.

Jana Shelfer:

However, our words create our reality. We are actually planting the seeds of how this is going to unfold.

Jason Shelfer:

Yeah, and when we get around the but or we can get rid of the but.

Jana Shelfer:

Some buts are pretty big. Jason, I know A kadonk-a-donk. A kadonk-a-donk, that's right.

Jason Shelfer:

I like big buts. Buts and I cannot lie, but when we get around that but and we can live and stay in that gratitude, it creates the possibility. It creates the new growth, the new life and the path forward, instead of dragging the don't haves forward.

Jana Shelfer:

Okay, so the key word there is gratitude, and I know people are probably listening to this going. How do you find gratitude in a tragic situation? Trust me, it's always there. I have been in the depths of where I think oh my God, my problems, my problems. Well, just the fact that you have problems means you are alive and there's always something to be grateful there for.

Jason Shelfer:

Amen, amen. I know because people have told me why are you always so grateful, why are you always so happy, and I would say that a lot of times it's happy because I'm choosing it and it's also because I live in the appreciation for the things that I have and what you appreciate, appreciates.

Jana Shelfer:

It's so true, and gratitude is the fertilizer for the future to unfold.

Jason Shelfer:

And it's the fertilizer for your spirit.

Jana Shelfer:

It really is. It really is, and so now there's a distinction here. I'm not saying ignore your feelings, because feelings are very important. However, we can transmute those feelings and we don't have to live in the woe is me, because that's how people. It's called victimhood, people become victims, and I understand that this is a very, very sensitive situation right now, so I don't want to undermine what people are going through.

Jana Shelfer:

And it's important to feel the feelings. However, there's always something to be grateful for, even in death. There's always something you know. The people who knew that person can say I'm so grateful to have known that person, and that will reframe that shifts something.

Jason Shelfer:

It gives it. That's the hope and that's the awareness of the goodness. And if you're focused on hope and goodness, it leaves out the power, the hopelessness and the bad. So it's a. It is a positive stepping stone towards the new and and the and even the better and even the better, like it's a gratitude. Doesn't ignore anything that may have happened, that was considered catastrophic, that had a feeling of hurt, pain or anguish. What it does is it says what are the good things, what are the hopeful things here?

Jana Shelfer:

Yeah, okay, I think we might just need to wrap it up right there, because I feel like that was just a really good button to tie everything up. I'm using buttons and ties and wraps.

Jason Shelfer:

Well, you're a crafter, you're crafty.

Jana Shelfer:

That is true.

Jason Shelfer:

And you also unpack all those beautiful things in our minds and in our souls. You're a traveler.

Jana Shelfer:

That's why you use the word unpack.

Jason Shelfer:

That's right, jason likes adventure, I like creating and I like big butts and I cannot lie. But let's just think about if one of the major stepping stones in Living Lucky® as a lifestyle is to seek out the gratitude, seek out the possibilities and also be appreciative of all the wonderful things that are available and that we do have, whether it's the problem, whether it's just the breath Like it's just I am able to breathe or even if it's just the machine that's helping me breathe.

Jana Shelfer:

Well, you know. One last thing I want to bring up is fire is an element.

Jason Shelfer:

It's a renewing agent.

Jana Shelfer:

It is, it is.

Jason Shelfer:

It's an agent of destruction and renewal.

Jana Shelfer:

Yes, and if we can start thinking of it like that, then it doesn't feel so personal, it feels a little bit like okay, there's a bigger picture here. I just need to get through this. I just need to get through this. I just need to get through the fire.

Jason Shelfer:

I love it. Keep Living Lucky®, get through the fire.

Jana Shelfer:

Thanks for joining. Bye-bye. If the idea of Living Lucky® appeals to you, visit us at www. LivingLucky. com.