The Remembrance Codes

Heart-Aligned Decisions: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing Without Certainty

• Susan Sutherland

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Ever catch yourself saying “I’ll figure it out” while your mind spins and your body tightens?

In this episode, we explore heart-aligned decision making - the difference between mental strategy and embodied clarity - and why the answers you’re waiting for often aren’t logical at all.

Through real, human stories - real estate choices that didn’t go as planned, a health scare that reset priorities, navigating college transitions, and the decision to welcome a puppy during a season of change - we unpack how clarity actually shows up in real life. Not through perfect plans, but through choosing, listening, and learning in motion.

You’ll hear why:

  • Analysis paralysis keeps you disconnected from your body
  • Most “right vs. wrong” decisions are a false binary
  • Peace isn’t stillness - it’s capacity
  • Detours often become the exact path that grows you

We also share simple, practical ways to access somatic wisdom, including:

  • Journaling by hand to bypass overthinking
  • Naming the fear beneath the pro/con list
  • Checking for sensations of expansion or contraction in the body
  • Learning to trust a clear yes without waiting for more data

If you’ve been stuck at a crossroads - waiting for certainty, permission, or the “right” moment - this episode is an invitation to shake the snow globe on purpose and trust the clarity your heart already holds.

✨ Listen now if you’re ready to move from mental loops to embodied truth.
✨ Follow the podcast, share with a friend who’s navigating a big decision, and leave a review sharing the choice your heart is ready to make.
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SPEAKER_00:

If you have ever said, I'll figure it out while you are laying awake at night, spinning through every option in your head, then this conversation is for you. Because figuring it out is a mental strategy and alignment is something else. And often it is not that you are confused, it is asking the wrong part of you to assist in your decision making. I was talking to my niece on Christmas night, having a conversation about a decision she has in the near future that she needs to make. And I'm listening to her mental gymnastics and her talking out loud, talking herself through the choice that she's going to make. And she must have said, I'll figure it out five times. And after the fifth one, I was like, You already know, your heart already knows. And her whole face lit up, and she kind of looked down and smiled, and she said, Yes, my heart knows. Isn't that what we do? Is we spend nights asking our mind, asking our mind to talk us into or out of that which our heart really already knows when we quiet down to listen. In 2020, I started learning about real estate, and there was a phrase that always came up in the teachings about analysis paralysis. It is when you are doing so much research trying to find the perfect property that is going to have enough cash flow and enough appreciation that is going to make sense on paper, that you never actually get in the game. And it's funny that I was learning about this in 2020 because that is years after Mark and I had gotten in the game, and we got in the game with some real flops. We had townhomes whose HOA monthly expenses kept going up and up to where it made zero sense as a rental. But we had no idea. We had not studied, we just got in the game. We had a flip that the contractor made money and the realtor made money, and everybody except Mark, who had put his time and his design work and his money behind the project, we didn't make anything. In fact, we lost on those real estate deals. We were doing them before we did any kind of education or learning. But we learned. We learned and we learned. And so once I started understanding the tools, once I started actually learning from people who have done this before, it made so much sense because I already had the experience. And that's the thing, is we think that there's a right and a wrong decision. And a lot of times we are stuck, not because we don't know what the right decision is, but because we are so terrified of making the wrong decision. But if you zoom out, if you truly zoom out on your life and you find your biggest periods of growth, I bet there are some opportunities to pinpoint some decisions that you thought were wrong, that you'd messed up, that you'd you'd gone off your path, and somehow the biggest growth came from those decisions. And that's one of the most freeing things you can begin to understand is you can't make a wrong decision. You can make a decision, and from that decision, you will have growth and learning and expansion. We choose how to experience growth through our choices. But if you always see it as an experience, as learning, as growth, you can't mess up. And when you take the shackles off of yourself that says, I'm gonna screw this up, it is very freeing. It is very freeing to know I'm either gonna learn this way or I'm gonna learn that way. But either way, I'm okay. And with that, you have the breath. You have the breath to like breathe into I can do this. There are very few decisions that we make that we can't decide again. It doesn't matter if it's a home or a job or a relationship. Most of us live in a time and a space that you can choose again. You are not locked in for life. If you decide that this is not the path of learning I choose to continue on, you have the opportunity to choose again. So it is truly the most freeing and liberating thing to realize there are no wrong choices. It's funny because Mark and I were talking, and you know, when you are witnessing your children, often you cannot understand their choices and why they do not choose what is very apparently an easier path. And I reminded Mark that some of our greatest lessons are those that we learn the hard way, and he quickly retorted, not me. So I got to remind him that in spite of the wifely wisdom that I had bestowed on him about resting more and reducing his stress levels, he did not take to that wisdom. He didn't take to those soft nudges that I had given him, that his body had given him. However, when the heart attack came, he responded. I would say that that is probably learning the hard way, which he agreed. But it worked. And so sometimes the most aligned path is the one you respond to, and maybe that is the hard way, but either way, you learn. Um, he does not look back and see that heart attack as a bad event. He knows how much good has come of it, and this is only just a couple months later. So even though it is incredibly freeing to realize you cannot make a wrong choice, it is very profound to learn how to make an aligned choice. In December, I had some friends who were walking through very big decisions for their life. One job transition, a potential job opportunity, and another a major medical procedure. And one allowed me to be present in her decision making. She was allowing me to witness her, not to guide her, but to witness her process. And she sent me her pro and con list. And as I'm reading it, I'm not seeing the words, but I'm seeing how she has organized her fears. This is how she has gone through and mentally categorized the fears that she holds regarding what she's going through until I got to number six. And number six says, it feels dot dot dot. And that's when she made it. That's when she made the leap out of her mind and into her heart. How does this decision make you feel? And from that space, you can tap into the somatic wisdom of the body, the knowing that your heart allows for. In mid-December, Granny and Sosha and I were around the puzzle at the dining room table and we were talking about Giftful, this app that we as a family were using for our Christmas wish list. And Sosha and I decided we should probably add some pygmy goats to ours, only because I gave up on my desire to get a micro pig about two years ago and had not had an animal on my wish list in some time. So we were gonna add pygmy goats, and somehow that conversation switched over to we should get a puppy, and she went hard. She went hard in on this. And before the end of the conversation, she had found the most adorable cockpoo that was available on these websites, and he had the most human-like name. His name was Brent, and she added him as the most desired option on her gift full. And what turned into days of begging and pleading and negotiating and consulting with an aunt who opened up to unlimited punch pass to stay with her while we traveled. And I started opening up to what if Brent came to live with us? In fact, one morning I called the breeder just to ask some questions about Brent. Brent. We just kept walking around the house going, Brent, because is that a puffy's name? I guess if you are a breeder, you're naming a lot of dogs, but it very much amused us that this precious little dog, his name was Brent. So I called about him, and when I spoke to the guy, Brent had been adopted. And my heart tugged at me, and I was like, whoa, is that for real? Now, if you are a friend's family like we are, you might recall the episode where Rachel thinks that she might be pregnant, and she goes and takes a pregnancy test, and Phoebe tricks her and says that she's not pregnant. And she realized then that she really did want the baby, that that made her really sad to find out she wasn't. Which thankfully, when Phoebe said I was tricking you and you are pregnant, thankfully, she did actually want the baby because otherwise that would have kind of blown up her face. Anyway, so I realized then I needed to go and get out my paper and my pen. And I didn't make a pro and a con list, but I decided to journal because Mark had spent his days as we're talking about Brent. He had spent his days being the voice of reason, talking to logistics, talking to our travel and being tied down. And granny was telling me how loud two dogs would be. And every time my dog barked, she would say, Can you imagine two of these? So what I needed to do was quiet the noise and quiet my own head and go and see what my heart had to say. I sat down with a pen and a paper because when I start writing, I can access my heart space. And the first question I asked was, is this self-sabotage? I have set myself up for a quiet, inward, deeper rooting kind of a year. And is this inviting chaos? Because I know a lot of times when we are on the threshold of something new, our small self messes us up. It does something to keep us safe. It throws a wrench in the plan intentionally to keep us in that safe zone because crossing through that threshold is scary for your ego who wants to keep you where you are. And what I discovered when I was writing this, what the image that kept coming to my mind was a snow globe. And a snow globe with a beautiful winter scene is nice when it's on the table, but the stillness is not the magic. It is meant to be shaken, it is meant to allow the glitter and the snow to move through the scene. That is the beauty. Mark and I at the end of summer had walked through a massive rupture, but now it felt like the scene had settled. And as I wrote, as I tapped into the energy of what I was inviting, I found that it was from a place of peace. Peace that could hold additional responsibility, a love that could expand into more, that I was inviting the shake to invite aliveness and energy into the picture because we can hold that. We can hold more when we are settled. And inviting him not only invites another dynamic in my family, but it invites us to negotiate responsibility and perhaps damaged belongings and less sleep or all of these different things that we have to coordinate. And I kept writing and trying to figure out because y'all know I want my freedom. I want freedom. Am I tying myself down? But y'all, I've got a dog and two lizards and three cats. I'm pretty tied down if that were gonna tie me. And what I realized is that we have never been either or, we have been both and we can travel and we can anchor, we can root and we can adventure. It has never been if you add this, you can't have that. And I started writing about all of the other times when I have felt this kind of negotiation where we, oh my gosh, the amount of conversations that Mark and I had before we decided to have our third child. The world is built for a family of four, it seems, and adding this other child changed the logistics, it changes the hotel rooms, it changes everything. And it wasn't until we stopped trying to figure it out and allowed ourselves to hear our heart that says there is one more child for your family, that we made that decision. But there has never been a time where we added anything, whether two legs or four legs, that it wasn't worth the added responsibility. And so after tapping into my heart and understanding that this was shaking a globe intentionally, we can invite the change by making intentional choices to bring the aliveness, or we invite change externally. You would rather have that growth be a chosen decision to shake things up internally as opposed to growth, which is required being forced from the outside. So I kept writing because even though Zosha says that she is going to be the caregiver for this dog, mom ain't no foo. And she's at school all day and has after school activities, and I am home. And so I really wanted to make sure that when I said yes, if I said yes, that it would be from a place of devotion and not a place of resentment when I end up responsible for this dog. But I could see myself sitting outside on my beloved bench typing with two little dogs playing. And the more I thought about it, the more sure it felt. The more calm I felt that a decision to grow was from a place of peace and not from impulse, which is what it would look like to everyone else. An impulsive decision, but it wasn't because your heart doesn't need time. I didn't need time to weigh the decision. I needed to listen, to listen to my heart and to know that I felt good about it. So I started looking for a puppy since Brent wasn't available. And on that website, there was a cute little puppy named Dasher. But I started thinking, let me just open it up. I know the right dog will come. And I went to uh another website and a breeder much closer by. There was another dog named Dasher. I understand now that that would be a common name in December, as it is a reindeer's name, but I didn't then. What I also was thinking about is this great transition year that we are gonna have with my oldest child leaving for college. My oldest two are best friends, and that transition for him to leave to college is going to impact me for sure, but it is going to impact her as well. And just seeing this little Dasher and and his eyes felt like they connected with me through the computer, and I just saw this little puppy as a bridge to hold our emotions, to help lighten some of our heart, to hold our grief as we walk through this period of transition. And since my son's name is Dashel, it just seemed so fitting that little Dasher will come and be our bridge. And so I pulled the trigger, and a little while later, I texted Mark, and he knows how I am. If I feel ready to do something, I'm gonna do it. I trust my heart so much. If it feels right in my heart, I decide it's the right decision, and that's gonna be that. And also, when you know that we're gonna learn from it regardless, then that's gonna be that too. I had already pulled the trigger when I told him, and um, he was actually really excited and happy about it. I think also knowing that I would be the way one to blame if it all went awry. And so that is how we ended up getting little baby Rafa. Rafa has joined our family, and he he's been here for a couple of weeks, and it has it does change your dynamic and your rhythm, and it has been a really beautiful thing. In fact, I had to schedule recording this during nap time. Just like a new mom, where it's like, when I get the baby down, then I'll have I'll have some time to do my stuff because the kids are back at school and he is my responsibility, but it has been a delight. Anyway, from the outside, that decision would look incredibly impulsive. It was not even a little bit impulsive, it was heart-centered, and that's the difference. Your heart doesn't need an extended time period, it doesn't need you to negotiate or to analyze, your heart already knows. So when you can tap into that wisdom, your decision-making time is very abbreviated. For my daughter, it looked like I was a pushover, but I was not. I know what I know when I listen to my heart and I trust that. So our life is all about making choices. And I wanted to have this conversation with you today because a lot of times we think that finding that peace is what the goal is. But I want you to also see the peace as a settled snow globe and invite change, invite aliveness, invite energy, invite, I don't know, fun and spice, and allow your heart to tell you when you are creating chaos and when you are inviting. This aliveness. We don't want to sit in a pretty, still, little nice winter setting. We want to see the glitter dropping, right? We want to see the snowflakes. We want to invite that aliveness, that energy, that excitement into our world. And you can feel comfortable doing this when you start accessing your heart. Thanks, friends, for listening. I love you, and I'll see you next week.

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Susan Sutherland

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