What’s This All About?

In this fun and personal episode, get to know Michele, her educational background, her weird 'n' wild journey, and how it all somehow makes sense and comes together in this podcast project!

Transcript

Michele: 0:00

Hey guys, it's Michele. Welcome to New Creation Meditations. This week's episode's gonna be a little different because I'm going to introduce you to me, tell you a little bit about my background and how this podcast came to be. And I didn't even mean for that to come out as a poem, but here we are. One thing you should probably know about me right off the bat is I love to laugh and I love to have fun. So we're gonna have fun. It's not gonna all be serious and I'm gonna change up the genres of music so you can tell we got a little funky hip hop in the background here.

Michele: 0:35

So I'm a DJ, I love music. I love all genres of music. I've been a musician. I started piano lessons when I was about eight, so I've been playing piano pretty much my whole life for like 500 years now, started with the classical and then moved into jazz piano lessons in high school and I just love it all. Love all the genres, love music. And then about 10 years ago, I had the bright idea to get into DJing. So I took some DJ lessons as a 40-something year old suburban mom of three who drives a minivan. So there's a life lesson right there Don't put yourself in a box and say you can't do this or you can't do that because you don't fit the mold. You can do whatever you wanna do. So I got this musician side of me, got into music production and put some songs up on YouTube et cetera, et cetera. But I also have this other side of me that's really into spirituality, spiritual growth, personal development, life coaching, all that good stuff, and this podcast really brings those two things together music and personal and spiritual growth.

Michele: 1:41

Got my bachelor's degree. I was a double major in counseling psychology and speech communication and I thought for sure that I was gonna be a music therapist and that was the plan until I took a counseling peer counseling course my senior year and found out I really didn't like to listen to people's problems all day. So that was a problem and highest respect to counselors and therapists out there. So I decided not to go into music therapy and kinda had to come up with a plan B. So I worked in corporate world for a while. I ended up getting certified in 1999 on the Myers Briggs type indicator so it's been 25 years now and really enjoyed working with the Myers Briggs. I helped a lot of people get to know how they were wired. I worked in training and development and I don't know, kinda bounced around from corporate job to corporate job for a while trying to figure out who I was, and went to grad school in 1999, ministry school and ended up with a master's degree in spiritual formation and the actual department at the time was called educational ministries. But I really focused in my studies on spiritual formation and curriculum design. That was my passion, and so I'm kind of a mixed bag.

Michele: 3:04

I'm one of those multi-passionate weirdos. After I graduated from ministry school, I had a baby, and then I had another baby and I had another baby. So I spent the next 20 years basically raising my three babies, and now two of those babies are in high school and ones in college. So I really can't call them babies anymore, can I? And during that time I went to Bible school.

Michele: 3:28

There was an online Bible school that I jumped into and that was 10 years ago Wow, 10 years ago already. And it ended up being in that Bible school for about five years and it was absolutely mind-blowing, blew away so many things that I had learned. I had to unlearn a ton of things and sort of deconstruct and reconstruct my faith Because I had just learned so many wrong things and I really hadn't even been a Christian that long. I became a Christian when I was 22. So I was not raised in the church. I became a Christian basically as a young adult and still had a ton of wrong foundation that I had to rebuild. And all that happened in Bible school. So I'm very, very grateful, even though the Bible school is no longer in existence. I am super grateful, one for my education there and two because I have developed some amazing lifelong friendships through that school, some of whom are maybe listening to this episode. Shout out to you, you know who you are. Also had the opportunity to teach a couple classes in that school, one on the Myers-Briggs and one on Love Languages and it was that school that inspired me to write my book on the Myers-Briggs and as far as I know, it's the only book out there on the Myers-Briggs from a kingdom of God perspective. So that's pretty cool. So I'm super grateful for those five years. I met some amazing people, I got mentored by some amazing scholars and I just learned a ton about the kingdom and the Bible and just completely gave me such a rock solid foundation for my faith. So super grateful for my time in Bible school and then over the last couple of years, I got a certification in life coaching Christian life coaching.

Michele: 5:28

So yeah, I wanna pull all those things together in this podcast. So the podcast is gonna be a mixture of personal and spiritual growth topics cause I'm passionate about that and some spiritual formation, specific topics like how to meditate on scripture, how to do a lectio divina, things like that. We're gonna do some straight up Bible study in some episodes where we will probably zoom in on some passages of scripture that are usually not correctly taught or they're often misunderstood, and I wanna just bring a lot of clarity to some of those things and just kinda share my love of scripture, because I've been digging into it a lot over the last few years and it is absolutely mind blowing. So I wanna share my passion for scripture in this show. And then, finally, we're gonna do meditations, hence the name. And, by the way, I gotta tell you I hemmed and hawed about the name of this podcast for a really long time and I might still change it, but for now we're going with new creation meditations. Let me know if you like it, if you don't like it or if you have a better idea, cause it's still a work in progress and it might change.

Michele: 7:02

Anyway, new creation comes from 2 Corinthians 5:17, where Paul writes if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. The old is gone, the new has come, and I really want us to focus in on our kingdom identity, our new creation identity. What is it really that we're packing as new creation Christians? Because there's some amazing stuff in the Bible that we just kind of miss or forget about that I really want to focus in on this podcast. So I'm gonna call you up higher, I'm gonna call you bigger, I'm gonna really have you dig deep and I might challenge some of your preconceived ideas and notions. And that's okay, and you can disagree with me, and that's okay, we can stay friends. But I want you to consider the things that you hear on this podcast, even if they're things you've never heard before, and explore it, research it, study it out, take it to heart, because I might challenge you with some new thoughts and ideas about who you are and what God has put inside of you.

Michele: 8:11

I am also very passionate about this idea of renewing your mind. So in scripture it says be transformed by the renewing of your mind and, as far as I can tell, there's really only two ways to be transformed. One is by beholding the Lord, because as we behold Him we become like Him, and the other way to be transformed is by renewing our mind, and one of the best ways to renew our mind is through repetition, and so on this podcast you'll experience some repetition, and the meditations will probably repeat certain phrases. I might have you put your hand on your heart and say something, and maybe say it again, and maybe say it a third time, and if it's something you really need to get inside of you, you might want to go back to that particular episode and listen to it again and again, and again until it really becomes a part of you. Because I think we have this kind of misconception that once we come into the kingdom, our minds are automatically magically renewed somehow, and that's just not the case. I mean, when we come into the kingdom, we bring with us all of our old belief systems and lies and strongholds and thinking patterns that we had before we were Christians, and so we need to actively take part in our own mind renewal, and we do. I think the best way to do that is through meditation and repetition, and so those are two huge things that I want to provide for you on this podcast, and they'll. The different episodes will have different topics that you can meditate on and if there's a particular area that's a struggle for you, that might be an episode you want to kind of bookmark and come back to again and again until it becomes something totally different, until your mind is renewed in that area. So for the meditation piece, I'm definitely gonna be drawing a lot on my psych background and some neuroscience. I know that there are certain types of music and even binaural beats and things that are especially effective at getting those in you, so you might notice some sound effects and some weird echoes and stuff. That is all very intentional in just helping you really focus in and really get these truths deep inside of you so you can see how kind of the psychology, the spiritual formation and the music production really kind of all come together in this podcast. That's the hope, anyway.

Michele: 10:45

Just a couple other notes. I do plan on having guests. I want to do guest interviews. So if you have requests, let me know. If you have connections or know people that you think would be a great guest, let me know. Make that connection. I really appreciate it.

Michele: 11:02

I'm also going to be answering questions, so if you have specific questions about any of the things that I mentioned in this episode, or if things come up in certain episodes and you're not sure about you can DM me and send me questions and I will answer them on the podcast. And lastly, my dream is to build a community around some of these things. So if you are someone who's interested in digging deeper and hanging out with other people around the world who are wanting to dig deeper into these things, stay tuned, because my dream is to build a community around all of this. So that's the podcast. I reserve the right to adapt and adjust as we go, but that's what it looks like so far and I'm super excited about it. I hope you are too. Thanks so much for listening to this episode and I'll see you on the next one.