117 ~ How Generational Shifts Created New Possibilities for Women

A tour through GraceLand in Nashville was created to be a fun excursion. But became something much bigger: a clear view of how much has changed; and how much we take for granted when it comes to voice, rights, and real creative freedom. 

Standing where Elvis needed producers, radio slots, and physical pressings to be heard, we realized we can open a laptop, hit record, and publish without permission. That contrast sparked a conversation about gratitude, responsibility, and the quiet privileges woven into everyday life.

Episode Highlights:
• contrast between legacy music gatekeepers and today’s creator tools
• creative control as modern privilege and responsibility
• women’s financial and legal milestones expanding choice
• tradeoffs of single vs double income households
• self‑actualization across generations and parenting timelines
• regulating the nervous system to make clear choices
• celebrating small wins as daily practice
• reframing success markers around alignment

Chapters

• 1:47 Nashville Trip And Graceland Impressions
• 3:10 Sun Studio Tech And Old Gatekeepers
• 4:45 Realizing Modern Creative Privilege
• 6:25 Our “Red Tape” And Inner Work
• 9:10 Women’s Financial And Legal Milestones
• 12:45 Choices Across Generations
• 16:20 Self‑Actualization, Motherhood, And Careers
• 20:40 Tradeoffs Of Single Vs Double Income
• 23:10 Empowered Choice And Parenting Evolution
• 26:15 Celebrating Small Wins Over Big Milestones

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:07

Welcome to Desire is Medicine. We are two very different women living a life led by desire, inviting you into our world.

SPEAKER_00: 0:16

I'm Brenda. I'm a devoted practitioner to being my fully expressed true self in my daily life, motherhood, relationships, and my business. Desire has taken me on quite a ride, and every day I practice listening to and following the voice within. I'm a middle school teacher, turned coach and guide of the feminine.

SPEAKER_01: 0:36

And I'm Catherine, devoted to living my life as the truest and hopefully the highest version of me. I don't have children, I've never been married, I've spent equal parts of my life in corporate as in some down and low shady spaces. I was the epitome of Tired and Wired, and my path led me to explore desire. I'm a coach, guide, energy worker, and a forever student.

SPEAKER_00: 0:58

Even after decades of inner work, we are humble beginners, on the mat, still exploring, always curious. We believe that listening to and following the nudge of desire is a deep spiritual practice that helps us grow.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12

On the Desire as Medicine podcast, we talk to each other, we interview people we know and love about the practice of desire, bringing in a very important piece that is often overlooked. Being responsible for our desire. So happy to be back with the lovely Brenda. Today is a special. Well, they're all special, but today's a special podcast. I'm just giggling because I'm sure I say they're all special. I recently went on a trip to Nashville. I had a workshop, and one of my coaches gave me a challenge of just learning how to have a little bit more fun in my life. So I took some time and figured out what do I want to do in Nashville? I've never been there before. And it took a second, for sure, to decide what I was going to do. I did a little research. I asked some friends, people that have been to Nashville, where should I, where should I go for sure? Like, where should I go? One of the things on my agenda was I took a trip to Memphis for the day. I went to go to Graceland, Elvis' mansion. It was the first time I ever got to see inside somebody's home how they lived. It was a super cool experience as a creator walking through the house. I was so impressed by what his ex-wife created, like what Priscilla created. We had these iPads, they had headsets, and you could walk through the house, get a 360 view on your iPad while also having an audio tour of the place. And it would pause at the end, assuming it's going to take you some time to go into the next room, and you would kind of go little by little. Took me about an hour and 15 minutes to get through the house. It was the first time I got to see to walk through somebody's private plane. I had never done that before. That was really fascinating. He had two different private planes, one of them he used on tour. I think the other one was more for family. And after that, I go to Zen Studios. And this whole time, I mean, I'm not a huge music fan. I love me, I do love music and I listen to all different kinds of music. I am of Hispanic descent. So I listen to Saliza music. I listen to Latin music. That's what I grew up listening to. But I can't say that I have this favorite artist that sings this particular song. Or for the most part, I listen to podcasts. I listen to books on audio. Like that's how I spend my time. My maybe as a teenager or in my early 20s, when I went clubbing and things like that, I was more into music. Now it's not such a it's not not so in the front of my life. But I get to some studios, and I'm taken back by all of the gadgetry, like all the gadgets, the different speakers and the different instruments, and how big the rooms were to record and the padding on all the walls. And they're talking about on the tours, about Johnny Cash and Elvis and all these other artists, and how hard it was to, I think they had to press their music onto CDs to get other people to listen. And you'd have to have somebody that someone that would be willing to play you on the radio, and what that whole system was like. And I paused and was really overtaken. And I want to share this. Brenda's also hearing this for the first time right now. I want to share how privileged I got to feel in that moment. Like while Brenda and I have over a hundred episodes on a podcast, and we didn't have a pimp like Elvis did. We don't have a Mr. Carnival. We don't have anybody pulling the strings. Like we get to literally talk about desire. We have a mic that we each have a mic that sits on our desk. We have software that sits inside of a computer. We don't have anybody as a barrier for what we want to post. We just get together, record, and upload. And it's that simple. We don't have any red tape in front of us to do the thing that we get to do. And I'm just so moved by that. Like the fact that wow, we have this body of work that was created, and we didn't have to pass anyone's test. So what comes up for you thus far, Brenda?

SPEAKER_00: 6:02

I love your passion around this. I love that you went somewhere following your intuition to have some fun. And it sounds like you were taken aback by something that you didn't expect. Like you thought you were just going to Graceland to have a great time and check out Elvis' home, which is really cool, and check out his private plane. And you're like, whoa, oh my God, look at how he used to record. And look at how we record. And you had this big wave of gratitude come across you. And that feels so good. And I can really tap into that because we really do have creative control. You know, we get to show up when we want, plug our mics into the wall, travel with them. I traveled across country last winter with my mic. I recorded in Colorado, in Asheville, I c recorded in California. And there's a lot of privilege in that. Like to get to live our lives the way we do, as opposed to what you're saying, that Elvis had somebody who produced for him, somebody scheduled. He had to go to a recording studio, and there were all these pieces that had to be done to get his music out. And we just get to record and publish. I mean, there's so much more to it. I have so much more to say about that because we have different kinds of red tape.

SPEAKER_01: 7:39

We have different kinds of red tape, but the part that became very clear to me. So I'll pause here for a second. When I think about our red tape, it's like, okay, we have a podcast, we talk about things that are near and dear hearts. We talk about personal growth. We talk about desire. Our education in this arena didn't come easy. That may be part of the red tape, right? It took some time to learn and to pass through our own cauldrons, our own fire to get here and to have to be in a place to be able to share wisdom, right? We're coming to you, yes, after X. I mean, I've been coaching since 2010, about after X amount of years of coaching, X amount of clients, like this whole thing. And it could easily say, I'm not privileged, I'm not part of the 1%, or I'm not privileged, I'm not a white male, I'm not privileged. Like we could, and it was a moment in time where I got to pause and say, Oh wow, I I do see this privilege. I do see privilege in us that we've been able to manage our nervous system enough and our finances enough to be able to have the education that we have. Right? That's a privilege. It's a privilege that it wasn't even available in our time. I'm assuming there was a time where this wasn't available, this school of thought wasn't available, this self-reflection wasn't available. We can definitely do more in community than we can alone. So that's a privilege. Being able to record with you is a privilege. I really got to feel that. And even deeper than that, it's like 2025. I think the year I was born in 74 was the first time that a woman could have a credit card without having a man sign. Like in my lifetime, I'm able to have my own credit card, open my own bank account, buy property, not have to get married, not not have to have children, and record a podcast. And it doesn't have to be a number one podcast in its field. Like I get to just record and share the insights that I have.

SPEAKER_00: 10:00

That's really beautiful. What what would you say the gifts are in your life that you get to do this with me?

SPEAKER_01: 10:10

I think everything that I've mentioned, if we were born in the 40s, we couldn't do it. How crazy is that? Just if we would have been born just two decades prior, that would make me instead of 51, 71. And I don't know if this is what I'd be wanting to do at 71.

SPEAKER_00: 10:31

It's not that long ago. It's like our it's like our mothers and our grandmothers generation who really didn't have the choices that we have. It's pretty incredible that we get to do what we really want to do. I mean, we are a desire podcast, and we say it in the intro, we're on the mat, following desire, curious, trusting. There's no answers. We don't, we don't have anything solved. We're both on our own journey. And we get to do that. That is quite a privilege to be able to follow our true heart's desire in that way.

SPEAKER_01: 11:11

Yeah, I don't know what my true heart's desire would have been if I was born in the 40s. But I do know that if there is a woman that was born in the 40s that wanted to buy her own home, that wanted to go to school, that wanted like all these things wouldn't have been a thing of that time. And when I sort of zoom out to my experience, I was thinking, okay, I went to Graceland and I had this experience. I went to the Sun Studios and I had this experience. And I feel really grateful for having had that experience. And where else in my life can I not see the privilege? Because I'm so used to looking at what I want and what's not here, right? Like, how do we get the next thing bigger, badder, better? And I think being tapped into what's already working is a privilege. Or maybe I want to rephrase that. It's not that being able to tap into what's already working is a privilege. I think being able to tap into what's already working really provides a perspective shift where we can potentially see gifts that we couldn't see before.

SPEAKER_00: 12:24

Yeah, thank you. It's a great lens to really expand your own mind and say, well, what am I not able to see? And you're really pointing to a lot of gratitude, is what it feels like in my body. Like a lot of gratitude to get to live this life, to get to on a Wednesday afternoon, which is what this is, record. And we have complete creative control. And you get to follow your path of being a coach and how you make money and how you live and make your own schedule. I mean, that wasn't available to women in the past.

SPEAKER_01: 13:06

It wasn't available to women in the past. You're right. It wasn't, I mean, entrepreneurship really wasn't available in the past. I'm thinking about another tour that I took in Nashville, the Raymond Auditorium, which is when we're like they part show, part temple, part church. And when her husband, Raymond Ry Rayman, passed, she took it over and she had to sort of sell herself to the board because she was a woman. That's not really what women did back then. She was able to do it. And I'm sure arguments can be made. He was a really, really wealthy man. That's why he even had the auditorium. That's why that was even part of their portfolio, let's call it. So I'm looking at how we as women have things. And this is something that I try to tap into often that we didn't have at a particular time in the past. I mean, just yesterday was voting day. Many generations of women before us couldn't do that in the United States. Like we had to defer to the man in our lives for our safety, our security.

SPEAKER_00: 14:30

It's really true. It's quite intense to think about it, that that wasn't really that long ago. I just saw this thing on Instagram about this doctor, Dr. James Barry, who was actually a woman. So I think for like in the 1800s, for like 40 years, she practiced medicine as Dr. James Barry, but her name was actually Margaret Ann Bulkley. How cool is that? I saw a photo on the Instagram reel, and she was just dressed in a suit, and she actually cleaned up a lot of conditions in hospitals. Like she saw where things weren't clean and she totally up-leveled conditions in hospitals. But she couldn't just do that as her own self. Like she dressed as a man every day for 40 years. That's incredible. I mean, there's so many stories like that. You know, women couldn't have credit cards, they couldn't own a house. If you were a single mother, it was really hard to get housing, not that long ago. And there's always been women who have gone out of the box. You know, there's always been women who have done incredible things and defied the odds. God bless them, the ones that came before us. It's really true. It's pretty incredible the amount of courage that they had to have. Like I just think of someone like Harriet Tubman creating the Underground Railroad, getting people out of slavery. My goodness. That's incredible what she must have gone gone through to have the nervous system and the capacity and the selflessness. And she would go back and forth. I don't know how many people she saved, but it's quite tremendous.

SPEAKER_01: 16:18

That's kind of what I'm pointing to on today's recording. Just the places where we potentially have privilege and it doesn't feel like it, right? And I think if I were to think hard enough, I would assume that the generations that come next are gonna have even more privilege, so on and so forth. Because there's so much available. I mean, yeah. Just look at AI right now. I remember encyclopedias.

SPEAKER_00: 16:48

Oh my god, encyclopedias. I remember that. What comes to mind for me is the age of women having children these days. I mean, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, even my mother, they gave birth at like 20, 19 to 22 years old. That was like the age where women had children. And if you didn't have children by that time, something was wrong with you. And by 25 or 30, you were just an old mate. And my mother had me, I think she was 22. I was 26 when I had my daughter and 29. And now my daughter's 30 and she doesn't have children yet. And she has that privilege. And I look at how, oh, even I added six years on, I went to college. My mother didn't go to college, my grandmother didn't go to college. My father's mother went to college. But this is so interesting. As soon as she got married, she quit her job. I'm sorry, not her job. She quit college. And there was no reason. But that was what it was expected of women at the time. She got married, she stopped going to college, and she was brilliant. And so I was really the first woman to go to college in my family. And so I gave birth at 26, which was quite different than the women before me. And now my daughter is 30, my son is 28. They're both not parents. And they're really have the opportunity in their 20s to self-actualize more. And I watch my daughter work through a lot of her relationship patterns and go through many relationship iterations that she watched her dad and I go through, which ultimately ended in our divorce. She went through all of those things. She cleaned it all up, and now she's in a beautiful relationship. Of course, that opportunity was always there. I know other people my age who spent their 20s in relationships, living in Hoboken, having a great time in their lives. I chose to get married. That's kind of what my lineage calling was. I didn't really think of anything else to do. I never thought of self-actualizing in my 20s. No, I was started doing that when I was in my 40s. But that's really cool. It's a lot of privilege in the generations for that to evolve.

SPEAKER_01: 19:11

It is. I and I love that the youth now has a chance to decide. Do I want to be a young parent? Do I want to be an older parent? Do I want to self-actualize in my 20s, in my 40s? Pretty much it's all game. Like it doesn't, one isn't necessarily better than the other. But I think what we are talking about is that the fact that that choice is even there. Like when you talk about one of your grandmothers who just quit college because, well, that's what they did. Now someone would have the opportunity to decide. And I do think that in that arena of family and money and school and work, there are other factors now at play because of our own consumerism and that it's very hard, I think, to hold a household as a single income. I think a single income family really has to budget in a way that double income family doesn't have to do. But a single-income family with children has the opportunity to raise their kids in a way that double income families don't necessarily have. It's there's really so much more choice now.

SPEAKER_00: 20:25

And with the choices come new problems, new awarenesses. And you can really see that too. I mean, two working parents, just to jam a little bit on what you were talking about, double income home, that's what I had. And it was a privilege. Like that was a privilege for me. Like I went to college, I became a teacher, I got my master's degree. That was really cool. I'm really proud of that. And working all those years while I was pregnant and having children was really hard, which has created a different path. And now I see a lot of younger women, a lot of moms in their 30s choosing to stay home. Like they have the next evolution, which is really cool. Like they have the college degree, they have the education, the self-actualization, and they're still choosing to stay home. It's like the next level of empowered choice. I mean, we were from the 80s, where, you know, it was like we were supposed to work. You know, that was where we were at the time. And we put our shoulder pads on and we went to work so we could look like men because we could do it like men and we could work. And that was a privilege at the time. And it's part of the evolution. And I don't know where it will end, but there's there's like something new happening right now, which is really cool, which is more self-actualized women becoming mothers, which really raises the entire vibration of the children that they're raising. Because I have no idea about the nervous system or regulating my emotions or saying my true yes and no, asking for what I wanted. Like I was riding on fumes and luck and also joy, you know, but it all, of course, came crashing down.

SPEAKER_01: 22:22

It's so funny. But it's true. There's always iterations and there's always change. And the biggest thing I wanted to share with that story from Nashville in Memphis is that I got to pause and say, oh, what can I really be grateful for? And but that wasn't necessarily a question. It was like, oh, this is what I'm experiencing. And how cool is this to see this area where I have a certain amount of privilege that I didn't recognize it as privilege. Mostly because I think when we celebrate, we we tend to want to celebrate big wins, right? Not, oh, I'm celebrating because I feel this privilege, even as we try to figure this thing out, this podcast thing out. Like, how crazy is that? We have oh, we're a hundred plus podcasts in and we're still figuring it out. Like you said it earlier, we're on the mat. There's no answer to that, but I think I definitely come from oh, we celebrate when we hit a big milestone. And this was a reminder that we can actually celebrate the privileges that we have, even if it's not accompanied with by a metal.

SPEAKER_00: 23:35

Amen. And we get to really pause each day and look at where are we going in our life? And it does take time. It change takes time. We talk about that a lot, and it's really true, right? And we're not only looking at huge successes like giant markers on the calendar, but every day, every moment that you choose something that's really in alignment for yourself and your values is a win. So, yeah, there's the big wins that are wonderful and they're great to hit, right? You want a certain amount of money in your bank account, you want to get that job, or even land the interview, you want your article to be published in a magazine, which I guess these days with the internet isn't that hard anymore. And everyone could self-publish, but you want to hit these markers. You want to lose a certain amount of weight, or you want to have a certain desire, whatever it is that you want. Every micro decision that you make towards that is a win. And that's a privilege and something that we're able to really focus on today. Where I don't know if they thought about that in the past. Who knows? Maybe they did, right? Probably, I'm guessing, women are are extremely wise. I bet the mothers and the women were telling each other, hey, you did a great job today. That's a win in whatever version they they did it. It is a privilege to get to look at that every day and take the pressure off. Taking the pressure off is a privilege. And it's a choice. It's a choice every day, every day, to not put the pressure on yourself and to say, okay, I just use food as as an example. I ate way too much for dinner last night and I felt really sick. And today I made a better choice. That's a win. Amen.

SPEAKER_01: 25:38

Amen for the little wins.

SPEAKER_00: 25:39

I like food examples.

SPEAKER_01: 25:41

I think I want to definitely just have our listeners uh and ourselves. Like, let's see if we can take a moment to just reflect on where we do have privilege. Like, where can we be grateful? Whether it's because we're doing the work, or maybe it's that you're able to do something, we're able to do something because it's 2025 and it wasn't possible in 1960, 70. Where are there things that things and places where we can engage? I mean, even thinking about just divorce. Like there was a time when that didn't even happen. I think people can get annulments now. That wasn't part of the landscape at one point in time. It was like you're married till death do you part, or you're doing X, Y, or Z until. And now we have so much choice. And yes, choice does come with responsibility. We also have the real true need for more capacity to be with discomfort. The more choices we have, the more possibilities there are. And I think self-doubt pops up. Is this the right thing? Right? Like, or or a fra or that can be phrased differently in our own minds, but a version of am I doing the right thing? And I just want to encourage all of us to feel into where, if any, is the privilege here? What can I be grateful for? It's not always about the big win. So may we all get to celebrate all the little wins along the way. Thank you so much for listening. That's a wrap for now. And if you liked the episode, as always, please share, rate, comment, let us know what landed for you. We'd love to hear from you.

SPEAKER_00: 27:58

Thank you for joining us on the Desire is Medicine podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 28:02

Desire invites us to be honest, loving, and deeply intimate with ourselves and others. You can find our handles in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.