Leaving a 25-year career and creating a life rooted in values
In the pleasure garden with Helen Svoboda-Barber
In the Pleasure Garden features monthly reflections from women solopreneurs about what nourishes them, from pleasure and self-care rituals to building businesses that sustain us rather than deplete us.
This month's Pleasure Garden interview is with Helen Svoboda-Barber, someone I think of as one of my fairy godmothers.
Helen came to an online summer retreat I hosted in 2020, and we've been part of each other's lives ever since. When I was wrestling with the decision to leave my career, she was my coach. One of her suggestions was to listen to discordant jazz as part of the process. It was unexpected and strangely perfect.
In this month's interview, Helen reflects on leaving a twenty-five-year career, creating a life rooted in her values, why she's become a devoted proponent of Epsom salt baths, and how a poem describing hope as "a sewer rat that bites you in the ass" has stayed with her through life's hardest transitions.
Can you share a glimpse into your world right now. What’s lighting you up these days?
I look around at my life and am stunned by the fact I've been able to create this life that I get to live! In my early 50s, I was 25 years into a stable career I assumed I'd stay in til retirement. But to my surprise, a difficult situation led me to set down that career, go back to school, and start my own businesses. I now fully live my values, work a reasonable number of hours, and invest deeply in my most meaningful relationships.
My schedule is spacious: I see Heal, Grow, Go: Mental Health and Wellness clients in my office three days a week, and I zoom with Cardboard Dog Coaching clients on those days plus one more.
I'm very active in Eno Commons Cohousing Community helping neighbors connect and support one another, and am involved with mutual aid with a sister who lives nearby. My husband and I are watching our young adult children embrace adulthood and are so pleased with the people they're becoming.
What lights me up these days are the people and the nature right in front of my face: the individual interactions; my favorite trees on my favorite path; the birdsong and bugs and beasties that change with the seasons.
What are three pleasurable words to describe yourself?
Enthusiastic, Light-hearted, Connecting.
Is there a book, podcast, or resource that has deeply influenced you?
Madeline L'Engle's series beginning with A Wrinkle in Time is a story I come back to again and again. Meg's family embraces the quirkiness of each member + the cosmic battle of good/evil + goodness winning when we invest and connect = an arc which gives me hope and strength.
Name a person, past or present, real or fictional, whom you admire and look up to.
I wish I had been able to meet and spend time with my great aunt Agnes Chase. She was born 100 years before me, and was an independent woman traveling the world and discovering hundreds of species of grass. She was well-respected in the scientific community and also a suffragette who chained herself to the White House fence as she worked for getting voting rights for women. She lived the life she wanted, and was a force to be reckoned with!
What are the first things you do every morning?
Look out the skylight above my bed and see what the day holds. Are the evergreen branches moving in the breeze? Any birds or squirrels frolicking? What are the clouds doing? I remind myself of the vastness of the world and its beauty and support. Then I begin my day.
Is there a ritual you could not live without in your day?
It's not an every day thing, but I've become a big proponent of epsom salt baths. Whether it's to support a sore body or help regulate a zippy nervous system or to tend to my calloused feet - drawing a bath is the answer. The rush of water, the pouring of the lavender epsom salt, the swishing as I mix them together, and then the deep settling in.
You hold so many roles — Episcopal priest, therapist, coach, retreat host, mother, partner, cohousing neighbor. What's the secret to wearing so many hats and actually enjoying them all?
Setting down the ones that don't fit! And knowing I have the power to mold the ones I continue to hold.
You work with grief, loss, and life's hardest transitions. How do you tend to your own pleasure and aliveness so you can keep doing this sacred work?
I adore spending time with my husband and our two young adults. I play board games with a neighbor a couple of times a week. I hike in a nearby state park not for exercise, but for reconnection with my forest family. I over-invest in keeping connected with long distance friends.
I ignore the enormity of the world, and embrace the joy of connecting with individuals.
The poem you feature on your therapy website describes hope as "a sewer rat that bites you in the ass." What does this mean to you personally?
I stumbled upon Caitlin Seida's fabulous poem while going through treatment for cancer, and have carried it with me ever since. Often in reality "hope" is not an easy thing to have. It's hard-won, and it's sometimes not pretty. When all the platitudes are stripped away, when control is lost - that's when this sewer rat of hope shows up. That mangey rat has seen some shit, and it's still there. Just like my hope.
Microscopic Pleasures
I’d love for you to share about microscopic pleasures that you have recently experienced:
A taste: Warm, ripe peach with furry skin and juice dripping down my arm
A sound: A birdcall, 3 miles from home, that I'd never heard before
A sight: My son and husband leaving for a bike ride together on Father's Day morning
A smell: The healing oil I often apply before working with clients
A touch: Hugging a neighbor who is not yet ready for his wife's upcoming death. (It's the support he needed – and a holy pleasure to be able to offer it.)
More about Helen Svoboda-Barber
Helen spent 25 years leading congregations as an Episcopal priest. She's been offering leadership coaching since 2020 and began a new career as mental health therapist in 2023. She and her husband live in Eno Commons Cohousing in Durham, NC and they've launched 2 kids from there. You can look at the stuff she's done on her CV on LinkedIn, but what matters to her is the relationships she tends.
Find her at: Heal, Grow, Go: Mental Health and Wellness and Cardboard Dog Coaching
