Take a deep breath in through your nose. Holds it.

Take a deep breath in through your nose. Holds it.

Now, release slowly again deep in haale hold release, repeating internally to yourself as you connect to my voice. I am deeply well. I am deeply well.

Now, release slowly again deep in haale hold release, repeating internally to yourself as you connect to my voice. I am deeply well. I am deeply well.

I am deeply wow. I'm Debbie Brown and this is the Deeply Well podcast.

I am deeply wow. I'm Debbie Brown and this is the Deeply Well podcast.

Welcome to another episode. Welcome back to the show. Of course, I'm Debbie Brown. Shout out to everybody watching on YouTube and listening in their cars and your phones however you listen to podcasts.

Welcome to another episode. Welcome back to the show. Of course, I'm Debbie Brown. Shout out to everybody watching on YouTube and listening in their cars and your phones however you listen to podcasts.

Oh, y'all, it has been a month.

Oh, y'all, it has been a month.

It has been a crazy last few weeks. This episode, I want to check in with everyone and kind of talk about some of the thoughts and the themes and the things that are expanding and growing in my life and the world hopefully in your life and in your hearts. One thing, and this is just very random, but the last few years really, since the pandemic, I want to say, so like five years ago, I kind of like stopped wearing makeup and doing my hair and I've just yeah, I've been very happily in my like you know, just like normal ordinary self. But I'm on a press run that has officially kicked off from my book, and so like I'm getting my makeup done and like getting my hair done and things like that, and it is just funny. It's it's I don't know if this makes sense for anyone, but it's been an interesting experience for me, having come from previously being in an industry that kind of demanded that from me every day to then being able to experience my life not connected to that whatsoever. And that's more who I am. I never really kind of like Saten, did my makeup, though I wish growing up I knew how to. And I never really sat and did my hair a bunch, though I wish I had known how to. And so it's just funny, like right now, I feel like I am fully embodying two kind of different sides of like who I am and how I move and how I feel. And it's been really interesting after spending so many years disconnecting myself intentionally and purposefully kind of from the world or from you know, certain aspects of being seen, and to now because I have a book out that I really want you to read that I think you'll love, and I think it'll be meaningful for you. You know, you kind of got to like turn those things on. So it's been interesting. My background, as I'm sure you know if you listen to this show, was spending many, many, many, many many years in broadcasting, and so I honed a lot of great technical ability to like speak and project my voice and host. And then when I moved into this evolution of my purpose years ago, I had to spend time coming down from my training to be able to talk like myself again, because you get so used to kind of whatever the performance is with your work, right, Like you know how sometimes you have to answer the phone a certain way at work or speak to people in a certain way. When you're in broadcasting, it's all about not having even a second of silence, and then like yeah, just being like very up, very fast, very succinct, you know, like word economy, saying as much as you can with as few words and doing it quickly. And so I had to really come down from that style of speaking after doing it for so many years and be in kind of practice with like how can I continue to do this work like with a microphone in front of me, but do it as the private version of myself that's not on display. So that was a really kind of interesting part of my journey, and it's just kind of funny, how, you know, every I've noticed every few years, the cyclical nature of our lives is that you know, things become full circle and are brought back in front of you, and you know, you kind of get to get to notice them and see them, be them, taste them, do them, but now from kind of an expanded view and as like a different version. So that has been interesting and fun. This week, I officially kicked off a lot of my press.

It has been a crazy last few weeks. This episode, I want to check in with everyone and kind of talk about some of the thoughts and the themes and the things that are expanding and growing in my life and the world hopefully in your life and in your hearts. One thing, and this is just very random, but the last few years really, since the pandemic, I want to say, so like five years ago, I kind of like stopped wearing makeup and doing my hair and I've just yeah, I've been very happily in my like you know, just like normal ordinary self. But I'm on a press run that has officially kicked off from my book, and so like I'm getting my makeup done and like getting my hair done and things like that, and it is just funny. It's it's I don't know if this makes sense for anyone, but it's been an interesting experience for me, having come from previously being in an industry that kind of demanded that from me every day to then being able to experience my life not connected to that whatsoever. And that's more who I am. I never really kind of like Saten, did my makeup, though I wish growing up I knew how to. And I never really sat and did my hair a bunch, though I wish I had known how to. And so it's just funny, like right now, I feel like I am fully embodying two kind of different sides of like who I am and how I move and how I feel. And it's been really interesting after spending so many years disconnecting myself intentionally and purposefully kind of from the world or from you know, certain aspects of being seen, and to now because I have a book out that I really want you to read that I think you'll love, and I think it'll be meaningful for you. You know, you kind of got to like turn those things on. So it's been interesting. My background, as I'm sure you know if you listen to this show, was spending many, many, many, many many years in broadcasting, and so I honed a lot of great technical ability to like speak and project my voice and host. And then when I moved into this evolution of my purpose years ago, I had to spend time coming down from my training to be able to talk like myself again, because you get so used to kind of whatever the performance is with your work, right, Like you know how sometimes you have to answer the phone a certain way at work or speak to people in a certain way. When you're in broadcasting, it's all about not having even a second of silence, and then like yeah, just being like very up, very fast, very succinct, you know, like word economy, saying as much as you can with as few words and doing it quickly. And so I had to really come down from that style of speaking after doing it for so many years and be in kind of practice with like how can I continue to do this work like with a microphone in front of me, but do it as the private version of myself that's not on display. So that was a really kind of interesting part of my journey, and it's just kind of funny, how, you know, every I've noticed every few years, the cyclical nature of our lives is that you know, things become full circle and are brought back in front of you, and you know, you kind of get to get to notice them and see them, be them, taste them, do them, but now from kind of an expanded view and as like a different version. So that has been interesting and fun. This week, I officially kicked off a lot of my press.

For the book Living.

For the book Living.

In Wisdom, A Path to Embodying your Authentic Self and Breathing grief and developing self mastery. I cannot wait for y'all to get this book. It's out April twenty second, so very very soon from right now, and I want to share a little bit about what this process has been in case there's anyone listening that is also birthing something, feels a desired to create, something to be birthed, or has recently birthed something. This creative process is just so fascinating. And I think even though writing a book is something I've done before, and kind of speaking about a book or speaking about myself is something I've done before, these last few years, I have just really, really really enjoyed not forming a lot of opinions about things, and I have really enjoyed like surrendering to even though I you know, I've been doing my work and doing this podcast and all the things, just like really surrendering to my personal life more and being in harmony with that life and really feeling the value of that life so much more. And then it's like when you do something that you know you feel called to do and create, and you also have to give it the honor and respect it deserves by like marketing it, you know, or like talking about it or being with it. I'm having this like very interesting experience right now. But it's been really fun. It's been really fun to talk about the book. It's it's also been to be quite honest, like very emotional to talk about the book. I don't know when you'll hear this episode, but for me right now, in this moment, I am still a week and a half out from anybody reading it, and almost no one in my life has read it so far. I think maybe I let two friends read it, and a couple people in regards to work have read it. But yeah, I am at this moment, a week and a half out of having something really close to me and really tender to me and really personal to me. In this book, I share a lot about my life and my process, and you know, speaking to the work in a very personal way, not as abstract. Right. What you may kind of notice is a lot of the guests I choose to have on this show are people that have done work or whose work represents work that I've already done on myself. So, for instance, if I have someone on this show who specializes in inner child healing, my desire to have them on this show really stems from the fact that I spent many, many years, and actually did a program that lasted three years in healing my own inner child, and in getting really intimate and close with my original wounds and understanding how generational trauma moves and how it moved in my life, and how it moved in my body, and how you know, so much of my chronic pain was because of my experiences, and so I share those stories in this book. Or you know, if I've had someone on this show to share about psychedelics, I don't necessarily center myself in the conversation because I want everyone listening to glean the wisdom and hear the life experiences of the person I'm in conversation with. But I spent several years doing a lot of different kinds of psychedelics and found them to be really powerful for my healing and especially for some of those deeper layers of my subconscious work that I needed to do on myself as someone that experienced childhood trauma and also many different forms of trauma, you know, all the way through many decades of my life. And so you know, when I have astrologers on the show, it's because I'm obsessed. When I have a numerologist on the show, it's because I, you know, started working with my own numerology years ago, or shamans or healers.

In Wisdom, A Path to Embodying your Authentic Self and Breathing grief and developing self mastery. I cannot wait for y'all to get this book. It's out April twenty second, so very very soon from right now, and I want to share a little bit about what this process has been in case there's anyone listening that is also birthing something, feels a desired to create, something to be birthed, or has recently birthed something. This creative process is just so fascinating. And I think even though writing a book is something I've done before, and kind of speaking about a book or speaking about myself is something I've done before, these last few years, I have just really, really really enjoyed not forming a lot of opinions about things, and I have really enjoyed like surrendering to even though I you know, I've been doing my work and doing this podcast and all the things, just like really surrendering to my personal life more and being in harmony with that life and really feeling the value of that life so much more. And then it's like when you do something that you know you feel called to do and create, and you also have to give it the honor and respect it deserves by like marketing it, you know, or like talking about it or being with it. I'm having this like very interesting experience right now. But it's been really fun. It's been really fun to talk about the book. It's it's also been to be quite honest, like very emotional to talk about the book. I don't know when you'll hear this episode, but for me right now, in this moment, I am still a week and a half out from anybody reading it, and almost no one in my life has read it so far. I think maybe I let two friends read it, and a couple people in regards to work have read it. But yeah, I am at this moment, a week and a half out of having something really close to me and really tender to me and really personal to me. In this book, I share a lot about my life and my process, and you know, speaking to the work in a very personal way, not as abstract. Right. What you may kind of notice is a lot of the guests I choose to have on this show are people that have done work or whose work represents work that I've already done on myself. So, for instance, if I have someone on this show who specializes in inner child healing, my desire to have them on this show really stems from the fact that I spent many, many years, and actually did a program that lasted three years in healing my own inner child, and in getting really intimate and close with my original wounds and understanding how generational trauma moves and how it moved in my life, and how it moved in my body, and how you know, so much of my chronic pain was because of my experiences, and so I share those stories in this book. Or you know, if I've had someone on this show to share about psychedelics, I don't necessarily center myself in the conversation because I want everyone listening to glean the wisdom and hear the life experiences of the person I'm in conversation with. But I spent several years doing a lot of different kinds of psychedelics and found them to be really powerful for my healing and especially for some of those deeper layers of my subconscious work that I needed to do on myself as someone that experienced childhood trauma and also many different forms of trauma, you know, all the way through many decades of my life. And so you know, when I have astrologers on the show, it's because I'm obsessed. When I have a numerologist on the show, it's because I, you know, started working with my own numerology years ago, or shamans or healers.

You know.

You know.

My desire is to amplify the work of people who do and work in these different modalities at an incredibly integrious level, and to amplify what they do and their expertise. But I usually feature them because I am years removed from having done a lot of those processes and work on myself. And so what is going to be different about this book is whereas on this deeply wall show, I do give glimpses into my own life, and I do give you know, reflections about my lived experience. But my desire on this show is not to have a podcast about myself, to be quite honest, It's not to have a podcast about all the things that I'm trying and doing. And so many of those shows exist, and that's one of the reasons I don't do that, because I think, if that is how you best learn and receive, I think a lot of shows do that really beautifully. But I'm someone that likes to you know, I believe in keeping your personal mystery. I believe in keeping the magic of your life kind of to yourself so that it further informs and enhances and grows the work you're able to do and your connection to God. But in this book, I really explore a lot of that personal side of what are some of the specific themes of pain I've been through, what are some of the challenges I've been through as a child, as a young person, as a woman, as a mother, And what are some of the ways that I look to heal those things within myself? You know, And I believe personally I meant to teach in a path of wisdom which means I may not share immediately something that has happened or something I've done. I usually will share it many years removed, after I've let myself settle into the learning and the healing, open to the continued work, because we're going to continue to do work our whole lives and have ideally really been able to kind of integrate and embody the other side of the healing, come into the wisdom of it. And so yeah, when I do this show, you know, my desire when I have some of these just beautiful guests on who all have powerful work and beautiful life stories and usually a lot of challenges like myself and like many of the people who listen and learn on this show, my desire is to deeply empathize with their experience. I may not be necessarily hearing anything new, right because I am a teacher, and I am a lifelong learner, and I am my own open and divine, sovereign channel to the divine, and so you know, my desire is to really just ask important questions that are useful. It's to have deep empathy for whoever is in front of me. You know, I'm a deep fealer, as I know many of you are. But part of the way God uses me and uses me as a healer is to also reflect and mirror, you know, the truth of pain and also the beauty and pain. I'm a wounded healer. I'm someone that has had hard things happen and God has allowed me to keep my heart open anyways and then use those experiences and use the presence that I've honed to be near darkness in service to others and ideally in service to everyone listening to this show. So it's you know, one thing that I think is really special about this book is in this book, I share my stories in this book, I share my overcomings. In this book, I let you know some just to pequk right, just a taste, because, as I say on this show often and a lot and in a lot of the positioning of the show, I design this show to be specifically for people that have had complex lived experiences, that have had a lot of different run ins with so many different kinds of traumas or so many just different kinds of challenges, whether that is a big tea or little t trauma. Because that is exactly what my life path has been and what I have been allowed to learn through and grow through and heal through and continue to heal through because the work is never done. But my life's path has taken me all over and I have studied so much. I have done many certifications and so many different hosts of healing modalities, and have had the pleasure to be in practice with my learning and with my expertise and with the modalities that I use and do for many many years with clients, with myself. And that's what this book is about. It's my stories, it's observation stories of working with clients. It's things that I have experienced and seen and learned from as a healer, working in the world like an actual healer, doing some of the deeper work with people in some more challenging ways, and from having you know, hosted many, many, many retreats with thousands of people all over the world. And I'm not an Instagram girly, so to be quite honest, I don't post every event I do. For every ten events that I go to, I might post one thing. For every ten retreats that I host or five companies that I've worked with, I might post one thing, and it might even be a year later. That's just my cadence. That's just how I flow with social media. But you know, that is the foundation of who I am and the work that I do and the work that I share, and my style of teaching is really about leaning into knowledge and less about kind of my personal, individualized experience with things I never want to come in this space and trauma dump. I had a very vulnerable episode recently where I opened up and I shared that part of my journey was for many years suffering from chronic pain and autoimmune and part of my connection to God and my connection to my own healing was learning the ways to heal myself from the pain and doing many, many, many years of studying research around what creates chronic conditions in the human body. And so though I haven't done this on this show yet, some of the work that I do, and actually a workshop that I taught this week over the last several years, is a lot of my in person and workshops and in person retreats are actually about inner child healing, and they're actually centered and rooted in understanding what chronic pain is. Because out of the stats of chronic pain and it affects hundreds of millions of people, alive eighty percent or women and seventy percent or Black women. A lot of that has to do with epigenetics. A lot of that has to do with what we now know and say is the issues being and the tissues or the body keeping the score. But these are things that sometimes end up in your body and your activated genes because of things that happen to you, because of work you've been avoiding, because of trapped energy and emotions, and some of it is just things we inherited within our DNA because our mothers, our grandmothers, our ancestors were traumatized people, and a lot of that becomes compounded into our own physical, lived experience. That is really the crux of what my day to day work is. When I'm not doing this podcast. That is the work that I do with one on one clients wellness and well being and teaching some of the deeper complex layers of how to get into the crevices of our healing and how to do it consistently. Is the work that I do in the workshops that I teach and the retreats that I lead. So it's always a pleasure to be in service to people in that way. Deeply well, when I host this show, I really love speaking to it from a community standpoint where I invite other people in to share their work and to share their process. And there are so many of us, so many of us, hundreds of thousands on this planet right now doing the work of the soul. And I think when you are fortunate enough to be diligent in your own healing so that you're actually able to get on the other side of it. You know something that I may have forgotten to mention in the last episode because I was really shout out to my sling if you're watching on YouTube, I was really inspired to talk about pain last week and to share some of my journey, but to talk about the new things I was learning having had this surgery. And I was really excited to have this surgery because this was an injury that I first came into five years ago, when I was in some of the deeper throes of the work that I was called to do on myself. I spent many years in all kinds of therapies, from cognitive therapy to somatic therapy. I have worked with some of the most incredible healers on the planet to do some of my deeper work, and then I've just been in deep co creation with God on the work that I need to do, you know, spending hours meditating a day, spending hours in reflection and personal process, and then also working within community environments, working with groups, doing some group therapy again, working with psychedelics, doing pleasure work within myself and within my path. And you know, this work of higher consciousness, it is a never ending work. You are never you know, unless perhaps your path is to become Buddha like or the Buddha, you know, you're never not going to be oscillating between it. And if you're a highly sensitive person, even if you have cleared a lot of your own personal story and pain out of your body. And that is my hope for everyone, because when I look back to the kind of pain I carried physically ten years ago versus what I experience now, oh my god, it's just night and day. You know, I may have a flara a couple times a year, because that's the biology of the human experience, and it usually comes after I have kind of over exhausted myself in the work. Either I led too many retreats back to back to too many speaking engagements, were around too many large bodies of people. Sometimes with my work, I find myself kind of in groups that can be up to five hundred, sometimes up to one thousand. The nature of that, as a highly sensitive, energetic person means that even when I do all the protection rituals on myself, even when I cover myself in healing, I may pick up some stray energy. I may pick up, you know, some other things that can you know, make my body tired and wipe my body out. It's the nature of energy, and so a few times a year that does happen to me. But truly I have found for me personally, the more healing work I have allowed myself to do on myself, and the deeper I'm able to go with that work, It's changed my relationship with my body. I used to have ninety percent inflammation. So it's like if I had stress, or if I had an experience of having a reaction to my complex trauma. Sometimes it felt like I could put on twenty thirty pounds in a day and it would just be inflammation. And so that part of my life has changed dramatically. The fog in my brain has changed, the tension and the pain in my back and my body. It's just it's just changed in such a revolutionary way that I am so grateful for. But when I share certain parts of my story, you know, it's really to be in community with those I know may have a similar path and didn't always have the language for it, or didn't always have someone in front of them that was able to speak to the complexity or the new wants of what that experience is. So I just, first I want to say thank you to everybody that was present. I know I'm kind of going all over the place, but everybody that was really present with that episode last week, because I received so many messages from people that they've had a similar path, or this gave them the language, or this gave them a starting point within which to begin their journey to understand why their bodies may or may not feel the way that they do. And so I'm just really grateful for the presence for last week's episode, even if it was triggering for some of you. But the work is never done, and if your work did include chronic pain, also have a lot of grace for yourself because there will be some kinds of people in the wellness world or in the healing space that will want to shame you because you have pain and try to tell you that you haven't done enough work, and they don't know the truth of what your karma is, what your destiny is, why you need to understand things about your path the way that you do. And usually it's always to be in service. It's so you can teach it. It's so you can hold space in front of other people and show them the grace in it. You know, I feel proud of the fact that, even though I am in a little bit of shoulder pain, I'm healing really well though. I'm so grateful, Like it's kind of wild to me how quickly and fully this shoulder is healing. Like I just feel like I have so much of my life force back in now being three weeks removed from surgery. But you know, like having this surgery, as I shared last week, it really gave me the chance to now get a glimpse of understanding and cultivate a lot of compassion for what surgical pain is. Like. I haven't had surgeries. I didn't know, you know, being a mama that hat a C section, it's like being able to speak to that experience with other people like, that's what being alive is. It's having our experiences and sometimes the challenging ones and sometimes the unescapable ones, right, because not everything means, you know, like this kind of shiny healing that allows you to quote unquote be perfect. None of us are ever will be. It's just we heal what we can heal and what we have access to, and then we recover, and then we heal more and then we recover. But we stay on this path. And really the point of being on this path is our own healing, and it is our lineage healing and our cross generational healing. And then it's also so others can bear witness to us, either while we're on the path or as we've come off the path, you know, having healed certain things. But it should always be in service and it's never ending. And you know, as beings that are having a spiritual experience and a human experience, I think it is so important to honor the limitations of our humanity and our physical body too. So you may have healed a lot of your root original wounds. You may have got back to the root of the root and been able to heal the childhood trauma. Maybe heal some of the experiences that hurt, or the neglect or things that didn't get your consent, or process all of the vast emotions that perhaps you weren't allowed to process in real time as things happened. You may be doing all of that beautiful work, and you may still have physical limitations in your body. And it's not because necessarily there is work undone or something you're not doing enough of or doing right. It's also the honoring of what your physical experience in this life is right. So like this is just like a kind of a wide example. But if hard things happen to you and then you also found that you got a certain diagnosis of a really challenging disease, or maybe something happened and maybe you found yourself, you know, disabled in a certain capacity because of the limitations of age and physicality and what it is to be biologically engineered as human. You may not come into perfect health where everything works like you're an elite athlete or works perfectly, or you have a complete healing or restoration in something, and it doesn't mean that you haven't done your work, and it doesn't mean that you're not enough, and it doesn't mean you're not doing enough. It simply means you're here embodying the totality of what it is to be a spiritual being and what it is to be human. And some of us have karma with certain physical issues that we are working out in this lifetime or we are meant to use in service to helping other people in this lifetime. Something I thought that was really interesting when I first started, probably well over ten years ago, understanding that my path was kind of the wounded healer path and beginning to slowly dismantle the chronic pain that enveloped my life and understand my body's reactions to my experiences. I was exploring my chronic pain from the lens of spirituality, spiritual curriculum, therapy, cognitive therapy, somatic therapy, and also a lot of different viewpoints. I started to find it kind of fascinating, as I tend to do, and I started studying my astrology chart. And for those of you that know, I think astrology is a really beautiful tool and companion for being a love. It can be a really special sacred science. But in astrology, and especially in some of the older astrology like Vedic astrology or what is referred to as Yodish astrology, which is very very very very old, and a lot of people that practiced astrology were also medical doctors for their time or on a past episode, I had doctor Suhas who is a master astrologer and an emty medical doctor, and he utilizes both in his practices to understand people. Something I found in my astrology chart was that certain placements I have lent themselves to saying that some of the experiences I would have in this life would be centered around bone pain and specifically pain in the spine, and that some of my work was to understand some of the things that had happened to me or that I had witnessed, so that I could be in co creation with releasing that pain from my body. So that's part of what this work is too, and it's not overnight. It's an ongoing process, and I talk about a lot of that in my book, and I'm really excited to share that. But it's also been fascinating kind of noticing as I'm a week and a half out from launching this how it feels to talk about.

My desire is to amplify the work of people who do and work in these different modalities at an incredibly integrious level, and to amplify what they do and their expertise. But I usually feature them because I am years removed from having done a lot of those processes and work on myself. And so what is going to be different about this book is whereas on this deeply wall show, I do give glimpses into my own life, and I do give you know, reflections about my lived experience. But my desire on this show is not to have a podcast about myself, to be quite honest, It's not to have a podcast about all the things that I'm trying and doing. And so many of those shows exist, and that's one of the reasons I don't do that, because I think, if that is how you best learn and receive, I think a lot of shows do that really beautifully. But I'm someone that likes to you know, I believe in keeping your personal mystery. I believe in keeping the magic of your life kind of to yourself so that it further informs and enhances and grows the work you're able to do and your connection to God. But in this book, I really explore a lot of that personal side of what are some of the specific themes of pain I've been through, what are some of the challenges I've been through as a child, as a young person, as a woman, as a mother, And what are some of the ways that I look to heal those things within myself? You know, And I believe personally I meant to teach in a path of wisdom which means I may not share immediately something that has happened or something I've done. I usually will share it many years removed, after I've let myself settle into the learning and the healing, open to the continued work, because we're going to continue to do work our whole lives and have ideally really been able to kind of integrate and embody the other side of the healing, come into the wisdom of it. And so yeah, when I do this show, you know, my desire when I have some of these just beautiful guests on who all have powerful work and beautiful life stories and usually a lot of challenges like myself and like many of the people who listen and learn on this show, my desire is to deeply empathize with their experience. I may not be necessarily hearing anything new, right because I am a teacher, and I am a lifelong learner, and I am my own open and divine, sovereign channel to the divine, and so you know, my desire is to really just ask important questions that are useful. It's to have deep empathy for whoever is in front of me. You know, I'm a deep fealer, as I know many of you are. But part of the way God uses me and uses me as a healer is to also reflect and mirror, you know, the truth of pain and also the beauty and pain. I'm a wounded healer. I'm someone that has had hard things happen and God has allowed me to keep my heart open anyways and then use those experiences and use the presence that I've honed to be near darkness in service to others and ideally in service to everyone listening to this show. So it's you know, one thing that I think is really special about this book is in this book, I share my stories in this book, I share my overcomings. In this book, I let you know some just to pequk right, just a taste, because, as I say on this show often and a lot and in a lot of the positioning of the show, I design this show to be specifically for people that have had complex lived experiences, that have had a lot of different run ins with so many different kinds of traumas or so many just different kinds of challenges, whether that is a big tea or little t trauma. Because that is exactly what my life path has been and what I have been allowed to learn through and grow through and heal through and continue to heal through because the work is never done. But my life's path has taken me all over and I have studied so much. I have done many certifications and so many different hosts of healing modalities, and have had the pleasure to be in practice with my learning and with my expertise and with the modalities that I use and do for many many years with clients, with myself. And that's what this book is about. It's my stories, it's observation stories of working with clients. It's things that I have experienced and seen and learned from as a healer, working in the world like an actual healer, doing some of the deeper work with people in some more challenging ways, and from having you know, hosted many, many, many retreats with thousands of people all over the world. And I'm not an Instagram girly, so to be quite honest, I don't post every event I do. For every ten events that I go to, I might post one thing. For every ten retreats that I host or five companies that I've worked with, I might post one thing, and it might even be a year later. That's just my cadence. That's just how I flow with social media. But you know, that is the foundation of who I am and the work that I do and the work that I share, and my style of teaching is really about leaning into knowledge and less about kind of my personal, individualized experience with things I never want to come in this space and trauma dump. I had a very vulnerable episode recently where I opened up and I shared that part of my journey was for many years suffering from chronic pain and autoimmune and part of my connection to God and my connection to my own healing was learning the ways to heal myself from the pain and doing many, many, many years of studying research around what creates chronic conditions in the human body. And so though I haven't done this on this show yet, some of the work that I do, and actually a workshop that I taught this week over the last several years, is a lot of my in person and workshops and in person retreats are actually about inner child healing, and they're actually centered and rooted in understanding what chronic pain is. Because out of the stats of chronic pain and it affects hundreds of millions of people, alive eighty percent or women and seventy percent or Black women. A lot of that has to do with epigenetics. A lot of that has to do with what we now know and say is the issues being and the tissues or the body keeping the score. But these are things that sometimes end up in your body and your activated genes because of things that happen to you, because of work you've been avoiding, because of trapped energy and emotions, and some of it is just things we inherited within our DNA because our mothers, our grandmothers, our ancestors were traumatized people, and a lot of that becomes compounded into our own physical, lived experience. That is really the crux of what my day to day work is. When I'm not doing this podcast. That is the work that I do with one on one clients wellness and well being and teaching some of the deeper complex layers of how to get into the crevices of our healing and how to do it consistently. Is the work that I do in the workshops that I teach and the retreats that I lead. So it's always a pleasure to be in service to people in that way. Deeply well, when I host this show, I really love speaking to it from a community standpoint where I invite other people in to share their work and to share their process. And there are so many of us, so many of us, hundreds of thousands on this planet right now doing the work of the soul. And I think when you are fortunate enough to be diligent in your own healing so that you're actually able to get on the other side of it. You know something that I may have forgotten to mention in the last episode because I was really shout out to my sling if you're watching on YouTube, I was really inspired to talk about pain last week and to share some of my journey, but to talk about the new things I was learning having had this surgery. And I was really excited to have this surgery because this was an injury that I first came into five years ago, when I was in some of the deeper throes of the work that I was called to do on myself. I spent many years in all kinds of therapies, from cognitive therapy to somatic therapy. I have worked with some of the most incredible healers on the planet to do some of my deeper work, and then I've just been in deep co creation with God on the work that I need to do, you know, spending hours meditating a day, spending hours in reflection and personal process, and then also working within community environments, working with groups, doing some group therapy again, working with psychedelics, doing pleasure work within myself and within my path. And you know, this work of higher consciousness, it is a never ending work. You are never you know, unless perhaps your path is to become Buddha like or the Buddha, you know, you're never not going to be oscillating between it. And if you're a highly sensitive person, even if you have cleared a lot of your own personal story and pain out of your body. And that is my hope for everyone, because when I look back to the kind of pain I carried physically ten years ago versus what I experience now, oh my god, it's just night and day. You know, I may have a flara a couple times a year, because that's the biology of the human experience, and it usually comes after I have kind of over exhausted myself in the work. Either I led too many retreats back to back to too many speaking engagements, were around too many large bodies of people. Sometimes with my work, I find myself kind of in groups that can be up to five hundred, sometimes up to one thousand. The nature of that, as a highly sensitive, energetic person means that even when I do all the protection rituals on myself, even when I cover myself in healing, I may pick up some stray energy. I may pick up, you know, some other things that can you know, make my body tired and wipe my body out. It's the nature of energy, and so a few times a year that does happen to me. But truly I have found for me personally, the more healing work I have allowed myself to do on myself, and the deeper I'm able to go with that work, It's changed my relationship with my body. I used to have ninety percent inflammation. So it's like if I had stress, or if I had an experience of having a reaction to my complex trauma. Sometimes it felt like I could put on twenty thirty pounds in a day and it would just be inflammation. And so that part of my life has changed dramatically. The fog in my brain has changed, the tension and the pain in my back and my body. It's just it's just changed in such a revolutionary way that I am so grateful for. But when I share certain parts of my story, you know, it's really to be in community with those I know may have a similar path and didn't always have the language for it, or didn't always have someone in front of them that was able to speak to the complexity or the new wants of what that experience is. So I just, first I want to say thank you to everybody that was present. I know I'm kind of going all over the place, but everybody that was really present with that episode last week, because I received so many messages from people that they've had a similar path, or this gave them the language, or this gave them a starting point within which to begin their journey to understand why their bodies may or may not feel the way that they do. And so I'm just really grateful for the presence for last week's episode, even if it was triggering for some of you. But the work is never done, and if your work did include chronic pain, also have a lot of grace for yourself because there will be some kinds of people in the wellness world or in the healing space that will want to shame you because you have pain and try to tell you that you haven't done enough work, and they don't know the truth of what your karma is, what your destiny is, why you need to understand things about your path the way that you do. And usually it's always to be in service. It's so you can teach it. It's so you can hold space in front of other people and show them the grace in it. You know, I feel proud of the fact that, even though I am in a little bit of shoulder pain, I'm healing really well though. I'm so grateful, Like it's kind of wild to me how quickly and fully this shoulder is healing. Like I just feel like I have so much of my life force back in now being three weeks removed from surgery. But you know, like having this surgery, as I shared last week, it really gave me the chance to now get a glimpse of understanding and cultivate a lot of compassion for what surgical pain is. Like. I haven't had surgeries. I didn't know, you know, being a mama that hat a C section, it's like being able to speak to that experience with other people like, that's what being alive is. It's having our experiences and sometimes the challenging ones and sometimes the unescapable ones, right, because not everything means, you know, like this kind of shiny healing that allows you to quote unquote be perfect. None of us are ever will be. It's just we heal what we can heal and what we have access to, and then we recover, and then we heal more and then we recover. But we stay on this path. And really the point of being on this path is our own healing, and it is our lineage healing and our cross generational healing. And then it's also so others can bear witness to us, either while we're on the path or as we've come off the path, you know, having healed certain things. But it should always be in service and it's never ending. And you know, as beings that are having a spiritual experience and a human experience, I think it is so important to honor the limitations of our humanity and our physical body too. So you may have healed a lot of your root original wounds. You may have got back to the root of the root and been able to heal the childhood trauma. Maybe heal some of the experiences that hurt, or the neglect or things that didn't get your consent, or process all of the vast emotions that perhaps you weren't allowed to process in real time as things happened. You may be doing all of that beautiful work, and you may still have physical limitations in your body. And it's not because necessarily there is work undone or something you're not doing enough of or doing right. It's also the honoring of what your physical experience in this life is right. So like this is just like a kind of a wide example. But if hard things happen to you and then you also found that you got a certain diagnosis of a really challenging disease, or maybe something happened and maybe you found yourself, you know, disabled in a certain capacity because of the limitations of age and physicality and what it is to be biologically engineered as human. You may not come into perfect health where everything works like you're an elite athlete or works perfectly, or you have a complete healing or restoration in something, and it doesn't mean that you haven't done your work, and it doesn't mean that you're not enough, and it doesn't mean you're not doing enough. It simply means you're here embodying the totality of what it is to be a spiritual being and what it is to be human. And some of us have karma with certain physical issues that we are working out in this lifetime or we are meant to use in service to helping other people in this lifetime. Something I thought that was really interesting when I first started, probably well over ten years ago, understanding that my path was kind of the wounded healer path and beginning to slowly dismantle the chronic pain that enveloped my life and understand my body's reactions to my experiences. I was exploring my chronic pain from the lens of spirituality, spiritual curriculum, therapy, cognitive therapy, somatic therapy, and also a lot of different viewpoints. I started to find it kind of fascinating, as I tend to do, and I started studying my astrology chart. And for those of you that know, I think astrology is a really beautiful tool and companion for being a love. It can be a really special sacred science. But in astrology, and especially in some of the older astrology like Vedic astrology or what is referred to as Yodish astrology, which is very very very very old, and a lot of people that practiced astrology were also medical doctors for their time or on a past episode, I had doctor Suhas who is a master astrologer and an emty medical doctor, and he utilizes both in his practices to understand people. Something I found in my astrology chart was that certain placements I have lent themselves to saying that some of the experiences I would have in this life would be centered around bone pain and specifically pain in the spine, and that some of my work was to understand some of the things that had happened to me or that I had witnessed, so that I could be in co creation with releasing that pain from my body. So that's part of what this work is too, and it's not overnight. It's an ongoing process, and I talk about a lot of that in my book, and I'm really excited to share that. But it's also been fascinating kind of noticing as I'm a week and a half out from launching this how it feels to talk about.

It with people.

It with people.

So so far, I've recorded i want to say, three or four podcasts in the last two days where I've had a chance to talk about my book and share about my book, and it's been deep, you know, because I am not self focused on this show and always speaking from I guess what I might be saying with some judgment is like a trauma dumping perspective. I'm not saying I went through this, and this is how I did it, and this is how you do it do it. I'm more I'm interested in providing pathways for everyone listening to see what resonates with your spirit uniquely, and then how do you begin to approach that work and then deepen in that work based on your own intuition. It's been really interesting talking about myself so much and kind of opening to that space to talk from my first person perspective and not more from what I believe is a wisdom perspective, which is more so through storytelling and through analogy and through kind of archetypes and wider concepts of understanding. I found that to be more powerful for me in my learning as a student, to learn in that way than from learning from someone's first hand experience, because we're all so different, layered and nuanced, and so that is how I prefer to teach, that is how God has called me to teach. But now just kind of speaking so much about myself from a first person standpoint, it's interesting. Yeah, I do it happily, and it's been really fun kind of exploring these stories, but it's also not how I teach. So it's just been interesting to experience and to look at it from that standpoint. So y'all will be getting the book sewn. I'm very excited about that, and very excited for you to kind of utilize this book and open with it through my own experiences, but definitely through some of my observations of clients and people that I have been with and teachers that I've learned from, and then also just real technical practice. This book is filled with practices of higher consciousness. Inquiries, questions to ask your inner child, questions to ask who you are now, questions to ask your soul about your purpose. There are so many prompts in this book. One of the certification programs that I did for over three years was this master's program in spiritual psychology, and it was three years and every time we met for class, it would be for three days in a row for twelve hours each day, and it was gnarly. You had to do so much self processing, so much self processing around things that you don't even want to say out loud, let alone in front of a classroom or in front of a partner. But it was the path to freedom for me to deep into understanding in addition to so many other things I had done and been doing. But a lot of what I gleaned in that program I share in this book as well, especially the practices and processes to meet those younger, tender, beautiful versions of who we are and maybe who there wasn't space to become because of life experiences. But how do you integrate and reconnect and come into acceptance with all the layers of who you are and who have you been? So there's practices for that, and then there's also practice to really deepen into advance meditation, which opens your higher awareness, which hopefully helps to cultivate your intuition and really bring online perhaps some of your deeper gifts and some of your intuitive gifts, some of your ability to be in direct communication with Source and with the divine, and ways in which to hopefully activate and turn on some of your energy centers so that you can experience your body and your life differently. One of the practices I lean into the book that I love so much is leaning into maudras, which are really a way to advance in your meditation practice, but a way to really open to some of the downloads that may want to come into you and your life miraculously and instantaneously. That's one of the beautiful things I think about building a meditation practice. You know, at first, you think, as you're starting to study meditation that it's just about peace, or it's just about getting quiet or getting still. But the more you practice meditation, the more you're able to access all the different layers and realms of higher awareness. So when you first start your practice, the baseline may be just learning how to get still and how to get quiet. Once you've done that and not be irritated by it or not to seek stimulation because of it, the next layer would be when some of those pain points start coming up, and you might find yourself in meditation crying or getting angry or even getting like, you know, like laughing, getting really happy. But you're able to tap into maybe all the emotions that you've been suppressing for a lifetime and so as you sit with that and learn to release that and witness it and be present with it and observe it and release it, then you're able to go a little higher into what your meditation practice is and what it feels like. And then you're kind of getting a ground and you're opening to meditation as a tool for higher consciousness, as a tool for purpose, as a tool for really fuel and pleasure and rebuilding and recircuiting your brain, and you know, kind of leaning into growing the neuroplasticity which is within your brain and kind of recarving out some neural pathways and healing older calcified ones so that you can be who you really are and so that some of the pain in your life can leave. And I think that for me and doing the work has been the greatest blessing. I've been able to open my compassion and my understanding and really open to a profound ability to empathize with anyone in.

So so far, I've recorded i want to say, three or four podcasts in the last two days where I've had a chance to talk about my book and share about my book, and it's been deep, you know, because I am not self focused on this show and always speaking from I guess what I might be saying with some judgment is like a trauma dumping perspective. I'm not saying I went through this, and this is how I did it, and this is how you do it do it. I'm more I'm interested in providing pathways for everyone listening to see what resonates with your spirit uniquely, and then how do you begin to approach that work and then deepen in that work based on your own intuition. It's been really interesting talking about myself so much and kind of opening to that space to talk from my first person perspective and not more from what I believe is a wisdom perspective, which is more so through storytelling and through analogy and through kind of archetypes and wider concepts of understanding. I found that to be more powerful for me in my learning as a student, to learn in that way than from learning from someone's first hand experience, because we're all so different, layered and nuanced, and so that is how I prefer to teach, that is how God has called me to teach. But now just kind of speaking so much about myself from a first person standpoint, it's interesting. Yeah, I do it happily, and it's been really fun kind of exploring these stories, but it's also not how I teach. So it's just been interesting to experience and to look at it from that standpoint. So y'all will be getting the book sewn. I'm very excited about that, and very excited for you to kind of utilize this book and open with it through my own experiences, but definitely through some of my observations of clients and people that I have been with and teachers that I've learned from, and then also just real technical practice. This book is filled with practices of higher consciousness. Inquiries, questions to ask your inner child, questions to ask who you are now, questions to ask your soul about your purpose. There are so many prompts in this book. One of the certification programs that I did for over three years was this master's program in spiritual psychology, and it was three years and every time we met for class, it would be for three days in a row for twelve hours each day, and it was gnarly. You had to do so much self processing, so much self processing around things that you don't even want to say out loud, let alone in front of a classroom or in front of a partner. But it was the path to freedom for me to deep into understanding in addition to so many other things I had done and been doing. But a lot of what I gleaned in that program I share in this book as well, especially the practices and processes to meet those younger, tender, beautiful versions of who we are and maybe who there wasn't space to become because of life experiences. But how do you integrate and reconnect and come into acceptance with all the layers of who you are and who have you been? So there's practices for that, and then there's also practice to really deepen into advance meditation, which opens your higher awareness, which hopefully helps to cultivate your intuition and really bring online perhaps some of your deeper gifts and some of your intuitive gifts, some of your ability to be in direct communication with Source and with the divine, and ways in which to hopefully activate and turn on some of your energy centers so that you can experience your body and your life differently. One of the practices I lean into the book that I love so much is leaning into maudras, which are really a way to advance in your meditation practice, but a way to really open to some of the downloads that may want to come into you and your life miraculously and instantaneously. That's one of the beautiful things I think about building a meditation practice. You know, at first, you think, as you're starting to study meditation that it's just about peace, or it's just about getting quiet or getting still. But the more you practice meditation, the more you're able to access all the different layers and realms of higher awareness. So when you first start your practice, the baseline may be just learning how to get still and how to get quiet. Once you've done that and not be irritated by it or not to seek stimulation because of it, the next layer would be when some of those pain points start coming up, and you might find yourself in meditation crying or getting angry or even getting like, you know, like laughing, getting really happy. But you're able to tap into maybe all the emotions that you've been suppressing for a lifetime and so as you sit with that and learn to release that and witness it and be present with it and observe it and release it, then you're able to go a little higher into what your meditation practice is and what it feels like. And then you're kind of getting a ground and you're opening to meditation as a tool for higher consciousness, as a tool for purpose, as a tool for really fuel and pleasure and rebuilding and recircuiting your brain, and you know, kind of leaning into growing the neuroplasticity which is within your brain and kind of recarving out some neural pathways and healing older calcified ones so that you can be who you really are and so that some of the pain in your life can leave. And I think that for me and doing the work has been the greatest blessing. I've been able to open my compassion and my understanding and really open to a profound ability to empathize with anyone in.

Front of me deeply. Well, some of.

Front of me deeply. Well, some of.

This ecology programs that I did when I was getting certification, sometimes you'd have to bear witness to really hard confessions from other people, things that may make you want to judge them, things they've done to other people things they've done to themselves. But meditation and compassion and empathy allow you to kind of open to see the deeper struggle that is within and behind people that do cause pain to other people, and to really see how we're all kind of some of our experiences and we choose to paths, and some people who were harmed you know there really is no other choice but to choose a path to harm until you know otherwise. And others who were harmed choose a path first, often of pleasing and even self righteousness or self denial and over empathy without boundary. And then as you become empowered, you turn that empathy and that compassion outward and inward, and you know you're able to really recognize that your role is to serve. It's not to please, it's not to fix anyone else's problems. It's not to become whoever other people think you should be, or behave how they think you should behave, or do things how they think you should do them. But it is to anchor down into the truth of who God told you to be, the truth of who you are, the truth of the work that you've done, and then hold space for others and both there sometimes perceivedly good and bad behavior. You know, I think strength comes in so many forms, and for some of us, strength there's really like you know, holding people up. For other strength is and witnessing brothers. Their strength is kind of holding a quiet power, a mysterio power about who and what they are. But we're all here to focus on our spiritual curriculum and then to use it as a way to serve others. And that's really that's really what it is. It really is.

This ecology programs that I did when I was getting certification, sometimes you'd have to bear witness to really hard confessions from other people, things that may make you want to judge them, things they've done to other people things they've done to themselves. But meditation and compassion and empathy allow you to kind of open to see the deeper struggle that is within and behind people that do cause pain to other people, and to really see how we're all kind of some of our experiences and we choose to paths, and some people who were harmed you know there really is no other choice but to choose a path to harm until you know otherwise. And others who were harmed choose a path first, often of pleasing and even self righteousness or self denial and over empathy without boundary. And then as you become empowered, you turn that empathy and that compassion outward and inward, and you know you're able to really recognize that your role is to serve. It's not to please, it's not to fix anyone else's problems. It's not to become whoever other people think you should be, or behave how they think you should behave, or do things how they think you should do them. But it is to anchor down into the truth of who God told you to be, the truth of who you are, the truth of the work that you've done, and then hold space for others and both there sometimes perceivedly good and bad behavior. You know, I think strength comes in so many forms, and for some of us, strength there's really like you know, holding people up. For other strength is and witnessing brothers. Their strength is kind of holding a quiet power, a mysterio power about who and what they are. But we're all here to focus on our spiritual curriculum and then to use it as a way to serve others. And that's really that's really what it is. It really is.

That simple.

That simple.

When you do your work, you then serve, and your work is never done. We're always continue to refine it. There's always deeper to go in your own path of healing and your own path of self mastery. We will be doing the work till the day that we're gone. But hopefully, you know, you get to a place, and that's my intention with this book where you're able to get a lot of the gunk out of the way and then some of the work of your life is really just about continuing to refine and continuing to ask God how you're meant to be used and how you're going to show up in that work for others. But we're all meant to do that differently once you get to a healing. For some people, it is being powerful motivators and maybe really inspiring people through their own life stories and you know, kind of bringing a deep level of motivation to others. For some it's like, you know, kind of disappearing and maybe you live a monk life and you know, do something that is off the radar of even being seen, but you're holding this powerful healing space and enlightened space for others that don't even know you exist. For some people, it's it's really holding up some of the deeper themes in the work that others are doing, or you know, speaking to things and kind of bigger way that creates space for more people to hear it. But you'll know what your work is as long as you stay devoted to your practices and devoted to the divine and devoted to your personal spiritual curriculum, which a lot of people can have projections on and ideas of, but only you and God really know what that is. So find strength in that. Find solace in that you know your healing journey does not have to make sense to anyone else. You don't have to quantify it. For anyone else. You don't have to trauma dump it for anyone else so that you are believed or seen as accurate. You know, you just have to do the work you're called to with integrity, with diligence, with devotion, and then find ways to serve others, Find ways to love others and to embody love for others. Find ways to embody your learning and your work and your wisdom so that you can actually live who you say you are, a lot of people can get up and say who they are in front of people. A lot of people can get up and proclaim what they are on the internet, But the truth of your life always tells the story. Are you in conflict with who you are? Are you in conflict with other people? Are you looking at others through a lens of lack or judgment? Are you feeling peace and wholeness and worthiness at the core of who you are? Or are you just telling people that's how you feel. There's no judgment in it, But there's always work to be done, you know. And I think when it comes to even the discernment of who you should listen to on your path, who you should believe, whose work you should be connecting to really take a long, hard look at the person and what is the truth of their life. You know, I don't always bring all my personal stuff to the table here because I also think, well, why should I I'm working? Is that necessary and actually useful for people? Or is the work I'm providing the most useful and nourishing thing for others? You know, I don't want to live a SIMS reality. I think the Internet is the only place where people think they have to engage twenty four seven. Nothing else about life is that way.

When you do your work, you then serve, and your work is never done. We're always continue to refine it. There's always deeper to go in your own path of healing and your own path of self mastery. We will be doing the work till the day that we're gone. But hopefully, you know, you get to a place, and that's my intention with this book where you're able to get a lot of the gunk out of the way and then some of the work of your life is really just about continuing to refine and continuing to ask God how you're meant to be used and how you're going to show up in that work for others. But we're all meant to do that differently once you get to a healing. For some people, it is being powerful motivators and maybe really inspiring people through their own life stories and you know, kind of bringing a deep level of motivation to others. For some it's like, you know, kind of disappearing and maybe you live a monk life and you know, do something that is off the radar of even being seen, but you're holding this powerful healing space and enlightened space for others that don't even know you exist. For some people, it's it's really holding up some of the deeper themes in the work that others are doing, or you know, speaking to things and kind of bigger way that creates space for more people to hear it. But you'll know what your work is as long as you stay devoted to your practices and devoted to the divine and devoted to your personal spiritual curriculum, which a lot of people can have projections on and ideas of, but only you and God really know what that is. So find strength in that. Find solace in that you know your healing journey does not have to make sense to anyone else. You don't have to quantify it. For anyone else. You don't have to trauma dump it for anyone else so that you are believed or seen as accurate. You know, you just have to do the work you're called to with integrity, with diligence, with devotion, and then find ways to serve others, Find ways to love others and to embody love for others. Find ways to embody your learning and your work and your wisdom so that you can actually live who you say you are, a lot of people can get up and say who they are in front of people. A lot of people can get up and proclaim what they are on the internet, But the truth of your life always tells the story. Are you in conflict with who you are? Are you in conflict with other people? Are you looking at others through a lens of lack or judgment? Are you feeling peace and wholeness and worthiness at the core of who you are? Or are you just telling people that's how you feel. There's no judgment in it, But there's always work to be done, you know. And I think when it comes to even the discernment of who you should listen to on your path, who you should believe, whose work you should be connecting to really take a long, hard look at the person and what is the truth of their life. You know, I don't always bring all my personal stuff to the table here because I also think, well, why should I I'm working? Is that necessary and actually useful for people? Or is the work I'm providing the most useful and nourishing thing for others? You know, I don't want to live a SIMS reality. I think the Internet is the only place where people think they have to engage twenty four seven. Nothing else about life is that way.

You know.

You know.

I personally love the privacy of my life. I love the specialness of my life at this moment in my life. Though the world is always changing, and I accept that about being alive, that it's not always going to be easy, It's not always going to be graceful. It's not for no one. And I have met with some of the most enlightened minds on the planet in the last ten years. I have had access to some of the absolute great spiritual leaders of our time in the last few years, and not just hearing them speak, having years and years to build relationships with them, having long, deep conversations with them over time, and I've come to know that not a single person is perfect, and we are all always strengthening and refining in our paths on this journey of healing and then on this journey of teaching and serving, and so you know, to just deeply understand and accept that that is the case. You know, we are always here really for all of it. Yeah, but I've really learned that, you know, nothing shows the truth of how much work someone has done or not on themselves, like the actual quality of their day to day life. And I think that's where I came into a deep understanding about how grateful I am for where I've at least momentarily arrived on my path. And I feel really proud to say this because this was not my God, my god, my god, this was not always the case in my life. But I live a really beautiful life right now. I live a really beautiful life, a life that to such a large extent is conflict free, a life that has beautiful, healthy boundaries everywhere where. The deep close community on my life that you will likely never see shared on Instagram are people I have deep respect, love, admiration for, and harmony with, and people who have deep love, respect, admiration harmony and support of me, and we do special things to we get together. We do ordinary things together, like spend time and fill each other with love and support and friendship. I spend a lot of time in my garden. I spend a lot of time focused on being a good mother to my son. My motherhood means a lot to me. And that's why I don't really share it on social media. Why I don't really share photos of myself and my son and all the fun things that we do together, the good moments, the hard moments, because that's our business, you know. And I think as as I pull out a camera or try to come to a quick understanding of who he is or who I am in a moment, I rob both of us of the magic of the relationship that.

I personally love the privacy of my life. I love the specialness of my life at this moment in my life. Though the world is always changing, and I accept that about being alive, that it's not always going to be easy, It's not always going to be graceful. It's not for no one. And I have met with some of the most enlightened minds on the planet in the last ten years. I have had access to some of the absolute great spiritual leaders of our time in the last few years, and not just hearing them speak, having years and years to build relationships with them, having long, deep conversations with them over time, and I've come to know that not a single person is perfect, and we are all always strengthening and refining in our paths on this journey of healing and then on this journey of teaching and serving, and so you know, to just deeply understand and accept that that is the case. You know, we are always here really for all of it. Yeah, but I've really learned that, you know, nothing shows the truth of how much work someone has done or not on themselves, like the actual quality of their day to day life. And I think that's where I came into a deep understanding about how grateful I am for where I've at least momentarily arrived on my path. And I feel really proud to say this because this was not my God, my god, my god, this was not always the case in my life. But I live a really beautiful life right now. I live a really beautiful life, a life that to such a large extent is conflict free, a life that has beautiful, healthy boundaries everywhere where. The deep close community on my life that you will likely never see shared on Instagram are people I have deep respect, love, admiration for, and harmony with, and people who have deep love, respect, admiration harmony and support of me, and we do special things to we get together. We do ordinary things together, like spend time and fill each other with love and support and friendship. I spend a lot of time in my garden. I spend a lot of time focused on being a good mother to my son. My motherhood means a lot to me. And that's why I don't really share it on social media. Why I don't really share photos of myself and my son and all the fun things that we do together, the good moments, the hard moments, because that's our business, you know. And I think as as I pull out a camera or try to come to a quick understanding of who he is or who I am in a moment, I rob both of us of the magic of the relationship that.

We have right now.

We have right now.

You know, I don't want to be so focused on documenting him at six years old and what I know about being a mom of a six year old right now, because I'm living it and I want to feel all of it, and I don't want to distort it by making it consumable. As soon as you make certain private parts of your life consumable to strangers or to other people, it changes the authenticity of it. It changes how it feels inside of your body, It changes how you interact with it. You know, as soon as you start taking a picture based on how it will perform, it changes the relationship of what you're taking a picture of, right Like, think about if you see your kid making a funny, silly face and you just want to capture it. But then if you're so used to capturing the perfect picture of them, you're going to do it another five to ten times to make it perfect so that it can then be shared, and then you lose the truth and the beauty of that original, maybe perceivedly, you know, ordinary or nonesthetic image, and the moment that was being created in that image. And then you're doing it for performance. You're doing it for perception. And I think our kids feel that, right Like, if I take a picture of my son and then I ask him to take it five more times and then I'm finally happy with it, and I'm giving him that feedback, and then I'm staring at my phone and sharing at it. Whether I think so or not, and whether he has a language for it or not. He's learning how to perform, He's learning that a very specific smile is what I'm after that a very specific response or way of positioning his body is what will please me, and that's what I want to void in my relationship with my son. I want him to be himself. So I guess I'm sharing some of this nuance and I hope it's relevant for people because I think it's something we should all be kind of considering and exploring as we renegotiate our agreements with social media moving forward. I'll be forty this year, which I'm really excited about, so just in general, I think, not just because the work that I've done, but just because generationally, this is the time I'm coming into, you know, you start to really renegotiate and look at a lot of the agreements you have. So it's been kind of cool in the last couple of weeks. Again, I'm three weeks removed from having this rotator cuff surgery, and I'm a week and a half out from dropping my book. So I'm kind of noticing this moment in my path and in my time of healing and of coming into a new biological age of who I am and how I present and how I live. It's kind of interesting experiencing you know, an aging body with an injury and experiencing talking about some of those deeper, darker chapters of my life that I'm many years removed from. You know, nothing, no experience I share in this book is younger than five to six years old, and a lot of them are ten and twenty years old. So I've had a lot of time to reflect and glean the wisdom of the things that I share with you in this book and the space to having been able been allowed to come into a multitude of perspectives of what these experiences crafted within me and in my life and in other people. And so yeah, it's really interesting to share this at this moment of life, almost turning forty and birthing this kind of baby that feels really intimate for me and really vulnerable for me. Again, I'm yeah, I like to work and I like to be in my life, and I kind of, you know, hold both sacredly but separately in a lot of regards, and they're coming together here, and so I'm making peace with that and making peace with you know, the fact that strangers get to know things about me that they didn't come to know from actually knowing me as a person. It's it's a really interesting feeling in space. And I've talked to a few other author friends who have had their own revealing books and memoirs, and you know, they've all assured me that, like, yeah, this is a part of the process. Waking up at three am, like oh God, am I sure about this? You know that that's a part of the process, and questioning everything and having a little bit of you know, discomfort at the new vulnerability that you're kind of being called to share. And I know that doesn't always seem like it because we are in a culture and a time of oversharing where you know, people are people are going live, they're getting like a Brazilian wax, people are going live with their families in the midst of conflict, or you know, just telling really private things to people, Like I know that has become the norm, but that's actually not the norm, and it's not necessarily safe for you or your wellbeing to operate in that way unless you're sure that you're called that that's how God is asking you to be used. But yeah, it's been interesting exploring the context and the nuance of all of that. So that is what I have been thinking about and moving through this week, and since you know, the last layer of the conversation that I've had with you, and I've also had some really special experiences, so quickly before we head out of this episode, I want to share a very dear friend of mine, Maria Shriver, has an incredible book out called I Am Maria. It is profound, it is beautiful.