Shift Your Spirits

How I personally choose to navigate and manage dark energy on social media. I hope that by sharing the headspace I am coming from, you will be inspired to create an intentional approach that allows you to find some more peace.

And while you're at it — be better at it than I am.

Publishers hated ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ Madeleine L’Engle never forgot the rejections.

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This is not going to be easy to talk about. I’m only going to even get close, if I get close. I’m going to fail miserably and leave a lot out.

But I had some part of this conversation in a session with a client named Marissa from the Automatic Intuition community. She said she found my thoughts and strategies helpful in dealing with some online PTA communication.

It’s something people ask me about a lot in my personal life—those who are both my friends on social media and in real life. So I felt compelled to just share some of it with you guys.

Nobody needs to know you don’t like them.

In this age of media

Nothing is more effective at shutting down the attention-seekers than silence.

These comment wars are misplaced sense of purpose.

They don’t have any mountains to climb so they pick hills to die on, almost at random

You have a higher outlet.

I’ve told the story about experimenting with putting out some writing as a blog in 2006. That’s how Shift Your Spirits came to be.

There were 2 contenders—I seriously considered doing either a political blog or a blog about spirituality and personal development.

I could easily have gone either way. I have plenty to say about politics.

It was a hard decision. I received a name and a concept—a shining sentence—a clairaudient download — for the political blog, just like I did with Shift Your Spirits: 83% fewer hearts and flowers than most new age blather.

It came down to: which energy could I bear carrying everyday.

I knew Shift Your Spirits would encourage me to be a better version of myself. Now, don’t get me wrong, the religiosity of fundamentalism is a constant source of anger.

Political blogging would have meant running a toxic channel 24-7. Even if I was careful to put something better into the stream, I would have been at least beholden to listening and observing and analyzing all the other toxic political comment.

Resist. Fuck yes. Be involved. Vote. Donate. Gather. Preach. Sit in. Stand up. All of it.

But online posts on social media aren’t really any of that. They are a pale shade of true action.

Act. In meaningful ways.

Getting in arguments on FB. Kinda no skin in the game. It’s the catfishing of giving a godamn.

If it’s all you got, so be it.

If you must comment or post, I have a few rules that might help you keep it constructive.

DO NOT respond to any comments on what you posted. Ever.

Leave it for the lesser minds to squabble over.

The true reason I do not post political stuff is ... I can’t do it a little bit. What is 2%? How it is different than 10%? 10 becomes 75 in a hot flash of being baited. You lose all day to anger and rehearsing — a mental spinning that is obsessive and useless and draining.

You give away your time and energy and you feel stressed and tired afterward.

Was that really worth it?

For me, a cold hard white hot silent NONE is the only way to manage it. 1% is 100%. That’s like being a 1% smoker. What the hell is that?

ZERO. It the only way for me to manage it. A little bit is not an option.

I was listening recently to Oprah on an interview with Van Jones talk about giving energy to the darkness, to the other side.

That’s what the ZERO hard line is for me. It’s managing part of my attempt to transcend it.

I have to be on Facebook a little bit. I have a community on there, and the technology is great for managing a private group. So here’s what I do. I set tabs to open on my browser to window to all the sites I’m monitoring — email, mailing lists, scheduler, web sites, podcast …

That way, I can come in as an admin and keep an eye on my group without swimming out into the larger FB ecosystem.

That which you give your attention to expands. For a million different reasons.

In so many ways and contexts that statement is true.

So don’t it give your attention.

Everything you respond to — even just to give a “like” expands. This is not even just metaphysical. Online, the algorithms will promote posts that have been liked more, commented on more, and shared more.

What I mean by radical lack of attention...

One boring item or just something irrelevant. I go to their profile and look at their last 5 or 10 posts.

There is someone who posts in a language I can’t read. 100% of the time. I don’t follow that. Now that person is likely bilingual and can read English and follows my posts, and that’s awesome. But I can’t return the attention because of my own language.

But... I make room for what I can consume and what I want to consume.

Sometimes I want a challenging different opinion that is intelligent. There are people with different political opinions who are extremely intelligent and I respect what they thoughtfully put out and I am CURIOUS about where they are coming from. They are the best representation of people who are different than me.

Or I choose to follow a different racial perspective that is eye-opening for me. I have an author friend who is very passionate about whitewashing and issues of race, and she’s brilliant. I want to hear what she has to say.

I don’t “enjoy” the posts that challenge me...

But I value them. And I choose them. I’m not passive about what invades my mental space.

I try not to BE irrelevant to others. I try to be authentic and personal but less fluff. Less detritus. Less stuff you see everywhere else.

(I don’t always pull that off. It’s just an aspiration running in the background of my mind.)

Everything I want to say, politically, is being said. I see my opinions represented. I don’t need to tell you a news item of the day—20 of your friends just did.

I don’t need to tell you what kind of human being the President is—he shows you and he tells you every day.

I don’t have to say a thing.

I don’t have to say anything negative. I don’t have to give my attention my focus or my voice to darkness.

I don’t have to magnify anything with my attention without choosing to do so.

Do as I say, not as I do.

And at the end of the day, we are one race, stuck together on one planet, and I pray we survive long enough to evolve beyond the petty divisions. One of the things I think will be most impactful about contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization is it will change our perspective on what is Other. It will shift the otherness away from our human family.

Hopefully, we will use this as more leverage to Ascend.

For the record, I haven’t given up hope that we will Ascend as a species.

Many of the people who listen to the Attunement Guided Meditation I created for the Automatic Intuition Course report meeting spirit guides, in the Akashic Records in particular, who appear as blue-skinned extraterrestrial beings.

I have never been personally drawn to "Starseed" information, but the topic shows up frequently in the private community of intuitives I mentor. I asked them to weigh in on the research I found on the subject.

And I'm sharing my own thoughts on the beings who are said to be assisting in the ascension of humanity.

Coast to Coast https://www.coasttocoastam.com/

Automatic Intuition Professional

Mark Watson | AngelEarth Music

Shiva | Hindu Deity

Andromeda, Antares, Arcturus | Federation of Planets

The Prism of Lyra by Lyssa Royal & Keith Priest

The Lantern Bearer

About Channeling with Frank Butterfield

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Take 11.

I want to talk about Blue-skinned Aliens. That's right. Extraterrestrials. Possibly Angels. Possibly both.

I actually think it's a technicality.

The reason why I said "Take 11" and I'm leaving that in is because I want to say upfront that this is an unscripted episode and it's probably going to be really rambly, and I'm just going to do it off the top of my head because in order to prepare a really thoughtful, wholly inclusive report on Blue-skinned Aliens would be beyond my ability to do in any normal amount of time and I would have to bring in a huge chunk of the internet, and I don't even have time to read all that the internet has to say about Blue-skinned Aliens.

So, I know that for some of you, this is going to start what I call a 'Magic Carpet Ride'.

It also could actually be happening to you in the middle of a magic carpet ride about this subject. So what I mean by 'Magic Carpet Ride' is, and I don't do these so much anymore. I actually don't have the free time or the sleep schedule to allow for me to do magic carpet rides anymore.

Because when I was in a period where I was doing a lot of these, it was back during the time period that you hear me talk about in my origin story, between 2003 and 2006. I was partially paralyzed. I was housebound, a recluse, I was communicating with my guides a lot intentionally for the first time, I was spending a lot of time learning to code online.

So I was just living in front of a computer and had no sense of time. And to me, a magic carpet ride kind of describes this prayerful meditative experience that is part investigation, part channelled inquiry, part synchronicity, where something comes into your consciousness and you start with a query and Google and it leads from one thing to the next and you keep exploring and seeing new things to click on and time goes by and I would start out doing this at 10 or 11:00 at night and suddenly I would realize that the sky was turning grey outside and it was morning and I'd spent an entire evening travelling around the globe and travelling this interior landscape and this quasi-dimensional place that we've created in the internet, and I would come out of it, having been to all these places that I never realized that initial query was going to take me.

So Blue-skinned Aliens. If you start that, if you click on the links that I'm going to give you in the show notes, just be warned. You could end up on a magic carpet ride.

I actually was very, very careful to not allow myself to do that. I kept a protective bubble around me and I looked at it through a window and I got what I needed to get to have this conversation with you, and then I shut myself down.

Because I didn't want to go full rabbit hole here.

So yeah, in 2008, I went to Hawaii, the first and only time that I've been to Hawaii, for a conference of people who communicate with angels. I went there admittedly a bit as a corporate spy. I was in the process of developing what would become the Automatic Intuition program, and I had some ideas about how I wanted to support and teach people to do readings and to connect with their emerging intuition. But I wasn't really sure, I didn't have a sense of, Can I teach this to other people? Will it work? How do other people teach it?

So I was in a mode back in 2008. I remember the day I arrived in Hawaii was the day that Barack Obama was elected. So that was a really interesting milestone that solidifies the date forever in my mind, for many reasons. But I was in the process of going to a lot of different kinds of psychic development workshops, really just kind of seeing how other people were teaching it.

One of the things that really annoyed me was how much of it was really only teaching clairvoyance, but that's another conversation and that might be something that we get into if you ever work with me in the context of Automatic Intuition. You'll hear my speel about how I decided to adapt what I was doing to account for the lack of support in the other types of sensitivities and clairs, as we call them, beyond just clairvoyance.

Because I wasn't particularly clairvoyant. Not at the time that I went to Hawaii. But anyway, so I was in Hawaii to be a corporate spy, to go to a really high-up the food chain kind of new age event to see how it was done by the pros!

And also just to experience being in Hawaii with over 300 other people who all have the ability to connect with and communicate with Angels, as I already identified with.

So yeah, it was magical and amazing on a lot of levels and I met a lot of people who are still in my life all these years later.

But anyway, fast forward a little bit.

I was really interested in and intrigued by, there was a man, Mark Watson, who is a composer, a musician who does a lot of background music for new age meditations and, he gave a little speel or a little talk about music theory, the scales, the chords that are associated with different archangelic vibrations, and how to use a certain musical key to invoke a specific type of angelic entity.

To tell you the truth, it was all over my head, music-wise. Like I knew enough to be able to just kind of furiously scribble down what he was saying, and I knew that coming up as part of the training program that I was developing, I was going to be creating a guided meditation that would act as an Attunement, and so I felt like, Oh this is amazing. This is exactly what I need to know in order to create the Attunement. I wanted to do some very specific things and call in some certain types of energy so I took notes.

And, in a very simplistic way, attempted to apply what I learned from him in creating that Attunement.

So fast forward basically a year later was when I launched the Automatic Intuition Professional Program in November of 2009, I believe. And so, the way it works, and actually if you want to experience this, if you haven't already, you can go to AutomaticIntuition.com and download the Attunement for free and experience what I'm talking about.

So what the Attunement is and how it works. It's a guided meditation. The intentions at the level of the musical stuff that I'm talking about was to align the chakras, to ground, centre, work your way up through the chakras, and more than anything, to open the crown chakra to ensure that all of the information that's coming in for you is the highest possible vibration and there is a few specific triggers within the Attunement that allow you to connect with your asher, which is a sort of a personal guardian angel. You know when we talk to little kids about, Oh you have a guardian angel that's watching out for you!

I call that the asher. I can't even remember where I learned that term, but that's the type of angel who is sort of like your personal bodyguard.

Anyway, so new experience and meeting with that entity and you also experience, as this sort of finale of the Attunement, if you will, a meeting with your guides in the Akashic Records. And this could be one entity, it could be a group. But it's meant to call in any entity that you have, that's hanging out, waiting for you to use your spiritual gifts or your intuitive abilities, your healing abilities, in the context of doing it for other people.

Now this is not just about, Oh, what should I do with my job, and when am I going to meet the love of my life, and the kinds of things you might ask a phone psychic. This is specifically to introduce you to someone who can help retrieve information for you on behalf of other people.

So you are volunteering to be a channel and a conduit and this entity is meant to assist in that.

It's a very high level intention. It's a high level vibration and it calls in a very high level, for lack of a better word, I keep calling it high. I actually think of, when we talk about high and low frequencies in vibrations, I think of those as notes on a piano, so you can think of this frequency as being something in the dog whistle range, or whatever. Something outside the normal ability to hear and process sounds.

That's kind of what the Attunement does.

One of the most difficult things about creating the Attunement is actually to script an experience where I am prompting you on what to see, hear and feel without telling you what to see, hear, and feel. Or in some cases, to prompt you to have an experience that might be visual without telling you to see something, or that could be visual for one person, could be auditory for another, could be sensory in the body for another person.

So it's a very weird thing to try to write if you ever do a guided meditation. It's like telling a story without telling too much detail because, of course, you want the person to fill in all of that on their own.

That's what the Attunement is and that's how it works.

The reason why we start the course with the Attunement is obviously, it represents an intention, a goal that you've set for yourself and also a kind of promise that you're making. You're putting it out to the Universe, to all of humanity: Hey, I intend to use my abilities and to develop my abilities in order to serve other people and make everything wonderful for everyone else. That's your goal.

It's a selfless act of service and the Attunement is really kind of something for us to wrap our brains around down here in the earthly dimension and just give us a way to see, hear, feel, name, experience, talk about that thing that is happening at a higher level. Because there's a part of it that's happening in a dimension that we're not even aware of and I don't even try to script that. I just, in my intentions in creating this, I am calling in those energies and asking that they be there for anyone who listens to it.

So, thanks to Mark Watson for giving me that little bit of music theory help enact that.

So I've been using this Attunement with my clients and my students for, what is it, almost 9 years now? And I always get really wonderful feedback. I get a lot of requests to create separate music tracks for meditation without the guided part. Without the vocal script. Even my dad asked me if he could just have the background music and make it extra long and then he can just use that to either rest or meditate or do that kind of relaxation stuff with it, which I have never really gotten around to.

I don't even know if I can find the master files for that... We'll see...

But anyway, so everybody who comes into my program does this Attunement and one of the things that's really cool for me is, every single one of the first sessions that I do with everyone, they tell me about their experience with the Attunement as if it's a dream that they had and I am writing down notes of what they're saying, and there is information encoded in your experience of the Attunement. Not only the things that you hear that are symbolic, and the things that you see that are archtypal, but the actual word choice and the way that you speak about this phenomenon tells me things about your intuitive abilities, how they already manifest, and more importantly, it lets me know if there is something waiting in the wings for you that you are not even aware of and you've never thought to try. If there's some kind of ability you have the potential for, that's right there, and you just don't know to reach for it.

It will let me know whether or not to coach you forward, and which tools would allow you to access those abilities.

So based on that, we have an entire session pretty much where we unpack everything in the Attunement. What you saw, felt, heard, thought, your impressions, what you learned during the Attunement. Anything that I see that I can unpack for you in terms of symbolism and the guide that you met and the names that you're getting for these guides and what they all mean.

Based on that conversation, what we really do is, we use that to determine which tools and techniques and psychic modalities are most likely to produce results for you.

So for instance, I can tell from the Attunement if clairvoyance is not your thing, if you're going to go a bunch of classes where they're like, Close your eyes and visualize, you're probably going to be disappointed. But I can also tell that automatic writing would produce some really satisfying experiences, both for you and for anyone that you read for, and here's why that tool would be better suited to you.

So it's kind of like a diagnostic and it helps me customize the course and how you learn to develop your intuition.

So it's a really cool thing. I'm very proud of it.

At the time that I was creating it, I was just creating it and those were my intentions. My understanding of how it works has evolved over time.

So one of the coolest things for me is, I have the perspective of everybody else's experience with the Attunement, so the patterns that I see emerging may not be apparent to the people who are having these experiences, but from where

We are always striving to be better. We’re always wanting to change ourselves.

All this judgment - all this trying to change - is exhausting and detrimental to the creative process. It constantly introduces self-doubt and expectation of failure.

If you’re spinning your wheels, or not seeing the results your efforts should be producing, or if you feel like there’s never enough time in the day to pursue all that purposeful stuff you really want to get to in this life…

I might have some ideas about how we can bust out of these prisons of our own making. I’m ready to try something different.

Arrival film

3x3 Strategy

The Magicians TV show

Krish Surroy - Mavericks Unlimited

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I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted with trying. With working, with doing, with straining, with pushing and reaching… With clenching and holding my breath and … JUDGING myself.

On the one hand there’s discipline and all that—and I’m very disciplined, slow and steady, committed to assigning blocks of time to all the things I want to get done and fiercely protecting them from Resistance.

But … ugh. If I’m so good at being disciplined and productive, why am I talking to myself like I’m not?

There has to be some middle ground.

I think what I’m experiencing here is a pendulum swing in the other direction.

Introducing podcasting into my work and my schedule was a big requirement of discipline and establishing systems and discovering which rules I had to follow before I could start throwing them out and …

I’m ready to ditch some shit, guys.

No more To Do Lists

I’m lumping iPhone reminders in with this. That’s my To Do of choice.

if it is important but kind of small, it will get done immediately or, it's too big to forget, and it will hang in the sky like a spaceship in the movie Arrival until I engage with it.

I’m not going to forget an enormous flattened black shard ominously looming over my landscape. I don’t need to write that down.

“Remember to make contact with large alien space craft.” Ridiculous.

That doesn’t need to be on a list.

I have friends—and I’m not singling anyone out if you’re listening, so don’t think I’m talking about you, I can name a dozen of you and at least ten are worse than you about this—I have friends who claim to be addicted to having a physical day planner. They all say the same thing: they need to see it there in writing, physically, or they feel like they can’t manage it. It gives them a feeling of control over all the stuff they have to keep up with.

By the way, this is the same impulse hoarders have. They feel less anxious if they see all the stuff lined up on top of physical surfaces. Things put away, tucked in cabinets and organized in bins, might get lost.

Having all the stuff at your fingertips, carrying it around with you even, in a tote bag or a ginormous purse, helps you feel less anxious and more in control.

But … Does it really? Or does it really only create artifacts? Tiny physical manifestations of your anxiety.

What happens if you go planner free?

Anybody wiling to try it?

I’m not talking about client appointments, doctor’s appointments. Things that involve other people’s businesses. Your shared family and kids calendar on the kitchen wall.

But consider how much you are duplicating. That’s where we might find the real issue. Anxiety-fueled duplication. CC’ing the crap out of every facet of your life. Making a backup and then a copy of the backup.

If you have an appointment card under a magnet on the fridge, is it also on a to do list, on your phone calendar (you have more than one digital calendar too don’t you) and then on your phone reminders and then physically written in your day planner and put on one of those list pages in the back of the planner or in the margins. Maybe you throw it on a sticky note too and leave it on your desk right in your eye line, just in case.

No seriously, are you doing this?

THIS is what I’m talking about with all the trying. It’s layers and layers of self-doubt and expectation of failure.

No more big email lists

I’m exhausted with carrying big lists. This is the dick size/ bust size of internet business posturing. It is super important. It is more important than money. Your contact list is the most important thing ever. It’s true. I will continue to beat that drum.

But the size, beyond the 1000 true fans, is meaningless. Worse than meaningless. It’s actually the inverse of meaningful.

It literally costs more money to maintain large lists. You’re buying tickets for every friend you have, even the ones who never show up and are never going to.

I am pruning my lists.

(I hear gasps from all the people with internet based businesses.)

I’m cutting dead weight. Deleting those who don’t read and click and interact with me. There’s 30k, 40K zombies I’m carrying around. 2000, maybe 3000 of you are actually truly participating. That’s more than enough to support my work.

If you’re hearing the sound of my voice at this moment, you are one of the chosen. You chose yourself, you chose me. Thank you for being here.

The rest are kept around because of fear of missing out, I guess. Fear of someone asking me how big my list is and not having a huge number to impress them with. Sometimes, it’s a barrier to participate. I am no longer asking my collaborators about their list size. I’m going to start by removing my energy from the hive mind on this issue.

It’s not a requirement to be a guest on my show. Your personality and your message and your energy and the cool thing I like about you is what matters. And I am getting rid of statistics in my business dealings that don’t reflect that.

It may hurt. When someone says “You need 5000 people on your email list in order to participate in this author cross promotion” I may regret pruning 25,000 people. Gulp. Whoops. They weren’t going to bring anything to the game.

And if I’m not being invited because of who I am and what I do in the world, then I don’t want to play with you anyway. I don’t want to be member on your panel or whatever.

"What if I don’t do the thing everybody told me to do and I end up regretting it?"

(Sidebar: That’s an ever present thought, it’s a mind virus—you probably have your own strain of career mind virus specific to your work and field. But if I stop and analyze that. It’s really never true. I can’t find one instance where I intuitively broke from the herd and regretted it at a deep soul level for months and years later. Anything that might kind of look like that, in the moment, ends up being a detour I was meant to take and so it’s okay further along in my story.)

No more paid advertising

I’m so sick of worrying about whether or not you are my “target.”

You’re their target.

Be one thing. You. Do the hell out of it. Let everyone decide whether or not they dig you. End of story. They’re shooting queries into Google, into the universe, and they hit something you made. Bulls eye. Awesome. They will know it; you don’t even have to.

Which is easier? To be a big deep bright red authentic cool relatable target hanging out there for everyone to find, or to shoot a million differently tweaked arrows at a gazillion abstractions of human beings?

No. Not doing that. Not even trying anymore. Taking back that energy.

No more writing to market

This goes along with target. Trying to play this fortune-telling educated guess about what creative projects to pursue based on their potential to sell.

I gotta tell you. Nothing makes me feel like I’m trying too hard more than that. Many authors and speakers and artists and business people do this with practical success.

But, when it’s just you, and it’s your passion, and you’re intending to inject something with pieces of your soul and hang it out in the world.

It is exhausting and detrimental to the creative process to constantly introduce self-doubt and expectation of failure.

Put simply—I’m going to pivot from this trying mindset and create things that are deeper, more specific, more narrow … for fewer of you. Beautiful novels that only a special (possibly smaller) group can appreciate.

You’re either mass marketing some shit, or you’re making custom, luxury items.

Get really clear about which one you want to do. This is true of your purpose of your work. I think it could be true of your relationships as well. How many of you maintain fewer but deeper friendships?

It just occurred to me as I’m talking about all this. That the word TRYING also means getting on your nerves. Exhausting you.

Here’s what I've been thinking about a lot in the last few months and how I’m going to go about changing it.

Whatever I’ve done in the past, whatever I’ve been doing. Especially systems that I have in place, I’m going to look at and ask myself “does it have to be that way?”

Ex. I’ve worked weekends for 15 years. Why? I know why I did in the beginning. Why have I continued to do it?

Example - my podcast show notes

I sort of tried to do what other people do—always a good way to start. But after doing them for awhile, I find they are awkward to execute in their current format. So I might change those to more accurately reflect the process I naturally use to put them together.

If you want to participate in this mental exercise with me, ask yourself these questions

I’m kind of thinking:

What’s the opposite of a 3x3 strategy?

I know, I spent all last year teaching you one of my productivity techniques, and now I’m telling you I’m gonna throw it out.

If it’s important enough, it’s not like I will forget its existence.

I just do it. This moment suddenly feels like the moment, and I just execute. Or start.

I have these rhythms that feel good—my dedicated blocks of time I’ve told you about. There are writing blocks, and client blocks, and reading blocks, and recording blocks, and blocks for exercise and downtime… I don’t decide what I’m going to do in those blocks sometimes until I get there. And then I spontaneously work within the block. It’s a loose set of rules that feels powerful and flexible to me.

And then there are some rhythms that do not feel good to me. (working on weekends)

That started because of Sunday’s at the cafe. My posts used to get picked up by my email service provider for afternoon Sunday delivery, and so if I wrote the post by a certain time on Sunday morning, that was my deadline.

I don’t remotely do that anymore. I schedule it all in advance.

That’s insane.

I’m gonna stop scripting my solo episodes.

I’m going to stop using a template for interviews.

I’m going to stop weighting myself on a scale and stop obsessing over portions and look at quality of what I eat and how I feel in my body and in my clothes

Doesn’t mean I’m not exercising.

You don’t have to do any of what I’m going to do.

This may represent advanced material and advanced approach for you. You can certainly use all my old tools and all my old advice it will get you there. It will work the way I said it did, especially if you’re at the right point.

But if it feels good to you what I’m saying right now about letting it go, about not trying so hard, maybe that’s what you need to do to. Maybe relaxing is going to allow you to move forward.

I have a proven track record of producing and shipping and getting it out there and making money from it and getting people to hear me. So you can’t fool yourself here. You can’t use this as a way to procrastinate and avoid. You can only use this if it allows you to run.

If it allows you to expand.

If it sets you free.

I may find out this is a terrible idea. A year ago I was telling you to do something completely different. If this is a disaster I’ll come back and tell you that too. And I’ll also tell you what I discover if it works.

I am tired of trying so hard. of clenching, straining, controlling.

I need a name for this approach. Naming things is a part of my magic I want to keep.

Maybe I will call it something like … Freestyle.

I’m going to try Freestyling in as many areas of my life as it seems applicable.

Look around in your life

Are you the only one doing what you’re doing?

You’re probably doing something right.

We are always striving to be better. We’re always talking about changing ourselves.

I heard a great quote a few weeks ago on The Magicians (the TV show on SyFy)

I love that. It’s wicked, subversive, rebellious. I need a hit of that. That’s what was missing from my New Year.

So:

This week is a long personal introduction with reflections on the show's first year, the most popular episodes, what that has shown me about you guys, and where we're going in the future.

There is also a shorter segment with a message about creativity and purpose and your duty to dedicate yourself to the tasks you’ve been given.

Frank Butterfield & Lori Ference on Leaders' Call to Adventure: Ep 10, Ep 11, Ep16

Seth Godin (on true fans) The Grand Opening

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You must honor the ideas you’ve already been given if you want to receive more.

A few months ago, Shawn, one of my mentoring clients in the Automatic Intuition program presented me with a really exciting prospect — a project that's part channeling, part writing.

I was truly excited for him. I thought Wow. That’s a beautiful concept. It’s succinct, the title itself is one of those shining sentence type clairaudient downloads. It honestly reminded me a bit of when I received the idea for Shift Your Spirits.

I was thinking, I can see an entire platform that can be built around this. There’s the potential for a practice and a business. And it will really appeal to people. But I didn’t want to overwhelm him with where it could all go. It was an idea that had yet to be executed and brought through.

So, the Holidays came, and we know how those months go by, and Shawn contacted me for a session. He said he was lost. He wasn’t sure what to do next. What direction to take. He was kind of waiting for everything to come together.

And when we were talking this week he told me that he had successfully learned to do readings, and the feedback from his reading clients is positive. And when I asked him about the channeling project, he said he had no trouble connecting and retrieving those channeled messages.

All that was really missing, the sense of direction, in my observation, was he just needed to dedicate himself to this project. To dedicate time in his schedule either every day or on a 3x3 Strategy.

He said that word DEDICATE was the marching orders he was hoping for.

I experience this all the time in my fiction. I have lists of ideas for novels and stories. I have two books on my desk laid open in a sloppy state of word surgery, sequels to my novel Havenwood.

And I feel uninspired by them. Last autumn I kept wanting some really BIG idea to strike me. To land in my lap and light me up so that all I could think about was writing it.

I kept trying to make that idea come.

I tried to prime that pump and drag it out of the sky. To draw down the moon, to raise a cone of power, and the silence from my guides, from my muse, was actually painful. I obsessed over the absence of the next big idea.

I finally gave up. I dedicated myself to the projects on my desk. The ones my readers are waiting for and expecting. I’m not in love with them. I’m not on fire. I was when I first started to plot them, maybe, but that beautiful brainstormy part of the process had already come and left me with a big pile of work.

In absence of anything better to do during my writing time, I went back to working on my current books.

I am about a month away from the end of a four month writing stretch. The drafting of this current book will soon shift into the editing process.

And then last week I had a story come. A bolt from the blue. A lightning. I sat up in bed, just before drifting off, and reached for my tablet to furiously type some notes.

That’s what I was waiting for. That’s the kind of idea, burst of inspiration, I wanted 6 months ago.

But I believe with all my heart, it was given because I followed through on the ones I’d been given before.

Why would they give me more, if I’m only going to lay them aside and demand another one? Doesn’t it make sense if the muses and the guides are giving out assignments, they give the best ones to those with a track record of following through?

You have to honor the ideas you're given.

Regardless of how they might be critically received, whether or not they will sell, whether they become a replacement career or remain a hobby, if the Divine is delivering plans and ideas to you, it is your duty to execute them, to bring them through.

You've been chosen.

You've been interrogating your divinity (your creativity) about your purpose:

And if these questions have only left you spinning in hesitation -- paralysis, blocks -- then ask your work what it needs.

If you're going to be true to your creative gifts, you must honor the ideas you’ve been given.

When we talk about doing something Amazing with our lives, meaning something large scale, a legacy that will outlive us… Do you really need that to be happy?

When you look into your heart, when you get really honest with yourself, you may find that you don’t.

I honestly believe you might be happier if you can let all that Amazing go.

Oscillococcinum (homeopathic flu remedy - WholeFoods markets a storebrand version as "Flu Ease" - same stuff)

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The title of this episode “You don’t have to do something amazing to be happy” is a line from the movie Passengers, with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.

I’ve been hanging onto this quote for awhile, for about 6 months.

(No spoilers, here.) It's the controlling idea for the decision the Jennifer Lawrence's character Aurora Lane has to make.

Aurora’s a journalist, with big plans to create this amazing piece of reporting, that spans centuries of time, that she will essentially spend her life’s work on, it’s a project that will define her posthumously.

It’s very much about the future. Even the future that exists beyond her life.

One friend of Aurora’s had left her a message which stops her in her tracks.

"You don’t have to do something amazing to be happy."

With all that solar eclipse existential crisis stuff going on in the summer and fall of 2017 — who am I? What is my light? Who can see it shining? — all that stuff…

I spent a lot of time privately considering whether or not I could be happy without being aspirational in my work. Having to create something Amazing. Is that something I could possibly let go of? I won’t spoil the movie by telling you the choices the characters make and how they arrived at their decisions.

But the contemplation put me in mind of something that is talked about very much in the indie publishing world, the internet marketing world...the Long Tail

There are no gate keepers anymore.

The gate keepers used to define it so that only those who did something amazing even got to show their work.

It used to be, only the big fish, the Stephen Kings, the Danielle Steeles, the JK Rowlings could make a living as an author. They weren’t even fish, they were whales. And they made a LOT of money. They were incredibly financially successful.

And then you had maybe some little tiny poets and academics swimming around. Minnows. Teaching in schools to make their income. Their published works were more merit-based accomplishments.

Those whales are still there. But, what used to be the mid-list and the small-list, the little bits along the tail, is expanding.

What the longer tail means for creatives is that more and more people can make money — as a side hustle, as a living — doing something they love.

And almost ANYONE can make and share something they love to do just for the pure joy of it, and reach potentially millions of other humans on the planet.

In the past, if you were an amazing cake decorator, only the members of your family or your local community experienced your work on special occasions. And you probably didn’t have too many peers.

Now, your Instagram and Pinterest encircle the globe and you have thousands of online peers. Even just hundreds.

Maybe you’re one of those musicians who isn’t going to blow up on YouTube like Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift… But you’re still able to sit down at the piano and do a Facebook live and blow some people away. Change their day. Communicate a message to them at just the right time that changes how they feel.

"You don’t have to do something amazing to be happy.”

But, here are some questions:

How do you define amazing?

Are we talking everyday amazing?

1000 true fans amazing and you can make some money from it on the side?

Are you internet famous or mainstream media famous?

Do you have to be any of things?

Can you go back to making a pretty cake for your sister’s wedding?

Can you just decorate cookies and build gingerbread houses with your kids at the holidays?

How about you sing to your beloved when there’s no one else around to hear it?

What if you write an amazing toast for a friend’s retirement party?

What if, what you can jot down in a blank card rivals anything a greeting card company author can compose?

What if a birthday card from you makes a person choke up and weep?

It’s still kind of amazing.

So I think the decision is a matter of SCALE.

What kind of scale do you require to be happy?

Because you do have to express your creativity, share your gifts, practice your talent. You must. For your own health and well being and for the joy of others. It’s a kind of duty really.

And it’s a part of a whole lifestyle — like eating well and exercising and getting good sleep.

You must.

"You don’t have to do something amazing to be happy.”

But what scale do you really require?

Most people I know would love it to be the scale of their job and income.

But be careful with that. Turning a passion into a job can change the passion.

My friend Tricia went to school to be a pastry chef. Her desserts are amazing. But she went and got an admin job at a university because working in restaurants was horrible for her and sucked all the joy out of why she baked in the first place.

She’s happier having it be her passion, not her job.

Being married.

And you may borrow any of the above or supply your own happy thing.

Are these things amazing?

But when we talk about doing something Amazing with our lives, meaning something Large Scale, a legacy that will outlive us…

Do you really need THAT?

When you look into your heart, when you get really honest with yourself, you may find that you don’t.

I don’t know what will make you happy. You may not yet either. You might stumble upon it. Just make sure you take a moment to acknowledge when you finally realize you’re sitting smack in the middle of it. Don’t miss it — the happiness — because you’re focused on the Amazing.

I am speaking to you now as someone who does have to do something a little bit amazing. If you think creating and producing this show is amazing. If writing and publishing books is amazing. I think both those things are.

I considered all this and found that I am a happy mid-lister. I don’t need to be Oprah or James Lipton. I like this smaller scale. But a little bit amazing is way, way more happy than NOT doing it could ever be, for me.

That’s me. You may scale up or down.

I was struck by the line in that movie, and I spent a lot of this year considering what I could redefine and possibly let go of.

I honestly believe you might actually be happier if you CAN let all that Amazing go.

I think a great exercise to do here would be to write a letter to yourself, write a journal entry, a morning page and consider the questions:

Do I have to do something amazing to be happy?

What would happy be for me, what would it look like, without that pressure?

Amanda Heisman is a Nutrition Intuitive & Energy Coach. She teaches Intuitive Eating & Eating for Energy, while exploring the spiritual & emotional sides of Nourishment and channeling the needs of the Nourishment Body. The marrying of her formal training and intuitive gifts provides deep transformation.

"Thriving health isn't just about the absence of disease." - Amanda

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VIDEO: "Why Intuition and Nutrition are a Match Made in Heaven" or The Marriage of a Nutrition Coach and Intuitive

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Amanda:

So I'm Amanda Heisman. I'm an intuitive nutrition and energy coach. So what that means is, I kind of married my formal training as a Certified Holistic Health coach and my abilities as a nutrition intuitive.

So I help people transform their energy. I help people eat for energy and eat more intuitively. So they can use that sort of energy and intuition they build to just create a life that they love. Pretty much.

So I explore the spiritual and emotional sides of nourishment as well as the physical. And as a nutrition intuitive I can channel the needs of the nourishment body and kind of explore where you can be better nourished.

Slade:

Okay. I know everyone listening is really curious about the intuitive part of this, right?

Amanda:

Yeah!

Slade:

That's the part I'm really interested in hearing about.

So, how do you use intuition in the process of counseling someone around nutrition? Just describe that for me.

Amanda:

Sure.

So I can use these words like, the nourishment body, or explore the energy of your health potential, but what does that really mean?

What I do is, I'm more claircognizant or clairsentient, so I feel things very specifically as far as I can feel where an organ might be holding stuck emotion or where it might be storing emotion or it might be storing some toxicity. It might not be - I see it as a spinning, almost. Like it might not be corr - but like the energy of the organ might not be corresponding with the energy centre of the body or the chakras, you know, if you're listeners are familiar with the chakra system, right?

So it might not be, kind of matching up to what it needs to be for a full energy or for full nourishment.

So we know that health isn't just - great thriving health isn't just the absence of disease, right? A great relationship isn't just the absence of abuse. Things... we really look at what is the full potential here of how much you can be thriving. How much energy you can have. How beautiful a life you can have.

And so, how I use my intuition is first seeing where that toxicity might be stored in the physical... It's kind of a, you know we have our energetic body, we have our physical body, we have our emotional body. It's kind of like I feel whether it's on the emotional body side or the physical body side, where there's kind of stuck energy. And then I can address it from there.

So it might feel like an organ, it might feel like a colour... It just might present as emotions, as stored emotions that we need to address.

Does that make sense?

Slade:

Yeah, absolutely. That's really interesting. I was just talking to someone last night about the fact that the chakras spin. That many people talk about the spinning as the motion of the energy.

So that's cool that you affirmed that for me. Because I wasn't sure if I had that entirely right.

I'm curious to know, was there a life event that sort of led you to this work? How did you come to it? What's your story?

Amanda:

Yeah! Excuse me.

So, I have kind of two big life events that first led me back on the nutrition path and then second led me back on the more intuitive side. That second part was more gradual but the initial one was, I was living in south Florida and I was climbing the corporate ladder, so to speak. I had a great life and I had a great job and I was doing really well for myself down there.

And I, one day, I was very work-hard play-hard Type A borderline, I call myself sometimes a recovering perfectionist or recovering Type A sort of achiever.

And one day, I got in a car accident on 95, a freeway down there. And I suffered from herniated discs in both my C5 and my L5, so my structure, my spine, my structural health and that kind of turned my life upside down at the time because I was so centered around... I was very active. I was very athletic. Always very athletic growing up and through my 20s and young adult life, and then I just couldn't do anything anymore.

I'd run marathons and triathlons, soccer games, all these things, and then it was kind of like, BLOP. Like, I had to be really, I had to rest during my recovery and I didn't like that so much. I really resisted it at the time. I was always trying to figure out how to go back to my old ways. And that was just kind of a coming out of the really young energy, right? The really masculine energy I had going in my career and in my sports and everything. And kind of swinging into learning, connecting to my yin side and being really, connecting with gentle exercises so...

That's what opened me up after going through with the neurologist. Going through kind of the gamut of the western medicine diagnoses and treatments. CT scans and MRIs and everything else and it ended with the neurologist telling me to fuse my discs together. And have that surgery.

And I think I was 30 at the time and I just... It was a full body no. No, there has to be something else. You know? I don't want to do that.

So I, that started me on this path of just exploring all sorts of holistic modalities. So osteopathy really helped me. Qigong and yoga really helped me. And then I started looking at nutrition. I finally, after nearly a year of this, got it through a little bit that, hmmm maybe if I can't go run, or do something really active anymore, I should take a look at what I'm putting in my body in the first place.

And that opened up this whole world of nutrition and I couldn't believe the initial - two small changes that I made for my body, for my individual body, having just an exponential effect on my energy. So I thought, Maybe there's something to this. And I kind of worked my way through my recovery the following year.

And then, fast forward basically ended up leaving corporate America and didn't know what I was going to do at the time. That was kind of, surprised that wasn't a surprise, sort of thing.

And then ended up just resting for a few months and then going back to, deciding to go back to nutrition school that summer. And now I'm on this path to help others.

So that was kind of, the first big life event was the car accident and all the ramifications in recovery and lessons I learned from that.

And then the second would be, kind of the perfect storm that was happening when I knew I had to end a relationship but I wasn't doing it. So it was the end of a very significant partnership of a romantic partner. He and I separated and during my emotional recovery from that, I was just so aware of, and I had spiritual mentors at the time as well, I had a modern day shaman, and other folks who channeled the Archangels and different mentors around me. I was very well supported and I have a great support system in my family and friends as well.

But I was very aware of how many kind of, very spiritual mystical experiences I was having. Things that couldn't be explained. Just over and over again. That were directly related to each stage of the grief cycle, each emotion I was going through. And so, during the last maybe year of our relationship and then the year of recovery, my abilities started to become really apparent.

Such that I couldn't hide them anymore. The whole quote about, to remain tight in a bud was more painful than to blossom, so that started, that really started to come forth and I'm, I'm still coming into my own as far as that goes.

I help people in the capacity I do now, but I can feel that it's going to maybe be different in a year. We're always growing, right?

Slade:

What were some of those experiences that you were having? I mean, I mentor emerging intuitive all the time and I'm always curious to see the patterns of how these opportunities keep presenting themselves. You know, if it was like a movie, and we had special effects, it would be like some spirit would beam in and talk to us or something...

What were the real world examples of how that was presenting itself for you? Was it synchronicities or... What were the signs?

Amanda:

Yeah!

There were, I mean, sure there were a ton of synchronicities, there were a ton of repeating numbers, there were a ton of repeating animals that would show up in my life. Animal symbolism. So those were just kind of par for the course.

But then there were these experiences like, we'd both decided to separate but we had about two months left on our lease so we kind of decided to stay, to live together. So that was really difficult. And sometimes one or the other of us would go to friends, but sometimes we were just both there together. And one time we're both there. We just happened to be in bed together and this... I felt this incredible warmth in, because this is just such a painful time, for both of us. For both of us.

Such a painful time.

And I just felt an incredible warmth in the room and like a, it wasn't a flash with my physical eyes, but it was a flash. You know? It was like a flash in between us and then over by the door of the bedroom.

And I just, I woke my partner up because I was like, somebody's here! Somebody's here and I heard Michael and so it was Archangel Michael and he was just providing comfort for me. I didn't get a clear message, or words or anything.

But he was just there, letting me know that I was going to get through this time.

There was another time in the summer, it was summertime in south Florida. It's hot and sticky. And I had dreams. So I'd have dreams at that time I was really connecting to the earth I was on, and so I was in my dreams, talking to a lot of Native American tribes.

So I was part of their tribe and I was doing a lot of talking about, I was, there was a very clear message from them for me about our earth and about how we can do better with the earth. So there was that.

There was, there were a lot of sort of what, I don't know, people call it astral traveling or whatever, different experiences I would have in higher realms, where I was clearly meeting with higher selves, we were working through contracts or forgiving each other, things we couldn't say in the physical to each other, saying it up there.

And then just helping, having experiences where I was flying around the globe - I say "flying", I don't know what else to call it. Flying around the globe just kind of helping humanity through a difficult time it's been the last couple of years on earth.

That's just a few things!

Slade:

I've actually really fascinated by - I love to hear those kind of stories. Those experiences and you actually made me remember something that I haven't talked about for maybe 11 or 12 years. And I remember very early on when I started blogging, writing about how I would have these experiences. I guess they were dreams where I was at some kind of, it felt like an outdoor gathering. Like a music festival or something. Except the Pope would be speaking.

And for some reason, it was the Pope a lot. It was right after Pope John Paul had died and that's a whole other story.

But it's just funny. I just wanted to mention that because then somebody will ask me about it and I can talk about it again.

Yeah, I kind of had that same experience where you feel like you're, I called it like a congress. It was like I had been chosen to go somewhere and convene with all these other people for the purposes of hearing these speeches or something.

And it felt like some kind of movement or whatever. And I guess here in the 3rd dimensional plane I was doing whatever I was supposed to do because I stopped having those dreams. And then I just started doing this instead. So maybe that had something to do with my process as well.

To get back to your story, one of the things I'm curious about is, were you already doing sort of more formal straight up mainstream nutritional counseling and then you kind of decided to add in this intuitive or spiritual component, or was it all kind of happening at the same time?

Describe how that kind of emerged for you, or came together in the way that you do your practice.

Amanda:

Sure!

So... Yes.

Both and. It was kind of like, yes, I started out, I wouldn't say it was ever mainstream, because it wasn't, it's wasn't like a dietitian, the difference between a holistic health coach and a dietitian is that we do look at all sides of health, right?

Slade:

Okay.

Amanda:

So we're very holistic in the sense that we're considering the whole person and all human faculties, emotional, physical spiritual, mental. So it's already very holistic and I already knew about my intuition and trusted my intuition in a very nominal sense. But I hadn't had these really super mystical experiences yet. I'd just, I just knew that when I trusted my intuition, good things happened. And when I went against it, not so gr

Are you a Lantern Bearer? Are you one of those people even strangers seem to want to tell their problems to? Does it seem like you have a sign above your head, some signal broadcasting out into the world?

You’ve heard the term lightworker, but this archetype is something much more specific...

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Are you a Lantern Bearer?

Are you one of those people total strangers seem to want to tell their problems to?

Does it seem like you have a sign above your head? Some signal broadcasting out into the world?

You’ve heard the term light worker, but there is a specific archetype and terminology I've observed in the Automatic Intuition community.

There’s an archetype that shows up a lot in guided meditations with emerging intuitives, psychics and healers — they call him by different names, but the description is very consistent — what most Tarot decks call The Hermit.

Sometimes people say he's Gandalf-like or they directly identify him as Merlin. Or they just describe someone who is clearly that entity.

In Tarot the spiritual journey of a lifetime is the archetypal progress of acquiring wisdom.

This culmination of a spiritual life path of magic is the life of Merlin.

The Hermit, as a word, as a term, conjures a lot of negatives in our modern mindset. We also tend to disconnect from it. It’s not an easy thing for contemporary light workers to identify with this word, this image, The Hermit.

We disparage ourselves with it, use it to describe an impulse to withdraw from the world, to cocoon ourselves in our safe space and not engage. I can’t tell you how many people have used the term this week in describing their winter hibernation practices. “I’ve been such a hermit lately. I just want to stay home with the pets and watch Netflix.”

That sounds like the greatest peace in the world to me, an ideal scenario, and yet when we say this to each other, it’s always with a note of apology, isn’t it?

There is an alternate term for the Hermit archetype (and for the term light worker) that I find so much more appealing.

The Lantern Bearer.

Years ago I ran across a Tarot deck somewhere or a book on the work of Dr. Carl Jung where the term Lantern Bearer was used in place of the Hermit.

The Hermit just makes us think of someone alone, an introvert, an older person no longer connected to society, living as an outcast, either by choice or circumstance.

The Lantern Bearer better describes what it is this person, this archetype, is doing.

I often tell the people I mentor who want to develop their intuition and to use it in service to others… Be prepared to be in the trenches. The people who come to you for readings for assistance or advice (as it often manifests in normal everyday Muggle life) come with darkness.

They’re bringing anxiety, fear, pain, uncertainty, worry.

By the time they’re speaking to you about their worries, decisions, issues — they’ve spent hundreds — maybe thousands — of hours overthinking it. They’ve turned themselves around until they are dizzy. They’re stumbling around in the darkness looking for a light to lead them back.

The light doesn’t need your light. Those who are truly in the light are all together in a big bright super nova humming together in harmony.

The darkness is where your light is needed.

The Hermit — the Lantern Bearer — lives at the edge of civilization not only because he is some outcast, he is there to do his work. To carry his lantern into the night so that those lost in the dark woods can find their way back.

If you are a Lantern Bearer, you’re a human lighthouse. And you’re likely placed a bit away from the center of culture and society. You’re on the edge because that is where you are needed. You are isolated because we have been dispersed throughout the population so that we may serve and reach more people.

Sure, it would be great if you could gather up all the like-minded spiritual souls and put them in one place. That would be an amazing place to live. But the rest of the world would go to hell and a lot of souls would remain lost there.

If you are a Lantern Bearer, you already know it.

It’s like you have a neon sigh floating over your head — a light — that invites people to ask you for help. To tell you their problems. To seek your perspective.

People at work bring you their problems. Your family members call you. Total strangers confide surprising amounts of personal information. You’re everybody’s untrained psychotherapist and counselor, even when your actual job has nothing to do with it. You will always be found inhabiting that role.

This is what we talk about when we say a life purpose is not necessarily a job. It could be in alignment with your job, but it is the thing you will end up doing no matter where we put you.

I remember about 18 years ago, still a good five or six years before I would create a career that more closely embodied my purpose — this thing for which you know me. I was in a convenience store with a friend of mine, Seth. (Seth listens to the show, so Hey Seth! I don’t know if you remember this incident the way I do. I think it was at the BP on Dayton Boulevard.)

Anyway. We were waiting in a long line. The cashier was one of those bitter creatures who can ring you up without ever once acknowledging your existence. Something I despised when I was in a supervisory position over cashiers, by the way. I would eat you alive for doing this when I Manage on Duty. I did my part to ensure there is at least a small population of cashiers trained and released on the public who make eye contact and speak to the customers they interact with.

So. We watched this woman ring up person after person, without so much as a hello or thank you, and when we got to the counter, in the course of ringing up a couple of drinks — we’re talking seconds, here — she managed to tell me all about the divorce she was currently going through. And in that moment, of course I tried to think of something quick and brief but hopefully helpful to say. To leave her with some fortune cookie wisdom that might make a positive impact.

Walking out to Seth’s truck, I remember he was sort of smiling and shaking his head at me. And I asked him, pointblank “What? Does that not happen to everyone?”

I will never forget, he said “It happens to you.”

Well, it happens to a lot of us. Because it’s about who we are. And when we know it, we can use it with intention.

If you are a Lantern Bearer, you have the ability to change lives. Maybe to save a life. With as little as a smile or a nod. To let someone know that in your light, they are seen. They are visible. They matter. They count.

Everybody you pity, everyone you love, those with whom you empathize or despise… They all need to be acknowledged. Noticed. Heard.

We all need a witness.

To recognize the spark in the eyes of another is our most eminently worthy gesture of humanity. To withhold such a small instance of focus from any living person seems lazy, at best; at worst, it’s cruel.

We focus so much on gaining acknowledgement for ourselves, we miss the easiest act of grace and power — to look into the eyes of another and simply allow ourselves to see a flash of mirrors there.

Susan Hyatt is a master certified life coach, weight loss expert, and the author of BARE. She’s the creator of the trademarked BARE Process, the BARE Deck, a podcast called BARE, and an online community called BARE DAILY.

We talk about:

"There's no upside to violent self-thoughts. They don't help in any way," Susan says. "The more you allow yourself to be seen and take up space, the more you can conquer those voices that say you shouldn't."

If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight? by Brooke Castillo

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Susan:

I help people get what they want.

Slade:

What does that mean?

Susan:

That means, so when you say to people, I'm a life coach, still most of the population has no idea what that means. Theres an elderly woman on a plane that thought that meant I was a hospice worker.

And so I look at it more as a conversation starter. So I'm not, if I just say, I'm a life coach, people's eyes kind of glaze over and then they are like, Oh, okay.

If I say, I help opoeple get what they want, then they're like, WHAAAT? Say more!

And then it's a conversation I'm having about, I'm a life coach and an author and I specialize in helping women stop dieting. Sometimes I just say, I help women stop dieting and you can see, I've written a couple funny stories because especially women are like, What?? You help them stop?? What would you do that? Because we're so immersed in diet culture. People think that dieting is being healthy and it's actually the opposite of that.

Slade:

Hnm.. How did that land in your lap, by the way? How did that become your thing?

Susan:

Well, it became my thing because I was 35 - 40 pounds over my natural weight when my first year as a life coach. And I knew that there were underlying issues about that. And I felt like, Hahaha it was my final frontier to conquer.

It wasn't, but it certainly was one issue that I needed to deal with.

And I hired a weight loss coach named Brook Castillo who's amazing, and she has this great book, If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight? And what we really did was dive in to the emotional side of eating, which really rocked my world. And I lost that weight within about six months.

And I was somebody who I joke, that I was, I really had a PhD in being a couch potato. I mean, I refused to exercise, I didn't want anyone telling me what I could or couldn't eat, and it really rocked my world.

And I thought, If I can lose this extra weight, then I want to help other women do it. And so I became, I added weight loss coaching to my repertoire.

And what I started to notice after coaching hundreds of women was, I was really spending the bulk of my time, because I could help anybody lose weight. It's really the inner deep work that makes weight loss sustainable, and it has nothing, I promise, to do with calories in, calories out, no pain no gain, all that stuff we're taught.

It's really about, Is this woman cherishing herself, loving herself, giving herself enough daily pleasure so that she's not getting her entertainment from food, so that she's not getting her comfort from food, so that she's not numbing out.

And I really started to notice that my clients, I could help them lose 50, 100 pounds, and then they would start complaining about other parts of their bodies. So yes, they had lost the weight, but now they were fixated on stretch marks, or, I still have a muffin top, or, Maybe I should get cosmetic surgery.

And I started focusing on learning how to love your body as it is, right now. And THEN we'll do this other stuff.

And BINGO! Everything changed.

And so I developed this process called BARE, and it's really a process of bringing a woman back to herself. And figuring out that diet just keeps you on this deprivation cycle that you can't win. And the diet industry's actually counting on that. It's like, I think the latest statistic, it's a over 100 billion dollar industry and it's designed to keep you dissatisfied with how you look so that you keep spending money trying to become something else .

Slade:

Wow.

Do you remember what the breaking point was for you? The shift that happened in your own mindset. I mean, now, working with the other clients, you were able to see it from outside and observe it in controlled environment.

But when that happened to you, can you go back and remember what that mindset shift was?

Susan:

Yeah, I can remember.

There was this moment, it was, I think maybe I had lost about 16 pounds of the 35 to 40, and we were going on spring break vacation and my daughter at the time was maybe 7. And I bought a new bikini and I was so excited in the store about having this bathing suit.

And I remember my coach wanted me, she made a joke about a client of hers that she had asked to take a picture of herself in a swimsuit and send it to her. And when the photo arrived, it was a photo of her client flipping her off. And I started laughing and I said, "Don't ever assign that to me."

And she was like, "Oh, really?? That's your homework then!"

And so I have my daughter, I put my swimsuit on, I was actually feeling great. My little 8-year old Emily takes a photo of me and I felt fine the entire process.

Until I looked at the photo on my big desktop screen.

And all of a sudden, all of these really negative thoughts started flooding in. That were still there about, Oh, you don't look as good as you thought, and just really self-violent thoughts that almost all women have about their bodies.

And I thought, You've got some real work to do. And I often think about, I was doing a webinar yesterday and I was talking about this. When you look at little kids. Say a film crew shows up at an elementary school, little kids are fighting, shoving each other out of the way to be seen on camera. This is an exciting thing, like, Look at me, I'm on TV!

And at some point, we receive messages from either family of origin or culture at large that the way that you look is not acceptable. And by the time we reach our age, we're so full of these messages that we should look a certain way and we're not good enough.

And in that moment when I looked at myself on screen, I was like, You have got to figure out how to be like that again.

Be like, There I am! Look at me! And show up. And stop this hiding because you have some cellulite or whatever it might be.

And that was really a moment, an AHA moment, a breaking point moment, a moment where I shifted and decided to devote myself to figuring that out.

And I did!

And I can tell you that people are always asking me, I don't understand how you get all that stuff done. And I can tell you, the reason I get so much stuff done, is because I'm no longer obsessing about food and body and how I look.

Slade:

Mmm...

Tell me about, well, first I have to tell you. You probably know this about me but I like to personify the archetypes, I like to communicate with voices, a lot of the work I do with people is around policing the negative self talk. You know, it's really about learning how to, not only identify that, but one of the things that you pointed out was, these voices come from your family and society. They don't come from your higher self. They don't come from little kid you. You've got them from somewhere. You took them on, you download them, and you call them your own thoughts and they're really not.

I noticed when I was looking at your website, before the interview, that you have an archetype called the Inner Mean Girl. Tell me about her. Is that who it is that's saying all these mean things?

Susan:

Yes! And you're absolutely right. These thoughts that we absorb and take on as our own, we were not born into this world with those kind of beliefs. We picked them up along the way and yeah, your inner mean girl is the one saying really horrible things to you about yourself that are untrue and the way that you know they're not true is because they make you feel horrible.

And I think most women think that that is because they talk with their girlfriends, they talk with their mom, they talk with other people and everybody goes, "Oh yeah! Me too!"

And so they think, Well that's normal and that's just the way it is.

But it is prevalent in our culture but it's not what we were meant to experience, and so we have to clap back at that and tell the mean girl to have a seat and educate her on how you want to be treated. And you can flip the dialogue on that and practice talking back to her and saying kind things, because, listen, even if you want to argue with me and say, No, but she's right. I DO need to lose weight. I don't exercise. I am lazy.

You've to to ask yourself different questions and tell yourself different things so that you change your behaviour, but there's no upside to self-violent thoughts, if you haven't noticed. There's no upside to it.

Slade:

Right.

Susan:

It doesn't help in any way.

Slade:

So you recently landed a big book deal. And I know this because we're friends on Facebook and you've been talking about the process and everything. Is this book deal, The BARE Message, is that what this is about?

Tell me about the book.

Susan:

The book is called BARE, and we're still working on the subtitle. But thank you very much. Yes, I'm so excited to have a book deal for it. It's basically -

Slade:

Yay! Congrats!

Susan:

Thank you!!! I'm so stoked!

Actually, just had a meeting with my publishing team yesterday, and they are on it. It's gonna be fire. I cannot wait for it to hit. Actually, pre-sale, the book is not going to be out until January of 2019, so there's a big process to getting these books out into the world, and I'm slightly impatient...

Slade:

Yeah...

Susan:

I would like it to be in your hands tomorrow, but pre-orders, actually, will start fairly soon, but the books will not ship until January.

And yes, it's a book full of personal stories and client stories and it walks you through the BARE process. And the thing that I like about the BARE process is - so when you get the book, it's a story, and then there's a challenge.

So it gets you taking action immediately.

Side note, I have a podcast, the BARE podcast, which is going to drop on iTunes maybe by next week, so people, while they're waliting on the book, can check out the podcast. I'm dropping an entire season at once, so it can walk people through... there's 8 episodes in season 1. It walks people through the BARE process. You can do it on your own or you can decide to hire a coach to help you.

Slade:

Oh! Okay.

You also have, for people who don't want to wait, who want to dive in and work with it, this platform, this work, this material exists in various forms. You have a community, an online community around it already, right?

Susan:

Yeah, yeah!

It's called BARE Daily. The way that it's set up is, if someone joins the community, they get access, a username and password to an online classroom that has the BARE process in videos, so you can watch a video, there's homework assignments, there's tons of stuff in there.

And then, in the private forum, I'm in there every day and so are my BARE coaches. So let's say you sign up and you start doing the BARE process, and you hit a wall or you have an issue, which you will. Coaches are there 24/7 to coach you through what's happening in the forum.

So it's really a sweet set up.

Slade:

I have to ask you this question. I love to ask everyone this, and I'm trying to learn to ask it in a more postitive way, but, as someone who's spent some time now in the personal development world, what do you most hope to change about the conversation?

Susan:

So many things, Slade. So many things.

Primarily, I want to disrupt diet culture. So the segment of the self-help industry that focuses on food, body and weight, I want to change the conversation from fear and deprivation to pleasure, love, positivity. So that's number one.

People who are promoting unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyle changes, things that you wrap your body in, or starve yourself. All these kinds of things. I definitely want to, not flip the switch, flip the table on those folks.

And then, also, the part of the self-help industry that is selling a bill of goods around, how do I say this? So I'm a big believer in spiritual grease plus elbow grease. Meaning, Yes, the Universe has your back. Yes, the Universe is conspiring in your favour. And whatever higher power you believe in, yes, your higher power, your higher self wants you to have everything that you crave. But you have to couple that faith in belief with action.

And so, I get pretty worn out with people who are selling the idea that if you just believe it hard enough, it will happen.

Slade:

Mmm... yeah. Like the law of attraction method, I mean, not like specifically, but some of that stuff. Like thinking it will be true, feel your way into the reality, that kind of stuff?

Susan:

Yeah, because it's only part of the story.

I have dear friends who are big law of attraction teachers, and I think people misunderstand it and they think, Well if I pay this money and I make a vision board, and I just believe that I'm going to own a Mercedes, and it's going to appear in my driveway... And tomorrow, I'm going to be dancing with Cardi B and Bruno Mars

I receive a lot of emails and requests for readings from people who feel blocked from hearing their guides.

On this episode, I talk about: receiving psychic information through the different clairs; developing claircognizance in particular; the different "lanes" of consciousness; reframing expectations to bust through the blocks; and whether guides are external or within us.

I'm also sharing real examples, conversation, and correspondence with mentoring students from Automatic Intuition.

About Channeling with Frank Butterfield

Black Irish Books & Steven Pressfield

Slade's Books & Courses

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Automatic Intuition

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This week, I'm talking about getting rid of goals and replacing them with systems. It’s a mindset shift.

What’s the difference between Systems and Goals?

Tim Grahl

Slade's Books & Courses

Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon