Shift Your Spirits

Do you have disturbing thoughts about your own death? Or horrific daydreams where you play out different scenarios involving your own death, or that of your loved ones?

I think of it as the "elephant in the room" when we’re talking about spirituality and our souls. We’re probably all having these thoughts a lot more than we’re talking about them …

You Might Die Tomorrow is Kate Manser's life’s work dedicated to helping you live urgently, love openly, and enjoy your life — by thinking about your death.

It’s about an inspiration to live today.

www.youmightdietomorrow.com

Deathbed Meditation

You Might Die Tomorrow Facebook Group

Heather Alice Shea

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Kate:

Yeah, I was just like everybody else. I didn't really think about death very much, other than thinking that I was totally invincible all throughout high school, doing a lot of dangerous things.

But at the time, what precipitated my shift, from going from not thinking about death to embracing death, which is where I am today, was a period of intense death anxiety. I don't know if you've ever been there, Slade, but I was just consumed by death anxiety.

At the time, I was in a marriage that was very unhappy and I was just in decision paralysis agony, didn't know what to do, and then I had three people die around my same age in unrelated tragedies in a span of six months.

So that just sent me into a tailspin oh, Ohmygod, I could die at any moment. I need to be scared all the time.

Slade:

Mmm... So tell me, what are some of the components of death anxiety? What are the thoughts and the voices that you're hearing? What are they saying?

Kate:

It was like there was a movie in my head all the time of a really gory, not fun movie happening where like, if I was driving into an intersection, for example, which you do, we do all the time. I would just have this quick snap vision of a Mack truck coming and taking me out as I went through the intersection. And then it would just continue. That movie would continue and I would think, oh, what would happen?

The paramedics would come, then my family would have to be notified. All down just this dark tunnel of mortality.

And then the same thing would apply for other people in my life. I would imagine getting the call that my mom had died unexpectedly. And I think the phone was kind of a trigger for me because I had gotten a couple of these unexpected calls when three of my friends died. I had that negative association.

And so I was just afraid of death all the time. It was just this mysterious unknown thing that I couldn't control but put all my energy into trying to.

Slade:

Okay, so it was much more visceral violence, suspensful gory movie kind of stuff for you. It wasn't even more the existential stuff. It was actual... Well I've heard before that that's kind of a PTSD thing? To, in the moment, be struck with flashes of anxious violence. I mean, anything can cause you to have PTSD. You could have it around the trauma of those phone calls. You know what I'm saying? The ones that had happened in the past and that was some kind of lingering energy that was getting triggered.

Kate:

Oh yeah.

And it was the gory moment of death, for sure, but it was also.. My mind was very preoccupied with all the things that would happen after the death occurred. Because that's what's unknown. We don't know if we're going to be like the stoic, you know, if we lose someone in our life that we really care about, are we going to be the stoic survivor or are we going to be like crumbled under the circumstances?

So I would have trouble sleeping at night because I would imagine the whole scenario. What would happen if my husband had died unexpectedly, and calling his family and going to Brazil to have a funeral there and all of the things that would happen.

It got to the point that, I had always been someone who was like, pretty much a lover of life, but during this period, which lasted about a year and half, I was putting all my energy into death anxiety and it had completely clouded the beauty of life.

Slade:

Okay, so I have to tell you. There was this synchronicity involved with our meeting. The day before I was introduced to your site, a woman had posted in our Facebook Shift Your Spirits community asking if anyone else had obsessive thoughts about death.

Kate:

Wow...

Slade:

And she was really quick to say that, it wasn't really negative, it wasn't violent. She wasn't contemplating suicide or anything like that. She was just kind of putting it out there that she thought really often about death. But more from an existential place.

That's why I was surprised that you were talking about these kind of violent scenarios, the actual death itself. She was kind of talking more from a place of like, being really profoundly aware, like this clock ticking and having this limited amount of time on earth and she just put it out there and said, you know, that she was thinking about it in a contemplative way.

She found it odd that more people didn't talk about it, right? It's like this elephant in the room, especially in a community like ours where we're talking about spirits and communication from those who've passed. That kind of stuff. She was asking if anyone wanted to chime in and say how they felt about it.

And it was weird because it was one of those posts where a lot of people were liking it or responding to it without commenting. So I said, "Yeah, I really do think those thoughts actually, and I wasn't sure what to say though in support of that other than... I feel you.

Kate:

Yeah.

Slade:

And then the very day, there you were with your message and I thought, okay, this is obviously a conversation that I need to have for everyone who was probably seeing that post and thinking, I don't even know what to do with this.

So help me reframe this in a positive light. How did you get to a place where you could embrace your death?

Kate:

So believe it or not, it was another tragic and unexpected death of someone around me, same age, so it was like the fourth. A year and a half had passed since that six months where I had three in a row. I believe it was, yeah, about a year and a half went by and then a friend and coworker of mine at Google, Dan Freedenburg, was climbing Mount Everest and he died in the Nepal earthquake, in an avalanche, when he was up at base camp.

Man, I was so angry initially when I heard that he died, because he was a really vibrant, adventurous, goofy, very intelligent person, and very well liked among Google and his friends. He dated a celebrity and what my first reaction was, was just anger. That he had taken part in an elective sport, really, and took his life in his own hands and ultimately it was his choice to climb Mount Everest. That ultimately took him out of this world, away from all of us.

I was so mad at him at first.

But then as I thought more about it, I realized that climbing Mount Everest is something that you don't just like do on a random Saturday. It's something that requires a ton of mindful energy. It's very expensive. You have to train really hard for it and it's a choice that you make over a long period of time.

I realized that he was a very smart and vibrant person and he had put a lot of thought into climbing Mount Everest. He accepted the risk that came with that because, as I looked back on his decision, I came upon this realization that he HAD to climb Mount Everest in order to truly live. That if he had stayed on the ground, he also would have died in a way as well, because he would have been living out of his system of values and not living his authentic life.

That was when I suddenly saw death in a new perspective, which was that I have no control over when I die. Dan had no control over when he died and he decided to live vibrantly and take calculated risk.

I could die climbing Mount Everest if I ever did that, which I probably wouldn't.

I could die in that intersection that I was so afraid of going through all the time.

Or, I'm a very clumsy person! I could probably die climbing the stairs, and I'm putting so much of my precious energy into worrying about death when I could be putting that energy into living while I'm still alive.

That was really the main turning point for me, was just like, hey, I could die tomorrow and whereas when I was with the death anxiety, that was the most terrifying thought. Suddenly, a light had been shown on it and I was like, oh! I could die tomorrow! And that's the most freeing concept I've ever experienced.

Slade:

So that's interesting. The fact that we could make that a freeing concept.

So how do you recommend, as we're listening, we're all probably now really feeling the anxiety about it. So how do we manage that?

Kate:

Yeah. I'm actually doing some research right now for this for the last chapter that I'm working on for my book. Like, psychologically we manage our fear of death. I believe that fear of death is... And many, many scientists and psychologists believe that fear of death is like the one universal fear that all humans share. We're not all afraid of snakes but we're all afraid of death.

The research shows that the best way to manage our fear of death is two things:

Because, I know I can say for myself that the more I invite death into my life, the more I think about it and meditate on it, the better I feel and the more vibrant I live while I'm still alive.

Slade:

So how do you think we can use this sense of our mortality to empower us? To help us make decisions about what we're doing in our lives?

Kate:

Man, in death, everything seems to just fall away and become clear. Death is this... There's something about it. There's something about the finality of it that we have so much going on in our lives that when we look at it from the perspective of death or the end of our life, we realize how little of it really matters to us.

That's what I've found is the best way to help me make decisions in life is, I actually do this thing that I call the Deathbed Gut Check, which is that when i'm faced with a decision that I'm having trouble making, I don't know what to do. I get decision paralysis with the best of them and I'm frozen and trying to figure out what the heck I want to do with my life.

I do the Death Bed Gut Check, which is, I will close my eyes and imagine myself on my deathbed. I'm on my deathbed and I'm looking at the present moment or the tough decision that I'm trying to make, I'm looking BACK at it from the perspective of being about to die.

I am given a sense of clarity and I imagine myself thinking, like, ok, I'm on my deathbed, how do I feel having done Option A. I observe the visceral reaction in my body. Do I feel a lightness of being, or do I feel a pit at the bottom of my stomach?

I do the same thing for Option B.

Because it's so loud in our lives, with all this stuff that swirls around, and it's difficult to focus on... get that perspective of what matters. I use that sense of mortality to get perspective and help me make decisions in life. And that five second Deathbed Gut Check has helped me make some really, really important decisions and also really simple ones.

And it's something that, death is accessible to all of us and it's a tool that is radically underused.

Slade:

I have to share with you that several months ago, I was working with a healer around some creativity blocks and I was really struggling with the book that I was working on. Part of my struggle was that I had another book that I really wanted to be writing instead, and I had this HUGE sense of guilt about abandoning one to work on the other, and abandoning all that work and etcetera etcetera.

I was just angst thinking about it, as authors do. You know, just ridiculously blown up into this existential crisis.

The woman I was sharing all this with came back to me with just a really simple question: If you had only enough time to live and produce one of these books, which one is it?

Kate:

Wow.

Slade:

And it was INSTANTLY...

Kate:

gasp It was!

Slade:

You know what I mean? The answer was like, Oh.

Kate:

Lightning bolt.

Slade:

Yeah! It was like, so just flashed through your body. Like, all the thinking and worrying and pros and cons list just fell away.

Kate:

Yes!

Slade:

Yeah, so I will now call it the Deathbed Gut Check.

Kate:

Yeaaaah.

Slade:

It's a great way to think about it.

Well, so you also have something called the Deathbed Meditation. Tell us about that.

Kate:

The Deathbed Meditation actually came from the Deathbed Gut Check, because I had observed these positive effects of imagining myself on my deathbed and helping me make decisions in life that... I became curious about the deeper effects of meditating on mortality.

So I started googling around and I learned a lot about how pervasive death-awareness is, particularly in the Buddhist religion. But I couldn't find an actual meditation similar to what that Deathbed Gut Check is, from the perspective of our deathbed, looking back over our lives, and so I wrote one.

I've been facilitating it now for I thin

A little personal diatribe about comparing yourself to others, impostor syndrome and shoulding all over yourself.

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Slade:

Have you been shoulding all over yourself?

Are the voices playing in your head these days starting sentences with You should this ... or You should that… Or I should …

You know, “I should …” feels a little better, a little more like you’re driving, you’re in control, it’s intentional … but beware the “I should probably …”

Hmm. That “probably” … That’s external. That is not originating within you.

And along with all the things you’re telling yourself you should be doing, if you do them, then it feels like you’re faking it. It feels like a mask. It feels like a white lie, at best. And if you’re supposed to be shining your light, then putting a mask over that dims it.

It’s a shade.

Impostor syndrome — who the F do you think you are, acting like you’re some kind of star. Nobody’s buying it. Look at so and so over there, look at HER instagram. She knows how to do it. She’s barely even trying.

And now we’re into Comparisonitis.

See, this malaise is actually sort of a cluster of mind virus cancer cells — it's comparisonitis and impostor syndrome (referred to in pharmaceutical commercials as IS) — and shoulding all over yourself.

That's the big symptom.

The past month or so, in my world, was difficult.

In addition to all the typical holiday stuff and just having all your routines interrupted, my dad was also in the hospital. And although I should have had a lot of excuses and reasons to cut myself some slack, instead I just kept thinking of all the things that a "Real FB group host" would post.

I kept being presented with the idea of things I was “supposed” to do or things I “ought” to do.

It actually became a little ridiculous. Because I was aware of it, as a voice, as a program, playing in the background. Like a tv left on across the room.

Somebody turn that shit OFF already!

I thought I ought to be posting Solstice message, because I would prefer to acknowledge THAT among all the holidays that we're acknowledging during the holidays and I felt like I needed to let everyone know I'm down with solstice.

And then of course, do I do a Christmas message? That's always kid of awkward for a non-Christian because we celebrate quasi-pagan American Christmas. I don't know. That's a conflict in and of itself.

And then a New Years message. That's a huge one for personal development bloggers and self-help people like me. I saw all these happy new year messages in the Facebook community and I felt like as the administrator, the originator of our group, I “should” somehow beam in. I "should" somehow appear in a FB live video or something.

But the reality is, what I wanted to do during the Holidays, once the actual holidays hit and everyone was off doing all their stuff, I just wanted to RETREAT.

Self care was definitely what was called for and I don't think anyone who looked in and took a peek at what was going on in my world and the lives of those close to me and my family and all that, I don't think anyone would have argued with me that, you know, you need to just be focused on some self care.

But I felt like, in order to claim that, I had to REBEL.

I sure as shit couldn't "phone it in" or go through the motions (because that’s IS for sure. Impostor syndrome. We're calling it IS now).

By rebel I mean not “call in sick”, not apologize. I didn’t want to have to explain it or announce it or do a Facebook post about how I'm not going to be on Facebook. That annoys me.

I just wanted to ghost.

Aka the Irish goodbye, the French exit, and any number of other ethnophobic terms—which means leaving a social gathering without saying goodbye. One minute you’re there at the bar, the party ... And then the next minute you’re just gone.

Where did he go?

I’ve been practicing that for as long as I can remember. I know since childhood I can remember at least an elementary school age Halloween costume party of some type at some time when I ghosted. It required my mother's assistance because of course she was driving. But somehow I pulled off a ghosting.

Leaving without anyone noticing is one of the components of invisibility magic, which is something that I can say that I'm good at, or that I enjoy practicing. I don't know that I ENJOY it. I think I had to learn how to do it for any number of reasons. I enjoy the fact that I'm good at it and it's kind of fun to watch the effects of good invisibility magic. I think, wow, it's cool that I can do that.

I’ll talk about that another time too.

But this idea of ghosting, the Irish goodbye, the French exit, my friends in college kind of probably hated that about me. I was known to do it. I let it be a THING I was known for, because then it was just a blank cheque. I could do it all the time.

After college, friends always wanted to ride with me when we went out because I didn’t drink. I did designated driver on New Years Eve for, I can't even remember how many years.

But I always used to say, “Alright. You can ride with me to the club, but I WILL disappear on you, so just be prepared… I'll get you there but you gotta figure out how you're getting home. Because I will disappear."

Interestingly, when I think back to that, I realize what I REALLY wanted to be doing when I wanted to disappear from the club was the same thing that I wanted to be doing now when I disappeared from everything.

I just wanted to be home, reading a book. And that's exactly what I did for New Years.

Not New Years Eve. New Years Day.

I actually prefer New Years Day so much that I just go to bed in preparation on New Years Eve of having a luscious New Years Day.

My New Years Day's intentions were to really truly just take the day off, do nothing, but drink caffeine, coffee, tea, watch Netflix and read. And stay in my pajamas all day.

It's HARD for me not to work at least a little bit every day. And I did end up working for about 10 minutes. Because it was a Tuesday, and I forgot to schedule everything, so I had to jump on Facebook and share a few links to my latest podcast episode — for the sake of my guest, really, more than for me. If it had been one of these solo episodes, I would've just been like, eh, I'll do it tomorrow.

But I didn't want her to not get the full, you know, backing and sharing and promotion that her show deserves.

By the way, just for the record, lying all around day in pajamas not doing anything … was depressing. It was physically depressing. It programmed my body in a way that was really uncomfortable to me and I don’t think that I'm ever going to even try that again.

It honestly felt like being sick, but I wasn’t. And it kind of made me almost have symptoms of being tired, like feeling fatigue. And who wants that?

Through all this, on New Years Day even, when I was really just intentionally ghosting everything. I kept thinking:

And I don't mean are they wondering where I am, do they miss me... like I wanted to be missed. It was more like, "Oh crap, I hope I can get away with this and that they really don't care." Because I really need this.

And I feel like if I could've asked you all to vote, you probably would've said it's okay. And there were so many wonderful Happy New Year messages on there anyway. I would kind of look at them and scan once in awhile, oh those are nice! You know, whoever's in there looking for that is getting a lot of it. They don't need mine. It's just a drop in the bucket at this point.

To tell you honestly, it sometimes feels like I’ve thrown a party on social media and then chosen to stay upstairs. Like I'm having a party in my house but I'm just hanging out in my bedroom with my cats because social media for me has always been a necessity of my business more than a real kind of personal impulse.

My personal impulse is always to ghost.

I don't know. Did you guys criticize my absence? Did you think, “Wow. What a lousy leader he is…”

Or did you even notice? Or did you think maybe I was recovering from a stressful holiday period with a parent in the hospital, because you saw me post about that. So you kind of knew, maybe, what was going on for me.

You know what? Who cares what you think about me? WHO CARES WHAT ANYONE THINKS? About you. Or me. Or anyone.

That’s kind of the point of all those thoughts — all the Shoulding all over yourself.

What do you really want to do? What do you need? Why isn’t that acceptable? Why isn't that enough?

How are you shoulding all over yourself? What areas of your life? What’s it about?

It’s gotta be about something to do with the public. With other people. With those around you outside your own head. With some perceived external judgment from the world.

But is that even real? Or are you projecting it?

And what happens if you just don’t? If you’re honest with your true inclinations and desires and needs and you just say:

Even as I say that, I’m thinking “Isn’t that a little rude though? You gotta make some excuses and apologies just to keep from hurting other people’s feelings…”

One of my favorite memes is a picture of a T-shirt that I really need to track down and order:

That kinda sums up my social life.

I'm one of those people that gets excited if you cancel plans with me. I go, "Oh yes!" I feel a sense of relief. It still assumes an apology. "Sorry I'm late. I didn't want to come."

It draws sarcastic attention to the issue and makes you more of an asshole.

But one of my favorite Oprah quotes, or Oprah-isms is “NO" IS A COMPLETE ANSWER.

It’s okay to say No.

What if you just say No? What can you really get away with just saying No to?

If you’re a spiritual person and you're trying to better yourself and be best, you probably want to come from a place of Yes.

So, that’s sticky, right? I want to come from a place of Yes but I need to say no and not apologize for it when I need to.

It sounds good, but that's all kind of hard to follow through on, I think. So maybe do this. Maybe get clear about what are you saying Yes to for the right or wrong reasons. What are you saying No to for the right or wrong reasons?

Just get clear about that.

Do you say No because of a fear of success? Then you should probably come from a place of Yes then right?

It’s so easy to convince ourselves that every invitation is an opportunity. Have you ever thought something like, "Yeah, but what if I don't go to the Christmas party and my soul mate was there and we didn't meet."

Some bad romantic comedy situation.

But let’s be honest—you know there are some things you just want to say No to.

Obligations.

What happens if you say No? Really, what happens?

What about instead of explaining or apologizing, you just don’t say the word 'sorry' anymore.

There was a meme going around last year that I loved so much. And it was about replacing Sorry with Thank you.

I know Oprah said No is a complete answer, but I think we can still make it pretty.

You could say: “Thank you for the invitation. I’m really grateful you included me. I won’t be able to attend. Have a fantastic time! Let’s catch up soon and you can tell me all about it.”

They're excited. They're don't want to hear about the drama going on in your world that you're using as an excuse not to come. So just wish them well. Wish them happiness and say, "Have a great time. Tell me about it later."

Are you mad at me, for choosing to be alone in my tower over the holidays? And just ignore all that Solstice, Christmas, New Year stuff and just not be there for it.

Are you disappointed? Do you resent me?

You’re not. You don't.

I’ve talked to some of you about this and I know what your response is...

And, you know, your friends and family and clients, they're probably okay with your choices too.

Whatever it is you’re trying to be:

perfect parent

You notice the theme there…

Shoulding all over yourself is about perfectionism.

You’re not going to be perfect.

Maybe as we remove the words sorry and should from our vocabulary, and we can also remove the word perfect.

My friend Seth has a mantra for this:

“Is it possible… that Kundalini awakening could look like psychosis?”

After ditching university, Kara-Leah Grant spent her twenties traveling the world in search of adventure, creativity and a tribe of like-minded souls. Sex, drugs, yoga and music festivals were simply part of the fun, until they weren’t. Diagnosed as bipolar after leaping topless onto a moving logging truck in the wilderness of British Columbia, Kara-Leah returns to New Zealand to heal her soul, face her past, and uncover the deep truths of her innermost being.

karaleah.com

Sex, Drugs & (mostly) Yoga: Field Notes from a Kundalini Awakening by Kara-Leah Grant

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I asked her how bad it got when it really wasn’t fun anymore...

Kara-Leah:

That moment was waking up in a psych ward for the second time, so this is September 2004, and 4 weeks earlier I ended up in the psych ward as well. The second time I woke up, I remember so clearly I was in this single bed right beside the door and there were 4 beds to a room so it was me with other people.

I woke up knowing that my fiancé had broken up with me 5 or 6 days before. Knowing that because he'd broken up with me, I now didn't have anywhere to live. Knowing that I was essentially in debt and I didn't have a job. Knowing that I'd been diagnosed bipolar. That I was back in a psych ward. That I was potentially seen as crazy. That my whole life had imploded.

And knowing that, for the second time... The first time, it had been triggered by taking LSD and mushrooms and ecstasy and weed and all those things. But this time I hadn't taken any drugs.

So it's a sense of waking up going, I'm crazy again and I can't blame the drugs and I've been dumped by the person that was supposed to be here for me. And feeling like hell was gracing my heart but I was so afraid of being vulnerable that I couldn't express it even. There was nowhere to go because I was surrounded by people in the ward and the room and the sense of total implosion of life and nowhere to hide anymore. Just nowhere to hide.

It was a pretty painful moment in my life.

Slade:

So what switch sort of flipped in you to make you think, you know what? I'm gonna share this story with everyone.

Kara-Leah:

Well, I'd always been a writer and I had journalled my whole life. I had been working as a journalist in British Columbia where I was living. I was working as a waitress and as a journalist and as a go go dancer. And then I had quit waitressing because through writing full-time I'd written a screenplay that had won a national award.

But I was really struggling. I was struggling massively.

I wasn't able to pitch myself. I had a lot of stuff going on emotionally so even though I was theoretically freelancing as a writer, I wasn't making any money coming in.

So when I woke up in the psych ward, I had a journal with me fortunately that someone had brought in and gave to me. She was like this angel. She literally showed up and she was like, I know that you write. And I thought that you would appreciate having something to write in. I didn't even know her that well, like an acquaintance of mine.

So I had this journal that she dropped off for me maybe the first or second day I was in the psych ward. And I just remember writing in my journal and writing out everything that's happened.

And at the very end of writing that diary entry, there was like this surge of knowingness, like this energy. I actually talk about this in the book, this knowingness or this energy came through several times in my life since, and I just found myself writing down, The sun was shining in in my life. So real. And it was just this, almost rebellious, You know what? Fuck you. You can't keep me down. All this shit that's happened to me, I will find my way back to the light. Just you wait and see.

So that was me right at that moment. And I think that energy was what called me forth to find my way through. And I knew, even back then, that I would one day, that part of the journey was to share this story of mine with the public. Like it was really important to write about it because I was able to...

I mean, it was such a gift to experience psychosis from the inside. To really witness what the mind was like, and that experience. And then to be able to recall it. And then to be able to articulate it in a way that other people could understand.

So even then I had a sense of how important it was that I journal and write about my experiences of psychosis/awakening. It was though.

Slade:

So is it possible that what we would call psychosis or mental illness could also be a kundalini awakening? Tell me about that connection. Other people may be experiencing one or the other and wondering.

Kara-Leah:

Absolutely.

Since then, my understanding from conversations I've had with different people and research that I've done, what can begin to happen for us is, especially if we're dabbling in a combination, as I was, of yoga practices and meditation practices and ecstatic dance practices combined with LSD or mushrooms or even weed, etc. All these plants' medicines, they're so powerful they really do impact our psyche and consciousness.

And if you combine them with things like yoga and meditation and you haven't done the grounding work and the building of the witness of the container, and you haven't cleared out the psychological patterns from childhood, basically it blows your circuits, is one way to put it. It just blows your circuits. You're not really able to handle the amount of pure light and the amount of energy, of kundalini, that can start to move through the system.

It's kind of like hooking up a regular old light bulb to 10,000 volts and expecting it to handle it. It just won't. You know, you've got to change your light bulb first. You've got to put in a 10,000 volt light bulb before you start channelling that much energy.

But I didn't know any better.

I know that there are so many people that are experiencing that convergence of awakening practices with plant medicines of various kinds without necessarily having done the psychological work necessary to stabilize the system and build strong enough channels to hold the flow.

Slade:

Mmm... That's a really great way of explaining it actually. I love that. And I mean, gee, what are the chances that we will play with magic if we run across it and don't know what we're doing?

Kara-Leah:

Ohmygod. It's happening so often. All over the place!

People are doing ayahuasca...

Slade:

Yeah.

Kara-Leah:

Multiple times. And I don't necessarily have a follow up care yet... I don't necessarily have the constructs or the context to understand how one being works with what is revealed and what comes up in the unconscious. And so people are just left hanging so often, and they can dissolve. They can disintegrate. They can fall apart and not know how to navigate that territory.

Slade:

So how did you figure out how to recover from that? Or to retro-engineer the proper container, as you call it. How did you fix the container?

Kara-Leah:

So I was fortunate in that because I already did have the yoga and meditation practice, some part of me intuitively knew that what I'd experienced wasn't just psychosis and that I wasn't necessarily bipolar. That that was a western labelling.

It was just this knowingness. So I knew that yoga would help me to pop myself back together mentally, emotionally, and right from the get-go, I was in the psych ward and I would go out on the lawn and practice yoga. That was my rock.

That was the way that I built the container. Which is like the ability to witness oneself in action so that I was able to, rather than be identified with my thoughts and identified with my feelings, and identified with my body, and the sensations in my body, I was able to orientate to the witness that I am and still experience the thoughts and the feelings in the body but from a HELD place.

So that I wasn't overwhelmed by the thoughts, or overwhelmed by the feelings. I was able to hold myself while I felt what I needed to feel. And while I learned how to observe my thoughts and then trace back to what was giving rise to the thoughts, so that I can uninstall or unprogram myself from the constructs of a lifetime and beyond, really. Like all the programming from childhood, from family, from school, from society. All the stuff that is NOT who I truly am.

I just knew yoga was the way for me and I practice every single day. I was relentless in my practice of yoga.

Slade:

So you were in British Columbia though when you were in the psych ward?

Kara-Leah:

Yeah. I didn't know this at the time, but the experiences all happened during Lion's Gate, the astrological period of Lion's Gate that happens in August. And I was taken down to Lion's Gate hospital to keep at the psych ward at Lion's Gate hospital. It's interesting coincidences...

Slade:

Interesting!

Kara-Leah:

And what was even more intriguing was that it all got triggered when I was at Shambhala Music Festival and it was a Sunday morning. And I took acid that morning. Not a LOT, Maybe a quarter of a tab. I never took a lot. But I took acid and I went to the yoga class on acid and we went into lion's pose, which I've never done in my life before.

I remember quite distinctly doing 3 rounds of lion's pose with lion's breath, and THAT was the moment that something in me went into the awakening process. It was like an excavation and I literally stood up in the class. I kind of looked at the teacher and I do recall her looking at me strangely but I was just like, I'm done. I've got what I needed from this.

And I left the yoga class.

From that moment on, I started to go through the awakening that eventually devolved into the psychosis of the next 5 or 6 days. So it was like, from lion's pose to Lion's Gate to Lion's Gate.

Slade:

Ooo... How long were you in that ward?

Kara-Leah:

So the first time I was there for just 3 days. They basically sedated me and... Because I'd gone into the ward that time speaking some kind of ancient language and doing prostrations. My body was going into spontaneous prostrations to the Sun god Ra. I mean, I'd never been taught this but it's just coming through my system. Like I knew how to do these things spontaneously.

So the first doctor I saw, the psychiatrist, he was kind of onto it. Because he called it spiritual burglary. He's like, You've opened some doors you shouldn't have opened.

He gave me some medication. Don't do that again. Don't take any more drugs. And oh, by the way, you're bipolar. Take this medication and see you later. So I was only there for 3 days.

The second time which was exactly a month later on the new moon, both times, the second time, partly because it was my second time and there was no drugs that had precipitated it, I was there for 9 days. It took me longer to convince them I was sane enough to live out again in the community.

Slade:

Mmm... So at that point, you travelled back home to New Zealand, right?

Kara-Leah:

Yeah. I had no choice. I mean, I didn't have any money. I had nowhere to live. My fiancé had broken up with me. I needed to just come home. I didn't want to. I SO did not want to.

I was leaving... I had lived in British Columbia for 7 years. I love that place. I love the mountains. I love the land. And I have amazing friends. I felt connected and I felt good there. I felt like I could be me there.

Coming back to New Zealand, it was like slipping back into all the old constructs and all the old expectations and assumptions of who I was meant to be and how I was meant to act.

Yeah, I didn't want to come home.

Slade:

Oh, I came home too. It took me a couple years from the time that I had my stroke to move back here. But I really did come home to just sort of survive, you know? To heal and to build back from square one.

But that's of course when I started Shift Your Spirits.

So we were experiencing that in parallel as well. I'm only just now realizing that. Because I didn't know you when all that was going on. I only know you as you started to build this online presence that you have and how we met.

But yeah, my 2004, 2005 was probably very similar to yours in many ways.

But it was like, oh, I'm back here?? Back to square one?

Did you feel like that a little bit?

Kara-Leah:

Ohmygod. It was awful. I felt like I left the excitement and the adventure and the awesomeness and the aliveness of life, and I was back in this dead place where nothing was happening. And I was nobody and there was nothing. And it was like... My mom had moved so we lived in Dunedin when I was a teenager, which is like a university town of about 100,000 in the South Island.

She's moved to this small mountain town of 400 people in the interim. So when I came back home, I was coming back to a place where I had no... It was completely different. It was a different house. It was a different town.

In that respect it was actually amazing because the mountains and the lake, the nature was so beautiful, so powerful. And it was that landscape that really helped me to heal. Being in the mountains again of Queenstown, New Zealand is extraordinary, but yeah, I didn't want to be there.

Did not want to be there.

Slade:

I credit the mountains with bringing me back as well. I came back to the Appalachians where I grew up and very, very powerful... One of the oldest geological features in the world, I have since learned. So they're very ancient mountains that have been worn down for just millennia, so there's layers and layers of magic here. The smokey mountains is how they're commonly known.

So I had something similar going on where I almost had to choose to reconnect to the landscape and

A special astrology workshop with recurring guest and evolutionary astrologer Dena DeCastro.

We're taking a deep dive into Venus placement in your natal chart. Venus affects not only your love life but also other partnerships — including your relationship with money. Learn about the strengths and challenges associated with your Venus sign.

*Each and every sign is explained.

Ep 40 - Love & Money Personified with Morgana Rae

Ep - 74 - Astrology & Past-Lives: Karmic Patterns in the Birth Chart with Dena DeCastro

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Let’s set you up for this astrology workshop as well as any others we do in the future ... If you know a lot about your natal chart, you may know some of these planets and signs without having to look them up.

Feel free to go ahead and listen along right now.

For those of you who are beginners or who want to reference your chart and take notes — we are going to explore additional areas of your chart on future episodes, so you may want to start a document or a notebook — the site I most use and recommend is:

astro.com

There’s quite a bit you can do with a free account. There are a lot of places where you can cast your natal chart online—and I don’t get any kind of kickback for referring astro.com —the reason I prefer Astro is you can store up to 100 profiles with a free account.

That’s helpful if you have clients you’re casting charts for, BUT even more importantly, you may want to store the charts of people you’re in relationships with. There’s a partner report in astro you may want to explore for spouses, people you’re dating, family members, coworkers, people you’re in business with … that person you’re about to marry!

After you sign up for a user name and password, you’ll be asked to enter your exact birth information.

Under the Free horoscopes tab, you’ll find a daily personal horoscope that’s pretty good for computer generated, but for the purposes of our workshops here, you’ll want to look under the Free Horoscopes tab, in the Short Horoscopes list is Personal Portrait.

The personal portrait is what astro calls the Natal chart or the birth chart.

Now, on that Personal Portrait page, they will offer some highlights from your chart, but that is nowhere close to everything. They may or may not interpret your Venus placement, I’m not sure how their algorithm works.

But if you scroll down to the bottom, you will find a list called planetary positions of every planet in your chart and what sign it is in.

For this episode, you’ll want to know what sign your Venus is in.

You may also want to find the Venus placement of your significant others

Of course, if you have an astrology site you like, or a natal chart that was professionally prepared for you, by all means use those.

Find your Venus, we’ll jump right in to this conversation and let Dena tell you what it means and what you can do with this information in terms of Love and Money.

Dena:

So evolutionary astrology is a branch of astrology that focuses on past life and karmic patterns as part of the reading of the natal chart. We look at that through something in the chart called the nodes, the south node representing that past life or karmic pattern situation and then the north node representing what it is in this life that we're here to learn, that we have not experienced in past lives, that we've not mastered.

And so we're here learning about that thing which is foreign to us.

So it's much more... it's less predictive than some other branches of astrology. In fact, it's not predictive at all. It is more of a personal development kind of astrology, where in the reading, I'm offering people a way to look at themselves differently, not only from this life's perspective but from a soul level perspective.

With that knowledge, I'm giving them suggestions about how to best live in alignment with their soul's plan coming into this life. And how ultimately, to live a more fulfilling, content and happy life.

So that's the aim of it.

So it's not meant for prediction. It is more meant for personal development and for growth.

Slade:

I actually really like that, because it's a little bit more woo woo and yet, also the personal development aspect of it really brings it down to earth. So, of course I'll link to the show that we did earlier so everyone can listen to that and find out about their node astrology, but what you told me on that show about my own south node in Virgo, has been really impactful going forward from that moment.

It explained a lot of things about the way that I operate. It also explained a lot of my relationships with Virgos.

Dena:

Oh totally. I'm with you on that one.

Slade:

So anyway, I really love that piece of information.

And one of the things that I noticed, talking to you the very first time that we ever spoke, which is that conversation by the way, and the reason why I wanted you back on the show is, well, first I'd love any excuse to talk to you, but...

One of the things I found myself recommending to my friends and my clients about your readings is, astrology I've often noticed can have this really, really old, like old testament doom and gloom kind of quality to it sometimes...

Dena:

Yeah.

Slade:

Especially if you're looking at things that are computer-generated sometimes, I often tell people, Okay, you need to dial back the negative a little bit.

Dena:

Dial that back!

Slade:

And you have a way of speaking about astrology that feels kind of more hopeful and more positive and enthusiastic to me. And I was wondering if you are aware of what I'm talking about and if you get a sense of that as well.

Dena:

Yeah, you know, I think that in the astrological community, one of the viewpoints is that evolutionary astrologers are too much Pollyanna perhaps, or positive, compared to some others, which will tell you more of the doom and gloom aspects, like if you have an afflicted Venus, that your love life is going to be challenged for your whole life.

Some branches of astrology are more deterministic, I will say that. And I am not coming from an, evolutionary astrology is not coming from a deterministic perspective. We embrace the idea of free will as being the prime mover and that once we have self-knowledge, we can make better choices.

That's the whole point.

We can, the reading itself changes what you can do with your future. It's not telling you that this is the future that's laid out for you. That this is what's going to happen because Saturn squared your Venus and it's gonna suck.

Slade:

Right.

Dena:

That it's a... it's saying, here are some choices. I will say though, that it is not all love and light. Anybody whose gotten a reading from me will tell you that we go into the shadow stuff. We go into what is, what are the lower possibilities for you? What are the things that can trip you up or the places where you can get tangled up in old patterns and get stuck.

But in knowing that, then you can more likely avoid those places, right?

Slade:

Yeah, like, to explain what I meant by how that information for me impacted me going forward, what it did was, it just identified a certain thought process or where something's coming from in the way that I think and react to things.

And knowing to look for that and to be aware when it popped it's head, I'd be like, Ooo... that's totally my south node in Virgo! And then having a polar companion opposite of like, Okay well so in order to balance out that energy that idea is to move towards this more Piscean way of looking at things.

So when I say it's impactful to me, you're right. It's not like, Oh, it's just going to be this way and I'm just screwed to be that way.

Dena:

Right.

Slade:

What it does is it allows me to say, Oh, there's my tendency to do THAT, now I'm going to make a willful conscious decision to lean this other way in order to kind of balance that out, or to move away from it.

So yeah, I'd like that. I definitely don't want to... I don't want information that I can't change or manipulate in some way.

Dena:

Right. And I said this on another podcast recently, that I'm always thinking, as I do a reading, how can I empower the client, not how can I disempower the client. Or to be careful not to say things that are going to disempower the client.

That's super important to me. It really guides everything that I say as I go through a reading.

Slade:

Mmm... Well you're doing a good job of it.

Dena:

Thank you.

Slade:

So there is some great astrology content obviously online, on social media...

Dena:

Yeah!

Slade:

A lot of astrologers do time sensitive current posts about what's going on in the skies and you do a little of that as well. But when you and I were brainstorming astrological topics that we could explore on the show, I talked about how much I try to create evergreen content, meaning, whenever someone comes along and they find this show, even if it's two years from now, I want the information to still be relevant to them.

Aspects of the natal chart, or birth chart, are those items that aren't as time sensitive, so I'd love for you to explain to us the difference between transits and our natal or birth chart elements.

Dena:

Yeah, so the natal chart is the birth chart that you're born with. It is the permanent chart. It's not going to change. However, how you respond to that chart can change. YOU can grow and change. But that chart doesn't change.

So when I do a reading that's focused mainly on the natal chart, we're really looking at those lifelong themes and patterns, not the things that are happening now.

The transits and progressions and solar arcs, those are three things, three tools that astrologers use. And there are more tools, but those are the three common ones. They tell us what is happening right now in this person's chart. What are the things moving through, that transits from the outside, the cosmic weather.

For example, let's say Neptune is currently in Pisces and it may be connecting with something in your chart. It may be trining your moon or, I think it is trining your moon, I'm not sure... Maybe soon..

That is its own set of meaning about what's happening now or in this coming year, or maybe for the next two years. A Neptune transit is two years long, for example. So that's time and that's forecasting. That's not prediction. That's like saying, "Here is the cosmic weather that is around you. How can you best navigate it?"

Progressions and solar arcs are a little bit different. They're something that unfolds from the chart itself and I won't get into a technical discussion of those, but they're just other tools that we use to look at this moment in time, but also what's coming down the road, maybe the next year, two years for somebody.

To say, what are the lessons that are on your plate right now, what are the themes that are up in your life?

And it can be really helpful, particularly if you're going through a challenging time, to understand that there are forces at play that may be affecting you, that are causing this to be a challenging time and there is something you can do about it. There are things that you can do to better work with those energies than if you didn't know about it.

Slade:

I like your weather metaphor because it's kind of like, if you know a hurricane's coming, then you can close the shutters and go underground. You can respond to those conditions in a different way.

Another thing that I do think that astrological transits are good for, and I was just talking to a friend of mine who is going through a really rough life transition, and I said, "One of the things I like about astrology is, it's not a psychic reading. It's actually external, you know? It's like, here's a spreadsheet about stuff in your life."

It has a little bit of a disconnect from being so much in our own heads a little bit. It's something that also can give you a sense of... Like if you are really going through something, and you're thinking, gawd, when is this ever gonna end?? I find it really helpful for someone to say, "Well, you know, April something is totally gonna shift."

And just having a sense of, oh, okay. I may feel like I'm smack in the middle of it, and then I get a reading with you and you talk about some transits, and you're like, "Oh actually, it's been going on for a long time but you're almost done."

That can be the difference between being in a really dark hole in the ground and having a little sense of, okay, I can go for two more months or whatever.

Dena:

Right.

Slade:

I love the emphasis on it not being so much about prediction as about conditions, like weather conditions and sort of windows of time as opposed to specific moments.

Dena:

Yeah.

Slade:

Well just to get back to the birth chart stuff. So we decided we wanted to do some shows where we focus on some of the bigger elements in birth charts. I feel like for people who are new to astrology, it makes sense for them to study their birth chart or their natal chart first, as a way of learning about this vocabulary and these concepts and how it relates to what they're working with in this lifetime.

Dena:

Yeah.

Slade:

So one of those big elements in our birth chart is our Venus. So teach us about Venus.

Dena:

Haha...

So Venus is a planet that most peop

This show originally aired on the Big Seance Podcast - Ep 132 "Straight Dudes! Get Thyself to a Spirit Triangle!" and was produced by Patrick Keller.

Where are all the straight men in the metaphysical and spiritual communities? Patrick Keller of the Big Seance podcast hosted a "triangle table" chat with Ash Riley of In My Sacred Space and Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits.

We talk about ... the divine feminine, LGBTQ spirituality, coming out of the (spiritual) closet, and how to make spirituality more accessible to the elusive straight male.

A fun, lively, original discussion of some rarely approached topics!

InMySacredSpace.com

In My Sacred Space Discussion Group on Facebook

In My Sacred Space on Instagram

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Big Seance Podcast

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Get an intuitive reading with Slade

Automatic Intuition

Edit your pledge on Patreon

Ash:

I've decided that I am a connector.

Slade:

Yes.

Patrick:

Yes.

Ash:

You should like each other.

Slade:

I feel very much the same way. I consider myself a matchmaker, and I used to do it even when I was in corporate. I would hire people and put them in certain places to work with other people.

I have six marriages that resulted from that and...

Ash:

Holy -----!

Slade:

And there are at least three children that I can claim.

Ash:

You can start a business on that!

Patrick:

I remember you saying that, yeah.

Slade:

I don't know that I could do it if I did it intentionally with a romantic intention involved. But if I do it in the context of maybe work or, yeah, like you said, just recognizing, you guys should know each other.

Like, my Automatic Intuition program has become this party that I host. And whenever I add someone to it, it becomes increasingly more difficult to screen people to become a part of that. You know what I'm saying? It gets to be more and more kind of delicate and intricate.

And that's what I think about when somebody's like, I want to take your program!

I'm thinking, okay, what's the seating chart here, at the dinner table? You know what I mean?

Ash:

I feel like when I meet people that I want to introduce to other people, it's because I feel like they're gonna vibe and it's like a certain energy that I get from them. I feel they're similar.

Slade:

Yeah, I mean I would love it if people would do that to me. I mean, it does happen. People do introduce me to people, but I have become, especially with all this podcasting stuff, really kind of aware of the fact that, it's interesting that you say that, because I feel like my power is in introducing people to other people, also on a scale of like, discovering someone, or finding this person and being like, why aren't thousands of people listening to this woman?

Ash:

Yeah, yeah!

Slade:

You know? And interviewing them and I'm not interested in interviewing people who are already famous, or have more followers than I do, or whatever. Even though Patrick does.

Patrick:

Do you know how many people I've had the opportunity to, and I just go, and I either drop the ball and don't do it, or it just doesn't feel right. And the ones that I have interviewed that have been, you know, bigger names, just like landed in my lap.

Ash:

I've always wanted to... I mean, I have a decent following for what I do and the amount of effort that I put into it. It's not spectacular, but I recognize that I have a much bigger platform than a lot of other people.

When I do meet those people who I think, Gawd, people should know who this person is! That's why I always want to give them an opportunity to be exposed to my audience at least, because I'm like, if I meet somebody and I believe in them and what they're talking about, I think that that's really valuable for other people.

Slade:

Well you're also displaying your talent for recognizing that in other people. And people come to associate you with someone who has cool people on their platform. You know what I mean? I don't want people to feel like I have a bunch of canned interviews, or..

Ash:

Right!

Slade:

I want them to think, Wow! He always finds these people that I would've never known about otherwise but I'm so glad that I do. That's the feeling that I want them to have.

And I also want the people who are on the show to feel like it's a big deal for them. To feel like, either they love the show already so it's really cool for them to get to be on it, or they feel like, Wow, I went on the show and now I have so many more people listening to me. Or I've got so many new clients from that or whatever, and to be really excited about it.

Because we do this stuff so much more frequently now than the average person that we might put on.

There's just an energy about having someone be excited about being a part of what you're doing. And being excited about being a collaborator and it comes through. You can feel it. You know what I mean? When you listen to a show with somebody who's really excited and happy to be there, even if they're kind of nervous or something.

Ash:

Absolutely.

Patrick:

So, I'm just considering this thing started.

Slade:

Well why don't you tell everybody how we met, because I'd love to know what your perspective is on how we all three know each other.

Patrick:

I think I talked a little about it when I had each of you on the show, but I think I talked about it the most when Ash was on the show, and in my... it's not really a previous blogging life, because a podcast is just kind of an extension of what I started doing with the blog.

I met Ash through her blog, and I think when I realized she was from my area, that's when we started talking. I think I had, you might remember this, Ash, I don't know exactly how... If like, I messaged you or you messaged me. Or maybe you commented on my blog or something, but we started communicating pretty regularly.

I had lots of questions for her about my website. She had already been in the blogging world and I was still learning about it. I think we were talking about how I was experiencing the intense early part of my spiritual shift.

We've all talked about this, where I couldn't get enough books about it. And I couldn't stop reading about it and...

Ash:

The information-gathering phase.

Patrick:

Yes! Yes. And I was overwhelmed and I think Ash was like, You know, there's this dude that I need to connect you with because he's real.

That's how I got connected with your blog. I don't think I actually communicated with you until quite a bit later, Slade, but I was following you and learning from you at that time.

Slade:

Cool.

Patrick:

Then I think you reached out to me, Slade, before you started your fabulous podcast and Ash always pops up in topics, like, Ash said this, or Ash is so...

Ash:

SURPRISE! Here I am!

Slade:

From the closet.

Ash:

Like a jack-in-the-box.

Patrick:

By the way everybody, I made Ash sit in her closet because that's the greatest place for someone with a mobile laptop to record for acoustics, and it turns out her closet is basically a spiritual oasis and is beautiful.

Slade:

There's fashion in there too.

Patrick:

Yes!

Ash:

When I come out of the broom closet, it's like literally the spiritual broom closet here.

Slade:

It really is what I would expect your closet to be in the best kind of way. My closets are very suburban and not exciting at all. They are arranged by ROYGBIV and they all have the same exact hanger on every item of clothing, I will say that. Those are my two.

Ash:

You're not OCD either.

Slade:

No, not at all.

I have a south node in Virgo, I've discovered, which is where I get all my perfectionism in this lifetime from.

Ash:

I have a south node in Sagittarius, which is where I get all of my bluntness.

Slade:

Oh good! I like Sagittarius energy. We can trust it. That we're getting the exact, undistilled, unvarnished...

Ash:

The unvarnished truth.

Slade:

Yes. I like that. I like that quality.

Patrick:

I just wanted to tell people that we were, when we decided to do this, I don't know whose idea it was first, but it just...

Ash:

It was me! I said we should do this. It would be like the Avengers except with a better ending than Age of Ultron.

Patrick:

It just makes sense that it happened, because...

Slade:

We end up talking about each other anyway. If any two of us are together, the other person's name gets invoked, so...

Patrick:

Yes.

Ash:

We're like the Holy Trinity.

Patrick:

Yes!

And by way of joking, it's funny. We discussed what we were going to talk about and I don't know if you guys ended up being serious, but I was just joking and coming up with all these funny, ha ha things just to entertain people.

And it ended up that we came up with the curious thing that there are more women and gay men in our spiritual, psychic, metaphysical world, and not a lot of straight men. Like, what's up with straight men? Where are the straight men?

And I think Ash said something like, I think I copied and pasted it here, she said something like... Hang on...

Slade:

He's got receipts, Ash.

Patrick:

I apparently didn't copy. But you said something funny about, "Where are the straight men at, yo?" Or...Oh! I know! "When are straight men gonna get their sh*t together??" is what you said. Something like that.

Ash:

Yeah!

Slade:

Mmm... I have some theories about why it is a women-gay-men alliance predominantly. That's pretty easy to speak to. And it's so weird because when we were joking about this topic, we're kind of joking about it but then I was like, That's actually kind of a real thing that I observe all the time.

It came up in conversation with so many people over the next few days.

Ash:

Oh, really?

Slade:

There were other people who commented on it as well. It came up in a really super woo-woo way when someone told me, at the teahouse I go to, the next day, she brought up the fact that a lot of women were murdered for witchcraft during the Inquisition are reincarnating at this time. And that there were a lot of gay men that were crucified along with them. That is a very common lore, or whatever.

It's where the term 'faggot' literally comes from.

Patrick:

Ooo explain that more. How does that...?

Slade:

Well, they burned them along with the witches but in the context of like, Okay, we're going to have this big grand inquisition inquiry public burning to kill 1 or 2 or 3 women at a time, but then they just take a handful of queers and throw them in just as kindling, just to dispose of them. It wasn't even like, they didn't even waste a lot of energy on having a specific murder event for us, you know?

So the term 'faggot' refers to kindling, sticks that you throw in the fire to help it start burning. And that's kind of one of the origins of that disparaging term, or whatever.

So I was talking to this woman the day after you and I, the three of us, were kind of tossing that concept around. Where are all the straight dudes?? She just came out of nowhere with this idea that those souls are reincarnating right now.

And I'm not a huge past-life, reincarnation, that's not a rabbit hole that I go down really often. But I will always engage anyone in a conversation about it that wants to talk about it.

Yeah, she was like, "There's all these witches, the souls of all these women, who have chosen to reincarnate at this time."

It's, you know, I'm just passing it on.

Ash:

You just recently did an interview with Susan Grace, which is a long-time friend of mine as well. One of the things that she talks about pretty regularly is how... I would need to go back and... I think she's mentioned it in every single reading she's done for me in the last year.

Astrologically, we're coming back around through a cycle, and I can't remember which planet it is, but...

Patrick:

I can read your comment. Or actually it's Slade's comment. Slade said that she said something about the planetoid Regulus causing a 2,000 reign of men. That is over in 2020.

Ash:

So I think that might be what she's talking about, is the last time this happened was, it put us into the Dark Ages, which was the time when women were being burned at the stake for being witches. It was a suppression of the feminine.

That cycle is ending in the next five years. And it's kind of coming on right now. So you're seeing a lot of that collective pain and energy from that time coming up from beneath the surface for healing.

Patrick:

Mmm...

Slade:

I like the thought of it being kind of a cultural zeitgeist, or like an ancestral DNA kind of thing where it's just in our collective psyche to deal with that again. So I don't even think it has to be as literal a story as 'those souls are reincarnating', like they're all hanging out, going, "Okay, now's the time. Let's go y'all!"

Like it's a suffragette march.

I like to b

Just because you’ve dealt with something in your life and survived it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t ever happen again.

The monsters you slay come back - faster, stronger, and more cunning than ever.

But recurring patterns are not necessarily your failures.

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Dallas Woodburn is a writing coach and "book doula" who helps people give birth to the books that are burning inside them. She is also the author of three books, both traditionally published and indie-published, and is a freelance writer for dozens of magazines, newspapers, and websites.

Dallas and I talk about the tiny shifts in perception that will help you stop procrastinating, stop making excuses, and finally write your book—or pursue another creative project you have.

Have a book burning inside you? This episode is for you.

www.yourbookbreakthrough.com/

www.dallaswoodburnauthor.com/

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Like you, I have all these things on the horizon I haven’t reached yet:

I tell myself I can’t

I tell myself I’m not there yet

One day

Some day

When I’m some Thing, some other version of myself than what I am now.

What happens when I get there?

Will I still be straining for the future and disconnected from what is all around me?

Or will I have a moment like today, where I stop, and look around and realize I have so much of what I’m looking for?

dooce.com by Heather Armstrong

Out on a Limb by Shirley Maclaine

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I had a moment the other day, on a rainy day, drinking Earl Grey tea and writing at the Wildflower Apothecary and Tea shop where I go in the afternoons. It came over me, this wave of emotion, of realization and just awareness, in the moment.

I am who I want to be when I grow up.

I'm purposefully making that statement present tense, because I've still got a long ways to go. But I want to acknowledge that it's also happening now. If I can't be happy now, I mean, my family are all living and relatively healthy, nobody's fighting a serious illness.

My pets are happy and healthy. I am so thankful and acutely aware of that joy every single day. My favourite moments are being on the couch watching Netflix or reading a novel on Kindle with my cat Sam on my chest and my cat Scotty between my knees. My heart is so full in those moments.

And I know that they won't last forever.

I've never been more comfortable in my own body - I feel very grounded, I work out a LOT, I sleep well, I have no chronic physical complaints, no pain. I don't take high blood pressure medicine. I'm in pretty good shape for somebody going on 50.

I look in the mirror and I like myself. More so than I ever have.

I have a safe and comfortable home. It’s not some dream loft I might have envisioned, but it’s more abundance than 99.9% of the people on the planet can claim.

I have friends all over the country who trust and adore me and even though they are far away, I can text them within moments. I actually love those texting, long distance relationships. It's like this amazing, creative, humourous Improv that's always going on out there in the cloud.

The physical landscape I move through every day is pretty freaking beautiful. Nature in Chattanooga, Tennessee is a fairyland, it really is. It's the reason why I wrote about a fairyland that exists here. I would have never imagined myself moving back home, but there is an energy in this city at this time, and it’s a good time to be here.

And after all the personal friends and family and gratitude for good health and wellness, there is my work. My work is my life. THIS, right here, is my work. And I'm kind of like, Are you kidding me? That's awesome.

I make money for talking, and commenting, and giving my opinion and sharing my stories, and doing all the things I would do with you over a cup at a cafe.

And although I do work everyday, it’s because I love my work. It's part of my life and an extension of my personality. My schedule is my own, even though I'm kind of a slave driver about it.

And you know, by the way, I was just telling my mother I know this sounds like a highly superficial thing, but I drive my dream car. It’s not a luxury car by any means. It’s a hard top Mini Cooper, British racing green. And I remember a time when that seemed so out of my reach and I thought “Wow. That is THE car that I would get if I could get any car.” Sometimes I walk up to it parked on the street and I think “I love my car!"

I do! I got it.

I could go on with this list. I don’t do this enough. By the way, especially when you’re feeling bad, playing this game when you’re alone, driving around, naming things that are pretty or that make you happy on those days when you can feel happy. If you do it on the days you don't feel happy, it’s really powerful.

Just do it all the time, actually. But if you're in a place where you're trying to get that happy back, I mean, happy is such a dumb word. But you know what I mean. Whatever that means for you. I think it's something so much more quiet and less exciting than what we envision.

But it's a powerful exercise. The gratitude listing, the gratitude journalling thing, it really will change your mind. You can reframe anything, and if you get really, really diligent about it and really police it, it will change your life.

So do that, if you need it. Or if you haven't done it in awhile, this is your reminder, whenever you're done listening to me talk, turn this device off. Look around and start naming things.

The point of all this — and I hate it when people do the “I love my clients so much” posts on Facebook, because it feels a little like humble bragging / marketing your services without doing it, kind of winky wink. I try not to do things that I think will make people roll their eyes.

People make me roll my eyes a lot… That's something you don't know about me. You think I'm so much of a nicer person than I really am.

I digress … The point of all this is, not to humble brag, and not to imply that I love my work so much therefore you should buy all of it. The point of all this is,

If I can’t be happy now, when would I be?

One of the things I notice we tend to do — and there’s a lot of evidence of this in the conversations in the Shift Your Spirits Community on Facebook. So I lurk and I skim and I read and comment here and there as I can, but I don't have the time or ability to get involved in ALL the conversations, but I do love to observe the patterns of things that emerge for me there, within an hour collective zeitgeist.

We make a lot of things aspirational.

And we think we're just identifying aspirations, but I think we make things aspirational and make them too hard.

If it’s important, it has to be waaaaaaay out in the future. It needs to be difficult to get to. It needs to be freaking unattainable for us to dream about attaining it.

I mean, just as a common example, people often post or ask about meditating like it’s learning to execute a particularly difficult spell from Dark Arts class at Hogwarts. Lotus positions and mind emptying and special rooms in your house and special corners in the room and alters and singing bowls and incense burning and stretchy flowy clothes that cost way too much money to be synthetic…

In my mind, I'm seeing those and I'm seeing other people engaging and helping and offering advice, and their advice is often offered in difficult ways. They buy in to the difficult and, "Here's a really complicated answer to your complicated question", and I do that too with my own stuff. Especially when it comes to my writing and all my perfectionism issues around that stuff.

But I notice that, just with the whole meditation thing, people come up to me on a daily basis at the cafe and engage me in conversations. It's a really common refrain: "I really need to start meditating." "I want to start meditating." "I try to meditate. Do you have any advice for meditating?"

I just want to say, "You know what? Go for a walk. Clean things. Sweep your driveway."

Literally, that's what I do when I want to meditate. Because I don't do all that other stuff. I'm bad at it too! I don't like things that are aspirational and difficult. If I really want to do it, I want it to be doable.

Everything about my reason for starting Shift Your Spirits was to make the magical and the paranormal accessible to us NOW. In our daily lives, right? Where else would we want to have it?

It's the magic in the mundane.

I believe Toni Morrison is the one who gave me that phrase, possibly in some of her writing about writing or maybe an interview that she gave. I've always been really into stream of consciousness fiction. There's a strong element of magical realism and stream of consciousness in her work. That was my literary concentration in college — 20th century British novel. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. Virginia's one of the really most famous executors of stream of consciousness. She's the reason we probably had to study it.

This concept of illuminating a single moment in time and consciousness, and elevating it with layers of thought and synchronicity and observation and philosophy, all existing within this fluidity of time.

Toni Morrison also talked about how we don’t have to find answers.

People think, especially with writers or with leaders or preachers, or whoever it is that's standing up in front of the others, and trying to show the way, that it's about delivering answers. She talked about how she thinks the true job is to ask and contemplate powerful questions.

So stop looking for the answers so much and just find a defining question for you.

It may not have an answer. But leaning towards those possible answers, and searching for them, can be the meaningful process that you're looking for.

It could give you the work of a lifetime, by the way. Trying to answer an unanswerable question.

Not only is it the magic in the mundane, but it's also the mystery. Being who you want to be when you grow up is about being able to recognize that, and living in the present moment and being that. And choosing to contemplate the gratitude for it, right?

Procrastination protects our dreams.

It keeps them in the future where we can’t fuck them up as long as it remains in a glass bubble floating out of reach, we have hope around it. We can build all these stories and these fantasies about "some day", and "When we get there", and "Oh, if only that were mine".

But if you take it down, and you break the glass and you use it, it changes it. And it's never as beautiful and mystical and magical as we thought it was.

It exists in perfection in that abstract, out of reach, state. But it's not usable. It's not alive. It's not happening to us now. We aren't really using it. So why have it in our consciousness if we can't get to it?

It's insane!

Just as an idea for a piece of writing or creative project is never what you actually execute. It's like, the best book is always the one you’re going to write next. It's never the one you're working on. It is never the one that you're 75% of the way through. Trust me. Even though you're doing it!

You're being the author that you wanted to be when you grow up. You're 75% of the way through editing a book, Draft 2. Oh, god help you. That looks nothing like the fantasy, right?

I thought when I was a kid, I was going to grow up to be a cross between, get this, C.S. Lewis, a diarist, and a writer on the team of The Young & the Restless — don’t laugh.

I loved soap operas from a really early age. I would rush home from the bus stop from kindergarden, or maybe my mother picked me up, but I still would want her to drive really fast and not stop and get the mail. I would want to get in there and watch that show.

I still adore that format, I don’t watch old school daytime soaps or telenovelas or anything like that, but I do love really good serialized premium cable story telling, you know what I mean?

And the diarist thing. I fell in love with this word at a really early age and I identified a lot with Anne Frank. A lot of us did when we read that book. And it’s this word that my spirit guides whispered to me as a child, diarist, again as a teenage, even again in my late 20s.

And I can remember, in fifth or sixth grade, researching who are the authors were who were famous or known for their diaries and at that time, there was this humorist named Erma Bombeck, who wrote these kind of funny, almost like stand-up comedy routines about her life as a housewife in Middle America, or whatever. It was in book format though. I think she wrote columns in newspapers and syndicated stuff.

I thought of that as kind of being a diarist.

And when I was a teenager, there were those Shirley MacLaine spiritual non-fiction memoirs. Out on a limb. I somehow discovered Virginia Woolf, too, waaaay before anyone had to study stream of consciousness literature or became an English major or anything. It was like a ridiculously young age, reading letters that Virginia Woolf wrote. LIke a collection of her letters, for which she was famous, and that kind of felt like diaries.

But I never understood HOW anyone would ever become successful or famous for writing a diary. Remember, my guides are whispering "diarist" all the time. Because Shirley MacLaine was already famous for being an actress before she shared her memoir. Even then, if the story was or wasn't interesting, we all knew that was part of the reason why it was published, and her face was on the cover, was because she was already someone that we knew, so we were interested in hearing more about her.

But I started keeping journals, because of all this, when I was about 11 or 12. I wasn't even a teenager yet. I was really diligently trying to follow this practice of being a diarist, which I felt like would lead me to something. But I had no idea what it would be.

I didn’t know as a little kid that C.S. Lewis was writing about religion and spirituality in another part of his career. I only knew Narnia.

As I grew up and discovered that he was trying to indoctrinate me with Christian allegory, I was really resentful of that. I was a little pissed. I found his other work really tedious, like the other science fiction stuff, and then the more religious stuff, ohmygod, it was just so polemic and... No! I don't even go to church. Why in the hell would I want to read this?

I quickly moved away from identifying wanting to be C.S. Lewis when I grew up.

Although I did memorialize the death of the opinion of both him and Tolkien by writing a research paper in college about how Lewis converted Tolkien to Christianity. Like, worked him over for a really long time.

I’m sharing observations from my trip to Boston. Notes on shadow work, manifesting, parking angels, and an expanded awareness of the stranger angels phenomenon.

E:79 - The Passenger

E:61 - Parking Angels

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I travelled to Boston, Massachusetts, last week with my friend Rob, who you may remember is also one of the people I travelled to New Orleans with last month. We were joking, while in Boston, that we were living The Passenger Part 2, the sequel to Episode #79, the podcast where I shared some of my adventures and spiritual observations while travelling in New Orleans.

We were laughing about the fact that sequels are often really disappointing attempts to resurrect some memes or themes that were successful in the original. We were laughing about it because the point of comparison between these two trips is really unfair. There's no way that this, as a sequel, would be satisfying to that other trip.

This trip was different from the New Orleans trip for a lot of reasons. There was a large group of people coming from all over to go to New Orleans to celebrate a birthday party for a friend that we all had in common. Of course, it was New Orleans so there was the expectation of a certain level of party and debauchery, etc.

This trip was just the two of us. It was just Rob and I. The tone was extremely different. The quest was entirely focused and we were dealing with some darker emotions on this trip.

Just to give you a little bit of backstory without going into his privacy too much. Rob's sister passed away a couple of years ago in New Hampshire. After the funeral, there was a storage facility with some of her personal effects and belongings that had been left behind, that still needed to be gone through and processed and distributed to people within the family.

He'd been dreading, obviously, going back up there, taking a trip just to go through those boxes, clear out the storage facility and ship some things back to his home in Atlanta. He told me, when he first presented the trip to me, that I just kept coming up as someone to accompany him on this journey.

He hated to ask his partner to go back up there, after having already gone and done all the funeral stuff once before. He felt like it was a tall order to ask him to go back and be a companion one more time in this last leg of the process.

I seemed uniquely qualified as someone who's been friends with him for over 25 years. We are like family and I am someone who deals with stuff, you know, issues of life and death, a lot of vulnerable client conversations in my daily world. So yeah, it made sense to me why I came up as a possible person to accompany him on this.

We also wanted to, after accomplishing what we needed to, to have a moment where we could shake some of that energy off and turn to something more hopeful and happy, and just have a good time a couple days in Boston enjoying the city.

We've known each other for years. We've travelled together a lot and we travel well together. So I was really looking forward to it. I did feel like I was uniquely equipped to be the passenger again on this trip. I couldn't really imagine anyone else. On paper, maybe it doesn't sound like so much fun but it was a really intensely great experience for both of us.

We were travelling on the new moon in Scorpio. That was the day we were going up there. I was very aware of the significance of that. If you haven't heard me talk about my chart before, I'm a Leo with a Scorpio moon and Scorpio ascendant. I have a lot of Scorpio in my chart. I always personally like to unload some of my darker stuff with Scorpio friends.

If you have friends who have Scorpio significantly in their chart, there's something about Scorpio energy people. They're able to process a lot of really heavy stuff, whether it's death or sexuality. And they have a capacity to do so without being negatively impacted by it, and also without there being shame involved.

If you have any kind of issue that you feel shame around, even if it's the shame of sharing something dark and affecting other people, find yourself a Scorpio, or someone with a Scorpio moon, or it could be any significant placement in their chart. We do have the capacity to do that kind of work. It's shadow work!

This trip, whether Rob would ever use that terminology or not, was a shadow work voyage. Sexuality, mortality, very much a part of the link to Scorpio energies, Scorpio new moon. I've heard it expressed that someone who has this kind of energy, or this kind of placements in their chart, is referred to as someone who can see in the dark, and I like that term.

I'm someone who can see in the dark. So I was all down to accompany him to the dark and back into the light again.

Just a little bit of a note on my update on travel anxiety and sleep issues. It's definitely an anxiety thing. Travelling relinquishes a lot of control in order to work. To be successful you do need to be carried a bit and not trying to control everything. Routines go out the window when you travel. That all makes it difficult for me.

I really thrive on having a very routine life, so it can be exhausting for me to be outside of that and to be ungrounded, especially if you don't know how to recognize and allow those magic moments to happen.

Now fortunately, I am very hyperaware of my own shortcomings in those areas and also aware of how to make those experiences what they need to be. How to allow them to be what they're meant to be for you, and to step back outside yourself a little bit and observe how it's an opportunity for you to practice differently. To be in the world differently. Literally to wear a different cloak and to move through the world in a new way.

The biggest takeaway from this trip for both Rob and I was about the recurring theme that manifesting is not about attracting the right place or the right circumstances, the right details or the right things, but it's about connecting to the right people. Manifesting even a circumstance is often about attracting the right kind of people to assist in that to make it happen.

If you manifest and attract the right people to you, and present whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish, often a lot of stuff gets taken care of by itself. Or the people that you attract will take care of multiple steps along your to-do list. That was something that I noticed a lot.

We would have a set of things we needed to accomplish. We need to go here and get this. And we need to go to this other place and pick up the key. And after that, we need to figure out where to take this stuff, and can we haul this here. There'd be like a set of five things and sometimes the answer to that was one person that we met along the way, who we would share, We're trying to do this, this and this. And they would often have a simplified route, or a way of condensing a lot of the steps.

So I noticed that in manifesting, we weren't manifesting each individual thing. It was all sort of rolled together, and it was all defined by people.

Manifesting the right person and presenting your needs to them, they often had solutions that were simply better than anything that you could come up with. Sometimes because they were local to the place and the space that we were working in, they had information and understanding and knowledge about where we were that made it very easy for them to connect dots for us that we would have really struggled to make on our own.

Rob is very much a friendly and outgoing person, like I am. We both have the capacity to speak to strangers and to project our personalities a little bit. And we got into a lot of situations where there were people who were unacknowledged in the roles that they were in.

Especially like, people working in the airport. You could see that they were very close to being an automaton. They were saying the same thing over and over again. Hundreds of people were just streaming by and Rob talked about the fact that, breaking that for them and simply acknowledging them, and asking them, Hey, how's it going, or whatever.

Just seeing them in the moment produced powerful magic. It was like, we weren't just looking to get assistance. We were also giving it. We were in this very conscious dance of interacting with people and giving our energy and creating opportunities for them to give us theirs. It was like everyone was sleepwalking and we were suddenly coming through and waking everyone up for just a moment.

And you could see the impact that it has.

I think most people who are sad and troubled and struggling in their lives feel a certain amount of invisibility. I do think that just acknowledging someone, making eye contact with them, speaking to them in just a pleasant way, you never know what kind of impact that you might have just had on the trajectory that that person is on.

It's so easy for us to not experience that. It's very easy to get on a bus and immediately look at your phone. Or get in an Uber and get on your phone, without talking to the driver. That kind of thing.

Of course, I talked a lot about Uber drivers in the first passenger episode, episode #79, so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of Uber stories this time around, but we still had those moments, you know? We still had the guy that was an Uber driver who was looking to develop his real estate business and doing rentals and Rob was able to give him some advice about some tools and platforms he could use to automate certain parts of his business.

Just these little things where we were sharing bits of information.

And, you know, I was really aware, even to myself, I wasn't so much talking to Rob about stranger angels phenomenon. But I saw how Rob, in the way that he interacted with people, he very much was a stranger angel to a lot of the people he encountered.

I could see how the impact that he was making and the energy that he was sharing, some day they could be like, You know what? This guy just got in my car and told me about this cool thing and I started using it and it was awesome. It was just the answer I was looking for. I never saw him again, kind of thing.

So I was very aware of this phenomenon, not only of attracting stranger angels to help us on our journey through the small towns of New Hampshire, and trying to navigate where we needed to go.

But also the fact that you could be a stranger angel if you were in the mindset. It was kind of like the same switch got thrown. And whether or not you were that for the other person or they were that for you, was kind of secondary. Like it could sort of happen for both of us.

It sounds so simple. The kindness of strangers, just to interact with people more. Don't be lost in your cell phone.

Like, yeah, yeah, we hear that kind of stuff all the time and I don't think there's anything wrong with information technology and being connected in that way. But I do think it's very powerful. To be present and to look other people in the eyes and make sure that they feel they're seen. Even just for a moment.

So, you know, some of the kinds of things that happened was, what started out as a question about where we could drop off donated items. We had some things after we went through the storage facility, we had boxes of things. Bins, nice plastic tubs full of stuff that we wanted to donate. And so we were looking online for Goodwillls and places where we could go and drop off stuff. Places that would be open.

Some of them were 25 miles away, they were in neighbouring towns. We didn't really know like, do they have one of those big drop centres, where they have a trailer in the parking lot where you can leave stuff inside it. We didn't have any way of knowing these things.

And so there was a small antique junk store kind of place. You know one of those places, it's like kind of antiques, but then it just kind of like this crazy random stuff. It was right across the street from the storage facility. I said, You know what? Let me stop in there and ask them, because they probably know where some dumpsters are that we can throw some stuff away. And they probably are also aware of where we could take things and donate it, and it might save us a trip somewhere out of town.

Once I got inside and started talking to the owner of the junk store, I realized really quickly that he actually wanted the stuff. He was willing to go through it himself. So what started out as a frustrating googling situation, just by manifesting this one person, suddenly he took it all off our hands on the spot.

We didn't have to go anywhere. We didn't have to go find any of those places. He actually helped us unload the truck right then and there. I realized that we were sort of possibly a windfall to him, to his store. He had all these items, hopefully, among that stuff that he could sell in his store. To him, it was a plus. One man's trash is another man's treasure kind of thing.

And there were just a lot of circumstances where things like that happened and it made me really aware every time we started to say, We need to find a certain kind of hotel, or we need to find a certain kind of restaurant, that I started to think of everything in terms of, we need to find people to ask. We need to find the right people to present what we're trying to do. And then they always have great recommendations to make.

It's the same as when you go somewhere and you ask someone, Where's somewhere good to eat? People who live somewhere locally will know about places to go that tourists don't necessarily see. And so, you always get a different experience if you can plug into someone who is from that world. It's very different than googling 'restaurants close to me'.

So, yeah, the power of acknowledging people. That was really a big part of this trip. The idea of being a stranger angel, and also attracting them to you. That this is a phenomenon of interaction.

Of course, I've written about and spo

Jocelyne Leach calls herself a mystical midlife rebel. She's a personal and spiritual empowerment coach, mentor, and intuitive for women who want a joyful, vibrant second half of life.

We’re talking about second acts and the opportunities present for us at middle age to finally do something meaningful with our lives.

jocelynekelseyleach.com

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Jocelyne:

Okay, well it was about 10 years ago. Probably everyone can remember 10 years ago when the shit hit the fan in the financial markets and it just felt like the whole world collapsing. The news was just terrible. Every day was very depressing.

At the time, my husband and I were... We had two businesses that were quite vulnerable to fluctuating markets, and one was a pub and restaurant. One was a property development business.

And so, when the markets take a dive, people stop eating out and property takes a dive. The whole thing just imploded.

So my husband was extremely stressed. He got taken to hospital seriously ill with three perforated ulcers. At the time, I was uncharacteristically stressed and unhappy and suffering as well. Usually I'm quite a grounded person. So for me to feel all these kind of... the emotional wrangling of all this going on. It made me think, I've gotta get to the doctor and get some medication to help me through this.

And I thought, No, that's not the route I want to go. I need to sort this out myself.

So I started two things. One thing you might not know about me is I'm also a yoga teacher. So I really dug back into my yoga practice that had got a little bit kind of wishy washy. I dug back into that and took up a more powerful type of yoga.

That helped a great deal. It really gave me something to focus on that took the thoughts out of my head because it was the thoughts that were just driving me crazy.

And then, at that time, about 10 years ago, the internet was really starting to take off. And so, the wonderful thing of search engines were I could just keep finding different people on the internet who would give me words of wisdom that started me moving forward and kind of climbing out of my big black hole.

It's things like finding Byron Katie and reading her books and beginning to kind of control my mindshit, basically. And that was how I started to kind of turn my ship around, basically.

And I think at the same time, I was also having a bit of a mid-life crisis. I was kind of late-40s and just wondering what my life had all been about, because I had always been involved with the family business in one form or another. And I've never really pushed out on my own and done anything that I felt was my particular career, so to speak.

So it just started that journey. And yoga, really, was the catalyst that got me into more and more kind of spiritual and metaphysical stuff.

When I first started yoga, it was just a physical practice. I wasn't into any mumbo jumbo at all. It was kind of a physical practice so I wasn't interested in anything like chanting or meditation or anything like that. But when the need arose, I needed to get into that place of being calmer and finding tools for my mind.

So that's really how it all evolved.

Slade:

That's interesting. I did not know that you were a yoga teacher.

I have a pretty special place in my heart as well for yoga. I sort of feel like it was the thing that allowed me to... It's funny, I... Like what you just said. It started as a physical practice for you and then the mumbo jumbo came later.

I started out with the mumbo jumbo, and when I went looking for something to physically heal me, I had had a surgery which cut into my core muscles and I was a smoker for 20 years. So at that time, I was recovering from surgery and smoking, and I thought, Ugh, this is disgusting, to be doing these two things at the same time.

So I started to think, What is the representation of the breath in healing form? What is a replacement behaviour for smoking? And I really quickly landed on yoga, as being the kind of intersection of all that stuff. And I thought, Yay! I went to yoga as this mystic already!

And it was funny because I really quickly was drawn into more of power yoga and as I built up that core strength and became more and more physically strong, and of course I did quit smoking and did yoga instead of smoking, I became extremely physically empowered and alive in my own body in a way that I'd never experienced.

Jocelyne:

Yeah. Yeah.

Slade:

Never experienced.

We're talking, like, I was 41 when that happened, so... It ultimately led me to all the fitness that I do now, because I was like, Ah, I do the mumbo jumbo stuff in my day job. I want to lift weights and be a crossfit cult member, so I went that route.

One of the things that I have noticed is, a lot of people who are yoga instructors may go into it as a physical practice, as a job, and somewhere along the way, they start to discover that they can read energy, that they are intuitive, then they start to pick up a lot of stuff especially if they're touching clients sometimes.

Did any of that happen to you?

Jocelyne:

Yeah. Exactly how it happened.

Like I said, I was more into the physical side of it, but I began to notice that, and I think I've always had this attribute, of being able to read people's energy. And I think it goes right back to childhood. I don't know why, but that was just always how I felt that I could understand people. I could look at them and I could kind of guess what was going on.

And I began to notice that when people are in my class, I could figure out what was going on for them. And I began to notice that people were quite interested, in fact, they really demanded that I would make the classes in a way that they could tap into their own energy.

It was the beginning of class where I used to, when it was quite a physical practice for me, I didn't really have a run in into class. We'd do maybe a couple of breaths just to show willing. And then I'd go straight into the physical practice.

And then I began to see that people more and more wanted me to take them into more of a breathing sequence and to decompress them from their day. So the start of my class where we just do a couple minutes of breathing began to be 10 or 15 minutes of breathing. At first I thought, Oh, I don't know if I should be doing this. I don't think people will like it.

But more and more, I found that was part of the reason they were coming. And so it went from there. And then I began to really see the difference that it was making to people and I began to put my foot into the other aspects. The more ethereal aspects of yoga.

And it was quite a journey. Learning the history of yoga and realizing there are things that, what you might call the new age community had adopted, like working with chakras and visualizations and stuff like that. They were all things that had been part of yoga practice for thousands of years.

And that's what led me into studying other things like astrology and hand reading and the akashic records. Because all of those also belong to vedic studies. So it's quite fascinating how that all unfolded for me.

Slade:

Do you still, I'm just curious if you still work with astrology at all.

Jocelyne:

Yeah, I do.

Some of the most powerful readings I've ever had in astrology have been vedic astrology readings. I haven't been studying vedic astrology. But I have been studying western astrology and when I work with people now, I just always take their birth dates so I at least know what sign they are. Because that gives me a lot of information.

Because a lot of my work is about energy, whether it's physical, mental, emotional, what have you. And things like astrology help you cut through a lot of chit chat. It gets you to the heart of the matter more quickly.

Slade:

Yeah. The reason I ask about that is because astrology is emerging as a theme in all my interviews right now. There are at least three people on this season who are specifically astrologers. But then when you mentioned that, I felt like I needed to ask, because this is a theme and I have been sort of reinvigorated around using that in my practice.

I actually used to use, like, someone's natal chart was almost like a meditation or a gateway image for me to do readings, so I come from having done astrological charts for extra money when I was a teenager, when I was in college, for my parents' friends and some people in my family. Stuff like that.

And so, I've always asked for that information for a client because if I know their sun, moon and rising sign, I can talk for an hour about what that tells me about them, you know?

Jocelyne:

Yeah.

Slade:

At that point, all the intuitive stuff comes in as well.

I used to think, maybe I'm just kind of using this as a crutch. Maybe I'm just sort of using that as my way to log in, as we say. But then with all of you that I'm having these conversations with, I had sort of just backed away from including that on my intake forms. Now I'm rethinking, Oh wait a minute, I feel like my Guides and the Universe is all telling me, No, no. There's more to do with that. Keep that in place. It's a very useful vocabulary.

Jocelyne:

I think so.

It goes along with another thing I do, which is to do with yoga. Which is ayurvedic medicine, which is kind of the Indian version of traditional chinese medicine.

I do a, not with every client, but with some of my clients, I'll give them a kind of questionnaire thing that they complete, which also gives me their dosha, which is a physical representation of energy, so it goes into elemental energy like in astrology.

For example, if I use me as an example, I'm a Gemini so I've got a lot of mental air energy. But physically, I've got a lot of earth energy. So it gives me a great understanding of someone if I know what their physical energy type is along with their mental energy type.

So if I'm helping someone in more of a wellness way, which was my previous iteration in coaching. I was a lot more focused on wellness and health because that kind of went with the yoga.

And then I started building the more mystical and intuitive skills now, so I'm veering more in that direction. It gave me a really good picture of that person quite quickly and I'm all for something that kind of cuts through stuff and you can get to the heart of the matter much more quickly.

The same goes with the hand analysis. I learned how to do hand analysis and the energy shows up in the lines and the fingerprints in the hands as well.

So all those things kind of tie in.

Slade:

Wow, so if you have a client there in person with you, do you usually read their hand as well?

Jocelyne:

I do do in person hand reading things. They're usually mini sessions. I'm lucky enough to teach my yoga classes, the majority of them, at a local spa that opened a few years ago. I offer a kind of 45-minute mini session. So I do that in person.

But if I'm seeing someone long distance, then I like to send them a kit so they can print their hand prints for me. They send them back and I look at the printed version of their handprints.

And in honesty, I prefer doing that.

Because number one, it gives me a bit more time to just kind of mull over what I'm seeing. And secondly, with ink print, you get more fine detail. And quite often, I'm a bit distracted if I've got a person physically in that space, all expectant-like.

I get stage fright a bit. I quite like to be kind of tucked up in my office, and just kind of mulling and ruminating over the information I've got so that I can present it in a more cogent way.

Slade:

I didn't know that you could do that! That you could do prints with ink and send them to someone and that they can... I've never thought of that before!

Jocelyne:

Yeah.

Slade:

That's fascinating.

Jocelyne:

Yes, it is. It's much, much more fun.

Slade:

Well, it also allows you the time to create a more meaningful volume of information. Because I think there's a tendency, you know, like, it's weird to just let a stranger hold your hand for most people for a long amount of time. I can see where there would be some kind of, a little bit of almost like a social space pressure to not sit there and manhandle them for 15 or 20 minutes.

So to be able to have that kind of intellectual distance and to study the information kind of outside of that whole issue of touching or being in someone's personal space.

I find it easier to read for people that I cannot see, that I'm not physically in the same room with. I often describe it as being like, when you are listening to music and you want to concentrate, you close your eyes. It's like getting rid of a lot of the senses that you don't need in that moment, so that you can sort of put all your focus on that intuitive channel, essentially.

Jocelyne:

Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I don't appreciate the distraction because I'm easily distracted anyway, so if I see an expression or something that... It can put me into my headspace, and I don't really want to be there. I want to be more into my intuitive space.

The other thing I find especially with hand analysis, if I'm there with the person, and it's kind of, Cross my palm with silver, dearie, that kind of vibe, where if I'm at more a distance, it seems more, whatever the word is...

Slade:

Elevated?

Jocelyne:

Yeah. The opposite of being at the end of the pier, or in a fairground.

Slade:

Right. It's more elevated.

Jocelyne:

Doing tricks.

Slade:

More highbrow.

Jocelyne:

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

You know, I come from a family where this is the kind of stuff that is not believed in. All my family think I'm a proper weirdo. And they're the kind o