(00:00) welcome boys and babes it’s the magic hour a place where we navigate through life’s Peaks and valleys with all the vulnerability and shamelessness we can muster with the help of worldclass guests from all walks of life we uncover new truths and valuable tools for manifesting our Highest Potential I’m your host Mercedes tarot along with my partner in shine Jade Bryce hey you guys today’s episode is probably going to cause a lot of looking NW so I’d like to start off the show by saying thank you

(00:29) to our listeners for choosing to do the work yeah you could easily have chosen to listen to music or a comedy show today or a million other things that wouldn’t have asked you to put in some self-work so the fact that you guys chose to tune in here today just shows that you are actively seeking and dedicated to your own growth yes and that makes you someone we are thrilled to be sharing this planet with so thank you guys all right Mercedes let’s introduce today’s guest and get this work started let’s do it fully invested

(01:01) in fostering the growth and betterment of women as a collective today’s guest has built a platform called Rising woman where she weaves together spirituality and psychology to create a safe place for women to develop themselves to their fullest potential she is a coach in conscious relationship boundaries Shadow work including inner child work and astrology she also runs a women’s group where she guides women toward better relationships with themselves and others as a birth doua and menstration Guru

(01:32) she’s helping to redefine how both men and women perceive the inner workings of female reproduction and hormonal Cycles taking us from the current repressive patriarchal ideas ideals to a wonderfully improved and balanced image of the Miracles and power that the female body is capable of as a passionate writer she poetically relays her knowledge to the world and is constantly finding ways to destigmatize vulnerability and facilitate self-healing determined to make a difference she’s here to serve her

(02:04) fellow Community especially women who’ve suffered from domestic violence and to help us all to lay down our masks finally feel our feelings and do the work we’re here to do rise together please welcome Shelina Ayan to the magic hour yay okay um want to do one more read we have a couple minutes yeah might as well hello welcome boys and babes to the magic hour a place where we navigate through life’s Peaks and valleys with all the vulnerability and shamelessness we can muster with the help of worldclass guests from all walks of life

(02:44) we uncover new truths and valuable tools for manifesting our Highest Potential I’m your host Mercedes tarot along with my partner in shine Jade Bryce hey you guys today’s episode is probably going to cause a lot of looking N word so I’d like to start off the show by saying thank you to our listeners for choosing to do the work yes you could easily have chosen to listen to music or comedy show or a million other things that wouldn’t have asked you to put in some self-work so the fact that you guys chose to tune

(03:15) in here today just shows that you are actively seeking and dedicated to your own growth we love you for that yes and that makes you someone we are so thrilled to be sharing this planet with so thank you guys all right Mercedes let’s introduce today’s guest and get this work started let’s do it fully invested in fostering the growth and betterment of women as a collective today’s guest has built a platform called Rising woman where she weaves together spirituality and psychology to create a safe place for women to develop

(03:49) themselves to their fullest potential she is a coach in conscious relationship boundaries Shadow work including inner child work and astrology she also runs A Woman’s Group where she guides women towards better relationships with themselves and others as a birth doua and ministration Guru she’s helping to redefine how both men and women perceive the inner workings of female reproduction and hormonal Cycles taking us from the current repressive patriarchal ideals to a wonderfully improved and balanced image of the

(04:21) Miracles and power that the female body is capable of as a passionate writer she poetically relays her knowledge to the world and is constantly ly finding ways to destigmatize vulnerability and facilitate selfhealing determined to make a difference she’s here to serve her fellow Community especially women who’ve suffered from domestic violence and to help us all to lay down our masks finally feel our feelings and do the work we’re here to do rise together please welcome Shelina Ayana to the magic

(04:55) hour okay all right um uh that wrap one it wouldn’t let me all right cool okay right here we go fully invested in fostering the growth and betterment of women as a collective today’s guest has built a platform called Rising woman where she weaves together spirituality and psychology to create a safe place for women to velop themselves to their fullest potential she is a coach in conscious relationship boundaries Shadow work including inner child work and astrology she also runs a women’s group where she guides women’s women toward

(05:43) better relationships with themselves and others as a birth doua and ministration Guru she’s helping to redefine how both men and women perceive the inner workings of female reproduction and hormonal Cycles taking us from the current repressive patriarchal ideals to a wonderfully improved and balanced image of the Miracles and power that the female body is capable of as a passionate writer she poetically relays her knowledge to the world and is constantly finding ways to destigmatize vulnerability and facilitate

(06:15) self-healing determined to make a difference she’s here to serve her fellow Community especially women who’ve suffered from domestic violence and to help us all to lay down our masks finally feel our feelings and do the work we’re here to do rise together please please welcome Shelina Ayana to the magic hour hik you hi thank you that where did you get that bio I wrote it from my heart okay uh from a lot of research and a lot of love but yeah we’re really excited to have you here you um I was telling Jade

(06:55) before you got on that your bio is something that I hope one day people can say about us you know and say um that this show is helping to bring to light a lot of the things that are in that so we’re so excited to to talk to you today thanks for having so take us through your story from you know I I’ve research you a lot now so I know you have a pretty turbulent upbringing and maybe you can take us through some pieces of that and all the way up through your divorce that caused a bit of the Awakening for you

(07:26) and and led you to who you are now and and how you’re embodying your work that you’re doing now and serving others with now yes so for me this all really began around the time of birth because I was born to a mom who was struggling with mental illness she uh had endured a lot of trauma and abuse on her side um and so she had me when she was 22 years old and really had not had a chance to cover even the slightest from her own childhood and so my earliest years even in the first year of my life um there

(08:09) was a lot of time spent alone a lot of time spent lacking nurturance and care and um at about three years old my mom dropped me off at a foster home because she wanted to go and try to heal and get better um but at the time I had really no understanding of that and she didn’t really say anything we just kind of got in the car and and I got dropped off and that was sort of the first peak of my abandonment wound even though there were earlier instances of that and then throughout my childhood there was a lot of you know instances where there

(08:48) was either sexual abuse or abandonment um or just general emotional neglect um even though my mom loved me she couldn’t be there for me because she couldn’t be there for herself and she really struggled to just COPE in her own mind and um and so that was quite turbulent and challenging and I think it was about around age 12 where I began running with Street kids and drinking a lot and oh is my sorry this is crackling oh oh know we didn’t hear anything uh oh I think we might be having a battery issue

(09:31) you want to switch it out now that’s fine we we couldn’t hear it but if you hear it on your side for sure yeah just let me let me check it because sorry yeah I think I’m gonna need to change these batteries sorry guys give no worries okay sorry I’m going to pause it yeah sorry about that technical difficulties all abound all good thank you for sorry for the stress of all of it yeah no it’s totally fine I just I’m gonna just unravel this cord because that might be what’s causing the St all good um one

(10:15) sec I will say I’m very impressed by the uh color coding of the books behind you Soul’s favorite toy right now is the fake thumb oh what the hell I know it’s so weird boys I just found it next to me oh body parts yeah all right how do you want to do this do you want me to just start over that was kind of choppy anyways I can just kind of start from the top yeah I’ll just do you prefer so we’re just taking us through your story and getting us to who you are now and the work you’re doing now how that all came to be

(10:59) okay I’ll just start over cool so I was born to a mentally ill mom who had me at about 22 and she had endured a lot of childhood trauma some of the things that she endured I just can’t even believe that she’s alive today and um so growing up with her it was really very much like growing up with somebody who was just trying to survive and just trying to get through the day um which of course as a a baby and as a toddler you don’t understand that at all um but there was a lot of alcoholism and emotional neglect and I

(11:39) spent a lot of time alone before the age of three I can remember being alone almost every night sometimes for weeks and um it was just it was like a really intense time but as we know when we grow up in environments like that we don’t know the difference and I can just remember you know my mom coming home drunk and breaking things or hitting walls and falling asleep in the bathroom and me tucking her in and brushing her teeth and um just really always wanting to take care of her and um I was often worried about her and um this was you

(12:15) know just three years old and then one day she picked me up and uh took me to a home and dropped me off um and this was a foster home which I had been dropped off at but I wasn’t aware of that so I just remember kicking and screaming and wanting her to come back and she didn’t come back and um that was when she really wanted to go and get clean um but that was also the point of Abandonment wound City for me it was just like everything kind of formed around my heart walls formed around my heart and I

(12:51) really didn’t feel safe in the world um and that was sort of my childhood that was my whole childhood on and off being being um dropped off at foster homes or being abandoned in some way and also really not feeling safe to express myself because there wasn’t an emotional theme of safety or Security in my life because my mom had never had that either and what I’ve later learned is that when you have children at a specific age that you experienced trauma your child will begin to trigger you and so that’s sort of what happened with us

(13:29) us which you know we’ve processed a bit now but essentially I just hit a certain age and it was just too much for her it was too much of a mirror and just brought everything up so around the age of 12 I started running with Street kids and I started drinking a lot and smoking and like sleeping outside and just hanging with you know the worst of the worst crowd I guess you could say people who are you know anywhere from five to 10 years older than me and and that’s about the same time where I became what they call like ward of the

(14:04) government so the government took custody of me um and and again that was a really deep moment of Abandonment for me um given the all the circumstances around it and then at age 14 my mom moved away she moved to a different Province and uh from that point on I I went to a couple more foster homes and then I moved out on my own when I was 16 and I was was so done I was like I’m done with the system I’m done you know being told what to do I’m done being controlled because that’s really how it felt for me and I’m just doing this on

(14:40) my own and uh so I worked two jobs and I homeschooled myself and by the time I was 19 I felt ready to like build a life I was you know not drinking anymore really and um I started to seek more and that’s when I met some somebody who seemed like a good ticket out of the life I was in and so I moved right away in with him like two months H total trauma Bond was very very exciting total Um passion lust all of the things and right away he became abusive and it just got worse and worse and because of my upbringing I learned to be

(15:25) responsible for others and to take care of people who were sick or harmed me and because of my upbringing I also didn’t have a baseline for what healthy love looked like and so for me that was normal in some way even though I knew that the physical violence was absolutely not normal and not okay it was almost like I had been in a bubble my whole life and so it didn’t feel easy to get out and so I spent about a year in that relationship and there was a moment where he had attacked me and I had made it to the bathroom and I locked myself

(16:05) in the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and my whole face was bruised and swollen and I hardly recognized myself I had never seen myself that way and then all of a sudden I just had this Flash and it was as if this message was being poured into me and it just said this is a part of your path this is a part of your purpose you’re gonna speak on stage to women you’re gonna help women who have been through domestic violence and you’re G to help women get through these types of things and it really hit me

(16:37) hard and I actually even told him I told him that when we were driving in a car I said you know I had this this Vision essentially that this is going to be something that I talk about one day and I really think that you should get help because I’m I’m gonna work on this stuff and uh so I left him finally and um and then eventually I started to build a life of my own I moved to Vancouver where I live now today and yeah and then I met another guy after I think I did about a year of celibacy and um I don’t think it was

(17:13) conscious tantric celibacy it was just like I’m not having sex and I’m not dating which you know there’s many more layers to real true celibacy but I did that and then I had made all of these beautiful friends and I was you know playing with crystals and studying chakras and I felt like I was like really on the spiritual healing path and so I met someone who he seemed really nice and he was really into spirituality and we were like 21 and uh and so we started dating and it was very much uh the most healing relationship I’ve ever

(17:50) been in in terms of waking me up to my own internal BS because we had this strange relationship where we both sort of didn’t want to be fully in it and I especially didn’t he was always trying to get me to do work in the relationship and I was always hesitant like I didn’t want to be with him and even when we got married which was you know he was from another country and we’re like let’s try to make this work even then it was like I don’t really see myself with you but for some reason I just had to be in it I just had

(18:26) to be in it and I can remember night staring up at my ceiling and thinking gosh you know I’m again this is codependent thinking I’m responsible for this guy like what would he do without me um I really hope he just falls in love with somebody else because I don’t want to take care of him anymore W and within a month he did fall in love with someone else it happened to be a friend of mine what not a super close friend uh but enough to really hurt and uh and so my wish came true and I was seriously

(19:01) shocked it was the most painful thing I have ever felt I was so devastated I felt desperate for him to come back and it was like all of these emotions and feelings that I hadn’t let myself feel throughout my entire life came flooding in and I can remember him leaving the last time and I he had and I had gotten in a fight and I just followed him out the house and he got in the car with her and they just drove away and I was barefoot and I was standing in the road watching them drive away and I just had this flash of when I was three and I saw

(19:42) myself being ripped out of my mom’s arms into these Foster parents’ arms and I saw myself screaming and thrashing and I felt that exact same way and and then I just got this message like this is not about him and it seriously felt like a light bulb went off in my whole body and I was flooded with relief like even though it was so painful and I was so overwhelmed I was like thank God it’s not about him this is about my Old Wounds and my tri childhood trauma the things that I haven’t ever let myself

(20:16) feel that means that I can heal without him and that I actually don’t need him to come back or do anything and it started to make sense for me why it hurt so bad because here I am finally getting what I wanted which was to break of this deadend relationship and yet when it happened I was like begging for him to come back and I was I felt crazy like absolutely psycho and I couldn’t understand what the hell was happening to me and it all fell together then and so that’s when I really Dove deep so I

(20:48) started doing deep deep inner child work deep transpersonal therapy Shadow work plant medicines like multiple ceremonies per week like breath work everything I just went for it um and that is why I’m so grateful for him even though there was so much betrayal and so many things that really didn’t end well in that Partnership if that hadn’t happened I think I could have stayed asleep and so people are like oh that’s so horrible like I can’t believe he did that and I can’t believe he did that I’m like yeah

(21:22) you know what like that was a gift that was a real gift for me so that’s how it all started yeah powerful our relationships are so powerful and I love how you um relate how your life has looked through that because I think that that’s something we don’t when we tell our story we don’t always think or maybe we don’t maybe our ego say we don’t want to put it rest it so much on the different relationships we have but really that is what makes us who we are um and not just romantic relationships of course but our es

(21:56) especially our our earliest relationships with our parents or parental figures so um yeah that’s really beautiful thank you for sharing that with us yeah I love um I found over a dozen similarities between my story and yours but I love how you um you articulate it in a way that’s like um you’re seeing the point of it all and I think um I I tend to just talk about it in chronological order this is exactly what happened the end so I love the way that you um were able to put light in your story um I think sometimes

(22:32) Jade it’s hard for us to to navigate our own stories without falling into like the victimhood or the V you know the victim personality of this piece and coming in and out of because we know all these ties and emotions that come up when we relate it especially when it’s our darkest shadows and we don’t want to get sucked into that when we’re just trying to tell the story you know yeah that’s true um so we hear the term wild woman being thrown around a lot these days can you put words to what a wild woman

(23:03) is it’s interesting I keep getting asked this I’m like am I the wild woman expert yeah you know what’s funny is um I wrote a piece on what it means to be a wild woman years ago and it’s like one of the posts that has gone crazy like I don’t know something like 30 or 40,000 shares I don’t know oh wow and and people really love it and really essence of it is that you know a wild woman can be trusted even though she’s feared because she’s honest and I think there are some misconceptions and you know

(23:39) terms fly around these days they get really trendy and then and then we lose the essence of them and I think that if we’re really tuning into the essence of what people are after when they hear that term they’re they’re craving authenticity and that’s I think something that we all crave and that’s something that we all want is authenticity vulnerability bravery courage and willingness to go deep and I sort of see the wild woman as that and I think that she kind of embodies all of the archetypes because she’s courageous

(24:10) enough to allow herself to embody all of the archetypes within her rather than suppress or deny any of them and so for me that’s sort of what she represents she also represents a woman who is willing to you know face her fears face her Shadow and dive deep and um of course nobody could say it better than Clarissa pinka estas who wrot women who run with the Wolves so if you want to dive in I mean go go there yeah it’s one of the best books just because her storytelling ability is so strong and she sings to you if you

(24:43) get the audio book which I really like oh I have the hard copy I’ll have to get the audio book um and in that wild woman description what I’m hearing is essentially it’s a a woman who has done this deep work dug up the things that she really needs to look up that are some of her core wounds in order to put um in alignment her life in a way that she can feel okay being authentic instead of uh living in that chaos of hi basically hiding behind a mask all the time uh which I think we all just it’s

(25:18) like as soon as we join the culture we’re born into we’re just gluing that mask to our face and it’s really hard to ever unstick that thing you know it takes a lot of painful work even though we’re just basically doing the slow pain thing while we’re wearing it right like we’re just sad that we aren’t being able to be our real selves so I’m so glad we’re we’re in this time where we can step into our wild women you know our wild woman selves and and really own that part of our Persona so um and your

(25:52) work is so much a part of that so thank you for that uh H how would you describe a conscious relationship and I know that’s a huge question but you know start maybe we can get into that any way you want and and how do we create that in our lives is really what we want to know so yeah that’s I’m gonna make it as simple as possible because it’s my favorite thing to do is simplify this because really the there’s only one distinction between for me between a conscious relationship and one that

(26:21) maybe is unconscious uh and that is whether or not we are willing to take ownership for our minds and our shadows and our projections in relationship so I can have a relationship with my husband where every time something triggers me I blame it on him I make it his fault I make it somebody else’s fault I blame the relationship I start to demonize him I build a story of him in my mind and then slowly over time we erode uh or I can allow every moment when I feel triggered as an opportunity to explore my mind

(27:02) what is this that’s coming up in me again oh maybe that’s my coping mechanism which is to run away maybe this is that part of me that always wants to push away love maybe this is that part of me that doesn’t trust maybe this is that part of me that thinks I’m better off alone because that’s all I ever knew and I can practice bringing that to him and really Lean Into Love lean into vulnerability and practice conscious mindful communication and really let myself be seen instead of you know reacting in anger I can say I’m

(27:35) scared or I’m feeling hurt and that actually takes so much more courage than it does to uh react in anger so conscious relationship really is deep personal work and it’s all about getting to know yourself on a deep level and sort of Leaning into the fear rather than believing everything your mind tells you does that make sense absolutely I think that starts too with realizing that in relationship it is a team you know that this is about how do we help each other rise like how do we help each other get to become better

(28:12) humans because sometimes we get into a pattern I know I’m speaking for myself here um get into a pattern that feels like it’s almost a competition with your romantic partner it feels like you always have to be right you always have to find you know some way to have the upper hand uh and especially you know energetically I’ve always kind of had that more of a masculine tended towards the more masculine like stepping into those shoes so that has been a big challenge for me and I know probably a lot of people

(28:43) listening have a similar plight so uh yeah teammates try to focus on that well and you know it’s it’s beautiful that you bring that up because we can only have a teammate if there’s two people willing to be a teammate and I think the reason why we don’t feel like that is because if we grew up in an environment where we weren’t a contributing member of the family and we were we were told that you know we we’re living on under someone else’s roof and we’ll do as we’re told we’re you know we’re forced to do things

(29:13) that we don’t want to do we’re forced to eat food when we don’t want to eat it we’re told that our emotions some of them are acceptable and some of them aren’t right it’s incredibly challenging then to relate to others in a way that we feel like we are a peer or that we are a team member and so our self-esteem is really shaped when we’re young and so many of us come into relationship looking to resolve those old wounds but also seeing our partners as those people from our past so we’re projecting those

(29:45) ghost figures onto them so in my previous relationship the one that kind of woke me up um he really represented my mom but it was all unconscious and so we just projected our crap all over each other all the time and neither of us took ownership for it I Still project my mom onto my husband Ben but the thing is is that I’m aware of it so we can actually sit down and process what’s coming up right and so having a partner who’s actually willing to see you and be on your team that’s the factor so people

(30:18) are are always asking what do I do if my partner doesn’t want to do the work um or like I’m trying so hard but you know they’re coming back at me with insults or name calling yeah that’s not necessarily going to work for you you’re not going to be able to change them and convince them to show up different what are those red flags that we might look for in a partner or even like on a first date it you know whatever it is or in the beginning of a relationship or even if you’re deep in a

(30:44) relationship that could tend you to notice that that might be a Direction you don’t want to go yeah I mean I think there’s so many and aside from feeling your body and the energetics which I think we have learned again to tune out there’s many and I’ll say a few that really come to my mind that I’ve noticed and of course there’s lots of um work out there that you could research if you really want to go deep into how to spot it but one thing that always comes up for me is when I hear somebody speaking

(31:19) really negatively about their ex partner and not taking any accountability or any responsibility like that’s really scary because that means that in their mind they didn’t play a role in what happened and regardless I mean I can see the role that I played in every single relationship regardless of how badly the other person acted it doesn’t justify anything that they chose to do that’s out of alignment but I also know how I showed up and how I contributed and so it kind of worries me when when I hear somebody talking about

(31:56) their EX in a really demeaning way rather than focusing on their own lessons um and then of course you know you can notice like how how do you feel in their presence do you feel safe like do they are they curious about you are they curious about anyone are they really just focused on talking about themselves all of the time and how do they treat other people how do they treat people who they’re who are being served right like are you at a restaurant and they’re talking down to the server um I think all of those

(32:23) things even though it might sound insignificant um you’re you’re getting to see who that person is but the truth is is that you know if you’re talking about someone who’s like narcissistic or sociopathic they’re they can be the most Charming people in the world like my my ex who the abusive person I dated when I was 19 he was like the most Charming individual you’ve ever met like when I told people later what had happened nobody believed me because they said he the nicest guy right and um actually he

(32:54) was incredibly violent and Incredibly sick but because he he saw that I was vulnerable and I was over overzealous to just get out of my life I was the perfect opportunity and there was red flags along the way where I noticed him kind of slip out of his charm and into something that looked like aggression or say something like really offside or rude or I would just feel unsafe but I ignored it even though I knew that it was a red flag and I even remember one time sitting on his couch and I had this thought oh my gosh this guy’s going to

(33:32) get abusive and instead of leaving or not going deeper with this guy I totally ignored it and then I moved in with him yeah right and that’s that’s what we do sometimes and so I feel like we we may even be able to spot a red flag but if our programming is to make exceptions for people or to caretake them or to try to fix them or prove our lovability then that’s what we got to work on yeah so because you brought up narcissism and just a just this week actually we released an episode specifically on

(34:11) narcissism uh narcissistic personality disorder so someone with extreme narcissism something like you’re speaking to in that that abusive boyfriend they you know talked about NPD narcissistic personality disorder being something that is incurable which is such a depression depressing thought I don’t know if it is for you but just like that you can’t fix this thing you know you can’t do anything about it and I think in as women when we’re in an abusive relationship we think that it’s going to get better you know we think we

(34:39) are going to be able to like be strong enough to help him get through whatever he’s going through so that he won’t do this anymore do you what do you believe about um someone with extreme narcissism since you’ve been through that are your thoughts are that that is incurable to some degree you know I really couldn’t speak on that because I haven’t done any of that type of research my my focus has always really been on sort of the transpersonal and the more esoteric but I will say that I have a suspicion that

(35:12) most people even people who have you know the most severe form of narcissism might be able to shift a little bit if they are given the right environment and the right support um and I think we’re learning about the brain all of the time so even when we think that something can’t change it’s possible that it could but obviously there are some things that can’t be reversed or can’t be cured and I think that that’s the danger is when we start questioning that and thinking well maybe maybe it is possible maybe I

(35:43) can change them and I can relate because I did the same thing I really wanted to fix this guy and um and that just proved to be really unsafe but yeah I think what’s important is that we realize that a lot lot of times all of these disorders and these things that we’re seeing in our culture are based in a foundation of trauma and so I wish that we would start talking more about why there are people out there that have turned on themselves and others I’m watching I I do this really weird thing which I guess I’ll

(36:20) just share is I watch a lot of um crime documentaries and I do it because I’m so f fascinated by the backgrounds of people who who you know are sort of what they call like a menace to society or someone who’s acted out and it’s really interesting almost all of them have severe severe childhood trauma true and so I wish that we would work on that more because that’s the ba that’s the base of it all I think luckily we are that’s why we’re here on the show doing this work so I don’t know of course

(36:54) we’re surrounded by this a lot more than probably the rest of the population because we chose to do this but um I think it’s coming you know like I think we are taking the taboo around off around therapy and around doing Shadow work and caring about you know self-love and all that I think we’re taking that stigma away um little by little so we’ll just keep chipping away at that um but yeah there’s so much more of course we could go in every direction with you and Accord regarding the narcissism piece

(37:25) it’s just um I wanted to just say that anyone listening if you’re in a situation like that of course getting out of it is probably your best bet so I’m not trying to give you any uh idea that it is solvable you you shouldn’t be trying to fix someone in the first place because that’s not really your place uh so yeah self-work get out of there and then be able to look at it with clear hindsight um so you I’ve heard you speak on something you called front loading which I don’t know you know if this is

(38:01) something you have any expertise in but I but the way you articulated it when you talked about it was something that I thought would be so beneficial to add into my own relationship when I’m in a very heated situation which is usually like hormonally spurred it seems um as I track you know here’s when I’m being the biggest dick and here’s um but when I can’t seem to regulate my emotions if I get triggered for whatever reason in relationship with my husband being able to say to him you know

(38:32) frontload I think would be very beneficial so maybe can you explain what that is and how that could work in a in a triggered conversation yeah I think um I don’t actually think maybe we want to cut this part out because I don’t actually think that’s um my term well I don’t think it’s your I don’t know if it’s your term I just heard you talk about front loing as something you used with Ben before as uh you were triggered or something and you instead of just responding or reacting really you said I

(39:04) might be really reactive right now are you sure you can handle it okay got okay we we’ll get there we’ll cut that piece out okay okay yeah so um when I’m triggered I have learned that I’m not a very nice person and that anything that comes out of my mouth is going to be my ego trying to defend itself and that is true for all of us and so what I’ve learned to do and what I usually suggest to others is that when you’re feeling triggered it’s best to call a timeout and I mean John and Julie

(39:40) gotman they talk about this all the time in their research if your heart rate is high you cannot respond in a way that is helpful it’s just not possible and if we’re in our trigger then that means that our ego is terrified and it’s going to come out and try to protect us so you know Ben and I have a way of processing things and we have certain dialogues that we follow um but something that I tend to say to him you know if I do need to vent and we’re in a container where that’s okay is I’ll say hey like do you

(40:10) mind holding space for me for a few moments so that I can just get this out um but I need to warn you like I’m still quite triggered and I don’t feel totally responsible for my mind yet and I’m not really able to take full ownership so I need time to get there and now of course I don’t always do this and most of the time I end up processing on my own because it’s just my way of kind of getting it sorted out first but when we can do that sometimes what I notice is that as I’m sort of venting to him and I

(40:42) might start out kind of projecty and blamy that I will quickly start to catch myself and start to see see the projection and see how I’m making him responsible for something in my history and I’ll often even tie it back to some incident and have this really realization moment where I’m like oh wow this is totally about that one time you know when I was this age and this happened to me and I felt this way and it’s coming up again and then we can talk about that and then we can have a really healing

(41:15) conversation rather than me just blaming him or projecting on him so generally now what we do is we try to just take time out before we talk like we don’t have a lot of those conversations anymore because I feel like it’s not that useful and we want to really create an environment of positivity in our lives and we don’t really want to be you know going at it while we’re both really triggered but sometimes that can really help and then we follow like a clearing process and so we’ve worked with u the Gans and with

(41:49) Harville and Helen Hendrick and we follow these dialogue processes where you stay really tightly actually within a script like you’re not allowed to Veer off of it and it really changes things because you can’t blame and you can’t judge and you can’t criticize and you can’t project really unless you’re projecting within the script which is like designed to Usher you to a moment of realization wow um and so we’ve really learned to use our tools because we used to have the tools but not use

(42:18) them and then our fights were like so childish and honestly just not enjoyable where can people find those dialogues um so the Gman Institute could be a good resource um there are some I think they have some free and then you can take their workshops um and then uh Harville and Helen Hendrick you could read the book getting the love you want that’s the best book I’ve I recommend that more than any other book yeah that one’s good yeah we just went and worked with them up at elen in a couple of months ago and

(42:50) we’re goingon to be going and working with them again uh sometime uh in the next couple of months and and their work is amazing and then and I are also working with couples now as well um just sort of on the side when we have a bit of extra time and so we also support couples in just learning basic dialogue processes and learning how to fight clean um because it’s really a GameChanger and it’s going to make the world of difference if you know how to fight fair again just remembering you’re on

(43:21) the same team yeah um I wanted to go into shadow Shadow work with you could you explain what shadow work is yeah so Shadow work is essentially the aspect of looking at our minds looking at the darker sides of our personality maybe like the the parts of us that are angry and jealous and hateful and aggressive and mean and whatever you know that is inside of you we all have something we all have all of it really and and it’s really not about extraction and it’s not about really changing ourselves so much as it is about

(44:05) acceptance so when we work with people in our programs we’re like hey you’re not here to become a completely different person you’re not here to extract the qualities that you don’t believe are good enough or that you think are wrong or that you think make you a bad person we’re here to shine a light on those things and take a real good look understand their function than them for being there and welcome them and give them a seat at the table but not at the head table right and so what happens when we allow ourselves

(44:39) to have anger we allow ourselves to have jealousy we allow ourselves to even feel hatred sometimes in our bodies if that’s what’s passing through us without shame without guilt without repression is that it doesn’t build the same way it’s kind of like putting lid on a pressure cooker and then just like blows off because there’s no way to express it so Shadow work is really about accepting that hey as a human being I do have a full spectrum of emotions and sometimes those emotions can be pretty intense and pretty dark

(45:09) and they’re not all super nice and fluffy and that’s totally okay because if I can own that then I don’t need to project it out on the world and so I see the world in a way that is a reflection of what’s going on inside of me and so if I’ve got a lot of bottled up anger and a lot of bottled up resentment it’s going to be really hard for me to see connection for me to see friendship for me to trust love I’m probably going to be yelling at everybody in my car right I’m G to be pretty angry all the time

(45:42) and it’s going to come out in all sorts of ways that don’t serve me whereas if it’s integrated I might be able to own that anger in a way that I can use it as a tool to express myself more like I might fuel it into dance or I might fuel it into sex or I might fuel it into screaming into a pillow or doing breath work or journaling some way that I can own it and that is why we do Shadow work is just so we can become more whole yeah that’s beautiful I I wanted to ask you know I use these terms in

(46:16) language sometimes with my husband who um is understanding it now but it’s it’s I’m just not articulate about getting these points across so reactive versus responsive maybe you can describe when you use those two terms in this language of how you’re having conscious relationship what do we mean totally that’s a good one because when we react to something we’re often reacting to a story that our minds made up so when I’m in a fight with Ben and he does something that I think is just

(46:47) so rude my story is going to be that he did that on purpose that he knows damn well what he did and he is just being ignorant that’s the story that’s where my ego comes in and and pushes him away but if I respond I’m going to get curious and instead of jumping to conclusions and assuming the worst I love to assume the best so chances are there’s a good reason why he did that or there’s a good reason why he said that or something else entirely was going through his mind and I wonder what that

(47:17) might be so to me responding is about curiosity and it’s about taking a moment to see what’s really happening and what’s really present in space reacting is sort of coming from ego it’s coming from defensiveness and it leaves very little room for connection yes you said um if it’s not true it shouldn’t be triggering could you go into that some for some reason it’s hard for me to understand yeah this is so these are some of the deeper Concepts that you know we start to work with when we’re in

(47:52) Shadow work containers and there’s a few things that I want to say first of of all there’s no absolutism in any of the things that you know we study or that we write um especially with these like esoteric practices and principles you have to remember that there’s a lot of time deep metaphor in it but when it comes to speaking about you know if it’s not true then it shouldn’t trigger you that is sort of referring to when somebody else is coming at you with a judgment or with at you with a

(48:23) projection it’s not really like that’s always true across the board but somebody comes to me and they make a judgment of me and it’s not true and I’m and I’m confident Within Myself then chances are yeah it might it might irritate me a little bit I might be like okay well screw that guy for saying that but I’m not gonna spin out over it I’m not GNA go Trail off in my mind and get extremely defensive and then strategize all the ways that he’s wrong and how to prove him wrong um I’m going to just

(48:56) accept that that’s their job judgement and so often times what happens when we get really triggered by something it’s because it’s tapping on a wound tapping on something that is true for us something that feels a little bit too close to home right and so that’s where when we get triggered we can really look at what does this represent for me you know does does this there’s this character flaw that I see in this other person that just drives me absolutely crazy remind me of sometimes how I can

(49:29) do that do I think they’re over sensitive because I actually feel so much shame at how sensitive I am that kind of thing yeah I um I thought of an example like the first time when I first started to realize what triggers were um when I first started to do um Shadow work I would get so um heated if I was cat called and I turned it into this thing of like it’s disrespectful to woman and I care about other women but really it was because I I felt deep down inside that all of my all of my jobs were image-based and so I felt like that was

(50:06) all I had to offer so whenever someone would cat call me um or say something about my body like a stranger walking by it would really trigger me um and so I don’t know if that example helps anybody but uh well I also I mean I I understand what you’re saying Shelina is that essentially all behaviors tend to be a response to our belief systems or our fears or our anxieties and that makes me think of the example of when you recognize anything when you basically see something terrible in someone it’s because it

(50:44) lives in you as well right so I think of like right now in the in the you know we’re going into this new voting um year and everyone’s red flags are going up everywhere there’s anxieties going up everywhere there’s fear going up everywhere so people are shoting on everybody people are hating on everybody and having all the segregation happen but the things that they’re pointing out in their opposing you know party are things that if they look deep enough are triggering to them because there’s

(51:17) something internal happening so I think that’s maybe an example that might be I don’t know for me I can visualize it with the voting world and Trump and everybody you know up in arms so since this all does oh go ahead sorry I think the the example that you gave Jade it made sense to me too because on one hand my mind goes oh well that actually makes a lot of sense that you would be upset about that because I mean it feels violating and it’s it’s actually somebody’s crossing your energetic

(51:47) boundaries and that’s not okay and this is where we get confused where we think oh well if I’m triggered by it then that means that it’s also okay that’s not true just because you’re triggered by it doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to have a boundary about that thank you for say that that’s a good point feel like hey this isn’t okay nobody has a right to make a comment about your body or cat call you however if you find yourself really really triggered by it you did the right thing by inquiring okay what

(52:16) is it inside of me that is feeling so worked up about this and so so upset and and you realized oh wow like this is really tapping on that belief that I have that I’m just a body right and so this is how we sort of use these opportunities as a way to know ourselves better and so that doesn’t mean that when that happens in the future you’re not still going to be like that’s not okay it’s just that it won’t impact you in such a way that it takes you down exactly because you’re like

(52:46) okay this is going to bring up that part of me that thinks I’m just a body and I know that that’s not true yeah and I know that all of this has so much to do with our inner child so how can we tap into our inner child I love this question because inner child work is my fave uh you could download my meditation I did a free inner child meditation which um is basically just a a recording of how I work with my own inner child and how I’ve I’ve done my own inner child work for a long time which is

(53:18) visualization so my husband and I when we first got together once we started having fights which was like 6 months in and then I think a year and a half in we started to get into the power struggle all of our stuff started to come up and we kind of got in this pushpull Dynamic where you know we would have a fight and then it didn’t we weren’t using our dialogue tools at that point and so he would move away from me and I would just keep leaning into his space and kind of like try to sort of bulldo his energy and want

(53:51) him to respond a certain way and I would label him as the avoidant because he needed space and um so over time we did this dance for a while and it got really exhausting and I was like I don’t want to do this anymore it doesn’t feel good for me I I want to stop this pattern and I realized that the whole time I had been blaming him for it because I would be ready to work things out or I would want to talk about it but in that I was also wanting to analyze him and like fix him and tell him all the ways that he

(54:24) was projecting instead of taking ownership for my own stuff and so one day I realized oh wow I’m still not taking ownership I’m still making it about him so I let him go I just said you know the next time we have a conflict if you don’t want to lean in if you don’t want to talk about it if you need space I’m just going to let you if you don’t want to hold space for me you don’t have to I’m going to go and feel my feelings and so the first time that it happened I said can you hold space

(54:53) for me right now and he said no And I said Okay and so I went into the other room and I laid on my bed and I put a hand on my heart and a hand on my belly and I just breathed and I just cried and I just visualized my inner child my little girl when she’s like three years old and it was so dark and it was so black and she was so scared and I just said you know I’m here for you I love you you’re safe you’re not alone it’s okay to feel this stuff you’re not crazy for having big emotions it’s okay and I

(55:26) just did that and I just moved the energy it’s what we call it moving the energy when we’re letting our emotions flow through us and and then I felt okay again and I felt really empowered and as I did that more he started to feel safe to come towards me because I was no longer coming at him with this intense energy that he needed to do something or to like save me from my emotions and that’s actually what shifted the pattern and so I did that inner child work every single time I felt triggered or upset or

(55:56) sad s or scared and I just really built that relationship where I was allowed to feel and I didn’t need anyone’s permission I didn’t need anyone to save me and that’s a really beautiful gift that we can give ourselves and learning to self sooe that’s really good [Music] um it kind of has to do with inner child but can you also touch on mother wounds and how um the way a man relates to his mother um will maybe go into play with how he relates to you yeah this is sort of how all relationship works right like our

(56:38) relationship to our parents for all of us not just men is is going to come into our relationships with our romantic partners and sometimes even really close friends um you know my co- facilitator Heather and I we’ve done a ton of mother work together because we both trigger each other’s mother wounds like crazy and it’s not just with you know romantic Partners or with men and so the interesting thing is is that you know in in the IMO system which is you know the Harville Hendrick model that good there’s a lot of dialogue around talking

(57:13) about our history with our parents and then seeing how we tend to attract people into our Lives who do mirror some of those negative traits um in our parents and that’s because unconsciously we really want to close the loop and we want to heal it right and so what I have noticed is that when we have an unhealed relationship with a parent and we haven’t done the work to heal it in our minds we might not be able to heal with them that might not be possible but if we haven’t done any of that exploration chances are that we are not

(57:46) going to be aware of how we’re projecting that pain or that anger or that resentment onto our partners and and that takes a sometimes a lifetime of work like and I are still doing that work together right because I I have a lot of that in my history and so there are still wounds in me where I don’t fully trust or when I don’t fly fully feel safe um but what I find is that because our culture has sort of become very rigid in the ways that it sees you know masculinity and femininity men more than ever now don’t feel safe

(58:23) to show their emotions they’re they’re actually neglected more it’s proven statistically that boys are more neglected emotionally by their parents than girls are and so then they come into relationship and they just don’t know how to relate in the ways that we want them to and so um then they can you know bring their anger at their mother or their resentment at their mother or their fear of being controlled um to the relationship and really project that and Ben and I talk openly about how that

(58:51) happens in our marriage sometimes like how he projects that I’m trying to control him or or whatever when really that’s not my intention but the the flip side of it is that you know he owns it and then I also own that sometimes I am trying to control and and that’s where it gets juicy is like can we just own that like sometimes that’s going to come up and it’s okay but can we own it can we be with that too yeah I think that’s another we said red flags before another big red flag is if

(59:20) they they may not be completely healed from their trauma with their parents but if they um like I had an ex that in the very beginning I heard him like cuss out his mom so I I should have I I um that was a big red flag and I I like you said it like didn’t it didn’t make me feel safe and I ignored it but I always I always find that um if a man or or a woman if they talk down to their mother or father like cuss at them and call them names then that shows a lot of um trauma that is going to come out at you

(59:57) absolutely yeah you know that is such a good one because it really just represents what’s going to come up in your relationship right if there’s that unresolved anger then we’re no longer dealing in those moments we’re no longer dealing with the adult self we’re deal dealing with the wounded child and wounded child is very entitled and they think it’s all about them and they just want what they want and they they have demands and they have needs to be met and it’s it’s really this self-centered

(1:00:26) space and so if we know that we’re in relationship with somebody who has not dealt with any of those wounds then really we’re signing up to be in relationship with Wounded inner child and so we by you know just by being with them we automatically become that figure for them and and that goes the same the other way around right if we’re not healed and we go into relationship we’re going to expect our partners to meet our needs to excess to the point where it’s not healthy anymore and so really have

(1:00:57) to watch for that yeah what are the levels of the mind that you talk about in your program yeah so there’s there’s levels and stages of Awakening um Le levels of consciousness um and the first level is sort of like Blissful aware Blissful ignorance right and so kind of just floating around we’re just blissfully unaware of how we play a role in anything and and then and then the next stage is that we start to get irritated by everything around us and we start to feel angry um but it looks like it’s all happening outside of us and so

(1:01:40) everything is external at this point and we keep bumping into that wall until we get to the third stage which is the mirror which is where we start to see that oh wow I keep coming up against this pattern over and over again and and I’m hitting a wall so I can either hit that wall and I can go back to square one which is to just be blissfully unaware and not take any accountability for anything or I can look a little bit deeper and in that wall there’s a mirror and if I look in the mirror I’m able to see a reflection

(1:02:13) of my wounds and of the things that are being shown to me right and so then the next stage is sort of like this place of where we go into a bit of um remorse and a bit of acceptance and more ownership where we really start to take accountability but it can be a challenging time it’s kind of like Dark Night of the Soul because all of a sudden we’re like wow I’m responsible for my mind and I’m responsible for how my relationships go does that mean that I’m a terrible person did I do all of

(1:02:42) this and that’s not what’s H that’s not what’s happening but it can feel like that it can feel like all of a sudden you are a wrecking ball and that everything is your fault but it’s really a beautiful time too because you’re finally getting to that place of self-awareness and then the final stage is illumination which is you know essentially we’re talking about being enlightened in some way which most of us never get to that point but we can have moments of Illumination we can have of

(1:03:14) opening in our relationships and and in our time with ourselves where we have a moment where we could react or we could project but instead we go in and we take accountability and then instead of making ourselves wrong or beating ourselves up for it we just soften and those are the moments of Illumination that we go for and that’s where conscious relationship takes us is through those stages um but it’s it’s painful to get there it’s really not that fun and so that’s why most of us don’t want to do it until we hit this

(1:03:42) really painful moment in our lives where we’re forced into it like I was forced into it I didn’t choose it it just got thrown at me and I was like yeah I never want to feel this much pain again time for me to wake up wow I’m so glad I’m so glad you’re saying this is medicine for me today because I feel like this is very current like I feel like a wrecking bll I feel like I don’t even know what you know ever I thought love was I don’t know what any of the things I’ve been doing were because they’re all wrapped

(1:04:14) up in these stories that I’m realizing and these patterns that I realizing I’ve just been puppeteering my whole life with yeah and it’s a definitely a Dark Night of the Soul situation where you go through periods of pain um again that weave through my hormonal cycle which we’ll get into in a little bit so I’m sure you have more to say on that that’s really beautiful though thank you for I really needed to hear that today um absolutely I was also wondering the levels of Mind Is there any foundation

(1:04:42) where that comes from or is that a system you guys put together yourself yeah um so we worked with a spiritual teacher for about four and a half five years he’s still my my husband still works with him in his men’s groups um and he sort of created that it’s adapted from A Course in Miracles which oh okay is if you’ve heard of Course in Miracles it’s you know very very deep teachings dense yeah yeah very dense you get through a page a night and you’re good um and so it’s sort of adapted from that

(1:05:13) and so a lot of the things that we teach do come from a lineage that we were trained in and that we were actually initiated into um by our teacher and it stems from sort of a blend of course and miracles and depth psychology young y psychology and Shadow work and some esoteric teachings um all kind of blended into one beautiful yeah yeah I love those steps that’s beautiful stuff um we were gonna ask you too about your self-esteem dipping while we do Shadow work but I guess that ties to the idea there about the dark KN of the Soul

(1:05:49) situation where you just feel like for a while because you’re sorting sorting through yeah you do feel like like for a while and oh my gosh I remember going through this to the point where I just didn’t think anything mattered and I felt like my self-esteem had just completely plummeted and I didn’t want to do the work anymore because I just felt so terrible about myself but we don’t actually need to go that far I think that you know I I immersed myself in pretty wild group therapy containers and we were doing

(1:06:19) like 10 hours a week of this stuff for four years yeah but what I what I like to do is remind people that this is a practice of self-love and self-compassion and it’s not about judgment and it’s not about blame and so in our programs we’re really designing softer approaches so that we can do Shadow work in a way that also nurtures us so that we can do Shadow work in a way that also reinforces why that is there and how it’s been valuable or how it’s served us because what you sometimes forget is

(1:06:53) like even at our worst we were responding to something in our environment or some threat that we felt we needed to defend against yeah we were doing our very best even in those moments because of our domestications yes yeah yeah all right thank you for that again so I gotta listen back to this 20 times let that sink in and integrate um I’ve heard you speak about intuition uh before and you beautifully described probably the most critical part and that is how we create the ability to trust our intuition by

(1:07:27) doing this inner work um can you talk about how intuition and inner work are related yeah I think a lot of times when we’re doing the work we’ve lost connection to our bodies we’ve lost we’ve lost connection to that inner voice because there have been so many times where we ignored it or there so many times where we were coming from judgment and it wasn’t real and so in the beginning intuition is actually pretty hard to trust my my teacher used to say intuition is for the birds and and I would be like what are you talking

(1:08:01) about like intuition is sacred how could you say that but I do understand what he was saying when he was saying that because if we are full of stories I’m not good enough they’re not good enough we’re always comparing we’re always criticizing as a way to distance ourselves from love yeah we’re like I’ve suffered more than everyone nobody could possibly understand me or that person’s bad because we don’t trust then chances are our intuition is not actually intuition it’s fear and so intuition is

(1:08:35) usually it’s like an an inner knowing and it it feels peaceful and it feels calm fear has a lot of story attached to it feel feel fears very H fear feels very mental it’s like busy in the mind makes sense and so we have to be willing willing to question ourselves for a while and really inquire with our minds like am I making up a story am I using is this my ego trying to keep me separate because the intuition isn’t meant for that and I think intuition can be a really sacred part of us that’s like a an inner knowing but it’s really

(1:09:18) loving yeah wow yeah I feel like right now again it’s that’s a piece of what we were talking about just before is being able to trust yourself is part of doing enough inner work and sorting through um the Shadows enough to know that this isn’t fear okay I can recognize the difference between reactive and responsive all these pieces kind of fit together in that and create the intuition the the flow you’re talking about yeah yeah yeah Tak time how do we begin to Define our own boundaries if we’ve been someone who

(1:09:54) often failed to create or hold any so there’s usually two types of people people who have really really intense boundaries that are almost like walls you can’t get in at all those are they’re not really boundaries they’re walls and then we have the other side of that which is what you’re speaking to which is virtually no boundaries and generally we come from backgrounds where we had to caretake others or our feelings were dismissed a lot or we just weren’t allowed to really prioritize

(1:10:25) ourselves in any any way um and so developing boundaries is more than just writing out a list of things that we want or that we don’t want and then saying them we have to also feel that and I believe that in order to feel that we also need to know what’s behind the fear why are we not setting boundaries in the first place and sometimes what we’ll discover is I’m not setting boundaries because I’m afraid to lose love I’m not setting boundaries because I’m terrified that if I do I might die

(1:10:54) there are some deep Primal fears behind not setting boundaries right and so even though that might sound totally drastic and someone’s like oh yeah right like fear of death are you kidding me for real it’s there and if you really tap in when you’re at that pivotal point where you have to set a boundary with somebody who you love so much but they’re hurting you there could be this primal fear of death because if you think about it when you were little even if your caretakers crossed your boundaries or you couldn’t

(1:11:29) trust them you had to override that to survive right and that comes back again and again in romantic relationship so I really think that it’s a really beautiful process of coming home to our bodies again and I always love raving about sematic experiencing work because that is how I’ve rebuilt my own internal boundary system for me it’s been about sort of taking the walls down a little um because I’m that the somatic experiencing it’s a somatic experiencing is a a system designed by Peter LaVine

(1:12:02) and he’s a trauma expert and a legend and he discovered ways of working with and repatterning the nervous system after trauma and so it is a way of rewiring your nervous system there are trauma therapists out there who are experienced uh sematic experiencing practitioners um and it does involve you know different ways of you know just coming into your body and grounding but it also can be table work where they’re working with your adrenals or your kidneys and it’s so it’s changed my life and so I love recommending that because

(1:12:38) in my opinion if we’re not working with the body as well we can’t actually get the results that we want because sometimes our responses are so deeply wired into our nervous system so taking a look at that and then also just gentle practices of like coming home to your body every day and doing body scans checking in with your body and then really feeling into the fear and remembering that when that fear comes up you can have a conversation with yourself right so if the fear of setting the boundary is like I’m going to lose

(1:13:10) love then you can have a conversation with yourself about that you can remind yourself that you know you are lovable and that you it is okay to set a boundary and you can trust that if the person in your life can’t respect your boundary or doesn’t want to be in your life if they can’t walk walk all over your boundaries then that’s not really a healthy relationship to start with but it takes having a self-esteem and a foundation of self-worth and also knowing that it’s okay to set those boundaries in order to do it and really

(1:13:41) stick with it yeah absolutely uh something you said there stuck out to me and that was that we can have a core wound or or energy or egoic tie that makes it feel like that literally death is you know we’re on the verge of death or we’re we’re so um endangered that that’s how we feel and I have this um reoccurring idea that the fear of Abandonment which all of us have to some degree we all you know we all cried when our mothers first set us down right we all cried when we left for the first day

(1:14:20) of school and we weren’t with our mommies or whatever um I have this idea that the ego sees abandonment in any form essentially as not being validated so your existence is not being validated at anytime when someone is deciding not to be around you anymore or um your mother has to leave you to go to school or leave you with a foster uh family or whatever it is and that essentially is your ego uh afraid that that means you will die right like the fear of death is essentially just the fear of Abandonment the ultimate

(1:14:54) abandonment the abandonment of when we leave our bodies in the same sense so I don’t know if that’s worth even bringing up here it just feels like for anyone wondering how we could have gone from talking about you know boundaries to creating this idea of actually we fear death and that’s what’s ultimate cause of all this um it can be that dramatic because at the base level our ego is only working on very black and white dramatic formula you know there’s only these certain things that it work Works

(1:15:25) off of and it all ties back down to really core basic fears like death like survival we are all going to die we are yeah you know I’m gonna die you’re gonna die we don’t know when and so we create a lot of distractions and we create a lot of ways to forget about that yeah and um I like to be in relationship with death and I know that might sound strange but it’s with me every day because I never know what moment’s going to be my last and so that’s also inspiration to do the work absolutely I think that that’s a really

(1:15:57) good um therapy in itself is we talk about thinking from your deathbed head you know like just sitting for five minutes and thinking about what would it be like or what if I died in five years what would matter to me that I’m doing right now or would this thing I’m stressed out about matter at all yeah um yeah just so such a good perspective Gainer yeah could you um also discuss with us the different attachment Styles yeah so there’s the disorganized attachment there’s anxious attachment there’s

(1:16:31) avoidant attachment and there’s secure attachment um I won’t go too deep into all of them because it’s you know obviously we could spend an hour doing that um and there’s so many great resources on attachment it’s crazy how popular this is now it’s like the trendiest thing ever to talk about attachment Styles yeah but essentially what I see in all of them you know anxious avoidant um and disorganized is it’s all coming from anxiety and it’s coming from lack of a secure safe loving

(1:17:01) foundation in early childhood and so we our nervous system wired in a way that we don’t fully trust love and so the anxious person is the one who sort of like leans away and then um comes back in and is like hey I really need to work this out now I really need to figure this out because you need to help me feel safe and I need these things from you and I need you to tell me how you feel all of the time or I don’t trust it and then and then the avoidant person is the one who’s like I need space I need to get away I probably

(1:17:34) am not even going to communicate my feelings when I’m upset or maybe even at all because I’m so terrified of rejection that I can’t bear to bring myself to you and then you know the disorganized is kind of a mix of both where it’s like a push pull constantly and just not sure if I’m coming or going which can be utterly confusing and um we tend to demonize or vilify the void attachment Styles in our culture we’re like oh well screw them if they’re avoidant you know who needs them just

(1:18:05) let them go and well I think if you’re a person who is anxious in the pattern of avoidant anxious attachment chasing an avoidant person is not going to work it’s not going to serve you it doesn’t mean you just stay in it but also just watch your mind you don’t need to vilify them either because they’re also anxious they’re also coming from a wound it’s just expressing differently so where I see us going in this is to recognize that all of these responses come from some hurt place

(1:18:37) inside and while that doesn’t mean that we need to try to fix and save each other we can also come away from it knowing that we’re not responsible for the other person’s behavior and so like I mentioned in my relationship with Ben right we had the pushpull thing going on like I would be like really anxious and we had to fix this and he was like I’m out I need space I got to go to the gym I don’t even want to talk to you for a day and and that is sort of a result of how we wire when we’re kids and they

(1:19:09) they’ve done studies and they find you know some babies just are are avoid it from the start and it can be based on you know birth trauma it can be based on just like little subtle things because we’re so so sensitive when we’re babies and when we’re children we’re wiring um that little events can actually impact us so much more than you would ever think which is why the conversation of attachment Styles has even come in because we are wiring our nervous systems until we’re about seven our

(1:19:40) brains and our nervous systems and so even these like little micr traumas that can happen where you know our parent goes away for the day to work and uh we had a meltdown over it you know that could be perceived as uh like a break in attachment and then if there’s not a repair done then we might find ourselves becoming anxious in relationships in the future um and so the key word there is repairs like do we take the time to repair the break and attachment which can be done it can be done either in childhood as a a parent

(1:20:14) with your child or it can be done later in life as an adult in relationship you can move towards and become a secure attachment style you’re not anxious or avoidant and then you’re that forever so when people identify as anxious attachment or avoidant I always like to reference the reframe of becoming secure I’m working towards becoming a secure attachment rather than I’m anxious you know I’m anxious attachment style is just how I am you’re just going to have to deal with it and it almost becomes an

(1:20:45) identity and that’s not your identity you can act actually become secure yeah and we we reference uh Stan tkin work a lot with being a wave anchor Island in a similar sense it’s like yeah we label ourselves I feel like Millennials too were really famous for doing this nobody likes an island nobody likes an avoid an attachment um but but I also think it’s so valuable that we have the ability to you know do the research in order to sort through these labels and be like okay this is where I’m at now and I know

(1:21:17) where I’m going it plots a plan you know in order to get to the goal totally yeah I took a quiz um that you posted today uh I thought it was attachment Styles but I got Mountain um which I was surprised because I with Sant Tech and I’m I’ve always Associated as a or always thought of myself as a wave and I don’t know what the others the other options were but um yeah I got Mountain on your quiz so yeah so we we sort of mirrored attachment Styles but we wanted to really move away from again this like

(1:21:53) pathologizing of it so we did um the wind and the ocean and the mountain because all of the elements are beautiful they’re just doing their thing all of those sound great yeah yeah and it just shows up differently doesn’t it and so then we can say okay well this is how I’m showing up and here’s how it’s serving me and here’s how it’s not there’s a beautiful gift in inside of every quality that that lives within us um and so if we remove the shame then we can actually be with that we can come

(1:22:24) more into yeah yeah thank you for that hope we need that um why do we become attached to the idea of our partner being responsible for our happiness because we’re we’re in relationship with ghost figures always and we’re projecting our parents onto our partners and we were wired to have want to have our needs met you know and and again this comes back to the inner child we all have an inner child and we are all kind of parenting each other in this life as as partners and that’s not always a bad thing um but when we bring

(1:23:04) our our unfinished business into the present with our partners it’s really easy to slip into that projection and think that our partners are actually our mom or our dad and it’s not conscious it’s unconscious and so we don’t even know that that’s happening but the the inner child the child just wants to be loved the child wants to be validated and seen and heard and accepted and everything is about them right it comes back to this self-centeredness and so this is why when we get into the power struggle in

(1:23:34) relationship it’s so hectic and it’s so annoying because you’re not hearing each other you’re not meeting each other’s needs you’re not listening at all and you’re just making demands and this other person just won’t do what you want and you’re both doing that because you’re both in your child self and the child self is entitled it’s like me me me me so to step out of that we nurture our inner child we reconnect to our own inner child we reparent ourselves and then we let our partners off the hook

(1:24:05) because we remember right they’re also trying to get their needs met and they’re not my source of happiness and validation they’re a partner for me and they can be a source of validation and happiness but they can’t be the source man I hope I’m able to step out of this inner child sit situation that I always go back to and become like the woman I’m here to be during this lifetime I feel like uh at least I we have this podcast that reminds me and reinvigorates me and remotiv hates me every time we sit down with someone like

(1:24:38) you so totally work it’s good medicine um well you already gave us some tips on how to self soothe but that is something that I’m trying to learn how to do myself because I feel like it’s maybe one of my hardest struggles is like we were just talking about reaching out for my partner to be there as my soothing Aid you know um do you have any maybe just foundational tips for how to go into that type of work yeah for self- soothing which is to me it’s the work because if we can learn how to self soothe we can slow down we

(1:25:17) can breathe we can notice where we are in the room we can listen to The Sounds we can feel our body right we be like all right I’m here I’m safe I’m okay and I don’t need to react so strongly I don’t need to project I don’t need to defend I can just soften and be that’s what self soothing allows us to do and so taking breaks throughout the day to feel what we’re feeling oh I wonder what Sensations are in my body right now you know maybe I feel some tingling in my foot or I feel some

(1:25:50) sensation in my arm or I feel tension in my face right uh maybe I want to relax my shoulders a little bit I can feel my bum on my chair these simple acts of noticing our Body Sensations and and naming it allows us to soothe and calm our nervous systems and then of course there’s the Breath Right am I breathing shallow or heavy is it tight like am I holding on and am I not taking a breath and I’m talking really fast and I’m staying everything a mile a minute and I’m not present at all so I can just take a breath just let it

(1:26:23) out ah okay I’ve arrived I’m here what am I feeling what do I want to share do I want to maybe just listen and so we’re self soothing every time we drop in um and of course there are other ways to self soothe like you know you can just count your breaths you can go and do a meditation you can listen to an inner child meditation you can go for a walk you can do sematic work right there’s all of these things but it really all comes down down to slowing down tuning in breathing and just being present with yourself remembering where

(1:27:02) you really are you’re here now in the present moment you’re not in the past you’re not in the future that’s it that’s yes need more of that okay we’re gonna move into a new topic which is I’m so excited for uh here on the show we like to call ourselves pist which which stands for poop period activists so um you are the guru when it comes to menstration and birth and moon cycles and all that so would you please describe the phases of a menstrual cycle and Enlighten us on the power we embody in each of the four

(1:27:42) phases of the C yeah been called a guru before it’s ni so okay so first just starting out like there are a bunch of book lists on Rising woman.com that I’ve listed all of my favorite books from some of my most favorite teachers and really sort of the the pioneering women who are now like in their 70s and 80s who really founded this work for me and so I’m just so grateful for them because without them I wouldn’t even have this wisdom um so the four the four phases I like to relate to we could do archetypes

(1:28:21) but I really like to do the seasons because I relate so much to the seasons just in my emotions and so winter time is week one which is like when you’re bleeding you’re on your moon or you’re menstruating and during that phase there there have been some sayings that a woman cannot tell a lie while she’s on her Moon and know of course W of course you can tell a lie but what that really means is that you’re the most honest right you’re the most direct almost like cutting because you’re just like I don’t

(1:28:54) have time for this here’s the truth and so they relate this to the Crone phase right the Elder Crone woman because what do we know about that is that it’s really it’s really just you know she’s come to the point in her life where she’s not hiding anymore she’s really honest and direct and also deeply wise so um during the winter phase it’s it’s inward it’s quiet you don’t want to be rushing around taking care of everybody feeding everyone you know cleaning and cooking and running a

(1:29:27) business you just want to really be off your feet if you can I sometimes spend two full days in bed on my moon I still I bring my computer but in bed right and um there’s a beautiful gift to just allowing yourself that time if you can even if you know that’s totally not possible for you you’re a mom that’s you’re like probably like yeah right um but if you can take any time to be really really quiet and inward then I find that winter or moontime cycle is really a beautiful time where we just

(1:30:04) really can go Inward and get clear like if there’s something that’s not clear we can really find clarifying moments in in our cycle at that time um and then we move into the inner spring which is um like pre-ovulation and that’s kind of like after you have had your moon and that’s kind of like if you think of spring it’s like we’ve had a long winter we’ve been really inward we haven’t been seeing anyone we’ve been just like hibernating now we’re starting to come out o it’s a little bit warm outside

(1:30:35) there’s some flowers like think I want to go smell them and I’m feeling a little bit more social it’s like mating time and then we’re blossoming yeah so week one is like your energy levels your hormones are starting to rise and you can start to feel more outward and like having more energy to actually do things and then and then week two is when you’re like in pre-ovulation you might be ovulating in week or sorry in um week three which is like you’re in summer now and you’re ovulating now you’re like

(1:31:06) getting into it you’re like oh yeah I’m really out there and I’m feeling extroverted and maybe social but also there’s a bit of awaiting starting to happen because you’re about to go into Moon time and so I find like week one I’m pretty on it week two I’m getting really into life and that’s when I want to make plans and socialize and then week three I’m about to ovulate and then I ovulate and that’s where we might find that we are really magnetic that’s where we might find that we get more yeses

(1:31:43) from people like there’s literally scientific studies that tell women go ask for a raise when you’re ovulating um you just you might find that if you’re not a really bright color person you will be when you’re ovulating I used to go shopping when I was ovulating and then buy these really bright dresses and I’d come home and then the next week I’d be like what the hell was I thinking I must have bought that when I was ovulating so I stopped doing that because I’m not actually a bright color

(1:32:09) person but um if you are it’s a great time to go and get bold yeah and and then we move into fall which is again you’re really winding down your um hormones are really starting to wne now and your the leaves are falling and you’re starting to feel cozy again you don’t want to be out as much right the weather’s colder you’re starting to get ready for winter now you’re just preparing and so um I actually sometimes notice that this can be a lot like preparing for birth where I’ll go

(1:32:39) through this manic cleaning phase and I’ll be nesting and preparing and just getting ready um and I’ll even have this crazy burst of creativity right before winter comes right before my moon and so if we allow ourselves to use our cycle um as a way to operate in harmony with our lives then we can schedule things for when we’re going to be feeling really good so like we can schedule things for spring and summer and we can book more time off for ourselves like we might not want to be social during our

(1:33:12) winter phase or we might want to do less during fall because it’s starting to wne so I’ve organized my schedule based on my cycle so I don’t take any clients I don’t take any calls don’t do any interviews um the three days before my cycle and for three days after because I know that I’m not going to want to I’m going to be like oh I’m so inward I can’t do it so Heather and I um she created a Mystic moon calendar years ago and then we decided to rebuild it together and we added a 65 page guide with it and um

(1:33:49) it’s free for download on our website and it walks you through all of your cycle um and then there’s a whole herbal guide and nutrition guide and you can learn how to live in harmony with your cycle and if a man read it would it help him live in harmony with our cycle Yes actually I created a partner calendar in it oh amazing yeah so you know what I actually built was something for Ben and it was a here’s my cycle and I broke it up week by week and then I I had to really tune into okay what do I need

(1:34:19) week by week what mood am I in obviously there’s you know es and flows but what am I feeling what am I needing most and how could he support me yeah and so in it week by week I said here’s what I’m experiencing here’s where my hormones are at and here’s what I need so for example um in week three and four I wrote in there we used to have a small apartment before we moved into a house and it was like if you’re if you’ve got guess over you don’t have any space so I wrote in week three and four you know

(1:34:53) how you could help me is not scheduling plans with friends we’re going to be in the home keep our space really clear and free of anybody else’s energy um things you could do is like ask me how I’m feeling don’t make as many jokes because I’m more sensitive R run me a bath you know give me space encourage my alone time week two great time to plan a date great time to invite me out to things great time to have people over for dinner and so he had this little guide on our fridge that told him where things

(1:35:23) were at and so it wasn’t that he had to do those things they weren’t demands but if he wanted to get in tune and he wanted to have a more harmonious relationship then he had a reference just saying guys this is all on the rising woman website yeah it’s in the Mystic moon calendar Mystic moon calendar okay yeah and it’s you can download it on our website beautiful I just want to say that for women who who uh scoffed at the idea that a man might even think about you know reading this type of calendar

(1:35:56) or have posed it on your fridge and and actually applying it to your life with him um my husband two and a half years ago when I asked him to do that laughed at me and told me that no man would do that because you’re just basically asking him to take on more responsibility and two years so that seed has was planted and then little by little he’s come up to the occasion and Rose to the occasion and now is very much open to it and he actually like is very inquisitive about it and he’s turned around so there is hope and

(1:36:27) of course Selina’s husband Ben is obviously I mean he has a podcast called the modern man so he’s very advanced in this um so there’s already two guys as examples of what this uh this work can help with um bringing to light in a relationship so I think it’s very powerful stuff I’m all we’re all about it awesome yeah actually I think so his podcast is called evolving man and if you go back into the archives somewhere we did we did a podcast years ago on menstration together because he was so

(1:37:00) curious about it it’s funny like all of the men in our community they all say they all talk about it together you know all be like oh how’s you know how’s so and so doing or how’s your wife oh she’s on her moon today so I’m just bringing her food or just getting out of the house that kind of thing so so cute it’s possible yeah and sorry evolving man I said it wrong yeah um so moon cycle the term can you tell us where that originates because I feel like we just say it and we don’t really think about

(1:37:30) why it’s that way well you know in in ancient times and um even in you know like Egypt we used to use astrology and the stars as a way to um track everything basically time and you know what was going to happen in the future and we’ve obviously moved far away from that now um but you know there is some uh ideology that says that when we were living in more tribal times that our Cycles would reflect the moon cycle and so we would actually ovulate and then bleed with you know full and new moon but now that we are in such a modern

(1:38:13) world with all of this excess light um it makes it a little bit more challenging and so um you know typically they would find that we were impacted by the Light by the our Cycles were impacted by the Light of the Moon and so if we slept you know with our bedroom window open um and then there was the full moon there it was impacting our cycle um and so you know there’s some research that says that that’s true and some research that says that it’s not um but regardless of that it’s actually quite a beautiful way to feel in tune

(1:38:49) with the Earth and with nature because the Moon Cycles really do reflect different inward phases and I find that you know when it’s a full moon I almost always know and when it’s a new moon I almost always know because I can yeah see my behavior is different I used to have a partner who I used to have a partner who I would have a fight with like every single full moon when I was and I was like oh we fight every full moon this is weird yeah so you know there’s those kind of things say that’s when the werewolf comes out

(1:39:25) in yeah totally so you think if we didn’t have any of the endic endocrine disruptors and the the the fake lighting and all that stuff that we would be all cycling at the same time as women um I think that it would be more likely okay and and because you know we’ve already seen this that in in groups of women we tend to sink up like our Cycles tend to sink up I mean I’ve had this happen dozens of times with close friends you know we spend enough time together we’re all bleeding at the same time um and so

(1:39:58) it’s not really I mean it’s just that’s Primal that’s what happens right and um who was it I think it was the author of sex at dawn and there’s a lot of other stuff on Primal behavior that talks about how you know we do Sy up and so yeah it would be totally likely if we’re in close proximity that we would yeah yeah cool so how has the patriarchy played a major role in creating shame and suppression around both menstration and birth for that matter H well what I will say is that there has always been essentially except

(1:40:40) for you know in really really really ancient times when we worshiped the goddess like way way back you know uh it’s always been that way and it’s it’s related to fear and it there’s this book called what was it called The Curse I used to go deep into the history of menstration like just really weird books and this one this one was all about the history of all of the different ways that different cultures throughout many lifetimes have made up really evil stories about women when they’re menstruating and

(1:41:22) so it built into our society it’s built into our culture and it’s not new it’s been like that for so so long and when I’ve done really deep studies on you know women’s Shamanism and female spirituality um we find that sometimes it is related to power and and control and fear of a woman’s power or fear of her moods or fear of her changes um because you know we’re chaotic and and way more emotionally expressive and certain parts of our cycle we’re just a completely different person and I like

(1:42:04) to say we’re we are powerful I mean our energy is aggressive or it’s it’s a lot so if we’re not harnessing it or the people we’re with aren’t able to co- harness it in a positive way then yeah it can be Mr directed in a really not so fun way yeah absolutely and and you know I think like really we’re actually doing a much better job at becoming more positive and and aware of menstruation and normalizing it um I used to make a practice of just telling people directly you know if I was scheduling an

(1:42:36) appointment with a man and I’d say I can’t meet this day or on this weekend he would say why I would say because I’ll be I’ll be bleeding at that time yeah and I really made a practice of being direct with him even if it made him uncomfortable because I really wanted to normalize that and so I will tell anyone I mean not anyone probably but I’m sure there’s someone I wouldn’t tell but you know if somebody asks me directly I will tell them and I will look them in the eye and I’ll just stay

(1:43:01) present because it’s nothing to be ashamed of yeah but when it comes to birth that’s such a big one that I get so fired up about because um birth can be a really sacred rights of Passage for us as as people but we’ve really removed ourselves from that and we’ve we’ve moved into the medicalized birth Society where we fear our bodies we don’t trust our bodies and we’ve given our power away and I think it’s in the US you know we have like the highest mortality rate of any of any modern country and it’s

(1:43:38) actually not safe to give birth in a hospital there um African-American women are dying at just horrific rates they’re not being protected and there’s a lot of Injustice that happens in the Realms of birth and so I remember starting to study birth when I was 21 years old and I would just go on these daylong birth binges where I would watch birth on YouTube and I just watched hours and hours of natural birth and I I realized what’s possible for the body and I studied all of these teachers and inime gasin if you’ve ever heard of her

(1:44:20) and um just different authors who really champion um essentially human rights for women in birthing and I learned that birth moved into the hospital as sort of like a marketing strategy when people weren’t going to hospitals because that’s where death happened and so people were too afraid and and so um they wouldn’t go when they were sick and so as a way to sort of bring people into the hospitals they brought birth there and then actually birth um birth inter intervention and and death rates actually Rose because you know doctors

(1:44:57) were doing autopsies and then going and putting their hands in a woman’s vagina and they didn’t understand bacteria yet and so you know the death rate was quite High yeah and so and then we had all of these just horrific historical interventions that we used right and so really there was a lot of trauma a lot of stripping away of a woman’s power and also a man’s ability to connect and bond to see his Woman’s power when he’s watching his woman give birth and also his ability to bond and connect with his

(1:45:34) child because they were kept out of the the hospital rooms and so if we think about it like that’s who our that’s what our parents and their parents and their parents went through and so it kind of helps you understand how we have so much trauma and so much broken attachment because generational yes yes and and how we’re born it’s it’s so impactful right and when I did a lot of my birth Doula training they talked about how a woman never forgets her birth you can ask a woman who’s 95 who

(1:46:06) doesn’t remember anything and chances are if you ask her about her birth she might remember she’ll probably tell you about it because it’s a pretty impactful moment and so for people who do choose to become mothers or do choose to give birth I’m just so passionate about them really diving deep into into the real science the real facts not the fear and understanding that you know it is safe your body does know what to do yeah and I you know you’ve talked about how now C-section is like it’s

(1:46:39) almost what you what you get you know when you go into the hospital I had two and so I didn’t get to do any of my birth plan and I wasn’t as knowledgeable then about you know why they do C-sections and all of that stuff so and how how do you feel about that like how was that for you um I don’t know if I’ll have more children so I do feel like I missed out on the experience um and um I my both of my births were really um a bit traumatic um because I felt alone um when it came to my partnership as well and like I had to

(1:47:18) drive myself to the hospital while having contractions and carry my own luggage and all that stuff so the entire experience I feel like I missed out on um you know what I had dreamt it would be so um the C-section just kind of topped it all off yeah that’s a lot to go through and I’m sorry that you didn’t feel supported and that you didn’t feel safe and protected in that because everybody deserves to feel that when they when they are giving birth I mean we all it’s our inherent right and I think it’s

(1:47:52) really important for people to know like regardless of how you gave birth you did something amazing when you gave birth and I can also so empathized with this feeling of kind of missing out and I hear that when I talk to a lot of people who gave birth by C-section and sometimes they feel like they didn’t get to have the birth that they wanted they don’t validate in our culture because we say well all all that matters is a healthy baby but what also matters is a healthy mother who felt respected and who felt

(1:48:24) cared for we have to Mother the mother and that’s something that we still haven’t figured out we don’t do that anymore yeah yeah my best friend is having a home birth in a couple of months and she’s letting me and my kids sit in on it my kids are toddlers but um we’re all GNA sit on it and I feel like that’ll um experience yeah I feel like that’s gonna kind of we’re so close that I feel like that’ll give me the experience a bit so that’s so beautiful to have the witnessing a birth in I’ve witnessed

(1:48:55) many births and it’s always so it’s like doing the craziest psychedelic drug that’s what it’s like that’s our next topic with you yeah before we get into that I just wanted to also note that you know if someone listening is maybe pregnant now and thinking about their options like diving deeper into this might maybe you can invite them to some places that they can um look deeper for research but also that that idea of a healthy baby um I don’t know specifically when I think about a healthy baby and because of my own like

(1:49:30) digestion issues I think about the microbiome and how going through the your mother’s vagina is so important because you pick up all that bacteria on the way out um that helps you have a healthy immune system helps helps you have a healthy intestinal tract all those good things that we need in order to be healthy individuals so there’s just like that’s just like obviously the tiny tip of the iceberg of what is out there as far as why this could be beneficial for you to try to have a natural birth if that’s possible for you

(1:49:58) but and and just to touch on that too now that now that um C-sections have risen so high they do have swabs so they tend to swab the vagina and then put it in the baby’s mouth after birth so there is still a way to have that um but there is there is so many more layers to it that really it relates to the emotional connection and the attachment um and so I think what’s hening now is that doctors and OBS and hospitals are really starting to see that and even with the process of having a a surgical birth

(1:50:33) they’re learning how to create more attachment within that so that we can still have these life-saving operations when we need them because they are life-saving and also how can we reduce the rate of interventions that didn’t need to happen because we were impatient so there is a woman named Jessica Austin that lives in my community and she has been a mentor of mine and she’s a woman I really respect she uh runs uh something called birth takes the village and she recently came on Ben’s podcast

(1:51:06) um because I was like begging him to bring her on I was like you have to interview her um she is so science-based she is she’s essentially the most she’s like a walking encyclopedia that’s what I’ll say she’s a walking encyclopedia when it comes to birth and she really knows the stats and she knows the actual numbers and she knows the facts about what is safe and what’s not safe and she can bust a lot of myths and we do a lot of that on that podcast because I really felt passionate about giving people the

(1:51:41) science because it’s it’s one thing for me to just go off about how spiritual the experience is and say how sacred it is but you’re talking about your life here so they’re like I don’t want to listen to this lady so I say go listen to her because she’s got the science yeah yeah um we started to bring up plant medicine and I know uh we’re running out of time with you but I just was curious um what your experience with plant medicine is and how you feel about people using it for healing I have used plant

(1:52:14) medicine a lot in my journey it’s been a really life-saving tool for for me personally yeah same for meh yeah it sounds like we have some some similar threads I’m sure if you and I got into it we would probably really be able to relate sounds um I I used plant medicine a lot to get to know myself and to meet myself in those dark and hard to love places um and I’ve pretty much worked with it all like you name it I’ve I’ve worked with it except for iboga because that sounds crazy and and iboga is really

(1:52:53) used as a way to to treat severe addiction I I don’t need to do everything what is that I don’t know what that is it’s like an African it’s an African bush I believe um or a bark and it is uh a plant medicine that has actually been shown to remove the withdrawals of heroin so if a heroin addict is going through withdrawal and they and they use a Boga of course under supervision and carefully guided um then it can remove that painful withdrawal so it helps them get clean which is you know as we know

(1:53:29) with Heroin withdrawing from yeah it is like the most painful thing and it’s what makes it so impossible wow um so I worked with all sorts of things and I did you know the Frog medicine and I did lots of hopp which is like a snuff and I did um lots of iasa um Ben and I have worked with iasa quite a lot mushrooms Etc and I’ve had just incredible healing from it but I also know that it is really really hard as somebody who never had secure attachment who does have a lot of trauma who does have a fried nervous system

(1:54:10) what I learned is that actually I was pushing it a little too hard sometimes and that what I needed most was gentleness and what I needed most was just to feel safe and and some of these tools really are too much for some people and so when people say oh do you recommend it I say I don’t recommend it to anyone I recommend that you follow your own call and with plant medicines I think it’s important that we remember that they’re tools we don’t have to do all of it and we want to make really sure that

(1:54:40) we’re prepared that we have a really really skilled and trained facilitator and space holder and um that we have the support for afterwards because it can open up some really deep stuff we’re not ready yeah integration if we’re not ready for it it can be bad and so we have this weird thing going on right now where you know we have lots of people who are just jumping in and calling themselves shamans and healers Without Really training so I would really caution against that and really find a good guide and facilitator if you feel

(1:55:12) drawn to working with plans yeah yeah I like that um we have many men who listen to this show and you’ve said some beautiful things around making sure we support men as well as women and that includes the men who’ve done some terrible things like being violent or have harmed women they need support too so um in order to change that you know we need to support anyone who’s gone through that so how can we support our men as a culture that um is trying to take on this critical task of transitioning from

(1:55:48) toxic to healthy masculinity know it’s interesting because every time I hear the term toxic masculinity when I really feel it in my body I feel that there’s something about it that doesn’t quite resonate and I I think that’s because I don’t believe that masculinity can be toxic just as I don’t believe femininity can be toxic I think what can be toxic is how we react to our circumstances and how we treat other people and so it’s a story behind it’s the story behind it and and it’s

(1:56:26) like I there’s a book called The Boy crisis so for anyone who wants to kind of understand boys and men more especially if you’re really caught in this idea that men are the the problem and that you know they are toxic I really suggest that book even though I haven’t read all of it but Ben read it in bed next to me from always was giving me quotes about it and and it really I learned a lot actually and it really touch my heart because I learned a lot about how boys are more neglected emotionally they’re treated differently

(1:56:58) they’re they’re not welcome to feel their emotions from an early age they’re picked up less when they’re crying like what they’re you know they’re they’re expected to be stronger than they really should be expected to be when they’re so vulnerable and so there is something to be said about really looking at the roots of our culture and our conditioning rather rather than blaming it on um an energy or or on a gender and of course you know masculinity is in all of us you know you

(1:57:31) said you’re a pretty masculine woman sometimes so am I I think that’s we run businesses of course we have a strong masculine Edge and I think that’s a good thing to have sometimes yeah yeah yeah not in relationship yeah well it’s about ebbing and flowing with it rather than um staying in in one stagnant energy um but I think what’s true is that men need other men to support them and they need other men to hold them accountable and they need other men to to call them out and so what we’re seeing now in my

(1:58:10) community my my husband he’s an executive of what they call the samurai Brotherhood and uh there’s like 300 men in groups around around the world now actually who meet every week and they hold each other accountable they talk about their feelings they cry they they scream they yell they unleash their minds and their shadows and they hold each other accountable and they challenge each other and there’s a book called iron John by Robert Blye it’s kind of like a mythopoetic men’s work and uh it’s sort of about the stages

(1:58:43) that a man goes through to separate his identity from that of his mothers and it’s this really empowering Journey that he goes on and what I notice is that men do not have that very often in our society like I think it’s a stat that most men over the age of 30 or 40 can’t name one person as like a close friend yeah they commit suicide at higher rates they are they’re just struggling men are struggling and they the boys struggle too and so I want to shift the conversation around um that to more of

(1:59:23) just like how can we all lean in together to this because you know all of this stuff that’s happening is learned behavior it’s learned and it’s passed down and it’s it’s ingrained in us just as much as it is ingrained in them and so if we can start to see each other again as teammates rather than opponents imagine what’s possible if we can start to heal together um and then I think it goes down to how are we raising our our young people too can we can we nurture them to feel safe to express their

(1:59:56) emotions so that they don’t go out into the world and harm others absolutely and that leads me to want to ask how can men approach women in a more authentic and balanced integrated way which I know you you’ve spoken on something I think it was actually on Ben’s show you guys talked about um something that David data talks about Macho jerk and the apologetic yeah can you speak to that a bit yeah Ben loves that reference yeah yeah so I mean again working with other men so joining a men’s group yeah I really

(2:00:34) suggest it not just because my husband runs one but because even before he was an executive and like a part of that movement uh I saw the benefits of him having other men to support him and hold him and so that I didn’t have to be that for him because I think when we get into relationship and we form this what we call Cult of two like I don’t have any friends anymore and like let’s not have any friends let’s just rely on each other and expect everything from each other and then it gets actually kind of

(2:01:02) icky the relationship gets icky and you become his mom and he becomes your dad or something else and it just doesn’t work out because the polarity gets killed and we don’t we don’t have any space and so I feel like men having each other’s backs and really holding each other to a higher standard like good models of what it means to be a conscious man is so so important and that’s what I see him doing and and cultivating in this community and I’m grateful for that um and also being willing to take feedback and be

(2:01:38) influenced by your partner like John gotman talks a lot about how the science shows that if a man is willing to take feedback and be influenced by his partner he has a much higher chance of having a successful marriage and it’s not because she’s trying control it’s because chances are her guidance and her influence can be helpful for him in his life and so you know in my marriage Ben and I we have come up against this feeling of him being controlled or me trying to control him but we really practice and he’s

(2:02:10) really softened to let me tell him what I see and let me influence him and I think that’s important as well and then just remembering that you know vulnerability is a day-to-day practice doesn’t have to be you have to bear it all at once you know do what feel yeah yeah and that uh having a having a men’s group I mean I feel like that is a kind of a newer movement I guess there was men’s groups or men’s uh clubs you know at some point where they’re hunting and they’re doing some sort of manly things

(2:02:44) together and I think if you think of it now guys listening uh there are options like I don’t know you join a Jiu-Jitsu class together or and I think men are doing that in ways where they try to find that camaraderie because they innately know they need that Brotherhood somewhere and so maybe it’s when they go like my husband goes out and surfs and his buddies will be out there but they don’t call and like set it up where they’re going to go surf together they just see each other out there and like

(2:03:08) you hey bro and then they might have an exchange but um deeper deeper bonds can build of course out of those things and especially I bring up Jiu-Jitsu because it’s such a intimate sport you know you’re literally like rubbing bodies on each other until you become energetically you’re having such a intimate exchange I think it’s a really easy way to build a a sort of Brotherhood um or to become bonded but so that that idea of trying to get a woman’s approval um when you’re a man trying to navigate this like this

(2:03:44) place of uh me too movement and feminist and all the things that men are probably trying to na right now and how to like pick up on a woman for instance that’s got to be kind of a complex way to go about that and that’s why everyone’s probably using dating apps instead of anything in person so maybe can you speak to like just give a tip on how a guy might approach a girl that would be in this day and age accepted way better than than probably any other tactic that they’ve tried so far so I know

(2:04:17) you yeah I mean it’s it’s a bit of a subjective question of course because everybody’s so different like what I like and what you like might be totally different but the the first thing that just comes to my mind is just be in your body just be in your body feel yourself right be rooted um because we are energetic beings and we can sense when some not in their body and also be authentic and true to your intentions because a woman can pick that up yes I do agree I think that’s what that that Macho jerk and apologetic wimp thing is

(2:04:48) like you’re either going to be on one end of the spectrum or the other if you just if you’re trying too hard to be something you’re not so yeah and that’s what Ben and I are really working on creating with his with evolving man and with the content we do together is to just really help guys make sense of what does it mean to be a conscious man and is it okay to own my feelings and also like be a sexual beast and yes it is um and there’s a lot of resources coming for guys yeah and that’s what women

(2:05:16) actually want you know at the end of the day sometimes they not able to voice it very well yeah all right so we’re going to head into our staple questions so that we can wrap this up it’s just a few short questions we like to ask everyone who comes on the show so if you could hug your younger self right now what would you say everything’s gonna be okay and how old is she three a baby girl yeah that’s how old my daughter is a so sweet sweet if you could have the whole world read one book which would it be you’ve already

(2:05:56) given us a hundred so I know top L this like my least favorite question because I’m like such a book I read so many books you guys oh God okay if I really I’m gonna give you two because I just can’t I can’t conform to this question so um getting love you want obviously is wonderful by um harvil Hendricks and then also I really love conscious loving I just and then they have the conscious Heart by K I don’t know that one it’s it’s their second it’s like their second conscious loving book basically and I

(2:06:32) just finished it I don’t know six months ago it’s amazing I absolutely love the conscious heart yeah gay and Katy Hendrick definitely with all of it if you could whisper one phrase to everyone on the planet what would it be you’re connected to everything that’s good I love that okay so before we let you go where can people find you online uh Rising woman.

(2:07:01) com it’s woman.com and then on Instagram we are rising woman we are also on Facebook as rising woman official because I couldn’t get the actual URL and yeah those are the three main places but Instagram is really where where we’re bumping we’re bumping over there but if you want the gifts yeah we love your Instagram we are always sending back and forth your posts so big fans thank you so thank you so much for coming on and being such a light with your work um I cannot praise you enough because this is really

(2:07:38) everything you’re doing you have your hands in so much and you seem to be really uh managing it all gracefully which is incredible in itself because there’s so many different things that you are attacking and uh just really app appreciate you thank you so much this was a great conversation I had a really good chat with you guys thank you so much all right so we will um be making some promos for this and some content and we’ll send it over to you of course and let you know the air date all that good stuff sounds great thanks so much

(2:08:09) you guys this was great thank you so much and we’d love to do a workshop in the future so um anytime you feel like LA or Austin is an option just let me know and we’d love to set something up okay yeah what are the what’s the capacity for in your space well it depends on which city in Austin um there’s a lot of options that’s where I live Mercedes lives um outside of LA but um we could make La work also okay and so in both in both it’s just kind of like whatever we decide to throw together or yeah we would basically in

(2:08:41) La we would rent a space that would you know Studio or yoga studio whatever it is that we would need to in order to facilitate what we think would work but what we’ve done in the past when we build workshops is sometimes we get together a few different people and whether it’s over one day or two days um you know we’ll have like this day is going to be all based on relationship or whatever it’s going to be and then we build that out with you um so like it just depends on you know really it’s

(2:09:10) just about figuring out a date that works and then we can kind of start planning around seeing who’s available or if that is even something we need to do maybe it’s just going to be you and Ben for instance yeah I think for this one just you and Ben if we were to do it in LA maybe it would be one day you and Ben one day London and Justin or something um but in Austin it would probably just be you and Ben like a full day or a full two days so once we pick a date we can like once a date works for you in either of those cities we can

(2:09:36) kind of like tailor it to whatever you think is best cool all right well I’m probably G to be coming to La I think in May to just do some more PR stuff so maybe I’ll just message you guys at least we could meet for coffee or something yeah yeah yeah and if you have preliminary dates like even if they’re not set in stone just send them over and we’ll say hey yeah that does or doesn’t work because we kind of know our schedule’s pretty far out Okay Jade obviously has her kids so that’s a big

(2:10:03) and then I have a a travel schedule with my work so we’ll awesome awesome have a great rest of your night with Ben than bye thank you bye okay um the next page that was really good I learned a lot about the moon cycle that I didn’t know about which is the the topic that I thought I would learn the least about really yeah yeah I learned a lot and I super excited to use her calendar and uh so happy that the man has one yeah yeah that is a magic trick inging yeah exactly print out that every month all month yeah she talked about

(2:10:53) actually when she talked about the that calendar when I’ve heard her talk about it before anyway she said on you know while she was minrating one time she was you know taking her three days off like she said she does and so she was like what should I do I should just doodle a calendar for Ben so she did she basically put that one together that she explained and I’m so now you know I’m on day one of my period right now ain’t afraid to say it uh and I was like I should be putting together a calendar

(2:11:20) right now for Chris but then I didn’t I got on here and did this podcast so I’m still work I should be doodling moon calendars I’ll get there I’ll get there I have it in my in my calendar right now take three days off when my period comes but it hasn’t worked out yet Jade yeah I I definitely have some homework with that yeah um really beautiful stuff so glad what about your own personal magic trick tonight my magic trick today what time is it wait now where are we we’ve been on this podcast for two and a half hours um is

(2:11:58) to basically self soothe but I I came up with this technique kind of on my own and I have been trying it for myself and I really like it so I thought I’d share it with y’all because self soothing has been like I mentioned earlier something I’m really trying to get better at so that I don’t have to rely on other people for my own happiness or ability to regulate my tions so the technique is to text yourself all the things that you need to hear that week maybe you needed to hear them from your romantic partner

(2:12:31) or from your boss or from a friend or even from yourself but that didn’t happen when you wanted it to so now you have the chance to remedy that by doing it yourself so for example you could text yourself you’re so smart and have really great ideas you deserve to relax and enjoy yourself you’re a hard worker and I appreciate your diligence and professionalism thank you for holding a safe space for me to express myself and for being such a wonderful listener thank you for being so patient you’re

(2:13:02) creative and your Ingenuity is not overlooked you’re a beautiful human being any of these things work right you get the idea um and you could obviously make it a even a little more specific to the person that you wanted to have sending it to you you know like you’re a great girl girlfriend for instance or you’re a amazing sister and I’m so proud that you’re a part of my family whatever it might be or whoever it might be coming from and uh just note that it might be a good idea to do it as a voicemail or a

(2:13:37) voice not voice note if sound resonates better for you which is something that works really well for me so I like to like hear someone say it you know maybe your love language is words of affirmation that’s a I didn’t think about that that is my love language I and I’m been mad at words lately so but it might feel weird to tell yourself these things especially because you’re just don’t that it’s like that Friends episode where uh where Rachel checks Ross’s voicemail and it’s to

(2:14:06) himself yeah it’s all the notes to self note to self um funny yeah but be okay so it might feel a little weird because you were hoping it came from another person but the reality is being upset that you didn’t get that from another person doesn’t get you anywhere and instead if you tell yourself these things it will neurologically have an effect on you for the better even simply because you’re taking the time out to make this effort of self-love for yourself but also because the things you’re saying are true whether someone

(2:14:36) else recognized them or not so writing them down and reading them to yourself is a way to make them part of your reality and I highly recommend it I like it so far yeah I actually did a self soothing for my magic trick also but I pulled it from Rise woman um and she kind of she kind of already said some of it when we were since we asked her how we can self Soo um but I wanted to go ahead and read her post on it because um I I saved it to my phone this was um like a month ago I saved it to my phone because I wanted to implement it so

(2:15:11) perfect um she says first of all remember that it’s okay to feel big emotions and sometimes your nervous systems need a reminder that you’re safe you don’t have to do it all alone it’s okay to ask for help call a friend or even better find the support of a coach therapist or healer who can help you learn to soothe your nervous system but there will inevitably be times when there’s no one available to support you and in those moments and on a day-to-day basis learning to self soothe is a very

(2:15:37) powerful skill so when you’re when you’re um feeling that big emotion take a few deep breaths and notice where you are tell yourself I am safe it’s okay to feel what I’m feeling I I think that’s important it’s okay to feel what I’m feeling notice the sensations in your body and breathe into the tension notice any desire to leave your body that’s a big one for me and Retreat into your mind and visualize the roots of a tree grounding you to where you are that that’s probably my favorite one

(2:16:13) pick up a book and read for at least 15 minutes or until you’re feeling better I actually um my favorite um method of self- soothing sometimes I just pick up a book and I make myself Read 50 pages and I don’t let myself put the book down now that I’m a mom this isn’t my favorite practice but um I would just read 50 pages and by the time I put the book down I would feel completely different so that one’s a really good one um this one she said go for a walk in nature and notice the beauty around

(2:16:43) you remember deep breaths write a letter to your inner child and talk to them like a loving nurturing and protective parent I haven’t done that one but I really want to do it I’ve done it in a but listen to the healing your inner child meditation which is free um on the rising woman website you can also find that in her bio on her Instagram make yourself a cup of tea or fruit infused water and sip it slowly which is just you know you’re practicing simply being with what you’re feeling by just doing

(2:17:15) that slowly mindfulness yeah yeah yeah I love those yep need to I’m getting better actually I think it’s powerful because all those things teach you to be in your body yeah absolutely yeah grounding for sure you’re not distracting yourself yeah all right magic mobbers thank you so much for tuning in and taking this journey with us if this episode held some magic for you please share it with your friends and family this one means so much to us and don’t forget to join us on our Instagram page at the magic hour and let us know what

(2:17:48) your favorite episodes have been so far we appreciate all of your feedback and want to know what’s lighting you up yes and we release a new episode every Monday so you can catch us again next week or go listen to some of our past episodes in our podcast library now we’ll meet you there until then be a light light