Ep 121 | Christian de la Huerta

Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, LGBTQ+, Mental Health, Mind/Body Wellness, Podcast, Spirituality | 0 comments

Christian de la Huerta | Awakening the Soul of Power

SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:

Christian is one of nine children born and raised in Cuba during turbulent times and in the Catholic faith.

His parents instilled in him the importance of excelling and reading. These early lessons laid a foundation. However, those lessons also set the stage for a desire to escape and not be seen.

Introversion and depression plagued his adolescence, as was his knowledge of being gay. With courage, he came out to his family. Christian speaks about this challenging time in his life and the ones that came to be in the future, including the recent (and unexpected) decline of his mother’s cognitive health.

Through his breath and deep, internal work, Christian paved a path to personal empowerment and now leads others in doing the same. Through the lens of 30+ years of experience, he shares two of the biggest hurdles others have to personal freedom and empowerment.

RESOURCES:

• Website
• Book | Awakening the Soul of Power: How to Live Heroically and Set Yourself Free

CONNECT:

•  Instagram
• Facebook

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If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.

Are you enjoying the podcast? Check out my bi-weekly newsletter, The Unleashed Letters.

CONNECT WITH VICTORIA: 

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Victoria Volk 0:00
Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices. Today my guest is Christian de la Huerta. He has 30 years experience and is a sought after spiritual teacher, personal transformation coach and leading voice in the breathwork community. He has traveled the world offering inspiring and transformational retreats combining psychological and spiritual teachings with lasting and life changing effects, and award winning critically acclaimed author he has spoken at numerous universities and conferences and on the TEDx stage. His new book, awakening the soul of power has described by multiple Grammy Award winner Gloria Estefan as a balm for the soul of anyone searching for truth and answers to life’s difficult questions, and has received a novelist Book Award and a nonfiction book award. So thank you so much for being here. And we are gonna go deep today.

Christian de la Huerta 0:52
Thank you so much, Victoria. I’m so happy to be here with you.

Victoria Volk 0:56
I actually really want to start, because I know you’ve done a lot of these podcast episodes, interviews, and then on the stage and things like that. But I really want to get to know you as a child, because I think our childhood really shapes our adulthood because adulthood is childhood reenactments. I say a lot. So I’m interested in learning about you as a child. So would you describe yourself as a child and your life? What it was like, for you?

Christian de la Huerta 1:24
Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. I was I was born in Cuba. And so lived in a communist regime for the first 10 years of my life. And I’m one part of a large family of one of nine kids and only 12 years between the oldest and the youngest, and my mom was pretty much pregnant the whole time. Which I can’t even imagine having any kids, I’m happy if I don’t kill my plants when I travel. The scene so it was it was a beautiful and challenging in different ways. Childhood, I’m really appreciative of the fact that we grew up without watching TV, we had a TV, but there was nothing worth watching, really. So we grew up reading and I’m really grateful for that. We grew up creating, inventing our games and our pastimes and spending a lot of time out outside. So you know, when I see some of my kids in my life, you know, just like with their nose to the to the screen, just lost in there’s, it’s, it saddens me a bit. To see that. I was, you know, it was interesting, because my parents were involved in counter revolutionary activity. So they were conspiring against the revolution, or the Communist revolution, there was this kind of interesting push pull between, like an implicit, wanting to be seen and wanting to excel, like there was sort of sort of a family message like most of us were, like, really good students. I think we all were, and then because of their cattle revolute with the right kind of revolutionary activities, there was an innate, another message not to be seen too much. So So I see that, that, you know, I’m basically introverted, which, which means that you know, that I that I process internally that I need time off, if I don’t have time alone, that’s when I’m liable to lose my center. And so this was an interesting childhood me surrounded by kids and then having this also introverted streak like looking fighting for I was looking for my own space. And what I think your your, your audience might relate to also is that my adolescence, if you don’t, going forward a little bit, was one long depression with suicidal fantasies, like, I don’t think I know, I wouldn’t have done anything about it. But I did have thoughts about not not being alive and sort of like that escape fantasy, and and what’s important for your audience, because another another depth of the work that you do is that flash forward now, no matter what the details, or the circumstances are in my life, whether a relationship works out where it doesn’t, whether a project succeeds or it fails in quotes. I never, ever, ever questioned my sense of self, my level of self love self acceptance, are established, and unshakable and so that I know that that we can all break out of that stuff, the traumatic the difficult stuff, the self esteem, stuff from from childhood that all that stuff can be healed and transcended.

Victoria Volk 4:47
In your TED talk, you spoke a lot about this fight, flight or freeze and would you express that that was your adolescence, like was it like a, like a lack of stupid ability or security, like what was the? What was the grief? Of of your experience, then?

Christian de la Huerta 5:07
Yeah, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t say that I was in that. Maybe No, I didn’t know that I would say that it was in the fight flight or freeze mode. I think it was just numbed out. And for me, it was an existential struggle. You know, I knew at a young age that I was gay. And I was raised in a very Catholic, very Catholic environment. So trying to reconcile, you know, those two parts of who I am, there was a part of me that that’s always had a spiritual sense, sense of mission sets of helping humanity making a difference in other people’s lives, with serving the sacred that’s interpreted that in different points in my life. So there was a huge part of me, and this other part of me that was told by the religion in which I was raised, that I was, you know, another I’m an abomination in the eyes of God, that I was gonna burn in hell for eternity. So that was the struggle, which, you know, looking back on it, I’m grateful for that now, for several reasons. But one of the reasons is that it forced me to struggle with those tough, existential questions of, you know, who am I? What am I here for? What’s life about? What, why do we do the things we do at a younger age that most of us have to struggle with. And so, for that, I’m grateful. And it also gives me an ability and an ability to deeply empathize with another person’s pain or their grief, you know, the details might be different, but the experience is similar, for most of us, so so I’m grateful for all of that.

Victoria Volk 6:43
Where you accepted your loved ones?

Christian de la Huerta 6:48
Eventually, yes, I mean, my siblings immediately, my parents, you know, it took a little bit longer for it to, you know, for my mom to get to the place of, I just want my kids to be happy, which, you know, which that foundation was always there, so that I know that I’m blessed in that area that many other people don’t have, which was that I knew that the love was there. And no matter what, even though I spent years, you know, with with that deep, dark secret, not telling them, but once I finally did come out to them, you know, it’s it took some navigating for sure. And my father was a psychiatrist. So there were other layers around that of, you know, his philosophy about that, but but I knew that deep down inside the love, was there always.

Victoria Volk 7:43
Can I ask for those listening? Who might get a sense that their child may be gay? Or be struggling with their sexual identity? What is one piece of advice that you would give them? Is it to confront it, and just start the conversation or allow the child to express it in their own time?

Christian de la Huerta 8:11
You know, it’s hard to make a blanket choice about that, or suggestion about that? I think it depends. My inclination, my initial inclination would be to let it let it come out in the child, but I’ve also heard stories where the father, the father, or the mother, just opening up the space and, you know, creating an environment which, in which the kid feel safe, and you know, kind of setting them up, to be able to come out to them, but that’s also very helpful. Here’s the thing that I think will be helpful, because I know that the reason that all of us you know, but especially parents, you know, struggle with that, how can I accept this in my child, when my religion may be telling you that this is wrong, or that it’s sinful, or whatever. So it’s going to take work, right? It’s gonna, it’s, for me, it was it took years to get to that point of self accepting and reconciling my sexuality and my spirituality. But But here’s what’s really key is that a lot, there’s about six, and I’m going to go immediately to the majority religion and in this country, and the West, which is Christianity. There are basically six biblical texts that are interpreted, and I would say misinterpreted, to condemn homosexuality. And the thing to remember about about this is that they’ve been taken out of their cultural and historical context, and they’re very selectively interpreted. What allowed me to get through this into healers and myself is that I started doing a lot of research and discovered and realized that before the patriarchal times and cultures and religions, people that we today would call gay or lesbian or LGBT, or Q or whatever. We’re not only spiritually inclined, but wherever actually honored, respected, in some cases revered for the roles of spiritual service and spiritual leadership that they played all over the world. So my first book was called coming out spiritually, and dives deeply into that, because there are examples of that all over the world and all inhabited continent. And so that begins, like, once we’re able to reconcile that for ourselves as parents, then it becomes easier to arrive at that point is like, you know what, all right, well, I don’t know about this stuff, and where these teachings come from, but I know the love I have for my child, no matter what, and I help them to arrive to a place of inner peace with that.

Victoria Volk 10:43
Isn’t that the goal? Just to find inner peace with it on both sides? Right? Yes, yes. It’s better than creating, destroying the bridge between that relationship, there’s ripple effects in that for sure.

Christian de la Huerta 10:57
Oh, my God, and it’s so unnecessary. And so unnecessary. By the way, it’s important to remember to that because the more I think about this, the more that I realized that homophobia and misogyny are two sides of the same coin. And the more that I think about it, I think misogyny is really the deeper one. Because if you look at any culture, any religion, that persecute homosexuality, or you know, LGBTQ people, 100% correlation, they are the same ones, where women do not have equal status. And so, you know, taking one of those, you know, what are called the holy text of terrorists, those six biblical injunction injunctions that are used to condemn same sex behavior. One of them is like, you know, you should not lie with a man as you do with a woman. But what about two women together? You know, that, that doesn’t even come up? And why is that? Because at that time, in that culture, you know, women weren’t even human. Women were property. And so am I going to base my my choices about what’s right, and what’s wrong on stuff that was written, you know, 1000s of years ago, that was translated and re translated and mistranslated, stuff was taken out stuff was put into those those those, you know, sacred texts that were written by humans. And so I’m personally not, you know, and even if we, if we flash forward to today, you know, for, you know, like, the many examples of homophobic, straight men, you tell him, Oh, two women, or you show him a movie with two women, it’s like, Ooh, I want some of that. But how different two men together, it’s like, wow, you know, either either, you got to shoot them, you got to kill them, get rid of them, or the yuck factor comes out. So why is that? And I think is because of two women together. We’re not a threat to the status quo. Right? Because again, they weren’t seemed to hold the same kind of amount of power in the world and still don’t, which connects to the book that, you know, that I just published last year, whereas two men in their mind, I think they believe that one of them is willingly forfeiting giving up their superior male status, and that is a threat to the status quo.

Victoria Volk 13:19
Do you think that if men, just straight men in general got more in touch with their femininity, their feminine side? You know, the yin and yang, equally balanced? Do you think that would change things?

Christian de la Huerta 13:39
Of course it would. And, and, you know, because we’re part of the cosmos, the cosmos is equally balanced between masculine and feminine energies. So that means that those masculine and feminine energies course through every one of us, no matter what kind of body we’re in, and for some reason, you know, at the rise of the patriarchy, the feminine was made, was turned us into weakness into something less than, and whereas, whereas, you know, from my perspective, if you want to talk, strength and power and resilience and courage, let’s talk about the power of creation that lies in a female body and to lighten things up a little bit, you know, read about an interview of Betty White Pass to not long ago, the one and only inimitable Betty White, but apparently she was in one of those group interviews and somebody said something about having balls and she goes, Wait a minute, I don’t know where we got this connection between having balls and encouraging strength and strength you thumped those little things in the guy collapses bends over in pain. You want to talk courage and strength, let’s talk vaginas. Those things take a pounding.

Victoria Volk 14:56
You know, just yesterday, my soul i you actually mentioned her in your TED Talk Joan of Arc. And so my daughter, she’s going to be confirmed. I’m actually a convert to Catholicism. But I, you know, I struggled spiritually and religiously for many years because my dad died when I was a child, and I was sexually assaulted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I wrote off God, I was angry at God, and I didn’t, you know, that relationship, I cut it off. And so I struggled for a long time, but I found something I could set a foundation of faith in. And it’s still evolving, it’s always going to evolve. And I think that’s where we kind of get stuck in our thought process. And then in our, we get stuck in our ways. Like, this is how it is, this is how it’s always gonna be. But I feel like I’m more spiritual now than I would say, I’m religious, you know, and that took a long time to get there. Anyway. Sure. My daughter, my daughter chose Joan of Arc, though as her patron saint. So anyway, I just said to her, I said to her yesterday, she has to do this paper on her and I just said, you know, well, you know, she was she’s like, she’s a badass. She, I don’t know how, how I will describe her. But I did say she has lady ball. That she had lady balls, you know, when you mentioned that, it’s like, oh, my gosh, my language, right. Like it is. It is in so this is my question, because I wasn’t gonna go here. But I feel like it’s, it’s just coming up. So currently, there’s this all this talk about gender neutral clothing, and I haven’t even seen the story I it was just shared with me and, and my thought is let the kids wear what they want to wear. Just let them wear what they want to wear. Let them express themselves. You know, here it’s us as parents and society, that places these places, children in a box, well, let’s just give them gender neutral, because they look male, and they they see male, so let’s just put blue clothes on him. But as adults, we were all kinds of colors. I’m wearing blue today. That make me male. You know what I mean? Like, it’s not a big deal as adults. It’s ridiculous. Why do we make it a big deal? I think we as a society, we make mountains out of molehills, where there doesn’t need to be just compassion, and kindness and free freedom of expression. Right? I have a picture of my child sheet my youngest girl, she, I don’t know, one time, it’s one of my favorite pictures. But she was dressed literally like a clown. Like just mismatched, and stripes and solids and all kinds of it. And she looked silly, ridiculous. And she had like a wellness check that day, I let her dress like that. I don’t care. Like what, you know, people get so afraid of what it what it says about them. You know? So I think that’s yeah, anyway, that’s my schpeel. What are your thoughts on that?

Christian de la Huerta 18:01
I think you’re absolutely right. It’s ridiculous and tragic. How much power we give away to others, and how much weight we give to what other people think how many choices we make, based on what we think they think. Right? So it’s all made up in our minds, and based on whether other people are gonna like it or not. And to me, it goes back to self esteem, right, the stronger our sense of self, the deeper that our level of self acceptance, the less and less and less that we care what anybody else thinks. And, and we get to that place of freedom, which I think is what we all have, we’re all longing for freedom just to be who we are, wherever we are. Because we spent so much time like with, you know, with masks, and being this way at work, and this other way, with, with our friends this other way with our family this other way with, with our lovers, it’s exhausting. It’s right, what if we were just able to, to be who we are, right, of course, selectively, unconsciously and intelligently. We don’t have to share every part of who we are with everybody in our lives. But it’s such a relief, we spend so much energy, worried about what other people think and then presenting ourselves in a way that we think they’re going to like exhausting.

Victoria Volk 19:21
Exactly. You mentioned in your TED Talk, too, which I’ll put that in the show notes link to that. But you mentioned you’re speaking the language of Grief Recovery. When you were talking about are you familiar with grief recovery method at all?

Christian de la Huerta 19:36
Not the method method specifically my degrees in psychology so and from personal experience I’ve also dealt with you know with grief, but I don’t know that particular methodology Grief Recovery, recover.

Victoria Volk 19:46
Okay. It Well, it’s based on the Grief Recovery handbook. But you were talking about particularly there was a spot where you’re talking about drugs and alcohol and shopping and gambling like all these ways that we call opened to distract ourselves from what we’re feeling. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, she’s speaking the language of Grief Recovery. Because in Grief Recovery, we call those stirpes short term energy relieving behaviors. And so as a teenager, when you are going through all of this struggle with self self acceptance, and you know, this tog, and what were some of the ways you were coping with that.

Christian de la Huerta 20:24
Yeah, you know, that’s, that’s a good, great conversation too, because we all do that, right? We, like most of us, I’m gonna say most of us, like, have become really adept at running away from numbing out or emotions. So and there’s so many creative ways in which we do that, right, that we numb out and not to not feel to not remember whether it’s substances, drugs, alcohol, food, whether it’s behaviors, exercise, social media, shopping, work, workaholism. Yeah, yeah, and not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with any of those. It’s how we do it, how we a relationship to all those things, TV, and, you know, all of them have potential to be have good or negative effects not so good effect. I think for me, I definitely hit at my books. And I love you know, the fantasies science fiction, it was it was easy for me just get lost in these worlds, whether it was Lord of the Rings are the foundation series are so many other series like that, that I could just go get lost in book after book after book after book for your Pisces, no, I’m a Gemini.

Victoria Volk 21:42
Oh my son’s a Gemini, but just how you’re describing getting lost in the fantasy. I’m like, okay, that’s, that’s like me.

Christian de la Huerta 21:48
And you know, and it’s understandable, it’s easier to go through it with, you know, to not want to feel stuff that wasn’t pleasant, or to remember stuff that, you know, may not have been great experience. So it’s understandable that we want to run away from that stuff, but the price we pay, the reason that it’s not an effective strategy, as you know, is that that stuff doesn’t go away, just because we don’t want to deal with it. So we stuffed it in we stuff our emotions, and you know, what used to be spiritual teaching that everything is energy. Now we know from quantum physics, that everything is energy. And we know that energy cannot be destroyed. And by everything, I mean everything like this cherub sitting on the table, or the computer, the body, the emotion, even though it might feel solid, it’s just energy, just vibration. And so whenever we stuff those emotions, whenever we numb out and run away from them, it doesn’t go away. It gets it gets lodged in the tissues of the body. And after years, and decades of doing that, we walk around with layers upon layers upon even more layers of repressed emotional crap, and unhealed past situations. And here we are trying to have a relationship in the present moment. And all of it is getting filtered through that lifetime of unhealed trauma, and repressed emotions like Yikes, how any relationship can work is it boggles my mind, because we haven’t been taught how to hold on how to approach them. And we certainly haven’t been taught how to clear ourselves of that cauldron of repressed emotion, because what happens is we suppress, suppress, suppress, and then the next unfortunate one just says something to us the wrong the wrong way and boom, volcanic eruption. And because our, to our relationships, sometimes irreparably, or suppress, suppress, suppress, suppress, that energy has to come out, and it begins to start seeping out of the body and showing up as physical symptoms, like cancer, heart attacks, ulcers, so we’ve got to get this we’ve got to get a relationship to our emotions and accept that they’re not weakness. Emotions are not good. They’re not bad. They’re not strength, they’re not weakness. They’re just energies coursing through our bodies, we get into trouble with them when we when we suffer, because what happens when we stuff sadness, as you know, it congeals it turns into grief. And when we stuff anger, it turns into rage and we walk around like a raging cauldrons. So better to nip it in the bud and learn how to first identify what we’re feeling because most of us are clueless about our emotions, including my psychiatrist, that including myself up until I started doing this conscious work 20 years 30 years ago, I had no idea no clue as to what I was feeling. I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling because I had no idea and so we can talk about processes, you know, like simple techniques to become more emotionally intelligent to increase our EQ and then learn how to communicate them responsibly like owning their our emotions, so that nobody can make us feel any anything, unless there’s some little button there that they’re triggering. But it’s here, right? So we’ve got to own that stuff. And then learning how to communicate them responsibly not not courageously, because it takes courage for sure, responsibly just not having a tantrum like a two year old and in a way that they can be heard that they can be received. And so, so level of mastery, so it’s the opposite of weakness, it’s a level of mastery.

Victoria Volk 25:27
I love that. You said so much that we talk about in Grief Recovery to just you know, the implode or explode, that’s we either implode or we explode. We either suffer from disease and illness and you know, all these symptoms, these physical symptoms, or we explode and have these dherbs Right, these behaviors and angers in anger can be a sturb I was very angry as a child and I grew up. I was very angry as an adult too. And if solidly I yeah, I would argue that at the root of grief and sadness and, and fear and anxiety is grief, like all of those emotions. It just is the embodiment of grief. And I always say to like grief was our pandemic long before COVID-19, long before your teenage years. And growing up, that was just the start of your experience with grief. But there’s more to your story. And I would like to get there. So you had shared in your information with me that your brother, you had lost your brother when he was 26? you mind sharing that story with us?

Christian de la Huerta 26:31
Yeah, of course. And I want to say to that there’s that it’s important for us to realize that there is there is an end to suffering. Right? Like there is an end to that. Not so much for sadness, like there’s always going to be stuff in life, that’s going to be sad, that’s going to evoke those emotions in US people are gonna come people are gonna go crazy traumatic stuff, crisis level stuff is going to happen in the world, as we’re witnessing right now. And global pandemic wars, the things that humans do to other humans, it’s just like boggle the mind. So what once we get to the level where we can feel our emotions, we are no longer running away from them, or numbing them out or stuffing them? Well, we can just let them course through us, then we can get to that place of freedom, where we just allow those energies to course through us and we don’t get stuck in and and so yes, you know that what happened with my brother and my nephew? Later, it’s just stuff that shouldn’t happen. You know, my brother was 26. And he drowned in a kind of freaky boat accident, riverboat accident and attempts in London. And I can’t even imagine, of course, we’re all impacted. But I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like for a parent to lose a child. I don’t have any kids myself, have many kids in my life. But no, none that are mine, so to speak, because and then I witnessed that again with my sister, my nephew was also around 2627. He was 27 incredible. I mean, both of them really creative and smart. My my nephew shown because he had these amazing leadership qualities. He his passion was being a DMT. He was a firefighter DMT gave up a scholarship to Harvard because of his grades, because that was what he really wanted to do. And at 27, he, his wife was seven months pregnant with their first child, which they never met. He got this really aggressive form of brain cancer. And within weeks, like four or five weeks, it was gone to everybody’s Chuck. And again, like how do what does one do with that, of course, it’s sad, of course, takes the parents years degree that stuff, some of that lingering grief doesn’t ever really leave you we heal it for sure. But there are layers of the sadness and the missing somebody like that. And I guess I guess what I’m saying is that the more work that I did on myself, the more that I was able to get to that place of feeling these incredibly sad emotions and not be stuck with them. Either we can we can weave it into the fabric of our lives and realize that one thing we know for sure, is that life is going to continue throwing curveballs our way, whether it’s a global pandemic or a 26 year old getting brain cancer or an an unexpected drowning like there is not one thing that any of us can do about that. So we can that can help us add you know the to the feeling of grievous grief and sadness, it can add a layer of feeling helpless, and even some people feel victimized by life. Like I got such a horrible deck of cards this lifetime. And if only this hadn’t happened or that had happened if I had only been born in a different place a different time, a different culture. You finally You know, the system was set up differently. As long as we’re doing that, if only and feeling victimized by life, we’re giving our power away. And sometimes even to the perpetrators, as you know, as long as we’re holding them responsible for our emotions for our state of being. And it’s not to minimize any of that, or to excuse anything. If we want to be free, we’ve got to get to that place of healing and acceptance. And one thing that helps to reframe that is knowing that no matter what happens going forward, no matter what new curveballs come our way, no matter what happened in the past, we always, always get to choose how we show up in response and that element of choice, just remembering that and knowing that it’s liberating, and it’s empowering.

Victoria Volk 30:49
And I just had a thought to it when you are someone who isn’t there yet, in their heart and their mind, because forgiveness, too, can be very, very difficult for people. Again, like you said, it always comes down to choice you can you can have grief in the back seat, you can, because it’s going to follow you, right? You take you everywhere you go. But you have a choice, if you’re going to continue to look in the rearview mirror at it. That’s where you can look forward to but what if what if you’re stuck looking at the rearview mirror, I think that’s where finding support in someone who is a little further along than you, who maybe is an example of of where you’d like to be in your life. So when you were going through these losses, had you already been at this place in your life with the breath work and on your spiritual journey and things like that, like had you because we never fully arrived? Right? But had you already started.

Christian de la Huerta 31:46
In this in the case of my brother’s death, it was synchronous, it’s right around that time, is when I did breathwork for the first time and were in when I started to, to reclaim my spirituality, right, because like many people and like you were referring to, I threw the baby out with a baptismal water, I didn’t know that there was a difference between religion and spirituality. And I didn’t know that spirituality is just an inherent part of who we are. That is just as ludicrous for you to for me to have tried to repress and reject and run away from my sexuality, as it was to ignore it and repress it in in with my spirituality. It’s just part of who we are as humans. So yeah, I did have much better tools in those situations. And I want to go back to something I want to highlight something you just said, which I think is really important, because we just hit on the two biggest hurdles on the on the on the journey to freedom and personal empowerment. One is that victimization, you know, poor me, woe is me relationship to life. The other one that you mentioned is forgiveness. Because we know we’ve heard this, we’ve heard that forgiveness is really for us. But how do we forgive? You know, the what feels unforgivable? How do we do that, because if we think about it, as long as we’re holding someone, right, looking in that rearview mirror, where we’re holding somebody over the fire for what they did, or failed to do, our hand is also getting burned or hand is in the fire. So, so it helps us to understand the necessity for forgiveness. Another way to convey that visual, if you think of the heart center, not the organ or the chakra, the energy center, it opens and closes in the same way that like the shutter of a camera, or the iris of the eye. If I shut my heart to my sexual abuser, or to my father who left or to mom who did who was emotionally abusive, or to the teacher, or the minister, or society, or sexism or misogyny or racism, or homophobia, I can’t close it selectively just to that, or to the boss who fired me or the ex who cheated on me, right? We I can’t close it just to them. If I close it, I close it. So it’s not even about them. Because in closing it we’re giving our power away again. So this is between me and my heart. This is a bit in my heart and love between my heart and life. And so how do we do that? How do we even begin to forgive the unforgivable and this is something that I picked up along the way from a teacher that begins to open the door to the possibility of forgiveness. And it’s forgive two syllables, flip them around, give for what we do, when we forgive, we’re giving others and ourselves which is often even more difficult to do. We’re giving them the space to be human, to make mistakes, to fall short of the mark to to make a royal mess of things like to really if things up.

Christian de la Huerta 34:50
And it’s it getting off the self righteous stance of the ego. Like we don’t have time to dive into what the ego construct is here. But it’s really important To understand what the ego is, I spent the first quarter of the book, maybe even the third talking about the ego mind, and and how it keeps us in a self made prison of fear and lack and limitation and self doubt, and reactivity and the victim and defended victim mindset and defensiveness. So really, really important. If we want to be free, if we want to step into our power, if we want to have relationships that have a chance of working, that we understand that how the ego is and how it works, so that we can get ourselves out of it out of its self made prison because nobody else can. So the ego one of the aspects of it is it’s very self righteous, again, knows, it went to law school and appoints itself a judge, jury prosecutor, it knows exactly what the other person did that was wrong, what the punishment should be and delivers the punishment. So forgiving means getting off, like stepping off that self righteous stance, I know I’m right, I would never do anything like right, because that closes the heart. And again, a highlight it again, it’s not about making it okay about denying what happened about rationalizing. It is not about any of that. It’s not about minimizing, or making Okay, whatever they did or didn’t do, but it’s not about them. This is about us, and how do we free ourselves from that. And so when we forgive we make we give the other and ourselves the room to make all those mistakes, to to forgive to get off that self righteous stance, and say maybe right, all it takes is that question mark MIDI, I can’t see it, I cannot even begin to imagine that I would ever do that. But maybe if they had been raised in their situation with their parents, their culture, their time, in whatever way their parents raised them and their parents before them, raise them. Who knows what was going on in their brain cut biochemistry? Who know what, who knows what happened in their own past? Who know what traumas they had, because we know trauma is the gift that keeps on giving, especially in sexual abuse and that kind of stuff. And right and again, not minimizing it not making it okay. We don’t have to hang out with them. We don’t have to be friends with them. We don’t have to ever see them again. But that question marks like maybe, maybe I might have done that. I might have I might have done that. And here’s like an extreme way to be able to do that a terrorist like it’s really hard for us to otherwise them we because we can’t imagine like anybody listening to this for sure. Watching this cannot have Woods is not about to wrap their bodies in explosives of walk into a crowded mall and detonate ourselves. So it’s really difficult for us to understand that standard is easy to say I would never do that. And have we ever terrorized others emotionally? Have we ever terrorized ourselves emotionally and that I know every single one of us has done. So we have an inner terrorist inside me that inside of each one of us, the details are different. But we have that potential. So it’s again not to make it okay not to minimize it. It just begins to soften that harsh separation of I wouldn’t ever do that, because that’s what makes forgiveness difficult. Like when we soften that then it begins to to free ourselves from carrying that weight and being stuck in the past.

Victoria Volk 38:19
I can bring a visual to this that can lighten things up. Because when you were talking about emotions, and how like what came up for me is like yeah, we’re just all walking around a little bit emotionally constipated some more than others. Right? And I when you were saying how we terrorized others emotionally. It’s like if we think of that emotional constipation, right? It’s gotta go somewhere. So either it’s gonna, we’re just gonna have, we’re gonna let it come out of us, or we’re going to just throw it at people, right?

Christian de la Huerta 38:50
Yes. You know, it’s so funny because I called breathwork. Virtual Drano. Oh, cool. Yeah, emotional and spiritual drain, and we get rid of all that crap that we’ve been carrying inside of us. Quickly, and it works fast. Well, that’s so profoundly at so many levels. It’s just a really amazing and for lack of another word, miraculous.

Victoria Volk 39:12
That’s a great segue. So I do want to talk about that. What is I had a personal experience, a friend of mine, she does Kundalini yoga, and she’s in a training right now to become a practitioner in that. But she does breath work. She does breath work practice every day, and she walked me through this breathwork practice was about 30 minutes, but I tell you what, I learned the power of our breath. In that one session that blew my mind. I felt I’m a Reiki Master, but I had my hands were vibrating to the extent of nothing a comparison like my hands are starting to tingle just thinking about it. I felt so alive. Like the Most alive that I had felt in a long time after experiencing that it was so powerful for me, can you give our listeners something that they can do today, if they are in a moment of panic, fight flight or freeze, grief, whatever they’re experiencing right now can you share some a technique with them.

Christian de la Huerta 40:20
Of course, and you know, breathwork is a, it’s a really broad umbrella, there’s a lot of breathing practices, a lot of breathing techniques, yoga, practice yogic practices, pranayama, it’s called in that yoga tradition, you know, whether it’s Kundalini yoga, or any other kind of yoga. And so the breath is at the core of all those practices, and at the core of every meditation practice at the core of every spiritual tradition. And so the particular breathwork that I do, it’s longer, it’s about an hour, an hour and a half, there’s different modalities, it’s you. So you can use breathing techniques. for different purposes. If you’re if you’re stressed out, if you’re stuck in traffic, if you’re, like, stressed out or nervous about right before a difficult conversation, or an important meeting, you can do take slow, deep breaths, to calm yourself down and the body has to slow down. Like there’s Swamis in India have that much control over their body, they can tell their hearts to slow down. And they do you know, they can, some of them can mimic states that are really, really hard to distinguish from death, they can slow down the body that much, most of us are not gonna be able to aren’t there. And I’m probably not going to learn how to do that kind of stuff. But anybody can slow down the breath, anyone can slow down the breath. When we do that, the heart has no choice, the heart has to slow down. And and when the heart slows down, the nervous system begins to quiet down, the body begins to relax. Right? So it’s, it’s slowly and under breath. It’s like it’s your best friend, your most effective practice. There are also breathing techniques that you can use, like in place or the afternoon slump, you know, a cup of coffee, you know, there’s the faster, more energizing more focusing practices, the type of breathwork that I do, it’s a different model, it’s more of a, to me, it’s part of my psycho spiritual therapy, you know, approach to healing. I was on a trip my father was a psychiatrist. As I said, my my degrees in psychology, I was on a track to get a PhD. When I discovered breathwork, this modality that I that I practice, I jumped tracks, I never went for the PhD because it works so fast and heal so profoundly at so many levels, including, by the way, I don’t know anything more effective that healing past traumas, including sexual abuse, including, you know, just violent stuff that people have have experienced, that I’ve worked with over the years, and it gets healed. And so not only that, which will be hard enough to believe, but it heals spiritually, mentally, even physically. And yes, you know, even like more than 30 years saying this or talking about this, I know to my mind, it still sounds hard to believe, to my logical, more scientific, more skeptical mind. But I can’t argue with the result. It works with permanent effects. And you know, they haven’t studied it yet. They’re starting to do more research now about what’s happening in the body scientifically. But even that, it doesn’t explain it to me, like, like the stuff that happens. Because you can also have incredibly ecstatic moments like moments of oneness, moments of feeling connectedness to to everyone and everything to all of creation. And so just from breathing, but here’s what ultimately helps me understand that the way that I can understand if you look at any religion, any culture, some even languages, in many of them the same word, one word, can mean breath, or spirit, depending on the context. So for example, from Numa, from that Greek word Numa, from which we get pneumonia, that word meant or it meant soul, and lung, from the Latin root speed at A, we get both respiration and inspiration or exploration. So that breath spirit connection is is available, like I said, most spiritual traditions and even several sets of regular languages. And that’s what ultimately helps me understand that is when we breathe in this conscious, intentional way, that the effects of which are undeniable like you felt your body was you will beginning to notice your body more as vibration. So you popped out of that limited perspective of separateness as like I’m just over here, this is this description as Victoria which is what the ego is that artificials you know, sense of of separate separateness, and you began to experience yourself beyond the confines of your body as a physical thing, and that that’s what that vibration was, and that we can access Not only profound healing, but ecstatic states, which by the word, that’s what the word ecstasy means means out of ourselves. And that’s what that breathing practices and breathing practices help us to do. So that we can pop behind the illusion of separation of the ego, and reconnect with our, no our ultimate nature.

Victoria Volk 45:20
There was a conversation one time about psychedelics, and she’s like, you don’t need to take a psychedelic to have that experience, you can find that through your breath. And I totally, totally agree. I actually had written down just before you said it, I wrote the soul is in the gut and grief is in the lungs. So isn’t that just really ironic in a way that the breath connects us to? Both right is part of both, essentially. So I’m curious. Is it was it just breathwork? Because, you know, I’ve dabbled in different healing modalities. I’m currently actually learning biofield tuning, which addresses the energy field that’s around us the stuck energy that’s outside of us, you know that, because our bodies are a mirror of what’s out here, stuck in this energy field, and that extends five to six feet beyond us. So was it just breathwork? Or have? Were you kind of dabbling in a lot of different things? And breathwork? Is what stuck? Or was it always breathwork. And that’s just kind of been your thing?

Christian de la Huerta 46:28
I think the combination I mean, there’s so many tools to help us heal and help free. The ones that I include in every single retreat for over 30 years. No matter whether the retreat is on conscious relationships, and having relationships that can actually work, whether it’s stepping into our personal power, and reconciling the conflicted, ambivalent relationship we have to power? And how do we step into power in a way that’s not about hierarchy and control, and fear and force and domination? How do we do it in a way that’s a match for who we are? Whether it’s about life purpose, and what are we really, really doing here? And how do we stop selling out for that illusion of security of a biweekly paycheck, because we sell ourselves so cheaply for that illusion, as many have had to discover the hard way during this pandemic, but no matter what the theme of the retreat the to constant, or the breath work, because I’ve yet to come across any tool that heals as quickly and as profoundly. And in many ways, the other one is understanding that you go, because it’s to me, there’s that’s step one, understanding the mind and why we do the things we do and our patterns, why do we get triggered what? Well, the same behavior would have could have a completely different response in you. And yet, it’s got me just out of control and got my goat. So why is that? Understanding our patterns? Like, why do we do the things we do? Why do we attract certain people into our lives? Why do we have certain what are we recreate patterns and situations? What? Why do we keep creating patterns of relationships that sometimes feel like it’s the same boring movie, different actor different co lead, but the same crap? Same argument, same patterns? Why is that? Right? So it’s so again, a lot easier to go through life numbing out and running away from these questions. But then we get stuck in a there’s no way to this, we’re just going to recreate and recreating, and keep creating the same stuff. What we’re talking about is like having the courage to face our grief, to face our memories to do whatever it is that we need to do to heal ourselves and declare ourselves that is nothing less than heroic. That’s why there’s no book awakening this whole power is the first of a series of three, which is the tide the series is titled Calling All Heroes, what does it mean to live heroically in the 21st century? And so yes, you know, I honor you for the work that you’ve done to not only heal your past trauma, but to now use that to make a difference in other people’s lives. And I honor anybody who has stuck with this conversation thus far. It’s, you know, this stuff is not easy. It’s not for the faint of heart. This is And speaking of heart, you know, that’s courage comes from that root, the same root core which a Latin means heart, courage, courage, and in French, the big heart, take this word takes big heart, big courage. Nothing short of heroic. incredibly rewarding, like freedom, empowerment.

Victoria Volk 49:40
Empowerment. Yes. That’s huge. Yes, absolutely.

Christian de la Huerta 49:44
Like you were telling me when we were connecting right before we started recording like this podcast is like, the best thing you ever did. Like wow, and you using your own? Like that’s what he lives there, right. We use our own stuff to bring healing to others for On lived experience, not just stuff that we read in a book, and we all have access to that.

Victoria Volk 50:05
You actually mentioned that your mother’s presence is diminishing slowly is is that did you? Do you mean cognitively? Yes. Okay. And I asked that because a friend of mine mentioned this, you can have cancer and you can have disease and things like that, which is really difficult for the person going through it. Right? They have to reconcile their life right when you’re faced with this is what’s happening to me, whether it’s, you know, MS, or muscular dystrophy, or, or any kind of debilitating progressive disease, cancer, anything like that. It’s really difficult on the person experiencing, and of course, the family and people watching it happen. But when it’s someone that’s going through a cognitive decline, they aren’t necessarily aware of it. And so that’s really more impactful on the family and the loved ones. And that struck me because I hadn’t really thought about that. But what do you say? How is that different? for loved ones? In your, in your experience? You’ve had both experiences, right? You’re your nephew, and now your mother.

Christian de la Huerta 51:12
Yeah I think this one’s even more difficult. Because what I’ve realized is that I’ve been preparing I’ve been preparing for the for the inevitable, which is my mother’s passing for years, she’s not in good health, physical, like she, you know, nine kids is take a toll on my body, She’s diabetic, she’s overweight, from that generation that never took care of her bodies of her body. And, and that dealt with everything. Like from the perspective of Western medicine, my dad being addicted to it just medicated it, rather than addressing the symptom, I mean, the addressing the symptom rather than addressing the source. And so I never thought for a moment that my mom, my mom’s body would outlive her mind. And so I didn’t see that coming. That one I was not prepared for it. caught me off guard. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s difficult to experience not only to see her and this beautiful, vibrant, brilliant, loving woman to be like a shell of who she was, to be caught in, in fear, which, which it’s heartbreaking. And there’s nothing, nothing that as a family we can do except no lover and create, you know, like, try to improve the quality of our life as best we can. And, and be one thing to connect to everything else. We’ve been talking about the importance of doing the heroic work of, of self discovery and, and healing ourselves. What I’m beginning to see is that is her undone work. Like sometimes when she goes into these places of fear that, you know, she’s living or reliving something that we can’t see. And beginning to feel that as she’s recreating, like, there’s this one kind of actor that keeps coming back into her her her moment. And it’s, it’s beginning to realize it’s a young woman, like a teenage girl, and my mom calls her all sorts of names, like stuff that she would never say in real life. Like now it’s like, unleashed. And so what I’ve what I’m beginning to put together is that when she was in high school, there was a moment where they were put into they were taken to boarding school and Cuba, my aunt and my sister and her aunt Amy. And her sister, my aunt, and I think she had to, you know, just piecing together stories, there was a there was a group of girls, you know, I mean, girls that were kind of bullies and they were rich, the rich girls in the school. And I think because she never really worked with with her feeling, I’m projecting I’m making it up in my own mind that a feeling rejected or feeling unloved because she was put away were taken away to a boarding school and then having to deal with this bullying, that she never really worked through that and so now when the filters are off, it’s coming back up. And so important for us than to do this kind of work whether we’re using traditional therapy whether we’re using breathwork you know, it’s really important to do or your your energy work, whatever whatever it is that were guided to do. To to have that courage to to clear to face and clear or inner demons.

Victoria Volk 54:23
I just got chills as I heard you talking about that, because it’s like the same. It’s almost like reliving a nightmare over and over and over that you can’t just push stop on.

Christian de la Huerta 54:34
I know it’s it to me, that’s hell, she’s still going to Hell yeah, weaving it back to the religion and it’s, you know, that it gets tragic to me, that in her end, the end of her life, that the religion to which she devoted her entire life is not a source of love and support and support and inner peace, that because of the teachings about hell, which, you know, I personally don’t believe like there’s a physical place that you go to When you die, I don’t believe in a punitive micromanaging didi. But don’t take away my mother effer to, to fear that she might go to hell, like why? It’s nothing that she could have ever done. And it to me, I found that tragic that that fear was put into her head, which to me is not even real.

Victoria Volk 55:19
I had a medium expressed to me once, it was a teenager experience, spirit that had come through and she just her experience was that what she’s learned through her work was that it’s even someone who’s done not great things are good things, you know, good deeds, who have maybe done some bad things, right? It’s, they’re going through school. They’re just they’re going through school, and they’re having to learn these lessons. And they’re kind of in school until they can graduate, I suppose in a way to, to be with the good spirits. I don’t know how to explain that, you know, but that’s kind of how she said it. How, you know, because the mother was so worried that he because he died by suicide, she was so worried that he was in hell. And that brought so much peace to her. But you know, how the Son explained, he’s like, No, I’m in school. I’m having to learn these lessons that I never was open to learning on the physical plane. Yeah, I just thought that was beautiful.

Christian de la Huerta 56:23
I think it is beautiful, and very, very liberating. And to me, you know, from my current perspective, heaven, and hell are not places that we go to after we that I think their states of being heaven, and hell can be right here right now. It’s not your truth. Yeah. And, and it’s a state of mind. And I think that even if we’re going to, you know, stick with a Christian frame of belief, philosophy, mythology, whatever you want to call it, teachings, Jesus said, You know, these greater things you will do. And so, that comes from that state of mind, which he had access to, and to which he never claimed exclusivity. He never had never really did.

Victoria Volk 57:08
And I think there’s just so much we don’t know, that we’ll never know. And even when it comes to healing to the forgiveness piece that we talked about earlier, and, you know, trauma and stuff, it’s, or we feel like we were a victim in our own stories, we just we don’t know what we don’t know. Yeah, if I want to learn this method of breathwork, especially as a Griever, where do I go to learn that.

Christian de la Huerta 57:31
I mean, if anybody’s interested, they can email me, or, you know, just go to my website, soulfulpower.com. And I can either try to help them find somebody local, where they can do it, there’s some people that do it virtually now, I do it virtually very selectively, because it’s really powerful, that the modality that I teach is very powerful. And you never know what’s underneath the surface of somebody’s psyche, what’s going to what’s going to come up. And as you know, so many of us have memories that we suppressed. So like in person in live, I have no hesitation, like, I know that I can handle anything that comes up. And I’ve had some really traumatic stuff come up for people virtually, not so much, right? There’s because there’s my what I’m able to do to support intervene, to, to hold space for them is limited by and all they have to do is click, and then there’s nothing I can do to help. So I do it only with people that you know who have come to my retreats, people I know, people that that are part of my year long coaching program, and that I don’t even start with breathwork that’s only like halfway through once I get a sense of who’s in the group and what kind of stuff they’re dealing with. Or if it’s somebody maybe who has a support system. So sometimes therapists refer people to maybe therapists, you know, where they’ve been with a client for some time, and they’re plateaued, they’re stuck, they’re stagnant. Even one breathwork session can can change your life it did for me, my first session, I knew that I’d never be the same. And I wasn’t. And I knew that I had to do it again, I didn’t care where I had to go what it cost, and I knew that I had to make it available to others. It was just the most amazing thing that I’ve ever experienced. And by the way, you mentioned psychedelics in a different, like branch of breathwork, which is called Holotropic. To more, it’s longer you do for like three, four hours, kind of very similar technique, but longer. And there are other differences, but the founder of that modality. Stan Grof, was a psychiatrist from the Czech Republic. When he was over there, he was researching LSD. And what he realized, you know, once he came to the States, he couldn’t, you know, continue that research. But somewhere along the way, he discovered because when once people attain certain levels of pain, through the chemical substances are the sacred plant medicines that so many people are working with these days. The breath that kind of breathing pattern sometimes gets triggered automatically. spontaneously. And so he realized, by just using the breath, you can access the same levels of non ordinary beings or states of being. So yeah, and I hear that constantly from people who come to breathe with me, it’s like, yeah, I got to the same place that I did with on an Ayahuasca journey or, or whatever, mushrooms, whatever they were doing, it got to that same place, that same ability to perceive myself from from a different perspectives. And that sense of oneness of connecting with all of it. Because here’s a great metaphor for that for the ego goes back to the ego, right? If, if you think of the ego as a baseball, it’s a part of who we are, that’s a very limited experience of who we are. It’s like a tiny, tiny, tiny part of who we are. Yet we think it’s all who we are. And we make really important consequential choices in our lives from its very limited small and always fear based perspective, once who we are. So imagine the ego in a center of a stadium, that’s the the baseball in the center of a stadium, that’s the ego, who we are, is actually the stadium. And we’ve allowed this tiny, tiny part of us to think and then to make choices from its from its small perspective. So part of what happens in breathwork. And with sacred plant medicine work is, you know, we experience ourselves, we pop out of the, the false limitation of the ego, that false sense of separation. And we reconnect with our essence with our interconnectedness with everything with all of it.

Victoria Volk 1:01:32
Is just hanging on your every word there.

Christian de la Huerta 1:01:34
And it’s accessible to all of us like it’s our breath, it’s just in the beginning, we and you can be taught how to do it yourself in the beginning, that’s the first 510 sessions, it’s important to do it, somebody who knows what they’re doing somebody who has been trained that can hold space, and so that the ego can feel safe enough to release a lot of stuff that’s been suppressing and allow it to come up to consciousness and call you and by the way, the psychologist said that the process of enlightenment is making the unconscious conscious, and breathwork is really speeds up that process.

Victoria Volk 1:02:07
Love it, love this conversation. And we could go so many other directions, too. I want to be respectful of your time. But is there is there anything else that you would like to share that you didn’t get a chance to address?

Christian de la Huerta 1:02:21
Well, I just give a brief overview about the book on empowerment, because as I started to say, most of us have an ambivalent conflict, the relationship to power, we part of us wants it part of us is afraid of it. And I think what we fear the more that I work with people around this issue, what we fear is that if we really stepped into our power, if we really stepped into all of who we are, that other people wouldn’t be able to handle it and that we might end up rejected that alone, and who wants that? We also fear that we might abuse it. And no wonder like how many abuses of power have you on I experience and have all of us experience? Like all we got to do is turn on the news any day, any given day to witness at least one abuse of power. So and then on top of that we’ve been in court, it’s been ingrained in us that power is bad, that power is negative, you know, with quotes, like power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who wants to be corrupted. But what they didn’t tell us is that Lord Acton who said those words, were speaking specifically about political power, not personal power. And so, add to that mix, what we were talking about the emotions, we’ve turned the emotions into weakness, you know, we hate conflict, we avoid confrontation. And so what happens when you put all that together, we we end up giving our power away our power that nobody can give to us, nobody can take away. We are the only ones who can give it away. And the sad part, the tragic part is that we give it away for the lamest of reasons. Like we say yes, when inside we really feel no inside, it’s really not okay with us. But in order to maintain that illusion of peace do not rock the boat too much. We override our desires or preferences or dreams. And we say yes, when inside we feel no we stuffed ourselves into tiny little packages that the you know that not gonna rock anybody’s boat. So we limit ourselves we play small for an illusion of security for a false sense of acceptance. And for crumbs, we settle for morsels of pseudo love. So it’s not a good strategy. It’s a really good strategy in life. And so what the this book walks the reader through in a very doable way I know how crazy busy and overscheduled everybody is. So designed the book and with very readable, doable short chapters with power practices. Do you have to rush through the book one chapter a week Do the practices because those practices are designed to integrate and apply the teachings to our lives. So they don’t stay at the level of information, we don’t need more information. We’ve got information overload, what we need is transformation. And that only comes from taking on the stuff and really living it. And so so the, if they will do that, it’ll begin to transform the relationship to power and began to discover ways that we can step into and express our power. And we’re in the in the wet in the world in a way that’s not about fear, hierarchy, force, control, domination, that kind of power that that requires that we step on, somebody push them down. In order for us to feel powerful. There’s a different way to do this.

Victoria Volk 1:05:48
I recently, there’s so much so many synchronicities. And what you say is because just the other day, I shared a quote on my social media about it was in a podcasting email of all things, and it just it hit me it’s, it’s stuck out. So I created a quote, for knowledge isn’t power. It’s the application of knowledge. That gives you power. Exactly. Right. So it’s the application of the knowledge. And that’s just what came to my mind as I was hearing you sharing that? Yeah, that’s a great quote, for sure. So where can people reach you, I know you have your website, just share all the things.

Christian de la Huerta 1:06:25
Yeah, I think the best way to reach me, well, the book is available anywhere where books are sold, you can get it at your local bookstore, you can order it there, if you want to support them. You can also get it on Amazon. In terms of reaching me probably the best way is my my website soulfulpower.com, and by any for anybody who of your audience who signs up goes to soulfulpower.com, and get to my email list. And we all know how easy it is to click unsubscribe down the road if it doesn’t work for you. And I’m not going to take it personally. That’s one of the benefits of doing this kind of self love and self acceptance work is like you don’t take stuff personally anymore. And so anybody who signs up for my email list will send them a sample chapter from the book, and it’s one that talks about what it means to live heroically. In the 21st century, we’ll share some of the power practices we were talking about, and a guided meditation. And it’s on trust that I created last year, with a year before in the midst of the pandemic. And so how do we find a place of inner peace and trust? How do we become that eye of the storm? In a world in a time of chaos and fear and uncertainty? How do we move into trust?

Victoria Volk 1:07:42
It’s a big word. Trust, right?

Christian de la Huerta 1:07:44
It’s a big word.

Victoria Volk 1:07:46
Thank you so much for this conversation today. I could talk even longer about energy and all of that more about the ego. Maybe around two,

Christian de la Huerta 1:07:56
Maybe around two. Yeah, it’s clear that you and I would not run out of stuff to talk about.

Victoria Volk 1:08:01
Never. No, I don’t think so either. Maybe after I get a chance to read your book. Okay, well, thank you so much for being here today.

Christian de la Huerta 1:08:11
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the show and for having the show.

Victoria Volk 1:08:15
And remember, when you unleash your heart you unleash your life. Much love.