Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Pet Loss, Podcast, Where Are They Now? |
Maha Bodhi | Part II: The Pet Loss & The Surrender That Cracked Me Open
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
This week’s guest, Maha Bodhi, who previously appeared on the podcast in season 3, shares her experience of saying goodbye to her dog and the grief she experienced as a result. Having to choose what she felt was right for her pet versus hoping nature would take its course is a struggle many pet owners face when their pet reaches the end of their life.
Pet loss is one of the most minimized losses. Those who don’t experience pet loss, and many grievers, often see pets as being replaceable. Although Maha did attempt to replace Blake’s loss with another dog a month after his passing, she quickly realized it wasn’t the best decision for herself or the other dog.
In the following months, Maha was reminded of what she had learned through several Heart with Ears sessions with me, Victoria, while her dog, Blake, was preparing to transition. And that was that grief needs to be honored, felt, and addressed. One of the ways we can do that, which I had shared with Maha, is through the Grief Recovery Method, as described in The Grief Recovery Handbook.
Maha took herself through the method in the book and found tremendous value and relief. Although going it alone is not recommended for reasons explained in this episode, Maha gained new knowledge and tools that help her better support herself and others during times of challenge.
“The degree of your surrender is the degree of your success.” – Maha Bodhi
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CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk: Welcome listeners to grieving voices. Today, I’m excited to bring back a previous guest for a part two recording Maha Bodhi, we initially recorded, and you can I’m gonna link to the episode in the show notes, but it was from season three episode one zero nine, a quest for inner peace and freedom. And thank you so much, first of all, for coming back to record with me and the reason why I wanted to have you back is because since we recorded, you had a devastating loss that you’ve worked through and you’ve moved through. And so you’re here to share that experience. And also, what’s kind of just blown up in your world since in a good way. So thank you so much for coming back.
Maha Bodhi: Thanks for having me, Victoria. I’m so excited to be here. And I’ve been looking forward to our conversation to follow up on our previous podcast. So, yeah, I’m excited to be here.
Victoria Volk: I had actually met Maha initially at a women’s convention thing. And you’re a public speaker there and, I don’t know, we connected after and kept in touch, and I actually invited you on my podcast. That was that first episode. And after that, you had reached out to me because you blake, your dog was incredibly sick, and he was going to be passing. That’s why I wanted to have you back here too to speak to that experience because it hasn’t really been covered on this podcast before. But also because you’re kind of on the other side of it now, and I want people to realize the importance of that loss that it’s because it is so minimized in our society, and if you would mind taking it from here and just speaking to that experience.
Maha Bodhi: Yes, absolutely. So I really, you know, I’m a a yogi first and foremost, and I truly believe that the universe always gives you the right people at the right time in your life that can support you throughout your journey. And we have met in the Woman Business Summit in the Conference where I was a public I was, like, the inspirational speaker, the keynote, and that’s how we connected, and you have this great podcast in Europe. You’re certified in Grief recovery, and that’s kind of your area of expertise and your superpower. And when we did the initial podcast, I truly haven’t experienced a tremendous loss in my life, so I wasn’t able to really speak to that. And it’s interesting that we did our podcast and that’s it and we went our separate ways.
Maha Bodhi: And then my dog and he was such an important figure in my life. Like, my dog was or I don’t have kids and we were really we had such as deep on it and I know a lot of dog parents can relate to this, but we were inseparable where I go. He goes. I would always tell my friends he’s part of me like a limb. Like he’s just always with me. We travel together. We do yoga together. You know? I do everything with him. And if, you know, I have even if it’s a a work opportunity and they don’t allow dogs, like, I won’t go. Like, that’s how I refused to leave him behind. And when I got him, he was he’s a he’s a rescue. So we really didn’t know how old he was. They told me he’s two years old, and then I took him to a vet, and they said he the vet said he’s five years old. But we really couldn’t tell.
Maha Bodhi: But I had him for eight years, and I thought that I still had more time with him. So I was really I was not prepared. It was a shock to me, and it happened so quickly, so fast that I took him to the vet and they said he has kidney cancer and he has and he’s gonna and he’s gonna die. Like, be prepared to make arrangement. I knew that this was gonna be a big deal for me. And I knew that this thing can I didn’t want it to break me. So I knew that I needed support. And I wanted expert support.
Maha Bodhi: And so I reached out to you right away because I knew you were certified in Grief recovery. You also kindly suggested that I hire an end-of-life Doula, which I didn’t even know such job existed, which I am so grateful that it exists because it’s such noble work to help people in, you know, the most difficult time of their lives. And like you said, I really think that our dog’s passing the way is really underrated. Like, when you tell someone my dog is not like, oh, I’m sorry. And that’s pretty much it. But for me, he was my whole life. He was like my child, mine, everything. And like I mentioned, like, we wake up together, we sleep together with you. So then there’s this emptiness when he’s gone. It’s like, what am I gonna do when he’s gone? And I really wanted the support that I need. I wanted to process this in the healthiest way possible. I know it was gonna be painful. I know it was gonna be hard. And so I just needed support. And we did a few sessions together, and it was tremendously helpful. And the doula was because you’re not we’re not in the same physical location. So the doula was actually here in Los Angeles, so she was able to come over and really had really hold my hand step by step. You’re helping me there, and she’s helping me. So I really got incredible support, and I’m truly grateful. Because with pets, it’s not just that, oh, your pet is dying, you have to make a decision. The most difficult decision that there ever is is whether you help them cross over to the other side or you let kind of nature take its course. And that’s the most difficult decision. And I just felt like oh my god, not only am I grieving his loss, grieving his illness, seeing him suffering, but now I actually have to make this the hardest decision that I’ve ever made is like how you and it has to happen quickly. It’s not like, oh, you have time to think about this. You have it’s like he’s suffering and you have to think and it was against everything in my nature. Are you telling me that I’m supposed to, like, I’m just gonna say, like, kill my own dog, like, that’s not in my nature, that’s not. And but then you see him suffering And I and it was just like, okay, what do I do here? And that’s where you helped me. And she helped me.
Maha Bodhi: And I’m a deep meditator. And I tried to we even did Reiki with my dog together, and I really tried to tap into his energy. But I also knew him so well because of our bond. And I knew he was kinda done. He was done and who’s ready to go. And animals, they’re different. They don’t have the ego that we have the clinging on to the life that we as human have. Like, he knew that his journey was over and his soul was ready to leave his body and he was okay with that. And so I just had to hold his hand and help him pass through when I had to make that difficult decision with the help of the doula. So we did everything together step by step. I actually I didn’t want to do the unionization, but what ended up happening is that he ended up having seizures. Like really, really bad seizures. I could hear his, like, bone clicking. And I just was like, I can’t, like, if it was me and I’m having these intense seizures, I would want somebody to help me pass away peacefully. So that’s what I did. And it was an emergency because it was just hot. It was, like, at it was, like, at three in the morning and then and I called the doula. I mean, how amazing is she? She’s, like, I’m on call. My phone is, let me know, and I’ll come with you. And I call her, and we go at three in the morning, we go to the hospital, and the hospital was amazing, and I’m just so grateful that we even have these resources and we have these people and we have access to this support because I’m not originally from the United States and most other countries don’t have these kind of resources. They don’t have an animal hospital, an animal room, where you can go at three in the morning and the vet is there and the staff is there and and and they know what they’re doing, their pros, and they know how to help you. And they put me in a private room and we were there with him the whole time. And I will say that I don’t have regrets. I feel like I did the right thing to do because of my the meditations and the energy that I was tapping in. I just felt like this is this is just the right humane thing to do for him. And then we and in the hospital, they take they take the that they take the pet and they cremate him or whatever you decide you wanna do. But because I had my doula, I took him back. I took him back and we washed him at home, and we did a ceremony, and we did a vigil, and it was really truly healing for me. It really gave me that closure because it was really, really stressful before and I had to make the decision and it was just so and then once thou was over and I was really able to grieve and sit with him and sit with and pet him and he’s just there’s a put flowers around him and just meditate and process the pain. And I learned this from both of you to really give myself permission to breathe. It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to feel pain. And I would sit every single day and just allow myself to cry and sit and really create space. And I’m like, I’m just gonna sit here and I’m gonna and I cry and I but until I don’t feel like crying anymore, I’m not gonna resist it. I’m not gonna try to distract myself. I’m not gonna try to run away from this pain. I’m gonna honor this, this like that came into my life. And I will say that it was really, really healthy and I kept seeing you and I kept seeing the doula after a few times and until I felt like, okay, I think I’m now in a good healthy place. And I’m ready to take the next step of the journey. So really thank you to you, Victoria so much you played a tremendous role in this experience that I had.
Victoria Volk: Thank you for sharing all of that. What people don’t really may not realize, like, you didn’t and maybe many other people listening don’t. Is that because I’m an end-trained end-of-life doula, and it hadn’t occurred to me either, even in my local area to pitch myself as an end-of-life doula to support people with their animals passing. Right? Like, as an end-of-life doula, we have this training that can transfer into these other areas of people’s lives like pet loss. And so I’m glad that you I’m glad that I had that idea to share with you and that you took it upon yourself to do that.
Maha Bodhi: I did not even I have heard of, like, the birth doulas that helped bring life into the world, but I did never heard about end-of-life doulas. And I think people need to know that there is support available and there is a healthy way to process this. You don’t need to do it alone.
Victoria Volk: And had this end-of-life doula, had she ever helped others, as a service in with pet loss before?
Maha Bodhi: Yeah. She’s Verint.
Victoria Volk: Okay.
Maha Bodhi: Yeah. She’s Verint. She works mostly, like, with people that are past in the way, but also she said, oh yeah, with animals and she also said that it’s very underrated and people think, oh, it’s just a dog, it’s just a pet, but that loss is huge for me.
Victoria Volk: Well, and just like people who have a spouse. Right? A spouse passes away. That person becomes very much a fabric of your daily life. You have breakfast together or you have dinner together or you mow the lawn together, regularly what are all these activities, right, that you do on a day to day basis with a spouse, you were doing with your pet. And our pets are involved in our daily lives.
Maha Bodhi: So it. They don’t talk. They don’t, pets are just so unconditionally loving. And there’s also a chemical literally, a chemical withdrawal that happens because dogs are known to induce dopamine, induce those happy hormones in the brain and the body. They say just snuggling with your dog induces all sorts of chemicals that induce happiness, induce joy. And there is a chemical withdrawal that happens when I’ve been living with the stock for eight years I come home, and he’s jumping, and I’m smiling. Now when I come home, like, I don’t have a reason to smile. I don’t have a reason to giggle, to laugh, to run around because there’s no one there. And so that’s like literally a chemical withdraw that your brain has been used to your body has been used to inducing, and now it’s gone, and it really drops your energy. But I mean, like I said, because of the grief recovery, and, like, your support and we’re gonna talk about this in a little bit, I was really able to to process it in a healthy way.
Victoria Volk: And I do recall after he passed, you were looking for another pet, which is also our inclination. Right? Like, we want to replace that loss and
Maha Bodhi: Who said, don’t do it?
Victoria Volk: Yeah.
Maha Bodhi: I’m just gonna be really transparent. I’m gonna be really honest and I struggled with this a lot. But I was looking for another pet and you told me don’t do it because you’re just gonna replace you’re trying to replace your dog. And it just doesn’t work first. And I think you even sent me an article and I read the article And I just I’m just so emotional. And it hasn’t been, like, maybe a month since Blake, my dog passed away. And I just saw this furry animal online, and then he looks exactly like Blake. And I was like, I’m just gonna go and get this dog. And I went and I got this dog and I mean, it didn’t work out. Believe it or not, because I’m a dog lover. And I was like, oh, I will love any dog. It’s unconditional love, and it’s and even though I was aware because I was educated by you and I read the books and I understood that they say, oh, don’t just try to replace the dog. And I’m like, okay, this is a new dog. He’s a puppy. Right? Like, when he passed away, it was older, it was mature, so it’s a completely different energy. This is a one-year-old puppy active hyper different energy. We haven’t bonded, this is a new completely new relationship And so I even though cognitively, like, intellectually, I was aware of that, and still the reality of it was very different. And so it was very difficult for us to bond even though I tried. And I would walk him and we’d try to do training sessions, and we and we did all these things and he and he was very high energy. If I wasn’t breathing, it would have worked out. But he needed a lot of energy and a lot of attention that I didn’t have the capacity at that time to do. He was chewing everything, chewing the furniture, chewing the remote, chewing my shoes, and Blake was beyond that phase in his life. And so that dog needed more training, more energy, more. And if I was in a like I said, in a good place, I would’ve probably would be more ready for that, but I wasn’t. And it was because then what I was looking for was an emotional support animal. And what this dog ended up being, I was the one who needed to support the dog. And so it just it wasn’t fair for the dog. And the dog didn’t bond with me. So the dog, they’re highly intelligent. They’re so they’re just feelings. Right? They’re all, like, just intuition. They don’t intellectualize. And so the dog felt like this isn’t right. And so we tried for two months we did trainings. We hired professional dog trainers. And it was just the dog was so unhappy. Would distract the house, would it would try to bite me, would try to like, it was just the I can tell the dog was like, you’re not my mommy, I don’t wanna be here, and it was really sad and I had to rehome the dog. And I will say that I always judged people that overwhelm the dog. And I would always say there’s no bad dog. There’s only a bad owner. And this experience allowed me to change my mind about a lot of things. It was a learning experience, and it was my mistake that I didn’t honor the process grieving and I didn’t give myself time to grieve and I thought this would be just a quick fix and everything is gonna be okay and it wasn’t and it was really really hard and I was ashamed I will say to rehome him because people will come, where’s your dog? Where’s your dog? And I just feels so like a really bad person to say I had to overwhelm the dog. But guess what? The dog ended up having exactly the parent that he needed. Right? He now he’s happy. I even asked the new mom. I was like, is he chewing? It’s just like, no. He doesn’t chew in her house. He doesn’t do destructive things at her house. And so it was the energy. Just wasn’t the right energy. And ever since I haven’t, I haven’t gotten another dog. I was like, when the time is right, it’s gonna happen, and the right dog will find me, and I will find the right dog.
Maha Bodhi: But it’s definitely been a tremendously growth experience that impacted the work that I do. I’m an inspirational speaker. I’m a yoga instructor. I live with retreats and teacher trainings and all these things. And it really added a level of depth of my empathy, of my compassion, to people, to loss, to grief, and to understand it instead of running away from it. So I will say, like, before that, I was very focused on positive mindset, positive thinking moving forward And this was kind of the missing piece of the puzzle because the ying and the ying, that’s really part of life. And it is superficial for us to just focus on, yes, positive, positive and moving forward is a great way to live life. But we also really need to honor and process the darkness and process the grief. And there is multiple healthy ways to do this. And if you don’t and if you try to skip steps and you’ve tried to hack your way through it, it keeps building up, it’s building up, and it’s gonna come out one way or another, and you’re just gonna make mistakes. And that’s the beauty of life. It keeps nudging you in the right direction and it gives you exactly what you need until you face, what you need to face. And that’s how you move. And it’s called I’m sure you’ve heard the spelling post-traumatic growth versus post-traumatic stress, that’s how you choose to grow instead of stress and get stuck.
Victoria Volk: Thank you for sharing all that because I did not know that piece that you had actually gotten another dog in all of that experience. So thank you for sharing that. I mean, for people listening too, it’s it doesn’t have to be a dog. I mean, this can apply to relationships too, friendships, spouses. Like, I mean, this is what we do. This is our like, are instinct to do. We, like, we just wanna we wanna get over the pain. Right? And so we just wanna feel better and it just doesn’t work to push yourself through it or to sweep it under the rug and try to just
Maha Bodhi: Gonna come out one way or another, energy. It’s literally energy. And if you don’t give that energy time to liberate itself to process, to move through you, right? We know that saying about emotions or energy in motion, so they wanted to move, they want to. The energies want to be liberated. It’s us that keep them stuck when we resisted, when we try to cheat, when we try to skip steps, that’s when things get messed up. But if we allow nature to take its course. And we honor the process that’s where growth in learning happens. That’s where opportunity really happens. And it builds care and it makes you a better human in life and it makes you then better in relationship in your future because you’ve healed and you’ve processed what he’s processing and you’re not gonna dump your expectations and your pain and all the past information on this new relationship. So it’s not even fair to the new relationship just like with my dog. It wasn’t fair to that dog, and the dog was happier with someone else. And it’s the same thing like you said, with the spouse, with the relationship, with the human being. So we’re always trying to avoid pain as humans. It’s in our nature to do whatever we can do to avoid the pain, to run away from no one wants to hurt. Right? But it’s kinda counterintuitive that the caves you fear to enter, hold the treasures that you seek Joseph Campbell said that. And I always say that in my teachings, but leaning into the pain and processing the pain and allowing it to feel your feelings I mean, I can’t stress this enough to feel your feelings. And I’m not talking about to feel the story behind the feelings, but actually to feel the sensations of the feeling, and a lot of people don’t know how to discern between the two. So, like, feeling your feelings is, like, oh, I like, oh, I’m feeling I’m feeling sad. I feel I missed this person. That’s an emotion. That’s still you’re still at the level of the mind. But to feel the feelings, it’s this what is this sensation? This you’re missing this person or you’re hurting. You’re grieving. You’re you’re experiencing loss. What is how does that manifest physically in your body? It’s a physical sensation. So if I pinch you, The pinch, it’s a physical sensation. So is it sharp? Is it heaviness in your chest? Is it hollow stomach is it a fidgeting, a shaking in the legs. So it’s a sensation and it really took me a long time to get this. And so when we feel that heaviness in the chest, when we feel I sometimes I used to feel like my arm goes numb. And so what happens is that when we feel the sensation, the brain freaks out, and it’s like, okay, solution, solution, solution. Let’s run away from this. What do I? Because the brain is creative. Problem solving. Okay. Get another dog. Okay. Let’s go shopping. Okay. Let’s binge-watch. Okay. Let’s grab the drink. Let’s grab the alcohol. Let’s let’s do something so I don’t feel this sharpness, this numbiness, this heaviness. But the secret is that you actually wanna lean into it. You wanna sit with this. You wanna hold your own hand. And be like, I’m gonna be here. We’re gonna stay here and it’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna feel the feelings. And I’m not gonna abandon you. I’m not gonna neglect you like how everyone did in your life, I we talked about my upbringing in my past. And so we learned this abandonment. It’s really your abandoning yourself when you grab the drink, when you grab, you turn on the TV or you grab your phone. You’re doing what people who abandoned you did to you and you’re just repeating the cycle. But if you say, hey, you know what? I’m not going I’m gonna love you unconditionally. And I’m not gonna leave you when you’re hurting. I’m gonna be with you when you’re hurting. And I’m gonna feel the hurt, and we’re gonna be in this together. And then this tremendous liberation of energy happens. When you tell your brain, hey, you know what? You can go offline. You don’t need There’s no problem to solve. Okay? Just it’s okay. It’s safe to feel.
You can just be quiet and I’m gonna feel my feels. I’m not gonna try to fix it. I’m not gonna try to change it. I’m not gonna try to solve for it. I’m just going to feel it. It’s as simple as that.
Maha Bodhi: And the moment you wholeheartedly do this at the liberation of energy because that energy that’s being consumed and overloaded and trying to find an escape is now liberated. And there is this sense of freedom, and that’s where really true healing happens. And it’s almost like a superpower because you’re no longer afraid of the pain. And that translates in so many areas in your life, Victoria. I mean, it translates it in you not being afraid in the world anymore. You’re able to take more risks because you’re not afraid of the pain. You’re not afraid of rejection. You’re not afraid of doubt. You’re not afraid of uncertainty. You’re not afraid of the unknown because, hey, no matter what life throws at me, I’m I’m okay with that. I’m okay with feeling the feels. I’m okay with feeling the pain. And that translates into confidence in the world that translates and you’re really wholeheartedly showing up. Here I am, whole complete, not perfect, but whole and complete, vulnerable. Yes, I’m a human being. Yes, I have flaws, but I’m okay with that. And I accept myself unconditionally, and it all starts with leaning into the pain and allowing yourself to feel the sensations in your body and not running away from it.
Victoria Volk: So good. And when people listening, they couldn’t see what I was seeing unless they’re watching this on YouTube, but you kind of gestured to your left shoulder, which energetically is grief and despair. In biofuel tuning, that’s where we see often is grief and despair is off the left shoulder. So I just wanted to share that with.
Maha Bodhi: And when we worked together, you touched upon that because we worked and you would ask me these things where do you feel it in your body, and I didn’t even need to think about it. Like, I mean, right away, for me, it’s always my heart and then my left sided. And all and if it’s intense, like, when like, that it goes all the way down to my left arm, to my left fingertips, and normally I would freak out, before I learned about going for covering the pond how it manifests in the body and all these things and feeling the feels I would be like, oh my god my arm is going numb. Like, oh, let’s call the doctor. Let’s, what’s happening. Right? But now I understand this. And I understand what’s happening, and I just literally bold myself. Like, it’s okay. I know you’re hurting right now, and it’s okay.
Victoria Volk: So when you had this realization that this second dog was not going to replace Blake, that you had to do something for yourself to get to move through this. What did that look like? What was that process for you then?
Maha Bodhi: I rehome the dog and I just took a few moments. I just took it one day at a time to be honest. I took it one day at a time once at that time. And, I’m a yoga teacher. I have a very strong yoga practice, and I embody yoga, not just, I don’t know, like, a lot of people think yoga is an exercise. It’s stretching and exposes and it’s so much deeper than that. And for me, I embody it as a way of being I believe that yoga is a science. It’s a science of being in the world. It’s a science of living healthy in the world. Not only in your body, but in your mind and in your heart. And so when stress builds up in your body, when your arm goes numb, when your chest is hurting, that’s energy in your body. And when we move the body in a very specific way, in a very mindful way, you’re helping that energy to process. You’re helping that energy to move. So yoga is deeply connected to the nervous system. It’s connected to the mind, to the brain.
Maha Bodhi: So I had just had my practices, and I check-in with myself every morning I wake up and I’m like, okay, what is the diagnose? How am I feeling today? Because sometimes if you’re breathing too intensely and the body is too overwhelmed, you actually don’t wanna do the invigorating sweaty power yoga classes. You might wanna move a little bit slower and a little bit more gentle and do the more gentle flow. So I would every morning wake up and check-in with myself, how am I feeling today? Do I need to pick it up a notch? Do I need to slow it down? In the evening, I always journal to process my thoughts, so they’re not just floating in my head and overwhelming. So I always write I always start with gratitude because we do have a negativity bias that the brain automatically wants protect you from danger. So the brain is always looking around what can go wrong. And so practicing gratitude is grabbing the steering wheel and be like, no, no, no, yes. There are hard things in life, but there’s also really good things in life, and let’s not lose track of those good things. So I would right away start to write three things that I’m grateful for, and they could be as simple as, I don’t know. I had a a nice smoothy today. You know? It’s it could be just as simple as that. And then if there’s something that I’ve been struggling with, I’ll key I’ll start to process it and I’ll start to write it down. In the moment you start to write things down, you it creates a little bit of clarity and you will start to really see things and you start to see even patterns in your journal and you start to see, okay, this is just, me in my default state and I actually have control in in the way that I process information in the way I process the world.
Maha Bodhi: So I always say we see things not with our eyes. We see things with our mind. And it was Dr. Wayne Dyer that famously said when you change the way you look at things, the things that you’ll look at begin to change. Right? And so and that’s what journaling does for me. It changes the way I see things, it changes the way I process information, and it gives me an opportunity to make a choice because we always, always have a choice even though when it doesn’t look like we do, we have a choice.
Maha Bodhi: So those are my practices for the longest longest time, yoga, journaling, and my work, my work is really participating and helping people and being of service and contributing to society. And so because my work is deeply integrated with my personality, there’s I’m very fortunate. And you this. I used to work in the corporate world, so it wasn’t always like this. I used to have to be two separate people. I used to be have to be, Maha at home and then Maha at work. But because of now I’m so fortunate that I get to do what I love, and I am a living, breathing embodiment of what the practice of yoga is, there is no separation. So it’s either I’m either practicing yoga or I’m teaching yoga or I’m creating something around yoga. And that I really heal through the work. When you do meaningful, purposeful work, you heal through the work and then you see people come to me and I can be just saying something so simple and they come to me thank you so much. You have no idea how much I needed to hear that. I don’t know how you knew what I was going through. And I’m like, I didn’t. No. But you need but you heard exactly what you needed to do. And yoga is so universal that it applies to literally almost every person no matter what you’re going through.
Maha Bodhi: So really that’s that’s how it helped me through. It wasn’t until recently that I actually did the grief recovery program. And I know when we were working together, you were telling me, and it was honestly thanks to you because I didn’t even know it. It even existed. I didn’t know much about grief. I’m gonna say that during those things to you that I really am now educated. You recommended. You and you kept drilling it. You’re like because we log in and we’d have a session like this, and I’m just, like, complaining complaining complaining. Like telling you about all my pain and what I’m going through. And you keep telling me you have to do the program. And I think I was just in so much pain at the time, and enrolling in a program felt overwhelming. And I was like, oh my god. I am dealing with this, and now I have to do a program, and I have to, like, write things and all these things. And I was like, I just don’t have the mental capacity to do it.
Maha Bodhi: So again, I was trying to skip steps. Again, I was trying to cheat my way through. And like I just mentioned earlier, there’s it comes out one way or another. That energy is gonna be dispersed. It’s gonna slowed one way or another. So it wasn’t until very recently, and I think it’s been, like, more than a year since we did our sessions. And it wasn’t until very recently that I kept feeling this level of grief. And you know grief is not like, okay, my dog died and that was a horrible thing, but it’s not it’s not just that grief. It’s all the griefs that you felt from the day you were born, one on top of the other, on top of that that you never processed in a healthy way. So that energy kept building up, building up, building up until, the dog dies, and then it’s and then it’s an explosion. And so then that just kept happening. I just noticed that I’m very sensitive and I’m very easily I don’t like the word triggered, but I just I I just wanted to I I just wanted I’m like, okay. There’s something off here. There’s something off here, and it just won’t go away. And I noticed because of my love of awareness, this voice in your head or this pain in your body. If you don’t pay attention to it, it just keeps getting louder and louder. And louder until it forces you to stop and drop everything and look at me. That’s what it’s saying. It saying, look at me, I need your attention. And that’s really just reached a point where it happened, and I can’t tell you that it’s like a specific incident. I think it was just an accumulation of events. And I was like, you know what? I need to nip this in the butt. I need to find the source of this grief and process it in a healthy way. And I remembered you and I remember the grief recovery program. And I was like, let me look this up. And I looked it up, and I found the book, and I bought the book, and I started reading the book. And I just started doing the exercise because it’s literally a workbook and it’s a step-by-step workbook and I just kept doing it. And I’m not gonna lie to you even though, I’m in this field of healing. I’m a yogi and all these things. It’s not for the faint of heart, and I was nervous. And I honestly see the value of having someone like you a guide to guide you through. I just thought I was like, I’ll just do it by myself, and I just did it by myself. And in the book, they always say it’s better. So much better to work with someone, but they also give you an option to to do it on your own. So I just follow the instructions to do it on my own, and I drew the graph the timeline of my and it always usually starts with your parents because that’s, like, the oldest grief ever. It always starts there. And so I did that and I did one for my mother and I did one for my father and I was so scared and because they tell you to write things, to process, to write the statements. I’m like, are they gonna tell me to show them this statement?
Maha Bodhi: And I was like, I almost stopped at that point because I was my subconscious mind locked in that fear, just locked in and I stopped at that crucial point, which I’m not supposed to stop. And I stopped, for a couple of days, I stopped just like, oh, tomorrow, tomorrow. Like, you know, like, I’m just so scared. And then and then I felt that the energy. Right? It’s like it’s like it wants to be released, and it’s like I’m like I stopped in the wrong moment. And I’m like, this is not gonna go away until I cross the finish line. I need to cross the finish line. And I need to trust. I need to trust the process. This grief recovery program was built in the eighties or something. Right? So it’s time-tested.
Maha Bodhi: Over forty years. Yeah.
Maha Bodhi: I don’t know, like, how many thousands and thousands of people have been, you know, went through the program and it’s highly highly recommended. So I was just like, You know what? You have to trust to this and not trust your fear. They know what they’re doing. Let’s just finish it. And if it ever gets too scary, you could always stop. So then I finish it, and it’s funny the moment I opened the book. It’s like the only I read, like, flipped to the next state. Exactly. You should never do not send this letter to the person that you’re, you know, mad with or grieving with or and I was like, okay. There’s no confrontation. This is really more about me and my feelings and my grief, and my personal journey because really that’s what it’s always about. It’s your relationship with yourself more than your relationship with other people. It’s your relationship to the grief. It’s your relationship to the pain, not the person that caused the pain. And so I did I finished it all the way to the end and I instantly instantly felt a weight lifted off my shoulder, off my that literally, that physical pain that I told you in my chest, in my arm. It was like, like, lifted, like, immediately. And I was like, oh my god. Why did I wait this long? Why did I not listen to Victoria?
Victoria Volk: It’s never too soon. It’s never too late.
Maha Bodhi: And just because, like, well, why did I kept torturing myself for this long? You know, and I’m very strong. I’m a very strong person. I think that didn’t serve me because I’m like, I’m strong. I can handle this. I can do this. But there’s no reason to suffer. There’s no reason to power through this, and they talk about this in the book, like, if you have a cut, like, if you’re hurt, are you gonna wait? Are you gonna, like, oh, next year, I’ll deal with it. I’m like,
Victoria Volk: Let me just let me just let it let’s just let it fester and ooze with bacteria first.
Speaker 1: I’m strong. I’m tough. I’m gonna tough it out versus, like, you immediately wanted to clean it up and you wanna nurture and intend to and allow it to heal in a way that it deserves to be healed.
Victoria Volk: Well, and thank you for sharing that because I didn’t know that either. And so to have you share the testimonial of the process for you is beneficial for the listeners to hear. I do want to share that so I tried it alone too. I was just like you. However, I was not I wasn’t as what’s the word? I hadn’t evolved myself and my growth to the point where you had been at the time that you did this on your own, for me to have this awareness of myself to do it on my own. I tried to do it on my own and I realized really quickly that I needed, one, the accountability because for exactly the reason you said, Yes. Because this and even in the program when I’m working with someone in person or online, I tell them you know, next week, you’re not gonna wanna get on Zoom with me. You’re not gonna wanna put your shoes on and get out the door. And I’m telling you, do it anyway because when you’ve already pulled off that scab. Right? And if you don’t tend to that wound, this is when those old behaviors and these old patterns start to come back. And it can actually put you back in progress. Like, you can actually go even it’s like when you lose fifty pounds and then you gain a hundred. Right? Because you fall off the wagon and you just give up on yourself. It’s the same way in this work. And so I don’t encourage anybody to do it on their own for those reasons. Because it can
Maha Bodhi: Of course. I agree. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: However, you’re different. Everybody’s different, but you are in a different place in your own evolution of where you were too. Yes. And you were you I know I feel in my heart that had you felt yourself stuck in that place that you would have reached out to me.
Maha Bodhi: Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: Or another grief recovery specialist that you could have finished that work with?
Maha Bodhi: Yeah. Absolutely. Yes.
Victoria Volk: So I think it’s important for listeners to know, yes. Grab the book. Learn a lot because you will. You will learn a lot. But don’t go into it, adamant, hell or high water, you’re gonna do this yourself because you don’t wanna set yourself up for, first of all, that disappointment. Right? And then there’s shame in that too. Right? Gosh. Canning. I can’t do this. I just I can’t even heal. I can’t even do this myself. Like, you know what I mean? Then that
Maha Bodhi: Absolutely. Yeah. Now it’s it’s absolutely better to do it with with another person for accountability. Also for perspective to things that maybe you can see sometimes we get too caught up in our pain, in our shame, like you said,
Victoria Volk: Can’t see the label from inside the jar.
Maha Bodhi: Yeah. Exactly.
Victoria Volk: And for anyone listening to, it might be let’s say you’re in a household of people. Right? You live alone and not everybody lives alone. And so you might be afraid somebody might find your writings and things like that. Right? That can be a worry for some people. I actually just discovered an app. It’s called day one, and it’s for journaling with your voice. Okay. So for a lot of people, if they don’t feel like they can just for the journaling piece. Right? Like, I don’t suggest doing using day one to do this grief recovery work. But, I mean, if it helps you move forward and helps you get to a place where I can finally reach out for help. Right? Because sometimes we just need to realize, I can’t do this alone. I do need support because that was me for over thirty years. Right? I got this. Like, I can do this myself. You know, the DIY or that was me. But so how has this work going through that process now and being on this side of it, which I really fully wholeheartedly believed eventually some day you would circle back to. Because that’s what loss does. Right? It just kinda worms. Because I was even gonna ask you what loss like, what came up for you that would have been a better lead to the squad to you talking about that. But what losses came up after you lost Blake? But you just described that. But how has this work now? You mentioned briefly that it’s influenced or maybe it was before we started recording. It’s influenced your work and what you how you work with people today. But, yeah, what’s happened for you since doing this? How does it change things for you?
Maha Bodhi: Change my yeah, definitely with the work that I do, you know, I lead teacher trainings and these teacher trainings are trends formational, and they’re long, and they’re challenging, and they’re physically demanding, and it’s a two hundred hour train, and you go throughout and you go through this journey of ups and down. Sometimes you feel triumphant and sometimes you feel like, oh my god, this is too hard. And it could get emotional and your grief can come up because the mind and the body are deeply connected and we just talked about how the emotions manifest as a physical sensation in the body. And with yoga, what happens is that when you hold the pose because of the nature of the practice, you hold the pose, for a little bit longer than you would do in a gym and other workout. And you’re you’re guided to be present in the pose. And to quiet the mind because it is a meditation first and foremost and we add the poses to the meditation. So a lot of people get it mixed, and it’s just a workout. But if yoga is, first and foremost, the removal of the fluctuations that disturb the peace within the mind. That is the very definition of yoga according to Potentially in the yoga sutras. And so when yoga is taught, traditionally and properly, you’re in the yoga pose and it’s, yes, it’s challenging. Some can be very challenging. And you hold the pose, for a minimum five breaths. And you’re guided to breathe. You’re guided to quiet the mind. And be present to the challenge and not escape the challenge, which is literally a rehearsal. That’s why we call it a practice. Because it’s a practice for how to live life. It’s a practice of how to quiet down the mind and to be peaceful in the mind. And to be present in the heart and present in the body and present with the challenges and that’s how you kind of cross that threshold because it it challenges you to go be a little bit beyond your edge. Right? And that’s where growth happens. That’s where transformation happens.
Maha Bodhi: And so I see people when they struggle, sometimes you see people break down and cry, especially if they have trauma, if they have unprocessed grief, and they’re going through this journey. And there is this, they crying so sweet. They’re like, I’m so sorry and I’m like, why are you apologizing? Like, there’s nothing to apologize for. This is a beautiful opportunity for you to process what’s being demand it to be released, that your body has been probably craving a moment like this, a moment of liberation of this energy that has been stuck for, God knows how long in your body. And this is the only time that you’re able to be still enough and present enough and quiet enough for it to be released. So, cry. Go deeper into this pain. Don’t run away. Don’t apologize. Don’t try to fix it, don’t try to rush through it and just be with it.
Maha Bodhi: So literally what yoga is, it’s like an embodiment, a process, kinda a metaphor for your whole life. And so that’s the level of compassion and the level of understanding for me to recognize brief in others to recognize pain in others. And I know you know this. That loss is not always just loss of, death loss. So many things are considered lost, a grief of even just a dream you had, a potential that you thought is gonna be your future, and then it disappeared. That’s a loss. That’s a great losing a job is, you have to grief that. Losing that relationship. Even if it’s a brief small relationship, it’s the dream behind the relationship. That that’s what you’re grieving. So it can it can be so many different things and that just deepened my level of understanding of grief in that. And before that, before this experience that I had, I would probably be like, hey, you can do this, like, just breathe through it. Let’s you know, you’re stronger than you think you are because I’m such a motivational, inspirational person, but now I’m like b with this. Be present with this. I’m right here. I’m not running away. I’m gonna be here, and that’s okay. And I and I think that’s in a much healthier way. And like we talked about the balance of, yes, the lightness and also the darkness. And we wanna honor the darkness just as much as we’re honoring the lightness. And you see that symbol, I love it because it explains everything. Right? It’s the yin, the yang, the lightness, and the darkness. But within the darkness, right, there’s a little bit of light. And within the light, there’s a little bit of darkness. That it all belongs and it’s all part of the holistic experience, the holistic human journey. And once we understand that and we embrace that and we accept that as a whole. Really your life experience, the way you navigate through life, becomes way more graceful, way more peaceful, because you’re no longer grinding, you’re no longer hustling, any fix it mode, trying to change the world around you, and you’re literally flowing with the current. Right? Like, paddling down a canoe down the river and you’re letting that river kind of carry you through and you’re just in it for the ride. Yes, you’re navigating. Yes, you’re choosing where you’re going. But you’re literally trusting the current of life.
Victoria Volk: Trusting the current of life. I love that. Yeah. We have really difficult time trusting. Right? Trusting ourselves. And so we have a difficult time trusting others and trusting the process. Right? of of
Maha Bodhi: But that’s the level of them. It’s always trying to some. And the truth, it’s like so useless because that’s the energy that’s just being consumed and depleted and drained and really use useless way of using your mind, using your brain. It says that, like, the most sophisticated technology in the entire universe exists in your brain. Right? And no one gave you the manual. And everyone is using their brain in wrong. It’s so sad, but everyone is using their brain wrong, solve it, solve it, solve it. How can I fix it? How can I control the world around me? You cannot control the world around. People are gonna die, your heart is gonna get broken, bad, things are gonna happen, and good things are gonna happen and then you’re gonna grow and you’re gonna be stronger and you’re gonna succeed and you’re gonna laugh and you’re gonna love and you’re gonna be all these things are part of the human experience, but you trying to control it is a waste of energy is a waste of time. But being present for the experience and seeing what’s unfolding in front of you and then participating in this unfolding whether it’s positive or negative I’m not checked out. I’m going to participate. I’m here for it all.
Victoria Volk: And there are tools to help you do that.
Maha Bodhi: Absolutely. Yes. And I know you have you know your your grief program. I have my yoga program, and it’s not one size fits on. They’re all these they’re multiple tools and yeah. I’m a yoga teacher, but I need a grief recovery coach. I need an end-of-life doula too. Like, you need different things for different experiences that you have in your life. And there’s plenty of that. We are so fortunate to live in this day and age where we have, you know, access to resources and information.
Victoria Volk: And so please share with my listeners some of your tools and where can people find you and work with you. When you got cooking.
Maha Bodhi: I can
Victoria Volk: know you got something to know better.
Maha Bodhi: I will say that the most, like, in-depth and premier experience that you can have with me is my yoga teacher training. My yoga school was accepted by Yoga Alliance under elevated standard. It was unprecedented. They’re, like, a yoga they were, like, this is the fastest that we’ve ever accepted a yoga school. I put so much thought and so much work into it. And it’s really the work of my entire life that led me to this moment. So all the pain, all the grief, all the growth and all the strength that I accumulated in all the education throughout my life. And I truly believe that this is my offering to the world and this is the reason why I am here in the world is to teach the science of yoga, which is a science of how to be in the world. So it doesn’t really matter if you wanna be a yoga instructor, It’s a way to help you, like we talked about, navigate through life with more of a embrace, and you literally take your power back, you take your mind back, you take, control of your not external environment, your internal environment.
Victoria Volk: So where can people find you to learn that?
Maha Bodhi: Yogimaha.com. It’s my website. All my events are there. So my teacher training, the dates, all the details, how you can sign up, is there I lead yoga retreats, from time to time. So if there’s any upcoming retreats, you’re gonna see it on my website. I’m on social media, @yogimaha108, so you can follow me on Instagram, on Facebook. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: Thank you so much for sharing everything that you’ve shared today. And I loved this follow-up in this part too. I think it was much needed. Because we can see, we can have this bird’s eye view or this be the, like, the fly on the wall of a conversation of someone’s life. But to see it in this stent. Right? Like, to see the I always wonder, like, sometimes when I hear a story, oh, I wonder what happened to so and so. And so I think it’s important that we share the darkness in this light. Right? Because you had that in your first episode, but then life continues. Right? And it stuff gets are on our way and challenges happened. And so thank you for sharing about Blake and how that experience just really opened you up even more to this deepened learning and experience. So thank you.
Maha Bodhi: So honor Victoria. Thank you so much for having me, and I’m so glad we were able to have this follow-up.
Victoria Volk: Check out Maha’s website, yogimaha.com. I’ll put the links to everything in the show notes. And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Divorce, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Life with Human Design, Parenting, Podcast |
Amy Douglas | From Betrayal and Loss To Manifesting Joy
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
How much betrayal and loss can the heart take within less than two years?
Today’s guest shares how betrayal, loss, unsurmountable grief, and a decline in health catalyzed her personal growth.
Amy chose to empower herself by getting a life coach and learning new tools that enabled her to recalibrate her life and move forward beyond the hurt, pain, and emotional hurricane she felt stuck in for too long.
In this episode, we dabble into Amy’s experience with Human Design, what she’s learned about herself, and how Human Design became the permission slip to radically change things, including leaving her corporate job.
We have all experienced something that challenges our beliefs and who we thought others were. We may question who we are and our role in the mess, and often, fear and expectations play a role and serve a purpose in making sense of our experiences.
Listen to today’s episode to hear Amy’s perspective on fear, how learning her Human Design helped her change her approach and point of view of expectations, and so much more!
RESOURCES:
CONNECT:
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NEED HELP?
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If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk: Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices. I’m so excited for this episode because I’m talking with Amy Douglas. She is a human design reader. And I have been working with her as her client. But today’s episode is about her sharing her grief journey in what she’s learned through human design about herself and her grief. And I’m just really excited to bring this knowledge to the podcast because, like, one of my favorite quotes is the more you know yourself, the less you look to others to tell you who you are. And so human design is just another tool in the toolbox to help you to better understand yourself. And so Amy, thank you so much for being here and sharing about your journey today and thank you for your time.
Amy Douglas: Well, thank you for inviting me. I’m thrilled to be here. I’m excited for our conversation. Grief is not something that we all love to touch on but reflecting on it and empowering ourselves to move through it’s such a critical part of our own evolution and definitely human design. I feel like in my journey with human design. If I were to say, you know, that I have felt grief by learning my design, it was the grief of not allowing myself to be what I chose for myself for so many years. And the grief of thinking or feeling that those ways that I chose for myself and my design were wrong because they’re not it’s just sad, we’re so full of not enoughness and design hasn’t powered me to release a lot of that, not enoughness, offer some deep compassion and understanding for myself and others. I love your quote. It’s so true. I see so many people looking to others for the answers, the right ways to do things, and they’re all within us. We just really get to take the time, to sit with ourselves, to uncover that.
Victoria Volk: People might not be familiar with human design can you just briefly cover what that is? And also too, like, we are both manifestors design, which is only like nine percent of the population and often the most misunderstood. So imagine the grief that that has caused us in our lives alone.
Amy Douglas: So true in being female manifestors. Right? Like, there’s there’s so many layers to it. So human design is, another one of those architectural ways to help us discern, kind of who we are. But there are a lot of different modalities that were brought in together, but I want you to just if you hear nothing else, it’s basically the blueprint or the owner’s manual, operators manual, that you chose for yourself to tell you how you are meant to be existing in this three-d experience. And who knew? We had an owner’s manual that told us so many ways like how we’re meant to make decisions, and how we process fear, and how we’re meant to digest food and life there’s, I mean, down to so many things that it really just offers you the opportunity to say, oh, this is what I chose for myself. Very much to your point instead of looking to others to help point us in it, quote unquote, right direction.
Victoria Volk: And I imagine like me who’s just now starting to get down the human design rabbit hole again after I dabbled in it maybe a year ago and just coming back to it now. But or human design, how did you navigate life without this manual? And what was your life experience before coming into human design?
Amy Douglas: So, I think I’m probably not different than many. We use our eyes and ears. To show us what is the path that we’re meant to take. And so whether that is witnessing it from loved ones, having someone tell you how to be and how to show up. I had a lot of that in my household. I’m the youngest of three girls. There was a lot of like this, be like this, don’t say that, don’t do that, don’t be too much, did it at, like, not necessarily the Barbie monologue, but you could probably put some words to that as well. And so I was trying to run at a pace in my life that I had witnessed was the way like, there was a lot of pride and applause for being really busy doing a lot of things and not like being quote unquote lazy there. That was a really that l word was really kind of ingrained into our household. We were not gonna tolerate laziness Well, can we redefine what lazy is? Because like, I mean, we all have the opportunity to sit and be with who we are.
Amy Douglas: I think a big pivotal change for me that led to a lot of grief in my life in twenty fourteen. I had a lot of loss in my family. I lost my dad in April. He was only sixty seven and had been battling a lot of hard stuff for nine years. So, we kind of said he had nine lives. And the last one was the taker. And then shortly after that, my mom became very ill. A lot of it was grief. Let’s be honest. They’ve been together their whole life. She ended up spending the entire summer in the hospital almost lost her a couple times. She had severe ulcerative colitis and thankfully, she’s got it at bay, but it was really challenging to negotiate and navigate her being in the hospital after losing dad. And her grieving in the hospital, in a hospital bed was traumatic. And then not no sooner did we get her home and my brother-in-law dropped dead in the shower. I mean, my mom and my sister within four months becoming widows together, it just was insurmountable. And yet I was kind of the rock in the family. Like, we’re all gonna be fine. I’ll help take care of everything. And that’s kind of what I did. I never really let myself feel anything. And honestly, to be real just completely transparent, I kinda like shut off my heart after my divorce about five years before that. I kinda just said, alright, my husband of seventeen years been together twenty, father both of my children left with my best friend. I don’t know where to process that, so I won’t I’m just gonna put on the happy face and exist. Run at the pace that I know will have me running away from any of those feelings. And then fast forward losing, so many family members and just a lot of grief with that.
Amy Douglas: And then in twenty fifteen, my dog who’d got me through my divorce and was only four years old, was diagnosed with lymphoma, and I’m like, oh, hell no, that’s the one person in that note has seen witnessed everything, one person, one thing that had witnessed everything. And so then, you know, whenever I lost him toward the end of fifteen. I was like, what the hell am I doing? And sixteen just really started a deep journey of just my own self discovery and just a lot of letting go of ways of thinking that I had to be. Really giving myself the opportunity to be very curious what I was feeling in my life. Started my journey. I hired a coach. I didn’t I mean, from the Midwest. We didn’t know what those words but my good friend, Google said that’s what you need sunshine if you’re gonna pull out of this. And so I hired a coach out of the West Coast and I was still a very much a trust bit verify kind of person. So it felt only right for me to get the education myself didn’t tell Seoul, did everything under the radar. I wasn’t allowed to moonlight in my corporate life that I was still running a ridiculous pace at. And I empowered myself through lots and lots of deconditioning, lots of letting go, which is the practice that you use in the coaching modalities and just the healing spaces of the world. In twenty nineteen, the beginning of twenty nineteen, I quit my corporate life. And that’s the year that design brought itself into my experience. And I was like, okay, I know now that I’m ready for you, but I had to do for myself a lot of the layers of letting go and, you know, getting curious versus and dropping judgment and letting myself feel things again for the first time. I hadn’t done that. I really shut that part of me off. And design came when it was meant to, and I think it does for many. I resisted it first I was like, oh my god. Just another thing to tell me, whatever. But it wasn’t a questionnaire. I wasn’t answering questions, I know how to manipulate those to get the letters I want or the data that I want. This is very specific information about your birth details. So you can’t really fake those. And it just led to just a really beautiful way of me embodying and trusting myself and believing in myself and allowing me to be unapologetically me, which is what I said I was gonna do when I left my corporate life and I think human design was the open permissions slip to do that for me.
Victoria Volk: Was there a certain moment? Do you remember where you were? What you were doing? Like this was there like this aha moment or was this was there a certain thing? Or thought or experience. Because sometimes we have these pivotal moments, right, that just change the trajectory of our life. Like, because I know so many people who might be in the corporate hamster wheel, who are scared to leave that behind, who desire to venture onto something that is a more authentic expression of who they are. What do you say to those people? How did you do that?
Amy Douglas: In July of twenty eighteen, when I was still going through well, I was in a mastermind with a bunch of coaches, and we were all supporting each other and just I never thought I was gonna lead my corporate life. Like, that wasn’t even in my radar. I was a single mom raising my children on my own. Right? And I had one daughter that was in a private college that was ridiculously expensive. The labeling of it was irresponsible. Right? If I did that. It was safe and secure for me to stay where I was even though I was really it was becoming very clear that I was miserable. My body, our body is our greatest messenger. And from about twenty sixteen, and I’m sure this was very, very grief-related, I started having all these warning signs. My hair was falling now. I had extreme insomnia. I thought for sure that I was gonna have a heart attack in my sleep and my children were gonna find me dead in the morning. Just all these terrible fears, Western medicine, is like your picture health. I am an avid exercise or eat really healthy, meditate, I all the things. And yet, what was I dismissing? What was I not paying attention to? So I think for me to answer your question in July of twenty eighteen, I wrote a contract I was at a conference with a bunch of my peer coaches. And I wrote a contract with myself of what it was gonna take for me to actually leave my corporate life. Like, I’d been ruminating on that all of twenty eighteen. Like, could I do this? Is this really what I want? Can I be free? Like, freedom has been my word since my divorce and peace, which is the signature of a manifestor, okay, has been something that I have been for lack of a better word victory chasing like, okay. What does that feel like? When am I gonna know when I have it? What’s available to me when I do? And so I wrote this contract out, very logically very corporate intense. It’s like these things must be true in order for me to leave. And my peer coaches just gave me a little, a little tap. I had them sign it as my witnesses. I was like, okay, I’m making this contract. These things must come true. And one by one over the course of the next six months, I just they were all limiting beliefs and I just let all of them go. One by one. Those were things I did not have to note that did not have to be true because they were limitations. What are limiting beliefs? They’re beliefs that limit you. From the thing that you wanna be having, being, or doing. And so by December, it was just like, oh, yeah, I’m doing this. Actually, I was on vacation in November. And I said to another couple, well, I’m leaving my corporate life in January. That’s the first time I’d set it out loud. Then I was like, oh, and very manifestor like Right? Say it out loud, and then it becomes your reality. And then by the time I did it on January second, it was a transaction. It was like it was already done. And so I think the aha was actually that contract witnessing my peers going, wow, she’s still really holding herself back without saying those words. Right? Just being intuitive enough to witness their receipts of whatever I was trying to create for myself. And then doing the work to show myself. I didn’t have to have all of these things in place because again, I was creating that safety and security which is not allowing yourself to really take the leap for what you want in your life. And I finally did.
Victoria Volk: I don’t want to gloss over all of the losses that you just scribed before. And but I also wanna talk about this the idea of fear. So can we go back in time though to that divorce? And do you think that that was a catalyst for you to start coming into your own? Really?
Amy Douglas: Oh, my heavens. Yes. I used to make a joke. Like, it was and it’s very, like, I hear it in bitterness now, but it’s like, I take a vote and I always win. What I need to do for this and who gets to do that. And I used to say, but I’m like, how do you do it? How do you do everything on your own? I’m like, well, I figured out that once he left, the only thing he really did that I wasn’t already capable of doing was put the Christmas tree in the Christmas tree stands and open the pickle jar. So I stopped buying pickles. That was easy. And every time I bought a Christmas tree here, I did that, I brought the Christmas tree stand to the Christmas tree farm and had them install it because I can. So it’s just do you see, like, it was just like, did I have the avoidant attachment style. I have now I understand that I have that. And so it’s like, I didn’t need them anyway, type of energy. But it did really empower me to be like, okay, I now get to look at what I in those in those days, I was still saying what I need to do, what I should be doing, what I have to do. I don’t use any of those words anymore. Need, should, and have to, are full of resistance. It’s what I get to do. And it took me a couple years to get there, right? Because I was still really proving my open heart, proving to myself that I could do this. I didn’t need him. I’m good, losing my best friend along with it was hard. That grief is real. It still stings. And just people through your most trusted people in your life gone in a flash and that image of what your life was. It was real. It was really beautiful life. And I remember sitting in the car with my kiddos, we were getting ready to go into a movie. Same year of the divorce. And it just was somber because we used to go to the movies as a divorce, and it was one of our favorite things to do. And I just presidential. I turned the car off. And before we went into the theater, I said, I’m aware there’s only three of us in here. And yet, I’m so grateful that there’s the three of us in here. So how can we make this the best that it can possibly be? And I think that was a real catalyst for all three of us to just be like, okay, we can grieve the loss and we still do. And yet, we can create something different. And that helped us crawl out of a lot. I think because we just prescient it. We were honest about what we were feeling. We kinda did this thing of what are we sitting in the car, staying in the car. So if you’re mad about things or just it’s okay. It’s safe in the car. Safe in the car. And then it’ll stay in the car when we get out. We don’t have to take it with us, you know. We just tried to create some spaces that felt like we’re not gonna be judged for how we’re feeling. Right?
Victoria Volk: I love that. I love that idea. How old were your children at the time?
Amy Douglas: So they would have been Ten and twelve. Yeah. Nine and eleven, ten and twelve, those were some really really hard in eleven and thirteen because Yeah. Those were some really hard years. Yeah. I think, honestly, Victoria, My son just turned twenty three. He has had a major health journey this year. Oh, my goodness. And I think we are both. He’s also an emotional manifestor like us. And I think he is allowing himself to grieve the loss of his childhood, Mhmm. And I’m so proud of him doing it now. And not waiting and carrying it all these years. He’s like, maybe I should’ve waited a couple years, like, till I got out of college and I’m like, you. Happens when we’re meant to, let’s not let’s not resist it.
Victoria Volk: And the best friend. I mean, I imagine too, like, in the relationship you had an extended, like, in your friendship with her, but in your marriage with your husband, you had not just those relationships, but you had circles of friends. Right? And so it’s not just the husband and it’s not just the best friend, it’s the circle of friends, too. Like Mhmm. Was everything just gone and one fell swoop? Like,
Amy Douglas: Yes. Yes. Yes. And we were not from the town that we were in, that this happened, we were, transplants. And we hadn’t been here long enough to really I mean, you know, three or four years just doesn’t feel like long enough where, she and her husband were lifers. Well, now, ex husband were lifers and there was just a lot of scrutiny, a lot of harshness on myself and my children. And the sporting events that you would look forward to going to. Now we’re just so isolating and dreadful. And praying the kids weren’t treated differently, but both of them were. It was just terrible. It was because they had kids and their kids were the same age as our kids and the same gender and so in the same classes and
Victoria Volk: Oh my gosh.
Amy Douglas: A lot of finger-pointing, a lot of assumptions. And while I used to say I just grew really thick skin, I think it was just the epitome of learning that what other people thought about me were none of my business because what really mattered was what I thought about me. That’s the only way I knew how to keep moving forward because I knew I was a good person. I knew that I was gonna come out of this. I knew my children were amazing. And yet, man, just a lot. I tried to get them to just like, you know what? We’re just gonna travel. I’m gonna get a tutor. Run do our own lives, but, you know, too much change, just way too much change for everything. So
Victoria Volk: I’m glad you mentioned that because my next question was going to be, did you ever just consider, like, packing all your bags and just going somewhere else and starting over and making a fresh start and without all of these reminders. I mean, whether your husband passes away or whether you get a divorce or whether it’s this scandal scandalous relationship that you’re describing, where it’s two couples, families are being torn apart. It can be very easy to just, again, like you said, add on more change in things. What like, to have the self-awareness about that, like, and to have really the courage and the strength, to stand up to it. Mhmm. I don’t know a lot of people like you. I’m just gonna say that. I mean, I mean, I’ve been doing this podcast for four years and just knowing the nature of grief and the trauma that had probably on you and your life and your kids. Most people would have just ran the other way. I never think, what was it? You think that
Amy Douglas: My daughter, she’s my oldest, and I put the house on the market. I didn’t. It was a big house. We lived on a lot of acres. We had a horse farm because my daughter used to gloved ride horses, and it was gonna be a lot to just take care of and maintenance and expensive, etcetera. And she just begged. She just said, can we just not change this? And I said, okay. We won’t change the physical location, but we are changing the energy of the inside, and we just changed so many things. I repainted everybody new furniture made rooms, different rooms just to create a totally so it wasn’t like, oh, I remember sitting in here as a family. Right? I just It was like just giving ourselves a quote unquote facelift, just like, okay. If we can’t move and create a new experience somewhere else, we’re going to create a new one here for ourselves. And I’m like, or whatever color you want your room, whatever furniture you want. Like, if you had want bunk beds because you’re done with this, let’s just change it up. Let’s change everything that we can and see what it feels like. Open g center, all three of us, so that felt really good for us. And I would have escaped in a heartbeat. And yet, I really needed to honor where they were. And when they came home and wounded by something that was said. We just I pressed it for him. I just let them talk about it and shared with them kinda what I just shared it’s not really any of our business. And I know they chose to share what they were feeling, but they don’t know us. And you’re the one that gets to look in the mirror every day and lay your head on your pillow every night. So just choose how you want to feel about yourself and that little eye rubber your glue. Whatever bounces off me, sticks to you. Like hold that little childhood chant as best you can and don’t be afraid to tell others if someone has wronged you because we’re not here to take it all in and not get any support. I had them through, counseling if they needed it. I ended up with a life coach for my daughter. That’s what really counseling just was hard. And they just wanted to keep repeating what you’d been going through, and she just wanted she’s like, I don’t wanna feel this anymore. I wanna look at where I am and look at where I’m going and that’s what coaching offers. And it was so pivotal for her. I mean, she and my ex-husband were they were, like, two peas in a pod. So that was hard. She and I thought to be out the female in the We both wanted to raise my son and now we both celebrate that we both raised my son. But it was a big dynamic change in the house. It was a lot to adjust too. And while I did a lot of my own morning and grieving after they were at bed at night, I just didn’t really want them to know that I was going through that for some reason. Now they have both their twenty three and twenty five and have both said to me, god, mom, why’d you make it look so easy? And now I wish I wouldn’t have. But yet, I was doing the best I could with what I had new then. And now I’m honest and I share with them how dreadful it was. How unbelievably hard and I thought many mornings they would find me, in my bed, gone. And while I’m grateful for the ways that I have learned, I tell them all the time I raised you through a lot of my unresolved issues, unresolved traumas, unresolved grief, and I can help presence anything that you’re feeling now, and there’s nothing wrong with anything that you’re feeling. And that feels really good to just be able to have we are the closest tight-knit threesome, and it’s fun because my daughter marrying down my son. It’s inevitable. And just like building that and deepening that, it’s so fun to be a part of. But yet, there’s nothing that’s off limits that we talk about anything and everything. And I don’t know that we would have victory if we would have stayed married. I think we would have lived in that paradigm that, okay, we’re the adults and you’re the kids, and I just let all of that go. Nope, we’re all equals here. Everybody gets a voice. So thank goodness for that.
Victoria Volk: I had full body chills as you were sharing just about the, like, because what I heard what so many grievers do is they put on this armor to be strong for everybody around them. And so what I hear you saying is that you wished you would have dropped that armor in front of them. Mhmm. More.
Amy Douglas: And as I said, our body is our greatest messenger, grief is trapped in our body for sure. And I know that what was happening when my body was sending me louder and louder messages. And so finally, I started listening. I you know, before I just had the headphones on and the, like, the little of those things called the little blenders, you know, it’s like, I gotta move forward. Everything’s forward. Everything’s forward, I’ve gotta show them, you know, I’ll take on all their pain, so they don’t have to feel it. You know? And that wasn’t the answer either. But yet, at the time, it was the solution that felt most aligned until it didn’t And then once I started doing my own work and sharing it with them, you can hear it in them, you know, my coaching, what was what was happening for me, I started embodying and then there’s that ripple effect and my son just latched onto it like, Thank goodness. My daughter was a little more resistant. She’s got a little more energy in her design than I do, and she’s like, I know more than you, and they both do. Which is brilliant. My kids are my greatest teachers by far, but we were all open to hearing each other, giving each other the space to share who we were, what we were feeling And I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful for the messages my body kept giving me. Otherwise, I would have kept up the facade that I’d built so well for myself, very intentionally because I didn’t want anybody to think that there was anything wrong. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I’m always fine. I’ve had a friend tell me before. I never know if you’re happy. I never know if you’re sad. I never know if you’re hurting. Because you just show up and you listen in such a beautiful way. And I remember thinking, I don’t wanna do that anymore. I can be unapologetically me. That’s just the language that I knew when I left my corporate life. That’s that’s what I was choosing.
Victoria Volk: Which brings me to a question of when do you feel like it’s the manifestor type, and we’ll get into the types maybe yet in this episode or maybe not. If not, we’ll we’re gonna do a part two, friends. We’ll do a part two, and it’ll be all about human design because I love that rabbit hole, but do you feel like for a manifestor specifically anyone listening as a manifestor type, which you can find on or can you find that out?
Amy Douglas: My body graph is probably the easiest one. So and you need to know your birth time, hour, and minute your birth location, city and state, country, whatever that is, and then obviously your date of birth. Most people know that one without question. But that time and the location could be a little tricky. So those are just three important things. You plug them in and butter bing, butter boom, it spits it out for you.
Victoria Volk: So if you find out you are a manifestor, my question is, do you feel like it’s a manifestor thing that we really don’t allow ourselves to be held. We really don’t allow ourselves. Like, is it a manifestor thing? Do you see?
Amy Douglas: So much. So much. And we have what’s referred to as a closed protective aura. So we’re not easily read. We’re very mysterious. So because we’re not easily read and I had built a facade for myself that no one could see, I was impenetrable. Right? Like, unless I was sharing. And oftentimes now that I do understand that I am really, really meant to share my emotional experiences It helps others. That unlocked such as, like, wait. People wanna know this. People want to hear what I’ve been through. I thought that’s what I did for others. It just And I think, our aura doesn’t empower us to Like, we kind of we’re, like, a little bit off the, you know, like, I’m not sure. A little standoffish. Is this safe? Do I wanna be a part of this? You know? Or oh my goodness, is this gonna be exhausting once I get in? We don’t have the same level of energy as, seventy percent of our counterparts. So I think I’d always been juggling some of that, but just dismissing it, which is why my body got louder and louder, you know. A lot of adrenal fatigue, that’s not uncommon at all with manifestors by any stretch. Not knowing when an up is enough. We do not have that sacral energy that our counterparts do. And so and then you combine that with my open heart, which is, again, lots of human design lingo, but you put those two together and we just we don’t know enough is enough. And I sure didn’t, I was just like, nope, I have to do this. I have to, that’s just the way that and then I started softening and I was like, oh, no, I don’t. And I love my life so much differently than I did before. I love myself differently before because if I woulda loved myself, I wouldn’t have had to build a facade. Right?
Victoria Volk: Mhmm.
Amy Douglas: Because I wanted people to see me a certain way. And now I don’t care what people see because I know who I am and the right people I will be attracted to and will attract back to me to them.
Victoria Volk: Do you feel like there is a period of time where you were looking back at all of your friendships and relationships with people on just thinking how not fake but not authentic. Because if you’re not showing up, knowing who you are, knowing what you bring to the table, understanding what your desires and needs and wants are, you’re showing up for whatever that person wants you to be. So there’s no truth and honesty in that relationship.
Amy Douglas: Actually, I have put a lot of thought into this and a lot of my learning through design. So I have an undefined g center like you. And we’re really we are chameleons and we’re meant to’s, I did have someone say to me once, cut your suit different with your corporate people. And then with your kiddos, you’re so different. And then when you hang out with us, group, you’re so different. We’re meant to. We’re meant to because we’re trying those things on and then allowing ourselves to is this kind of like, which how do I wanna mold and what do I wanna do? So I’m grateful for the years. I allowed myself to do that. I think it felt right in the moment. I think there were things that I was craving that I thought that I could get with some of the connections I was in. And once I started doing my own growth journey that really started in twenty sixteen, I was realizing the toxicity in some of the choices once I was learning more about myself. But until then, I really do feel like my connections were genuine, but I don’t know if they were for migrate or good. I think it was because, oh, they needed something from me. And I felt good about giving that. And while I still get to do that in relationship that I have, that’s not what I’m most drawn to anymore. And a lot of my growth led to letting go of people in my life. And thankfully, I’m designed that it is relatively easy and comfortable for me, and I know it’s not for the other, but it’s not mine to carry. The longer I hold onto it, the more I’m resisting what’s really meant for me. And that has become an easier and easier process for myself, especially learning my design, and the connections that I crave and desire, but I didn’t realize how much I loved my own alone time. That’s very, very common for manifestors too.
Victoria Volk: I very much do too. Mhmm. So what was the role of fear in all of that life experience as you were going through all of that. And can you speak to, like, fear in our human design just a little bit? In your human design and just.
Amy Douglas: Yeah. So a lot of the fear is housed in the spleen, which is one of the nine centers that builds the body graph of human design. I have a defined spleen as to you. And so what when we have something and I’m using that word defined, It just means that we have consistent access to the energy that’s in that center. And the spleen is very instinctual, it’s very primal. Right? The bears coming, I must run. Okay? Let’s face it folks. We don’t have a lot of bears chasing us anymore. But we still are wired to feel that fight or flight. And I think the only fear that I feel like I have connected to in my life. Like, last year, I was living in Florida, and hurricane in came. And I had no fear for it whatsoever. And I was sitting in the eye for hours and everything around me was completely destroyed. I never even lost power, I lost connection with the outside world because we lost wifi, which was devastating for my six-month pregnant daughter. And I wish I could take that back because she has an undefined spleen. So what that means for her, she doesn’t have a consistent way to process that fear. And so it’s like, fear of not enoughness, fear of rejection, fear of repeating past mistakes. There’s a lot of that that’s housed in that center where I don’t feel a lot of that. I think my fear way back before I started my own journey was, what will everyone else think? And now I couldn’t care less, or how am I gonna screw up my kids? That’s the heaviest fear in the world. Is how can I make this easier for my children? Because they didn’t ask for this. And I’m an adult and they’re not emotionally mature enough to navigate this. Quite frankly, I wasn’t even sure if I was. Because as you heard me say early on, I just buried it down. I’m a thirty five year recovering binge eater. They never knew I was doing that. Hell, my ex-husband never even knew, but I was a binge eater. Right? I know how to hide things. But what was I hiding from? Basically, myself. And so I am thankful I’m also in my profile, I’m three in human design. And so I am just like, hey, run out there and see how this works or not. And I have done that my whole life. And I don’t have a lot of fear with like, when I moved to Florida, everybody was like, oh my god. You’re leaving everything behind. I’m like, I know is it great? They’re like, you don’t know anybody. I’m like, nope. Do you even know where you’re gonna live? Yes. I secured that online, like everybody else in the world, I have a lot of that energy about myself anyway, and I don’t go into with, like, I think that contract with myself in July of twenty eighteen has helped a lot in my journaling of flushing out any limiting beliefs that somebody might label as fear. Mhmm. And I just don’t I don’t like fear and excitement or born in the same place in our body. It’s our mind that labels it as such. And so I choose excitement. That’s what I choose.
Victoria Volk: I love that. One thing we talked about before we started recording was because you have so much loss. This is where I’m, like, where do we start? Right? And I had my losses starting very early on in my life. I was a young child. And so I feel like I’ve gotten the worst part kind of over with. Hopefully, I mean, I pray that that’s the case. Right? But before we start recording, we were talking about how we both share that. Thirty five, thirty six channel. It’s that channel of emotional experiences. And I also have what did you say? I had the incarnation cross. There’s I mean, we keep going too.
Amy Douglas: Yeah. You have thirty five in your cross. So that it’s definitely a part of, you know and thirty five is more of that element of, like, desiring change and the thirty six part of it is that crises energy. It’s like something chaotic. There’s emotional turbulence in your life. And so then that kind of pushes you to the throat center of like, okay, what can I change? The biggest part of that wave, that abstract wave is what that thirty five, thirty six is referred to. It’s very emotionally volatile, is our expectations. And think about what we have in the world of expectations. Right? Of others, of the world, of our own experiences, etcetera. And this piece of my design has been absolutely life-changing for me to connect with because I didn’t realize how much chaos I was creating my own life by having these expectations out there. I cannot have expectations of others or anything that is outside of my air coating control because I want control in the highest vibration. Control is a core wound for manifestors. We don’t wanna be controlled, and we don’t wanna be controlling. And I’ve been on both sides of those that fence for sure. And so when I learned this about myself, it’s like, oh, I can drop the expectations. Like, my partner would say something to me and I hung onto it like it was the law. We were doing this. Right? Like, oh my gosh. And then when we didn’t because he’d forgotten he’d even said it, I’m like, I made it mean something about me. Like, I wasn’t worthy, I wasn’t deserving, and of course, or going back to that attachment. Well, I didn’t need it anyway. Right, that avoidant attachment. I didn’t want that anyway. And now, I just have a lot more clarity. And when he does have all these ideas and suggestions, It’s just like a little fluffy cloud and I let it float on by and I don’t hang on to it like the law. It’s more of like wouldn’t it be nice if? Type of energy, and then any expectations I have on myself, I really want to check-in on those. Am I being hard on myself again? Am I trying to prove something? I have nothing to prove. I’m enough exactly as I am. I have enough. I know enough. I am enough. And that has been a critical part of my journey. And then sharing that with others, like, especially if I see someone like you, Victoria, who has this wave. It’s like, what are we expecting? And who are we expecting it of? And how can we allow ourselves to release a lot of that? Because then it will really, you know, that way it won’t hit a way that it could if we have these expectations. And then just noticing that we’re meant to share those experiences as well it really is a game changer for a lot of people. We’re not meant to just harbor them ourselves at all. And that was that was something that I just I thought was unheard of. Why would anybody else wanna hear my trials and tribulations? Well, because it invites others to share those too, and that’s how we move through these things. And we move grief and disappointment and disgust, all those things through us when we empower ourselves to talk about it.
Victoria Volk: And then you can weave in what kind of energy type you are. If you’d have the thirty five, thirty six. Yeah. So if you are a manifesting generator or a generator, like, go do some exercises, go work out, like, just do some high impact stuff, right, to get those emotions out. But as a manifestor, is it the same? Like, to do the same? Like, what’s
Amy Douglas: So it really depends on the mechanics of your design. I have a defined route, and my route is connected to my spleen. And so that has me being someone who is really meant for movement, but any emotionality find your practice. Some people it might be meditation, just really quiet stillness. Right? Some people it might be really cathartic, like just especially as manifestors. I had my podcast co-host get me a damn it doll. You heard of those?
Victoria Volk: No.
Amy Douglas: Oh my gosh. So it’s this little doll that’s all fluffy and it’s like I can use it to hit things. Right? Or throw things or I can act as if I’m gonna pull its legs off And at first, I was like, oh, that’s so harsh, but it is so cathartic. Like, I invite clients to, like, get their anger out on pillows. And letting yourself move through it, throw access, like just move through it, you’re be surprised, dance it out, shake it off, whatever that practice can be, there are symptoms based on your mechanics of how you might do that, that anybody that is feeling something emotional, find a way to let yourself let it out holding it in is literally the worst thing you can do for yourself. But yet, that’s what I was taught Victoria. Like, nope. Suck that back in. Do not share that. And so then I stuffed it down. Stuffed it down. Stuffed it down.
Victoria Volk: And particularly as manifestors anger.
Amy Douglas: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Victoria Volk: Don’t show your anger.
Amy Douglas: And this is my son who referenced, is an emotional manifestor. That’s something he said to me recently. Thank you mom for letting me witness your anger. Because instead of, like, my daughter had a very sensitive head, and that was not the most patient person, manifestors typically aren’t doing her hair in the morning before school, before I had to go to work, it’s like all of these things. And then she, you know, they would hurt, and I have to go slower. And more than one brushes were broken. Thankfully, I never used it on her, but I would throw them or smack them down on the counter to get my anger out. And it is important that we let ourselves do that. And my son who has a lot of that anger, certainly at his age too, like things aren’t going your way. Like, letting yourself let it out, fear of judgment or shame. There is no shame in those expressions. Let it out. It often has a great message. Right? We’re misaligned with something.
Victoria Volk: For sure. And I think about too, like, in that thirty five, thirty six, what’s been helpful for me is recognizing that when you were talking about expectations, like the grief that causes us, the self-suffering that we put ourselves through by, it’s like, like you said, when someone says something you take as you take them at their word. Right? And so we can find ourselves in these situations where, well, this is how it’s always been. It’s always been this way. We’ve always we’ve always been this way. It’s different now. You’re different now. Is it a self-practice? Or is this something to communicate with the people in our lives Like, does the human design help us find the language to communicate this?
Amy Douglas: Yes.
Victoria Volk: These things?
Amy Douglas: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, a hundred percent. And again, going back to what the activations are in your design helps you share and empowers you to share your truth. And I think it’s a you said, is it this or is it that? And I wanted to say yes. Yes and both. You have to find your own practice. Wow. I just said, have to. You get to find your own practice. Right? It is important that you find a way to connect that you feel that release. You and I, Victoria, we will feel peace with that release. Right? We also will find peace we’re sharing it with others. It’s important based on our mechanics. Our connection from where all those emotions are coming from, from go straight to the throat. They are meant to be expressed. But somebody else’s mechanics in their design might look different, and so I can help invite them in the ways that they can allow and empower themselves to get through that too. But I do believe, especially in this instance for you and I, it’s a hundred percent both. I don’t think people are meant to just keep things in. That’s not safe. And I don’t care if it is an expression of like they do it in a journal or they they write a book or they have an audio file that they add to daily. I went in December of twenty two, so almost a year ago, I moved from doing a written handwritten journal to an audio app that I speak into. It transcribes it if I wanna see other words, but then I also get to listen to the emotionality of what I was feeling and experiencing. I was a very turbulent time of my life. I was thrust out of Florida where I was loving my life because my daughter was having a terrible pregnancy and I couldn’t not be there with her. I knew I didn’t want to go to Michigan in the winter. Are you kidding me? I didn’t want anything to go north. Right? And yet I did. And it was very I was holding her and her fear and her concerns and the status of her health and all of those things. And if I wouldn’t have created that practice for myself to let it out, journaling just felt like writing it down. I felt like I was filtering it. Felt like I was like, what if she found this? What if she came over and found what I was and in the audio file, it just felt safer trapped in my phone. I don’t know. You find the practice that empowers you to let it out. That’s what I’m offering.
Victoria Volk: I love that. And I think that’s a brilliant place to and this recording today. But first, I wanna give you an opportunity. And you’ve shared so much, and I feel like I do feel like I’ve glossed over so much of your losses because it’s a lot and I feel like each one of these could have their own episode. I mean, really, truthfully, I feel like I’m doing a disservice to you and your grief and to my listeners. I really do. Like, I feel like I’m shortchanging your story here. I’m giving emotional and I don’t know. I don’t know why. I mean, I know why because I’m emotional, but it’s so much. Yeah.
Amy Douglas: And yet, you give me the space to share. And this is what I’m meant to do. Right? This is what I’m meant to do. And I’m double-barreled, is what it’s referred to.
So both of my emotional waves go from my solar plexus to my throat, our emotional center to our communication center, And so one kind of softens the other. And so the way that I feel called to share it is empowering for me. And it’s like part of my deconditioning process because you gave me the space to share it. And if I don’t sound emotional about it, it’s because I’ve done the work to let myself say, it’s okay. I’ve been through it. I’ve navigated it. And now I am meant to share it so others can have their space. And feel empowered and safe and almost given permission to do it for themselves as well. So I don’t feel like it’s been glossed over. At all. Mhmm. I felt like you’ve given me the space to share. And if it helps someone else, oh, that feels so delicious to me.
Victoria Volk: To me as well. So thank you for sharing that. And I want to give you an opportunity to share how people can the different ways people can work with you. And we’ve got, the holidays are coming up. It’s we’re still in October yet, but the holidays are coming up, and you’d shared briefly or recorded recording. One of your offerings is a great Christmas gift, so please share how people can work with you and where can they find you.
Amy Douglas: So the best place to go, I’m not a big social media person. It’s not uncommon kind of in my manifestor world. But Amyadouglas.com is my website and that has and there’s a page for all of my offerings. If you’re curious about human design, the one that you’re referencing Victoria is that little audio file. I do about a twenty five minute mini reading. It is full of deliciousness. It’s like the first glance of everything I see about your design, and it’s so fun to share. I have a lot of moms that give it to their kiddos. Also, by the way, it’s so great for the moms to hear about their kiddos. Because we think how can they be mine.
We’re so different. Hello? We’re all different and we all choose. And it’s so beautiful to witness seen a mom and a child understand each other without those that hierarchical position. Right? So you can see that I also weave human design into a lot of the ways that I support others in coaching. And those offerings are on there as well. I have digital courses. So, and you can connect with me on what I think that’s probably just the best place. I will happily offer your listenership twenty five percent off of any reading. And I’ll give you a coupon code if you want me to have the coupon code be the name of your podcast. Does that feel
Victoria Volk: Yeah. Sure.
Amy Douglas: Most recorded for you. So The Unleashed Heart will be the coupon code
Victoria Volk: or grieving voices.
Amy Douglas: Grieving voices. Okay. The Unleashed Heart is your website. Right?
Victoria Volk: Yep. Yep.
Amy Douglas: Okay. So the coupon code will be Grieving Voices which would afford any of your listeners twenty five percent off of my human design offerings. And happy to connect. I even have, like, a little thirty minute call if you just wanna chat about what might be best for you. You can sign up for something like that as well.
Victoria Volk: Thank you so much for your time today, and your strength and your courage have I just adore you. I’ve gained so much I mean, I respected you before, but just hearing all that you’ve gone through and experienced, I really, as a manifestor to a fellow manifestor, like, thank you. Thank you for sharing. We are small, but we are strong in mighty in numbers. So the world needs you and the world needs all of us to understand ourselves better because like you said, it’s the ripple effects of that. And the work that we do within ourselves that changes the world. So Yeah. It’s pretty
Amy Douglas: Beautifully said. Yes. Thank you, Victoria. It’s been my absolute pleasure to be with you today.
Victoria Volk: And stay tuned for the part two to come out. We’ll get that scheduled soon because I really am excited to dive deep into all things human design. So until then, remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Emotions, Energy, Grieving Voices Podcast, Mental Health, Mind/Body Wellness, Podcast, solo episode, Spirituality |
Biofield Tuning: Raising Voltage & Harmonizing the Body
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Biofield Tuning is a type of sound healing that helps to relieve emotional and physical stress. It is a holistic wellness modality that uses the vibration from tuning forks to induce targeted relaxation and to recalibrate our vibrational rhythms from stressors that deplete us. Your biofield or aura is the electromagnetic energy field that surrounds your body, which extends 5-6′ in all directions from your body. It is connected with your conscious and subconscious mind, including all your memories.
Because we are electrical beings, what affects one part affects the whole. What happens within the body is expressed in the body’s magnetic field (or Biofield). And what is stuck, perturbed, or tangled in the magnetic field informs the body – they are connected. Through Biofield Tuning, we can use electromagnetism within (and around) the body to rewire, recharge, and raise the body’s voltage.
In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle describes the “pain body” as “the remains of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.” In Biofield Tuning, we work within the energy field to bring harmony so the body can operate at its fullest energetic potential and expression. This harmony brought to the body can be incredibly supportive to those grieving.
***SURPRISE! Through October, I’m offering ✨10 discount codes ✨ for NEW Energy Healing Clients. Use the code grievingvoices10 to receive 10% off any energy healing session. You don’t have to schedule in October to receive the discount. If the code does not work, all ten codes have been redeemed. ***
RESOURCES:
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NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, whatever time it is you’re listening to this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in and for pushing play and for being here. If this is your first time listening, this is a great episode to start with, but if not, thank you for tuning in again.
Victoria Volk: Today, I want to talk about something I haven’t talked about yet on the podcast and shared with you, and that is about biofield tuning which is an energy healing modality that I offer in person and over distance. And I’ll get into a lot of stuff today, so let’s get into it.
Victoria Volk: So the founder of biofuel tuning Eileen McKusick. She created her own set of tuning forks and the process of biofuel tuning. And she mapped out the biofield through her twenty-plus years of research and then working with individuals and groups. But biofield tuning is a type of sound healing that helps to relieve emotional and physical stress. It is a holistic wellness modality that uses the vibration from tuning forks to induce targeted relaxation and to recalibrate our vibrational rhythms from stressors that deplete us.
Victoria Volk: Your biofield or aura is the electric magnetic energy field that surrounds your body. It extends five to six feet out from you and it is connected with your conscious and subconscious mind, including all of your memories. A biofield tune introduces a coherent sound into the energy field, allowing the body’s nervous system to release subtle energy that creates dissonance in our lives. By activating a tuning fork in the biofield that offers your body the information it needs to recalibrate itself. During a biofield tuning session, a client lies fully clothed on a treatment table while the practitioner slowly scans the body, with an activated tuning fork beginning from a distance. If the session is conducted at a distance, the client may rest quietly and comfortably in their home or go about their day. Although I do find clients appreciate the opportunity to connect and rest during this session but either way, the energetic turbulences that must be addressed will come up regardless of what you do during the session. As your practitioner, I feel for resistance and turbulence in your energy field. I also listen for a change in the overtones and undertones of the tuning fork. And when a turbulent area is encountered, I continue to activate the tuning fork holding it in that area.
Victoria Volk: And research suggests that the body’s organizational energy uses the tuning fork steady coherent vibrational frequency to tune itself. Soon the dissonance results and the resistance gives way. This resistance seems to correspond to the release of subconsciously held tension in the body. One might interpret this as a kind of targeted nervous to biofeedback. Eileen founder has come to see this process as consciousness hacking, a side door entry into the psyche, working with what has been hidden in plain view, which assists people in making changes they otherwise could not on their own. Holding an activated tuning fork in the area of the traumatic memory or another challenging period produces repeatable, predictable outcomes. The sound input helps the body digest and integrate unprocessed experiences. As the biofield dissonance subsides, clients generally report feeling lighter and diminishing or resolving of their symptoms.
Victoria Volk: So we can think of the human body as a tuning, self-tuning instrument just like you can use a tuning fork to tune a piano. You can also use the tuning fork to tune the body as I’ve talked about. And as I mentioned, biofuel tuning uses these tuning forks to scan through the body’s electromagnetic field and then finds that distance and resistance. And anything with electric current running through, it has a magnetic field around it. A changing magnetic field can cause electric changes, charges to move, essentially moving energy. Because if you remember from high school science class, energy can neither be changed nor destroyed. It can only be moved.
Victoria Volk: A vibrating tuning fork produces electricity and therefore magnetism. The tuning fork acts like a magnet, moving charges within the body’s magnetic field, shifting how electricity moves through the body. Pain can be experienced as too much electric current through the wires or the nerves. And we know that magnetic fields guide electric currents. So by shifting the body’s magnetic field, and thus shifting the electrical flow in the body, we can release pain, tension, stuck emotions and trauma.
Victoria Volk: Pain is essentially a manifestation of too much electrical current through the wires, and we can redirect that energy by manipulating the magnetic field. And with tuning forks, we can sense the rhythms of the currents in the body in a similar way to how punctured needles are used. Essentially, I and other certified biofuel tuning practitioners are bioelectricians.
Victoria Volk: In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle describes the pain body, which he describes in which we describe in biofuel tuning as being perturbations and stuck energy, Eckhart states that “the remains of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body”.
Victoria Volk: In my work with grievers and from my personal experience, I can tell you that traumatic events or experiences which don’t have to be significant tea traumas, by the way, and grief overall manifest in the body. Through countless conversations with people and the deep internal work I’ve done to work through my past, I can tell you that when we have experiences that throw us off kilter, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, etcetera, our voltage goes way down. We become more susceptible to illness or injury due to reduced focus and concentration and have less energy to sustain us to meet our goals and sometimes even our daily needs. And after this point, we find ourselves on a slippery slope of feeling depressed, lacking passion, and just getting by day to day, living a lackluster life where we begin to forget who we were before life knocked us down. Where we no longer see possibilities, but instead roadblocks and find it far too easy to make excuses for ourselves.
Victoria Volk: If you’ve experienced periods of challenge and adversity in your life and believe you’ve addressed those things, take a moment to take a bird’s eye view of your life from that period on. Zoom way out. Look at your life. Do you recognize shifts within your energy? How you showed up for yourself, your partner, friends, colleagues and how you’ve functioned at work and in life. Have you resorted to alcohol or other means to relax your afraid nerves? Have you needed a crutch to sleep at night? Does food or shopping fill a void created by a feeling of lack in some area of her life? Such as love, affection, recognition, or attention because we are electrical beings what affects one part affects the whole. And what happens within the body is expressed in the body’s magnetic field or biofield. And what is stuck, perturbed, or tangled in the magnetic field informs the body. They are connected. Through biofuel tuning, we can use electromagnetism within and around the body to rewire recharge, and raise the body’s voltage.
Victoria Volk: I can tell by looking at someone’s posture, stride when they walk or overall how they carry themselves, where they may have an area of dissonance or resistance in their body and magnetic field. For example, the shoulders are telling because the left shoulder’s energetic imbalance relates to sadness, grief, and loss. Meanwhile, the right shoulder imbalance relates to saying yes when we mean no and emotional caretaking. And by looking at someone’s posture, it’s easy to visualize which shoulder on the person is likely a source of energetic imbalance. Every energy center, which you may know also as chakras, relates to an area each governs such as the third eye governing the pineal gland and the brain, as well as what the energy of that center relates to emotionally and its function when it’s healthy or imbalanced.
Victoria Volk: A healthy third eye center, which relates to our intuition and thought processes gives us a clear third eye perception, mental focus, and acuity. An unhealthy low energy, third eye, would have us struggling with focus and experiencing a distrust or disconnection from our intuition. Furthermore, depending on which side the imbalance also occurs, the right or left side means something a little different too. An imbalance of the third eye chakra on the right side which is the masculine side relates to overthinking the past whereas the left, the feminine side relates to worrying about the future. Add in a traumatic experience where your sense of safety and security was jeopardized, or taken away, which this relates to the first chakra, the root chakra located in the tailbone, and your entire central channel is likely compromised and imbalanced. In such experiences, grounding practices are a supportive way to help yourself. There is so much more sciencey information I could go into in this episode, which I totally would love to share and geek out over with you. However, I fear I’d lose some of you listening who are more interested in what’s in it for you and who it’s for. And who it isn’t for and more commonly asked questions, which I’ll get into in a moment.
Victoria Volk: However, suppose you’d like to dive into the science behind biofield tuning. In that case, I recommend checking out Eileen’s book tuning the human biofield, where she digs into deep into the science of energy itself, including but not limited to biophotons and thermodynamics. Much of which is above my head, but is precisely why I was drawn to biofuel tuning. As a skeptic myself, I was searching for what feels like truth to me and needing the facts the science behind biofuel tuning is what peaked my curiosity and drew me in.
Victoria Volk: So, alright. Well, let’s get to some FAQs about biofuel tuning. And here’s just a quick down and dirty of a few facts about some Q and A about biofuel tuning that if you’re listening, if you’re thinking this might be for you, this is a great segment for you to listen to. So conditions that biofuel tuning may help with include, but are not limited to, concussion recovery, which I have to say, if it’s been less than six months since you’ve had a concussion, you should probably wait to have biofuel tuning. Anxiety, addiction, adrenal stress, digestive issues, PTSD, fear or phobias, panic attacks, vertigo, menstrual issues, depression, pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions, migraines or headaches, restless leg syndrome.
Victoria Volk: And those with the following are not candidates to receive biofuel tuning however, could receive Reiki, which is another healing modality I provide. So if you’re pregnant, have cancer, a terminal illness, a pacemaker, pain stimulator implants, or are very sick these are precautions that we take with biofuel tuning. Eileen has stated that these conditions or precautions and that as practitioners, we use common sense that, you know, we should be using common and because every situation is different and nuanced, in some circumstances, it’s best to avoid biofield tuning altogether and other times where a gentle approach may be taken such as using weighted forks It is the practitioner’s discretion. And I and personally, I think that less is more in these circumstances. So what can you expect during a session? There is no guarantee that a specific result will occur from biofield tuning. However, what can happen is you can experience detox like symptoms. As the body releases tension toxins in constricted tissues are released, which may produce flu like symptoms exhaustion, waves of emotion, loose stools, and in extreme cases, which are very rare, rashes, and vomiting. However, clients also report feeling lighter, having more energy, clarity of mind, and a feeling of energetic ease and flow.
Victoria Volk: So how many sessions would I need to experience before I can expect to receive benefits from biofuel tuning? So biofuel tuning just like any healing modality is cumulative. So every session builds on the one prior to it. Like chiropractic trains the bones to find their balanced relationship, biofuel tuning, trains the magnetic electrical system of the body to flow in a balanced rhythmically, harmonious way. So if a person has had long term, extreme, nonbeneficial inputs, it may take longer to achieve balance. Younger people respond more quickly than older people. Generally, a minimum of three sessions is recommended to begin, often a presenting symptom can be cleared within three sessions. If there is no change in a condition after three sessions, then it is likely that biofuel tuning will not be able to help with that particular condition.
Victoria Volk: Is there an age limit for receiving biofuel tuning? As there is no age limit for receiving biofuel tuning, however, less is more with seniors, those who are over age sixty five and with children who generally should receive shorter sessions. Children between the ages of two to six can become hyperactive after a biofiltering session. So I do offer thirty minute sessions for seniors over sixty-five and children who are thirteen and under.
Victoria Volk: Can biofuel tuning treat issues like depression or bipolar disorder? Yes. Eileen views, conditions such as depression and or bipolar disorders as tonal imbalances, rather than chemical imbalances, which can be readily addressed with biofuel tuning. For example, during a biofuel tuning scan, a bipolar person will exhibit high tones associated with anxiety and mania as well as low tones linked with depression, but a mid-tone range will be absent. In such cases, the practitioners’ biofuel tuning to quiet the high tones, and lift the low tones, which will strengthen the mid-tone range. This helps the recipient achieve a more balanced state.
Victoria Volk: Does biofuel tuning work on animals? Animals respond beautifully to biofuel tuning. Biofuel tuning has helped pets stops being fearful of thunder, more trusting of strangers, stop fussing with hot spots and generally enter a healthier relaxed state. Pets respond well to in person biofuel tuning and when they receive it from a distance.
Victoria Volk: How does biofield tuning work from a distance? I lean herself scoffed at the idea of offering biofield tuning at a distance until she was convinced to give it tried by a friend who was a doctor. What she found, astonished even her. There was no difference in the client’s experience. To understand how distance healing works. It helps to understand what the ether is. One of the biggest omissions in our collective cosmology or understanding of the nature of life is ether. Essentially, either is the ocean of clear light that all creation arises from. Information travels through this medium much faster than light speed because the information of the entire field is accessible at any point. While the term aether is not in our popular sycambe. The concept of the phenomenon persists and has been referred to by many other names including the zero point field, the source field, the torsion field, the field, the acacic field and even the higgs field, whose definition is an invisible energy field that exists throughout the universe. And is very similar to the definition of aether. This can potentially explain the mechanics of how distant healing works. For example, with intention, transfer your awareness from your left foot and then into your right hand. Notice that there is no sense of that awareness having to travel in a linear way through your body. In the same way, a client can place their intention, their awareness, and their consciousness on a treatment table regardless of where it is in actuality. It is through this same kind of intention that vibrational patterns can be found at a distance with a biofield tuning practitioner’s tuning fork and modulated into a more coherent and harmonic expression.
Victoria Volk: As the nonlocal interconnective medium that unifies us all in real time, aether is the missing link in so called paranormal phenomena such as remote viewing and distance healing. Of course, this is all very sciencey. And in a nutshell, I always like to simply say, time knows no space, time or sequence.
Victoria Volk: And I’ve had several clients who use to always be in-person clients and receive biofield tuning or reiki and have since switched to distant sessions because of the convenience mostly, but also because they haven’t noticed any less benefit to receiving. So what is here’s one last Q and A.
Victoria Volk: What is biofield tuning detox? Which I mentioned previously. The biofield tuning recipient may experience a detox response after a session which is completely normal and means the body is releasing the stress and trauma. Generally, these symptoms pass within one to three days. And the following are possible symptoms of detox, fatigue, waves of emotions like crying or being angry or sad, loose stools, exhaustion, headaches, or dizziness, flu like symptoms, or in very rare cases, skin rashes, mucus, fever, vomiting, excessive thirst. If clients have an extreme detox response from their biofuel tuning session, I ask them to contact me. Otherwise know that a detox is good. It means the energy and toxins are moving and are being released, and I always say that are out than in.
Victoria Volk: Alright. So there you have it. A lot of info packed into one episode about a modality that I’m thrilled to share with you today. If you’ve never considered or received an energy healing biofuel tuning, it’s a great place to start if you want more bang for your buck, so to speak. I say that as someone who strictly offered reiki for several years before discovering biofuel tuning. So if you loved learning about this modality, please share this episode with a friend who may also find it interesting. And to learn more, you can check out Eileen’s book I previously mentioned or her website biofueltuning.com or my website to learn more. Check out the show notes for all the links. And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Emotions, Grieving Voices Podcast, Mental Health, Podcast, solo episode |
I Can’t Stop Crying
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
What is your opinion or belief about crying? What has been your life experience with crying? As a child, were you told to stop being a “crybaby?” Or, if you wanted to cry, your parent would give you something to cry about?
If you reflect on your relationship to crying for a moment, you may see that the patterns and behaviors about crying likely haven’t changed much as an adult. That is unless you’ve done considerable emotional personal development work. Just like we have to build our self-confidence muscle, our emotional intelligence, like a muscle, needs attention, too.
Do you know people who have used crying as a manipulation tactic to get what they want? Have you known people who have used crying to bypass what is emotionally going on – using it not to have to talk about what they’re feeling? Maybe you’ve done one or both of these things yourself. Most of us have, at some point in our lives, particularly as children, when there was something we wanted. Depending on the behavior emulated for you as a child, perhaps these behaviors were learned and are tactics you rely on today.
This episode aims to get you thinking about crying and your relationship to it. As well as to consider how the ways others respond to the grief and loss in their lives may differ from you – and allowing that to be okay and not judging the other person for it.
And for funsies, if you haven’t seen the 1990 movie Crybaby with Johnny Depp and Ricki Lake, it’s a fun role to see Johnny Depp play.
RESOURCES:
Victoria Volk: Hey, Hey, Hey. Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode. This is episode one sixty-two already. And I just wanna take a moment to thank you for being a regular listener if you are, if you’re brand new, Thank you for being here. And if you found me through someone else sharing it with you, I hope you paid it forward and share it with someone else you know her love. Let me find the content of grieving voices helpful. I really enjoy bringing on guests who I am personally curious about and love to know more about. In an effort that what they have to share will be meaningful, and helpful to you the listener. And so if this podcast is, I asked that you please leave a review five stars if you would please. It really helps the podcast continue to grow but more importantly sharing it with someone who really does maybe need to hear whatever that episode is that you feel inclined to share. I hope you share it. Follow that nudge. If there’s someone that you’re thinking about, like, oh, so and so should really hear this hear this episode, follow that nudge. Share it with them because that nudge was given to you for a reason.
Victoria Volk: There’s many examples in my life where I follow the nudges and you just feel really good when you do. You can’t be wrong when you’re listening to your inner voice, which really knows better than our ego. So listen to that inner voice if you feel called to share this with someone or any other episode for that matter. And I greatly appreciate a review if you have five minutes to do so.
Victoria Volk: So, yeah, let’s get into today’s episode where I wanna talk about crying. Growing up, I cried a lot. I had a lot to cry about, but I cried a lot, and it was I’m I would I would say that I’m a highly sensitive person. And as a child going through so much grief and loss, traumatic things happening and a lot of change, just from age five on it was a lot for a child to take in for any child to take in and a lot of children are going through really difficult times. And what do you do with those big emotions? Adults really I mean, we as adults don’t even know what to do with their big emotions half the time, particularly with anger. And so when a child is expressing these things, including anger, it can be confronting for adults. You don’t know what to do, and so it’s easier to just say just go to your room and cry. I don’t you know, they don’t wanna see it. Adults don’t wanna see it. They don’t want it in their face. I’m not saying all adults, I’m just these are very generalization, very much generalizations.
Victoria Volk: But as particularly, I will say, adults who have not address their own emotions or really have sat with their own emotions. Maybe their children who grew up and are continuing those behaviors because that’s what they were taught. That’s all they know. You get angry, you punch a wall, you spew words to other people that are just out of character. We just don’t know what to do with their big emotions including grief, anger, sadness, all of these things that are part of the human experience.
Victoria Volk: In particular though, I wanna talk about crying though because we have this idea that when someone passes away and no one’s and the person isn’t crying, that they’re somehow detached or they just that’s abnormal. It’s abnormal behavior to not cry when someone close to them passes away. And so I just think that this is an important topic to talk about. And on the flip side of that, I mean, people can use crime as a way to manipulate as well. Right? Like, we can turn on our acting skills on a dime sometimes to get what we want. This is if we have needs that aren’t being met, our egos can really get creative and our minds can really get creative on how we obtain what we desire, what we want to help us to feel better.
Victoria Volk: So I wanna dive into crying today, and I think there’s a lot of confusion about crying. Like how much crying is enough? If I start crying, will I be able to stop? Do I have to cry at all? I’ve cried and cried, but I still don’t feel better. Is there something wrong with me?
Are men and women different when it comes to crying? So I wanna talk about all of these things and you might be recognizing yourself in some of the scenarios that I share. Many of you listening may have yourself experience this first scenario. Let’s say you’re an older child and you’re very worried about your father or your mother because several years ago the other parent passed away and you believe that your parent is devastated by the death of their spouse, but your surviving parent hasn’t cried yet. And we can use the word yet in an air quotes because you might have this belief audious belief that in order to grieve that you must cry. And the fact is that maybe you did not see your parent cry. Does that mean that they haven’t cried? And it doesn’t mean that they haven’t cried in private. Or that they will or will not talk about it. So well-meaning children are concerned because they believe that there is this absolute and direct correlation between grief and crying. And of course, you believe that your parent’s heart is broken. And surely, that is usually the case. Right? And so where is it written that you must cry when you are sad? I mean, think about that. Not everybody displays an outward expression of emotion. In the beginning of this episode, I shared how as a child, I would cry to hide. I think I’ve said that on this podcast a few times. I still do. I still do. Because I think there’s still probably a part of me that feels like it’s not safe to or that it’s not allowed or that there’s something wrong with me because as I mentioned, I’m an emotional person. I feel deeply about things, about people, about experiences. I feel it very deeply, good or bad, you put those in air quotes because it’s not good or bad, it just is. Right? It’s part of being human.
Victoria Volk: But I think it’s important for us to recognize that not everybody grows up in a home where it’s okay to cry openly. And especially, like, older generations where you did not display that type of weakness, deemed weakness. I say crying as weakness, but it’s not. But there is this mindset that exists, that it’s weak to cry and it’s a societal norm that women, yes, cry more and men not as much, and if men cry, then that’s somehow, oh my gosh, this guy’s crying, you know?
Victoria Volk: So I think it’s becoming more acceptable in society for men to openly express themselves with tears and that takes strength. It does take strength to openly share your emotions. It’s vulnerability that we need more of truthfully in this world. And it’s an authenticity that It’s not acting, like, you can’t act that when it’s coming from an authentic and vulnerable place.
Victoria Volk: So let me ask you this, have you ever known anyone who cries all the time, but never seems to change or grow? Have you ever known anyone who uses crying as a manipulation to get something? And there is a high probability that you will answer yes to both of those questions. And both of those questions are designed to explain the fact that crying in and of itself does not necessarily lead to completion of the pain caused by death, divorce, or any other losses. And at best, crying acts as a short-term energy-relieving action and relieves temporarily some of the emotional energy generated by loss.
Victoria Volk: So you might know people who’ve been crying over the same loss daily for years and years. And we know that the crying has not helped them complete what is emotionally incomplete in their relationship with their loved one who had died or the person for whom they are divorced or restrained or whatever the circumstance maybe. As our society is continuing to evolve, we are seeing the shift in the public display of emotion as I mentioned. And in today’s world, it is not at all unlikely to even see a retiring professional athlete, with this all this masculinity, weeping openly in a televised press conference. So it is hard to imagine that the same scenario occurring thirty to forty years ago would have a different outcome that was not the thing thirty to forty years ago. So if you’re male parent is seventy years old or older, he is more likely to be affected by different beliefs about the open play of emotions than you are. Even your female parent is liable to be less willing to communicate sad, painful, or negative emotions than you. And we must fight this trap of applying our emotional value system to others. And it may seem odd since your parents are the ones who taught you but that you have a different emotional view than they do.
Victoria Volk: And I think that’s where, especially, today, with that, like, people in my generation, the sandwich generation, our parents, my mom is eighty years old they didn’t openly talk about the really painful stuff. They just didn’t. And so it’s as time goes on and we learn and we grow and this podcast like this one exists and the more we talk about grief, the more this will shift in society as a whole. And maybe when I’m eighty, I will be the opposite. I will be more communicative about painful times. And I am already. I am already, but I’ve come to know this stuff and I’ve done a lot of personal work on myself. And I think that’s the key. Is so many of the people on that generation, the older generation there wasn’t, like, talk space and better help and just it was a different time. It was just a completely different time. And so as we’re evolving as a society, I do see this shifting, and I do see this changing, and it already is. I mean, here I am sitting on and I have my own podcast and I’m using my voice in ways that I never did and never felt safe to as a child. And I think I’m I mean, that’s a whole another podcast. I could do a whole podcast on throat wounds. The throat chakra wound of just being having your voice suppressed or not being able to express yourself, which maybe I will do an episode on that because I think it’s hugely important that we recognize our wounds so that we can heal them within ourselves. And this podcast and doing the work that I’ve personally done on myself has helped me to heal my throat wound were crying wasn’t, something that was acceptable. I mean, yes, go cry, but I don’t wanna see it. Go hide to cry was the message I received and I did. And so I guess, again, as we come into our own, we recognize where we need to do the work for ourselves. And for me, it was in the expression of emotion because I suppressed so much. And I think as grievers, many of us have grown up in homes and in this belief system that we just don’t talk about what is hurting us. And so just keep that in mind as I’m continuing on with this episode.
Victoria Volk: So the short of what I’ve just talked about is basically that it can be dangerous and counterproductive to attach our personal ideas and beliefs to how other people express their grief, given the fact that many people will communicate tremendous depth of emotion and never shed a tear, while others cry all the time, but don’t seem to complete the pain, nor derive any long term benefit from crying.
Victoria Volk: And so let’s talk about the gender issue and uniqueness of individuals and relationships as well as what function crying serves and for whom. There is research that indicates that tears of sadness differ in chemical makeup from tears of joy and that tears perform the valuable function of washing the eyes and women cry on average five times more than men. And the grief recovery institute has actually tried to find research, like psychological basis for this five-to-one ratio of women crying more than men, and they couldn’t find it. And failing to find any valid studies on crime would support a physical distinction by gender. But they couldn’t find the research.
Victoria Volk: So what the Great Recovery Institute did do is do their little own anecdotal research that they believe represents the truth. They had called some nurse friends whose life experience is working with infants. And without exception, they indicated that the circumstances and frequency with which very young infants cry is not dictated by gender. Little baby boys and little baby girls cry equally. There are clear personality differences between individual babies. Some cry more than others, not by gender, but rather by individual uniqueness. And they did not limit their research to those who worked only with newborns. They got some of the same responses from experts who worked with children up to the age of five. From age five onwards, distinction by gender and attitudes and beliefs began to magnify. This informal study led to the inescapable conclusion that socialization, not gender, was the key to later differences of attitude and expression regarding crying.
Victoria Volk: So although there really isn’t an innate physiological difference between males and females when it comes to crying, we must still ask what purpose or value, if any, does crime have in recovery from loss?
Victoria Volk: So let us say that crying can represent a physical demonstration of emotional energy attached to a reminder of someone or something that has some significance for you.
Victoria Volk: In fact, during grief recovery work that I do with clients when someone starts crying, I ask them to talk while they cry. The emotions are contained in the words that the griever speaks, not in the tears that they cry. And so what’s fascinating to observe is that as the thoughts and feelings are spoken, the tears usually disappear and the depth of feeling communicated seems much more powerful than just tears alone.
Victoria Volk: And I can add in my personal experience when I was going through the program myself in Austin, Texas in early twenty nineteen, I was overcome with emotion. And I don’t know that there were enough tissues in the box and snot was coming down my knows and I mean, I was a mess. I looked like an emotional mess and a wreck. However, I continued on with the exercise just as I was instructed to do and at the end of it, I can tell you, like, even now when I reflect back on it, had I just been crying, had I just let my tears fall and not have been communicating through this exercise, what I was feeling, I don’t know I don’t believe the impact would have been as great as it was because the person that came to that training and that experience was a different person on the flight home. I was completely emotionally transformed from that experience. The work that you put into it is exactly the output that you get, the more that you put into the experience, the more you get out, and that’s with anything. That’s with any kind of program or coaching or anything as long as you are open and willing to put in the emotional work into it, you will get a return of that investment.
Victoria Volk: And again, like just sitting home alone and crying is not gonna get you the results in your life that you’re looking for. So when we think about this idea that it’s not the tears, but yet the communication that helps people heal. And in talking about our experiences, let’s bring that back to the conversation about the adult child and the parent whose other parent passes away if you believe that your parents’ heart is broken, it doesn’t take words to show that. Right? We can see when someone’s heart’s broken based on their body language, their tone, and other factors that show us that someone is being deeply affected by a loss of a loved one or an experience they’re having in their life. And for some people, it might be unusual or uncommon for them and may be even uncomfortable, for them to cry.
Victoria Volk: And frankly for some people, it might not even have any real benefit. But brace yourself for this next part because on the other hand, don’t be fooled by those who cry frequently. In one of the strangest of all paradoxes, people can use crying as a way to stop feeling rather than to experience great depths of emotions so it can go the opposite way. The tears can become a distraction from the real pain caused by the loss. The key to recovery from the incredible pain caused by death, divorce, and all other losses is contained in a simple statement. Each of us is unique and each of our relationships is unique. Therefore, we must cover and complete what is emotionally unfinished for us in all of our relationships. Our personal belief systems about the display of emotions are also unique and individual. We may not even have a conscious awareness of what our own beliefs even are an alert to everyone, young or old, don’t let anyone else dictate what is emotionally correct for you. not even your children, or your parents ,only you get to determine what is correct for you.
Victoria Volk: If you need help, in discovering or determining what might help you deal with a broken heart caused by a death or a divorce. I highly recommend you get in touch with me or check out the book, The Grief Recovery Handbook. I will put a link to it in the show notes, that will I guarantee you, that will have you connecting so many dots and you’ll have so many aha moments while you read that book. I really firmly believe that it could be a game changer as you are on your path working through your grief and looking at it and trying to recover from it. But don’t take this podcast episode that I’m any way against crying. Like I mentioned several times now throughout this episode that I’m a big cryer I can be. Not near as much as I used to be because what’s changed for me from a child to an adult is that as a child I didn’t have the skills or the know how and how to process what I was feeling to work through my feelings and the emotions. I didn’t have a way to do that. I didn’t know how to do that. Most children don’t and most children are not taught how to do that. And so as we grow into adulthood, we continue those behaviors until we learn differently, until we learn better healthier ways to address what’s happening for us emotionally. And so I don’t have to cry, I don’t feel the need to cry as much as even near as much as I used to. I have to be really emotionally charged, feel either like, an immense an immense an immense amount of gratitude in a moment or an immense amount of sorrow or hurt or pain, emotional pain, whatever it is, to cry. And that those moments are far widened in between and that’s not good and that’s not bad. It’s just what is and but I’m connecting why that is. And for me why that is, because I have the tools to process what I’m feeling emotionally. I have energy work that I can use in those tools I can use to process my emotions. And to catch myself before I get to a place where I can’t control my emotions. This is what it means to develop our emotional intelligence. And as we do that, we don’t feel the need to cry as much because we have gain skills and tools that support us so that we’re not using tears as a way to bypass our emotions, and we’re not using tears to manipulate. And we’re not using tears as without that emotional component we’re addressing.
Victoria Volk: So I’m not against crying. And in fact, I expect people to cry when I’m working with them one-on-one or in groups. In grief recovery. I expect them to cry. I cried. Right? You’re learning this stuff for the first time in that situation. I expect that you’ll probably cry. And that’s okay. But to get to the point where you’re in recovery from the emotional pain, that’s really the end goal. That’s the end game for the people that I work with, and even for myself and my own healing. So when fond memories are turning painful, we wanna use these tools so that they don’t turn painful anymore. So that it that’s where those tears will come. Right? I’m here for you to have a life of meaning and value even though a loss or losses may have made your life drastically different than what you had hoped or dreamed. And trust me, I have plenty of relationships in my life, and I’ve had plenty of relationships in my life that are different and were different from what I had hoped and dreamed.
Victoria Volk: And so I hope that this episode has gleaned some insight into crying a little bit. I know this is something that we don’t really even think about. Right? We just you think crying is always a good thing. And yet, there is a there is a shadow side to crying. It can be used to manipulate. It can be used to bypass our own emotions, yes, an emotion is prompting the crying, but is it a painful memory? And that’s a thing. So if it’s a painful memory, then you probably have something left there that’s emotionally incomplete for you. And that’s where I’m trying to get to the heart of. That’s what I work with people to address. And that’s what I’ve put a lot of work into myself to address.
Victoria Volk: So what do you think about crying now? Share your thoughts with me. Find me on Instagram @theunleashedheart or on Facebook, Victoria The Unleashed Heart. Or shoot me an email [email protected] and share your thoughts about this episode. I’m really curious what you have to say about crying. And if you found it insightful, share it with someone else who you think might find it insightful too. And if there’s any questions that you have that you would like to be addressed or here addressed on this podcast, then you can reach out me on social or via email as well. Alright, my friends, thank you for tuning in to this episode, and I hope to reach your listening ears once again. And in the meantime, remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Death/Dying, Energy, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Podcast, Spirituality |
Dr. Amirah Hall Part II | Quantum Energy Tools to Discover Your Divine Design
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
In this Part II episode with the previous guest, Dr. Amirah Hall, we dig deeper into the energetics of our life experience.
A near-death experience catapulted Amirah into a realm of energy work she had not anticipated finding herself doing. However, it’s also probably what saved her from herself. As she states in this episode, we tend to stand in our way.
Through a set of what she calls quantum energy tools, she developed a daily practice that is grounding and that initiates herself into the present moment. From a place of awareness, she shares a way that all of us can shed the parts of ourselves we’ve identified with that are not ourselves but an experience in our lives.
Amirah believes learning to manage our energy field is part of our purpose. She added that we need to remember the truth of who we are: we are light and energy.
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CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk: Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices. I am excited that you’ve hit play on this episode because this is part two with Dr. Amirah Hall. If you have not listened to episode one, it was episode one fifty-five and it went live and was published on August fifteenth twenty twenty-three, in that episode she talks about her experience of having an end of I’m an End life Doula, I had death on my mind I guess, a near-death experience while in Egypt and what that experience was like for her. But in this episode, I kind of wanted to dig into a little bit more about how the gift presented itself in her life and what that experience was like. And the skeptics that probably came along with that and probably the grief too of realizing yet you have this gift and what do you do with it? How do you use it for the good of humanity? And the impact it probably had on her life as well. Also, we’re gonna talk about some spiritual practices that all of us can do to sharpen our tool of intuition and maybe some advice too for empaths are highly sensitive people who are really sensitive to their environment or subtle energies and things like that. So I’m really excited to dig in. We’re gonna also talk about something that happened on the previous episode. So if you haven’t listened you’ll want to go back to a specific part of that first episode with Dr. Amirah Hall, and we’ll dig into that too a little bit. But Here we go. Thank you for joining me, Dr. Amirah Hall. Welcome back.
Victoria Volk: Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure.
Victoria Volk: Okay. Well, let’s just start off by saying in the last episode around thirty-seven minutes and fifty-five seconds in around that time, you started talking about your experience of coming across Deepak Chopra, who was very helpful on your journey as you talked about in the last episode. But when I was editing that episode, there was an audible male, very distinct male voice that said yes. And I want you to go back to that first episode. I left it in intentionally. I had a little teaser in the show notes, so I don’t know if you caught it, if you did listen to it, but now go back and check it out. And this really ties into the skepticism that there might be out in the world because I had my entire family listened to it. I think I listened to it a dozen times myself. I am a natural skeptic. It takes a lot to I want the proof. Right? I’m always looking for the truth and the proof I want evidence. And as I’ve been working on myself more and more over the years, more understanding of energy and subtle energies and how I mean, I went from believing that when you died, you went in the ground and that was it, as a child like that was my understanding of death to becoming an end of life doula, understanding that death can be this beautiful transition, that it can be something that you can choose how it happens and plays out with dignity. If you are blessed with giving that choice, not a lot not everybody is. Right? With terminal illness. You have a you have a say in that. My perspective of death is greatly changed. Put it that way. So when you started to realize that this was your gift around where were you in your life? And how did you respond to that first knowing or inkling?
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, I don’t know that it was look, I’m very much like you, very skeptical and discerning. And even though I had been a seeker of truth and light or spirituality for a good part of my life, I was still extremely skeptical. And because there were so many far out ideas, I think being somewhat dis being discerning period is a good thing. I think it’s sort of a protective and a guide to help us. But there’s a certain point when what literally happened was I was a six figure income earner back in nineteen ninety eight. I was doing extremely well. I was in sales for a high-tech industry, selling a service contracts for backup emergency power equipment. And I was doing really, really well. But when I came back after my near-death experience, my whole world fell apart. I was depressed again. I was lost. I was losing friends. I was explaining some of the situations and experiences I had in Egypt. We’re very metaphysical, very mysterious like watching going by these granite statues and then seeing one of them wink at you or watching a hand raise, their arms are straight by their side. And I literally saw like the hand lifted as if to wave at me while I was going that by. And I wasn’t the only one that saw it like, I would my mouth would drop and I would just literally go, like my eyes wide open. Did I just see that? Yes. And look to my left or my right and other people saw it too. And you’re like, well, that was our validation in the moment that we weren’t losing our minds. And so many mysterious things happened to us in that journey. When I came back home, and I tried to explain some of these things. I mean, it just goes off deaf ears. Right? It’s just people like, yeah. Right. What were you guys smoking something over there? Or why do you think that was so? Or maybe you were dehydrated? So So all these we had prepared ourselves. We’ve been meditating. We had we’re so immersed into letting go, letting go of our perception of what we think we know is true or not. I had no preconceived ideas of a granite statute waving at me. It was beyond my scope of possibilities. And so that that started everything. But then when I would interview, okay, so my life fell apart, lost my friends, quit my hobbies, I just wasn’t the same. I knew something was diaphragmatically different after my NDE. But when I started feeling somewhat better, I started interviewing. And going to a company and I’d get to the third interview thinking, okay, I got this it’s a slam dunk. Right? They didn’t hire me. And it happened three times where I get to the third interview, and then they didn’t take me on. So that was a critical moment for me and I remember the thought. Okay. I surrender. Now what? Now what? And I had been starting a process of learning how to release energy blocks that was my form of healing. When I found a healer that said to me, oh, you’ve got stuck energy. I went, great. Give me a path, give me a solution, give me the ABCs, one, two, three, whatever, I will do it. And that where I started. So I started feeling really good and started going back on my track, but universe shut me down. And like I said, I had no intention of doing this work professionally. And so I started to, I think it would I don’t even know if it was a realization that it was a gift. I didn’t think of it as a gift. I just knew it was now my purpose because what I’ve come to believe in training thousands of people over the last two decades is that everybody has the abilities. I don’t know that they’re gifts. I think it’s just a matter of us developing like, we can all learn to speak English. We can go learn French too. We can learn to write. We can some people learn to write poetry, and they start immediately, they’re good at it. But as they develop, it gets better and better and better. Same thing with a sculpture. We could all go learn the club take the class, but you might be exceptional at it. I might suck. Right? Or mine are pretty rugged. So we could all develop these abilities because they’re deep within us they like a statue, literally, we have to start carving and shedding the outer layers to reveal the inner beauty. It’s all there. I believe that our creator so magnificent has input us with this, let’s call it a software, let’s call it a divine design, and it’s there for us to discover. And so all of our journey is here to explore and to reveal that inner light, that power, that ability to shine or redirect in whatever capacity we’re ready or want to discover.
Victoria Volk: I mean, there’s a lot of people listening who can resonate and relate to their life falling apart and who have not had a near-death experience.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Right?
Victoria Volk: And so when you are in that lowest of lows, what are some suggestions for people to start to maybe open themselves up spiritually? Because I think what happens is, especially with grief, trauma, things like that, like we become spiritually thirsty. It Yes. Our spiritual life greatly suffers because we start to shut down, we start to, we don’t see ourselves clearly. We don’t see other people clearly. It’s almost like we’re zombies in our own life experience. You just going with emotions and on autopilot.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yeah. I refer to that as walking in the land of paper dolls, sleepwalking. I was just going through the motions. And, yeah, life is bitter, ugly, flat, two dimensional and we become apathetic. We become detached. We are angry. We are angry and well depressed is sort of a broad extension or description of all the feelings, but lackluster unmotivated, just not given a shit how about anything or anybody? And it’s a deep-rooted anger and fear. So for me when I lost interest in my hobbies and my artwork, I was creating jewelry at the time. And I had built a business in selling internationally. And I just didn’t care anymore. Those were my signs. And I think when you’re that low for me, it got to a point where I didn’t have any family nearby. My family didn’t really get it what I was going through they were really detached also, they were in Canada. So I didn’t have a big support group at all. And so it came down to, I guess, a switch in my head like, if I’m gonna survive, I’m gonna have to do whatever it takes. And none of the other possibilities or what was presented to me, maybe it was I wasn’t suppose, remember this was back in nineteen ninety-eight.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So now we’ve got this plethora of resources. And that can also be overwhelming. I think it’s to the opposite extreme. Right? But I sort of plunked around until something resonated and that for me was energy work. Now when people say energy work today, it’s not the same. I know there’s a lot of energy workers listening to this, but hardening being sort of the old krona on the block here, I would say that a lot of people really haven’t done their work. That’s what I’m witnessing. They haven’t done the true deep work because they didn’t have a system that they could rely on consistently and or having a mentor that would stretch them, reach them beyond what that limit or that ceiling that they can’t see their subconscious mind.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So the tools that I learned were really about me surviving. It was just about me doing something different because I couldn’t take the pain anymore. And sometimes we just have to get to that breaking point of just going, I can’t effint take this anymore. I’m just done. So it’s either die, completely let yourself sink into that deepest abyss possible or okay, I’m gonna kick like if you’re being pulled in a current riptide, you just all of a sudden go, I’m gonna kick bloody hell. I am gonna kick so hard I’m gonna move out of this. And the tools that I teach, I call them quantum energy tools. They’re simple guided visualizations. And quite honestly, I didn’t believe in them when I started. But I’m just like, what the hell I got through? Yeah. I got nothing else here, so I’m gonna go for it. And I created these tools that I used to this day, myself, every single day, and all my students and all my trainings and all of the profound transformations that I’ve witnessed have been based on these basic principles. And the number one thing, whether you mentioned empaths, you mentioned sensitive people, you mentioned depressed people, you mentioned anybody that’s sick, we don’t know how to ground. Nobody taught us how to ground. Every device you buy now has three prongs on it. Right? The electrical appliances. The third prong is a grounding wire. Why? Because if there’s a surge of energy, if there’s a surge of something, it will not mow up your device. But we get served or bombarded all day long and we have no way to discharge. It gets stuck in what we don’t even understand is what I call the energy field, the aura. And some people think they know what it is. They say they wanna see it. Well, what? Why? If you see it, the reason is not to see, oh, you’ve got a happy life learning how to manage our energy field I believe is part of our purpose. All of us is as we remember the truth of who we are, it’s that you’re light, you are energy, and this energy is continually moving for anybody that says put up that white light around your or I’m gonna say. You know, to that, it because it’s almost like hitting the pause button on your remote control. It freezes everything. It slows everything down so nothing can move. The idea here is that we want to keep our energy moving. We want to release the block so back to grounding. So that’s the very first thing I teach based on so there’s all these devices now. I call them shiny objects you can go and you can, why the grounding mat and you put it under you while you’re working and you go or go out urthing as they say walking in the grass. Okay there may be some validity to that because I know I sure feel good when I go in nature and just let go. What do we do? Right? We just let go. Why? What is it about that energy that just helps us?
Dr. Amirah Hall: So I visualize from the base of my spine, I attach a cord. I like to imagine a laser beam or even a USB cord or a wire, and I have a magnet at the base of my spine, and I have a magnet at the center of the earth. And that line just invisibly is drawn to the center of the earth. And then boom. So you can ground right here and now and so can I? And we can be more present. What that almost does is it almost brings in our energy field. So the problem with empaths, I call them out of control healers because their energy field is so far and so wide It’s filling up the whole house or the whole building or the whole world, and everybody else’s energy field steps into theirs.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So we’ve not been taught how to bring that energy field into, let’s say, arms length around us. And when it’s arms length around us, it’s much easier to manage. Right? I teach a symbol on the edge of my aura so that people think where Amirah is out there in that symbol. So anybody looking for me or their energy or they don’t like something I say or they do Either way, that energy goes into that symbol, not into my energy field. So it’s a decoy not a protective field because you’re an idiot if you think you can protect yourself from energy moving, idiotic belief system.
Victoria Volk: I’m so glad you mentioned that, and I have never heard that perspective, but it it absolutely clicks with me because what I’m learning just as of late because that is the message. Right? Like, especially in my reiki training that was the message I received was imagine this ball of golden light wrapped around you and protecting you and it’s partly intention. Right? If the intention makes you feel good, but it’s still not going to stop your energy field from rubbing up, bumping up against your environment because everything is energy. And we’re always communicating with our little antennas. Right?
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, it’s naive at. Right? And as we’re growing up as humans and learning about the quantum field, science is expanding. Right? And it merging with spirituality. There’s something to be said about the golden light, and I use that too. However, it’s not gonna protect you. And it is it is a high when you can bring it into the physical body gold is the highest frequency that we can hold in the physical body for an extended amount of time. It’s probably not going to stay there forever. But even if it’s for a few minutes or even if you realign with that high frequency, it changes the dynamics of everything within. Right? So, but there’s no absolutes to any of this. And anybody that’s talks about, oh, bring in red light for the first chakra and orange, but that’s BS too.
Dr. Amirah Hall. And here’s why I can say that is because I’ve got to how I really develop sense, a clairvoyant sense, but my third eye. So when I look at the energy of the second chakra, let’s say, our emotional center are empathic. We’re sucking it all up. Right? From everybody and everything. The news from I look at I’m picking up feelings and thoughts from people that are look there was a friend of mine in California, and I reached out to her I said, hey, is everything going okay with you? And she goes, oh, yeah. I’ve been thinking about you for the last couple weeks. Should we set up a. So I was feeling it. Right? So I reach out to her because her energy at some level was creeping in and finding a plug in to me because she wanted to communicate with me. So I hate people like that. I just wish they’d pick up the phone or I wish they’d send a text. Right?
Dr. Amirah Hall: But then I do that with my students too. I’m like, okay, I’m not sure who this is, so I start reaching out to everybody. Back to the second chakra, when when I look at any of the energy fields, I see wheels within wheels of spinning light. And the best way I can describe that is it looks to me like a kaleidoscope. Have you ever seen a kaleidoscope? Mhmm. So they’re moving. The patterns are always changing. The colors are always changing. Right? So how in god’s name can orange be the color to bring that into harmony? You, Victoria, might be needing to work on something that’s, let’s say, I don’t know. I mean, you’re looking for a recipe from your grandmother. There’s something with your grandmother that you’ve been feeling like you wanted to connect with or or demonstrate or resurrect. Right? Maybe a tradition. Well, it might be for you to bring that shocker into harmony might be a soft blue. Is blue to one of your favorite colors by the way?
Victoria Volk: It is my favorite color.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Because I see that. Yeah. So I just see that that’s more for you right now. Next week, it could be turquoise. It could be agreed. It could be a yellow. So as we evolve, as we resolve, and grow, and change, there’s other aspects to us that want some healing or looking for attention. And so those would be different colors that we might bring into that space to bring it into balance. Does that make sense how it works?
Victoria Volk: Absolutely. I mean, because you’re speaking my language of biofield tuning, which is using tuning forks in your energy field to, like, basically bring harmony through sound, to the energy field. And when you brought up the nature piece, I think what happens is our bodies become in sync. You know, it’s like those
Dr. Amirah Hall: We reverberate Yes. Up the vibes and they they help us they’re literally grounded.
Victoria Volk: Calibrating us.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yes. They’ve got roots. What do they do? They’re grounded.
Victoria Volk: Yeah?
Dr. Amirah Hall: So we’re trying to remember that part of us, I think, when we go to nature, because we are interconnected to everything. And so we need help with that as humans because we’re so much in our intellect. We’re so busy our mind is just and so we don’t know how to have that balance. The trees are great teachers to us. So grounding is the number one thing.
Dr. Amirah Hall: The biggest problem I find empaths have. Highly sensitive individuals is they’re not grounded. And so then we work through the process of one, second most important thing is clearing energy that’s not you. Because the simple truth is when you start releasing what you’re not, your mother’s beliefs, your dad’s beliefs, the family patterns, your your unconscious biases, or thoughts that you had that, let’s say, that white light could protect you. Right? All of those belief systems, when we start reducing those, minimizing those, all of a sudden, the true you, the true essence, and the true gifts can just shine bright.
Victoria Volk: I resonate with that because the opposite of releasing who you’re not is getting to know who you are. Is getting to know of yourself,
Dr. Amirah Hall: But it happens gently in the process of releasing what you’re not.
Victoria Volk: Right? And that’s why too, like, every session in biofuel tuning is so different. Like, this session is the same just like you said. It’s like, right, you know, this analogy of peeling back the onion, but let’s say the artichoke you know, it’s like yeah, pulling back an artichoke. It’s the same. Like, once you get to the heart.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yeah. I’m chiseling away at a piece of wood to create a sculpture or concrete. Yeah. And so I think tuning forks are awesome I know in ancient history, ancient mystery schools, they used sound walls, they used bells, they used rattles, to help us, that energy. It sends like a ripple. What I use is a tool that I explode things in my mind. So it’s like a stick of dynamite in my mind. Let’s say, I feel like some pain in in my left leg. And gee, I never felt that pain before. What is that? All pain is stuck energy. Whether it’s mental pain, emotional, spiritual, or physical, stuck energy. And so to release that block, I just didn’t visualize. Blowing up a stick of dynamite or another simple. And that gently releases it out of my field. So in a very short amount of time, so what I’m doing in and so the beauty of your tuning forks is it’s taking away stuff we don’t know about. The beauty of getting conscious to knowing what we’re clearing I find is a step in raising our conscious awareness because it is about being conscious. Conscious healers. And the and the other thing is tuning forks aren’t always available. Singing bowels or bells and those things aren’t always available. So for me, I the work I do is teaching independence. And self reliance.
Victoria Volk: I love that. So aside from the stick of dynamite, besides rounding and things like that like, these mental it’s all it’s really just using your imagination that can help
Dr. Amirah Hall: And that is clearvoyance. Most people don’t realize that. They say to me, I wanna open up my third eye. You know, this is like the big buzz. Right? The truth of it is is you’re doing it all. But you’re not conscious to what you’re doing. And so all those thoughts that you’re creating your experience with. So when we start using visualization, which is using your inner eye, using your inner abilities to connect with what you might call imagination, that’s really the same thing. And so when we direct the energy, then we are empowering ourselves for healing.
Victoria Volk: Is meditation a piece of your work as well?
Dr. Amirah Hall: Again, there’s thousands and thousands of different types of meditation. All the work I realized my efforts ended up directing me to and the NDE showed me proved to me is that I’m an energy being. However, I’m being a human right now. And in this human experience in the three d lace, we need practical experiences. Our job is to stay present. We are not present. We are not grounded and are consciously aware of what we’re doing from minute to minute. Have you ever been driving down the road and missed your exit?
Victoria Volk: Just happened the other day I was driving. I had to go somewhere and just totally just kept on driving.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yeah. Have you opened an Amazon package and threw the thing that you bought in the garbage and held the package in your hand?
Victoria Volk: No, but I have looked for my cell phone when it’s been in my back pocket.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Have you ever cleaned off your dinner plate and thrown the fork right in the garbage with all the food, you know, stuff like that.
Victoria Volk: The mindless. Yep.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So that’s a moment where your spirit wasn’t present. You were to wear. You snapped out for just a nanosecond. In some cases driving past years and it was longer than that until you got back in your body and you realized, oh my god I’ve got now another five minutes because I gotta go back and forth. It’s learning how to be aware. Learning how to be present is the power of actual manifestation.
Victoria Volk: And I’m glad you mentioned that too, not just the manifestation piece, but because I can tie this to I can tie this to grief, I feel like I’m being called to in that when we are so emotionally wound up, and our energy is just bound up within us, it’s almost impossible to be present in that moment. And we can’t focus. You can’t concentrate. And so accidents more are more likely to happen. You’re more likely to get hurt or trip or fall or call the wrong person or weird stuff like that, but you don’t tie it to grief. You don’t tie it. Yeah.
Dr. Amirah Hall : And then the poor empath or a person that’s grieving, and then and the trauma is just building, and building and building and then you do, like, I did, you withdraw. Mhmm. And you stop really living and you stop we become a victim and blaming the big ugly world. But the truth is, it’s all us. It’s all us. Our creations.
Victoria Volk: And you know what? That’s empowering to know for anyone listening because you have the power to change it. That’s it.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Might not feel like it. Right? Believe me. It may it may not feel like it. I’ve been there where I’m like, oh, god. I just don’t and I for a whole year, I just barely dragged my butt to the class. And I sat there thinking, I’m seeing black. I’m not doing anything. And then all of a sudden, it was like the lights turned on. I was my own biggest enemy, and I was resistant in a lot of different ways. In ways that I didn’t even know I was, I wasn’t intentionally trying to be resistant. But that, you know, family programming and anger and fear and doubt were layer and layer and layer that just kept me living small. And it really was only just the last couple of years that I I mean, because of, I guess, so many things have changed in technology, and I guess I got sick and tired of seeing these charlatans and fraudsters out there professing lies to people and nontruth about this work and the truth behind being an impact that you don’t have to be use that as your crutch. I am an empath. I’m probably the biggest out of control healer. Right? It’s not something that you can unlearn and I don’t mean not to be compassionate. I mean learning how your energy is interfering in somebody else’s healing and you don’t even know it. You know, we, as empaths, we’re typically healers, wanna help people, wanna see everybody do better. Right? And feel good. But what makes me think that my energies actually gonna heal them. It’s a lie because that person’s energy needs to be their energy in their body and that needs to be refined so it can heal itself. It’s different than Amira’s energy. In fact, my energy and many of my students we always do an exercise of separating energies when we finish the class. Because energy between you and I is exchanging, even if you’re thousands of miles away. Anybody listening is probably feeling my energy.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So after this, I will be bringing my energy back. And so the same is true with all my clients is I give them their energy back as there’s an exchange. So the idea as we progress is we build a more condensed sphere of our own frequency. Within the body and outside the body when it becomes more condensed and more higher percentage of uniquely you and your spirit, I mean, the world of possibilities just becomes infinite.
Victoria Volk: So what does that look like? Is it another visualization of almost like this bringing in of, like well, again, myself?
Dr. Amirah Hall: A healthy aura is about arms length around. So it is part of that process, but it’s a process of that I take people through is clearing the chakras as well as clearing the layers of the aura and all so just a continual amount of clearing becoming more aware. Clearing becoming more aware. We become more brighter. Look at our body. When we’re feeling good, We smile at people. We give gifts. We just are more generous and more creative and more flexible and more you know, letting the guy get out of, you know, of the parking lot before you and sit, we’re just more patient than laughing. So I don’t think after we do that, there’s much to do. It’s just enjoying what things light us up.
Victoria Volk: I’m curious if you’re familiar at all with human design.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Somewhat. Yes. I haven’t explored it extensively. I’ve got some friends that have done it. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: I’ve been recently diving a little deep. And I dabbled in the rabbit hole over a year ago, and I’ve recently, I don’t know, timing I suppose and it’s really connecting with me. But what I’m learning though I’m a manifestor energy type for human design. And we have this repelling manifestors have this repelling closed aura and when I first learned about that, it was kinda like, oh, well, people just don’t like me, you know, and the thing is, I don’t see like, I’m within my closed my own aura. I’m within my own closed aura. But it’s not that I’m repelling people. It’s that my energy, either you’re ready to receive it or you’re not, and then there’s something there’s a this energetic exchange. Right? Like, it’s too big or too much for you at this time, but maybe in the future it won’t be. And I’m trying to find how this connects to the energy work that I already do, the energy work that I do, and just really starting to explore that. And I was just curious if you had any insight into that or if that’s.
Dr. Amirah Hall: What I find is I really appreciate your intellect, and I really think it’s a great skill. However, I feel like most of us and I find I get sucked down rabbit holes too, and I like to think I’m intellectual, but I’m not. I don’t know. By the way, meditation, I think, sharpens our intellect, and our sharpen our just ability to know things. They resonate. But I feel like the problem that in the west is that we are over-intellectual. And the problem with energy once you define it and quantum physics has explained this. Right? Mhmm. If you if you define something, it becomes that. So I don’t like to define and say you’re a manifestor. What manifestation to me is everybody is a manifestor, first of all.
Victoria Volk: Oh, yeah. We’re always manifesting.
Dr. Amirah Hall: When somebody locks in a description and says that you’re this, oh, really? I mean, I can prove that different. I can prove that by clearing certain aspects within your space, all of a sudden you redefine yourself, then what? How does their theory or their protocol hold up with that? I don’t believe that we can lock ourselves into an absolute box. I reject those. A repulsive to me because that’s not the nature of energy. As his energetic beings were continually evolving. And so for right now, you might be that. That’s fine. However, if you find that your energy field is repelling people or opportunities or insights or inspiration, then it’s time to shift that, so that it’s not. And that’s all. So I don’t wanna define you that way. Does that make sense to you? Mhmm. Are you a Virgo?
Victoria Volk: I’m a Pisces.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Okay. So then your very nature of Pisces is you’re just swimming in and swimming out and trying to explore and Pisces has a very difficult time with boundaries. They don’t wanna be pinned in. Right? And so I just Yeah I think defining it is actually limiting us. Because I see and know that there’s just such infinite possibilities. I mean, we could really go down some rabbit holes, Victoria. But, I mean, imagine if that was just one dimension and one aspects to you and then other lives, you’re completely different. So how about if we merge all of those aspects together and be the most resourceful, integrated, aligned, present, incredible, abundant, beautiful soul in the present.
Victoria Volk: That’s what I’m working on.
Dr. Amirah Hall: That’s awesome. That’s really awesome. But it’s not in your head. This is the mistake that everybody makes. This is not in your head. The work does not occur there.
Victoria Volk: Oh, absolutely. I totally agree. I actually had a client be like after she worked with me through her grief stuff, in the grief work that I do, she was like people always say, you have to do the work. You have to do the work. And she was like, what’s the work?
She’s like, now I know what the work is.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yeah.
Victoria Volk: It’s the real
Dr. Amirah Hall: You’re in the crowd.
Victoria Volk: Difficult stuff. Yeah.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, it doesn’t have to be difficult.
Victoria Volk: That’s the but the most difficult times in your life, like really looking at them.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, and there’s a difference between looking at them or going to talk therapy and you talk till your face is blue about something. I don’t like that. I like honestly, I’m a quick down and dirty kind of girl. I like, you know, give it to me bottom line. Give it to me simple. And let’s get the results fast. That’s kinda how I operate. And that’s why I created these tools that I use is because they do the job. Now let’s get on to having the good stuff. You know? It’s like, hurry up. I don’t wanna I don’t wanna keep living it. I don’t wanna keep rehearsing it. Because the more we talk about it, the more we anchor it, and we’re just connecting with a memory from a plastic experience that’s got an emotional charge to it.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So what if we could just have a magic wand or a stick a dynamite blow that crap up? And then start living the space that we really are. And honestly, I think that’s the biggest adjustment is when we start realizing all the baggage that we’re hauling around isn’t us. We’ve identified with it, but it’s not really who you are. Who who? Now we’re on to it.
Victoria Volk: Well, and then we take on the emotions and then that adjusts our behavior and then those behaviors. Yeah. The heat and then it’s just more grief and more
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, that’s just how I am and this is who I am, so you have to accept me. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. None of that is true. It’s all a lie. And so, some people are probably rolling their eyes right now and some people are going, I get it. And so we get to we are creating our destiny. We are creating in this moment your present time energy field, whatever it’s consisting I’m holding on to known and unknown that’s conscious and unconscious beliefs and memories and experiences. All of that is creating your future.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So if we create a simple way to start releasing what you are not, because you’re just memories, you will still have the thought of an experience sometimes. Sometimes even some of the memories kind of fade away. And then you have more freedom, more energetic space to focus on what you do want to create. That’s what’s coming into the work. That’s becoming conscious creators, which I believe humanity is being primed for. When we talk about waking up, that’s coming to the awakening moment that we are creating our reality.
Victoria Volk: So what do you see coming up for all of us as a collective in the next year?
Dr. Amirah Hall: So that’s interesting that you would say that. I tuned into a couple guys on YouTube and, honestly, recently, I haven’t tuned into anybody because I don’t want to hear. There’s a lot of doom and gloom. Okay? And I do believe there’s I think there’s a lot of people that wanna suffer. And there’s a lot of people that wanna create more scarcity. I’m on the other end of the spectrum and you can call me idealistic or pollyanna or whatever you want. But, hey, when the economy went to shit in California the worldwide. Right? California was so depressed. And people were losing their houses and their jobs, and I just couldn’t take it. I bailed and I went to Dubai for five years. Now, I say, bailed. Listen. I sold my house. I sold everything and put what was left in a five by five foot storage unit. I went with one way ticket. I didn’t even research Dubai because it was well, it was in twenty ten, but I didn’t research it. I knew one person, and I ended up working with members of the royal family. I ended up working in five-star spas because I didn’t know anybody so I needed to make and build a following. And, honestly, there were times that I would crawl, you know, curl up in a ball and cry at night thinking I was an absolute fool. Because I didn’t know where my next client was gonna come from. And I depended completely on the work I do.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yes, I was afraid at times. But I also knew that was my point where I needed to be, and it turned out incredible. I learned so much. I explored so much. It was in a grand adventure. I learned so much from the Muslim people and their true beliefs and religion. Know they believe in this energy work. They talk about the gin, these unseen beings in their in their religion. They don’t talk openly too much about it because they don’t wanna call them up or conjure them in. Right? And so I just look, you know, I just have an adventurous part to my spirit. So for me to be around that culture and just to let go and be around incredible wealth, to just drink it, just like going to the forest. Right? You feel and plug into the trees. That’s what Dubai was for me is plugging into that. So when I look at scarcity versus sufficiency, I remember that, right, experience. I’ve just threw myself out there. I put every part of myself out there. And I more than survived. I thrived.
Victoria Volk: It’s interesting. Oh, I’m sorry.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Go ahead.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. It’s interesting you bring that up too because this human design rabbit hole I’ve been going down the aspect of environment really is an important piece of it because when you aren’t aligned with the environment that is conducive to you thriving, you can struggle. And so Yeah. Our environment plays a huge role. I mean, if we’re surrounded by stuff and just piles and junk and I mean, what does that I mean, I’ve always believed that the quarters, you know, it’s a reflection of what’s going on internally. I’ve always believed that, you know, change your environment
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yep.
Victoria Volk: Change your environment, things like that
Dr. Amirah Hall: And change the people you hang out with.
Victoria Volk: That includes the people that you surround yourself with.
Dr. Amirah Hall: If you can’t change the people you’re with, then change the people you’re with. You know, certain resistances that people have, and they’re just not good for us as we grow and thrive. And there’s a lot of people that don’t wanna see somebody thrive. They’re more comfortable being in lack. And then they compare, I came from a family like that. They didn’t celebrate wins. They didn’t cheer me on. They’d rather drag me down. And there’s sometimes we have friends, sometimes it’s somebody that you thought was your best friend, but you start to wake up to the fact that they don’t really celebrate the things you do, then it’s time to find new friends. And the other thing is once we step into coming into our alignment, our true divine design, then we attract people that really effortlessly and very quickly to support us, get a giving us our answers or a new direction.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Dubai was never on my radar. And it was only a client that I had worked with in her life completely changed. She was a doctor in Chicago and everything completely radically changed and she went back to where she was born and which was Dubai. She said, the mirror you need to come to Dubai. And I said, why? Great. Find me somebody to help promote me and I’ll go in. See, I had an open mind. Mhmm. And through caution, I set up some steps that would be reasonable, practical. I went for two weeks. Came back with the two pockets full of cash. And when I love this, say who doesn’t. Right? And so I went, okay. I’m gone with no plan. And I’m a business major. Right? I had a business degree and I knew how to set things up practically, but it it just didn’t work like that for me. And so I think my whole life back to one of your earlier questions that I’ve been trusting my intuition, but it wasn’t validated. Like, I didn’t have an environment or family that would talk about any of these things. And I didn’t have a family that was risk takers. So but even trusting our intuition, like, I would need to go to the grocery store now for this. I don’t know why I could wait later, but no, I need now. Well, I might run into somebody that or or a situation, or maybe I’ve avoided an accident, or maybe I just picked up something and then somebody drops in and so I had it. So whatever those intuitive managers are, I learned to trust mine. They’ve always been with me. But I did close them down for a good part of my life. And depression, grief, trauma, all of those situations, we’ll shut that down. And all the work I do now is to help people thrive in whatever all capacities of their life and to be aligned with who they truly are because that’s that’s the true abundance. That’s the true gift of a lot. That’s our purpose to know who we are.
Victoria Volk: That’s a fantastic way to end this episode because I, one thousand percent agree, we are on the same mission of that, helping people understand themselves, get to know themselves. And lose all these aspects of ourselves that were put on us. Yeah. Whether through expectations or lack of boundaries as kids or these beliefs and patterns and all of those. So how can people work with you?
Dr. Amirah Hall: They can go to my website amirahhall.com and that’s Amirah A M I R A H and Hall H A L L. And I’ve got some free gifts on the website. You can chat with me and we can talk about your next step. I have a reset program that’s a great place to start. It’s a video training. And I also have a master class that’s available on my website that about energy. It’s called manifestation mastery. And, yeah, so there’s a number of things I’ve got a YouTube channel. I’m out and about. And so
Victoria Volk: Anything exciting new coming up or that you’re
Dr. Amirah Hall: I have a class coming up. It’s called intuitive superpowers. It’s a masterclass that’s coming up. But that’s Wednesday. That’s tomorrow.
Victoria Volk: Oh, shoot.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So that won’t work but goal to get on my newsletter and to get on to my list so that you can keep updated for any upcoming events other than that. Yeah, that’s the most current that I’ve got. I will be launching a six-month training, which is an in-depth development of not only your intuitive abilities, but your abilities to manifest. It involves the shock or healing. It involves the mastery it learn and developing the third eye, developing your corevoyant abilities and all your other spiritual abilities. So it’s a robust and mentoring program of six months. So that will be launched in October. So if you’re interested, reach out to me and we can see if that’s appropriate for you.
Victoria Volk: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back and for doing this part two with me. I’m glad we got to dig into this the practical things that can help people move forward and anything energy stuff I love I love talking about all of this juicy stuff that really was not an aspect of my life up until maybe four years ago. So I’m still very much a newbie.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, congratulations. You’re doing amazing. You’re doing awesome work. And it’s such a delight to witness your you look to me like this beautiful flower that’s blooming right under the sun. It’s lovely.
Victoria Volk: Thank you so much. And thank you for being you and for doing the work that you do.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Thank you.
Victoria Volk: And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Emotions, Grieving Voices Podcast, Pespective, Podcast, solo episode |
The Gift and Grief of Self-Doubt
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Today’s episode is an example of the type of content that I enjoy sending within my bi-weekly newsletter, The Unleashed Letters.
I received lovely feedback on my last newsletter, which included a personal story about a time when I experienced self-doubt (and fear), so much so that it changed the trajectory of my life. Who knows where I would be today or who I would be spending my life with had I made a different decision?
We all experience life-altering moments and make life-altering decisions; however, our minds cannot even fathom the ramifications, consequences, or blessings of those decisions until later in life (sometimes decades later). And what if those moments or decisions were made from a place of self-doubt (and fear)? It’s a grief experience most of us can’t put our finger on unless we have cultivated some self-awareness.
There is definitely grief experienced as a result of self-doubt, but there are also gifts in doubt. Doubt leads us to ask questions and come up with better solutions.
Learn about my recent awareness and the dots I’ve connected in having Gate 63 (the Gate of Doubt) in my Human Design (as a 4/6 Emotional Manifestor). I hope you find it interesting enough to be initiated into wanting to learn your Human Design, too.
The more you know your grief and yourself, the less you look to others to tell you how you should show up in the world.
RESOURCES:
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NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk: Hey Hey Hey, Hello, this is episode 160, and thank you for being here and for pushing play on this episode. And I wasn’t sure what I was actually going to talk about until about five minutes ago before I sat down to record. And I realized that instead of reinventing the wheel and pushing out more content that I would actually share something that I’ve already shared to my newsletter subscribers that I received some really great feedback about. And so I thought why am I creating more content when people seem to like this? And it also gives me an opportunity to and it inspired the idea really to give you a taste of what I talk about in my newsletter.
Victoria Volk: It is the place that I generally get a little bit more personal. I share a little bit more personal stories what’s currently going on in my life or in my business. Yeah. It’s kind of my little sacred space. And sometimes it can feel like I’m talking to the ether and no one’s listening. Sometimes, like, with this podcast too, but I can actually see the stats that people are listening in fact. But it’s kinda different with a newsletter like, you really don’t know what people think about it or I mean, I guess they let you know if they unsubscribe, which that happens. I mean, I’m not gonna be for everybody. Right? But and that’s okay. But I can see who opens them. Right? I can see that people are reading it. But I just don’t always know how it lands, like how people feel about what I’ve shared.
Victoria Volk: But this newsletter was a little different. And I thought I’m gonna share it because first of all, I think it’s a great story. I personally think it’s a great story. And it’s my story. And it’s a story that I really I don’t know that I’ve shared on social media at all. I don’t believe so. Maybe just like a sentence or something but I haven’t shared the story and related it to something I’ve been learning about myself that I’ve expressed on this podcast already which is human design. And I’ve just been having aha moments left and right and a lot of self-awareness based on my human design by graph. And so I will put the link in the show notes again for this episode. I think I put it in the last episode. If you’re curious about learning what your energy type is, such as mine, I’m a manifestor, or what your authority is, which is, either emotional or splenic or ego. I’m an emotional. Mine’s emotional. And then also what your strategy is, like mine is to inform and initiate, and manifestors here to inform and initiate, whereas, like, manifesting generators are here to respond and then inform. And there’s other different energy types and things like that. But if you’re curious at all, there’s so much free information out there. You can get your body graph and then just Google. Just go to the Googles and find all the rabbit holes because there are so many when it comes to human design. It can be very overwhelming. But I would just read about your energy type, read about your strategy and your authority, and just start there first and foremost.
Victoria Volk: And and then also, like, what your I forget what they’re called like, your lines, like, I’m a four six. I think that’s also important to read upfront and get an understanding of. But to my story now, in why I wanted to share this or why I shared it in my newsletter is because I have a gate of doubt and you’ll I’m gonna read basically. I’m gonna read my newsletter because why reinvent the wheel again. But and because I received great feedback on this, I’m just going to read the newsletter and if it resonates with you, maybe it’s something that you wish to sign up to receive on the regular. It’s something I send out biweekly. It’s not weekly. It’s not daily. I don’t spam you with salesy stuff. It’s just a place, my sacred space, where I go to share some deeper thoughts. Really? That’s really what I do. And then some funzy things I put in there too.
Victoria Volk: So today is a story about doubt and there is a great gift in grief when it comes to self-doubt. After graduating high school, I was to attend a four-year college for a degree in clinical lab science. However, as quickly as I moved in, just as quickly I moved out, self-doubt roared in my head so much so that I drove around the city while smoking cigarettes and I didn’t even smoke. So, lo and behold, when I came to my human design and I’ve been learning about this stuff that I’m a four-six emotional manifest and that I have gate sixty three, the gate of doubt. I also realized I have gate sixty-four, the gate of confusion.
Victoria Volk: So no wonder I was paralyzed with fear at that time because gate sixty-three, the gate of doubt, is also a hanging gate for me and I’m not gonna go into a whole explanation of that, but meaning I don’t have the opposite gate, which is gate four. The gate of answers. So I’m someone that is always seeking the answers. But the thing is with this gate of doubt, in not having the gate of answer, like, I just have to trust. I have to trust that the answer will come when it’s supposed to come.
Victoria Volk: So do you see the conundrum I was in to add insult to injury, the motivation of a manifestor energy type coincidentally, which really is not a coincidence at all, is fear. And so no wonder I packed my bag so fast. What I know to be true now is that I would have had everything within me to achieve that bachelor’s degree. If I only trusted myself and could have had the wisdom to tune into my inner knowing with my defined heart or ego center, which is all about willpower and courage. And also my defined spleen center, which is also about intuition and the place of fear. And my defined solar plexus, which is our emotional center, where I could have taken a breath, stepped back from the decision, and from the situation, got into a neutral, emotional state instead of making a decision based solely on fear. My doubt and my fear got the best of me in that situation, and many others throughout my life. And that’s the thing about life. It will keep dishing out lessons until we learn them. Hence, history repeats itself until we get it. Really get it.
Victoria Volk: I suppose you probably have experiences of doubt and fear where the Voices of fear and doubt were the loudest in your head. It may be interesting for you to learn how those have been expressed through the lens of your human design. I just think it’s all fascinating. But the gate of doubt is skeptical. And questioning, and it seeks proof. So to protect ourselves, those of us with this gate we look for evidence with this gate. Usually, it supports how we failed in some way. And this gate explains why I’ve always been my worst critic. And also why trust of myself and others has never come easily. My mind has been completely blown just by this one awareness, all alone like, just this gate this gate explanation within my human design, like, explains why I packed my bags? Why I didn’t even give myself a chance? And it’s been a theme throughout my life.
Victoria Volk: But here’s the thing, doubt isn’t all bad though. It has been a growth catalyst for me. As has fear, once I started aligning with my intuition and my will. So in the garden of critical thinking, doubt can be likened to a seed. Cultivated with care and nurtured over time, it can sprout into a healthy thriving tree of wisdom.
Victoria Volk: And today, as I’m talking about this concept of these seeds of doubt that we can experience in life, these small, persistent questions aren’t encouragement to us to a question and explore and ultimately learn and grow. I mean, I can tell you I learned a lot in all of those situations where I let fear and self-doubt get the best of me. But doubt is often misunderstood as a negative force. I mean, we really think of doubt as this bad thing. Right? And that it’s something to be avoided at all costs. However, it is, in fact, a fundamental aspect of human nature and a powerful tool for intellectual and personal growth.
Victoria Volk: Doubt catalyzes curiosity and critical thinking and we can open new doors to ideas and discoveries when we allow ourselves to quest in the status quo. It’s interesting too, like, there was I can’t remember what the quiz was. It was some personality thing, and it said that I was the questioner. No. It’s fitting. Right? Like, I’ve taken so many different personality tests and there’s, like, different pieces they all fit together. Like, there’s a common theme with all of them. But seeds of doubt can be sown in various aspects of our lives from science and politics to personal relationships and like I’m talking about in self-reflection.
Victoria Volk: So here are a few ways you can intentionally plant these seeds. Well, you can question authority. Don’t blindly accept what authority figures tell you. Challenge assumptions ask for evidence and seek multiple perspectives before forming your own opinion. I’ve been known to do this and you can bet it’s most often met with resistance, which it most likely will. Because here’s the thing about being questioned. A lot of people don’t like to be questioned. Right? And so they take defense to that. They get offended if you question. But it’s for someone like me with the gate of doubt, it’s how I learned to process and under stand, the perspective of other people like, I want, I am seeking my own conclusion. I am seeking my own answer. So do you see we’re questioning or if I’m questioning, people can feel like I’m questioning them or I’m challenging them, but that’s really not the case. That’s where this gate of doubt has caused a lot of grief for me.
Victoria Volk: Self-reflection is something you can do regularly to examine your own beliefs and actions. Ask yourself why you hold certain views or make specific choices. Are they based on solid reasoning or merely tradition and habit? This is a huge component of the grief recovery work. And you can, I can’t even begin to tell you the skepticism that I had initially when I first came across grief recovery? I knew it was what I needed just based on what I was reading, but I personally went into it like I thought, this is something I knew I needed it, but I thought more importantly, I was thinking about how I could be of service, how I could help other people. So that was really the huge driver was, yes, I wanna help myself, but I think this will really help other me help me to help other people more.
Victoria Volk: So I went into it with some skepticism as to if it really would help me because I had been a griever at that point for nearly forty years. Well, not quite that long. Thirty-five years, something like that, and fortunately, my intuition was much stronger at that point and I had more self-awareness to make a more aligned decision. And choosing to do that. And despite the fear, I did it anyway. And everything in my life has changed since then, like, everything, literally, like, I feel like I have evolved, I have changed and evolved in ways that I don’t think would have happened that was a catalyst for me, for my growth. It’s why I’m a huge proponent of it.
Victoria Volk: Critical media consumption. So in today’s digital age, it’s easy to fall victim to misinformation. So cultivating a healthy skepticism towards online content, fact check and cross reference sources. I actually shared in this newsletter on that note. I shared a resource that I came across, it’s called fourteen forty and I’m just gonna make a note for myself here to add a link to it in the show notes because that is the best unbiased news I’ve come across in a long time. It it comes to your inbox, it’s daily, and it’s awesome. It’s a great way to not have to watch the news, but still be in the loop of what’s going on in the world. So I’ll link to that in the show notes.
Victoria Volk: Embracing uncertainty. It’s okay to not have all the answers. And this has been, like, I you know, this is for me, this has been a difficult thing, like, I need to find the answer. And in fact, it’s often a sign of intellectual honesty. Embrace your uncertainty as an opportunity to learn and explore. So when we’re cultivating doubt, once the seeds of doubt are planted and they require nurturing to grow into something meaningful, this is some things that we can do to flourish this tree of knowledge. You can do research, deep dive into topics that peak your curiosity, like for me it’s human design right now, seek out reliable sources, academic studies, and diverse perspectives to gain a comprehensive understanding. Engage in debate. Engaging in respectful discussions with others with different views can help sharpen your critical thinking skills. It also provides an opportunity to refine your arguments and consider alternative viewpoints. Stay open-minded. As you explore new ideas and perspectives, remain open to changing your mind. A flexible mind is a hallmark of intellectual growth.
Victoria Volk: And learn from doubt rather than fearing doubt, see it as an ally in your pursuit of knowledge. Doubt is the impetus for progress and innovation, driving us to seek better answers and solutions. In the garden of our minds, seeds of doubt are not pests to be eradicated, but rather precious gifts that when nurtured can lead to bountiful harvest of wisdom and understanding. By sowing these seeds intentionally, embracing uncertainty, and fostering a spirit of curiosity and critical thinking, we can cultivate a richer, more nuanced understanding of the world around us. And I’ll add end of ourselves.
Victoria Volk: So as you navigate the ever-changing landscape of information and ideas, remember that doubt is not the enemy, but a faithful companion on your journey toward enlightenment. Embrace, nurture, and watch as it blossoms into a garden of knowledge and wisdom that continues growing season after season. And I’ll add that the more you know your grief and yourself, the less you look to others to tell you how you should be showing up in the world. And by me learning about myself and you learning about yourself, whether it be through human design, whether it be through grief recovery work, energy healing work, the work that I offer or other modalities that you are curious about that may be able to support you, it’s just peeling back the onion. We’re just layer by layer uncovering and discovering who we are. And what we’re here for, and what we want to be doing, how we want to be showing up, and just learning about ourselves, making ourselves, less, less, I don’t know what the word is, unleashed from the past Right? I mean, this is really where the unleashed heart came to be is because this understanding that yes, my past is a part of me, but it doesn’t have to be my future. It doesn’t have to repeat itself. And how do we break these patterns of repetition of experiences? Because like I said, these lessons will continue time after time until we get them. It’s maybe part of the journey and it’s part of your human design of these things that you will go through, like, four, four, a four, six lines in the human design.
Victoria Volk: We have three phases of life. First, we’re like, just in it. We’re in the thick of it for the first thirty years. We’re having all these experiences. And then from thirty to fifty, it’s like we’re the observer. We’re seeing how these things play out in people other people’s lives were learning by observing. And then after fifty, fifty and older, we’re we’re on the roof. We come off the roof, I guess. Thirty to fifty, we’re on the roof, just observing. And fifty and older were off the roof and have all this wisdom behind us. So that’s in particular to the four six. So if any of this interests you and if anything that I said about the gate of doubt or any I could really talk about the other gates that I personally have and have how they’ve expressed themselves in my life, but this is a big one I think just because we doubt ourselves and our abilities and imagine the grief that causes us. Imagine the growth that that the growth the growth. Again talk. The growth that we stifle because of fear in that self-doubt.
Victoria Volk: So I think this is a very important area of grief to dive into and reflect on within ourselves. So I’ll ask you, what parts of your life have you experienced self-doubt? Have you had what have been your experiences of self-doubt? When have you let fear? Get the best of you. And moving forward, how do you want to change that perspective? Like, what are the questions that can help you come up with a better solution for when that feeling comes up again.
Victoria Volk: And that’s actually plays into my Youmap because one of my top five strengths is strategic. I strategically help other people come up with their own solutions. And with my strength of connectedness, I help them connect the dots from their past to their present to see how those patterns have repeated themselves. So I am seeing all of these things like, even Myers Briggs. Right? But that and that kind of assessment can be manipulated a little bit, but with Youmap and human design particular, I’m looking into how each of them are kind of playing into the other. It’s something I’m just gonna I’m just starting to explore and I’m curious about.
Victoria Volk: And so who knows where this curiosity and human design will lead me. But for the time being, I’m committedly immersed in learning about myself. I think what’s important for anyone who does work that I do in particular is especially with grief, which can be a very heavy area to work in. I mean, obviously, and it comes with a lot of responsibility, I feel. It’s important for me that I can make sense of myself and that I know myself as much as possible. Because that helps me serve others even better. And if I can connect things like self-doubt to stories that I have, that I can demonstrate and illustrate to my clients, people see themselves in other people’s stories. Right? Like, I just think it’s really important for any guide, mentor, leader, coach. I really don’t know what to label myself as, but I think it’s anyone that works in the capacity of one on one or group where there is an exchange of you know, if I’m giving feedback or I’m giving support for grief and or life coaching or whatever it is, I just think it’s really important for the the coach, the mentor, the leader, the guide, whatever, to know themselves and to understand themselves. I think it really helps to negate the risk of projection where I project my beliefs or my wounds. Right? My deep wounds onto other people. My values onto other people. Like, if you don’t know your values and you have that awareness about that, you can unwillingly and not intentionally, but people tend to give values based advice. Right? Like, For example, if I value success and I value money, I’m gonna give advice based on my value of success and money if someone’s coming to me with a question about money or about money. Right? Like, so I’m I’m gonna be like, yeah, take that risk. You know, if, you know, if I’m a if I’m a risk taker with money, or that’s how I made my money. You know what I mean?
Victoria Volk: So it’s really important for us to recognize ourselves first, to know ourselves so that we can be objective observers of other people in their lives, especially when we’re if you’re in a position like I am, where you’re supporting others like I am in grief or in their life. So that’s my two cents on that, but I hope this episode was enjoyable. I hope you found entertainment in my story. And if you did enjoy it, maybe you’ll feel inclined to sign up for my newsletter, which it’ll be coming out not tomorrow. When this episode goes live, but the following week. It’s every other Tuesday at Three AM Central Standard Time. I have a live a new episode goes live. So yeah, I hope you join me there.
Victoria Volk: And if you have any questions that I could answer on the podcast, I am always taking submissions. You can email me at [email protected] and just put question for podcasts in the subject line I can answer it you can be anonymous if you prefer.
Victoria Volk: I think that’s it. So I’ll put the link in the show notes for fourteen forty, the unbiased news in your inbox, the link for my newsletter. And for human design again, that’s right. I was gonna put that link in there too. So I hope this was helpful. If it was, I asked that you please share it or leave a five-star review or even some thoughts. It just takes a few moments of your time, and it really helps me to put a put some words in maybe a name. I don’t know. Sometimes people don’t use their name to a listener. Right? Because I don’t see who’s listening to this podcast. But, yeah, I can feel kind of lonely sometimes, when you’re putting out content and you just really don’t know what people are thinking about it. So if you love it, I would love to know. Inform me, please, because as a manifestor we do love to be informed as well. So with that being said, much loved to you today and have a beautiful rest of your week. And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
