Episode 17: Eight MORE Questions You've Never Asked Yourself (#2)

This week, I pull eight more questions out of the proverbial hat that you've never asked yourself. The questions are meant to make you think and hopefully gain a perspective that is required if you are serious about your healing. Each one involves situations and mindsets that need to be explored, released and resolved in order for you to move forward on your transformational journey.

Disclaimer: This podcast is for people who are ready to heal body, mind and spirit and are willing to take full responsibility for what that involves. I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. This podcast contains adult language and themes that are not suitable for young children or those who are easily offended or triggered. The views discussed in this podcast are my own, based on personal experience and of those I have known and worked with for my entire adult life. This show is not meant to take the place of sound medical or mental health advice. You and only you are responsible for the choices you make based on the information you hear on this show. 

"We're all just walking each other home." Ram Dass

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Transcript

Welcome to Episode 17: “Eight MORE Questions You’ve Never Asked Yourself.”

This episode is a continuation of Episode 7 that aired in early April. I had a tremendous response to that show not only from those of you currently on the transformational path but also from therapists and coaches who wrote to me and said they were going to include some of the questions I posed in the first go ‘round to ask their clients. 

For those who didn’t hear Episode 7, real quickly, the inspiration for these questions came from my own healing journey when I was asked questions by an alternative doctor, a trauma therapist, a shamanic healer and so on and I would often write the questions down because I felt they were worth remembering. I certainly had no plans to do a podcast back then but now that I am, I’m very glad I wrote them down and can share some of them with you. And if this episode gets the same response as Episode 7, I’ll do a part three with more questions later this year. 

The intention of these questions is to get you to think, and you don’t have to answer any of them right away. Sometimes I spent a week or longer pondering these questions. If they make you uncomfortable, that’s good. It means the question carries some type of energy that you need to explore. If you are offended, shocked, triggered or overwhelmed by any of them, same idea. Pay attention to that and eventually figure out your answer to it. As I mentioned during the first go ‘round, these questions all involve situations and mindsets that need to be explored, released and resolved in order for you to move forward in your healing journey. And remember, there’s usually a transcript generated on Apple and Buzzsprout and some of the other platforms where you can go to read the questions if you need to check them out again. 

The first question is: WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID IS GOING TO HAPPEN IF YOU STOP CONSTANTLY MOVING AND DOING? Do you believe your world will crash around you? Are you convinced that only you can do it all? Are you willing to consider that you have created a life and lifestyle for yourself that essentially depends on you and you alone? Why did you create that reality? Are people offering help and are you turning them down? If so, why are you doing that? How much control do you believe you have and how much of it are you willing to give up? 

These are not speculative, fear-based questions. These are real world questions that will eventually have to be answered when you finally crash. It may take a while for you to crash, but you’ll crash. Because it is impossible to keep going at top speed, generating top results for long periods of time and taking no scheduled breaks. You don’t believe that? I could tell you about dozens of people I know…attorneys, doctors, realtors, educators, business owners, actors, writers and more, who either got a devastating diagnosis or had a catastrophic accident that completely upended their life. I’ve noticed as I live and observe others and myself that often those of us who refuse to listen to their doctor, their friends, their family, their partner when they are told to ‘slow down’ and they refuse to do so, tend to be the ones who attract the most intense experiences that shut them down completely. It took me to age fifty-four when I couldn’t move any longer. But I’d been working on fumes for about two years prior to that. And every question I just posed to you, I had to answer and figure out when I was in an extremely weakened state of body and mind. And believe me, when you’re that far down the hole, it’s hard to answer those questions. It’s hard to answer, “What do you want for dinner?” Let alone the existential crisis questions. 

When your body falls apart and then your mind and spirit follow, you are going to have to delegate what needs to get done and you’re going to have to let go of all the things that you think are important but really are not in the long run. I’ve mentioned many times on this show the nature of people who are compelled to always be engaged in productivity. I was one of them. It was very common for me to work and be going, going, going from roughly eight in the morning until midnight or later, every single day, including weekends. If that sounds like you, you will eventually crash like I did. Illness or a serious accident or both is often the only way you will ever agree to stop. And even then, you’ll fight it. I know because that’s what I did and I know many others who operated in the same manner. It takes many months and learning how to surrender to get yourself to a place where you agree to step off the treadmill, vacate the fast-moving train that’s on a collision course and find your center again. There will be a lot of guilt you’ll need to deal with, and you may well be confronted by people in your family or your partner who are not used to you crashing. If you’re known as the ‘glue’ that holds your family or a business together and the ‘glue’ just came apart, other people are going to have to step up to the plate and take the burden from you. But YOU must let them do that. You must agree to let someone else do what you did and not worry about whether they’ll do it ‘right’ (which means, the way you would do it) and you must start deciding what is really important to you and what can be handed off to someone who is capable. And there can’t be twenty things on the list that you consider ‘really important.’ 

When you answer the question, “What are you afraid is going to happen if you stop constantly moving and doing?”, think hard about who you are trying to please. And I’ll give you a hint. It’s not your boss or your partner or customers at your business. It’s someone you grew up with who gave you the impression that your sense of worth was based on how much you could accomplish and used those accomplishments as a source of your value to the family or to that person. And you didn’t want to let him or her down because if you did, you knew it meant losing their attention and you couldn’t risk that. Because you equated their attention to “being loved” and you interpreted being valued because of your accomplishments as the same thing as “being loved”. It was never the definition of true or unconditional love and that’s one of the big things you’re going to have to wrap your head around when you go through the healing process. Whoever treated you in this way was doing it because that’s all he or she knew, most likely because they were treated in the same way. And that’s another huge part of your healing process when you can see the person who treated you this way through the lens of how they were treated growing up. 

So growing up, you lived with the entanglement that the more you produced or accomplished, the more attention you got from those you wanted to please. But you don’t live in that space anymore. That was then and this is now. I want you to know that you are enough. I know you don’t believe that. I know you think you can always do better. But it’s okay. You can sit. You can rest. And people will still love you. And if for whatever reason they give you a hard time for sitting and resting, love yourself enough to remove them from your life. Because if you are fighting a severe illness or dealing with the results of a serious injury from an accident, the guilt of not being productive will not allow you to heal. 

When you heal this part of you that feels the need to be productive as a way to be valued or be worthy of existence itself, I can tell you from my point of view that the payoff is spectacular. When I finally crashed in 2016 and had to take time off from work and life in general, I fought hard just sitting in a chair and being still. Now that I’ve healed those parts of me that wouldn’t allow me to just be…just be…I make sure that every single day, I sit down, put my feet up and just be. If I’m outside, I don’t have my phone or computer. I just sit there and take in the scenery around me. No guilt. No sense of this is a waste of time. God no! In fact, it is required now for me. I could never go back to working non-stop, sixteen or more hours a day. And I don’t have anyone in my life anymore who would question or judge it. 

The second question is: WHAT OR WHO ARE YOU WILLING TO LOSE IN ORDER TO SAVE YOURSELF? This dovetails into the first question. A way to flip this question would be: WHAT OR WHO IN YOUR LIFE IS A MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR TO YOUR STRESS AND IF REMOVED, WOULD ALLOW YOU TO HEAL YOURSELF? If you are truly dedicated to total healing, you are going to have to lose many lifelong belief systems, many assumptions, many patterns and yes, people, in your life that are no longer compatible or healthy for you and will not get you where you need to go. Now I understand if you are brand new to this path of healing, that you will believe that you can heal and drag all your old life into your new world. No. You can’t. It’s that old stuff that got you sick in the first place. So you’re going to have to ditch a lot of what you’re used to if you have any chance of true healing. 

Let’s take beliefs. Make a list of all the beliefs you have that you really lean on in life. One by one, examine each belief and ask yourself “Is this belief helping me move forward or weighing me down?” I’ll give you an example. One of my beliefs I had to let go of was I believed I had to work myself to exhaustion to make money. That nothing worth having was easy and required exhaustive energy to produce. So the key word here is ‘exhaustive’. So because I believed that, I always pushed myself very hard and I always became incredibly fatigued by the process. Is it any wonder one of my long-term health struggles was recovering from severe adrenal exhaustion? That took me four solid years to regulate and that was no small feat, let me tell you. I had flatlined adrenals for three solid years and one year of rebuilding and bringing them back into balance. Because I could never risk another serious setback with my adrenals, I had to figure out how to change that destructive belief system. And about a week or two after I made that conscious decision, I began to meet or read about people who were doing very well financially and weren’t sacrificing their entire life or health in the process. I noticed how they had an entirely different relationship with the way they worked and how they used their downtime. They still worked and achieved but it was done through a more relaxed filter. I didn’t realize back then that it was possible to do your work and feel relaxed about it. These people I was around weren’t engaging in negative self-talk. You know like, “I shouldn’t have done that. That was so stupid!” This was around the same time someone told me I had to release expectations which was totally counter to how I was raised. So that was also a belief system I had to examine. But I decided to give it a shot and take it out for a spin. And you know what? It worked. I could not believe how much more I enjoyed what I did and through that enjoyment - which relaxed the energy around it - the money absolutely increased with incredible ease. 

So negative belief systems are important to lose in order to save yourself. And it takes time. But if you think losing a belief system is hard, wait until you need to remove a person in your life. That was never something I took lightly. I spent a lot of time examining whatever relationship I had that I felt was contributing or possibly directly causing the stress in my life. And then I looked at the attributes of the relationship and whether they outweighed whatever stress it might be creating. But if the attributes were very minor or if one of them was “we have a shared past,” but the downside was extreme and absolutely affecting my health and well-being (especially my emotional and mental health), I still considered it a little more and then if I felt it was appropriate for me, I ended the relationship. And it wasn’t with bitterness. It was with the energy of 
“I matter.” For the first time in my life, I matter to me. Not to anyone else. I matter to me and my allegiance is to me. And if all someone is feeding me 24/7 is platefuls of stress or misery or just a general disrespect of my time, I was absolutely fine with letting it go. Because this should not be seen or felt as a sacrifice. To me, a sacrifice is losing something that you inherently love and that loves you back and letting it go. This is about looking at the beliefs, jobs, people in your life and seeing how often toxic they are to your emotional, mental and physical health and removing that from your life with the understanding that you are saving yourself in the process. Because you realize that you matter, it’s all about self-preservation and not allowing something or someone else to destroy you just because they can. 

The third question connects to what I mentioned about negative self-talk. The question is: WHAT JUDGMENTAL OR DISAPPROVING STATEMENTS DO YOU SAY TO YOURSELF OR TO OTHERS THAT WERE SAID TO YOU GROWING UP? Would you consider looking at them to see if they are YOUR opinions or are you just parroting someone else’s words and beliefs? Has your inner voice been hijacked by voices from your past? When you criticize yourself, whose words are you repeating that were said to you? “Oh, come on, Laurel. Get your shit together!” “Come on, Laurel, move faster.” Uh-huh. I don’t do that anymore. 

In relationship to working yourself to exhaustion, maybe you heard the pithy statement growing up “You can sleep when you’re dead” and maybe you have passed that gem along to your kids or your co-workers. I heard that saying a lot and I grew to hate it. Because as my health deteriorated, I began to realize that if I kept up the frenzied pace, at that rate I’d be dead and sleeping sooner than I expected. 

If you hear yourself calling yourself “stupid” or “a slacker” or “drifting” (that’s one of the words I heard a lot), stop and see if you can hear whose voice from the past is saying it to you. Once you have figured out that out, take a look at that person from an adult perspective and not the child or teenager who was influenced by them. They were most likely damaged by someone in their family who used the same derogatory vernacular toward them. And they just passed it onto you totally unconsciously. Maybe like you passed it along to your children or people around you. Now it’s time to acknowledge it, recognize it and stop repeating the pattern.

The fourth question is: WHO DO YOU NEED TO APOLOGIZE TO? WHO DO YOU NEED TO THANK THAT YOU NEVER THANKED? I realize this sounds very much a step in the 12-step program, but I assure you that it’s something to really look at and if you have the opportunity and the ability to reconnect or connect with the person that needs an apology or a thank you, I urge you to do it. As far as apologies, this is more about when you recognize past behaviors that hurt others and you didn’t acknowledge it at the time and perhaps were quite cavalier about something you did. In my case, I contacted my college boyfriend to apologize to him about the way I broke up with him. Essentially, I ghosted him back then and he felt completely confused and alienated and heartbroken, which he had every right to feel. How I handled or didn’t handle it had always bothered me and it was always sitting in the back of my head. I ghosted him not because he was a bad guy but because my Dad demanded it. He felt the relationship was encouraging me to drift away from my writing career….Remember the drifting word I mentioned in question number three? So I emailed my ex-boyfriend to apologize and shockingly discovered that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I told him how much I regretted the way I ended our relationship and why I was compelled to do it, not that that was an excuse just a reason, and that it had always hung in the background of my mind. He was exceptionally understanding about the whole thing. Obviously, he’d gotten on with his life and married and had children and he sent me photos of his family and we continued to stay in touch until he died.

As far as the thank you, I had a very close family friend growing up who I called an aunt but who I secretly often wished was my mother when I was a teenager. She had, in my mind, saved me and often rescued me from a home life that was not calm or conducive to stress relief. In 2017, I found out she wasn’t doing well physically and even though I was knee deep in my own physical, mental and emotional issues, I was also knee deep in the hardest parts of my healing journey. 2017 was a brutal year for me. But regardless, I felt compelled to travel to California where she lived to tell her face-to-face thank you. Frankly, the state of my body and mind at that time wasn’t conducive to traveling alone and often in 110-degree temperatures, but I didn’t know how much longer she was going to live and I knew I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t do this. So I balled up my courage and did the drive and thanked her and told her she saved my life. And she said, ‘no no no, I didn’t save your life’ and I said, ‘yes, yes, yes, you sure did.’ And while that trip was incredibly difficult for me to do at that time on so many levels, I am very grateful that I persevered and was able to acknowledge her. 

Apologizing when necessary and thanking someone with the deep meaning of what their actions did for you, has to come from a very pure place. You don’t blast any of this on your socials. The only reason I’m bringing it up is as an example of how this process can create peace in many relationships while also giving you a real clarity around that relationship and hopefully a real gratitude that you truly feel. It has to change you for the better in some way and that’s what alchemical transformation is all about. But I want to stress that it’s not ego-driven. Or agenda driven. No, no, no. This is gestated from a place of integrity where an apology or thank you is justified by you or driven by a need to say what you wished you’d had the balls to say a long time ago.  

The fifth question definitely resonates with the last one. HOW MANY REGRETS DO YOU HAVE AND WHAT ARE THEY? AND HOW MANY REGRETS ARE YOU CURRENTLY CREATING? The good news is the second question you have some control over! Because if you clearly understand the regrets you have from your past and see a pattern in your behavior that replicates those regrets to this day, ideally you can stop creating situations and events right now that will easily lead to more regret. One thing I have learned is that regret is a very difficult thing to deal with and if you can do anything in your power to not have regret, do it. Do it. 

Regret, for me, is one of those feelings that doesn’t necessarily create a shock to your system or a visceral reaction. But it does live in a kind of hibernating state under the surface or in the often-distant background of your mind but when you allow that regret to step forth and be seen again and felt, it can often be the source of great sadness or a “God, I wish I could go back and get a do-over.” In other words, it’s usually not your operating software. But it’s an App in your mind that just needs to get pulled up to stall your day for a bit. And if you have enough regrets to the point where they are piling up daily, you must look at that and consciously stop doing and saying things that perpetuate the likelihood of a low level but palpable sorrow that filters through your background static. Pay attention to your patterns and when you can easily see how you create regrets by, for example, not speaking up when you should speak up. That is a very big one for most of us. You know, “I should have said something. I regret keeping my mouth shut.” And so when the opportunity to speak up occurs, take it. Look at each situation and if you deeply feel, “If I don’t do this, I’m going to always regret it,” for God’s sake, do it. Because you’ll discover after you do whatever it is you need to do, that there’s a shift in your awareness. Take a moment to feel the effects of that. For me it was about owning my life in a different way and consciously taking charge of the experiences in my life that I wanted to have. 

The sixth question is WHO ARE YOU ATTEMPTING TO FIX, SAVE OR HEAL AND WHY AREN’T THEY DOING THAT JOB FOR THEMSELVES? WHY DO YOU FEEL IT’S UP TO YOU TO DO IT FOR THEM? If you are pondering why you are sick, take a look at whether you are giving all of your precious energy – and it’s precious, let me tell you - to someone else who has no intention or maybe the ability to generate the necessary energy that is required for them to heal themselves. I know this one all too well. I had a lot of energy back in the day. And I had no problem whatsoever giving it away to any number of people who needed it. What I didn’t understand or appreciate back then, was how valuable that energy was to me and how if I’d just taken seventy percent of it and poured it into myself, I would not have fallen so hard when I did finally break. That energy is like a currency. And if you don’t invest that energy in yourself, you will be broke and broken eventually. And you’ll have to start from scratch, which I had to do, with very little collateral and build myself back up. If this question resonates with you, no matter how old you are right now, I hope you can hear me when I say don’t destroy yourself for someone else. Who does that serve in the end? What is the point? Having a tragic life? Why? You may be propping them up for a short period of time, but once you aren’t there, they fall back. So without you, they will fail. And you don’t want them to fail, I get that. But you have to let them fail and that’s insanely difficult to do but for your own sanity and wellbeing, you finally have to do it. Stop the lengthy daily conversations with them. Been there and done that. Are you watching them closely when you’re talking? Are you paying attention? They’re not listening. They stopped listening to you a long time ago, if they ever listened at all. The hardest thing is watching someone you love destroy themselves while you stand on the sidelines. Been there and done that too.

If the other person shows a continual pattern that goes on for years, of being unwilling to do what they need to do to heal themselves, nothing you do or say will change anything. You will exhaust yourself and when you fall, they will still be in need and acting helpless. And you will barely be able to function. I ask you again, who does that serve? I understand that you deeply love them and want to see them healthy and able to be part of your life. I understand that from the deepest part of my soul. But if you destroy yourself in the process of trying to help or heal someone who is either terrified of what healing requires or just can’t do it for whatever reason, how do you justify that agreement? Unpack it and take an honest look at it. Who benefits on either side of the coin? You’re destroyed and the other person is unchanged. Wow. When do you finally say, “I’ve done enough. I’ve done everything I know how to do and more and I’m done”. These types of relationships are exceptionally tragic. It can be a husband and wife, a mother and a child, two siblings, you and your best friend. It can drugs, booze, depression, suicidal ideation. You can fall into that hypervigilant state of rescuing someone who you truly want to see become whole again so their light can shine. And you think about it all the time. You imagine what a beautiful world it would be if that person could only find their center because you can see how wonderful they are behind all that darkness that drowns out their light. I know what that feels like. But I’m here to tell you that your story does not have to end tragically. It doesn’t. You are not required to go down with the ship. You have an obligation to your soul to grab a life vest and swim to the shore and somehow find your own center and eventually, your own peace. Is it easy? Good God, NO! But if you are listening to this show because you are willing to break down the barriers that have prevented you from hardcore, true healing, it’s the one thing you must do. Stop buying into the belief that it’s selfish to save yourself. Nobody benefits when everybody drowns and nobody is left to tell the story of redemption and the deliverance from a hell that you are no longer required to live in.

Question number seven:  DO YOU STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT YOU HAVE BAD KARMA THAT YOU HAVE TO BALANCE IN THIS LIFETIME AND THAT UNTIL YOU DO BALANCE IT, YOU CANNOT MOVE FORWARD OR BE HAPPY? IF SO, WHEN WILL YOU KNOW THAT KARMIC DEBT IS PAID? WHILE YOU’RE ALIVE OR UPON DEATH OR AFTER DEATH? DO YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE A KARMIC DEBT TO A SITUATION OR SOMEONE IN YOUR LIFE AND THAT’S THE REASON WHY YOU HAVE TO ‘STICK IT OUT’? WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE WILL BE YOUR REWARD FOR STICKING IT OUT? Oh, brother, do I know this one. Not because I believed it. But because I was surrounded by those who did. There is this potent belief system within much of the alternative health and metaphysical community that we often bring bad karma or karmic debts into this lifetime to amend and create a zero balance on either side of what is owed and what is paid with that karmic debt. I do believe in karma and I do believe we come into this lifetime with the spiritual co-creation that does require something from us that is often experienced by us as sacrifice or a life of hard service or having to deal with a catastrophic injury when we’re young that plagues us our entire life. But it’s one thing to have these experiences and quite another to attach a long-suffering mentality to them. Because when you attach the long-suffering belief system that you have karmic debt or bad karma and this is your lot in life, the trail of victimhood that leads to that big pity pot at the end of the road has a whole lot of causalities along that trail. Take a serious look at this belief system if you own it! And contemplate the answers to those follow up questions I posed. I was raised around a lot of metaphysical, esoteric people and some of them, thank God, questioned these spiritual belief systems by simply saying, “Okay, if you believe you have a karmic debt to someone or something, when will you be able to successfully pay that debt?” It’s not a cruel question but the way people would often respond was with offense. “What are you getting at? What kind of a question is that? Are you trying to be clever or funny?” Oh, yeah. Anyone who responds with such emotion at a very innocuous question, feels threatened by that question because somewhere in their psyche, they cannot handle that their belief system has a few holes in it, and that belief system is driving how they live their life, regardless of those holes. And in the case of believing you have karmic debt that needs to be paid and you are willing to continually suffer and bear the punishment of this soul agreement with gritting teeth and a kind of distorted perspective on what God has wrought for you, when you break that belief down and explore the collateral damage and shrapnel you are slinging toward yourself and those you claim you love, it really starts to show up as just plain ol’ “I see myself as a bad person and I need to suffer. And I need to really lean into it.” So, when these people are asked when will your karmic debt be paid, they often become briefly detached or outright upset at the question. Why? Because if their conscious or unconscious goal is to endlessly suffer because that’s what we just do in this family or this marriage or whatever, the idea of being able to pay that karmic debt and not have it weighing on them is not something they can begin to visualize because they’re too much into the suffering of the supposed debt. 

The belief of living a life of karmic retribution is made even worse when you don’t realize you believe it. But you operate in your life on all levels as if you did believe in it consciously. Maybe you attract a lot of low-level misery ‘that ya just have to suffer through, because you know, God seems to want you to suffer.”  

The theatre of this belief is played out in relationships where one or both parties believe they need to ‘stick it out’ to pay off karmic debt or if they don’t believe in karmic debt directly, they say things like “Gotta stick it for better or worse. I just wish there was a little more better and a lot less worse. But oh well. I guess I just have to keep going until God sends me home.” And while they do that, they make everyone around them as miserable as possible. This really falls into the territory of generational trauma. Because this type of belief is often seen in multiple generations where they either refer to it as ‘bad luck’ or ‘a curse’ or ‘bad karma.’ You know, “If I didn’t have any bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.” And I’m not saying there aren’t family bloodlines that have a whole lot of bad karma injected into their bloodline. 

But how about instead of investing yourself into this dark belief system, what if you were to have a conversation with that karma? Pretend it’s a person and not a collective energy. And you sit down with that karma and you ask, “Who is this benefitting?” Where is this suffering beneficial to me? Am I to believe that I must experience extreme suffering at the expense of all my treasured relationships just to live a life that will be described as ‘tragic’ upon my awful death. Which I had coming to me. Because of that debt thing. Who is benefitting from this endless tragedy? This is a show that has a deeply spiritual resonance. So is your soul benefitting from this suffering? Because that’s the only reason I’m here and doing what I now do. I’m just trying to keep my soul content and moving forward. 

So instead of this heavy, suffering energy, how about transmuting that? Instead of the old school idea that you came here to suffer because of things you did in another life or because God hates you or name your poison, instead of that, what about transmuting that suffering into awareness and awakening? And taking whatever you learn from that transmutation and teaching that to other people who have this same suffering belief system? How about you show other people how to become their best ally and that they have the power to heal themselves, if they choose. Why can’t we look at this from the perspective of healing the karmic debt through ancestral healing forgiveness.  Because when you really think about it, after a while when you’re torturing people, it becomes boring. Its like ‘this again?” Haven’t we done the screws enough? Haven’t we overplayed the same scenes to their full extent of torture? It’s all the same shit and it’s getting pointless. Just torture for the sake of torture. And who does that serve? Who grows from that? Who can emerge from that dark point of view and be able to help others without carrying forward that belief in everlasting suffering and karmic debt. I’ve had many healers tell me about their karmic debt and how it weighed on them. And no, they weren’t great healers. Because they were too engaged in their own belief that they were writing a cosmic wrong so that set an undertone of bias to the healing or lack of healing they were able to provide for me. 

So if this karmic debt question resonates with you, explore it. Figure out the source of this belief and see if you can heal that source. 

I’m just going to lay out the Eighth question as something for all of you to think about this week as you go about your life. The question is, IF YOU COULD BRING BACK ONE PERSON FROM YOUR LIFE WHO HAS DIED AND YOU HAD ONLY ONE HOUR TO SPEND WITH THEM, WHO WOULD IT BE? Would you sit across a table from them or would you sit next to them on a couch? What would you talk about? I’ll just leave it there.

And I’m a going to throw in a bonus question today because I’m in a generous mood. This is also another question meant purely to ponder. But it’s a question I’ve pondered and asked a few atheists and agnostics. IF THE ESSENCE OF GOD IS DEFINED IN THE SENSE OF A COSMIC ENERGY OR UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THAT ENERGY IS IMBUED IN ALL LIVING MATTER INCLUDING HUMAN BEINGS, IF YOU ARE A DEVOUT ATHEIST OR AGNOSTIC, DOES THAT MEAN YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN YOURSELF?

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like what you hear, share this podcast with others and follow me. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. I’ve included the companies I personally support and have helped me in my own healing process on all the show notes, so please check that out. There are discount codes for you to use.  Looking forward to you joining me next week when the topic is “Don’t Fall Into The Buzzword Trap”. New episodes drop every Saturday. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”