Episode 24: Getting Advice

Everybody needs advice, especially when their life implodes. And being drawn into alchemical healing will certainly create that implosion. Not many people understand this type of healing because it IS the road less traveled. So right there, you have a built-in limited group that will understand how to advise you. But you will need advice. Attempting to go it alone as I did for too long is not a great idea. Your thoughts and fears begin to take root inside you, leaving your point of view completely ungrounded. It’s easy to become stalled for months or years because you are only listening to the confused voice inside. So, you say OK I need to get advice because I’m lost or stagnating. But, therein lies the big issue: who do I go to that I can trust and not just with information that is incredibly private but who can actually help me and lead me to the answers I need. In today’s show, I’ll discuss who to talk to and most importantly, WHO NOT to go to for advice. 

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. 

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Transcript

            Welcome to Episode 24. Today’s topic is: “Getting Advice.” 

            I’ve been putting together today’s show for about six months as I gather ideas and talking points. But over the last two weeks, I’ve certainly been dealing with what happens when you giveadvice to someone who is asking you for advice and how the fragility of people’s nature today influences how that advice is taken in, absorbed or even heard.  If the fragile individual doesn’t want to hear the practical or common-sense advice or is incapable of answering questions that possibly challenge their belief systems, they resort to attacking you or misinterpreting the advice as judgment, lacking in compassion or being rude. So the show I’ve been working on which was who and who not to ask advice from is still in play but I’m also going to briefly shine the light on the other point of view which is the person who is being asked for advice. 

            The lack of maturity that I’ve encountered over the last couple weeks is astounding to me. Some of it is from people who are in their twenties and some of it is from adults as old as fifty. What I’m seeing is that they don’t really want advice. They want their beliefs and dogma propped up and validated so they can keep circling the same drain they claim they don’t want any longer. If you want to play that game, fine. But if you are telling me that you are on a conscious path toward alchemical healing of mind, body and spirit and you are unwilling to hear anything that challenges your mindset – a mindset you claim you want to change – then you really don’t understand what this type of deep healing requires of you. When I said those exact words “You really don’t understand what this type of deep healing requires,” I was met with “Are you calling me stupid?” and “I don’t like your tone.” So let me use that tone so I can be really clear when I say this. Most of the people who have this type of overly sensitive reaction would not have lasted five minutes with the people I knew growing up who I went to for advice. Thank GOD I had people in my life who didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear, but what I needed to hear. And thank God I heard that advice from a very young age. Like under the age of six. Repeatedly. So it stuck. 

I was a very sensitive child. I was far too sensitive for this world. This world would have destroyed me if I was allowed to maintain that thin-skinned behavior and not been pushed into challenging myself, even when it absolutely terrified me. I was a scrawny, introverted little girl and if somebody treated me like I was stupid, I’d say to my grandmother, “They made me feel stupid” and her pat reply was always, “Nobody can make you feel stupid unless you allow them to.” I heard that probably one thousand times until it finally sunk in. I’ve mentioned this before on the show. I used to have a pretty bad stutter when I was younger and a lisp, both of which forced me into speech therapy. And once I was able to stop stuttering, I was given the advice that the next step was to get up in front of people and talk. Just the thought of doing that back then made me physically shake and stutter again. But I eventually did it and did it again and before you knew it, I was in school plays and doing very well. I had to get advice early on about how to deal with rejection and how to not take it personally. Since my goal from a very young age was to be a writer, I had to respect and agree to constructive criticism of my writing when I asked for advice on a story I’d written. Sometimes the criticism was brutal but I accepted it and because I trusted the people I was talking to, I would pay attention to what they suggested and apply that for the next story I wrote. Was I offended by their advice? No! I never once said, “You’re judging me!” Ever! Or “That makes me angry.” Ever! I respected the critique because I was being told the truth from specific people in my life who I trusted and who were genuinely good people and who absolutely had my best interest at heart. Those are two really important factors right there. You need to ask the right people for advice who are trustworthy, who sincerely care about you and who have a core understanding of whatever subject you’re asking them about. 

            People I grew up around had a thicker skin than what’s out there today. Nobody was being triggered back then. The word trigger back then meant the mechanism that released the hammer on a gun. Not a reaction to something that upsets your tender heart. And again, this show is all about consciously choosing the path of transformative healing that asks of you things you have never asked yourself or even contemplated. Baked into that cake is ‘being uncomfortable.’ You want to heal all that’s broken inside of you? You are going to have to get used to being so fucking uncomfortable that it becomes second nature to you. You are going to have to hear things that make you uncomfortable. You are going to have to admit things that really make you uncomfortable. That challenge your point of view, the way you have always chosen to see someone and more. You are going to have to put yourself in the shoes of the ones who hurt you and feel and experience their point of view that most likely contradicts your point of view.  And if you can do that, you are going to have to understand that some of the monsters in your life became monsters because of their own unhealed trauma and not because they chose to be monsters. And that’s a very difficult one to wrap your head around but if you keep killing the messenger who is advising you and trying to show that to you, you’ll never truly heal which is what you ultimately say you are after. 

When you’re offering advice to someone who has asked for it, and they don’t like it, there’s a propensity to accuse the other person of ‘being judgmental.” I also feel that if a person is always accusing people of being judgmental, that that’s a judgment unto itself, but I digress. Most people these days don’t understand the difference between judgment and discernment. Discernment comes with age IF – BIG IF - you have the ability to stand back and observe and pull your ego to the side. If you can do that and look at something or someone from both sides, with maturity, no bias, plenty of experience, that’s discernment, not judgment. And discernment can be (and I say CAN BE because age does not confer wisdom) a lifesaver if you are dealing with an unscrupulous person and can see that before you entangle yourself with that person. Is it judgment or discernment if you look at someone and see the red flags and say “No, I’m not getting involved with this”? That’s using discernment for self-preservation.

If I have zero experience with something, I don’t offer advice. Period. I admit I have no experience or reference point and leave it at that. I’ve never used Ketamine, for example, and I get asked a lot about  Ketamine and I always say, “I haven’t done it.” If a person keeps asking I’ll say, “I know a lot of people who have done it and I’ve observed how it affects their life over the months moving forward” and then I’d discuss what I observed, both positive and not so positive. But even if I had done Ketamine, my advice would come from MY experience with it. If I’m asked what I think about a certain person or teacher or healer, and I have personal experience OR have listened at length to their teachings and have been able to garner a sense of them and so on, I’ll give my take on what I’ve observed. But that’s just MY take. That’s not gospel. Unless the person has shown themselves to be dangerous or controlling, I’ll often say go work with them and see what you think. You might learn who NOT to go to because of them and that’s valuable right there. 

So let’s shift gears and get into who to get advice from. And this is all about asking advice in relationship to one’s alchemical transformational healing and how to navigate from point A to point B on that journey. 

Everybody needs advice, especially when their life implodes. And alchemical healing will create that implosion. Not many people understand this type of healing because it IS the road less traveled. So right there, you have a built-in limited group to go to for advice. But you will need advice. Attempting to go it alone as I did for too long is not a great idea. Your thoughts and fears begin to take root inside you, leaving your point of view completely ungrounded. So it’s easy to become stalled for months or years because you are only listening to the confused voice inside. So, you humble yourself and say OK I need to get advice for this shit show that I’ve created and is destroying my life. But therein lies the big issue. And that is who do I go to that I can trust and not just with information that is incredibly private but who can actually help me and lead me to the answers I need. This is what I dealt with and it’s a big reason I designed this show as a point of reference for people seeking advice or solutions to what is coming up for them along their sacred healing journey. I purposely created this show with the focused intention of creating a podcast that I wish I could have listened to when I was lying in a fetal position on the bathroom rug, drowning in confusion and terror. The advice I’m about to give you is the advice I know that woman on the bathroom floor needed to hear so she would have the best chance to keep moving forward. 

And as I said, alchemical healing is still a very small group of people within the alternative healing movement. People who choose this path, choose it because the path chooses them. You’re not skipping down that happy little road you’re living on and one day say, ‘You know what? Life is good but I think I’m going to incinerate my entire life for the next seven years or so and fall into the abyss of my tortured mind until I shatter into a million pieces and then rebuild myself in an entirely different life and mindset.” Nobody says that.  You don’t voluntarily seek out your own destruction. When you choose alchemical healing, your destruction comes to you and that is normally the impetus, for seeking body, mind, spirit healing. Within that destruction, you become weakened, feel very vulnerable and can become understandably desperate when asking for advice, and that is a potent recipe for falling off your healing path and rolling into the tall weeds of your own destruction. In that state of destruction and disorientation, you’re going to be very confused at the start. This alchemical shattering alters your entire life and how you perceive and choose to experience that Life. And in that physical and etheric shattering, you will have a high likelihood of reaching out to the wrong people. Not just people who can’t help you or regard you with stunned apprehension, like what’s going on here? But people who might not have your best interest at heart. People who might want to exploit you or use your temporary confused state of mind to mischaracterize you and who might benefit from that misrepresentation of you. People who might want to see you fail. Or manipulate you into taking part in their own misadventures that are terribly misguided and potentially dangerous. 

Pay attention to the way people project onto you or anyone. Observe their pattern if at all possible. That projection is a clue to how they will serve up advice to you. People who look you dead in the eye and take in everything you said with pinpoint accuracy and have a bit of nervous energy around them are going to give you to-the-point, no beating around the bushes advice. People who suffer from Main Character Syndrome are not people to ask advice from. People who are highly emotional and tend to overreact or overplay their life or their conversations will give you highly emotionally charged, ungrounded, ethereal advice that is gooey and sweet and usually leads to regrettable decisions. These are the people who tell you to quit your job, max out your credit card and go to Europe because “you’re worth it.” People who project envy all the time at other people’s successes are going to give you advice from a very thirsty perspective that is reactive and self-serving, usually with an extra serving of unhinged bitterness. So the theme here is ‘What or who is the source of this advice?’ “What is the source of this information?” And how is that source positively or negatively affecting the type of advice they are dishing out?

Don’t confuse advice with someone’s opinion. If they are giving me their opinion based upon having no experience with the question asked, that’s not advice. That’s an opinion masquerading as good advice. If you ask someone who has the opinion that all psychedelics are dangerous substances because they heard that from someone they trusted and believed it even though they have no experience using them in a sacred and controlled manner, you are going to be told to stay away from that shit and maybe ask God to forgive you for even considering to touch that mystical Devil juice.

            Never ask advice from someone who hasn’t healed their own trauma. This is a really big one and one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made and many others I’ve talked to agree with this. Never ask anyone who is deeply wounded and aren’t even aware they are wounded for advice. People who have not healed their own trauma will always give you advice through the cloudy lens of their unhealed trauma. And I know this because before I started to really heal my trauma, I gave advice to others from that same cloudy lens and it wasn’t always great advice nor was it apropos for them as an individual. People who haven’t healed their trauma will always give you self-destructive advice that weakens you or increases your fear or projects onto you whatever their trauma dictates they project. And that’s usually fear. Don’t ever ask advice from someone who is in fear mode. Or who sees the world through fearful eyes. They will be more than happy to project their fears onto you because it’s all they know. I’ve used the term “their operating system” and that’s true here. People who run on the fuel of fear are locked in to their fears and it’s very hard if not impossible to get them to relinquish their need to reduce this trauma-based, kneejerk reaction. And to add onto this, don’t ask advice from someone who is perhaps doing the same deep level healing you are doing but who is still in the really broken part of their journey. It’s like trying to ride a bike with a tire that’s leaking air. You’re not going to get anywhere.

Another type of person you should not ask for advice are those who are self-sabotaging because they will always tell you do just the opposite of what you actually need to do to empower yourself. So the only reason you might want to test the waters with a self-saboteur is to make a list of everything they tell you and do the exact opposite and you might end up empowering yourself oddly enough. For example, if you ask a self-saboteur “I’ve been doing really well on my healing journey and getting a little stronger and reading a lot about herbs, and I’m thinking of signing up for this online course on herbal medicine. What do you think?” Well, you had them at, “I’ve been doing really well” and they will have an unconscious or conscious bias against the fact that anyone is actually ‘doing well.’ So right away, you haven’t even gotten into your sentence, and the self-saboteur is already priming the bullet in the barrel of their gun. Then you make the big mistake of saying you’re “getting stronger”. Well, you just forced the self-saboteur to place their finger on the trigger. Strength is kryptonite to a self-saboteur. So when you ask whether you think signing up for an online course on herbal medicine is a good idea, their answer is going to sound something like this. “What can you possibly gain from doing that? Isn’t that just going to tire you out more? I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t waste my time or money.” You feel the energy of what I just said? Low energy. Low vibration. No useful interaction or questions asked or interest in any of it. Just an opinion based on an intrinsic need to never take anything to the next level so that any healing can happen. So if you’re using my theory of “do the opposite of what they tell you,” you could translate their answer into “You might be able to gain a lot from an online course in herbs. It might inspire you to move forward in your healing journey. You have the time now to do it and it could be a good investment of money.” See how that works? Just take what they say and flip it around. 

Self-saboteurs are the ones who invariably cancel appointments when therapies are going really well. They are the ones who will be moving along and then ‘have an accident’ that prevents them from continuing on their forward motion. It’s deeply unconscious most of the time but for some of the more unstable self-saboteurs it’s absolutely conscious. Self-saboteurs don’t believe they are worthy or deserve love and that they don’t have any self-worth. Tons of self-punishment too. A lot of the self-saboteurs I’ve met and known long term have a pathological programming that kicks in the second they are doing well. If you help figuring out how to screw up a good thing, they are the ones you call. When you become stronger and speak up against the way someone is treating you, a self-sabotaging person will advise you to “just let it go” and “just ignore it”. Because that’s exactly what they do when they are repeatedly drawn into the net of abusive people. They don’t expect any accountability from others because they have no accountability for their own actions and just see it as ‘more bad luck’ instead of self-destructive decisions that lead to self-destructive outcomes. So if you were to stupidly go to a self-sabotaging person and say to them, “I’m not interested in inviting so-and-so to the event because he’s repeatedly abusive and I’m tired of it,” they will tell you to “just get over it.” That it’s “your problem” and your biggest problem is that you can’t “let go.” Which is so ironic because when you choose to become stronger within yourself and not be a ball to be kicked around anymore, in order to get to that point, you had to do a LOT of ‘letting go.’ You are intimately connected with the action of ‘letting go.’ So when the self-saboteur tells you to ‘just let abusive behavior go,’ what they are actually asking you to do is disrespect yourself the same way they disrespect themselves. Because you know by this time that if you were to take their stupid advice and put yourself in the position where you would be someone’s verbal punching bag, you would just get another punch and another punch and another punch of abuse and you would deserve all of it because you are willingly and consciously allowing it. But because you’ve done a lot of work, when they tell to “just let it go,” that’s your cue to just let them go from your life. Take it from me. A self-sabotaging person serves absolutely no intrinsic value in your life after you have done a lot of work on yourself, except to remind you how frustrating and self-destructive they are to have around. 

And I could repeat the same advice about the next type of person you do not want to get advice from. And that group is the ones who see themselves as perpetual victims. They’ll give you the same low-energy advice that’s colored in neutral tones of beige and tan. They will never be able to see beyond their narrow tunnel of self-defeating drama. Oh and if a victim comes to you for advice, understand they are not asking for advice but to have their inability to demonstrate any ounce of internal power or strength validated by you. They want you to commiserate with them so that when the conversation is over, you both feel depleted and need a nap to recover. If you tell a victim, “Well, why did you allow that to happen?” they aren’t going to like that advice. Because that advice requires something of them that would require them to speak up and not be abused or allow the abuse of someone else they claimed to love. With people who carry victim mindsets, suffering is never optional. So cross them off your list of people to get advice from.

The next group of people you absolutely do NOT want to ask advice from, even if they are running the retreat center or the five-day workshop you paid good money for. And that group consists of narcissists. And my God, does the personal transformation movement attract narcissists like flies on shit. Anyone who has grown up with a narcissist parent, knows what I’m talking about. When you ask a narcissist for advice, they will tell you how you need to be experienced by others or the outside world in order to make them look good. Asking advice of a narcissist is being told how to accommodate yourself to serve someone else’s objective. I grew up around many people who fit this playbook. Some covert narcissists and a few malignant and two that were grandiose. But I didn’t understand narcissism back then. I didn’t understand that I was embroiled in a relationship that never took into consideration what was best for me when I went looking for advice. When you are the child of a narcissist, you are simply seen and experienced by that parents as a satellite and extension of them, not an independent individual who has needs, desires, opinions and more that don’t precisely necessarily echo the home office. And I mean precisely because you do not off the narcissist’s approved script or all hell breaks loose. And if you don’t understand a narcissist, which I didn’t, you will get advice, which I did, that was intelligent and made sense but was also manipulative and always took into consideration how it would make the family look. Let’s say you ask your father for advice on taking a job that’s out of town. And let’s say your father wants you around just in case he needs you. So if you ask him for advice on taking a job out of town that is a big money maker and could potentially put you on a career path toward great actualization of your dreams and help you to build a strong financial foundation, he will tell you not to take the job. He will imbue you with distrust of your abilities to take on that type of responsibility. Or he’ll flat out make a statement such as “You don’t want to do that. You’re not going to like that” Now a non-narcissist making a statement like that “Yeah, I don’t think that’s for you” could be a true warning by someone who knows you and your temperament and more. But a narcissist will make you doubt yourself even when you have proven many times that you are capable. He’ll suggest you look closer to home. He wants to keep you ‘round the ol’ homestead so he can depend on you at a moment’s notice. Or let’s say you’re tired of your hair length or color and you been looking at photos of different styles and colors and found one that you really think reflects how you yourself want to appear at this time. So you ask your narcissist mother for advice, showing her the photos you’ve been looking at. If she thinks in her own mind that it’s going to embarrass her to introduce you or show photos of you with this new hairstyle or color, she will tell you not to do it. Because, remember, you are not an autonomous individual. You are their two-dimensional projection of themselves and they believe that your actions and choices reflect back to them and if you choose something they believe is not going to make them look good or will make others question the mother, they will tell you not to do it. “You’ll look awful!” or “You’ll look ridiculous!” The narcissist’s advice will always be through the lens of ‘what serves them the best.’ And if they don’t care because it has no reflection back onto them, they won’t bother to give you an opinion.  But usually, everything will have a reflection back to them and so they will need to give you input. And if you don’t take a narcissist’s advice, they will often become enraged and then use your lack of taking their prior advice as a weapon if you’re stupid enough to ask them for advice again. 

Who else to not ask advice from? Never ask advice from someone who is immature, even someone who is in their seventies and still immature. They are the ones who will tell you that you want to start with five grams of psilocybin and go up from there. 

Never ask a bitter woman for advice. Don’t ask a bitter woman about love or forgiveness. They’ve been badly hurt and burned. They’ve had their hearts shattered by men they gave everything to. They see the cruelty that does exist in this world and they can’t stop focusing on it. Does that cruelty exist? Of course it does. To deny that is to deny reality. But there’s also goodness and light and beauty. Both can co-exist in the same world that looks terrible and abusive. 

As I said earlier in the show, alchemical healing is still growing and unless you’ve really been through it and come out the other side, you aren’t going to understand all the nuances and traps that show up along the path. So the next advice I have for you is do not share your darkest moments that are still unfolding and untethered with anyone who has no clue about what is happening to you. Innocently, they will become quite concerned about you and make comments they think are helpful but actually are tone deaf to the situation you are going through. I experienced this three times until I just stopped sharing with anyone because it became so clear to me that there was no point in asking these people for advice because they regarded what I was describing to them as ‘not okay,’ which is putting it mildly. A very well-meaning friend told me after I told her about what happened in a therapy session where I was releasing trauma, “That’s not okay, Laurel.” And immediately I’m thinking why is that not okay? It was a common release technique, and it wasn’t wrong or not okay. It was just very intense to observe. But her interpretation of what I told her was that it was something that I should not do. And I totally understood at that moment that when people don’t understand the depths of what trauma release creates in the body, they interpret it as everything from dangerous to being possessed by entities. I mean it. From an outsider hearing about it or observing it, it looks absolutely terrifying to them. So be aware of that because this is a very common pit to fall into when you do this type of healing. 

Definitely do NOT ask people for advice who have inherent bias. Obviously, that’s good advice for anyone at any time. But in this type of healing that is asking you to deconstruct everything you ever were and everything you ever thought you were, if you are talking to someone who has extremebias about a healer or a therapy or whatever, you could easily get drawn into something that is not right for you. It may be right for the person who has the inherent bias. But because of that bias, he or she cannot see beyond that bias and understand that you are possibly not a good candidate for what they are proposing. And to that, I don’t think it’s a good idea to ask advice about deep healing from people who are really overly emotionally or really locked into a belief system or dogmatic mindset that is immovable. That mindset or belief system is the operating system for how they deliver advice to anyone. And I think that’s baked into the cake of inherent bias. Being so passionately entangled with a therapy or healer and becoming hyper emotional or obsessed with a therapy or healer that they can’t get proper perspective. And this is something you are going to eventually encounter when you do this work. You’ll hear how “passionate” someone is about this or that and that’s great. I’m happy for anyone who feels drawn or connected to anything that is helping them. But my advice, because you will encounter this, is to check out whatever they are suggesting if it feels potentially good for you but don’t allow yourself to drink the Kool-Aid if it turns out to be something that doesn’t end up feeling right to you after you give it a shot. 

The next one sounds obvious, but you might be shocked how many people will not truly understand it until they reach the darker parts of alchemical healing. And this one is don’t ask anyone about the dark night of the soul who has no clue what a dark night of the soul means or feels like. I fell into this trap myself. I made some very naïve assumptions and believed that many of my healers had experienced some form of the dark night of the soul and comprehended what that entailed. Reflecting back on that ridiculous naivety I had at that time, I cringe when I remember some of the awkward conversations I had with some of these healers. I learned that if someone has not been through the dark night of their soul and emerged from it transformed – and most of these healers had never done that – that their advice reflected their own limitations by virtue of not having that deeply transforming experience. My dark night lasted somewhere around twenty-two months with thirteen or so of those months being seriously dark and terrifying to me. But I don’t want to scare you because the dark night of the soul is part of this alchemical experience and I’m going to do a show on it later this year. The point is it has an ending point. It doesn’t go on forever. But when you are in it, and you know you need to surrender but you are absolutely terrified of doing that because you perceive that experience of surrender to be your death….and turns out you are right! Except you don’t actually die. Just parts of you die that no longer serve your highest and greatest good. Yeah. Good times, right? And as someone who had to go through this without any spiritual guidance whatsoever, just white-knuckled it, I can tell you that you really want and need someone to tell you that you’re going to make it through to the other side and the sooner you surrender, the sooner you can see the light creep back into your very dark hole of destruction. But while you’re knee deep in the hardest parts of it and you don’t know how to do it and you’re at a chiropractic appointment as I was and you become unable to communicate with the chiropractor because, yeah, it’s that bad. And all you can say is: “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” And your chiropractor replies, “You mean your jaw and neck pain?” And you look up at him and the tears just fall without any effort on your part. Sinking deeper into the bottomless abyss where you will drown in a pool of dark, murky water And you say, “Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul?” And he says, “Nope! Sounds scary. Still want me to adjust you today?” True story. 

And if you make the bad decision of talking to the wrong person about your Dark Night, you may find that person relocating from your presence, especially when you start telling them what it feels like to have the death of your Ego. Yeah, they have no damn clue what you’re talking about, but the way your eyes fixate to the side when you’re talking about it, scares the shit out of them. And they just need to leave. And you’ll never talk to them again but if you do, there will always be that awkwardness where they regard you very cautiously and say something like, “Did you, uh, get over that, uh, death of your, uh, ego?” So my advice on getting advice about the Dark Night of the Soul is to search out podcasts that discuss it in-depth, books and articles and definitely videos online so you have a broad perspective on what you might experience. 

And bringing that up, never just ask one person for their advice on healing or workshops or whatever you want to pursue during your healing. I’ve seen this far too much in the alternative health industry literally for my entire life. People who forever just read or follow the same person and don’t consider other perspectives. I don’t care if the person is renowned or famous for helping others. Or whatever you want to say to glorify them. They are one human being with one point of view and while it may be a POV that fits for you, it may also be lacking in other aspects. Just like you should get a second and third and fourth opinion from different doctors, the same applies to transformation work. If you’re into shamanic work, work with different shamans. Work with a male and a female if possible. And you may only get one lesson or “Aha!” moment from a particular teacher but it could end up being a bedrock for your entire healing. 

The last ones I wrote down are….

Don’t ask about marriage advice from someone who has never been married.

Don’t ask for sex advice from someone who hates sex. 

Don’t expect attention from someone who was ignored as a child. They keep forgetting you’re sitting right next to them. 

Don’t ask a sadist to give you gentle advice. He’ll take it as a challenge. 

Don’t ask a workaholic where to vacation. He’s going to ask you “What’s a ‘vacation’?”

Don’t ask a mental patient if he thinks you’re crazy. According to a mental patient, everyone’scrazy.

So who do you get advice from in this very confusing world of transformational healing? From people who have healed their trauma and who have had years of living a life healed and have some type of perspective on the process and can honestly tell you what worked for them and what didn’t work. If someone tells you that “it all worked,” they are not being honest with themselves because not everything is going to work. They may have gotten something out of it that led them to the next therapy, but it didn’t necessarily resolve their issue. And as I said, I think it’s important that they haven’t just done the work and come out the other side but that there’s been adequate distance from the point of renewal and where they are now with plenty of time to integrate their experiences and hours of time to contemplate and reflect on what it all means for them. 

You want people who are also open minded to out-of-the-box healing modalities but not so open minded to the point that they carry a reckless nature and encourage you to partake in healing experiences that are not necessarily in your best interest or even in the neighborhood of what you need to be doing. If they are reckless, I don’t feel they’ve completely healed their nervous system so pay attention to that. You want open-mindedness with superior clarity, certainly innate and intuitive intelligence and a strong constitution with a calm center. These are the ideal people to talk to and get advice from. 

But regardless, it’s still going to be advice from their experience and their perception of how that experience affected them, for better or for worse. Your experience and your story will have many similarities to others who do this sacred work. But there will always be unique moments that nobody else experiences. And it’s those moments, along with the intense core lessons, that will shape and frame how you answer someone who is coming to you for advice. 

That’s all for this week. Thank you for all the great emails you’re sending me in regard to the upcoming show I’m putting together where I answer your questions. Keep them coming and you find my email in the show notes. 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. On all the show notes, I’ve included the companies I personally support and have truly helped me in my healing process, so please check that out along with the coupon codes. Looking forward to you joining me next week when we’ll talk about “How To Surrender To The Cosmic Death”. 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.”