Episode 34: Another Eight Questions You've Never Asked Yourself (#3)

In the third installment of a listener favorite, I ask eight questions that were either asked of me during my healing journey or I jotted down along the way as my path unfolded. Each question must be considered, explored and answered if you are truly focused on your transformation and healing. 

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Transcript

                  Welcome to Episode 34. Today’s Topic is “Yet Another Eight Questions You’ve Never Asked Yourself.” 

This is my third installment of the eight questions theme show and it always seems to generate a lot of response from my listeners. So I figured it was time to go find the list of questions I’d written down over the years that have been asked of me or questions I came up during critical times in my healing journey. 

But before I get into today’s questions, I have a show scheduling update for my regular listeners. As anyone who has listened to my show from the first episode knows, I am still dedicated to my health and well-being on all levels, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. And the advice that I offer on this podcast is advice that was either given to me or cultivated from my own healing experiences and perspectives. One of those sayings is, “Don’t go back to what broke you.” I am a big follower of that advice. One of my biggest lessons was learning how to stop overscheduling my life and taking on too many responsibilities that ended up creating serious damage to my physical body through the stress that was created. When you’ve burnt yourself out to the degree that I burnt myself out, and if you refuse to ever experience that burnout again, you learn to unapologetically regulate your life as best as you can and when opportunities show up that have the potential to possibly improve your life, you weigh those opportunities carefully against what they will provide for you against what potential chaos they can create. So to that, this show has given me a voice to talk to all of you and through that, I’m being offered some opportunities outside of this show that are intriguing but I won’t discuss because I also follow the rule of “Don’t overshare.” I have no idea where these opportunities might lead but I’m willing to explore a couple of them and see what happens. In order to do that, I had to look at my schedule and realize that if I maintained this show every single week and attempted to give strong focus on what is being offered to me, everything would suffer. Mainly because any chance of having that precious downtime I now require  and deeply value would vanish. And bam, I’d be right back in that cyclone of overdoing and not being able to “just be” in my life. And I won’t give that up. I’ve grown quite fond of “just being” after decades of racing through my life and not consciously creating the time to ‘be’ in life. So with all that said, I’ve come to a compromise that will work for me and I hope it works for my listeners as well. And that compromise is that instead of this show being weekly, I will release new episodes every two weeks. 

So onto this week’s episode. First question you’ve probably never asked yourself:

WHAT PEOPLE OR EVENTS IN YOUR LIFE OR OUTER LIFE DO YOU FIXATE ON THAT YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO ABILITY TO CONTROL OR MANAGE? HOW HAS FIXATING ON THESE THINGS DERAILED YOUR HEALING PROCESS? 

When you are consciously choosing to heal from a physical, mental, emotional or spiritual illness, your focus must be precise. It’s about diving into your perspectives, addressing your fears and weaknesses and strengthening them and a lot more. Shifting that focus toward anything outside yourself that you have absolutely no ability to fix, change, alter, etc. is counterproductive IF you say your highest intention is to heal yourself. I know this one very well because I got caught up in this destructive pattern in the first two years of my healing journey and those first two years were a nightmare for a lot of reasons. I compounded that nightmare by not recognizing that the relationships and the events that were peppering my outside world were of no consequence to me. And that my often myopic focus on those people and situations was draining precious energy I barely had at that time away from my own recovery. 

This question could also be asked in this way: What internal and external fears are you fixating on every day that you have no control over or any ability to change, fix or alter? How many of the things you’ve feared since forever, have actually come true in the exact way you envisioned they would? And because of that, how many years have you wasted worrying about things that never happened? This is not something I’ve done but I’ve had to be around people my entire life who followed this pattern. And the more you remind them that this or that they feared would happen did not happen, they tell the next time something comes up, that this time….this time it will. But it doesn’t. And rinse and repeat. I’ve lived it and I’ve had to constantly remain optimistic amidst an often strong storm of terror and doubt from the chorus around me. So if you are engaging in this type of constant fear focus and you are listening to this show because you want to find ways to heal, I strongly suggest that you make a list of all the things you feared in your life. All the seemingly catastrophic possibilities you spent years focused on the collection of these fears. Write them down and include what you believed was going to happen. Exactly as you believed it was going to happen. That part is very important because that’s catastrophic narrative is what you forced yourself and others around you to listen to every single day. So write it all down and then one by one, see if what you feared exactly happened in the way you exactly believed it would. And you know what? For a lot of you, you will not remember all of the fear beliefs you had at any given time when you engaged with this behavior. But others can fill in those missing parts for you because they had to endure all of it. 

The reason I bring this up is because you simply will not be able to heal whatever you are trying to heal, if you maintain living in this loop of destructive fear-based thinking. You will eventually manufacture an entire false reality and a world that only exists only…ONLY within your own head and that has not one scintilla of truth within that false reality. And if you create this dangerous mindset, you will become impervious to any logical or critical thinking individual who attempts to prove you are wrong. You will fervently defend your illusions. You will punctuate all your manufactured fear porn and pummel them with as much fear-based rhetoric as you can generate. Instead of waking up and realizing that you are living in the prison of your mind and relying on nothing but regurgitated terror, speculation and rumor, you will drown in the waters of your own stormy mind. 

There are two quotes I’m going to read that sum up this section. The first is from Thomas Jefferson’s “Canons for Conduct in Life.”  And that is: “How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened?” The second is credited to Mark Twain but that is not accurate. Nobody really knows who wrote it but it’s too good to not include. And that is, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

                  Second question you’ve probably never asked yourself but you probably should is: 

DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU PERCEIVE AS ‘NEGATIVE’ EXPERIENCES IN YOUR LIFE AS CHALLENGES AND HURDLES?  I knew someone growing up who always characterized their problem as “challenges.” And because of this, this individual carried great resistance to overcoming what they saw as a “challenge.” Remember the words we use in our life represent how we view our ability to overcome whatever we are up against. So seeing what is perceived as “negative’ as a challenge, instantly fortifies this wall of opposition, fighting, exhaustion and more. Calling it a “hurdle” creates a similar destructive energy. Hurdles are require precious energy to jump over. Some are high and some are low but you have to jump and maybe you’ll fall and oh my God! See? Challenges and hurdles. I’m already exhausted. How can I solve it if I’m already tired before I start?

Well, I figured out a way. Change the word and you’ll change the energy and when you change the energy, you’ll have a better chance of changing the outcome. So instead of “challenge” or “hurdle,” change it to “an opportunity.” When you agree to see what you perceive as challenging or hurdles or stressful or however you negatively charge it, as an opportunity to exercise a different mindset, or a chance to use a technique that you’ve learned or read about or to road test your ability to infuse creativity into the situation, now you’ve shifted the entire energy towards creating solutions, workarounds, and potentially success with little effort on your part. All that energy that goes into the “challenges” and the “hurdles” is counterproductive energy. When everything is seen as an opportunity to learn or grow or experience something from a different point of view, it changes everything about that situation. You are no longer the willing victim of whatever you want to overcome. You are instead the willing participant in whatever you seek to resolve or overcome. The next time something comes up in your life that you have always called a challenge or a  hurdle or whatever term you have used that creates stress and resistance, stop and turn it around and say out loud, “This is the perfect opportunity for me to _______” This is the perfect opportunity for me to get over my fears. This is the perfect opportunity for me to finally speak up. This is the perfect opportunity for me to practice my new skill set that I just learned.  This is alchemy. You are transforming one base belief system of challenges into a higher form of an opportunity. And when you do this, you will suddenly have no more challenges because you will transmute them into a strong potential for learning and moving past fear or lack of confidence.

                  The third question you should ask yourself is:

IF YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING WITH A THERAPIST, A LIFE COACH, A SHAMAN OR A GURU FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS, AND YOU ARE NO BETTER OFF THAN WHEN YOU STARTED AND POTENTIALLY WORSE OFF, WHY ARE YOU CONTINUING TO WORK WITH THIS INDIVIDUAL? 

This is a question that needs to be addressed by a lot of people right now. There are too many good hearted people right now who are staying with therapists, life coaches and shamans who are not providing them with the tools they need to move forward in their lives. The gurus carry their own bad energy and should be avoided at all cost. They are being led along and throwing money at these people and not feeling one bit of healing or power. In fact, they feel powerless. I’ve had four conversations over the last two weeks with friends who feel trapped by a therapist or life coach specifically who is either not doing their job or contributing to their confusion, and creating a shit storm of self-doubt, guilt and even fear in leaving this person. The stories these people have shared with me are mind-blowing in my opinion. There is a point where you as a client needs to take a step back and really disentangle yourself from what is potentially a very toxic and destructive relationship that is not fomenting any type of independence on your end, let alone cultivating any intrinsic power within you. If your therapist, life coach or shaman is not dedicated to teaching you the tools to build your internal fire so you can learn to stand within your own power and sovereignty of self, you are just being dragged along by someone who only seeks to control you and keep you thirsty and hungry and never satiated so that you never grow the wings you need to fly away and live your life without checking in with mommy or daddy every time you have to make a decision. 

I mentioned sovereignty of self. What does that mean? It means that you have self-determining authority of who you are as a human being, and you understand your talents and capabilities without exaggeration or apology. It means that you are contained in your own power. And when you understand that you are fully contained in your own power, you clearly see that YOU and YOU alone are your own healer. You recognize that the answers to your problems do not exist outside yourself. Your answers to your issues always lie within you. Nobody else can heal you. Nobody. Others can only potentially lead you toward the pathways or the methods that can help you. But in the end, your healing begins and ends from within YOU. And when you heal, it is because YOU did the work, it wasn’t done for you or to you. You created the right environment within you, you laid the right foundations and the right perspectives that changed everything for you and allowed you, and the word is “allow,” to create the outcomes you desired. And if your therapist, life coach or shaman is not driving that message home to you all the time, they are not fulfilling their obligation to you. 

Sovereignty of self means that you understand who you are and what your attributes are and also what you need to bolster within yourself. You only apologize if you hurt someone. NOT if you have an unpopular opinion that the therapist or life coach doesn’t share and feels threatened by. Sovereignty of self is being open to listening to different ideas and formulating what works and what doesn’t work for you and not being strongarmed into doing anything that doesn’t resonate with your highest intentions. Sovereignty of self is not allowing yourself to be bullied, harassed or gaslighted by your therapist, life coach or shaman. Gurus are in a separate class of psychopathic mentalities where they believe they are god incarnate. So creating a cultish hive mindset is part of that guru game. But that hive mindset can also be present with an unscrupulous therapist or life coach, especially ones that are highly sought after by others or are thought by others to have talent or powers that people are enamored with. When someone is enamored with anything or anyone, their ability to be able to see the dark side of that situation or person is drastically reduced. You know, another word for enamored is entranced or mesmerized. The word “trance” is baked into the cake of the word “entranced.” When you are mesmerized, you hover in a state of fixated focus to the exclusion of all else, including critical thinking and logic. This happens all the time when you don’t recognize your own power and hand yourself over to another human being who you believe is better, smarter, wiser or greater than you. That’s a potent recipe for disaster. 

It doesn’t help when the therapist, life coach or shaman is a narcissist. And believe me when I say this, the number of therapists and coaches who fit this description is shockingly high. More so with life coaches than with therapists. But your would-be false Malibu shaman and certainly gurus are all unhinged narcissists. Wake up! Please wake up. Your mental and emotional health is being destroyed when you agree to work with someone who has clear narcissistic traits. That will never end well. You will get sucked into the most diabolical co-dependent relationship that scoots you back in your progress until you can wake up from your slumber and get the hell out of there. The power struggles within that dynamic create situations where on the least important, you waste a lot of money. On the worst side, you are harmed in some way. 

And if that therapist or coach or shaman is young…in their twenties or thirties and had zero LIFE experience, never married, no children, no real obligations, and relies on a charismatic quality to draw in their clients with this idea of imparting special information or knowledge that you can only obtain by signing up for another immersion, retreat or sacred ceremony or whatever, you need to step back and reassess what you are doing and whether you’re any better off than you were when you started. And if your situation with your therapist or coach or shaman is such that if you dare question where you are and whether any of it is working for you, and you are met with manipulation, attacks on your character or mental acuity and one power play after the other, GET OUT. Walk away!  I’ve seen this too many times. Get out while you still have the ability to think for yourself. So much manipulation under the guise of “I’m helping you becoming your authentic self” bullshit. The bad ones don’t want you to become strong or ‘authentic’. You get strong and you’ll figure out that this is a scam to keep you around and keep you anchored to them. They do not want you to become strong because that means you will not need them. So they layer upon layer you with so much confusion and busy work and engage with you like you’re a child. Pay attention to that. Listen to the way they speak to you. It’s the same tenor that is used to speak to a toddler. “Look at you! I’m so proud of you”. “You go girl.”  What in the hell is this shit? You’re a grown adult. Why are you allowing yourself to be talked to in that childlike tone? You’re not a child. You need strength. But you won’t get strength from someone who is committed to communicating with you as if you were still a child. Very needy, very untethered, very confused. No. That’s not how you build your inner fire. 

But when you wake up and build that inner fire, watch what happens when you realize you gotta get out of this toxic relationship. Watch how that sweet, treacly, childlike tenor turns acidic, and passive aggressively mean. Watch how they project their ironically unhealed nature onto you. It’s sick. The way these individuals make you question your memory of conversations between them or your reality or they use your private confessions to them as a leveraging tool against you, whew, it’s diabolical and it’s got nothing to do with healing. One of the people I talked to at length shared her text conversations between she and her life coach who also considered himself qualified to be a sacred medicine shaman. After what she told me she went through, I will tell you that from my point of view and experience, he is not qualified and has no business doing that type of intense work. She sent me one of his videos to check him out. He’s not a shaman. He’s an operator. He’s got his well-rehearsed presentation and pitch down, and he knows how to change his voice and mannerisms to draw you in. A lot of time, these individuals use NLP techniques which is neurolinguistic programming methods to, in essence, hypnotize you and through that, attempt to influence you to follow their advice. I had a therapist who attempted to use NLP techniques on me years ago and I recognized it because I studied NLP and I immediately deflected what she was doing. Every time she mirrored me, which is a popular NLP technique which is copying the way I was sitting or moving my hand, I switched it up. And it made her very frustrated, I noticed. I wasn’t falling into her trap. And yes, of course, I left that therapist and never looked back. 

I want to stress it again because this is such a critically important question for you to answer if you are engaged in this type of destructive professional relationship. Remember that you are THEIR employer. Never forget that. You are paying them to do a job for you. You are in charge. Not them! And if they are stringing you along and have no interest in you becoming stronger and generating that Sovereignty of self I spoke about, they are failing at their job and you need to let them go. Yes, you need to fire them. Yes, I understand how frightening that can be especially if you are dealing with someone who is unstable and very manipulative. But at the same time, you must realize that that instability and manipulative behavior is not a healthy way toward your eventual healing. But remember the question I asked about challenges and hurdles and seeing them as opportunities? Well, here’s a golden opportunity to exercise your voice and honor yourself and your needs. Not the therapist or the life coach or shaman’s needs. YOUR needs. And when you do that and walk away, in an oblique way, they served a purpose for you. They got you to build your fire and find your voice and use that voice to say ‘goodbye’ to them. So you can say, “Thank you” to the therapist, life coach or shaman for reminding you that you have power and you have no problem using that power. And that’s a very big transformative moment in your healing journey. Of course, the therapist or life coach won’t see it that way. They’ll only see it as a confusing ego hit and a loss of income. And when that fact is spotlighted, often by the therapist or life coach, you will quickly understand what your value to them truly was. I know that’s hard to hear because we are still dealing in the realm of emotions and often fragile vulnerability. But if your goal is to heal and you are committed to that intention, you must also be committed to recognizing the individuals in this transformational healing world who are working against your personal intentions. 

                  Fourth question you’ve never asked yourself but you probably should:

IS YOUR NATURE SUCH THAT YOU ARE OBSESSED – AND I STRESS OBSESSED – WITH SAVING SOMETHING OUTSIDE OF YOURSELF, OFTEN THAT CARRIES WITHIN IT AN ENDLESS BATTLE THAT IS NEVER WON? How is that desire or focus making you feel? Are you calm? Or are you hyped up a lot? Are you measured in the way you speak with others or do you become easily worked up when the conversation of what you are striving to save comes up? Do you have any conversations that are not focused on this thing you are driven to save? How many pamphlets, posters, surveys, call to action mailings and more clutter your home or office? If you are sick and attempting to heal yourself, might I suggest that you stop trying to save the planet, the whales, the forests, the dogs and the cats, the homeless or whatever you are driven to save and focus instead on who you have been bypassing the entire time. Do you understand who you’ve been trying to save by proxy all these years? Do you understand that you are really trying to save yourself through them? That within whatever you’re trying to save, you see a part of yourself that is broken within that thing. You see the wounding. The helplessness. You see the isolation. You see what the world discards and within that, you see the part of you that feels broken. Within your fever of trying to save whatever it is you are seeking to salvage or make right in something else, you can’t see that you share many aspects with that thing. How about you take a break from trying to save the world, and turn your focus onto yourself? Because you cannot save yourself through others or something as grand as “the earth” or “the world.” That’s got built in limitations and a guarantee for feeling a great sense of futility as you near the end of your life. If you are of this mindset and you are also fighting an illness or disease, maybe you should stop and see where your energy has been drained and hyper-distorted in this exhausting quest to save or rescue someone or something. I’ve seen it and I’ve witnessed how this often strident mentality ignores not just the fact that you are not recognizing that YOU need to be saved but that there are people in your life, some who might be sitting just down the hall from your bedroom, who would love to receive from you the attention you choose to give to one or more of your causes. 

                  Fifth question: 

AS YOU MOVE THROUGH YOUR HEALING AND TRANSFORMATIONAL JOURNEY, HOW MANY TIMES EACH DAY DO YOU BECOME EMOTIONALLY UNHINGED OR UNSTABLE? Now, before you get emotionally upset by that question, I was asked this exact question back in 2017 when I was so emotionally unhinged prior to a chiropractic appointment that the chiropractor, rightly so, could not adjust me because of all the turmoil going on in my muscular structure. 2016 and 2017 were absolutely hellish years for me in regard to my worsening physical issues which blew open my emotional and mental reactions to that daily stress. And because of what I was dealing with, I could not go three days in a row without either exploding in emotional outbursts or falling into very dark pits of mental undoing. None of this was conducive to healing and when I was asked how often this was happening, at first I was put off by the question. Because I felt like I had a right to express myself and my physical and emotional pain and screw you for telling me to take it a down a notch! But you know what? While I did have a right to express myself, the continual roller coaster I was putting myself onto every day during those two years was not doing anything for my flatlined adrenals, for my tight muscles in my upper shoulders and neck that I could not move side to side or up and down at that time. It wasn’t creating the environment for deep or restful sleep. It was not having a positive whatsoever on my personal relationships that I still cared about. One has to consider how the fake luxury of continual emotional outbursts affects those you live with, your family and friends, your extended family members, if you have a caregiver, how it’s affecting that bond. And what kind of potential long-term damage are you instigating by ginning up so much emotional undoing simply because of frustration or anger or name your poison? So I ask this question not as a judgment but in an attempt to save you from creating an even greater burden on your ability to heal. You will not heal as long as you remain in a state of complete emotional dysregulation. 

Sixth question you’ve never asked yourself and maybe you should:

DO YOU BELIEVE IT IS STILL WORTH IT TO CONTINUE TO PUT YEARS OR DECADES INTO A FRIENDSHIP, A PARTNERSHIP, A FAMILY MEMBER, A MARRIAGE, OR A JOB THAT IS EITHER KILLING YOU ON SOME LEVEL OR CREATING UNRELENTING CHAOS IN YOUR LIFE OR IN THE LIVES OF THOSE YOU LOVE? If your conscious intention is to really, truly heal whatever imbalances you have brought into your life and have potentially created the soil or foundation for your illness, this is a question that you absolutely have to take a long hard look at. I know I did. I reached a point in my life and healing journey, where I had to ask myself the hard questions. Is this person or that person or this job or that commitment really worth it? How many emotional and mental swords am I willing to continually fall on? And how in the hell am I supposed to heal within that dynamic? In ten years you’ll have ten more years built onto the bricks of your deep dissatisfaction or pain and will you then use the same criteria for staying in that place because you have ten more years added to that total? Are the staggering number of years you’ve been engaged in that trauma something you hold up as a weapon? Do you think it shows toughness on your part? Or some type of queasy commitment that you must continue? Do you believe it gives you credit points with God or redemption on the other side? Or are you inflicting those miserable years onto yourself as a reason for why you can’t or won’t heal? Why do you believe you are not worth putting yourself and your sanity first? Obviously, making the big decisions to sever relationships, leave jobs and reduce or eliminate long term commitments is a huge and weighty decision and none of it should be taken lightly. I am not suggesting you cut and run without doing a lot of soul searching. I spent months, many months, engaging in massive reflection of major individuals and commitments in my life that were creating either chaos or draining what precious energy I had inside me at that time. And after a lot of thought, over a period of time, I removed from my life the people and the situations that were contributing to my stress levels and to my general wellbeing. Was it easy? Good God no! Did I get a lot of push back? Yes! Did that stop me? No. I held my ground because I saw the writing on the wall and the words said, “Save yourself.” And so I did. 

                  Seventh question:

IF YOU ARE TERRIFIED OF SURRENDERING OR LETTING GO TO ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE THAT NEEDS TO BE RELEASED OR LET GO OF, HOW ARE YOU GOING TO EVENTUALLY LET GO FROM THIS WORLD WHEN IT’S YOUR TIME TO DIE? Now, you may not be dying for a very long time, but I have learned from some very tragic situations I’ve been involved in, that when a person cannot surrender or let go while they are alive, that as they approach death, whenever that may be, they often build such a tremendous wall of resistance to their death, that their act of death is difficult and made more painful than it needs to be. I won’t go into the graphic details of what I’ve watched and witnessed and been part of over the years, but I will say that learning how to let go and surrender while you are alive to whatever needs to be released and let go of, imparts and energetic pattern or way of being, thinking and behaving that is reflected within the death experience. I did a four-part series on sacred plant medicines, and I know a few people who had terminal illnesses who used psilocybin, Ayahuasca and other entheogens as “training wheels”, so to speak, for how to let go into the next world. For the ones I knew who used this method, they felt it gave them a rehearsal in how it felt to cross the sacred veil between this reality and the next. I’m not suggesting that youneed to drink any potent brew to accomplish this. But we all have to learn as we move through our life that this is all temporary and one day we will be released from our physical body and coming to terms with that through the practice of surrendering to things in your life right now that no longer serve you or are weighing you down or simply need to be released for whatever reason, is a good muscle to flex. My life experience has proven to me that the people who have this ability to surrender to the unknown and to release what does not serve them, tend to have graceful and often beautiful transitions into the world beyond this one. 

                  The eighth and final question you’ve never asked yourself but you might want to is:

IF THERE WAS 100% CERTAINTY THAT BY FORGIVING YOUR WORST ENEMY OR ENEMIES YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO SAVE YOURSELF AND HEAL, WOULD YOU DO THAT? 

I was asked this exact question at a retreat I attended years ago. And I deeply struggled with it. Because I was mentally weighing the things in my life that I felt were unforgivable against the prospect of being free from my physical, mental and emotional burdens. “Was it worth it?” I asked myself. And what I realized is that where forgiveness was not something I was ready to do with specific situations, I could migrate to “acceptance.” Acceptance on a karmic level. As a life lesson. As something I somehow needed to experience in order for me to grow or simply have that experience, no matter whether that experience was traumatic and it often was. Could replacing the word “forgive” with “accept” be the catalyst for saving myself and potentiating my own healing? Because the lie in that question is the word “If”. If there was 100% certainty that by forgiving or accepting a certain situation or a person I had the ability to heal….Because it’s the energy of letting it go and releasing it that creates the space that allows the healing to take place. Holding the grudge, carrying the rage, focusing on the pain and more is what is keeping you sick. And believe me when I say that I understand there are egregious acts of trauma, violence, sexual abuse and more that piles up and without closure or even an apology, it lingers. And it festers. And what festers grows a thick armor and if you want to maintain that armor, then do it. But I’ll say it again: if your true objective is to heal and be free of whatever you are going through, consider it. And it really comes down to what I experienced at the retreat and realizing one night that I really wanted to heal more than I wanted to continue waging this internal battle that was not providing a pathway forward. And I remember lying in my bed the last night of the retreat and saying out loud, “I’ll do it.” I forgave what I was willing to forgive and what I couldn’t forgive, I accepted on some cosmic, spiritual level. Because my entire being was focused on one thing and one thing only. And that was me finding a way forward past the physical, mental and emotional illnesses I was dealing with back then and somehow remember what it felt like to be whole and alive again. Because that’s what I wanted more than anything. And if forgiving someone or accepting something was my ticket to that outcome, I’ll do it! Because I wanted to live and thrive and prosper. I offer that to you as an option for you to consider. Because that night when I made that decision, it changed everything. Pathways opened up. Opportunities opened up. The right people who I needed to take me to the next level of health and wellbeing, showed up. And before I knew it, everything changed for the better. 

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like this show, help me get the word out. Share this show or any other episode you like with someone right now who you feel needs to hear it. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. On the show notes, I’ve included the companies I support and have helped me in my healing process, so check that out and look for the coupon codes. Looking forward to you joining me in two weeks where I will discuss “The Dark Night Of The Soul.” Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”