Latest / Alive & Kicking: Stories of Waking Up with Kay Eck / Interview with Lexie Wilson | Awakening and Connection

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Interview with Lexie Wilson | Awakening and Connection · Alive & Kicking: Stories of Waking Up with Kay Eck

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Kay Eck, and welcome to my podcast, Alive and Kicking: Stories of Waking Up.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, friends, it's Kay.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just a note before we get started on today's episode with the fabulous Lexi Wilson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: At the beginning of the recording, I experienced a little internet disruption that caused a little technical difficulty.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: So please be patient.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's short and definitely worth waiting through.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Second, the Alive and Kicking Podcast will be on a short hiatus for the month of January.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back in February 2021 with more fabulous interviews with extraordinary individuals on their spiritual path.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the podcast, everybody.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: I want to thank all the listeners for coming in today, and I'm excited to share with you all the divine presence of Lexi Wilson.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome, Lexi.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, welcome, welcome, everybody.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you became acquainted.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I became acquainted with you and your work through a Facebook group.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I tuned in to your podcast and also happened to catch you live on an Instagram.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And to be perfectly honest, my reaction was where's this woman been all my life?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I like that reaction.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're just so bold and beautiful and bright.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like, oh, you know, it's you're like a breath of fresh air.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm delighted to be here with you.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm so excited to learn more about you.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that is literally the biggest compliment I can receive.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: So this essence of you, this brightness and this boldness, did this begin for you in childhood?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Is this part of um who you are or something you've grown into?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, part of who I am.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I almost too much.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and a lot of just excitement.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's usually really easy for me to make friends um just because I have a lot of energy, but I do a lot of birth chart readings.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so in my birth chart, there's a lot of fire.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm an earth sign, um, but I have a lot of fire.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of natural for me to be very outgoing, which is good because a lot of the earth that I have could make me really boring.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, is that secretly what you think of us earth signs?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: No, listen, and I love it because I'm a Capricorn sun, Capricorn rising, Capricorn Venus, like Capricorn a lot.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: I love that, but I'm gonna be honest, I know that I'm very, very boring.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: The things that I find to be most interesting are like reading and researching and being by myself.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: And like, so those things a lot of times people are shocked because I am so um outgoing that they're like, why do you like staying in is fun to me?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: And most people would be totally shocked by that.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: But I know it's because that's my Capricorn.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: I like, you know, being home, being stable, all of that.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: But I have a Leo moon, and that moon is bright.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so she's the one that makes me really, I think, appealing.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: But once people get to know me, they realize I'm I'm quite boring.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it feels like the that like those two energies are what would make you a really effective coach because you know you're well grounded, and then you also have like this explosive energy too.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's awesome.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want to start a little bit to I want to learn a little bit more about your childhood.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: How what was that?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: What was your sense of yourself as a child?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, okay.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: So my childhood was very complicated.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it was really complicated because on one hand, um I was really privileged.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: I I had um I grew up in a really big family.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there's only my brother and I in terms of direct siblings, but we all lived together.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I had a lot of cousins, and there's 14 of us.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm the oldest.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I had a very large family, and we were all really ingrained in each other's lives.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I had a lot of privilege in that sense that I had all these people around.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I, you know, went to college and I was able to have those kind of opportunities at the same time.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there was a lot of unhealed traumas from my family, my parents, as well as from myself.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: My grandmother uh raised me for the the while I was very young, and then she passed away while taking care of me.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that was the first time I had ever dealt with death.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: I had never even lost a pet.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't know at all what to expect on that day or anything, but it left me with a pretty big wound that no one in my family really knew how to even address.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't recognize it as a trauma and they didn't have the tools to be able to help me to even deal with that.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that shaped a large part of my childhood because I was dealing with um an abrupt loss of the love of my life, uh, who was more, she was like my mom.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: So she was, she wasn't just grandma to me, she truly was my mom.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was a really big loss without any um support to deal or even understand what this actually meant.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so that led to a lot of self-harm, um a lot of negative thoughts, um, thought patterns.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: I had a lot of suicidal ideations growing up.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: And because no one in my family really understood how to deal with that, I often, if I did reach out and say, like, hey, I'm struggling with self-harm, um, no one would say anything.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like they would just say, well, stop doing that.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: Or they would, um, there was one time I specifically spoke to one of the adults in my family and said that I was struggling with self-harm.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I I said it because I I was hoping that they would, you know, give me something to help me with.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I wasn't asking for help.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, you're you're a child, so you're like 12, 13.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: So you're just kind of saying it and hoping they know what to do with that.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: And they just pretended like they didn't hear what I said.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I struggled with that until my my mid-20s.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: I really had a hard time dealing with that, um, on top of the fact that I struggled with depression and anxiety that was undiagnosed until I got to college.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so it was really weird because I had a lot of, I have a lot of good memories with my family of good things that we did, but I also had a lot of neglect, emotional neglect in terms of people not knowing what to do with those traumas and lack of direction.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was a lot of child abuse and abuse in general in my home, just because within uh my culture and within my religion, harsh discipline was normalized.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so I dealt, I be, I struggled a lot with getting physically attacked in order to get myself together or discipline me or things like that under the guise of religion and under the guise of, you know, this is how this is what this is what you're here to do, or this is how we're supposed to parent.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I had a really warped perception of God and you know, the universe, um, all of that.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: I had believed a lot of things that they were like God was this mean guy in the sky who just kind of wanted to punish us and that he took things away from me, took my grandmother away, he left me with mental health issues and no one to help me with this.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I had a lot of just abusiveness uh in my life.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a weird childhood because it wasn't um all the way horrible, but it was not all the way a blessing either, or didn't feel like it was um at the time.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: So it was very weird childhood.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then religion, oh my goodness, that's a whole nother yeah, let's let's get into that.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I I'm curious about this early experience of trauma that you had, because on the one hand, if you have something you know, substantial like that in your life, you can kind of understand how it leads to behavior, your mindset, your your sense of yourself and your well-being.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: But um, I once heard a spiritual teacher talk about trauma as being any time the world did not conform to what you thought it would be.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is a that is a trauma.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you think about that, our childhoods were filled with trauma, trauma upon trauma upon trauma, because you're like innocence and you're you're light and like the world is not not.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, completely true.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm definitely I'm amazed that at the age of 11 or 12 or however old it was, that you were able to articulate to somebody that you were considering hurting yourself.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm wondering like, what was the language that you used?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what do you think was happening with the adults that they couldn't respond to you?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I think um I I started the first time I really started self-harming, I was five.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I was I'd already done it for a very long time.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: So by the time I was 11, I and I'm a natural researcher at heart.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: I will definitely blame that on my Capricorn.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I had the languaging because I read all the time.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I did was I didn't even realize it was a problem because I had started doing it at five.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it was little things, whether it was just scratching my arm intensely or um sometimes hitting my head.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: You'll see that sometimes in children.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then as I got older, it progressed into other things.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And around 11 or 12, um, I I can't remember if it was a TV show that I was watching or something, but they indicated that it was problematic.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's when I first realized that this was not something that that I mean, I I think intuitively I knew it was not a good thing because it wasn't like I was walking around letting people know that this was a habit that I had.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but at the same time, I didn't know it was that bad until I can't remember what show I was watching, but somebody kind of indicated like that, oh, she does this thing.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, oh, I do that, but the way that they're making it sound sounds like that's not a good thing or it's not normal.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I don't remember the exact sentence that I said, um, but I I basically said that sometimes when I get really emotional, I feel like hurting myself.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, at the at the time, um my parents just did not didn't say anything.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that I just learned at that moment, like, I don't need to talk about this again.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I just never brought it up.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we were in the car driving and they just kind of kept looking at the road.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I just was like, all right, that was awkward and just kept it to myself.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I was really, you know, I felt really abandoned in that moment.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, there was a piece of me that was was also kind of happy that that that it nothing was gonna be done.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted something to be done, but I kind of didn't because it was also the only way I knew how to cope.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it was like, I wish that you said something here, but I guess this is all right.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm just gonna keep doing that.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I I I know that for a lot of the adults in my family, they had a lot of trauma from growing up, a lot of um emotional neglect.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then my family is black.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's also a lot of they dealt with racism.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: I dealt with racism too, but in a very different way um than they did growing up.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so they there's within a lot of black communities, there is because of the way society was built at the time, there they didn't have the emotional capacity to develop these skills.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so there's a lot of trauma that's that goes undealt with because you're just trying to survive.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so now you have these children who they might have more access to resources and more understanding of emotional depth, but they're being raised by people who are also just trying to survive and get through the best way that they can and don't necessarily have all the capacity to handle the depth to which now this next generation, we have the vocabulary, we have the internet, we have these things that give us these tools that people like my parents and aunts and uncles just didn't have so easily.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I definitely think a lot of that is because they've dealt with a lot of racial trauma, um, then their own personal traumas that come from their childhood that also went emotionally ignored.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: So now here I come and I'm queen of emotion.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like emotional all the time.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: They don't really know how to interpret that and they don't have the space to deal with it.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so instead, it just goes unheard.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: I had to learn how to forgive that because for a long time I held them responsible.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like, well, you should have known and you should be.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: But now being in my 30s and being an adult, I recognize how hard life can be sometimes and how so many times we just don't know what's going on and what needs attention and what needs growth until we're triggered.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so often, if if you go your whole life without something being triggered, you don't even recognize that something you're doing is problematic or dangerous to the people that you love, whether it's because you're actually doing it or whether it's because it's neglect.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so I feel like that's why no one in my family really knew how to handle um what I was doing.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then some as well culturally, I do think for a lot of Black families, um, what I have learned now, because I now my my master's in marriage and family therapy.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I eventually learned a lot of these things within the Black community, self-harm is seen as like a white girl thing, you know?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so for a lot of times, if you um I thought that way too until I went to college and met other black girls who had either talked about doing that or questioned it, and we all had the same experience that it's like, oh, all of our parents think that's just a white girl thing, like only white people do that stuff.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: And we were like, no, apparently black people do it too.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so it it validated the sense that, oh, okay, so this is actually just something that people with mental health challenges will do, or people who don't have the tools will do.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I definitely was that I had mental health issues with my depression and anxiety, and I didn't have the tools.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's not based off of color.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that was something that uh I learned through connecting with other people in my community and hopefully will do better as parents moving forward for our communities.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I know, right?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Fingers crossed.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: But that's why I think they couldn't, they couldn't help me.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't know really how and they didn't have the the capacity to do that.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think that that capacity really is ringing so true to me.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the the I for most of us we can't imagine how an individual life that's filled with trauma, as I said before, on top combined with the the trauma of being in the black community and and the black experience, like the combination of those, it's like to me, it's like a miracle that it's like a survival miracle.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because that requires a certain sense of healedness.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah, right.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: It does.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's why it's like I say so much about um black and brown people are truly just like the amount of you know, just emotional torture and trauma that has happened for generations, that we can still just be here and have any sort of joy at all is a miracle, you know.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I definitely think that with 2020, it's been a crazy year.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, at the same time, it's been beautiful because finally a lot of these things are validated for so long, hundreds of years.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Our experiences have been invalidated.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: We've been gaslit for hundreds and hundreds of years, and yet still having to raise children, go to work, um, contribute to society and not lose our minds in the process.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so it's it's hard.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so to have any amount of joy or any about like any ability to keep going when what's the reason, why, why, you know, um it's powerful, you know, and I I'm very grateful for that.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm grateful that that runs through my blood, that that's who I am, it's what I carry.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: My very existence is proof of survivorship, you know?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so I hold that so dearly to my heart and and appreciate that so much.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: But that's definitely, you know, one of the downfalls of the remnants of slavery and the remnants of all that it's still trickling into our families now because we we are still until literally until 2020, we didn't even have the word racial trauma.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: We just uh some people didn't assume that it existed.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, obviously, lots of black and brown people understood that it existed, but we didn't have the vocabulary to understand how to ex how do we explain this experience.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then 2020 happened, and finally we're getting some acknowledgement of the fact that this community has been adversely affected by a lot of societal conditioning.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: And as a result, this is how it's showing up and how they raise their children.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: This is how it's showing up in how they're able to hold space for themselves.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that that's really hard.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so that for me as well, it's been healing because I'm able to go back to forgive my family members because I recognize I grew up in a very different time.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so I didn't have to um not only did I grew up in a very different time, but I also grew up quite privileged.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: So there are certain fights that I just didn't even have to fight, you know, um, certain awarenesses I didn't even have to have, which meant I could focus on my healing and my growth in a way that my family couldn't.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so now when I have children, hopefully I will have more tools to be able to give to them.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: So if they're dealing with mental health challenges like I was, if they're dealing with traumas that they can't explain like I was, I can hold space and at least be able to acknowledge and validate their experience in a way that I couldn't have for myself.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I think that one of the um injustices that has occurred, and that kind of breaks my heart a little bit, is that anybody should, any child, any any human being should should derive any portion of their sense of self as a result of resiliency.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like that that's just not okay.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's I just don't agree with that.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's because it's it that's like it's great to be resilient, of course.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: And the human spirit is exactly that.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: But to say that that is like that's who you are, that's what you, you know, it's so limiting, and it also creates this idea that in order to be strong, you have to have gone through something, or you have to experience this great unjustice in order to become who you are, like, or that it's okay that what you went through because you've got resiliency as a result.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's that's no good.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's no good at all.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's like that's a um, I look at it as kind of like that's just something that can happen as a result of going through something awful, but it shouldn't be something that we're like, well, at least be grateful because that's what you got.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that's kind of what we've developed is this sort of attitude.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's a way to, you know, sometimes people do that because they want to take the power back.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so I get it.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's it's really unfair, especially when you're putting that on a child, and then they have to kind of raise with this idea that well, at least I'm strong, I can get through anything now because I had this unfair, you know, it's just no, it's not a way to live.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk a little bit about your religious upbringing.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: Geez.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: That one, yeah.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: I I so where do I begin with that?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: I religion was my entire life until my 30s.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: I my whole world was religion.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'm third generation in in the particular religion that I was in, which meant that my grandma joined.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, she joined when she was 12 or 13, and then um she raised my mom in it, and then my mom raised me in it.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so there was no other option.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: There was no, I wasn't born with like freedom of religion.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: It was, this is who you are, this is what we do.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: I was in church three or four times a week.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I was uh doing whether it's volunteering or speaking.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Or leading children's programs or anything from very young, constantly doing those sorts of things, or witnessing, uh, which is something we would do on the weekends, going around and knocking on people's doors and asking, have you chosen Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: That was me.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was really when you're a kid, it's fine because you're cute and people are just like, oh, okay, let me take this little pamphlet.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: When you're a teenager, it gets hard because people are like, Will you get off of my lawn?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Will you, you know, like it's really hard.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, it was difficult because I didn't believe a lot of this stuff.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so I got in trouble a lot, which is where a lot of the abuse kind of kicked in because they didn't know how to control my rebellious quote unquote nature.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um and the rebellion is when we talk about that, it's not like a normal kid, you know, normal kid, they would say, Oh, you're rebellious because you sneak out or you stole your parents' car, you know, or something like that.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: Rebellion for me could simply look like wearing red nail polish when I'm not supposed to wear any nail polish at all, or wearing jewelry.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we weren't allowed to wear jewelry.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so I I got in a lot of trouble um for wearing clip-on earrings and literally dealt with um getting a spanking for that.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that was it was really intense.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it was my rebellion was just normal things that people do, but it was considered, you know, evil or bad of me to do that.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then because I had this predisposition towards evil things, um, I was always in trouble for that.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: I was also very inquisitive.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: I asked a lot of questions, and that was also problematic.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, on one hand, my mom did try to do a good job of making sure to make it safe for us to ask questions.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: At the same time, it was only to a certain point, because after a certain point, it just seems like you're trying to antagonize.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: And uh there are definitely times where I was trying to antagonize.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I was a teenager, but there were other times where I was genuinely confused as to why, especially being a woman, I wasn't allowed to do certain things.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but my brother, who is younger than me, he's allowed to do it, but he's younger and more like irresponsible.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how can he, you know?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so it just didn't make sense.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: But because of his gender, he's allowed to do that, but I'm not allowed to do.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was just kind of there was a lot of unfairness, and fairness is super important to me, which also makes sense when I look at my birth chart.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of I need fairness and equality.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: So the inequality that I was seeing um was really hard for me to manage.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then I got in trouble a lot because I also my best friend was gay.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't realize he was gay.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think he knew he was gay.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: I we, you know, but at the time, you couldn't come out um in that way.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: So um was he in the religion?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he was in the religion.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: Were all your friends in the religion?
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, most of my friends, because I was also homeschooled.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: So my whole world was church and being home at school and things like that.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I and then even when I went to college, I went to a Bible college.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I was in this faith until until 30, is 30 was when I finally left.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so up until that point, I didn't really have a lot of connection with the outside world.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_02: I had more connection with just people within the church.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so, and I had a lot of friends who um whenever, like I said, with my best friend, uh, when we were younger, it was fine, I guess.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: But then when we hit teen years, there was a lot of pressure put onto me to kind of convert my best friend to behave in an appropriate way, whatever that meant.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that always made me feel really uncomfortable.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't, I didn't understand what that means.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: What was he supposed to act like?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: Who is he supposed to be?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: Like he's just who he is, and now you're making it mean all these things.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so I got in a lot of trouble because I wasn't wit willing to witness to him and tell him the error of his ways, but it didn't feel like that for me.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why I just, and who am I to?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: If we're all sinning, if this is supposed to be this bad thing and we're all sinning, then why are we highlighting this quote unquote sin higher than any other sin that I'm doing or you're doing or whatever?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I would cut, I would say that often and that would get me in trouble.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because use that kind of logic.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: No, not at all.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was like, what?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: But it just didn't make sense to me because I remember one time there was an elder in our church who got in trouble for adultery.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: But yet he's the same elder who was on the pulpit talking about homosexuality is a sin.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, okay, but didn't you get in trouble for cheating on your wife?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like it just, but it didn't make any sense to me how that one sin was highlighted more than the other.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: Over time, I started to recognize like this isn't a sin, this isn't, you know.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: But at that time, I didn't understand that.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: All I understood was if we're all sinning, why then do we highlight one sin above the other?
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then we're bad if we don't save each other from each other's quote unquote sinning, but yet we're all still like I'm still doing my own sins.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like that, I it just didn't make sense to me.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I definitely got a lot of um, I got in trouble a lot of times because it didn't make sense to me.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: And sadly for my family, a lot of that resorted to physical abuse in order to try to make it make sense.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it was really um difficult growing up uh in that sort of world and religion of being so controlled of that my belief system was constantly being and my spirit was constantly being tried and broken down so I could develop this sense of, I don't know, uh, you know, right and wrong according to them.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the the vast majority, uh I was gonna say Americans, but I guess you could say actually say everybody, the vast majority of human beings grow up through a religion.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so what is the what is the point at which the belief structure becomes problematic?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like how did you recognize that like something's amiss here?
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, honestly, it was it was probably uh okay.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think when I was okay when I was 14, we had a gentleman in our church.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: He um he was awesome.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: And he we had like a teen group sort of club thing that was kind of like Girl Scouts, but it was religious, so it was a totally different thing, but it was kind of like that.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: And he would work with the boys' side.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: We had girls and boys, and one uh weekend we were doing, we would earn like honors and we were doing like a hiking honor thing, and he volunteered because he loved to hike, and so he volunteered.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: And after the hike, we went to his house, and at his house, um, he had a friend over.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now we were young, and so that's all we saw it as is just this is his friend.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: Years later, I had learned that that was his partner, not his friend.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: But at the time, I guess no one knew that he had a partner and all of that.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so when that came out, my church, it was like the biggest gossip that, oh my goodness, this guy, he has a partner, and you know, it was a big deal.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't, everybody loved him prior to the situation.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't quite understand like why all of a sudden he was this talk of the church.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and anyway, what ended up happening is he ended up being excommunicated from the church.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: And it was because he was quote unquote living in sin, um, not only in terms of living with someone without being married to them, but then to the fact that he's gay.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that for me was the beginning of me starting to say something doesn't feel right, um, because we all loved him.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: There was no problem.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't like he was a bad person or he had done something wrong.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't understand.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: And sadly, because no one communicated to me as well what had happened.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the good thing is that because they didn't communicate to me, I didn't get indoctrinated at that point.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but because I didn't understand, all I saw was this guy was nice.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: He was able to volunteer with us, and now all of a sudden he's no longer allowed to be a member of our church.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it was also humiliating.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I felt really bad because he he had such a gentle spirit.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so I felt really bad for him because I knew that it it cut him deeply.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so that really was the beginning of my starting to question a lot more why do we do certain things and why do we believe certain things?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas prior to that, it was just a way of life.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: I had never been exposed to much of anything else.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't think to question that.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: But that was a big problem for me that that became really, and I started doing research.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: And in doing research, I recognized we have a history of doing this, and that it just never quite felt right uh for me.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was the beginning.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: But it I didn't fully take action on leaving until literally 30 because I was terrified at my whole religion, my family, my friends, everybody's in this world.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: So if I leave, like, what is this?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: Where am I going?
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: Who, you know?
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and on top of that, when you are excommunicated, they don't say that you're not allowed to be friends with with people inside of the religion, but most people aren't gonna be friends with you because they recognize that you're quote unquote living in sin.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so they don't want to be tempted by your sinful nature.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: So often they end up not talking to you, even though they say that there's no like rule against it per se.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: So by leaving, I would be risking losing that as well.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, talk us through kind of the next 15 years it took you from the time that this first started dawning on you that something's not right until the age of 30 when you made the decision to leave.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: How did you walk yourself through that process?
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I started to, I um there was a couple of things along the way that I think really kind of hinted at at my leaving, but just again, still just fearful.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: There um was a documentary that was done by some members of our church and it highlighted um gay people within the church.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it's crazy how this happened.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like it just, it was the same theme just kept bothering me.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so there was this whole documentary, and in the documentary, uh, some of these people I knew because it was our church isn't very big.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: So pretty much everybody knows each other.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and when I saw their stories, like that they couldn't, you know, they didn't feel comfortable coming to church because they had been ostracized for this, or you know, you're watching them cry over things that are just so um like you just don't think about this stuff, and you're like, wow, like that's wow, that they can't do certain things because if they hand, if they hold hands, then the pastor is gonna say this or that, and they can't do that.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like that, it just so I started asking my parents a little bit, one to watch the documentary, just give it an opportunity.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: They were very much against it.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: There was a lot of people in my church who thought that documentary was just glorifying sin, um, and that it was encouraging us young people to just give way to passions which are just like living to your sins, and I don't know.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so they refused.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: There was a huge petition to not, you know, allow this to be viewed in our churches or things like that.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but a lot of us young people found ways to watch it.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so we all found it.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: But um that kind of began my when I saw how uncomfortable it was making my own family members that they weren't willing to have these conversations.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and they started to talk about it being a choice.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that bothered me because I felt like, for example, um, I never chose to be attracted to men, you know, like I just, so I just was like, I don't understand how this would be a choice, but all right, okay.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so um their their inability to answer my questions and their defensiveness increased my doubt.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so um when I hit my 20s and I graduated from Bible college, I got my first big girl job as a therapist.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: And my um some of my the couples that I had were gay.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so talking to them and hearing them, I I was just like, okay, what what was I taught?
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like what is going on?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because I I this just doesn't connect.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like this isn't making sense.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that uh continued, especially being outside of the church at that point.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't, you know, my whole world wasn't the church anymore now because now I had a regular job.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: I had a regular boss who had no idea about my growing up and what I was supposed to do, quote unquote.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that freedom to be able to hear from what other people felt and thought, um, and not be challenged on my own thought on that, that I could just say it and people were like, Oh, yeah, instead of constantly saying, ooh, you should think about that.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: You should, you know, does God agree with that?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: Is that in the Bible?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: Is that it was nice to have the freedom to do that, uh, to just be able to say, well, I think this.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then people just go, oh, that's an interesting thought.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that it was like, there's no challenge, there's no rebuttal, or you know, or even if they did rebuttal, it was not a what you just said was so sinful and wrong.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: You need to rethink that.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't judgmental, it was just, I don't agree with that.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then they would express themselves.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was nice to be able to have conversation where I wasn't this sinful person, it I was just a different opinion, and that was nice.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so having that um access to quote unquote unquote normal people um allowed me to feel safe to start to explore what do I actually believe.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that I had always believed um was in astrology and in energy.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: I've been, I had one of my first book that I had gotten from the library, I think I was 12 or 13, I had gotten a book on astrology and my mom found, I know, right?
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I loved astrology.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_02: I believed it, I still do, but it's it runs my life.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: But my mom found it and I got the worst, uh that wasn't the worst words, but it was like the top three moments, I think, top three moments of where I really thought I'm I think I'm gonna die today, kind of attacks for having this devil book in the house.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I I had learned to push that away.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: But once I gotten this big girl job and I had this freedom to explore without judgment, I started to say, well, I kind of want to get back into that.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: And when I started to learn about energy and healing and how we're all just beings of the universe, that made more sense to me.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: And it made more sense that it was like, okay, this makes sense how we're just why we're different, why we have the colors that we do, why we think the way we do, why we love the way we love.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like this makes sense to me.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so I began to keep um researching and diving into that.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: And by the time that I hit 30, um, I had to kind of, I had a moment with my mother where she was still very controlling at that point, which is also kind of normal within the religion.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I had to kind of stand up to her and tell her, like, I'm I'm almost 30 years old, like I'm allowed and I pay my own rent and I do this.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm allowed to believe what I want, to have the types of friends that I want to have.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: And we ended up disconnecting for four years as a result of me standing in my power.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of what happened in those 15 years is me constantly questioning, diving into my own beliefs.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: And the more that I dove into that, the more I found myself.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then I, I guess in my own power, was able to finally stand up and say, this is not something that I believe in.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: I don't believe that I should tell people that they're going to hell, period.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I definitely don't think I should I have the right to tell someone they're going to hell because of who they love.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: And by standing in that power, that began the the full on, you can't, you're not, this isn't acceptable.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it makes sense.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: 30 is the Saturn return, you know, so it kind of makes sense that I would go through this tumultuous, I'm not taking this anymore kind of thing.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I'm glad that I did because now I'm woo af and it's like the only way that I could, the only way that I could be here and fully embrace my faith and embrace myself is if I had taken that step.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: And what was interesting is, I mean, eventually I realized my own queerness, I guess.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's also what kind of made sense to me why this was so problematic.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: I realized that I'm actually bisexual.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's why there was a piece of me that was very much like I don't remember ever choosing anything.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't realize why I was so upset until I was in my 30s, and I was like, oh, this makes sense.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: But prior to that, I just thought, this just doesn't feel right to do this to people.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't until honestly, because I'm in my 30s now, it's like recently that I realized, oh, that's why it was bothering me so much.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was it was personal, and I just didn't recognize that it was personal until then.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but also you're kind of like um you you were kind of born a disruptor, you know, just because of your questioning.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like your nature is to question, and that is very disruptive to organizations that don't appreciate questions.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: I love right, yeah, yeah.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well the the um the term disconnection, is that a term that your religion used?
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Was it a formal?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's I've been watching uh Leah Remini's yeah, yeah.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: I knew you know it's so funny.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things that also helped me, I love Leah Remini.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm originally from Staten Island, New York.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: So New Yorkers like, we love her, she's everything.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: And um, so I I watched the show just because I love her.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then um at the same time that she broke away from Scientology, I was kind of in a similar space where I was like, I kind of want to leave, but I don't know.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then it erupted that she had left.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: So when I she kind of honestly helped me to figure out how to do this um by watching her before this was before the documentary or the um the show came out.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_02: This was me just watching her through the news and seeing, okay, this is how she's doing it.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: This is, you know, all um how she's getting through that.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: And that gave me permission to begin the process of saying, like, I'm allowed to believe what I want to believe too, because she was finding herself saying, I don't believe that that we should be doing this.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, what's interesting is when I watch the show, I love the show.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I fully recommend people watch it, especially if you want to understand the psychology and how people end up in these types of religions.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what I love is when it comes that disconnection piece, is I relate to that so much.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: We do not have a formal thing like they do.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: They have truly a you're not allowed to talk to these people.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: They say that they don't have that, but they do.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and for us, it's not it's definitely not formal, but it's completely spiritual in the sense that if you believe that I'm a sinner and you believe that I within the church, they believe that everyone's nature is sinful.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so you are predisposed to sin.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: And the way that you can avoid sin or be cleansed by sin is by believing in Jesus Christ.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus Christ's death covers that sin.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then you ask for forgiveness whenever you do, so that way that sin covers what you've done, and you're clean, white as snow every time.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you have to believe in Jesus Christ.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the the problem is if you believe that you have this nature where you're predisposed to sin, you want to kind of stay away from anybody who's going to trigger that that desire to sin.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: So although it's not official, it's unofficial that if I'm going to be somebody who's constantly questioning religion, constantly questioning the Bible, um, and questioning the lifestyle that the religion wants to uphold, well, then she's not safe around my children because she's going to cause them to start to question our lifestyle.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: She's going to cause them to question how we the rules that we've created in this church.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so that would not be safe.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in our best interest, it's better to block her, to disconnect, to not talk to her.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's unofficial, but it's definitely it's definitely there.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: So would you say that you're, you know, it it it feels like you always had this much broader sense of.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Spirituality, even though you had been kind of channeled through this very limited view of spirituality.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have a sense that there were um, you know, kind of those big moments where you were, you know, a light came on?
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I I don't know that I mean, yes, I've definitely had big moments.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: I can I can truly say that.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: I've had moments where I felt like something else exists, you know.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I definitely knew that.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I think I've always been I've always been deeply um connected.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's why I was really upset by the need to disconnect people because I felt like we're so we're we're pieces of the universe, we're pieces of source, we're pieces of God.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I always felt that way when I was little.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: I I didn't, so I didn't understand the need to say that someone is not a piece of that.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I don't know because of that, it was like this running current in me all the time.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um now I recognize it probably as I think I've always been a channeler in that sense.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so not that I didn't know that until recently in terms of saying that that would be the word.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but one thing that kind of stands out is like my mother, she she always says she has different wording for this um because of religion.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but she would say when I was a child, like a baby toddler, that my I had really powerful discernment skills.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so she always admired that because she struggles with that to be able to read the energy and pick up on things or know things without knowing things and not able to explain it.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: She always struggled with that.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, whereas for me, I I can feel you like you're I can feel it.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: So it doesn't, it feels like you said something out loud.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you're insecure, I can feel the insecurity as if you just said, oh, I don't feel really good in the sweater today.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_02: I can feel that.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so um I don't, I I think people around me recognize that too, which is also why they tried to control me, because to them, I think they perceived that as something evil.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas for me, it just felt it felt natural.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_02: It just feels like that's who I am.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: Now, over the course of my life, I had specific moments where I definitely felt like, okay, um, I'm named after my great grandmother.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I never met her.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: My grandma named me after her.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I never met her, but I always felt like I carried her with me, you know.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so I just had this energy that I was not by myself.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then when my grandmother passed a few years later, I definitely felt her presence as well.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think that's why once again, I it's just always there because I feel this power, you know.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're when you talk about connection, you're talking about a sense of connection to the world beyond form.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: Is that okay?
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: 1000%.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: It feels just as real to me, honestly, as the real world.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: And it's definitely way more comforting than the real world.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: That energy feels safer for me.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, and so that I think that's why it it just a lot of things just didn't make sense to me.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_02: Anything that encourages disconnection on any level doesn't make sense to me.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_02: It it short circuits me because it doesn't align with what I feel to be true, which is this this sense of we're all connected.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: So how is it that we did and how how can I determine who's disconnected and and not connected when I'm just part of the connection itself?
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like I didn't create this connection, I didn't create this this petri dish or something that we're all in.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, you know, it's like I didn't create this, but yet I can determine who is worthy to be here and who's not.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like that doesn't, we're all part of the form.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: We're all, you know, so I just I don't know.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I I I it just always has been there.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of easy for me to see how you went from your background to doing what you do now, which is coaching people on the nature and role of toxic relationships in their lives, which I love because um there's there's so many levels of toxicity, and there's it's like you could you could examine every relationship and find a little bit of toxicity in there.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: 1000%.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I see so much, um, and you talk specifically about um multi-level marketing, yeah.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: As a construct based on toxic relationships, which um I I find all of this so incredibly interesting.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to dive into that a little bit.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: Where did you um develop your interest in toxic relationships?
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm afraid to ask.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, right?
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's like see prior words.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: But no, I just grew up constantly being manipulated by my religion, by my family.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's so normal in my family.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's I mean, and anyone can identify with that, honestly.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: We can all look back and say, oh, it's normal in my family too, honey, because it really is.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's how we talk to each other these days is through manipulating.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_02: How do I get what I want without telling you the full truth?
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: And that's essentially how we speak a lot.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, that was part of what kind of led me to wanting to coach more on that and support people in developing the awareness.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then because I feel like I'm still young, so I have plenty of life to live.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, there's still a lot of years that I feel could have been better used had I not been manipulated, had I been allowed to grow in my purpose and grow in my skills.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there's a lot of ways that I'm still immature uh because of the fact of growing up in a religion, I was very controlled until 30.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I've only been out of the church for like five years, you know, and so in a lot of ways, I'm still trying to understand how the world really works.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_02: And and I'm also trying to explore who I am.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like the the things that people probably did in their 20s are what I'm trying to do now, where I'm like, how do I figure this out?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_02: Who am I and who do I want to be?
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: And that's because of that delayed ability to mature in a lot of ways.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so if they're if people understood how to protect their energy, how to spot when someone's being manipulative, how to handle that and confront it, they have room to grow and mature in their purpose and in their coping skills and in their way to protect themselves so they can focus on what you're actually here to do instead of focusing on the nonsense that people will throw our way in order for us to be distracted.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that's kind of what got me into focusing on toxic relationships and and what they look like, whether it's from, you know, your mom or to yeah, an MLM.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: And what does that look like corporate-wise?
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was just gonna say that there's really, you know, you can kind of think of your work life as separate from your personal life, but the it they're not.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're not at all.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: We live our lives through relationship.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's no, there's no like relationships is one issue and my corporate life is another.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's merged into a big yeah, big it's a big mess a little bit.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you I was listening to your podcast today about MLMs.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest, at first when when I first saw that that was part of what you did, I was like, oh my god, is that like some kind of slang?
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like I don't get it.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: I looked it up and I didn't find anything.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: But eventually, eventually I got it.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: But when you were describing the structure of an MLM, in that it's pure, it's a pyramid, obviously.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that the the it's function, it's the success of the structure depends on the people at the bottom doing the work and not being compensated for it in order for the people at the top to make the money that they desire to make.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: And as you were talking about this, I was like, what corporation is not built like that?
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: What aspect of society is not built in the pyramid model?
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Look at a family, yeah.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like, and that's true, but the the and that's where it's like the problem isn't the shape of it being a pyramid or the top being um of benefit.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is the lie that you will get to the top, and that you will you, if you are willing to put other people below you, you will actually arrive at the top.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: You do have a chance, and I say that, you know, as well.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_02: You have a chance of getting up there.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_02: Now, according to the FTC, that is only a 0.01% chance, but you do have the opportunity to get there.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is the cost of it is by having to tell other people that they have this chance.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: And you're not telling them it's 0.01%, you're telling them it's just as easy as pie and tell and giving them this uh idea that they can get there when they can't.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_02: It is easier, for example, if you like a business structure, you have the CEO at the top and you have the employees, and this is problematic because of capitalism, because of all that we're not getting paid fairly.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I worked in social work, so I fully understand not getting paid fairly.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and but at the same time, I still have the ability to get the education or the experience to become the CEO of that nonprofit and get that pay.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas within an MLM, I have a 0.01% chance, no matter the level of experience, no matter the education, to get to the top and get that money.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_02: And addition to the fact that once I get there, I'm only there because the majority of the people underneath me will not be getting paid.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_02: And not only are they not getting paid, but they're losing money in the process.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_02: Versus whereas when I'm in social work, my CEO is definitely getting more money than I am, but I'm still getting a salary.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that salary is promised to me.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: There's no I um they cannot tell me, well, you can work 60 hours a week this week and maybe we'll give you$100, but we're not sure.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see what how it works, but we expect you to give us this full 60 hours.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's not acceptable, and that's where that there's a little bit of a difference, but the structure itself is still very the same.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like that's a really flimsy distinction because if I'm really looking at, you know, the way that we are indoctrinated to the American dream and the number of people who actually don't have the opportunity to fulfill that dream, you know, kind of feels very similar to me.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: It does, except for the fact that once again, the truth is numbers-wise, in terms of the facts, the facts still raise that if you decide, and we're not talking about we're if we're talking about inequality, then yes, 100%.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, I can still, even if I go to a job at McDonald's, I'm still guaranteed a paycheck.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not guaranteed a paycheck at all inside of an MLM.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_02: But yet I might be working more, and probably more that that is probably the case than the person who's working at McDonald's.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'd still rather get$555 an hour and know that I'm getting that$555 an hour so I can budget accordingly or get another job or do what I have to do, knowing that that's coming in, than to be told that I have a chance of getting thousands of dollars a month or that or six figures a month if I'm willing to commit to the amount of work that somebody would do working at McDonald's or working as a social worker or whatever capacity, and then end up not only not making money, but losing money in the process.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what's happening, you know, and so that's where I was part of an MLM.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I fully understand the structure and I also understand the loss.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in that sense, that there are people who put up their homes who lose that.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_02: You don't put up your home when you're working a job at McDonald's.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: You're guaranteed to get that paycheck.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: They're not telling you that if you want to get paid this week, we're gonna need you to put in at least this much every month so you can get your paycheck by the end of the month.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's problematic, and that's not what's happening inside of corporate.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_02: Corporate is still problematic, 1000%.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_02: I am not like I'm an entrepreneur because of a lot of those things, but there's definitely a difference between being told what you're going to be getting and getting that versus being told what you're going to be getting and getting nothing and losing at the same time.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where I have to step in and prevent that.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, what is the state of the or what is the how big is the problem of MLMs?
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: How many people are involved with them?
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: What, how many people are at the bottom?
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_00: How many, what is what's going on?
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, honestly, I don't know the numbers of how many people, but it's so it's definitely common because we have um companies like Amway, who are massive.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: They've been around for a very long time.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I mean, there's there's a thousands, probably, probably more so than that.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'm probably doing a really safe number there for at just Amway alone.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_02: But you have all these other Amway is an easier company to go for, I guess, because it's been around for so long and it is so massive that there's been a lot of people who've been hurt by that that company versus all the other little companies that exist, they haven't been around as much.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but with that being said, there's a lot of people, most people, you can go to the Federal Trade Commission website.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: And when you go there, you can even put in a search for MLMs and they'll show you a lot of the studies, independent studies that they've done to show the numbers in comparison to being a small business owner versus within an MLM.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so you you have a way higher chance of losing money, not only not getting anything, but losing money by joining a network marketing company versus starting a small business.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a big difference there as well, because obviously both are risky, but one has a bigger risk than the other.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so when I saw, and that's what happened for me, I didn't know this stuff beforehand.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so when I became part of an MLM, I hard all the wonderful things that this is an opportunity to network with your community, to serve people, to help people, to get out of debt or things like that.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so it sounded really great.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that's part of what they tell you.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_02: So that way you'll join.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_02: Because if they lead with this, you're not gonna join.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so based off of that, when I learned on the FTC that there are so many people who have been negatively impacted by MLMs because they did not gain money or they lost a lot of money, or they lost their house or relationships and things like that kind of dead-ended because they were constantly pushing their products or their business onto this person.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's when I started to realize this is very similar to, and especially when you're inside of the MLM, there's a lot of tactics that you use that are very manipulative.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_02: When you're inside, you don't recognize it as manipulation.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: And if you grew up in a toxic family or a toxic family dynamic, you certainly don't recognize it as manipulation.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so you're constantly manipulating.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_02: And in the process, there's a lot of people that end up not getting what they want, but they think they're going to get it.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's that's where the fact that there's so many people that are affected by that, that's kind of problematic.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: But the FTC definitely includes a lot of numbers that I just don't have off the top of my head.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: So as a coach, how do you um get people to start questioning their beliefs, their actions, their motivations in order to overcome some of those beliefs?
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh honestly, I think, okay, so there's two ways to answer that.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_02: Because on one hand, um, I think it's just looking at your life.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: Are you happy with it?
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_02: Are you happy with the relationships?
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_02: Do you feel heard?
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_02: Do you feel seen?
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, do you feel constantly ignored or lied to all the time?
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um but on the other hand, if someone doesn't recognize those things, then that's okay too.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_02: They might be fine with being, there's a benefit.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_02: There's a benefit to being manipulated sometimes.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_02: You're taken care of sometimes, there's community.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, sometimes uh there's it's less challenging sometimes to not go against it.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so I don't judge that either.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's where I try to come through with the education, through videos, through so people can start to put these things together.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_02: Because for myself personally, um, there was I was both people.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_02: On one hand, I definitely questioned when it came to religion and people's freedom to live the life that they wanted.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: But then on the other hand, I certainly did not expect inside of corporations, when I both when I worked in social work in the corporate world and when I worked in MLMs, I did not expect that there would be manipulation to the degree at which I saw it.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I didn't question it the same the way that I questioned in every other aspect of my life.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I feel like if you're if you're just asking yourself, am I happy?
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_02: Do I feel like I'm being heard?
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_02: Do I feel like I'm being seen?
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's the beginning process of identifying whether or not the relationships in your life are allowing you to feel those feelings.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_02: And if there needs to be kind of like an audit of where where am I not experiencing this?
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is it at my work?
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is it in my family?
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_02: Is it in my relationship?
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_02: Is it with my kids?
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_02: Where is where am I experiencing this sense of emotional neglect or um invisibility and going from there?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't have those questions, that's okay either.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes just listening to someone else's experience allows you to recognize like, wait, that feels oddly familiar, you know, and go from there.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I really want to encourage people to check out your social media and your podcast because you have so many offerings that people can benefit from that are free and that you offer generously.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: And also um, I think a lot of people would benefit from some coaching with you.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think all of us can um learn better how to ask the questions that you're encouraging people to ask.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we'll put all your details um down below.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I wonder if you would be willing to switch over to our lightning round.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, totally.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I've got some good questions for you here.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: All right, first question.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: What are you most proud of in your life?
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, um, what am I most proud of?
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think, you know, I um I take risk, I think.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's that's what I'm most proud of.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm terrified, but I still do it and I take the risk.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's been one of my mantras.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm afraid, but I'm going anyway.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: And once you I think the the great thing is that once you become comfortable with being on edge like that, it becomes then there's there's very few limits.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's very few things that you won't explore when you're when you're like comfortable on the edge, you know?
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_02: You get to fully experience being a human when you allow yourself to take risks, you know, whatever that is.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_02: Be willing to lose, be willing to to love, be willing to grieve, all of that.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_02: You can experience so much when you're willing to say, you know what, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna risk it, even though I don't know how this is gonna end.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_02: And you get to experience fullness of life.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I feel like that's what puts like the aliveness in our life.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's so funny.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: I recently just created an affirmation now on my mirror.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_02: So when I'm brushing my teeth, I watch it and it says, um, when I'm when I am afraid, that just means I'm alive.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that's it.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's like it's not about eradicating the fear.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_02: The fear allows me to live.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_02: So it's just like, oh, you know, it's like if you're going on a roller coaster, part of what is is exciting is the fear that you feel when you're on that roller coaster.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know you're gonna be fine.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_02: So you go anyway, but you're kind of chasing the fear.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at the fear as like, this just means that I'm alive, that I'm feeling, then it's like, go for it.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_02: Just go for it.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: Who would play you in a movie and why?
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, oh, that's a good question.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_02: Who would play me in a movie?
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh, I really don't know the answer to that.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I should because I'm a huge movie person.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're millennial, so I might not know the person.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_02: That might be true.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: No, okay.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think who would play me?
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_02: Probably, I shouldn't say this answer because I don't love her, but I feel like people would say probably this girl, her name is Tiffany Haddish.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_02: She is hilarious, and I can do number one.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: She is definitely, I am wild like her.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think my Capricorn doesn't allow me to go full out the way that she does, but I'm always down for a really silly, crazy time, and I'm not easily embarrassed.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I can I can definitely be a little Tiffany.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say I feel like you could probably play her in a movie as well.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: Probably.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, who's your favorite superhero?
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm huge into superheroes.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I love this question.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and I could go on forever about this.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_02: My favorite superhero uh is Thor from Marvel, from from history, from I'm into mythology, so I love Thor.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so yeah, I think that that would probably be my favorite superhero.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_02: And and and Black Widow, just because she is um not the not the character in the movies per se.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_02: I love Scarlett Johansson and I love her take on it, but at the same time, I feel like the comic book version of her is a little bit more like, I don't know, like tougher and powerful, and just like don't mess with me.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I like that a lot.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_02: So those two are probably my favorite, but yeah, it's hard to choose.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's perfect.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what do you do to burn off stress?
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_02: Dance.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_02: I dance all the time.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_02: I dance, dance, dance.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a huge Zumba lover.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but even if I don't have Zoomba, if I'm not a Zumba class, that's how we've gotten through quarantine, is I just put on Brittany or Beyonce and I just and I just dance, and that is how we get through a lot of stress.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I was really attracted to Zumba until I actually took some classes, and then I was like, I need to freestyle.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like yeah, you need the freedom.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: I can't do whatever it is you're doing, but can I just come and freestyle?
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what do you do for inspiration?
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, oh, that's a good question.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_02: I well, I love movies.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_02: I love movies, so I watch them a lot a couple of times a week.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_02: I make time for movies.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I love, especially if um with quarantine, it's been a little hard, but with going to movie theater or theaters in general, I'm a theater kid as well.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so anytime I get to just watch like plays or just stories, I it I always end up learning something and it triggers something else.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm very if I'm stuck in a creative rut, I watch a movie and afterwards I'm super, super inspired to do something awesome.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then you're then inspiration's never very far away.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, it's not.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's easily accessible, which I love.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_02: When I was a kid, I did more reading as an adult.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't do as much reading, but I definitely do.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_02: I have movie nights multiple times a week.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: You must be on fire during COVID.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, when we first started, I was totally, I was like, this is amazing.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_02: Movie night every day.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it was awesome.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_02: But then the extrovert in me kind of was like, okay, I kind of miss being around people.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_02: And my biggest thing, everyone always asks me, that it's like, what do you miss the most?
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_02: And it's movie theaters.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_02: I that's the thing that I'm I miss going, especially for opening nights with everybody.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_02: The energy is very different on an opening night of a movie theater.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, because there's so much the people who go to, you know, whether it's like the midnight showing or just the first showing of a movie release, they're they have such respect for the movie.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_02: So they know when to laugh, when to clap, when to be quiet.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_02: The energy is just palpable.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I love opening nights of movies, is uh, I miss that the most, like the most.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_00: I have never been that person, but I have had a couple of kids who've been that person.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I've sat in parking lots during while my kids were at the movies and stuff like that.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so I now you're kind of making me wish I had done that more because I think you're right about that.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: That energy is pretty awesome.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's so awesome.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_02: So okay.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_02: Did you bring a question for me today?
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_02: So one question I had was just how did this what inspired you to create this podcast to ask these types of questions?
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Because I've never seen someone focus so much on this.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to know what your inspiration was for this.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of well, first of all, I had noticed that probably 98% of the conversations that I was having were already revolving around spirituality.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: The awakening process.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a it's a subject that I can endlessly dive into.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm never bored with people's stories of um how they became who they have become.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so that I was predisposed to it.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then I started to notice that um when you really listen to someone's story, um you can almost see them change in front of you.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the the being seen and heard and somebody actually being interested in you changes you in in a really positive way.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like it I it like I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about how special it is to be the person who uh gets to witness that.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um so that's kind of um how I got started.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's and it and it's been true, like the experiences has borne out that I see people come alive and feel differently um after the interview than they did before.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really like that's really special to me.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And now that I'm I've been doing it for a while, I've become in in the beginning, I was only interviewing people that I already knew because that's where my comfort level was.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_00: But now I can feel myself expanding out of that and becoming more comfortable with meeting new people.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so the horizon just looks huge to me.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm so excited about um, you know, kind of following that thread.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I love that.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that's such a beautiful thing because I agree.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_02: When you when someone gets a chance to share their story and you get to hold space with them, there is something that changes.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the things that I loved about being a therapist was you get to see people unfold versus when we are going through life, we are we got the mask on, you know, we're trying to just get through things and get it done or, you know, whatever.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_02: But when you get to sit with somebody and let them tell you who they are, this other version, this light kind of emanates through, even in some of the darkest moments.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then for that person, it is a beautiful moment because finally it's like it's safe for me to be seen.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_02: And for many people, that's not true until somebody asks, Who are you?
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_02: and sits with them.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_02: So what a beautiful, almost like ministry that you have, that you make this available to people to be just seen so you can hold space and sit with them in that moment.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm of course I hope that it will inspire other people to um ask their own questions of themselves and to um start to become comfortable with exploring and being supported in that by you know, people like you telling your telling your story.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I just want to thank you so much for being with me today.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I really want to meet again with you and hopefully do a live or um yeah, because I feel like, oh, we could have been here forever.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, we would have.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_00: We could be here for three hours, a three hours podcast special.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm terrible at that, but and so that's one of the reasons that I admire you so much, is I feel like you could go on forever.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I totally could.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's a problem, it's a real problem.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a beautiful, beautiful skill, and thank you so much for sharing it and making my job so easy today.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, thank you.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for having me.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_02: I love this.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll have to do it again.
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for being with me.