Latest / The FEEL Podcast: Women’s Empowerment, Emotional Wellness and Self-Leadership with Melissa Crook / Unmasking the Layers: Eating Disorders, Sexual Shame & the Journey to Self-Healing with Leslie Draffin

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Unmasking the Layers: Eating Disorders, Sexual Shame & the Journey to Self-Healing with Leslie Draffin · The FEEL Podcast: Women’s Empowerment, Emotional Wellness and Self-Leadership with Melissa Crook

• 0:00
  Hello, Melissa Crook here from the Field podcast.
• 0:03
  Welcome to today's episode unmasking the layers eating
• 0:08
  disorders, sexual shame and the journey to self healing with
• 0:12
  Leslie Draffen. The ways to engage with today's
• 0:15
  episode are as follows. Challenge yourself to look at
• 0:19
  your health in a different way. If you're constantly checking
• 0:23
  the number on the scale, start looking at how much water you
• 0:26
  drink in a day or how many steps you get in.
• 0:29
  If you I feel like you don't have any time for yourself,
• 0:32
  start carving out small amounts of time to let yourself breathe.
• 0:36
  This might be in the car ride to work, or on the car ride home,
• 0:40
  or sitting it outside the house before you go in at the end of
• 0:43
  the day at your lunch break. So there's some examples of
• 0:47
  where maybe you can find those minutes.
• 0:49
  And even if it's just four or five minutes, these things add
• 0:53
  up and matter. A fresh perspective allows for
• 0:56
  different results and new ideas in your journey.
• 1:00
  We hope you find these helpful and supportive as you listen
• 1:04
  today to our powerful episode with Leslie Draffin.
• 1:07
  Thanks so much for being with us.
• 1:25
  Hello Field podcast audience. Welcome back.
• 1:27
  This week I have a new friend here with me thanks to our good
• 1:30
  friends at Podmatch. They're always bringing me such
• 1:33
  insightful and interesting smart women that I can have these
• 1:38
  conversations with, and this is another example of that.
• 1:42
  I have Leslie Draffin here with me today and Leslie and I are
• 1:46
  going to have, I'm really excited about our conversation.
• 1:49
  She's doing work that is so in alignment with things we talk
• 1:54
  about here on the podcast of caring for ourselves well,
• 1:57
  caring for ourselves holistically, mind, body,
• 2:01
  spirit, mentally, emotionally, prioritizing our Wellness.
• 2:06
  These are such an intricate part of the work that she does.
• 2:09
  And living authentically out of our own expectations from a
• 2:13
  healed sense, embracing all of our layers, all all the parts
• 2:17
  that make us who we are, without shame, without feeling like we
• 2:21
  need to keep secrets about that. She addresses this so
• 2:24
  intuitively. And she learned a lot of these
• 2:27
  lessons the hard way. And she had to go on her own
• 2:30
  journey before she got to the space where she is today.
• 2:34
  So I'm excited to share her story and background with you
• 2:37
  today as it unfolds through the talking points.
• 2:40
  She describes herself as passionate, purpose driven,
• 2:44
  grounded, intuitive, resilient, a cheerleader and a
• 2:49
  permissionary, which we're going to talk about that more 'cause I
• 2:52
  love that word. Leslie Giraffe and Welcome to
• 2:55
  the Field podcast. Thanks so much for having me
• 2:58
  Melissa. I am so excited to be here.
• 3:00
  I am so excited to have you. OK, we're gonna jump right into
• 3:03
  it. Talk to me about prioritizing
• 3:05
  self-care in your life and what that journey has looked like for
• 3:10
  you from, because I, I imagine early on that was something that
• 3:16
  wasn't something you necessarily felt like was OK for you to do
• 3:20
  or that maybe you needed permission to prioritize
• 3:23
  yourself. I'm, I'm guessing so, but I'm
• 3:25
  going to let you kind of unfold and walk us through your journey
• 3:27
  with that. Yeah.
• 3:29
  So, you know, self-care for me, I think didn't really become
• 3:34
  something I fully understood until I was in my mid to late
• 3:37
  30s. And you know, in my 20s, I was
• 3:39
  doing the self-care that was the popular thing very much centered
• 3:43
  around materialism and capitalism where it was like a
• 3:46
  skin care mask here, girls night out there, a, a bubble bath.
• 3:51
  And, and so for me, what switched was when I realized
• 3:56
  that self-care is self-serving. And I, and I feel like there's
• 4:01
  that like mantra out there, self-care isn't selfish.
• 4:03
  Honestly, I think it is. And that's fine.
• 4:05
  And it should because it takes you getting a little selfish to
• 4:09
  understand that if you don't treat yourself as sacred, then
• 4:12
  you're not going to take care of yourself in the ways that you
• 4:15
  need to. And so self-care started to look
• 4:18
  for me like things that weren't that fun, like, you know,
• 4:22
  looking at my shadows, looking at my triggers, journaling and
• 4:25
  discovering, you know, all the blocks that were holding me
• 4:28
  back. Now my self-care really does
• 4:30
  look like sticking to my somatic practices every day when I'm in
• 4:35
  a micro dosing protocol, spending time with medicine and
• 4:38
  being reverent and gracious to the medicine.
• 4:43
  And then, you know, the little nitty gritty things that someone
• 4:46
  who struggled with depression like myself sometimes still
• 4:48
  struggles with, which is the showers, which is the skin care,
• 4:52
  which is the, are we making sure when we are in a functional
• 4:55
  freeze that we're still changing our clothes every day?
• 4:58
  So that's sort of my progression with self-care.
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  It's certainly been something that I've wanted to embody for a
• 5:07
  really long time, but it wasn't until I understood how to really
• 5:10
  love myself that I understood what self-care really could be.
• 5:14
  Yeah, and my friend Erin Copeland calls it self full,
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  which I love because you want to make sure yourself is full, full
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  of what you need to show up the way you want to.
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  And it is, it's meeting yourself wherever you are.
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  And it, it can be different things every day.
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  It can be different things in every season.
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  And it's it, it's tending to whatever your body needs.
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  Does it need rest? Does it need food?
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  Does it need sleep? Does it need water?
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  Does it need therapy? You are there things you need to
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  unpack? Does it need movement?
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  I mean, there's so many pieces spiritually, what does it need?
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  Do you need to? And you've said something so
• 5:53
  important. We will prioritize what we
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  value, what we see as worthwhile and worthy.
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  So if we don't value ourselves, it's going to be very difficult
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  to prioritize that if we don't see ourselves as being worth
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  that time. And and that's such an integral
• 6:12
  piece of this journey. And so many times we as women,
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  if something comes up, we will put ourselves on the back burner
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  and we will make room for that other thing that comes up.
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  And I had to realize real quickly, I've got to make myself
• 6:28
  a non negotiable too. I can't just move and adjust.
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  Of course, life requires flexibility, but it can't always
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  be me the one that's losing what that adjustment has to be made.
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  Is that something you can relate to?
• 6:41
  For sure. Yeah, absolutely.
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  And I think that, you know, when I started my healing journey,
• 6:46
  which interestingly enough is 6 years ago in January when we're
• 6:50
  talking, I felt so weird about asking for the space in the
• 6:56
  mornings from my husband to do things I wanted to do because I
• 6:59
  was doing meditation at that point and I was making weird
• 7:02
  sounds in our guest room. And I felt so nervous, so
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  ashamed, so kind of scared to carve out that time for myself
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  because of that whole thought that oh, he's going to think I'm
• 7:15
  weird. He's going to think this and
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  this and this. And he'd already seen me at this
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  point, like, you know, doing the self-care routines that I'd
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  mentioned before that felt very materialistic and kind of basic.
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  And it took me finally asking him to do these things with me
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  for me to feel comfortable enough to be like, OK, this is
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  what I'm doing and this is when I'm going to do it.
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  So it for me, it wasn't as much of an issue having the time
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  carved out. It was having the safety in our
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  own home so that I felt safe enough to do the things and felt
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  encouraged to do the things. And now, you know, he has his
• 7:53
  own spiritual path, and I have my own spiritual path.
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  And so we each kind of hold each other accountable.
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  Be like, hey, have you done your thing yet?
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  OK, Yeah. I'm going to do my thing.
• 8:00
  You can go do your thing on the other side of the house.
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  We don't have kids. We have a puppy.
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  So it's different. Obviously, my life is different
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  than folks who have, you know, little ones.
• 8:08
  Yeah. But it was tricky to figure out
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  how to ask for what I needed. Yeah, especially when you're not
• 8:14
  used to. I think that's an A learned
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  practice and because, and I talk about this all the time this
• 8:20
  season, it seems to be coming up a lot, but our nervous systems a
• 8:24
  lot of times equate safety with familiarity instead of safety
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  with actually meeting yourself where you are with what you need
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  in that moment. And so you have to retrain it
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  that this new thing is safe, that I don't need all these
• 8:43
  warning signs and other things to show up and protect me
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  anymore. I'm in a different environment
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  now that anxiety, that hyper vigilance that is no longer
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  serving me. And so we're going to go and
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  take this new route. And I think so many times when
• 8:59
  that happens, we will take that sometimes early on that
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  discomfort, we're so uncomfortable being
• 9:05
  uncomfortable that we'll take that discomfort as a sign that
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  we're doing something wrong rather than realizing, no, this
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  you've, your body has been trained, your mind, your, the
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  system has been trained to operate X way for X amount of
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  years. It's going to take some time for
• 9:23
  your system to accept this new reality as the the right, best,
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  healthiest way forward. For sure.
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  Yeah. I think the saying is like we'll
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  always pick a comfortable, comfortable hell versus an
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  uncomfortable heaven because like, that's what we know.
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  We know. But for me, what was interesting
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  is, and now it's coming back to me too, because this came up in
• 9:45
  a mushroom journey as well. I have struggled my whole life
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  with asking for what I need and using my voice to express what I
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  authentically want. Which is funny seeing as how I
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  was a news anchor for 15 years literally being paid to use my
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  voice. Wow.
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  So yeah, multiple layers in there.
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  Yeah, well, the irony of that too.
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  And that's another, I think, reminder for us to you never
• 10:12
  know someone's story and don't make assumptions about what
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  you're seeing on, on on just a one-on-one in a social setting
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  scenario or a workplace that doesn't necessarily told tell
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  the whole story. And so being really mindful
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  about that as we approach people and and ask questions and get
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  curious or even, you know, the danger of making assumptions
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  when we don't have all of the information.
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  This goes really nicely into, you know, confidently setting
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  boundaries when you find when you finally figure it out.
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  OK, wait, this is this way of operating is not working for me
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  anywhere. I've got to create some some
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  boundaries here around what I will engage in, the kind of
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  people I will surround myself with, what is healthy for me and
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  not healthy for me, how much of my time I can give away.
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  All those kinds of things that you have to become accustomed to
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  when you finally start prioritizing your Wellness and
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  not just giving yourself away all the time.
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  So talk to me about that journey for you.
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  Oh, boundaries, I know. Wow, yeah, I had them.
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  I had none of them for so long in my 20s for sure.
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  And it really came out a lot in my work where I would, you know,
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  say yes to projects or say yes to doing, you know, an
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  appearance and, and being so deeply disconnected from my
• 11:41
  body's ability to tell me yes or no that I was always in my head.
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  And so for me, what helped to be able to confidently set
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  boundaries was to get into the body and understand what does it
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  feel like in the body for this to be a yes or a no.
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  And I did that through a couple of things.
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  One was aligning with my menstrual cycle, understanding
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  what my unique cycle phases look like, what I need in each phase.
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  And so when I began to set boundaries through the lens of
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  my cycle, one, I would in the beginning just like blame my
• 12:15
  cycle, like, oh, it's just this. And that was helpful.
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  And I and your cycle will let you.
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  And she's not going to be upset about the fact that you're
• 12:22
  blaming her for your boundaries. But it really did like, help me
• 12:25
  understand and help me articulate to my husband and to
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  my friends and to my family. I am not available during these
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  days. I don't want I love you and do
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  not do not call me. I will not answer. 1st is 2
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  weeks from now I am available for all of these things.
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  And so for me, boundaries in my personal life do seem to shift
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  cyclically. So do self-care routines.
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  And that really did start to help me understand what my body
• 12:54
  was helping me see that I needed.
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  And so that's where I started is what can I feel in the body and
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  how can that help me set this boundary?
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  The other thing that really helped me was doing that work
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  around using my voice. And I did that through somatic
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  work, through vocal toning, through eating magic mushrooms
• 13:16
  and, you know, through coaching and all of those things.
• 13:19
  But as I was able to unleash the voice and understand how to say
• 13:27
  what I needed, boundaries became a little bit easier.
• 13:32
  But I'm going to be completely honest, I'm not great at
• 13:34
  boundaries with certain people in my life, my mother in
• 13:36
  particular, and I don't know if I ever will be just because of
• 13:40
  the nature of our relationship. And for me, that's not something
• 13:43
  that bothers me too much. But again, like I'm, I guess I
• 13:49
  share that because I can talk about boundaries all day and
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  then go and mess up in a phone call in two hours after this
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  call, you know, So I think that's, you know, I guess the
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  other thing I'll say is for me, I give myself grace for that
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  when I came from a place with no boundaries.
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  Never learned that as a as a kid.
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  Are you? Serious.
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  I was a preacher. 'S daughter there was literally
• 14:12
  no boundaries. There was a saying my mother had
• 14:15
  we live in a fishbowl, everyone is watching all the time and I
• 14:19
  was like, oh, talk about an in it like the boundary of glass.
• 14:23
  This see through invisible wall, no boundaries.
• 14:28
  No new boundaries and a lot of room for everyone to in in bring
• 14:33
  their own judgements and expectations and all the
• 14:36
  pressures. And we'll get into that as we go
• 14:38
  along in this conversation. But something so important here
• 14:42
  that she said a couple things. Cycles, my friend Valencia San
• 14:45
  Luis, a cycles coach, and we talked about cycles on here
• 14:48
  before. Our cycles are when we know how
• 14:51
  to manage them. We won't understand how they
• 14:55
  work in our body. I talked about this with
• 14:56
  Isabella Thor as well. They're actually quite
• 15:01
  miraculous. They let you know when you've
• 15:04
  got more energy, when you need to be a little more reserved,
• 15:08
  when you've got a lot to give, when it's more of a time of
• 15:12
  thinking and processing and, and resetting.
• 15:18
  And I mean, there's just so many pieces to it.
• 15:20
  When you can come to understand it and then live out of that
• 15:23
  space, it really does allow you to meet yourself right where you
• 15:27
  are all the time and communicate that to other people as well to
• 15:32
  really powerful, you know, force that exists within that.
• 15:36
  And that somatic piece. I tell you, when I started my
• 15:39
  journey five years ago, little over five years ago now, when my
• 15:44
  system finally felt safe to kind of let down and allow me to feel
• 15:51
  all that had been going on that I had been disassociating from
• 15:55
  and stuffing and ignoring in some cases.
• 16:00
  For. 3540 years. Other things not as long.
• 16:05
  All of a sudden my I just felt Everything Everywhere.
• 16:10
  And it really took some time. And as I slowly unraveled and
• 16:15
  unwound, I used EMDR that was really effective for me.
• 16:21
  I think slowly these physical manifestations would subside or
• 16:27
  go away. And I mean, I had this numbness
• 16:30
  that existed in my midsection for months.
• 16:32
  I had this pressure in the crown of my, my nose between my
• 16:38
  eyebrows. It existed for months, went off
• 16:41
  and on. And it'll still come up every
• 16:44
  once in a while if I'm feeling, if I'm really deeply impacted by
• 16:50
  something, you know, stress wise or anxiety wise.
• 16:53
  I mean, all these different spaces and I'm like, has this
• 16:56
  been here all along? And they're like, am I
• 16:59
  therapist? Like it's been there.
• 17:00
  It just didn't feel safe to come out.
• 17:02
  And you're now opening the door, you've, you've opened the, the,
• 17:07
  the tunnel and it's, it's starting to, you know, and then
• 17:10
  I had to learn how to really move through feel process.
• 17:15
  I mean, I would do my therapy with her, but then she would
• 17:19
  give me a physical activity of like, all right, there was a lot
• 17:22
  of anger wrapped up in that. You need to do something really,
• 17:25
  you know, get some go to an anger room or hit some, hit a
• 17:29
  wall with some pillows. I mean, there is all these
• 17:31
  different ways that I was a, that I was able to find for me
• 17:36
  to help me process that. And so I, I, I, and that goes
• 17:41
  nicely into when we're looking at our health, we got to look at
• 17:45
  the emotional health, the mental health, the physical health, the
• 17:49
  sexual health, the spiritual health.
• 17:51
  There's so many pieces to our health.
• 17:54
  It's not just physical and the connections between.
• 17:59
  I mean, at the end we feel a lot of these physically, but we'll
• 18:02
  throw a pill at something and we won't ask ourselves why am I
• 18:05
  feeling that? What is it, the root of that?
• 18:08
  I mean, for the first couple of years I was in therapy and I was
• 18:12
  seeing a holistic Dr. So he was looking at all the pieces and
• 18:15
  even he is like for now, until we can get to the root of this,
• 18:18
  we're going to put you on a blood pressure medication.
• 18:21
  I think this is probably hormone and anxiety related, but until
• 18:25
  we can get to the root of it, sure enough, you know, a year
• 18:29
  and a half later, I was heads, I was off the blood pressure
• 18:33
  medication because we did figure out I was learning how to
• 18:36
  regulate the hyper vigilance and anxiety that had been living
• 18:40
  very vivaciously, you know, within me.
• 18:44
  And it's still something that I deal with to this day.
• 18:47
  And I do still have one Med that I do take for the anxiety piece
• 18:51
  to help me manage that. But I have a whole list of
• 18:55
  practices that are in place. But it was me understanding and
• 18:58
  recognizing all the places that I felt those things physically
• 19:03
  and how they manifested themselves through the anxiety
• 19:06
  through blood. Pressure.
• 19:08
  Through racing heartbeat, through headaches, I mean,
• 19:11
  there's just so many manifestations.
• 19:13
  So talk to me more about that. And then also how you found the
• 19:19
  healing Rd. that you're on now to treat those because not we
• 19:25
  talked about this before, not a not one-size-fits-all.
• 19:28
  And there's a lot of modalities out there that are available.
• 19:33
  And if you haven't found yours yet, keep looking.
• 19:37
  There's something that will work for you.
• 19:38
  But talk to me how you decided to go on the journey you were on
• 19:42
  because on the outside you looked great.
• 19:44
  You were the successful anchor, beautiful, you know, out there
• 19:48
  with the people engaging all those things.
• 19:51
  And at some point you had to be like this is not working.
• 19:56
  Right. Yeah.
• 19:57
  So, you know, to talk about and to talk to that whole idea of
• 20:02
  supporting all the aspects of yourself, not just your physical
• 20:06
  body. You know, I suffered from eating
• 20:08
  disorders for 20 years and I was like, perfect BMI, probably low
• 20:14
  on the low BMI, but like, you know, where a doctor would be
• 20:18
  like, great check off. No, no doctor except one ever.
• 20:22
  Talk to me about my weight. Being low and what was so
• 20:25
  interesting it's because you know we I was so focused on that
• 20:28
  aspect of my life hyper focused on that aspect of life that in
• 20:35
  reality it was just a symptom of my disconnection to my body to
• 20:38
  be hurting my body in the way that I did for 20 years.
• 20:41
  And so you asked how I got to where I am now.
• 20:44
  So. And this is all retrospect,
• 20:46
  right? Like, this is not so funny how
• 20:48
  we always know when we look back.
• 20:49
  So I, yeah, spent 15 years as a news anchor.
• 20:54
  I left in the middle of 2022 because of my mental health
• 20:57
  challenges. But for me, you know, when I
• 21:00
  started my healing journey at 2019, I dove really hard into
• 21:07
  not only therapy and the Western medical model to try and help my
• 21:11
  anxiety, to try and help my depression, but meditation and
• 21:17
  podcasts and journaling and manifestation and affirmations
• 21:21
  and crystals. Like all of the things, right?
• 21:24
  All of the woo things. And so like you mentioned, you
• 21:28
  know, I looked from the outside in like I had it all together.
• 21:32
  But in reality, I was really suffering.
• 21:33
  And for me, what I uncovered is that I had and have always had a
• 21:38
  deep wound around feeling worthy and feeling worthy of love.
• 21:43
  And so when I was 18, four months, 4 weeks, excuse me,
• 21:48
  after I lost my virginity, I was diagnosed with herpes.
• 21:51
  And my dad's a preacher in the Deep South of the United States,
• 21:54
  super conservative. And so this shame that just
• 21:58
  manifested in my entire body activated that wound that I'd
• 22:02
  had since birth because I'm also adopted.
• 22:04
  So I had the in utero trauma that very likely was again, the
• 22:09
  wound around unworthiness. I was in a foster home for a
• 22:12
  month, like as an infant. Who can say what was happening
• 22:15
  in my little subconscious? But that shame spiral activated
• 22:20
  within me not only a worse eating disorder, but also here
• 22:25
  comes alcohol, here comes alcohol abuse, all the things
• 22:28
  that we. Can do to soothe and not feel.
• 22:31
  For sure. And and the other thing I did to
• 22:34
  soothe and not feel was to become an overachiever.
• 22:36
  I already was, but become addicted to this hustling and
• 22:40
  achieving. And so 15 years into my news
• 22:43
  anchoring, you know I am at the peak of overachieving.
• 22:48
  I'm at the peak of trying to prove how much I deserve love.
• 22:54
  Like, in my mindset especially, you know, I got divorced in my
• 22:57
  late 20s. And in that year afterwards, I
• 22:59
  saw it come out so heavy. Like, how can I prove to these
• 23:03
  new partners that I'm so lovable?
• 23:05
  Oh, look, I make all this money. Oh, look, I have this amazing
• 23:08
  job. Oh, look, this and this.
• 23:09
  I look like this. And so it all came crashing down
• 23:15
  as one does, when I really began to look into, you know, what was
• 23:20
  my emotional health like, what was my spiritual health like,
• 23:22
  what was my sexual health and my my pleasure body feeling.
• 23:29
  And so I tried that therapy, I tried meditation, I tried even
• 23:34
  embodiment practices and nothing worked for me until I started to
• 23:38
  microdose magic mushrooms. And so you talk about different
• 23:41
  modalities for different people. I never even tried psychedelics
• 23:45
  until I was in my 30s. I was absolutely a DARE kid.
• 23:49
  And so and I was still anchoring and I was doing things that were
• 23:53
  not legal where I was right. And so I took on a lot of risk
• 23:57
  and I had to address a lot of internalized bias and taboo to
• 24:01
  find in modality that worked so deeply for me.
• 24:05
  And it shifted things cat, like catastrophically in some ways,
• 24:10
  but also like, I think that sometimes you need the chaos to
• 24:13
  rise out of those ashes. I'm sober now for more than two
• 24:17
  years. My eating disorders are gone.
• 24:19
  I've stopped actively dieting. Now I have a more holistic
• 24:21
  approach to the way that my body looks and the way that I handle
• 24:24
  that. And now the table is steady,
• 24:28
  right? So when you look at the pillars
• 24:30
  of your health, there's all these legs on a table.
• 24:32
  For me, it was like the physical thing was all I had focused on
• 24:35
  and I had become hyper focused on it.
• 24:38
  So that table leg was so long, the table was like a lopsided
• 24:41
  mess. And now they've come back into
• 24:44
  being even where you can actually sit at that table and
• 24:47
  and holistically approach life. Yeah.
• 24:50
  You know, isn't it? It's so interesting when you
• 24:52
  finally, because when you're in it, when you're hyper vigilant,
• 24:57
  you're focused on achieving. I very much came from a
• 25:00
  background where it was very conservative.
• 25:04
  There was a very particular idea around the way girls were
• 25:07
  supposed to connect themselves, but was and wasn't appropriate.
• 25:11
  Had a very traumatic experience when I shared with my parents
• 25:14
  that I had, you know, had had sex before marriage and all
• 25:17
  these things and how it was made to feel within that and how I
• 25:20
  felt about myself when then that carried that for years.
• 25:24
  It's a very abbreviated version but impacted so many.
• 25:28
  It impacted my marriage for years in ways I didn't fully
• 25:30
  understand. It impacted how I saw myself
• 25:34
  that I have to keep showing up in the best way possible because
• 25:38
  I am awesome and I got to keep being and achieving and being
• 25:42
  great at everything so everyone can see how awesome I am.
• 25:46
  And I will over explain everything I'm doing so everyone
• 25:49
  will understand how awesome I am.
• 25:51
  So, so all of these things in so many ways have such a personal
• 25:56
  connect. And then you finally get to a
• 25:59
  point where you're just at this desperation point where it's
• 26:02
  like, I can't look like this anymore.
• 26:04
  This is just costing me too much.
• 26:07
  So I've got to find something that I can connect with.
• 26:10
  And so I think sometimes that desperation opens up your mind
• 26:15
  to things you wouldn't have maybe been open to before,
• 26:19
  because you just know you've got to find a way to move this
• 26:23
  through, to heal, to deal, to get on a better way of living
• 26:29
  and seeing yourself. Would you say that because there
• 26:32
  are so many stigmas? I mean, we've talked about in
• 26:34
  the past with my friend Lindsay Kerr, we talked about ketamine
• 26:37
  therapy on that and, and, and micro dosing is another one of
• 26:41
  those things. There's a lot of stigmas around
• 26:43
  and, and a lot of biases and a lot of bad information.
• 26:48
  And you know, and so being willing to go down that road and
• 26:52
  being in such a public space as you were learning this too, I
• 26:56
  mean, this wasn't just any old job.
• 26:58
  You were on the front, you were the face of a station.
• 27:02
  And so just that kind of I think can give people the idea of
• 27:06
  like, I had to do something. I had to get some kind of
• 27:10
  semblance of control in a healthy way and start defining
• 27:15
  who I was and seeing myself or I'm this is not going to work.
• 27:19
  I'm going to, there's going to be some really, really dramatic
• 27:24
  consequences if I don't get right the ship on that.
• 27:27
  So how did you find this? Because you talk about
• 27:31
  meditation, there's a lot of things you go to your website,
• 27:34
  you practice a lot of different things within this.
• 27:36
  You talk about somatics and meditation and yoga.
• 27:39
  I mean, there's a lot of pieces to these journeys and, and ways
• 27:43
  you meet and help people that you're working with.
• 27:45
  How did you learn about because it the micro dosing in the and
• 27:49
  these things are tricky. They're not legal in every
• 27:52
  state. I think it's becoming better
• 27:53
  now, but also to finding the right person to work with.
• 27:57
  It knows how to do it in a way that's healthy and can get these
• 28:01
  really helpful. Results.
• 28:04
  Sure. Yep.
• 28:04
  So you know, enough was enough for me when I continued to go to
• 28:09
  my therapist and she would say how great I was at therapy and
• 28:12
  how great I wasn't talking about my problems.
• 28:14
  And then I'd sit in the car afterwards and feel terrible
• 28:17
  like this does not make sense. And so I don't know when I was,
• 28:22
  I don't know where I was, but I was listening to a podcast and
• 28:25
  that's where I heard about micro dosing.
• 28:27
  I listened to a woman, her name is Biju Finney.
• 28:29
  I don't know what show she was on, but I was just immediately
• 28:32
  intrigued. And interestingly enough, my
• 28:35
  news director had asked me to do a story about micro dosing a
• 28:39
  couple years before for my weekly series, which was called
• 28:43
  Your Best Life. And I looked at him and was
• 28:44
  like, how am I going to do that if it's illegal?
• 28:46
  And that was the only conversation.
• 28:48
  So I actually still credit him to this day with being the one
• 28:52
  who planted the first seed. And he was, he's a deadhead.
• 28:56
  So like, of course he planted that.
• 28:57
  So anyway, so I heard Bijou on a podcast and she was talking
• 29:03
  specifically about how psilocybin or magic mushrooms
• 29:08
  can be really beneficial to assisting people as they deal
• 29:13
  with sexual shame or sexual trauma.
• 29:15
  I'm like, let me get this woman on my podcast.
• 29:17
  I invited her on to my show and as soon as we hung up the call,
• 29:20
  I'm like, OK, I have to, I've got to hire you.
• 29:23
  Like, this seems like the necessary next step.
• 29:26
  And so while I was doing that in early 2022, I was also sick.
• 29:31
  I had been sick in early 22 and I was still anchoring at this
• 29:35
  time from like early January through March.
• 29:38
  And I could not figure out what was wrong.
• 29:39
  I thought I had COVID. I took a week off of work.
• 29:42
  I kept testing negative, but it felt like COVID, Yeah.
• 29:45
  And I had been the essential anchor at work for the whole
• 29:49
  pandemic. So everyone else got to sit at
• 29:51
  home, and I had to go into work. And that was just a whole new
• 29:56
  secondary trauma for me and so much more stress and activation.
• 30:01
  And TV news is like fight and flight every single day.
• 30:05
  I can't believe it. So little did I know and
• 30:08
  understand at that point, because I was in it, I was in
• 30:12
  massive burnout. I was in like late stage
• 30:14
  burnout. And so micro dosing while in
• 30:19
  late stage burnout activated even more things.
• 30:24
  And the joke in the psychedelic space is like the medicine will
• 30:28
  show you what is for you, what is not for you.
• 30:31
  Couple months after I began, I'd say three months after I started
• 30:36
  my micro dosing, I took leave from my work.
• 30:40
  I took a mental health leave. I was blessed to be able to
• 30:43
  qualify for FMLA for that. And then I never went back and
• 30:48
  mushrooms really showed me what I was supposed to be doing and
• 30:51
  what I was not supposed to be doing.
• 30:53
  And then a lot of other things happened.
• 30:55
  It was a very dark night of the soul.
• 30:57
  But I I share all of that because I heard about it on a
• 31:01
  podcast and it was like in my body, I just felt, OK, maybe
• 31:07
  this is it. Like, oh, my gosh, there was
• 31:09
  hope because I've been doing everything.
• 31:11
  I have been prescribed meds. I have been in therapy.
• 31:13
  I had gone to multiple different therapists.
• 31:15
  I had tried EMDR. I had, like you said, done all
• 31:18
  of the things. Yeah.
• 31:19
  And for me, it was like mushrooms in these tiny little
• 31:23
  doses where I wasn't high, I could still go about my everyday
• 31:26
  life, help me open the door to my subconscious and look at it
• 31:30
  with like a flashlight so I could shine it on the things
• 31:33
  that I was ready to look at little by little.
• 31:36
  And it opened the door, right? Like, I was so consciously
• 31:41
  blocking that through my intellectualizing of my trauma
• 31:45
  that I couldn't get into the body and into those layers
• 31:48
  underneath. And so that's how I found it.
• 31:51
  I will say, and I think you can really put this and hit the nail
• 31:55
  on the head, right? Like there is so much taboo,
• 31:57
  there is so much bias. And when this is for you, you
• 32:02
  will not need convincing. You will likely still have to do
• 32:05
  a little deprogramming because I certainly did.
• 32:08
  And you will then begin to ask yourself things like, and I
• 32:12
  think the pandemic made me ask this too.
• 32:16
  Why would a loving government not want me to expand my
• 32:18
  consciousness? Why would they want me to stay
• 32:23
  sick? Why, you know, and so those
• 32:26
  types of questions begin to be the ones that we're asking.
• 32:29
  And you get to the answers that you get to they'll be individual
• 32:34
  to you. But like, that all comes, I
• 32:37
  think, from taking that step into the unknown and, and, and
• 32:41
  taking a step into things that can feel really scary because it
• 32:44
  did feel so, so scary. And I wasn't talking about it on
• 32:47
  the Internet. I wasn't telling anybody.
• 32:49
  I didn't tell the soul at this point.
• 32:52
  So that's a whole other kind of worms when I, like came out of
• 32:55
  the psychedelic closet online. Yeah.
• 32:59
  But that's how I found it. I found it in a podcast.
• 33:01
  I felt like that woman. And she was a great coach.
• 33:04
  She was a great mentor. She just spoke straight to what
• 33:06
  I needed. And yeah, I think she really
• 33:11
  helped to foster within me, as did the mushrooms, the purpose
• 33:15
  and life path that I'm on now. And I think I was in my purpose
• 33:19
  and in my path as an anchor because I really did see myself.
• 33:23
  And I continue to see myself as someone who lights the way and
• 33:26
  shines a light on the little dark places in society.
• 33:30
  Sure. Just doing it in a slightly
• 33:31
  different way now. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
• 33:34
  I thank you for that. I think it's, did you notice
• 33:37
  before you started going, were there things showing up for you
• 33:40
  physically that were manifesting?
• 33:44
  And this doesn't always show up for a while for me, things
• 33:47
  didn't really show up physically for a while.
• 33:48
  But were you noticing things were showing up for you
• 33:50
  physically before you started going down this road?
• 33:53
  And you're like, we just kind of blame it on other things like I
• 33:57
  had or or were you so disassociated that it's like,
• 34:00
  no, I'm just zipping through, I'm shutting down.
• 34:02
  I don't feel anything. Well, the first thing that
• 34:05
  started to happen when I started my healing in 2019, which is
• 34:08
  when my spiritual awakening happened, is I started to have
• 34:12
  these like intuitive hits during my meditations that I had to
• 34:16
  come off of birth control because I was stifling my
• 34:18
  feminine energy. And I was like, wait, what even
• 34:21
  is feminine energy? So then I came off of birth
• 34:25
  control, lost my libido completely.
• 34:27
  You talked about numbness, my clit and my, my vulva, so numb.
• 34:32
  They were so numb for months afterwards.
• 34:36
  And so that physical manifestation, lo and behold, to
• 34:40
  the spoiler alert, it was sexual shame.
• 34:42
  It was that sexual trauma of having that stigma, right.
• 34:46
  Yeah. And I, and I say, you know what?
• 34:48
  I had a sexual trauma because trauma isn't about what happens
• 34:52
  to you. It's how you deal with what
• 34:53
  happens to you. Yeah.
• 34:55
  Yeah. And so while no violence was
• 34:57
  done on me, I took what happened and that stigma that I placed on
• 35:02
  myself and society placed on myself, and the judgement that I
• 35:05
  got from that partner and from my parents.
• 35:08
  And yeah, that was traumatic. So yeah, yes, things definitely
• 35:13
  did manifest what was fascinating in the three months
• 35:16
  of early 2022. I had a lot of issues with my
• 35:19
  voice. Oh wow.
• 35:22
  While I was sick and burnt out, I'm like, oh, that's so funny.
• 35:27
  Yeah. And so.
• 35:28
  But like, at that point, I was still holding on to my career
• 35:32
  with, like, a death grip, man. Like, I did not want to let go.
• 35:36
  That was my whole identity. It's everything that I have
• 35:39
  wanted to be since I was in fifth grade.
• 35:41
  And I was like, literally a death grasp prying my cold, dead
• 35:46
  fingers away from this career. And mushrooms finally let me
• 35:49
  understand to just, like, just let go.
• 35:52
  Yeah, there were a lot of things that manifested.
• 35:55
  And it's always interesting to look back.
• 35:57
  Right, because you don't know it at the moment, right when you
• 36:00
  look back on it and you're like, oh, that's what that was.
• 36:03
  I mean, that's so interesting, the way the body works and the
• 36:06
  way that so many times we look at our bodies as being against
• 36:09
  us and our bodies are actually really, really for us and trying
• 36:13
  to give us clues and let us know that something needs to be
• 36:16
  addressed. And I think that that what
• 36:18
  you're talking about and this modality that's worked for you
• 36:21
  is another example of, of being able to tap into those areas
• 36:24
  because sometimes things are stepped down and buried so
• 36:27
  difficult, you know, talking about, you know, leaving talk
• 36:30
  therapy and just feeling miserable and in in tears
• 36:34
  afterwards. That doesn't work for everybody.
• 36:36
  Sometimes that's re traumatizing, you know, you
• 36:38
  know, And so it's not, you know, so being mindful of the fact
• 36:43
  that if you try one thing, it feels like that, you know,
• 36:47
  there's just, there's a lot of different avenues you can take
• 36:50
  out there and being open to those because you are worse
• 36:55
  healing and you are worthy of being your most authentic,
• 36:59
  beautiful self, as you are with all of your layers and pieces
• 37:03
  and parts of you. And but that can be really
• 37:06
  difficult, especially when you've been stuffing and and so
• 37:09
  many things that are shrouded in shame that you want to hide that
• 37:12
  you wish never happened. And, and you talked about, you
• 37:16
  know, earlier, you know, the trauma comes and how you process
• 37:19
  it. There's a lot of damage that's
• 37:21
  done when people that you love and respect and, and thought
• 37:26
  were for you have such a heavy opinion or judgment about
• 37:33
  something that's happened to you that doesn't feel like
• 37:36
  unconditional love at all. It feels really hurtful.
• 37:41
  That has a deep, deep impact. For sure.
• 37:45
  And for me, what's interesting, and this is such a pattern that
• 37:48
  I have been, you know, reminded of constantly is, you know, my
• 37:53
  family wasn't really verbally judgy.
• 37:56
  They just didn't talk about it. It was like it didn't exist.
• 38:00
  It was completely ignored and it was just for me, a chasm that
• 38:05
  like a separation, right? And and when we talk about
• 38:10
  trauma, like trauma often is a separation and that has, has and
• 38:16
  will continue to be just this massive, you know, shift that
• 38:20
  happened when I was 18, you know, and so it doesn't always
• 38:24
  look like them berating you or, or, you know, putting it out
• 38:29
  there, putting you on blast or like talking down to you.
• 38:32
  Sometimes it's them not saying it.
• 38:34
  At all. Right.
• 38:36
  Yeah, and, and, and that was in 20, 2004, 2005, I guess it was
• 38:41
  2005. And so therapy wasn't even like
• 38:43
  a real thing. I was away at college.
• 38:45
  It was like out of sight, out of mind and.
• 38:48
  I sweeping the whole never talk about it again.
• 38:52
  Yeah, and that's why I filled that hole, that chasm within
• 38:55
  myself with the alcohol, with the overachieving and with
• 38:59
  starving myself. And then when I would finally
• 39:01
  eat, throwing up. Yeah, yeah.
• 39:04
  Finding all those other ways to be.
• 39:06
  Yeah. Oh, that's, that's a really good
• 39:08
  point. I'm glad you brought that up
• 39:09
  because there are a lot of when there, when you're live in a
• 39:14
  fish bowl and you live in a background in a family whose
• 39:18
  jobs environment choices kind of put you there by nature of just
• 39:22
  the type of job and and space and community that you're in.
• 39:27
  It is all about appearance. It is all about what looks.
• 39:32
  And so there are things. I mean, I remember even growing
• 39:37
  up, it was very taboo to talk about what was happening in our
• 39:40
  family that wasn't good or healthy.
• 39:44
  It was very taboo to talk to it about to anybody outside of the
• 39:48
  house about it. That was unacceptable.
• 39:50
  I went to a family friend who also happened to be our high
• 39:54
  school assistant principal and athletic director and he was in
• 39:58
  the same faith community as we were.
• 40:00
  And there was some things happening in my home with my dad
• 40:03
  and in general. And that I was just really
• 40:06
  concerned about and was like kind of being asked to carry a
• 40:10
  live that I didn't feel like it was really my 15 year old self
• 40:13
  to carry. And I, I went to him and talked
• 40:16
  to him about it in hopes that maybe he could help me navigate
• 40:19
  this or find someone that could help.
• 40:21
  And so I didn't overtly tell him, don't tell my parents.
• 40:25
  I came and talked to you. So he so he, so he circled back.
• 40:29
  He's like, I'm really concerned. She came to me.
• 40:31
  I got in trouble. I got grounded.
• 40:35
  I got grounded for going and talking about that thing that
• 40:39
  was happening within our family dynamic outside because now
• 40:42
  other people knew that we didn't have it all together and, and it
• 40:46
  was, you know, those kinds of things.
• 40:48
  So that that I know what you mean about that.
• 40:51
  Like, Nope, this is who we are. This is the persona that we will
• 40:54
  be and we will not be anything different.
• 40:56
  And don't you dare say otherwise.
• 40:58
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, heavy load with that.
• 41:03
  All right, how we can support ourselves and other women in
• 41:07
  living unapologetically. You have really in your journey
• 41:11
  grown into this space and now you're helping other women as
• 41:16
  well. Talk to me about the progression
• 41:18
  of getting to like, OK, I've, I've finally got into this space
• 41:22
  myself. Oh, I think I can help others
• 41:25
  with this too. Yeah, you know, it was
• 41:27
  interesting. It was a Co worker back in 2021.
• 41:35
  It was very much a joke where like the anchors always continue
• 41:38
  to get older and older, but everyone else stays the same
• 41:41
  age. The joke.
• 41:42
  It's because all the new reporters are always like 2223.
• 41:45
  And so it was a newer reporter. Her name is Nikki.
• 41:48
  And she would come to me for like life advice.
• 41:51
  And so she told me one day she's like, you should be a life
• 41:53
  coach. I was like, oh, that's so sweet
• 41:55
  of you to say because I had I had thought a while, maybe I
• 41:58
  wanted to go do counseling or do therapy.
• 42:01
  And this was, you know, back in my late 20s.
• 42:04
  So that was just some sort of like something that was floating
• 42:08
  in the ether, right? This thing she had said.
• 42:10
  And where for me, it began to shift, though, was, you know, as
• 42:16
  I started to learn about my menstrual cycle and learn all
• 42:19
  the things I did not know. I came off of the pill after
• 42:22
  being on it for 16 years. I'm 3334 years old.
• 42:26
  We're in the pandemic. The doctor, like, can't see me.
• 42:29
  And also the doctor can't really help me.
• 42:32
  And so I have have to scour the Internet.
• 42:34
  Now I have a special set of skills, basically Liam Neeson,
• 42:38
  when it comes to investigating information.
• 42:41
  I was put on this planet to be someone who is a researcher.
• 42:45
  I research it all, I try it all. I'm like a little experimenter.
• 42:49
  And so I am very good at pulling information and synthesizing
• 42:55
  that into things that like make sense for people.
• 42:57
  And I always knew that that was probably why I was really good
• 42:59
  at my job. Yeah.
• 43:01
  I started to do that with menstrual cycle information and
• 43:04
  then I went into a coaching certification for that.
• 43:07
  And when I began to work one-on-one with clients around
• 43:10
  their cycle, that's, I think when things started to shift
• 43:12
  because they come to me with like period paying and
• 43:16
  underneath it was sexual assault or underneath it was some other
• 43:21
  sexual trauma. And then it really started to
• 43:23
  bubble up in myself, my own trauma, my own sexual shame.
• 43:28
  And so how did I become someone who could then help be an
• 43:32
  initiator of those in initiation or a witness to their rites of
• 43:36
  passage? I think it was because I did
• 43:38
  work to make the things that were wounds for me into scars.
• 43:44
  So what I mean by that is there are things in your life that are
• 43:50
  pillars around your healing and when they become scars and not
• 43:54
  wounds, that is a really great time to start sharing about that
• 43:57
  if you feel called. But we do not share about our
• 44:00
  wounds because that still feels too raw.
• 44:02
  So a great example of this is, you know, I'm coaching in the
• 44:05
  coaching space from 2021 on, and I do not talk about herpes.
• 44:10
  I talk about it with my clients. I think I'd mentioned it on a
• 44:13
  podcast once or twice. But I had never come out of the
• 44:15
  closet on being like, tah, I have herpes because it was still
• 44:19
  a little bit of a wound. Well, thanks to mushrooms,
• 44:23
  thanks to a lot of inner work and this inner thing within me
• 44:28
  that like hates a secret. I hate a secret.
• 44:31
  I'm like, damn, I need to. You know what?
• 44:34
  It's time. So a year ago I came out on the
• 44:38
  Internet and posted, you know, about having herpes very
• 44:42
  publicly. And it went about as good as you
• 44:46
  could think you would think about.
• 44:49
  No, I'm kidding. It went actually really well.
• 44:51
  The person that was the most upset was like the most
• 44:54
  surprising person. It was an ex-boyfriend, but it
• 44:56
  wasn't the ex-boyfriend. It was a different one.
• 44:59
  Oh, wow. And so and I was shocked at how
• 45:01
  upset he was. But you know, he was like, he
• 45:04
  wanted me to take it down and, and that I had somehow hurt his
• 45:07
  relationship and hadn't spoken to his man in 20 years.
• 45:10
  I'm like, you know what? I will never take this down
• 45:12
  because it is what I needed when I was 18.
• 45:15
  I needed me. I needed me.
• 45:18
  And let me tell you how many young women have come to me for
• 45:22
  advice and for just someone to hold their hand a little bit
• 45:25
  virtually, mostly because of their own recent diagnosis.
• 45:29
  And like, OK, that solidified and confirmed for me that that
• 45:35
  thing that was like the skeleton in my closet, that was such a
• 45:39
  festering wound for 20, almost 20 years when I did the work to
• 45:45
  heal it and it became a scar so that it could be out in the
• 45:47
  world. It was healing for others too.
• 45:50
  Yeah. And you don't have to have
• 45:53
  herpes to like, have this work, right?
• 45:55
  Whatever it is that you are go are going through, right.
• 45:58
  When you get to the place where you have looked at that shadow
• 46:02
  enough, you've looked at that trigger, you've looked at that
• 46:04
  trauma enough and you can confidently feel it is a scar
• 46:07
  now and not a wound. That's, I believe your
• 46:10
  permission to begin talking about that because you never
• 46:14
  under you never know who you're going to help.
• 46:16
  You never know. And for me that was really, I
• 46:21
  think a key part of my like coming into my authenticity
• 46:25
  because it felt like something I had hidden for so long.
• 46:29
  And I the other thing I thought to myself when I started to do
• 46:32
  that, when I started to share that it's like is can anyone
• 46:35
  hurt me if I shared this? And the answer was no, because
• 46:40
  my husband, he he's known since day one of our relationship.
• 46:44
  My parents know and and they are either watching my Instagram
• 46:48
  things or they're not, who can say?
• 46:50
  And it's like, and I didn't have a job.
• 46:52
  Now, I have probably made myself fairly unemployable, but you
• 46:55
  know, that's why I work for myself.
• 46:57
  And like, no one could hurt me in that decision.
• 47:00
  Yeah. And so for me, that was what
• 47:02
  unapologetically being authentic looked like because I'm like,
• 47:06
  all right, here it is. Let me just bear it all.
• 47:09
  And my nervous system really didn't like it for about 24
• 47:14
  hours, and then we settled back into it.
• 47:18
  And we continue to remind ourselves through our practices
• 47:21
  and through, you know, the loving, supportive system that I
• 47:24
  have that it was absolutely the right call.
• 47:27
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 47:28
  And I think, you know, when it is, I think, and I think too,
• 47:31
  when you go into work and where you've decided, OK, I'm going to
• 47:35
  take this next step, I'm going to help others too.
• 47:38
  It wakes up in authenticity because it's like, if I'm going
• 47:41
  to invite others to be authentic and open and feel safe, then
• 47:45
  I've got to do that too. I've got to model that in all
• 47:48
  these different areas. And so I think that can really
• 47:51
  awaken that part of you too. And once you do it and you're
• 47:54
  like, oh, wait a minute, everything's OK.
• 47:57
  The world did not cave in and the people that love me and know
• 48:02
  me and want the what's well and good for me are here standing
• 48:06
  with me, supporting me in this. And I'm here for me.
• 48:10
  And I 'cause you said something important earlier that you were
• 48:13
  the voice that you needed when you were 18 years old.
• 48:17
  And I think that can be so true for so many times.
• 48:20
  And just never know the impact that you're going to have on
• 48:24
  someone. And sometimes it's the people
• 48:26
  you least expect. I mean, you just, you'd never
• 48:29
  know who's going to show up being the ones that needed that
• 48:32
  thing, that needed that permission, which talk to me
• 48:37
  about your word commissionary. This is a good.
• 48:40
  Place to launch into this before we go into the why and values
• 48:44
  piece of our conversation. Well, I cannot say that I came
• 48:47
  up with it. I've heard it from Rachel
• 48:50
  Pringle, who was on my show years ago.
• 48:53
  But I kind of love it just because in my opinion, it is,
• 48:57
  you know, someone who goes out and proselytizes that you have
• 49:02
  permission to do whatever you want.
• 49:04
  Yeah, whatever you want, right, If you, so long as you're not
• 49:08
  hurting someone, let me say that.
• 49:09
  Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like in your healing journey,
• 49:13
  you have permission to try the thing, to say no to the thing,
• 49:17
  to take a break from healing, right?
• 49:20
  Like there's such a trance of self improvement.
• 49:22
  Like if you want to stop, just stop, honey.
• 49:24
  Like you can stop. You can just take a pause.
• 49:27
  And so the other thing that I really felt was so, I mean, the
• 49:33
  the tongue in cheekness of the fact that like I'm a preacher's
• 49:36
  kid, my husband was a missionary kid, like the permissionary and
• 49:40
  the little revel in me. I love that so much.
• 49:44
  That makes the story even better.
• 49:46
  But I love that. But I think so many times as
• 49:49
  women, we feel like that. We feel like we've got to have
• 49:52
  permission because of all the narratives and stereotypes.
• 49:56
  Especially if you've come up in a really conservative space that
• 50:00
  just manifests those things even more.
• 50:02
  So thank you for sharing that. I love that so much.
• 50:04
  And and this really goes back into as you went on this
• 50:10
  journey, it was really a time for you to discover your why,
• 50:14
  your values. And that can be really tricky to
• 50:17
  parse those out from what it was you grew up with.
• 50:20
  I was like, I can't pull out what's actually mine here and
• 50:23
  what I actually believe and value versus what I was told I
• 50:27
  was supposed to. And on this stage, in this
• 50:29
  looking glass in fishbowl was being protruded out, but wasn't
• 50:35
  necessarily what was it within me?
• 50:38
  Right. Yeah.
• 50:40
  You know, I think the biggest thing that helped me was coming
• 50:44
  into my spiritual connection with the divine feminine.
• 50:48
  You know, I think I spent all of my 20s, well, since 18 on very
• 50:54
  mad at God, very God. And you know, because I have
• 50:58
  been told my whole life, if you have sex before marriage,
• 51:00
  something bad will happen and something bad did happen.
• 51:03
  And so I'm like, wow, I'm so mad.
• 51:05
  I'm so angry. And and also I felt like I
• 51:09
  couldn't really be in the church because of this, like red
• 51:13
  scarlet H that now. Yeah, yeah.
• 51:16
  And, and it wasn't like that was how I was treated.
• 51:18
  I have to point that out. Like that was me, my
• 51:20
  internalized judgement on myself, my internalized bias.
• 51:23
  Like I don't think I actually experienced these things
• 51:27
  consciously, but like I was in such a shame spiral that I felt
• 51:31
  that way internally. And so everything revolved
• 51:33
  around that shame spiral. And so finding the divine
• 51:39
  feminine for me was so instrumental back in 2019
• 51:42
  because I had really spent a lot of time probably agnostic, never
• 51:46
  atheist, but like something bigger is out there.
• 51:49
  And yeah, I just can't wrap my head around it being like the
• 51:53
  Father had the Godhead 3, that male figure only because it and
• 52:00
  as I connected to my menstrual cycle, I'm like, yeah, I.
• 52:02
  Really can't get down with. That I just don't, it don't make
• 52:05
  sense the math and math then. And so I found that by
• 52:10
  connecting with my cycle, by connecting with the archetypes
• 52:14
  within myself of maiden, mother, wild woman, Crone throughout
• 52:18
  each phase of my menstrual cycle, and then aligning that
• 52:21
  with the divine feminine for me, it really did start to help me
• 52:28
  live my life in a way that felt more sacred.
• 52:31
  And for me, learning that that could still be a major value for
• 52:35
  me because I think I really always had this desire to like
• 52:39
  be around ritual and to be around things that were sacred
• 52:42
  and to have that connection to something bigger than myself.
• 52:45
  And yet it it got like cut off because of how I was taught that
• 52:52
  there was just one way. Yeah, you know.
• 52:55
  And so for me, it was very much connecting to the divine,
• 52:57
  connecting to the divine within me, which mushrooms help me see,
• 53:02
  and connecting with the idea that there is this greater
• 53:05
  creatrix life force energy out there that I am a divine
• 53:09
  embodiment of here on earth. Yeah.
• 53:11
  And so that certainly helped me understand, you know, how I
• 53:14
  wanted to live my life and how I want my life to look.
• 53:17
  And as someone who was highly successful and overachiever,
• 53:21
  addicted to hustling, I was very much in my wounded masculine
• 53:24
  energy. The whole world is in a wounded
• 53:26
  masculine energy phase in this capitalistic materialist
• 53:29
  society. And so a big part of my healing
• 53:33
  had to come from me getting more connected to the divine
• 53:38
  feminine, even when I was beginning as a menstrual cycle
• 53:41
  coach. I joke about this, I'm about to
• 53:43
  do a podcast episode for my show where I talk about how I
• 53:45
  masculine to my menstrual cycle and it did not work like that.
• 53:50
  Like the bio hackers who want to like cycle sync to do XY and ZI
• 53:54
  really see that as a very masculine approach to your
• 53:56
  menstrual cycle. And like, Goddess bless you.
• 53:59
  Like, yes, maybe it'll work for you.
• 54:00
  It did not work for me. I just got more burnt out.
• 54:03
  So I had to connect to the idea of flow, of slowness.
• 54:10
  And when I finally understood what that could feel like in the
• 54:14
  body, I think that's when I finally understood how I wanted
• 54:18
  to live my life, how I wanted my day-to-day life to look.
• 54:22
  And yeah, I think my values just really started to back that up
• 54:27
  thanks to the embodiment work and thanks to that connection.
• 54:31
  Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that.
• 54:32
  I think you get on such an important piece and I think I
• 54:35
  know we talk about it all the time, but going back to 2020, it
• 54:38
  just really forced us inside ourselves and to really take a
• 54:41
  retrospective look at things. And I, I did the same thing.
• 54:45
  And our daughters did we have three grown daughters.
• 54:47
  We all did on our own, in our own way, really took a step back
• 54:51
  from these spaces we had been inhabiting and look at things.
• 54:57
  And I, it was finally, you know, I've always, I went from a
• 55:01
  Mormon space to an evangelical space.
• 55:04
  And the evangelical space felt more free than the Mormon space.
• 55:07
  But over time, I realized it was a lot of the same narratives and
• 55:11
  a lot of the same messaging and, and all these different kinds of
• 55:14
  things. And I kind of got to this
• 55:15
  breaking point in 2020. I'm like, I have been my whole
• 55:19
  life trying to make myself fit this square, you know, brown pig
• 55:25
  into this square box or vice versa.
• 55:27
  I'm not sure I'm saying that right.
• 55:28
  And I've always found ways to explain away the parts that
• 55:32
  weren't sitting right with me. And I wasn't listening to my
• 55:35
  inner knowing and I wasn't trusting my inner wisdom because
• 55:39
  this other patriarchal approach had told me that wasn't the
• 55:42
  right way and that was wrong. And that was being tempted by
• 55:45
  the devil and all these other things instead of just.
• 55:49
  And I finally had to sit with myself.
• 55:51
  I'm like this way I've been going about it has not worked.
• 55:55
  I am in this entangled anxiety fit of a mess at 50 years old
• 56:02
  that nobody on the outside knew about.
• 56:03
  I looked like I had all things going great gangbusters, but
• 56:07
  within me and my family knew my family's sons.
• 56:12
  And I finally just had to take it all apart and kind of burn it
• 56:15
  all down. And within that sound, it's like
• 56:18
  has women are we're 50% of the population here.
• 56:23
  There's this this all patriarchal way of existing
• 56:27
  doesn't make sense. It just doesn't add up.
• 56:31
  And that can be a very revealing, very freeing when you
• 56:35
  finally get in touch with what it is you're connecting with
• 56:39
  versus what you've been told and be able to parse out the
• 56:42
  difference and remove the fear because it's so fear based to
• 56:46
  keep you in line on this one trajectory.
• 56:50
  And the allowance for exploration and really finding
• 56:53
  your connection to what that what God feels like to you, what
• 56:57
  the divine feels like to you doesn't feel like a place you
• 57:00
  can go. But when you finally give
• 57:02
  yourself a going back to permission area, the permission
• 57:05
  to do that and explore and find your connection, it really does
• 57:09
  OfferUp. It really opens up that ability
• 57:11
  to show up authentically without apology anymore.
• 57:15
  I'm like, this is where I've landed at my body finally feels
• 57:18
  in alignment with how I'm proceeding and how I'm doing.
• 57:20
  I'm finally not getting these nudges that I'm pushing back.
• 57:24
  And and because I was told at such a young age that my body
• 57:28
  wasn't trustworthy and it would lead me astray and not to
• 57:31
  listen, you know, to that and be dragged down by that.
• 57:34
  And you're, I know you understand that very well when
• 57:37
  you finally get to a place like no, this body was given to me
• 57:41
  and created by a divine with all these tools equipped in a way to
• 57:46
  take care of me, for me to listen to, for me to trust and
• 57:50
  follow and see as the guy that it is a. 100% and I love that.
• 57:56
  I think you just man, hit the nail on the head because I think
• 58:00
  that so much of the work that I do with myself and such a key
• 58:04
  part of my values with clients is helping women remember.
• 58:08
  Remember what you already know. And yet society has made you
• 58:12
  forget because like you said, if the if God gave us this body,
• 58:18
  like, why are we not supposed to trust it like that is, Yeah.
• 58:22
  I mean, the nationalized Western medical model will tell you not
• 58:25
  to trust your body. Church will tell you do not
• 58:27
  trust it. It is of the flesh.
• 58:30
  And so, yeah, wow, Thank you for pointing that part out.
• 58:32
  Because yes, remembering that you can trust yourself like you
• 58:37
  have the sovereign right to make your own choices for your own
• 58:41
  self and your body will show you the way when you can learn to
• 58:44
  understand the language that she is speaking to you, which is
• 58:47
  hard in this world. Because we get tired of it.
• 58:52
  Yes. Yeah.
• 58:53
  And we have to, you know, and we have to remove the fear.
• 58:56
  And I've really learned, too. I think that you have too if
• 58:58
  like anything based in fear is not good for me, that's not a
• 59:04
  good thing if it's based in fear and not in love and trust.
• 59:08
  Not that things won't be hard, but if, if, if fear is the the
• 59:12
  mechanism that's being used to keep me in line or keep me in a
• 59:17
  place that's not from God, no, that it's just not from.
• 59:21
  And that's not divine, that's not loving, that's not welcoming
• 59:25
  kind. And that's not I was created and
• 59:27
  that's not what I was created for.
• 59:29
  So, yeah, I think that's such an important part and it's an
• 59:31
  important part of that. Showing up, unapologetic,
• 59:35
  embracing your values, knowing what your why is what you were
• 59:38
  created to be and how you were created to show up in the world
• 59:41
  for yourself and for others. And that goes nicely into living
• 59:45
  out of your own expectations versus others.
• 59:48
  Your your, your journey is the whole journey of that.
• 59:51
  And we've been, we've really been hitting on that all along.
• 59:54
  But but to kind of talk bring that home for me as we as we hit
• 59:59
  this talking point. Yeah, You know, I think that,
• 1:00:03
  yeah. I I I really do think that
• 1:00:09
  whatever happened in 2022 on a cellular level, when I started
• 1:00:12
  to eat these mushrooms really just catapulted me into a place
• 1:00:18
  where I started to see what I really wanted in life and didn't
• 1:00:27
  feel as afraid to grab it. And so the expectation was
• 1:00:34
  probably for me to stay in TVI was making six figures.
• 1:00:36
  Why would I have left? That's psycho.
• 1:00:39
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. To go work for yourself in the
• 1:00:41
  most taboo of ways. So fortunately, you know, I have
• 1:00:46
  an amazing husband who supports me through and through and
• 1:00:50
  through. And he's also an entrepreneur,
• 1:00:52
  so he gets a lot of the stress. But like, making a life that
• 1:00:56
  felt like success to me, you know, looked different after
• 1:01:00
  2022, right? Like, I had made the money.
• 1:01:02
  I had gotten to the job. I had done all the things I'd
• 1:01:05
  wanted to do since I was in fifth grade.
• 1:01:07
  And then I got to look again at what success felt like.
• 1:01:11
  And for me now, the most successful I ever feel and the
• 1:01:16
  expectations that I now like allow that success to become is
• 1:01:19
  like when I get to sit outside on my porch, listen to all of my
• 1:01:22
  birds, have morning coffee, be so slow, hang out with my dog
• 1:01:27
  and like go for a walk. When I want to go for a walk,
• 1:01:30
  go, you know, work with clients at a time when I feel like I
• 1:01:32
  want to work with clients, talk to you on a podcast.
• 1:01:34
  When it's like that is success. It doesn't look like for me
• 1:01:39
  anymore. This like certain monetary value
• 1:01:41
  or this certain title. And that was not me 10 years
• 1:01:45
  ago. That was not me probably 7 years
• 1:01:48
  ago, right? Yeah.
• 1:01:50
  But I think what's happened is as I've peeled back these layers
• 1:01:55
  and layers of societal programming and expectations of
• 1:01:59
  what I should do and like, family expectations and like, Oh
• 1:02:05
  my gosh, what is the word I'm looking for?
• 1:02:07
  Like your potential? Yeah.
• 1:02:11
  Oh, yes, yes. When you begin to peel back that
• 1:02:14
  and like understand that just being right here, just having
• 1:02:19
  the time to have like a breath and like a coffee with a friend
• 1:02:23
  and like that can become such a sweet, beautiful spot that now
• 1:02:31
  this is what success looks like or this is what, you know, an
• 1:02:34
  expectation of life can look like.
• 1:02:36
  And my husband and I have been talking about, you know, what do
• 1:02:38
  we want the three-year plan to look like?
• 1:02:39
  What do we want the five year plan to look like?
• 1:02:41
  And you know, we're child free by choice.
• 1:02:43
  Another expectation that. Yeah.
• 1:02:46
  This vastly against society. Yeah.
• 1:02:49
  You know, So I guess what I'm saying is the mushrooms allowed
• 1:02:52
  me to come to this place where I understood and continue to learn
• 1:02:57
  because I'm still on the path of understanding what it is that I
• 1:03:00
  truly want, what I truly feel is for me.
• 1:03:04
  And so now I'm able to make those new decisions and live
• 1:03:08
  from that place, live from that area of expectation.
• 1:03:13
  Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And this is this is kind of tied
• 1:03:17
  into that. Talk to me about how you brought
• 1:03:19
  all of this together into what you offer women now because you
• 1:03:22
  have these different pieces. You went from a cycle coach, but
• 1:03:25
  also realizing how much that. The mushroom piece, micro dosing
• 1:03:31
  piece could help as well. Talk to me about that kind of
• 1:03:34
  bringing of this all together. Yeah.
• 1:03:36
  So like like you mentioned, I started off as a menstrual cycle
• 1:03:39
  coach and then I started to see deep layers of trauma be held in
• 1:03:44
  the wombs of the people that I was working with.
• 1:03:47
  And so I knew that I needed some way to get to that.
• 1:03:50
  It was my own story. It was the story of the women
• 1:03:52
  that were coming to me. And so I took additional
• 1:03:55
  trainings, trauma informed trainings around somatic
• 1:03:58
  therapy, and then again layered in my trainings with
• 1:04:01
  psychedelics to finally manifest what it is that I do now with
• 1:04:06
  work, which is helping women reconnect to their body through
• 1:04:12
  somatics, somatic breath work specifically, and psychedelics.
• 1:04:17
  So it's very much morphed. You know, I used to be very
• 1:04:20
  psychedelic first, psychedelic forward.
• 1:04:24
  And now what I've realized is nervous system regulation is
• 1:04:27
  absolutely the first thing that I work with people on.
• 1:04:30
  And then we let them eat some mushrooms in a couple weeks if
• 1:04:33
  they want to. Because I really think that you
• 1:04:38
  can have massive changes within your life.
• 1:04:40
  You can see massive changes within your connection to your
• 1:04:42
  body through somatics, through breath work, through intentional
• 1:04:45
  cyclical living, even if you do not have a cycle, and through
• 1:04:49
  connecting to your body. And then mushrooms really do
• 1:04:53
  come in as this beautiful extra layer.
• 1:04:57
  It's like the glitter on top to say like, all right now we're
• 1:05:00
  going to rocket you into the next phase.
• 1:05:03
  So that's what I what I do to help the women that I work with.
• 1:05:07
  I work in Group and I also work with individuals.
• 1:05:12
  And so that's sort of how they, the ecosystem, the ecology of my
• 1:05:15
  offerings is that they all pair so beautifully together.
• 1:05:19
  And there's a whole, I talked about it on my podcast, which
• 1:05:22
  folks can check out, you know, to hear all of that.
• 1:05:24
  But I do like to look at it as like an ecology.
• 1:05:26
  How are these things in relationship to each other?
• 1:05:31
  The cycle, the womb, the breath, somatics, so on and so forth.
• 1:05:37
  Yeah, and I brought that up with the expectations piece we were
• 1:05:40
  talking about because the way if people look at it on the
• 1:05:43
  surface, it might not be the except expected combinations for
• 1:05:47
  people to see. So I wanted to give you a moment
• 1:05:49
  to really bring that all together for people and
• 1:05:51
  understand why how it is you got there and why it is you offer it
• 1:05:55
  in that way. So thank you so much for that.
• 1:05:56
  That was such a great explanation.
• 1:05:57
  I love the ecological piece too. That really brought it together
• 1:06:01
  for me as I, as I've been looking at your stuff the last
• 1:06:04
  few weeks, accepting the layered aspects of ourselves.
• 1:06:08
  You have displayed that really beautifully and layers have come
• 1:06:11
  up multiple times in our conversation, which is, I mean,
• 1:06:14
  as I was looking for yourself, I knew you were going to be so
• 1:06:16
  naturally aligned because you understand that piece so
• 1:06:19
  intuitively. What do you tell?
• 1:06:23
  You've obviously been on your own journey of accepting these
• 1:06:25
  layers. So how do you, when you're
• 1:06:28
  helping others, how do you introduce that concept to them?
• 1:06:32
  Because that for people that don't haven't talked about it or
• 1:06:36
  thought about it in that way before and it's you kind of have
• 1:06:41
  to find a bridge or a place to approach them with because it
• 1:06:44
  can feel very overwhelming if it's not language or a journey
• 1:06:48
  you've already been on for a little bit.
• 1:06:51
  You know, I think what's helpful is maybe not necessarily using
• 1:06:54
  the term layers, but using the term parts.
• 1:06:58
  And you know, I'm not someone who is, I've taken a training
• 1:07:02
  around parts work, but not a parts work, you know, therapist
• 1:07:06
  or anything. But anyone can understand this,
• 1:07:08
  this idea, right? Because there's that colloquial
• 1:07:11
  phrase like, well, a part of me kind of wants to go to the party
• 1:07:13
  and a part of me really just wants to stay home.
• 1:07:15
  Yes, If you understand that, you understand that, like, duality
• 1:07:19
  of like wanting a thing and also wanting a different thing, then
• 1:07:21
  this is a layer, right? So a part of me feels like, you
• 1:07:27
  know, we'll just keep with this analogy.
• 1:07:29
  A part of me feels like I really want to go to the party, OK?
• 1:07:31
  And a part of me feels like I don't really want to see all
• 1:07:34
  these people. What could that be showing me?
• 1:07:37
  And especially if these then become habits, that's another
• 1:07:40
  thing that you can look at. What part of you is habitual?
• 1:07:43
  So it's like a whole. It's so fascinatingly layered.
• 1:07:47
  So for me, what I'm currently going through and what I'm
• 1:07:51
  currently working on is the layers of myself that are very
• 1:07:55
  deeply rooted in functional freeze.
• 1:07:58
  And I picked up on that and noticed that was a layer because
• 1:08:03
  of these little parts of me that continued to want to like stay
• 1:08:05
  at home bedrock doom scroll, even though I know logically and
• 1:08:10
  cognitively that's not good for me.
• 1:08:13
  But that was a deep layer that was like a part of me stuck in
• 1:08:17
  that situation. So when I work with people and
• 1:08:21
  start to help them understand, it's either, all right, let's
• 1:08:24
  talk about what parts of you came up during this argument,
• 1:08:27
  like you part of you really wanted to speak up or a part of
• 1:08:31
  you wanted to shut down. The other thing that you can
• 1:08:35
  look at is just allowing them to have the analogy of the onion.
• 1:08:39
  Like that's very much something I use with people who are doing
• 1:08:43
  psychedelic work. Micro dosing will start to help
• 1:08:47
  you unpeel layer by layer all of the different little parts of
• 1:08:51
  your cells. Here is the part of me that is,
• 1:08:55
  you know, scared to speak for myself.
• 1:08:57
  Here's the part of me that, you know, was a little wounded by
• 1:09:00
  this past relationship and so on and so forth.
• 1:09:02
  Micro dosing is really good at helping you peel back those
• 1:09:06
  things and then notice I like laying all the layers out.
• 1:09:10
  This is why I am the way I am. So for me, oh, I was so addicted
• 1:09:14
  to hustling because deeply inside of the core of this onion
• 1:09:18
  is this wound around being afraid of not of not being
• 1:09:23
  lovable, right? And so that's I guess, I guess I
• 1:09:27
  share my own experience of learning through my layers to
• 1:09:30
  help them kind of get the premise of what layers are and
• 1:09:34
  then helping them dig through their own layers to see, oh,
• 1:09:39
  what this, what could this be showing?
• 1:09:41
  Because it's very subjective, obviously.
• 1:09:43
  And it's really only in hindsight that we get these aha
• 1:09:47
  moments a lot of the time. However, I will say that one of
• 1:09:50
  the things I love about psychedelics is that you have
• 1:09:54
  aha moments in real time. Like it is such an interesting,
• 1:09:58
  I say, if you have you seen The Hunger Games, like how you know
• 1:10:02
  they've got like the people in the bubble out there, They're
• 1:10:04
  like the game makers. I see micro dosing is like
• 1:10:07
  making you the game maker where you can like look down in any
• 1:10:11
  situation with like this ability to presence yourself and pause.
• 1:10:15
  Like, OK, I could choose your own adventure.
• 1:10:17
  I could react this way and it'll probably go this way, this way,
• 1:10:20
  this way, this way, this way, or I could do this and this, this,
• 1:10:23
  this, this, this. So like I share that to your ask
• 1:10:28
  about like how do I help people understand the layers to explain
• 1:10:33
  that psychedelics are really great at helping you unpack
• 1:10:36
  these little layers and then also notice in real time that
• 1:10:41
  you're doing that work. It's just such a funny way.
• 1:10:44
  It's like you'll just be you'll just zoom out so fast.
• 1:10:48
  Like, Oh my gosh, this is a layer.
• 1:10:49
  This is my part that is upset about this.
• 1:10:51
  And all this is connected to my root wound.
• 1:10:54
  So yeah, that might not make that much sense, but.
• 1:10:58
  No, I see what you're seeing and it also allows you to see the
• 1:11:00
  choices that you have available to you.
• 1:11:02
  I think so many times we feel like we don't have a choice.
• 1:11:05
  We're stuck in this situation and it allows us to see it from
• 1:11:09
  a place of having choices. And also for me, I always talk
• 1:11:12
  to people about get curious rather than judgmental, perfect
• 1:11:17
  curious about why it is responding that way and what
• 1:11:20
  that's rooted in and why instead of beating yourself up for
• 1:11:24
  making that decision when you were 18 years old, what was
• 1:11:27
  going on around you that played into that?
• 1:11:30
  What part of that? And what do you still carry with
• 1:11:32
  you now that is connected to that?
• 1:11:35
  And in my a couple things that you said that piece and my
• 1:11:41
  therapist told me a few years ago, and you hit on this a
• 1:11:42
  little while ago that we are when we go on, I went to therapy
• 1:11:47
  and I'm like, I'm going to do this for six months and I'm
• 1:11:49
  going to be better. And then I'm just going to move
• 1:11:51
  on with my life. Five years later, here we are.
• 1:11:55
  I've moved to different state, had to get a new therapist, But
• 1:11:58
  but what I learned is like, this is like a journey.
• 1:12:01
  It's a continuation. And I'm going to pull back one
• 1:12:03
  layer and going to heal. I'm going to learn something new
• 1:12:06
  about myself. I'm going to go this different
• 1:12:07
  way, but also I can take a break.
• 1:12:11
  My, my, my therapist that I had my first one who I was able to
• 1:12:16
  journey with for four years and made so much progress with, She
• 1:12:21
  was like, you're not doing anything on this vacation or
• 1:12:24
  this weekend. No journaling.
• 1:12:26
  No, you're just going to take a break.
• 1:12:28
  I want you to veg out in front of Netflix.
• 1:12:30
  I want you to go to that football, whatever it is, go on
• 1:12:33
  a walk, eat a bunch of chocolate, whatever it is you're
• 1:12:35
  going to do, you're going to give yourself a break.
• 1:12:38
  You are not going to take 10 steps back if you quit working
• 1:12:42
  on healing because if you, you've got to give yourself rest
• 1:12:46
  and a chance to regenerate and rejuvenate.
• 1:12:49
  You don't want this to become a check, you know, a item on your
• 1:12:53
  checklist because I loved a good, I love a good checklist
• 1:12:55
  where I can show everybody how much I'm doing and how great I
• 1:12:59
  am and how much I'm accomplishing.
• 1:13:01
  And so really had to like, release that from myself and
• 1:13:06
  take apart that narrative and what it was feeding.
• 1:13:10
  And and that was such a revelation to me.
• 1:13:13
  But also, yeah, just. And then bringing in that
• 1:13:15
  curiosity and pulling things back and seeing that you have
• 1:13:19
  choices and understanding the why behind where you came from
• 1:13:23
  and what informed that. And yes, of course, I won't make
• 1:13:26
  that decision again. It was terrible.
• 1:13:28
  But also not going to, you know, live in this shame spiral and
• 1:13:31
  beat myself up for it either because I understand how I got
• 1:13:33
  there. So yeah, thank you for all that.
• 1:13:35
  So good. All right, in living out feel,
• 1:13:38
  finding empowerment, embracing layers, which is what your
• 1:13:42
  journey is such a great example of such a story of.
• 1:13:45
  Talk to me about how that's impacted your relationship with
• 1:13:48
  yourself as well as your relationship with other people.
• 1:13:53
  I see finding empowerment, embracing layers as self
• 1:13:59
  intimacy, honestly, like you know, I know myself so well now
• 1:14:08
  that you had mentioned earlier coming from a place of fear,
• 1:14:13
  like when I and this happens as an entrepreneur, let's say you
• 1:14:18
  think you need to hire a coach or you need to invest in this
• 1:14:21
  new thing. I now can pinpoint within my
• 1:14:23
  body pretty quickly, is this fear?
• 1:14:26
  Is this a fear response? Is this excitement?
• 1:14:28
  Is this a good excitement? Or is this a, is it a yes or a
• 1:14:31
  no? So that I think has been the
• 1:14:34
  most impactful day-to-day thing that has come from me doing this
• 1:14:38
  work is being able to very quickly within my body, get a
• 1:14:43
  get a good reading on OK, is this fear?
• 1:14:46
  Is this love? Does this feel expansive?
• 1:14:48
  Does this feel contracting? Does this feel like something
• 1:14:51
  that I'm excited about or something I want to run from?
• 1:14:54
  So that self intimacy has been deeply impacted by the work with
• 1:15:00
  mushrooms, by the work with my cycle.
• 1:15:03
  And then as far as my relationships go, you know, I
• 1:15:06
  think that as I become even better at knowing myself, I'm
• 1:15:12
  able to show up as my fullest self and allow myself to be
• 1:15:15
  loved. And so that deeply impacts my
• 1:15:17
  relationship with my husband. It deeply impacts my ability to
• 1:15:20
  be in relationship with women as friends.
• 1:15:23
  Right. Because I didn't see my mom with
• 1:15:25
  close friends. Yeah.
• 1:15:28
  And that deeply embedded in me that women were untrustworthy.
• 1:15:34
  Yeah. And so then you throw me into
• 1:15:36
  one of the most highly competitive job out there.
• 1:15:38
  Absolutely. Oh.
• 1:15:40
  My gosh. I was really blessed, you know,
• 1:15:43
  where there were a couple of women who were pretty
• 1:15:45
  backstabby, but for the most part I felt like it was OK,
• 1:15:51
  right? I didn't feel like it was that
• 1:15:52
  mean world mentality and maybe I was oblivious to it.
• 1:15:57
  I remember like one place that it was very much mean girl.
• 1:15:59
  But I really do just think that the more I know myself, the more
• 1:16:05
  I see my relationship with myself grow, the relationship
• 1:16:09
  with my body grow, the relationship with my language of
• 1:16:13
  my body, the more I'm able to, like I said, radiate out,
• 1:16:17
  understand what I will and will not accept.
• 1:16:20
  Yeah. And that's deeply affected
• 1:16:22
  relationships because when I got sober, I had to cut a lot of
• 1:16:25
  people off. Yeah.
• 1:16:27
  No longer am available for your small talk.
• 1:16:29
  I'm no longer available for, you know, people who believe certain
• 1:16:32
  things. And I think I wouldn't have been
• 1:16:35
  here if they if I hadn't been doing that work of.
• 1:16:37
  Feel. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:16:40
  Thank you for that. That's such a good example.
• 1:16:41
  And you and I talked about this before we got on this, showing
• 1:16:45
  up unapologetically and supporting other women in doing
• 1:16:48
  so. We've got to get rid of this
• 1:16:50
  idea that was put out there. It's been out there for
• 1:16:53
  thousands of years. We've seen it play out in
• 1:16:56
  different ways over and over again.
• 1:16:58
  That if you're going to make it in the world as a woman, you got
• 1:17:00
  to knock every other woman down on the way.
• 1:17:02
  That's just playing into the patriarchy's hand.
• 1:17:04
  That's just playing into old stigmas, old narratives hands.
• 1:17:08
  There's room for all of us. There's multiple ways for us to
• 1:17:11
  all show up. Different people are going to
• 1:17:13
  connect with us in different ways and, and it's important for
• 1:17:17
  all of us to lift each other up and let each other know we exist
• 1:17:21
  so those people that need to find us can find us.
• 1:17:24
  And maybe they only hear about us or see us because we're
• 1:17:27
  supporting each other in the process.
• 1:17:29
  But they stopped this idea of being threatened by and
• 1:17:32
  celebrated. Because when you succeed, I
• 1:17:35
  succeed, it opens another door. It grows another opportunity.
• 1:17:39
  And we have to start embodying and embracing that piece rather.
• 1:17:44
  And so if we're going to really make meaningful shifts for women
• 1:17:49
  in the world when it comes to our well-being, our health, our
• 1:17:52
  safety, continue to push these narratives, researching real
• 1:17:56
  science, real information about what's best and healthy for us
• 1:18:01
  and not, you know, not believing this idea.
• 1:18:03
  That's the way it's always been done.
• 1:18:05
  So that's the way we're going to do it.
• 1:18:07
  And when people push back against it, get curious about
• 1:18:11
  that, why are they pushing back? What are they afraid of?
• 1:18:14
  Why do they feel threatened? I mean, there's room and for all
• 1:18:18
  of us, it shouldn't be a threat or a problem to anybody who's
• 1:18:21
  living authentically and well and healthy.
• 1:18:24
  And so, but it's that as having these conversations and I'm
• 1:18:28
  pointing those things down. It's so interesting to me.
• 1:18:30
  You brought up here, here is your mom as a pastor's wife.
• 1:18:34
  But I know I've known a lot of pastors wives over the years.
• 1:18:36
  That's a very lonely place to reside because of the
• 1:18:41
  expectations, because people treat you as this other and and
• 1:18:48
  you're on this pedestal, but also they don't know how to
• 1:18:51
  connect with you. But also they're afraid to let
• 1:18:53
  you know who they really are because you're this other and
• 1:18:58
  you're just a human trying that needs community and people too.
• 1:19:01
  I mean, so it's such an interesting dynamic in a space
• 1:19:05
  of place that is supposed to be about Jesus and community and
• 1:19:10
  love and inclusion. It can be such an isolating
• 1:19:14
  space for so many women. Yeah, for sure.
• 1:19:18
  Yeah. So anyway, thank you for all of
• 1:19:19
  that and I'm glad we got to bring that up because I wanted
• 1:19:23
  to touch on that, that piece and that importance of us showing up
• 1:19:26
  for each other, for ourselves and each other in that way.
• 1:19:31
  Coming down to the rapid fire here at the end, name 5
• 1:19:34
  activities that nourish you. Singing with my cycle, bird
• 1:19:41
  washing, painting, self pleasure and I'll say obviously eating
• 1:19:49
  mushrooms. Nice, I'd love that you brought
• 1:19:51
  those things up and you did it with a smile and, and, and when
• 1:19:55
  you think back to yourself 10 to 15 years ago, it must give you
• 1:19:59
  such great joy to know that you're in a space where you can
• 1:20:03
  do that authentically now and and feel safe in doing so.
• 1:20:06
  I mean, that's I always loved those things.
• 1:20:08
  You went out there like man, myself 10 or 15 years ago, could
• 1:20:12
  see me now. It's always such a fun kind of
• 1:20:15
  spaces. Sit in for a minute and reflect
• 1:20:17
  on on your journey. 5 words on how you want to feel the next
• 1:20:21
  six months. Oh, the next six months, bless
• 1:20:25
  us. Free.
• 1:20:28
  I want to feel free. I want, I want to feel mystical.
• 1:20:34
  I want to feel empowered. I want to feel light and I want
• 1:20:42
  to feel grounded at the same time.
• 1:20:46
  Yeah, yeah, I love that. All right.
• 1:20:48
  Tell people how they can find you, follow you, learn more from
• 1:20:52
  you. This is also going to be on our
• 1:20:54
  website on embracinglayers.com, on our resources page.
• 1:20:58
  It'll be there forever once the episode drops.
• 1:21:00
  But share with people right now where they can find Leslie
• 1:21:03
  Draffen or like, OK, this connected with me.
• 1:21:05
  I want to find this right now. Perfect Well, I am on social
• 1:21:09
  medias at Leslie Draffen. I have a podcast, The light
• 1:21:13
  within. But if you're listening and you
• 1:21:15
  would like to dip your toe into the ecology of my offerings,
• 1:21:18
  then the best place to start is with my shift method.
• 1:21:21
  It is a 9 minute somatic practice I created last year
• 1:21:24
  when I was in the depths of grief to help you get out of
• 1:21:28
  your head and into your body. No meditation required.
• 1:21:32
  So I have a super simple e-book that explains it all.
• 1:21:35
  It talks about the science behind shift, why it works with
• 1:21:38
  your nervous system. It's a practice that includes
• 1:21:41
  journaling, breath work and movement.
• 1:21:43
  And the best part about the Shift Method e-book is there are
• 1:21:46
  free super juicy playlists that are perfectly timed to help you
• 1:21:50
  use Shift in your everyday life. So I'd love to give you a link
• 1:21:53
  to put that in the show notes. Yeah, within Shift you'll also
• 1:21:56
  find a link to my micro dosing work.
• 1:21:59
  You can book a call through that same little e-book and it gets
• 1:22:02
  you on my e-mail list. Because in the world that we
• 1:22:04
  live in, who can say what's going to happen?
• 1:22:08
  But e-mail will still be there. Don't.
• 1:22:11
  Know what other socials are going to be there?
• 1:22:14
  Pretty sure emails are going to be there.
• 1:22:16
  I love it. Yeah.
• 1:22:17
  No kidding. What a time.
• 1:22:18
  Oh, my goodness. Well, Leslie, thank you so much
• 1:22:20
  for this time today. I've loved this conversation.
• 1:22:23
  I look forward to future conversations with you.
• 1:22:26
  I think we have more of those coming.
• 1:22:27
  And I've just loved this time today to connect with you and
• 1:22:30
  share your voice with our audience, your story.
• 1:22:33
  Listeners, take a look and think about if anything you heard
• 1:22:37
  today, it was like, oh, I'm not supposed to do that.
• 1:22:41
  Unpack that, get and unpack that and make sure that the
• 1:22:46
  information that you're using to guide that thought is actually
• 1:22:50
  based in truth. Is it based or is it based in
• 1:22:53
  stigma? And that's like I said earlier,
• 1:22:55
  we've all got to find their way and the things that work for us.
• 1:22:58
  And there's going to be different modalities, but I
• 1:23:01
  think there's a lot of modalities out there that are
• 1:23:03
  available on. This is one of them that we've
• 1:23:05
  talked about today with the micro that can be really helpful
• 1:23:09
  to people if we can get around the stigmas that exist and work
• 1:23:13
  with qualified people who know what they're doing, doing this
• 1:23:17
  in a healthy way. Leslie is one of those people.
• 1:23:20
  But unpack that and, and, and dive into a little bit more of
• 1:23:24
  what's underlying that stigma, that fear, what needs to be
• 1:23:28
  unpacked. Get curious.
• 1:23:30
  And because we want you all to be well and we want you to find
• 1:23:33
  tools and resources that are going to enable you to do that,
• 1:23:36
  to show up as your most authentic, healthy self
• 1:23:39
  unapologetically in all the spaces you inhabit.
• 1:23:43
  So hopefully this this will give you a little nudge and
• 1:23:45
  inspiration to do that. I encourage you if you're doing
• 1:23:48
  that already. But thank you so much for being
• 1:23:50
  with us today. Thank you, Leslie, for your
• 1:23:52
  time. I've loved this conversation.
• 1:23:54
  So have I. Thanks for having me.
• 1:23:56
  You bet. All right, everybody, take care.
• 1:23:58
  Have a great week. Check out the resources page and
• 1:24:01
  check out Leslie's podcast. I got a chance to listen.
• 1:24:04
  It's got some great stuff on there and all that'll be on our
• 1:24:07
  resources page and our show notes.
• 1:24:08
  But take good care and have a great week.
• 1:24:13
  Hello, Melissa Crook here. Thank you so much for joining us
• 1:24:17
  on the field podcast today. Finding empowerment, Embracing
• 1:24:21
  Layers. I hope you found today's
• 1:24:23
  framework and resources supportive and informative.
• 1:24:27
  To learn more about all that we offer here at the Embracing
• 1:24:31
  Layers network, visit embracinglayers.com.
• 1:24:35
  You can go to our contact form to schedule me as a speaker for
• 1:24:39
  your next conference, workshop or seminar.
• 1:24:43
  You can go to our book page to order our book, The Jessica
• 1:24:46
  Garrison, our wonderful and talented writer and author
• 1:24:50
  authored with my support and engage with this framework in
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  written form, with your journal or in a book club with other
• 1:24:58
  women inviting them on this journey with you.
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  You can look at our resources page for all of the helpful and
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• 1:25:12
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  We truly appreciate you so deeply.