Latest / The Menopause Disruptor Podcast / The Spiritual Alchemy of Menopause with Heather Debreceni

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The Spiritual Alchemy of Menopause with Heather Debreceni · The Menopause Disruptor Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker: I have a separate shed.
• 0:01
  Speaker: It was not part of the house.
• 0:02
  Speaker: I had no spiritual anything in our home.
• 0:05
  Speaker: Nothing.
• 0:06
  Speaker: And my spiritual self, my truth, was just in a shed on the side that was like my she shed where I could be myself.
• 0:15
  Speaker: So I did see patterns in hindsight where when someone would ask me something, I just couldn't get it out.
• 0:23
  Speaker: One of my practitioners said that she felt like I had a thousand screams trapped in my throat.
• 0:29
  Speaker: And that's the best analogy for what it felt like for me.
• 0:34
  Speaker: It was like every time I had to not be who I was and not embody my truth, there was like a scream that was just stuck in there.
• 0:46
  Mary Lee: Welcome back to the Menopause Disrupted Podcast.
• 0:49
  Mary Lee: Thank you for being here, listeners.
• 0:50
  Mary Lee: Thank you for joining me.
• 0:52
  Mary Lee: If you're new to this podcast, welcome.
• 0:55
  Mary Lee: Okay, today's guest, someone whose story challenges us to look at menopause and midlife in a completely different way.
• 1:04
  Mary Lee: Heather Debreceni is a shamanic practitioner, a soul healer, author, and a former law enforcement professional, whose own journey through chronic illness, trauma, grief, and spiritual awakening ultimately led her to a much deeper understanding of herself and of the woman she now helps.
• 1:24
  Mary Lee: Heather's story is absolutely fascinating because for years her body was speaking to her through some very serious physical symptoms.
• 1:33
  Mary Lee: And while she sought answers through the medical system, she eventually began to explore another deeper question.
• 1:39
  Mary Lee: What if the body is telling us something about the life we're living, the emotions we're carrying, and the parts of ourselves we've learned to suppress?
• 1:48
  Mary Lee: Well, for Heather, through practices like kriya yoga, meditation, shamanic soul retrieval, and eventually hypnotherapy, Heather began uncovering layers of grief, trauma, and identity that she says had been held within her body for years.
• 2:04
  Mary Lee: And what happened next was remarkable.
• 2:06
  Mary Lee: And as she began doing the inner work, she experienced a dramatic shift in her health, and perhaps even more importantly, in how she understood her life.
• 2:13
  Mary Lee: One idea Heather and I explore in today's conversation is that menopause may be far more than biological transitions.
• 2:19
  Mary Lee: It can be a kind of great reveal, that time when the identities we've carried, the emotions we've suppressed, and the truths we've avoided become much harder to ignore.
• 2:28
  Mary Lee: But there's an important question here.
• 2:30
  Mary Lee: What happens when a woman finally hears the truth of her own voice after decades of suppressing it?
• 2:35
  Mary Lee: And that's why perhaps menopause can feel so disruptive.
• 2:39
  Mary Lee: We're not falling apart.
• 2:41
  Mary Lee: We are being invited to become something different.
• 2:43
  Mary Lee: Heather will share her book, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Housewife, a memoir about trauma, spiritual awakening, and learning to live a more sacred life.
• 2:53
  Mary Lee: I'm so excited for you to listen to this conversation.
• 2:56
  Mary Lee: Let's dive in right away.
• 2:58
  Mary Lee: Please join me in welcoming Heather to the Menopause Disruptor Podcast.
• 3:03
  Mary Lee: Welcome, Heather Deborah Seni to the Menopause Disruptor Podcast.
• 3:07
  Mary Lee: So happy to have you on the show today.
• 3:10
  Speaker: So happy to be here.
• 3:11
  Mary Lee: This is going to be an exciting conversation.
• 3:13
  Mary Lee: It's exactly in line where I like to land the intersection between the science and the spiritual aspects of our hormone shift and what is happening to women in their midlife as they see beyond just the psychological aspects and start to explore more of the emotional spiritual aspects.
• 3:30
  Mary Lee: So this is going to be a conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time.
• 3:34
  Mary Lee: Let's first off start, Heather, with you, your story, the woman behind your work.
• 3:41
  Mary Lee: What was happening in your life when you first realized that something needed to change?
• 3:48
  Speaker: A lot was happening.
• 3:49
  Speaker: My life was like a dumpster fire of medical illness meets relationship troubles.
• 3:55
  Speaker: I had retired from a career in law enforcement.
• 3:59
  Speaker: I had medically retired from being a divorce coach.
• 4:03
  Speaker: My body just shut down with all the trauma and stress of all the choices that I had made in my life, career choices and personal.
• 4:12
  Speaker: And I went into severe asthma, flares, acinophilic esophageas, which is where the synophilic cells accumulate in your esophagus.
• 4:24
  Speaker: So I was literally choking on my own stress and trauma, extreme food and environmental allergies, having anaphylaxis and cascading effects from that.
• 4:33
  Speaker: They suspected I had MCAS as well, mast cell activation syndrome, which means my whole body would just cascade with mast cells.
• 4:41
  Speaker: And it was just really, it was scary.
• 4:44
  Speaker: It was traumatizing in and of itself.
• 4:48
  Speaker: And it was a lesson in how to let go.
• 4:51
  Speaker: And all of that, and it was that portion of my life was about six years where I was just trying to survive.
• 4:59
  Speaker: That survival also impacted my relationship with my husband.
• 5:03
  Speaker: And we were not able to communicate anymore.
• 5:07
  Speaker: I was minimizing my needs because I already felt like I was too much.
• 5:11
  Speaker: And I lost myself in that whole process of, you know, everything that made me strong and independent and caring and being able to be open with people was just gone because I was just trying to be as contained as I could be because it was so much.
• 5:31
  Speaker: There were writing reports about my medical conditions because they were like, no one has this broad cascade of things.
• 5:37
  Speaker: We just they're like the the likelihood is one in a million.
• 5:40
  Speaker: It's we don't really have any data.
• 5:42
  Speaker: They couldn't figure out how to feed me, and it just took over everything.
• 5:47
  Speaker: And I got lost in all of that.
• 5:50
  Speaker: And then my husband and he was making decisions that, you know, for a relationship were not the best decisions, and we weren't communicating about it.
• 6:01
  Speaker: And so then I reached a point where I was in therapy and I was talking to my therapist and I was mad.
• 6:08
  Speaker: I was angry about being sick.
• 6:10
  Speaker: I was angry about not being able to find a solution to it.
• 6:14
  Speaker: I was angry about my relationship with my husband.
• 6:17
  Speaker: I was angry about everything in life.
• 6:19
  Speaker: And I just said, I just want to burn everything to the ground.
• 6:21
  Speaker: I'm just that mad about everything.
• 6:24
  Speaker: I don't know if I want to get divorced.
• 6:26
  Speaker: I don't know, leave my house.
• 6:27
  Speaker: I don't know what I want to do.
• 6:29
  Speaker: And I realized that in all of that, that I stopped being who I was.
• 6:35
  Speaker: And that anger and everything else, the sickness, everything took over that.
• 6:40
  Speaker: And so I started to ask myself, underneath all of this, who am I?
• 6:45
  Speaker: And the answer was is that I'm a kind, caring person and that I am okay and that I am enough and that I am strong, but not in a physical sense.
• 6:56
  Speaker: I don't have to be a warrior anymore.
• 6:58
  Speaker: I can be strong and feminine at the same time.
• 7:01
  Speaker: And throughout my whole life, I had been attracted to spirituality.
• 7:06
  Speaker: I had been, you know, studied biblical studies in college.
• 7:10
  Speaker: I studied upper and lower fundamentals of Buddhism.
• 7:13
  Speaker: I studied psychology in Buddhism, like developmental psychology.
• 7:17
  Speaker: I understood faith and the role it plays with people, but I always minimized that too.
• 7:23
  Speaker: Because I had kids to take care of and their dad didn't agree with my spirituality, which is fine, that's his choice.
• 7:31
  Speaker: But I couldn't even talk about it with my kids because I didn't want to create any tension and any disruption in their lives.
• 7:39
  Speaker: And so that was just another part of who I am that I suppressed for making everything okay for everybody else, but not me.
• 7:48
  Speaker: And so then that led me to this journey that here I am today, where this is I my whole life is now devoted to faith and service and helping others find their faith and heal from their traumas and the things that they suppress.
• 8:06
  Speaker: And that's that's where I am.
• 8:09
  Mary Lee: So looking back, Heather, do you see the patterns, the physical ailments that you were suffering, in particular certain areas of the body?
• 8:17
  Mary Lee: I'm drawn to where you said the esophageal esophageal area of the throat.
• 8:22
  Mary Lee: This is normally our throat chakra, the shuddha, of course, where we speak our truth, we allow ourselves to articulate and communicate.
• 8:31
  Mary Lee: Do you now look back and see some of those illnesses as patterns or messages, if you will, that your body was trying to communicate all along, but you kept silencing it to appease others?
• 8:45
  Speaker: Yes.
• 8:45
  Speaker: So I always thought, and I wrote about it in my book, like I thought that because I was willing to speak my mind, that that was the same as speaking my truth.
• 8:56
  Speaker: And it's not the same.
• 8:59
  Speaker: So, like I never felt like I was suppressing my opinion, but I was not expressing my truth within that opinion.
• 9:08
  Speaker: There was always still that tamping down of who Heather was behind that opinion, and it was just speaking what was socially acceptable, what was soft enough for people to not feel threatened by, right?
• 9:25
  Speaker: Right.
• 9:26
  Speaker: Feminine in the way that I presented it.
• 9:29
  Speaker: And it was just like, oh, this is just sort of this little thing that I do on the side.
• 9:33
  Speaker: I even hid my altars.
• 9:35
  Speaker: I have a separate shed.
• 9:37
  Speaker: It was not part of the house.
• 9:38
  Speaker: I had no spiritual anything in our home, nothing.
• 9:42
  Speaker: And my spiritual self, my truth, was just in a shed on the side that was like my she shed where I could be myself.
• 9:51
  Speaker: So I did see patterns in hindsight where when someone would ask me something, I just couldn't get it out.
• 9:59
  Speaker: And it was just, you know, one of my practitioners said that she felt like I had a thousand screams trapped in my throat.
• 10:06
  Speaker: And that's the best analogy for what it felt like for me.
• 10:13
  Speaker: It was like every time I had to not be who I was and not embody my truth, there was like a scream that was just stuck in there.
• 10:24
  Speaker: That was just like, you know, why can't I just be who I am?
• 10:30
  Speaker: And so yeah, there were patterns with that.
• 10:32
  Speaker: I still have trouble with my voice.
• 10:35
  Speaker: So because of the impact of the mast cells in my throat, it puts pressure on my vocal cords.
• 10:42
  Speaker: So the voice that I have now is not the voice that I had before this.
• 10:46
  Speaker: So singing sometimes is really hard for me because I have to be able to open up, you have to be able to open up your throat and let your vocal cords.
• 10:54
  Speaker: So there are still impact, there is still physical, physiological impact because of this closing off of speaking my truth and something I work on still continuously, right?
• 11:09
  Speaker: But, you know, it wasn't like it just happened overnight.
• 11:13
  Speaker: It would be like I would go to raise my voice, you know, to speak louder in a dorm when I was working as a deputy, and it would just not regulate and it would feel like a scratchy voice because I wasn't being who I was, I was being this strong, authoritative figure, and I was trying to force that out.
• 11:32
  Speaker: And it just was my throat was like, no, we're not gonna do that.
• 11:36
  Mary Lee: It's yeah, you're the persona that you had to play in that role didn't match the vibration of who you were.
• 11:43
  Mary Lee: And it was almost as if at the throat it got stuck in that vibration.
• 11:47
  Mary Lee: It was like the conflict was coming out as this distortion.
• 11:52
  Speaker: Yeah, and then like other physical manifestations that I still struggle with and I'm still working through, like we're all on this journey, right?
• 11:59
  Speaker: It's not like you magically, well, some people might magically heal one day and they don't have any other work to do.
• 12:04
  Speaker: I, however, am not that person.
• 12:06
  Speaker: So I'm still working through things, but grief, unprocessed grief.
• 12:11
  Speaker: That it's the grief of suppressing who I was, of not being able to be who I was, of the things that I saw, of the things that I had to do that weren't in alignment with who I am.
• 12:22
  Speaker: And so there's still grief in that my thought and my spiritual opinion, if you will, is that is is what is manifesting in my lungs.
• 12:32
  Speaker: That constriction of air that is caused by asthma is a manifestation of that constriction of feeling, of just allowing myself to feel whatever feelings were occurring at the time.
• 12:49
  Speaker: And that's the work that I'm doing now, is slowly dismantling and working through all of that grief that I've spent my lifetime just pushing down so I can get through it, you know, and then I think that also manifests in my joints, you know, like being stiff that comes, some of it is hormonal, right?
• 13:08
  Speaker: Like we know some of it is physiological, but some of it's not.
• 13:12
  Speaker: And so when I have a question of a topic of, you know, I've wrote a list of all the things, all the times in my life where I had to suppress my grief over any situation.
• 13:23
  Speaker: So it's a long list.
• 13:25
  Speaker: And I take each one of those and I sit with it and say, where do I feel this in my body?
• 13:30
  Speaker: How can I help myself heal from this in this moment?
• 13:34
  Speaker: How can I repair this damage that I've done to myself?
• 13:39
  Speaker: And that's the work that I'm doing right now for myself.
• 13:42
  Speaker: That's where I'm at right now.
• 13:53
  Mary Lee: And that takes a huge amount of introspective work, interoception perception work, just understanding who we are at the very fundamental level.
• 14:02
  Mary Lee: But not only that, it takes time.
• 14:05
  Mary Lee: We're so accustomed to being busy, busy, do do, being productive, busyness being masked as being accomplishing, where it's just actually masking the things that we're not dealing with, but carving out that time of peacefulness or stillness to observe internally what is happening.
• 14:26
  Mary Lee: So, what was that particular moment of the great reveal when you saw these patterns, the physical ailments, when you realized these experiences weren't just happening to you, but they were pointing to something greater?
• 14:41
  Speaker: I don't know that it was one moment.
• 14:43
  Speaker: I think it was a combination of moments.
• 14:46
  Speaker: One was that I started Kriya Yoga, and it is a deep ancient meditative practice.
• 14:54
  Speaker: And I started studying with monks, and I was just really fortunate, you know, I was guided to it.
• 15:00
  Speaker: I don't think I found it, I was guided to it.
• 15:02
  Speaker: And there's an ashram six minutes from my home.
• 15:05
  Speaker: And so I'm very fortunate that they are that close.
• 15:08
  Speaker: And I was initiated into Kriya Yoga and found a way to create stillness in my mind, and that is where we're really missing.
• 15:18
  Speaker: So I take time every day, no books, no phones, no, you know, TV, no noise, no music, nothing, not just for meditation, but just for stillness and silence.
• 15:33
  Speaker: And we don't do that.
• 15:35
  Speaker: We're told that that is lazy doing that, or that you're escaping, or any of the things that we're told by our society.
• 15:42
  Speaker: But the reality is that if I hadn't given myself the opportunity and been blessed with the gift of experiencing that stillness and silence, I wouldn't have the clarity of thought to make the connections that I made.
• 15:59
  Speaker: So Kriya was the first step in that.
• 16:03
  Speaker: And then the next step was I went and found a shamanic practitioner.
• 16:08
  Speaker: A friend had recommended doing a soul retrieval for me.
• 16:11
  Speaker: She said, I really think that you would benefit from doing soul retrieval.
• 16:14
  Speaker: And I knew about shamans from my studies, but I had never had an interaction with someone who was a shamanic practitioner.
• 16:22
  Speaker: I didn't even, they weren't even in my sphere of this is something that you do, right?
• 16:27
  Speaker: And so I made an appointment with a shamanic practitioner to do a soul retrieval.
• 16:32
  Speaker: And when we were doing the soul retrieval, she was talking about, you know, and it's hard to describe because it's a visual thing that when you're journeying, you see it and it's very real to you, but it's not something that's easy.
• 16:45
  Speaker: It's like describing a dream, right?
• 16:47
  Speaker: You kind of can get bits and pieces of it, but it's not the full picture.
• 16:50
  Speaker: But she described there being like thousands of little suckers attached to me energetically.
• 16:57
  Speaker: And she was like, it's like little octopus tentacles just sucked to you, and they're just all over your energetic field.
• 17:04
  Speaker: And it was a knowing, so it wasn't like it was a connection that she made, but that again, that clarity of thought, because I'd already been initiated in Korea, I was already practicing that that clarity of thought and just knowing was like this was a result of being in contact with thousands of victims and just that connection to energetically we exchange energy, right?
• 17:34
  Speaker: And victims, they don't know how to control their energy, and they will attach to anything that feels like it will save them, right?
• 17:42
  Speaker: So it was this moment of like, oh, I now carry all of the weight, not just of my own energy, but of these thousands of interactions that I've had with victims.
• 17:56
  Speaker: And that was the first time that I connected that this was affecting me, my physical health, because I was fatigued.
• 18:05
  Speaker: I was sick, and I had been carrying around other people's energetic trauma for most of my adult life, and I think that's true for all of us.
• 18:21
  Mary Lee: Right.
• 18:21
  Mary Lee: Well, particularly in your line of work where you were exposed to it in your career, yeah.
• 18:27
  Mary Lee: Naturally.
• 18:28
  Speaker: So it was in that that I made that connection that there is an exchange that's happening, and there it is an impact that it's having in real time on my body.
• 18:39
  Speaker: And it was like after that interaction with that particular shaman, it opened up to me like, hey, if I can be impacted by people this way, that means one, I can heal it, and two, that means I impact other people the same way.
• 19:00
  Mary Lee: Ooh.
• 19:01
  Mary Lee: Wow, what a revelation.
• 19:03
  Speaker: Right.
• 19:03
  Speaker: So then again, clarity of thought, right?
• 19:06
  Speaker: And so then that's what started me.
• 19:08
  Speaker: Like Kriya, it was the initial thing, but that interaction with that shaman and what was revealed to me in that moment is what really culminated in me taking this trip and to where I am today.
• 19:23
  Mary Lee: And just for clarity for the listeners who might not know it, Kriya as in K-R-I-Y-A, as a as in a yoga sequence.
• 19:30
  Mary Lee: Kriya means a sequence.
• 19:32
  Speaker: Like, yeah, or an action.
• 19:33
  Speaker: Yes.
• 19:34
  Mary Lee: Or an action, right?
• 19:35
  Speaker: Yes, right.
• 19:36
  Mary Lee: Yeah.
• 19:36
  Mary Lee: So the action or the yoga sequence, the action coupled with experience from the shaman with the soul retrieval was in essence the great reveal for you.
• 19:49
  Mary Lee: The aha, okay, pieces are starting to come together as though the universe was saying, Heather, you're ready.
• 19:56
  Mary Lee: You've realized what's happening, you're ready.
• 19:58
  Mary Lee: Now we're gonna line up all those things energetically, draw them into your awareness so that you can heal.
• 20:07
  Mary Lee: But do you feel also that when we discover a pain point and we lean into it and begin a transformation, it's not necessarily just for our own soul, but in fact the betterment of all souls, of the collective, conscious collective.
• 20:23
  Mary Lee: And that your work has was just beginning healing you, but your job or your purpose was to bring it to others.
• 20:32
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 20:33
  Speaker: So I did a meditation and had a mentor that I was working with at the time who was helping me develop mediumship skills.
• 20:41
  Speaker: So one of the things she said is, you know, before you meditate, you're doing these massive, amazing meditations, you're having these experiences.
• 20:49
  Speaker: Write a question down on your journal and keep this journal just for your meditations.
• 20:56
  Speaker: You write a question out and you don't meditate on the question.
• 21:00
  Speaker: You just have it there.
• 21:01
  Speaker: And then you do your meditation.
• 21:03
  Speaker: And when you're done, immediately afterwards, pick up your journal and write the answer.
• 21:09
  Speaker: Just let it free flow, write out what comes out.
• 21:12
  Speaker: And so the first question that I asked, there were a few questions that really stick out, but the first question that I asked was, What is my purpose?
• 21:20
  Speaker: And the answer, and this is everybody's question in hypnotherapy.
• 21:24
  Speaker: When I do QHHT, that's one of the number one questions, right?
• 21:27
  Speaker: Is what is my purpose?
• 21:29
  Speaker: And so I didn't know that at the time, but the answer was you're a soul healer.
• 21:34
  Speaker: And I thought, what does that even mean?
• 21:36
  Speaker: My cop brain was like, I don't even know what a soul healer is.
• 21:41
  Speaker: And it took a good two years of study.
• 21:45
  Speaker: One, I found out that it's traditionally considered a shaman, is a type of soul healer.
• 21:50
  Speaker: So I started actually working with a shamanic practitioner and going through a two year study, closely working with her to learn how to do these shamanic practices safely, ethically, and to help others heal on their journey.
• 22:05
  Speaker: But then I started to really meditate on.
• 22:08
  Speaker: What it means to heal other souls and what it meant for my particular journey in this lifetime.
• 22:16
  Speaker: And eventually at the end of the book, we're like almost done writing my book.
• 22:20
  Speaker: And then I go to a retreat for Kriya and I'm in an ashram for 21 days.
• 22:25
  Speaker: And the answer that came to me was is that I am a soul healer, but we're all soul healers.
• 22:33
  Speaker: And we're all meant to help one another.
• 22:37
  Speaker: We're all part of one another's story and journey and healing.
• 22:41
  Speaker: And it was the realization that every experience that I had in my life, every trauma, every joy, every part of it was never about me.
• 22:53
  Speaker: It was always about others.
• 22:57
  Speaker: I happened to be a beneficiary of those experiences, but it was never about me.
• 23:03
  Speaker: Even my illness was never about me.
• 23:06
  Speaker: It was about how that illness will allow me to help other people and how that experience will allow me to help other people.
• 23:14
  Speaker: And once that realization happened, then it became this isn't my story that I'm sharing.
• 23:19
  Speaker: This is me helping other people find a way to heal their story so that they can be soul healers and they can go on to help other people.
• 23:30
  Speaker: So that's how I think it's all interconnected is that we think we're like, and I equate it to being in a cave, right?
• 23:38
  Speaker: You're in a cave and you're like, it's so dark in here.
• 23:41
  Speaker: There's no other light, nothing, you know.
• 23:43
  Speaker: But the more internal work you do, you kind of clean off the cave and you realize, you know what, I'm not actually in a cave.
• 23:50
  Speaker: I'm in a room with glass walls.
• 23:53
  Speaker: And the more you clean that off, the more you can see that there's a world outside.
• 23:58
  Speaker: And then your light comes out of your cave because you're doing your work.
• 24:02
  Speaker: And then the person in the cube next to you is, oh, hey, I see there's someone else here, right?
• 24:07
  Speaker: And it's so it stacks from there.
• 24:09
  Speaker: Where it's once we start doing our own work, we become that light for other people.
• 24:13
  Speaker: And I think that that's the biggest joy for me in doing this work is seeing people really be able to step into their own light and just shine for other people to see and just be the amazing individual that they are for the greater good of everybody.
• 25:18
  Speaker: That's where it all plays in with one another.
• 25:20
  Speaker: For me, anyways.
• 25:22
  Mary Lee: So the book, what you had you mentioned that you wrote the book, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Housewife.
• 25:29
  Mary Lee: I love that.
• 25:29
  Mary Lee: The memoir about awakening, healing, trauma, and choosing to live a sacred life.
• 25:34
  Mary Lee: So beautiful.
• 25:35
  Mary Lee: You wrote this book prior to some of this full experiences with the soul retrieval.
• 25:43
  Speaker: Well, I had I had already had the soul retrieval.
• 25:46
  Mary Lee: Okay.
• 25:46
  Speaker: And I had already started on my journey.
• 25:48
  Speaker: I was about a year into my journey.
• 25:51
  Speaker: I would still consider myself going through a spiritual awakening because I was still pretty messy sometimes.
• 25:57
  Speaker: But I was very fortunate to be selected to be a group of, I think there was 20 of us that were selected to live in an ashram for 21 days and go through a program for, they call it vanasprata, which is the forest dweller ashram of life of the four ashrams of life.
• 26:17
  Speaker: So there's, you know, birth and childhood, then there's your young adult and you're going into the world, then you're a householder and a family person, and you know, and then you kind of go off into the forest to allow the younger generation to take over and you kind of step back and take a more mentoring role versus the breadwinner of the family, things like that.
• 26:37
  Speaker: And so I was selected to go into this program, and every day was a lesson in how to love without attachment, and how to be kind without expectation, and how to meditate deeply and reverently, and how to just learn how to be the being that we were all designed to be.
• 26:58
  Speaker: And it was so we were still writing, we were in Vanasprata when I went and the one of the Swamis said one of the ways that we could give back to the community was to write a book about our lives.
• 27:11
  Speaker: And so I thought, well, I'm not a writer.
• 27:16
  Speaker: For me, writing is the combination of a police report meets uh like like an instruction manual.
• 27:24
  Speaker: It really misses because I'm so I don't want my ego to take over.
• 27:28
  Speaker: I was so I don't want this to be my ego is oh, I'm such an amazing person, right?
• 27:32
  Speaker: I do all these wonderful things.
• 27:34
  Speaker: So I have a friend, Gina, who is a copywriter, and I said, you know, would you be willing to be my ghostwriter and help me write this story?
• 27:45
  Speaker: And she said yes.
• 27:46
  Speaker: And so we worked together for about nine months where we did interviews, and that's what created the book was those interviews and those conversations about my trauma.
• 27:57
  Speaker: We tried to make sure that it addressed issues without becoming sensational, and that it allowed people to really see that there is a way to take this, the trauma that we experience and learn from it, grow from it, and heal our bodies while we're doing it and heal our families while we're doing it.
• 28:18
  Speaker: And so that's where the book came in was that Vonasbratha.
• 28:22
  Speaker: And then I did another, I go to Trum a couple times a year and spent time in the ashram.
• 28:27
  Speaker: I'm very, very fortunate that I get to do that.
• 28:29
  Speaker: And I spent time in Chicago again, and that's where the last little bit of the book came from was I was really struggling with how do we end this because I'm still living the story, right?
• 28:39
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 28:40
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 28:41
  Speaker: So how do we end this with the knowledge that like this isn't the end of my story, right?
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 28:46
  Speaker: So that's where the end of it came from, was from that second retreat in the ashram in Chicago.
• 28:52
  Mary Lee: And the ashram is located right in Chicago.
• 28:55
  Speaker: It's in Juliet.
• 28:56
  Speaker: So there's there's five ashrams.
• 28:59
  Speaker: So I'm initiated into Korea Yoga International, and there's five ashrams that they have in the U.S.
• 29:05
  Speaker: And so Chicago and Juliet happens to be one of them.
• 29:08
  Speaker: We have another in Texas and Colorado, and then in Seattle, we're in the Seattle area, which is where I live.
• 29:16
  Mary Lee: I wonder if there's one on the West Coast, because I'm really interested, and I'm out here in the West Coast as well.
• 29:21
  Speaker: Wow.
• 29:21
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 29:22
  Speaker: Yes.
• 29:22
  Mary Lee: And each uh uh ashram is of these different levels you talked about, like the childhood and are they all of all five?
• 29:29
  Speaker: Like our terminology for things is there's sort of shared terminology in in Hindu and Indian culture.
• 29:36
  Speaker: And so when they speak about an ashram of life, that is your spiritual house or where you're at residing in your life.
• 29:43
  Speaker: There is also an ashram, which is a spiritual home, which is where monastics live.
• 29:49
  Mary Lee: Okay, so they decide for you.
• 29:50
  Mary Lee: You don't they know for you?
• 29:53
  Speaker: Yeah, no, no.
• 29:53
  Speaker: They they and whatever programs they have, because they have programs throughout the US in the different ashram.
• 29:58
  Speaker: So whatever programs they have, once you're initiated into this lineage of Kriya, you can go to any of the ashrams that they have worldwide and attend any of the programs there.
• 30:10
  Speaker: But the Vanas brought the specifically one, you have to be a certain age range.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: That makes sense.
• 30:16
  Speaker: To be able to go to that one because it has to do with the age of your life that you're in.
• 30:20
  Speaker: And so they teach you about that.
• 30:22
  Speaker: So they have a brahmachari one, which is people who are, you know, younger coming, I think it's 18 to 25, something like that.
• 30:28
  Speaker: But yeah, so it's a little bit different.
• 30:30
  Speaker: I've had to learn a whole new language.
• 30:33
  Speaker: Oh, yeah.
• 30:34
  Speaker: About it's not just physical yoga, it's philosophical yoga, yeah, and and things like that.
• 30:40
  Mary Lee: So yeah, and the higher states, and we could get in into that entirely.
• 30:44
  Mary Lee: But uh I want to bring it back to very interesting that it was based on age, and I've often said this that, and I'm quoting Ayurvedic practitioners, sure the listeners are gonna say, Oh, here she goes again.
• 30:57
  Mary Lee: Manipaws is the age of wisdom, but it's also the time of the great reveal.
• 31:02
  Mary Lee: But I am fascinated because now you're someone who's got lived experience and work in the practice with the ashram of understanding their philosophy that at your age, in particular time, I'm gonna dumb it down, but going into the forest to leave it to the next generation, you become a mentor.
• 31:22
  Mary Lee: And this is very akin to the grandmother hypothesis about menopause too, is that you step away the role, you're not producing, you're not reproductively active anymore.
• 31:33
  Mary Lee: You are stepping back to help society flourish by playing that role of uh a caregiver, a caretaker, mentor, watching over so that the next generation can fulfill their role.
• 31:46
  Mary Lee: Love that.
• 31:48
  Mary Lee: So it was very pivotal.
• 31:50
  Mary Lee: I'm looking at this as an outsider, saying, Well, of course, Heather, that you had to go through all these iterations of your life in the role, the persona of a cop first, and all those experiences to accumulate the trauma to so that there was not just a story to unfold, but there was something credible to understand as your soul was going through its soul journey and learning the lessons.
• 32:16
  Mary Lee: Because if we don't have those experiences, we don't gain wisdom.
• 32:21
  Mary Lee: Wisdom is that accumulation of experiences, and wisdom I feel very strongly, I'm sure you agreed too, is that it's also understanding that with our life's stories in all of its pain points, it is because there is something necessarily necessary for us to share and bring forward.
• 32:45
  Mary Lee: And that in itself is wisdom, like understanding a little bit of discernment.
• 32:49
  Mary Lee: And I love how you said it, had to let the ego sort of be quiet.
• 32:54
  Mary Lee: It's not about you, simmer down, right?
• 32:57
  Mary Lee: Yeah, and so you were literally have embodied an experience, and I wrote about it in your book, all the things that I have come to believe through my menopause training my own personal menopause experience, and looking back on all of the roles I had to play.
• 33:15
  Mary Lee: Very kind of similar in a way, military experience and a very stimulating environment, lots of trauma, lots of victim mentalities, lots of harshness, lots of okay, I gotta play this role and silence the true self.
• 33:29
  Mary Lee: And then getting into that role at a time in your own age, your own identity, where you don't really know who you are because that part of your brain, first of all, hasn't formulated.
• 33:38
  Mary Lee: So we take on all these personas that we think we have to play.
• 33:42
  Mary Lee: Well, again, I'm really curious to now learn how you said, all right, I gotta hang out, I gotta down my weapons, literally, put my pistol aside, and fully commit to this life's to this role, this purpose as I continue to learn, bring some meaning to other people's lives through your lived experience.
• 34:08
  Mary Lee: Love to learn about this.
• 34:10
  Mary Lee: Not in essence, I'm asking about how you built your business.
• 34:14
  Speaker: Yeah, how I built my business.
• 34:16
  Speaker: It started as my own personal healing, and I think that that's a big key to this.
• 34:21
  Speaker: Was I didn't start it thinking I'm gonna become an expert on how to deal with this, right?
• 34:27
  Speaker: I started it with I know that I am in pain, I know that I am suffering, and I know that I need to find a way to heal that for myself because it's no longer serving me.
• 34:42
  Speaker: That warrior mentality was just driving me into the ground, right?
• 34:47
  Speaker: I just knew I had to find a way to get away from it and to let it go.
• 34:52
  Speaker: And so my story started as just my own personal healing.
• 34:56
  Speaker: What does it mean to be a shamanic practitioner?
• 34:58
  Speaker: Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and go through that and find out what it means.
• 35:01
  Speaker: And then using those practices on myself.
• 35:04
  Speaker: I don't just do this for other people.
• 35:07
  Speaker: I see a shaman myself.
• 35:09
  Speaker: I still am on my healing journey and do that myself.
• 35:12
  Speaker: So, in that learning, I would meet people and they would talk to me.
• 35:17
  Speaker: And I say, like, I don't know why, but I think that that's divine intervention, spirituality, whatever term you want to use, they would find me.
• 35:26
  Speaker: So I wasn't searching for them.
• 35:27
  Speaker: They would find me and say, Hey, how did you do this?
• 35:31
  Speaker: And it was in trying to share those skills with other people that it wasn't just one person or two people, it was 10 people and you know, 12 people.
• 35:46
  Speaker: And it just slowly started growing from there.
• 35:49
  Speaker: And I wasn't charging anything for it.
• 35:51
  Speaker: It was just like, hey, this is what I learned how to do.
• 35:54
  Speaker: Oh, you want to do Reiki?
• 35:55
  Speaker: Sure.
• 35:55
  Speaker: Like it's you know, and by that point, I was already a Reiki master teacher, right?
• 36:00
  Speaker: Not because I was trying to build a business, but because I was just trying to heal myself and find all the different ways that could happen and what really worked for me and what didn't work for me.
• 36:11
  Speaker: And that built into then going to this, and I was a housewife at that point.
• 36:18
  Speaker: I was still sick, still trying to heal.
• 36:22
  Speaker: And then I went to the training and wrote the book, still just healing as we're writing the book, still just doing my thing, just doing whatever came to me and helping whoever came to me.
• 36:33
  Speaker: And then after we wrote the book, in the you know, sort of publicity phase of, oh hey, we wrote this book.
• 36:41
  Speaker: What does that even mean?
• 36:42
  Speaker: I found QHT, which is a type of hypnotherapy.
• 36:46
  Speaker: And I had done life between lives therapy all the way up and through this process.
• 36:51
  Speaker: I still do life between lives, and I talk about it as being like, this was an ancient form of healing that we think we invented, but it's been around for millennia, right?
• 37:02
  Speaker: This isn't anything new.
• 37:04
  Speaker: Like the techniques that we're using are, yeah, they've been around.
• 37:08
  Speaker: We think we're starting them, but we're really not.
• 37:11
  Mary Lee: I was gonna say yoga coming to North America and it's like, oh, this is new over, you know, 25, 50 years ago.
• 37:16
  Speaker: Right, right.
• 37:17
  Speaker: It's like, no, no, that's not really how it went.
• 37:19
  Speaker: So what drew me to that as a modality was that what I was witnessing from people who were going through that was that it was very similar experience to them to what I experience in Kriya.
• 37:33
  Speaker: So not everybody can sit for two hours for a meditation.
• 37:38
  Speaker: But they come and there might not even be wired to it.
• 37:42
  Speaker: There's no judgment there.
• 37:43
  Speaker: It's just like that's not how they're equipped, right?
• 37:46
  Speaker: They're not everybody is meant to do Kriya, not everybody is meant to do deep meditation andor called to do it even.
• 37:53
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 37:53
  Speaker: But what I was noticing in watching people's sessions of this hypnotherapy was that the energetic feeling of it was very similar to what I was experiencing in Kriya.
• 38:04
  Speaker: And so it was an opportunity, I thought, to find a healing modality that would allow people to ask their soul questions and get answers the same way that I was doing, writing my journal questions.
• 38:21
  Speaker: And that I could be a facilitator for that.
• 38:24
  Speaker: And that's what started me having an office because I can't, you can't do that over, you can't do that over Zoom.
• 38:32
  Speaker: It has to be done in person because you know, heaven forbid you you put someone under and we regress them and then the internet goes out.
• 38:38
  Speaker: Like that wouldn't be safe.
• 38:40
  Speaker: So uh have an office, and that that started, you know, me having an actual practice and seeing clients for reels, and not just because I was people were coming to me and asking me questions, but because they were coming to me and asking me, hey, can you do this?
• 38:57
  Speaker: And so here I am.
• 38:59
  Speaker: Now that's what I do every day is help people heal their soul connections.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 39:04
  Speaker: And it's beautiful, and it's it feels like um dharma.
• 39:08
  Speaker: It does feel like it's part of my soul's path.
• 39:10
  Speaker: And it feels um, it feels like it's a blessing every day to come in and to be able to witness them going on their healing journey.
• 39:20
  Mary Lee: Okay.
• 39:21
  Speaker: And and most of the women are in our age group.
• 39:24
  Speaker: Like they're not, you know, it doesn't mean there aren't younger women who are interested in this, but what I find is that the women who are that perimenopausal are open to this and they're like, yes, sign me up because that's right.
• 39:38
  Speaker: I need answers, right?
• 39:40
  Mary Lee: Yeah.
• 39:41
  Mary Lee: Yeah.
• 39:41
  Mary Lee: In this this concept that uh menopause, it's not something that we're simply going through.
• 39:47
  Mary Lee: It's something that's revealing to us, what we can know what can no longer be ignored.
• 39:52
  Mary Lee: Our pain points, physical, emotional, mental, the trauma coming up, estrogen that hides it all is a beautiful veil, is gone, and so we're exposed.
• 40:02
  Mary Lee: And clearly that resonates in your experience and obviously with your clients that you're seeing now because they are at that midlife stage.
• 40:09
  Mary Lee: But why do you think midlife can be such an uncomfortable period of self-confrontation before we can have this actual growth spiritually, whatever it might be?
• 40:25
  Speaker: You know, in really thinking about it, I think one, you're right, that that hormones, you know, estrogen softens everything, right?
• 40:33
  Speaker: They say in intimate moments when testosterone peaks for men, they become have a heightened sense of ever of danger of everything that's potentially around them.
• 40:43
  Speaker: And women, because of the flood of hormones, they soften and they kind of become focused on on their partner and what they're feeling in this sensation.
• 40:53
  Speaker: So I think that one is that, right?
• 40:56
  Speaker: Is that once that that hormone is gone, we're not softening and we're allowed to actually hormonally allowed to actually experience the world in that sharper focus.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 41:11
  Speaker: Right.
• 41:11
  Speaker: So there's that, and I think that it's also emotionally when you suppress, it's like a spring.
• 41:20
  Speaker: When you suppress anything and push it down, eventually it has to come back up.
• 41:27
  Speaker: It has to.
• 41:29
  Mary Lee: True.
• 41:30
  Mary Lee: Spring loaded, yeah.
• 41:32
  Speaker: Right, it's spring loaded.
• 41:33
  Speaker: So the more you push it down, the more it's gonna come up.
• 41:37
  Speaker: Pull back on the arrow.
• 41:38
  Speaker: And so I think right, pull back on the arrow.
• 41:41
  Speaker: Whatever analogy you want to use for that is that we spend our lives being told through both word and action and emotion that we have to suppress our natural inclinations to make everything better for everybody.
• 42:00
  Speaker: And that isn't to say society's bad and everything's bad.
• 42:04
  Speaker: It's just that's just what it is.
• 42:06
  Speaker: That's just the nature of being female, is that you are told in every way, including by your hormones, that you should soften everything down, suppress everything down, and make yourself palatable.
• 42:22
  Speaker: Because, you know, there's fight, flight, freeze, but there's also tend and befriend.
• 42:28
  Speaker: Yes.
• 42:29
  Speaker: Good point, right?
• 42:30
  Speaker: And so it is naturally taught to us we have to take care of our children.
• 42:35
  Speaker: So how are we gonna do that?
• 42:36
  Speaker: We're gonna be soft, we're gonna be feminine, we're gonna tend everybody, make sure nothing's wrong, nobody's a threat, we're gonna do all these things.
• 42:42
  Speaker: So we're pushing down, we're still human beings.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 42:46
  Speaker: We still are physical beings, but we're also still spiritual beings.
• 42:51
  Speaker: So all of that is being pushed down.
• 42:53
  Speaker: So I think what happens is that if a woman is very fortunate and she is born into a family or a culture that embraces that femininity and not suppresses it, sees it as a strength, nurtures it, and nurtures the spiritual aspects that come from that.
• 43:15
  Speaker: And everything in that realm of just saying, you know what, you're biologically different, but that doesn't mean less than you're not weaker, you're the same strength, it's just different focus, right?
• 43:26
  Speaker: And if they're raised in a culture where that is the norm for them, you don't see these huge physiological, psychological, spring-loaded reactions, right?
• 43:39
  Speaker: They just naturally blend from one life phase to the next, and it's just naturally part of it.
• 43:45
  Speaker: There's none of this that's happening with it, right?
• 43:47
  Speaker: And then I think what happens in our culture and in a lot of cultures is that because we've suppressed, I think the more it's suppressed, the greater the reaction at the end, right?
• 43:59
  Speaker: So, like in my case, huge physical issues, right?
• 44:04
  Speaker: Because I suppressed and suppressed and suppressed.
• 44:07
  Speaker: And I fought spiritual awakening.
• 44:11
  Speaker: I fought it tooth and nail because I was like, I know something's wrong, but that can't be it, right?
• 44:17
  Speaker: And I didn't want to give up control of my life and of my narrative, right?
• 44:23
  Speaker: I wanted to keep my ego was like, I need to, this is safe.
• 44:26
  Speaker: I know what this is, I'm safe here, I'm protected because I'm strong and I'm not weak.
• 44:31
  Speaker: And so I just held on and held on, and that's where all these physical manifestations came from, right?
• 44:38
  Speaker: But then once I said, you know what, I'm gonna lean into this.
• 44:43
  Speaker: I let go of control.
• 44:45
  Speaker: I said, I'm just gonna lean in and allow myself to be feminine.
• 44:49
  Speaker: Whatever that means.
• 44:51
  Mary Lee: Not an ego without the stigma attached to it.
• 44:55
  Speaker: Right.
• 44:55
  Speaker: Like not being attached to it, not being attached to what I look like.
• 44:58
  Speaker: So no hair, there's not a big hairdo.
• 45:01
  Speaker: It's not the clothes that I wear.
• 45:03
  Speaker: It's internally, I'm going to internally lean into all those things that I told myself were weakness.
• 45:11
  Speaker: Kindness, compassion.
• 45:13
  Speaker: And that included towards myself.
• 45:16
  Speaker: That was the biggest shift was this understanding that I don't have to forgive everybody.
• 45:21
  Speaker: I have to forgive myself.
• 45:23
  Speaker: I don't have to be compassionate with everybody.
• 45:26
  Speaker: I just have to learn how to be compassionate with myself.
• 45:29
  Speaker: And once I took that switch, it was like night and day.
• 45:34
  Speaker: Everything, my somatic system started to regulate again.
• 45:38
  Speaker: I was not having these big shifts in medical issues as I was.
• 45:42
  Speaker: Things were starting to slow down.
• 45:44
  Speaker: And it was quick.
• 45:45
  Speaker: Within three months, my numbers started to normalize.
• 45:49
  Speaker: I went from, hey, we think you might die, to like, hey, we don't know what you're doing, but keep doing that.
• 45:54
  Speaker: Right.
• 45:55
  Speaker: And medical science was like, we don't know why, what's different.
• 45:59
  Speaker: We just know that it's different and it's working.
• 46:03
  Speaker: But I knew the shift was me.
• 46:06
  Speaker: The shift wasn't the system.
• 46:08
  Speaker: It wasn't anything external.
• 46:10
  Speaker: It was my own shift that caused that change.
• 46:14
  Mary Lee: To stop fighting our true nature and just let it flow.
• 46:17
  Mary Lee: And not necessarily knowing what that true nature is, but just doing whatever feels natural and intuitive.
• 46:25
  Speaker: And I really sat with the question of like, who am I?
• 46:29
  Speaker: I know, and I know that's a big one.
• 46:31
  Speaker: And that's, you know, and it's becoming more popular.
• 46:34
  Speaker: And I think absolutely.
• 46:36
  Speaker: But who am I outside of being a mother?
• 46:40
  Speaker: Who am I outside of being a wife?
• 46:42
  Speaker: Who am I outside of being a woman?
• 46:45
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 46:46
  Speaker: Who am I?
• 46:47
  Speaker: Who am I?
• 46:48
  Speaker: When all of that is gone away, at the core, who am I?
• 46:53
  Speaker: And that was none of the things.
• 46:56
  Speaker: You know, who am I?
• 46:57
  Speaker: I'm a divine being.
• 46:58
  Speaker: That's what I am.
• 46:59
  Speaker: Right?
• 47:00
  Speaker: That's what I am.
• 47:01
  Speaker: And that's what we all are.
• 47:03
  Speaker: But it may manifest differently for you than it does for me.
• 47:06
  Speaker: So for me, it manifests as being really kind and caring and compassionate.
• 47:11
  Speaker: And we all have that capability, but for someone else, it might manifest as being a teacher.
• 47:17
  Mary Lee: Right.
• 47:17
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 47:17
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 47:18
  Speaker: And or healer of some other type of form.
• 47:21
  Speaker: Right.
• 47:24
  Speaker: Or creativity or being being someone who can teach people how to be embody while also being spiritual.
• 47:34
  Speaker: Right.
• 47:35
  Speaker: That's the answer to that is very different for each of us.
• 47:38
  Speaker: And I think it also comes with just accepting that that's exactly how it's supposed to be.
• 47:43
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 47:45
  Speaker: We're all supposed to be a little different.
• 47:48
  Mary Lee: So when you're you're when you work with clients, obviously your your job is to let them help them let go.
• 47:57
  Mary Lee: Yes.
• 47:58
  Mary Lee: Think about some of that.
• 47:59
  Mary Lee: I'm I'm gonna presume that the clients that come find you are already in this question, questioning phase of something's not the same, something's gotta switch, something's gotta be fixed.
• 48:11
  Mary Lee: I don't think they're coming in with the resistance against faith or spirituality.
• 48:15
  Mary Lee: I presume that they've had some kind of they do.
• 48:18
  Mary Lee: Is that right?
• 48:19
  Speaker: Okay, I should never presume is it's because they don't necessarily know what it is that they need.
• 48:25
  Speaker: A lot of times they're chronically ill.
• 48:28
  Speaker: And so they they don't even, they're not even acknowledging, they can't even acknowledge the impact that their illness is having on everything in their life.
• 48:36
  Speaker: They can't acknowledge that their relationships maybe are, you know, need a little, a little love, right?
• 48:43
  Speaker: They're like, I'm just know that I'm sick, I I feel like I'm dying, I don't know what to do, and I heard that you could help.
• 48:51
  Speaker: Okay.
• 48:52
  Speaker: Right?
• 48:53
  Speaker: So some of them, yes, are or at least somewhat spiritually aware, but not always, not always the case.
• 49:01
  Speaker: So and it's not always about me saying, I'm gonna guide you to become this spiritual being.
• 49:05
  Speaker: It's about helping them even just make peace.
• 49:09
  Speaker: So it's not always like you need to end your relationship, it's how do you stay regulated in your relationship and be true to who you are?
• 49:18
  Speaker: Right?
• 49:20
  Speaker: It's not always that you need to leave your career and start a new one as your life's purpose, right?
• 49:26
  Speaker: It's like, how do you stay and be true to who you are in a career that maybe doesn't serve you anymore?
• 49:33
  Speaker: And if it doesn't serve you anymore, how do you let go of it without pain?
• 49:37
  Speaker: And how do you embrace whatever the new situation is?
• 49:42
  Speaker: You know, menopause is a time of transition.
• 49:45
  Speaker: You know, we're transitioning from one reality to another reality for us, hormonally, physically, physiologically, emotionally, spiritually, it's a transition.
• 49:55
  Speaker: And so it's helping them, not telling them, helping them discover that for themselves, what that even means for them, and allowing them to give themselves permission if their relationship isn't working, and all their girlfriends are telling them, you need to leave him because he doesn't appreciate you, but internally they still feel love and they know that their partner is the right partner for them.
• 50:23
  Speaker: Then there is also this dynamic of, well, all my friends are telling me that this is what I need to do, and society tells me that I should just leave because he doesn't appreciate me.
• 50:35
  Speaker: And then how does that translate into, but I still have love for this person?
• 50:40
  Speaker: I don't want to leave.
• 50:42
  Speaker: So then the question isn't whether you should be listening to your friends or society.
• 50:47
  Speaker: It should be how do you listen to yourself and make peace with the fact that your friends may not understand, and that's okay.
• 50:55
  Speaker: Society should not understand, and that's okay.
• 51:00
  Speaker: But you are okay.
• 51:02
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 51:03
  Speaker: And you're okay staying in your relationship or leaving.
• 51:06
  Speaker: There's no, I don't have an attachment either way to what happens with my clients in the choices that they make.
• 51:11
  Speaker: It's more about making sure that when they make those choices, they're operating from their highest potential and truly speaking to what their soul needs from them in that moment.
• 51:24
  Speaker: And that's really where I find that that, so yeah, they're not always coming in knowing.
• 51:32
  Speaker: And sometimes they fight against that.
• 51:34
  Speaker: Well, I can't do this because you know, my friends say this, or you know, and an example would be it's not even relationship-wise.
• 51:42
  Speaker: Someone came and said, you know, they're struggling with problems with food, and their friends were saying, You're too skinny, you're too this, or you need to gain some more weight.
• 51:52
  Speaker: And the answer was, Well, how do you feel?
• 51:55
  Speaker: Right?
• 51:55
  Speaker: How do you feel in your body?
• 51:57
  Speaker: Do you feel like you're too skinny?
• 52:01
  Speaker: What does your doctor say about your body?
• 52:05
  Speaker: Is your body healthy?
• 52:06
  Speaker: So then it doesn't matter what society says or our friends say, it matters what is actually your lived experience.
• 52:16
  unknown: Yes.
• 52:17
  Speaker: So I don't know if that answered the question.
• 52:20
  Speaker: That's what came out.
• 52:22
  Mary Lee: Well, that's exactly how you you should present it because this is what you're experiencing with your clients as well with yourself.
• 52:30
  Mary Lee: It really is a journey into quietly listening, being able to shut down the noise around us and taking that time to hear that soft little voice of our spirit, our higher self that really knows best.
• 52:45
  Mary Lee: But everything else, so it's listening to the quiet voice of our higher self to shut out the noise, but we've been conditioned to hear the external world to tap in, and that's ego.
• 52:58
  Mary Lee: Ego wants to gauge its worth against what the external world is reflecting back to us, and when in fact it should be the words, and we will spend lifetime.
• 53:12
  Mary Lee: I mean, this is the work of Carl Jung for Crying Outless.
• 53:14
  Mary Lee: I think we can spend an eternity.
• 53:17
  Mary Lee: Philosophers have been looking at this since the since the very beginning, but nevertheless, it is one of those major essential questions that we'll ask always who am I?
• 53:30
  Mary Lee: What is I want to just tap in on the science and spirituality?
• 53:36
  Mary Lee: How do you see them as a beautiful marriage of what's happening with menopause?
• 53:40
  Mary Lee: To help some clients to wrap their head around, look, there is the science of the body.
• 53:45
  Mary Lee: We are in a uh a vessel, after all, a human body, but there's deeper layers.
• 53:51
  Mary Lee: How do you introduce that to them without being right?
• 53:55
  Speaker: I think that, but part of it is is understanding neurology and chemistry that happens within our bodies.
• 54:03
  Speaker: And so it's being able to speak to the fact that hormonally we're no longer, like you said, dealing with that veil of the fog of the estrogen, right?
• 54:13
  Speaker: Which is something that spiritual realms are really dominated, especially ancient spiritual realms, are really dominated by the male experience.
• 54:20
  Speaker: And part of that, I think, is because the male experience doesn't have that estrogen component to it, right?
• 54:27
  Speaker: And I think part of the rest of it is that women just haven't been afforded an opportunity in the past to have spiritual teaching from an early age.
• 54:38
  Speaker: Your options really to become a nun in the West, right?
• 54:43
  Speaker: That's really your option that you were given, unless you're in an indigenous culture.
• 54:47
  Speaker: And in indigenous cultures, it is embraced usually for women to step into the role of a medicine woman and train with another medicine woman.
• 54:57
  Speaker: And so they learn how to differentiate at a very young age from what is my physiology and what is my spiritual path.
• 55:06
  Speaker: We aren't given that opportunity in our Western culture.
• 55:09
  Speaker: We're given the opportunity to understand that, oh, we went through, you know, puberty and now boys are really cute.
• 55:16
  Speaker: And so there's not, and I'm not talking about indoctrination.
• 55:20
  Speaker: I'm talking about a girl, a young girl, young woman feeling like it's acceptable to say, I want to follow a spiritual path without being pigeonholed into what that means or indoctrinated into what that should mean for her.
• 55:39
  Speaker: And so there's no training around how you navigate hormones and spiritual truths and being a woman and having a family and all of those things, right?
• 55:53
  Speaker: So we're not given any real training or equipment for this.
• 55:56
  Speaker: So for Western women, it's like I went through menopause and I had this spiritual awakening where if there was someone who was listening when they were 15 or 5 or 6, when they were saying things that had a spiritual element to them and knew how to recognize what that was for them.
• 56:15
  Speaker: And then say, I'm not going to tell you what to believe, I'm going to support you so that you can experience it.
• 56:22
  Speaker: We, I don't think we would see as many women having the same spiritual awakening in menopause because they would have been allowed to have it throughout their whole lives.
• 56:34
  Speaker: I went to my father when I was six and said I wanted to be a nun, my stepdad.
• 56:40
  Speaker: And it wasn't a reflection of me or my ability to do that, but he was like, No, you don't want to do that.
• 56:46
  Speaker: You have to be born Catholic to be a nun.
• 56:49
  Speaker: That was his, and I know in hindsight, that was his reflection on his opinion of the Catholic Church, right?
• 56:54
  Speaker: And it was me identifying that there was a spiritually devout woman that I could identify with.
• 57:01
  Speaker: And we know psychologically how important it is for young women and young girls and boys to be able to identify themselves in authority figures.
• 57:12
  Speaker: And the only authority figure that I had to identify myself with was a nun and what my internal truth was.
• 57:21
  Speaker: So then that was suppressed because well, you can't be a nun.
• 57:24
  Speaker: And then at 15, I went on my own vision quest.
• 57:27
  Speaker: I know that that's the name for it now.
• 57:29
  Speaker: I didn't know that that's what it was then.
• 57:31
  Speaker: I went in the woods, fasted, I went camping, fasted for three days, and found my spirit animal.
• 57:39
  Speaker: 15.
• 57:40
  Speaker: If I had had mentors at that age or someone who could recognize that that's what I was doing, then I wouldn't be having a lifetime of suppression.
• 57:52
  Speaker: Where I was, well, that just I'm this is one of those weird things that Heather did, right?
• 57:58
  Speaker: This is one of those things that happened, right?
• 58:01
  Speaker: If we had if we lived in a culture where that was the norm, or if something like that was seen, and instead of pushed into what category it needed to be and just saw it for what it was, is that I was a spiritual person and allowed me to investigate that without shame or without pressure, then I don't think that in midlife I would have had the same reaction to trying to suppress it.
• 58:29
  Speaker: And I don't think it would have that same spring-loaded effect on the end, right?
• 58:34
  Speaker: So I think that as a whole, that's where the two meet is that what we're experiencing as an awakening at in our 50s, is really if these same women looked back on their lives, they would see those same similar moments like what I experienced.
• 58:55
  Speaker: I'm sure as I'm saying this to you, you're having moments where you're like, oh yeah, that really was not normal, right?
• 59:01
  Speaker: Not normal.
• 59:02
  Speaker: Right.
• 59:03
  Speaker: And so if I think if we can create an environment for, you know, the next generation of women and young girls where they're not indoctrinated into what they should believe, but they are allowed to experience the world spiritually without shame or pressure or any of those things, judgment, any of those things.
• 59:28
  Speaker: And they're just allowed to experience it.
• 59:31
  Speaker: I don't think that we'll see the same illness and the same intense pain, a spiritual pain that we go through when we're like everything in our lives just like explodes in midlife and we're having this dumpster fire, like a mice said of mine, like awakening.
• 59:49
  Speaker: I think that that's really where where we're missing things, or where at least our generation miss that.
• 59:56
  Speaker: I tried to raise my daughter as spiritually open as I could.
• 59:59
  Speaker: My granddaughter, we're doing the same with her.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker: She's four, she knows how to meditate, right?
• 1:00:04
  Speaker: Not because she has to be a meditator or be Hindu or do yoga or anything like that, but because she knows at four how to experience stillness and how to cultivate that stillness.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker: And then she can make those decisions about what that looks like for her as she gets older.
• 1:00:23
  Mary Lee: Yeah.
• 1:00:24
  Mary Lee: Which is very much a practice in Eastern philosophy.
• 1:00:28
  Mary Lee: Children in schools will sit for long periods of time collectively, learning to cultivate stillness, and it's just a natural part of their culture, without question.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker: Yeah, and we plan on using the same philosophies and approach to her view of her body and her view view of her cycle.
• 1:00:48
  Speaker: You know, in Western culture, having your cycle and having your period is like it's it's not embraced, it's an inconvenience at best, right?
• 1:00:57
  Speaker: It's like otherwise it's dirty.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker: It's just a sign of how weak you are.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker: And at least that's my experience.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker: I'm not saying it is for everybody, but it was, you know, it was like that's what happens to women.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker: It's just gross and it makes them hormonal and it, all of those things.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker: Again, that same mentality that suppresses and makes shame around a biological thing that we have no control over, right?
• 1:01:24
  Speaker: And so then when you get menopause, you're like, I just wish this would be over.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker: I just want it to be done instead of celebrating it as this is this beautiful time where you're stepping into fully being the mentor and leader that you were always meant to be.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker: And so I think that there's a lot of ways that science and culture have gotten it wrong for for us, and that that's not a that is what it is, and maybe it's what was needed, otherwise, we wouldn't be here having this conversation.
• 1:01:58
  Mary Lee: So true.
• 1:01:59
  Mary Lee: Right?
• 1:01:59
  Mary Lee: And I could carry on this conversation for hours at least.
• 1:02:02
  Mary Lee: It just piques my interest when we talk about science and spirituality and then really lean into the divine feminine and birthing into this second period in our lives where we step into that mentorship role as the wise woman.
• 1:02:16
  Mary Lee: But again, we need the call the accumulation of lids and the that helps us develop the empathy that truly culture needs, heal from so many patriarchal systems, heal from all of the um just heart-wrenching experiences that we've seen in this 21st century thus far.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 1:02:41
  Mary Lee: Wow.
• 1:02:41
  Mary Lee: Heather, I can talk and talk, but um, we'll bring you back for now.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 1:02:47
  Mary Lee: Yes.
• 1:02:48
  Mary Lee: Please share though a little bit about your book and the fact that listeners can actually have listen in and have an experience of your first couple of chapters of that book.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 1:02:58
  Mary Lee: And also where they can find you if they wish to work with you in person.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker: The book is, as you said, it's a memoir of my life.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker: It delves in the different areas of trauma that I had and the impact that it had on my spirituality and my spiritual development, as well as my view of myself and my role in the world.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker: And it was amazing.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker: I view it as like a love letter.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker: I wrote it with the sole intention was if it could just help one person see themselves, you know, see themselves in my story and say, Oh, oh, I see where I've been doing this wrong.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker: And that was the intention in writing it and fulfilling the subtle nudge from the Swami, like you should write books, right?
• 1:03:46
  Speaker: And it was a conversation.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker: And that's what it literally was a conversation with Gina, but Gina was just the placeholder.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker: Gina was is could be anybody on the other side of that.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker: And I think that that has been a learning experience and a growing experience for me writing it as well as anybody that reads it.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker: I think I developed such a deeper appreciation for others' lived experiences through sharing mine from the lens of how this could help someone else.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: And so beautiful.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker: As far as where you can find me and work with me, I have a website.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker: It's my name because I'm super original, Heather Deborah Stenny.com.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker: And you can get the book there, you can get chapters of the book there.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker: It's on Amazon, and it's available not only on Kindle, but it's also available on Google Play and Apple Books and just about every platform that can carry an ebook.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker: And so I tried to make it as accessible as possible for anybody that's interested in learning more about my journey and maybe how I can help, and also the different practices that I used in my journey because I talk about them.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker: And then there's also different resources there.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker: There's meditations, things like that.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker: So it's all on my website.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker: There's also a section for how you can work with me, and I'll be starting upcoming workshops and retreats too in the coming months and years.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker: So yeah.
• 1:05:15
  Mary Lee: Well, watch for that.
• 1:05:17
  Mary Lee: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 1:05:18
  Mary Lee: Heather will get all those links.
• 1:05:20
  Mary Lee: So, listeners, check out the show notes where you can find all those links to Heather's work, her resources, her book.
• 1:05:27
  Mary Lee: This has been a delightful, inspiring, eye-opening, uh affirming conversation in so many ways.
• 1:05:36
  Mary Lee: I've enjoyed it thoroughly, as you can see.
• 1:05:39
  Mary Lee: And my listeners will take up on if they haven't already, that I have a real big spiritual bone in my body that's screaming at me all the time that I have to really um listen to that higher self that was silenced for many years and the many roles that I played.
• 1:05:57
  Mary Lee: But that is the woman's experience.
• 1:05:59
  Mary Lee: And I'm hoping that as Gen X move it moves through this and we figure it all out, we pass on that knowledge like you are with your book, so that the next generation is much like your grandchild is just like this is a no brainer, dudes.
• 1:06:11
  Mary Lee: Like, why were you ever this way?
• 1:06:13
  Speaker: Why were we having this conversation?
• 1:06:15
  Mary Lee: Yeah, oh, so weird.
• 1:06:17
  Mary Lee: Like we talked about our grandparents, right?
• 1:06:20
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 1:06:21
  Mary Lee: Thank you so much for sharing.
• 1:06:22
  Mary Lee: Thank you so much for having me with it.
• 1:06:24
  Speaker: It was an amazing conversation.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker: I really enjoyed it.
• 1:06:27
  Mary Lee: It truly was.
• 1:06:27
  Mary Lee: I did too.
• 1:06:28
  Mary Lee: Thank you.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker: Thank you.