If you’ve been struggling with any kind of chronic condition in your heart, mind or body, this episode is for you. Even though chronic conditions can at times leave you feeling hopeless, I truly believe that you can heal anything. And the inner work that I’ve been doing has been proving that. Here I share what’s been working for me to heal the chronic fatigue I’ve been dealing with for years and the unexpected gifts that have come from this work.

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Full Show Transcript

00:00:00 – 00:01:17

If you are looking to grow and transform and connect with a beautiful heart led community also on a path of healing and transformation, then I’m inviting you to my Heart space facebook group. It is a place for spiritual seekers to find healing, to find answers within themselves and connect with other heart lead seekers in this group will be sharing daily tips on drama and form practices for self healing behind the scenes. Video lessons on working with your inner child, regulating your nervous system, accessing your intuition and using your powerful mind to work for you and not against you is the place to collaborate your resources and also learn from other active members who are heart led spiritual seekers. This is where I will be teaching you high level information about my medicine within method that I’ve used to come home to myself and that I regularly guide my clients home to their authentic selves with. There’s going to be a ton of value in this group over the coming days, weeks and months and years. So don’t miss out. Go to the link in the show notes and check out the Heart space healing for Spiritual Seekers facebook group. It is totally free to join and there’s going to be so much value shared in there.

00:01:20 – 00:01:42

Hello and welcome to the mind-body for podcast. I am your host, Abigail, of I’m a shaman. I am here to awaken the healers, to not simply teach you but to bring you home to your own divinity, nature and spirit, so that you may remember the depths of your own being, power and purpose, and embody your original medicine in all that you do. This work is not for the faint of heart, but for the driven seeker. We’ll not quit until they find what calls them. This is for those who are ready to step into their power, even though a fucking terrifies them. This is for the medicine, women, the light workers and the weary souls who live countless lifetimes. This is a path to mend, your deepest of los, to remember the innocence of your nature. This is a way of embodiment, integrity and awakening. It is a portal back to your soul and a bridge between worlds. This is where we reclaim our magic, our birthright and our true being, a magic that was hidden for centuries by religion, madness and fear. It is a power that stirs in our woods and knowing, whispered by our ancestors. It is a song sung by the universe, it is our birthright, our divinity and our day. We are here to remember it, embody it and return to the world from which it was hidden. Welcome this season to reclaim your magic.

00:03:39 – 00:04:29

So I want to share in this episode a little bit of about the journey that I’ve been going through lately. I’ve been going through a really intense season of my lifelong path to healing, and I say lifelong because I believe that it is a continuous journey. We are constantly in a state of evolution and moving towards our truest and freest expression of ourselves, and I want to acknowledge that that it’s not really a one and one thing. You don’t really go to one, experience, one healing session and then you’re good forever. It’s layered and being an infinite, being many of us being old souls who experienced many lifetimes, many heartaches and hardships.

00:04:29 – 00:05:28

There’s a lot to unpack and release and transform. So it is a journey, and I’m in it for the long hall, because I couldn’t imagine anything else. I couldn’t imagine being stagnant and not evolving and moving towards peace and freedom and wholeness and happiness and all those things that ultimately live inside each of us, that are always available to us, but are past traumas and limiting beliefs and unhealthy patterns and coping mechanisms that we create from that pull us away from the peace that is a part of our nature, and so the journey that I’m on and that I support others in, is breaking free of those things that stop us from being our true divine selves, so that we can step deeper into awakening into awareness, into peace and freedom and show up in the way that we’re meant to really share our gifts with the world.

00:05:29 – 00:06:10

So lately I’ve been going through a process of deeper embodiment in the work that I share with others, in coming more deeply into my body and going deeper in the inner work. Now my husband would tell you that I do more inner work than anybody he knows, and that’s probably true, but there are ways that my mind, which is trying to protect me, this is what our mind does, protects us from pain and discomfort, will shut down and compartmentalized, will unconsciously compartmentalized and put up walls against our own issues to protect us from discomfort and pain.

00:06:10 – 00:07:04

But the problem with that is we don’t get to grow. It holds us back, so I’ve been going deeper into removing those barriers, becoming aware of them and removing them and getting more deeply connected with my body, with my own natural way of being, with my divinity, with what feels harmonious and whole and empowered to me, and part of what i’ve been doing lately is reconnecting with grief. I’ve been getting a lot of messages from the universe and my mind’s been picking up. One of these messages of you need to process grief and sadness is something that throughout my whole life, if I had a tendency to dip into any dark place, it would be the sadness that I felt the most, and so I know that there’s grief there that I’m yet to process, and so last night I dipped into it a little bit.

00:07:04 – 00:09:05

I took a little bit of cannabis is fully legal all throughout Canada. Fortunately, and sometimes that really just helps me get into my body and break through those mental barrier. But I know how to navigate the medicine. So I’m not condoning one way or the other, but anyway, with the support of Canibus, we’re able to go into feeling in my body, into feeling this deep sense of emotional pain. And then I felt like I just dipped into my heart’s centre and from that space I just touched it for a moment, this profound, intense grief and as I touched it my body was trembling. My body was trying to. I was a little bit of a nervous system override where it was a lot. It was very intense and as I was feeling it, I was getting these images, this knowing of places it was coming from. So it was a combination of familiar and ancestral grief, past lifetime grief, things that happened in other lifetimes, and something that I became consciously aware of was environmental grief or eco grief, and I feel like this is one that we are a situation environmentally, that we are all in together, and the level at which we acknowledge and processes grief is dependent on each of us and our readiness to go there, because it is such a big one. But whether or not our minds allows us in there or we choose to consciously break through the mental barriers set up to protect us, our heart is feeling it and so if we don’t allow ourselves to process that grief or any grief for that matter, it weighs on the heart, it weighs on the body and then it can create mental and physical illness and disease.

00:09:05 – 00:10:34

So I know it’s really important to feel the stuff and to process the stuff. So as I was feeling it, I was reminded of something I had heard about grief support group, an ego grief support group, and I thought this is what I need. I don’t want to process this alone. I don’t feel like I meant to, and so I did some searching and I found the Good grief network dot org, and they have these programs and and the tense system of processing grief for our own well being and so that we can then be more effective in changing our habits and taking action to support a shift for a more sustainable way of living. Because if we are so overwhelmed with grief, if our mind is protecting us from the intensity of that feeling, we’re not going to think about it, we’re not going to process it, we’re not going to look at it, it’s going to get locked away in a black box and it’s going to be the thing that our mind doesn’t let us go to and we can’t really get much done in that way. So in order to be effective and helpful with the climate crisis, I know that I need to first process more of my grief. I feel around that and I want to share from the good grief network. There are 10 steps to processing and dealing with the situation that we’re in now.

00:10:34 – 00:12:35

I feel like for me anyway, these steps really speak to the depth of where we are at and the power and intensity of processing that. So this is the 10 steps, not too much, unlike the 10 step alcoholic program where there’s 10 steps to dealing with things. So this is the 10 steps from the good grief network. On processing ego grief step one: accept the severity of the predicament and it’s a simple statement, but it holds a lot of power and it speaks to a really powerful acknowledgment. I feel that has the capability to incredibly shift energy and the way that we are responding as human beings to what’s happening in these times. To acknowledge I am part of the problem and solutions to this I feel like I can feel triggering. I want to say: well, this is industry’s fault. You know this is government’s fault, people empowered to make the changes, but the fact of the matter is they’re not, and so it’s going to be, I believe, each individual’s journey of awakening and then coming together to create the change that’s needed and to demand the change that’s needed in the world. So it’s a lot more empowering, even though it’s scarier and harder to do step, to acknowledge that I am both part of the problem and the solution. It’s hard, but that is true ownership, that is leadership, that is responsibility, that’s that’s growing up and put it in any more simple terms. Step three: practice: being with uncertainty.

00:12:35 – 00:13:31

It’s interesting. This is actually something that I sat with a yoga class the other night. We’ve received news that our dog has emerging lymphoma, which is kind of lymphatic cancer, and I’m going to be working with him through energy work and diet and herbs help him heal. But of course it was a grieving process to learn that and it was really difficult day when we got that news and I was in yoga class and one of my guides showed up. And while I was in class I often go in these visionary shamanic journeys. Once once I hit the mat, because I’m doing in yoga, which is very much slow, gentle movement, lying down, opening up the body, breaking through the dramas like it held in the body. So there I was in yoga class, with this darkly lit room, it’s heated room, there’s music playing.

00:13:31 – 00:14:08

I’m going inward, i’m feeling myself in outer space and this guide shows up and wrapped us both in this bubble of gold light within that space and he said to me: can you get comfortable with uncertainty? And when he asked me that I got this image of falling like was falling through that golden bubble of light down through space, down to the abyss, the depth of darkness, and I felt this panic energy arising in this feeling of saying no, I need to hold on, I need to make things happen.

00:14:08 – 00:15:38

If I don’t hold on, everything will fall apart and into ruin and I’ll be surrounded by darkness. And he said to me: you need to have faith. And in that moment the energy shifted and I had this realization that when I am in fear, when, when I am in fear, with a space of uncertainty, I am not in the place of having faith. And this is faith in anything. It could be faith if you believe in God or the universe or spirit or divinity, or just faith in each moment. Faith in yourself. They said it’s going to be okay, it was just the energy of faith and I didn’t need to have any belief in one thing or any story. I just called in the energy of faith and as I called in that energy of faith, I felt this light coming in, I felt Nature holding me, I felt held and I felt safe and I felt like I can let go. I don’t need to hold on to everything because I’m being held because there is more than just me that are keeping things moving, that are keeping this world together. Thank God, it’s too much for any one individual shoulders. So that was very healing for me and it showed me that I can sit with uncertainty.

00:15:38 – 00:16:41

And when I have faith, there is no need for fear just being in the moment, being in the moment being with the energy of faith within the space of uncertainty, because everything within life is uncertain. I don’t believe we live in a deterministic reality whatsoever. We have free will. There is so much happening beyond our awareness, beyond our scope, beyond our control. So trying to control it, it’s just going to create so much suffering for ourselves. So practice being with uncertainty. And for me that also means not having an agenda, not needing anything to be one outcome in order to be happy or okay, except that it’s bigger than me. It’s beyond all of us, my dog’s health. What’s happening in the environment? We can’t be attached to the outcome, but we can do our best to help. That’s all we can do that and the inner work which enables us to do our best to help.

00:16:41 – 00:17:47

All right step four, honor my mortality and the mortality of all. That’s a big one. Can you feel the power of that one? Honor my mortality and the mortality of all. What? What kind of world would we live in if we were all doing that? Yeah, we’re here for a while, for a period of time, it’s not for forever. All things shall pass. This too shall pass. Honor that we all have mortality. So let’s make our time here as beautiful as can be. And you know, as a showman, I know, through my experience of existence and through supporting others and through mediumship, that we don’t and when the body dies, when our spirit leaves, the body or spirit is still energy and consciousness that cannot be created or destroyed.

00:17:47 – 00:18:54

That is a change of state. So we do move on to the next place, you know, which can be varied for each of us. Hopefully we move into the light, unless needing mediumship to do that. But honouring the mortality of this lifetime in this body. This is a part of life for all of us and we cannot argue with the greater laws of nature and rhythms of life that allows us the experience here to come in and swim in this ocean of life and then take our leave. What an amazing, beautiful, profound thing to do. Step five, inner work. Well, yeah, in percentage, it is the inner work that transforms our lives and transforms our impact in the world. Everything that holds us back is inside of us.

00:18:54 – 00:20:14

The mind will look to project, to think that the answers are outside of us. That is the mind, the egos habit, but they are not. They are always inside and if you are struggling with some, with motivation or confidence or self-worth or self-love or any of those that is going to hold you back, because that is, those feelings inside are going to form the narrative through which you see yourself and the world in which you. And if you want to change that world, you need to change the narrative and there’s no way around it but doing the inner work. And it is not easy. It’s fucking hard, but that is the only way to transform your life and to step in to who you are truly meant to be and the work you are truly meant to do. And it’s also fucking beautiful because as you work through and release the social conditioning, the familiar ancestral and past life drama you in shamanism it’s called sole retrieval. Where you get a part of yourself back and re connect it with the whole of who you are, and it’s like the feeling of a part of your soul.

00:20:14 – 00:21:19

Returning to you is like nothing else. It is the most beautiful heart expanding experience that you can have and I’ve been through it many a time and i’m sure I will go through it more. It is a continuous journey of coming back into reunion with the infinity that is your being. It’s pretty awesome step six: develop awareness of brain patterns and perception. So this is very important, because how I mentioned the ego likes to protect us from pain, and it is the mind’s job to keep you alive, and that is it. It is not here to necessarily help you evolve, and it is certainly not here to make you happy. It is our each of our own responsibility to become the watchers of our own mind and to become aware of the habits and patterns that the mind forms to protect itself. And I’m going into that a little bit more, I think actually.

00:21:20 – 00:22:41

So I’ve really been enjoying this book lately called potent Leadership by Ruby Freman, and in it she speaks to the ID, the ego and the superego from Sigmund Froid from his theory of these three components of the mind, and she breaks down the ego to the part of the mind that is constantly working to protect itself, often through any means necessary, and it is the part of us that feels offensive, that has defense mechanisms that are there to protect you from anything that is unpleasant, and it’s not that the ego is bad. We need the ego. The ego creates an identity, a sense of self and separation from you and another. So you know, to put a glass of water up to your mouth and not somebody else. We can’t abolish the ego, but it needs to be balanced, can’t we can, but it’s not great. We don’t want to live from the ego. We don’t want to allow the ego to run the show, because that’s putting us in this extreme version of defensiveness, really a lack of growth, because the ego is protecting you from anything uncomfortable and of course you have to get uncomfortable to grow.

00:22:41 – 00:24:04

That’s just part of transformations. Here are the steps that the ego takes to protect us from anything that is unpleasant. Number one is repression. Your ego pushes unwonted thoughts out of your conscious mind. Two is denial. Your ego blocks unwonted, upsetting, undesired and overwhelming experiences and events causing you to not see, not believe, not acknowledge and perhaps even refuse to accept what’s happening. Does that sound familiar with the environmental crisis? Number three is projection as an attempt to fix your problems. Your ego attributes your unacceptable thoughts, feelings and motives to another person, and this is something that you know. We go into a lot with my clients and part of my inner work. I work with the work of Byron Katie, and she has created an incredibly powerful system, what she calls the work for breaking down projections and realizing the patterns of the mind, these unhealthy patterns of the mind to project our thoughts and feelings and motives on to someone else. And so the work, if you’re wondering, you go to the work, dotcom or check out, buying Katy on Youtube or on her podcast.

00:24:04 – 00:24:39

She is amazing and the work is powerful. All right, the next pattern, the next defense mechanism of the ego, is displacement. Your ego will have you satisfy an impulse via a substitute person or object in a socially unacceptable way, for example releasing the anger that you feel towards yourself on your partner instead. So we’re basically displacing the pain that we feel somewhere else, and I think this could also be something that forms, you know, addictions as we know it.

00:24:39 – 00:25:36

So instead of facing the pain, I’m going to distract myself with a kind of substance or shopping or sex, any destructive behavior, habit or substance that allows us to feel a little bit better in the moment. Next one is regression. Your ego will lead you to move backward in your development to cope with stress or overwhelming situations. So acting like an 11 year-old or your 11 year-old self, and this is something that happens often, for example, in romantic relationships. So with your partner or spouse, we will often revert back to our inner child when we get triggered and our couple therapy has said that we get married so that we can trigger each other because that is the inner child wanting to heal. So we will find partners that push those buttons for us because each time the button gets pushed that is an opportunity for healing.

00:25:36 – 00:26:37

So it is not uncommon. You know when you say when you ask your partner, can you do this or that and you instantly get the snapback. Like what did that come from? Like? Well, that was the inner child who it’s pushing back and fighting, because in that moment you reminded them of their over controlling dad or their alcoholic mother. So it’s never about you in that moment. That’s that’s someone reverting back to their wounded in herself. The next pattern of the mind is rationalization. Your ego attempts to justify a mistake, problem or undesired feeling with seemingly logical reasons or explanations. Put your hand up. If you’ve done that, my hand is: we’ve all been there. We’ve all done that, something that I love as a way to bypass, that is, getting into the body, because the body does not rationalize. The body is a 100% authentic with the experience that it is feeling, with the emotions that are felt, with what it likes and what it doesn’t like.

00:26:37 – 00:27:58

And something that I do with my clients is teaching them how to get back into their body and listen to their body. And it’s a practice because we have to retrain ourselves from looking for the answers outside of us and other people on Google, on other, casts, on anything that is outside of us. The answers are always going to be inside of you and your powers of discernment, of knowing what is right for you and what’s not what is true, what is false? That is going to be in your body. So to get past the rationalization of the mind, we get into the body. That’s the tool that I love: to buy past that and to really rise above that, because the mind is going to try to justify anything that it feels in agenda towards. So I live in Alberta in Canada, which is a very oil and gas driven industry in this province. So there are a lot of people who don’t believe in climate change because their bills are paid through the oil and gas industries. So the mind will try to rationalize why we need oil and gas, why there are no other ways, why green alternatives are bad. Because behind that there is fear, like if we don’t do this, then what is there to do? Of course there’s we know that the largest growing industry for jobs is alternative energy.

00:27:58 – 00:28:34

So it’s just education and that part. All right. Reaction formation, your ego will lead you to express yourself or behave in ways that are opposite of your true feelings, for example, attempting to control everything because you actually feel insecure. So your ego will lead you to express yourself or behave in ways that are opposite of your true feelings. So how many times, how many of you have done this where you’ve betrayed what actually felt right, because you’ve felt that you needed to do something else.

00:28:34 – 00:29:21

So whether that is doing so much for others and not taking care of yourself or that is saying yes, when you really mean no, or trying to control everything because it doesn’t feel safe because of some kind of insecurity, so is another one that I’ve been through, and I think if you look for long enough, you’ll find that you’ve been through too, as we’ve all been through this. These are the patterns of the mind. This is not any condemnation, this is a process of illumination, of becoming aware of the way that our minds work so that we can then rise above them, and there is no need for any guilt or shame or blame. With that we are all going through it together. All right. So the next pattern of the mind, the last one here, is sublimation.

00:29:21 – 00:30:53

So like displacement. Your ego will have you satisfy an impulse, a substitute person or object, but in a socially acceptable way, for example channelling your frustration into your workouts. So this would be an example of, because it’s a socially acceptable way, socially acceptable addition. So working out it’s seen as a good thing, but it can be a way to avoid feeling pain. You know, yoga is. I need it in my life, I need it for my own healing and well being, but people can also use it. Any one of us could also use it as a way to numb by just pushing and pushing and pushing. So it is any form, what I would call socially acceptable addition. So those are the eight forms of defensiveness that the eagle will put up in order to protect you from anything unpleasant and, of course, in order to grow and change, we have to become aware of and break through these patterns, these defense mechanisms, so that we can then up into our authentic nature, our power, our integrity, our medicine, and share that with the world, and the world needs that right now could need it more. So, moving back now to the 10 steps of dealing with eco grief, we just went over step six: develop awareness of brain patterns and perception. Moving in now to step seven, which is practiced.

00:30:53 – 00:33:06

Gratitude, witness beauty and create connections, and I see this as a very necessary yang to the in the in the dark. It is the inward it is, it is doing the shadow work, the yang is the light, it is the outward, it is filling back up with light, and this is essential for restoration, because you can burn out from doing too much inner work. It can’t be all shadow work, shadow work, shadow work. The best of us will inevitably burn out from too much of that. We need to have balance in our lives. So practising gratitude, witnessing beauty and creating connections are all things that are going to lift us back up and bring us into a state of harmony and peace and appreciation, and that is so deeply nourishing for your mind, your body and your spirit. So I love Steven and I think if we all did more of this, we’d be in a wonderful place, and it is an essential yang to then. We need to do the shadow work. We need to face our own demons so they don’t run our lives any more. But after you do that, appreciate in the beauty and the gratitude and the connectedness with nature, with those whom you feel lifted up when you’re around them. That is the stuff that is going to make it all worthwhile and fill you back up so that you then have the capacity and the stamina to do the lifelong healing journey, and that’s what makes it beautiful. All right. Step eight, take breaks and rest. That is continuation of the young. To the end. We need to restore ourselves. We can’t push ourselves too far. We can’t go into that place of burnout because then we’re not effective. We don’t feel good in ourselves. You deserve to be happy and it is happy people. It is people who are nourished who are able to create massive change in this world, for for the better, to make this world a better place, step nine, show up.

00:33:06 – 00:34:39

So when we do steps one through eight, it enables us to show up when we face our darkness, when we let the light in, when we give it time to rest and integrate into our being, then we have the strength, then we have the strength of being to show up for ourselves number one, and for others, and for the environment or for whoever. Whatever I feel you feel you need to show up for now when you do these other steps. This is what enables you the integrity and the strength, the accountability to be there for yourself and others, and step 10 reinvest into meaningful efforts. So take action. So from there, when we do the work on ourselves and it begins within us, it has to begin within us. This cannot be an ego driven. I need to be significant, I need to change. The world is the only way I’ll be happy like that’s coming from a broken place and when we come from that energy we’re not being the change we want to see in the world and it’s not going to come from the strength of being an integrity that is needed in order to create the kind of changes that the world needs right now. So we really have to do this work within ourselves to embody our true being, so that we can show up and then reinvest into meaningful efforts and help each other. That’s what we’re meant to do. We’re not meant to work alone.

00:34:39 – 00:36:38

We are social species, we are meant to support each other, and there is no one in this world who does everything alone. And even if you are recluse away from other, human nature is there, with you supporting you. The air we breathe is given to us by the trees, breathing as well. Everything is working together, so the more that we can integrate that connectedness and community, the more that we can lift and support each other up. I send you my love: may you have grace and this journey may break through the walls that your mind puts up to protect you so that you can grow and transform into the depth of your true being and know that you don’t have to do it alone. Community. I truly have found to be an essential ingredient, a very, very powerful ingredient to healing the heart, and I have a completely free of charge to join heart Space Facebook group for spiritual seekers. This is where I go alive every Wednesday night and I share behind the scenes information on what is working for me and my clients using the medicine within method, a method that I created, that’s roadmap home to your authentic self, where you learn how to heal and free yourself of society, conditioning that steered you away from who you actually are, of the ancestral, familial and passive dramas that, behind the scenes, govern how you think, feel and act. This is embodied somatic healing. This is working with the subconscious, with the mind, with the spirit. So it is powerful, deep work and you get to be a part of this heart led community totally free of charge. Just go to the show notes and click on Heart Space Facebook group for spiritual seekers, and I love to have you in there until next time, my friends sending you my love.