My Favorite Sovereignty Hack That’ll Revolutionize Your Biz
Transcript:
Isha Vela 0:00
Welcome to Devotional Anarchy, a podcast about intimate embodied leadership that is radically human, honest AF and thereby inherently disruptive to systems of disempowerment and disconnection. I’m Isha Vela, trauma psychologist, certified somatic, intimacy Alchemist, wealth wizard, shadow doula, love anarchist, intuitive channel and sovereign business coach. You’re here because you know intimate self connection is the source of everything you want to create in life. And that building safety and trust in your own body is what allows you to fully own and steward your energy and your relationships. Get ready to explore attachments, sexuality, spirituality, self expression and sovereignty and other relational themes from a trauma responsive somatic energetic lens. The conversations and tools shared in this podcast are designed to offer permission to create the abundant life, love and business that lights your soul on fire.
Hey, sovereign, are you ready to hear about my favorite sovereignty hack? Are you ready? I don’t think you’re ready.
I’m going to be sharing with you one particular mindset and embodiment healing hack that has been incredibly helpful for me in some of the most challenging moments of my business, and personally as well. And I know it’s going to be so helpful to you also.
First, I wanted to let you know that you have one more week to sign up for the sovereign business accelerator. And I’m so excited about this six month container because it’s focused on Shadow Work in business, right? The the unconscious parts and emotions of your business, which is where most of us get stuck or slow down, right? self doubt wondering if anybody wants what you’re offering ghosting your audience convinced that nothing’s working, blowing up your lunch when nobody’s buying, right. And often when we get stuck or slow down. Our brains like to think that what we need is another strategy, right? So we jumped to another strategy, like lowering our prices. But the truth is that we need another strategy like we need another hole in the head. Or not another Won’t we have holes in our head. But you know what I mean? It’s it’s really an energetic issue based in either mindset or embodiment. And when I talk about energetics, it is about nervous system capacitation. Being able to receive clients attention, collaborations, power cash, with a sense of safety, right with sense of like your sense of deservingness and like your Yes, right, your full body. Yes. And it’s experiences such as shame, guilt and fear from trauma and collective conditioning that narrows your capacity or that or where you’re holding a note in your body that slows you down in your business. And that’s why I call it an accelerator because by focusing on the capacitation, by focusing on the shadow work, you’re actually able to move forward in your business with more, more fluidly, right. And the five areas we’re going to be focusing on for nervous system expansion is identity healing, that’s the shadow work, peace, emotional fluency, ie built, willing to feel at all
pleasure, right? Building abundance in your body and also soothing yourself through whatever activations arise, boundaries, being clear on your yeses and noes and obviously mindset so training your monkey brain. And what you can expect from this container is a deeply held space in which to do Shadow Work. Uncover all the parts that we hide, and that want to be revealed in our business, right. So if you’re a witchy healer, if you’re consider yourself a mystic, and you consider yourself a sensitive, sensitive, rebellious entrepreneur, and you want to be known as the go to leader in your industry, you want to feel the satisfaction of a business that also creates social impact, right that supports you and create social impact. If you want to build a business around your needs and desires without hustle and overwhelm. If you want to feel in love with sales and marketing, all while getting paid to be your fullest self on the internet, then the SBA is for you. And I put a link to my invitation page in the show notes. And on the invitation page are the some of the live trainings I did as tasters for the SBA, so definitely check those out. doors closed on Wednesday, March 29. So don’t miss it. There are three investment tiers right you think oh, I can afford it. Take a look at the in the invitation page. There are three investment tiers standard
There’s an ally, which is a little bit higher, and community, which is a little bit lower right? So you get to choose your own adventure.
All right, so are you ready for my favorite healing hack? So I’m gonna not gonna waste any more of your time and to say it. In a nutshell, it’s this. Don’t make anything that happens in your business mean anything about you?
I’ll say it again, don’t make anything that happens in your business mean anything about you?
Unknown Speaker 5:35
Why is this important? Well, it’s important because we often get tripped up on the stories that we tell ourselves when something goes wrong in our business when something doesn’t go as expected or as planned. And we create all sorts of meaning that isn’t helpful for us. That actually, you know, is recreates old trauma patterns, right. So, as a review, I’m gonna go a little bit more into why it’s important. But I want to just first start with a recap of why why we do this shit.
Unknown Speaker 6:15
So your brain has been making meaning of things since you were a child, since you’ve had any sort of awareness, right. And making meaning of things is how we understand ourselves, the people around us, the way things work in the world. It is purely like basic learning so that we can survive, right?
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However, a lot of the ways our brain has been making meaning of things has been false and erroneous because when you were a child, you were making meaning of things with pretty limited cognitive capacity, right? You made things right and wrong, you’ve had more black and white thinking, right? All or nothing thinking. And also, the way you perceive the world is sort of, from a
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sort of an from an egocentric place, right? So you were sort of the sun and everything revolved around you. And that’s okay, if you’re a child, but that’s not reality.
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So with limited understanding of how the world worked, you also had critical belonging and dependency needs that also needed to be met. And so what ended up happening right, what ends up happening for all of us, is that you make meaning of things by person not personalizing a ton of stuff that isn’t yours, right? You personalize how the culture of the systems we grew up in caused you to feel like you need to do things in order to get love or be loved, or, or you have to be different from who you are in order to get love. Right, just because being yourself as you are isn’t enough, or you personalize the way, the ways your parents, for example, weren’t able to show up for you emotionally, or the ways that they couldn’t see you because they were so involved in their own drama and adult problems. Or you personalize the way your teachers were impatient and annoyed with you. Because they were burnt out because they weren’t getting paid enough, or because they were going through a divorce. Or because they had too many students they were being asked to support. You’re personalizing maybe the messages you received from the bullies that teens do at school who are already deeply traumatized and indoctrinated into toxic culture of dominance. And they were cut off from their own hearts, right. So you personalized all those experiences.
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And all of this personalization, absorption and attachment to other people like your, your meat, the meaning that you made from all of those experiences leads up to a distorted self concept where you think you’re too much or not enough. Or you feel shame. Or you feel like
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you feel like you can’t have what other people have, or that you know that you’re exceptional in that way that you can’t have what other people have, or you doubt yourself.
Unknown Speaker 9:16
And, you know, when you sort of accumulate that over a lifetime, you stray so far from who you are, and you believe that if you show up fully as yourself, right, this is sort of how it sort of snowballs and then you end up in a place where you feel like you show up as yourself with your weird, freaky, oddball shadowy or vulnerable human parts.
Unknown Speaker 9:43
You’ll be rejected, criticized, shamed, ostracized, hated, ridiculed, for example.
Unknown Speaker 9:53
Right to get a drink there.
Unknown Speaker 9:56
So all of these it’s these harmful cars
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concepts were attached to that create these distortions, this distorted view of yourself. And from this distorted view, your brain will tell you stories about yourself in an attempt to make meaning and essentially, in an attempt to solve a problem, your brain is not an asshole. Although sometimes I say that, but really, it’s just an attempt for your your brain to find a solution just just like, we need to understand, right? And we we are, like, we grew up in a culture that we like, we’re sort of strategy based, we’re like, we have to fix the problem. Instead of just like being with what is our mind is attempting to solve a problem here about something that’s happening, whether it’s about your business or about something that’s happening in your relationships, right? So let me let me let’s do some examples here. So let’s imagine that you’re launching a group program and nobody’s buying.
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You have maybe like one person in there.
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And you might tell yourself, like, Oh, my God, people hate me. Nobody fucking wants what I’m buying. They think it’s stupid. Like,
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this is just, this is a shitty offer. Yeah, it’s not a good offer.
Unknown Speaker 11:17
So you’re thinking these things. And as you think these things, your nervous system is reliving moments, right? Maybe, maybe your body is sending these messages to your brain, right? Maybe you’re having like a nervous system response, a fear response. And your nervous system is sending all of this information to your brain, and your brain is just kind of like, okay, well, what’s the story? How do we solve the problem to get our fear back down, right, because we were in a fear response, we need to solve this.
Unknown Speaker 11:52
And maybe your brain is sending it to your body, I’m more of a body to brain kind of person, rather than a top down. But
Unknown Speaker 12:01
you know, how you process that information is individual to you, I’m not going to make one or the other wrong. But um,
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but the question here is, what if you didn’t make not having sold a single spot in the program mean anything about you? Like, what? If it has nothing? Like?
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It’s not that it doesn’t have anything to do with you? Right? But but it doesn’t mean anything about you. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Right? When you’re not making when you’ve you know, let’s say a failed launch, right air quotes here. When you don’t make a failed launch mean anything about you? What happens then, is that space opens up for you to get curious about what you could have done differently.
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Could you have posted and reached out more? Maybe there’s some issues around your messages that you could tweak? Right? Could you have invited people more personally into sales calls? Could you have reached out to specific people in order to invite them in? Right?
Unknown Speaker 13:09
So, you know, for me, this happens. This happens a lot. Like this kind of stuff happens a lot more in my personal relationships. I feel like in my business, I feel like I’ve gotten it like I’ve gotten to a really good place about like, not making anything mean anything about me. But even in my personal relationships, like it’s a little bit more challenging. But what happened recently?
Unknown Speaker 13:33
Yeah, somebody, somebody said, I was on a call with somebody. And they were basically like, saying no to me about something. Oh, I was messaging with somebody. And
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they were apologizing for having ghosted me or, you know, they said they were ghosting me and I, I didn’t, I didn’t,
Unknown Speaker 13:57
I didn’t think of them as ghosting me, I didn’t, when they didn’t respond, or when they didn’t, when the connection got cut off.
Unknown Speaker 14:05
Or when the connection dropped. Rather, I didn’t make it mean that they were avoiding me. You know, and, and in my personal relationships, sometimes I can get into those spaces where it’s like, I have someone in my life right now that I’m like, is she avoiding me? Is she avoiding me? And so I’m about to reach out and ask, but I can you know, I’m really like, I can remind myself, I can bring myself back to that place where I’m like, I’m not gonna make it mean anything about me. What if it doesn’t mean anything about me? It probably doesn’t. Right? Like, she’s busy. She’s got kids and a relationship and all this kind of stuff going on. So I’m not going to make it mean anything about me and I can instantly I can, like feel myself kind of like, less, a little less anxious. Okay. So I’m going to another example here. Just gonna give lots of examples so that you sort
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can get it. Another example is how much money you’re making or not making in your business. So in 2021, was the was my was my gap year, right? Because I retired at the end of 2020. As a therapist, I was making six figures. And in 2021, like I sold a lot, like I really focused on selling. I was selling lots of small offers, I was really practicing being relentless about my sales. And I didn’t really make a lot of money that year, I made like, a solid, a solid amount for a first year this in business, right. And I made enough to sustain myself. But because I had made over six figures in the year prior, the dip in my income activated some shift for me, right, I was just like, there were moments where I noticed stories in my brain telling me that I was wrong for having shifted into coaching, when I’d had a very stable job, like, why did you do that? That was stupid. My brain was also telling me a story about not being a good business person, because I couldn’t sell like other people were selling, even though I knew that my services were amazing.
Unknown Speaker 16:12
And I could feel myself like even at times, like being like, well, maybe I’m not as good as other people that are like, that’s not true. That’s not true. You know, or you’re not cut out for entrepreneurship, you can’t keep this up, right? And it’s like, no, but when I decided to not make
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what I had not made in income, anything about me, I was able to practice a healthy detachment between my lived reality, and my sense of self. In other words, that sense of self, that’s that unfuck with a bowl sovereignty, right that that place in you that is just like, non negotiable.
Unknown Speaker 16:54
So another example is, when you get dumped by a client, or by a partner, for that matter, clients sometimes don’t follow through on payments, or they ghost you, or maybe you’re having a sales conversation with somebody and they don’t follow up, maybe they decide your services are too costly, or that there are reasons they decide not to invest. This may bring up a lot of stuff for you. And you know, you might think that they don’t like you, or that you’re not a good coach. And so that’s not, that’s why they decided to stop paying you. Or maybe they don’t think you’re worthy of getting paid.
Unknown Speaker 17:31
Right, you can sort of maybe feel into how those stories, you know, maybe there’s other stories that might come up for you. But when you don’t make it mean anything about you,
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it lets you be open to other possibilities. So maybe they truly forgot to pay you maybe they’re super busy, maybe they forgot to follow up.
Unknown Speaker 17:53
And maybe they would really appreciate you reaching out again. And when it comes to people not deciding to invest, but they’ve expressed interest in working with you, and they have the money to do so. It’s often a reflection of them not being willing to invest in themselves. Right.
Unknown Speaker 18:16
Yeah, and it’s not like, you know, I am not intending to just sort of like, automatically automatically flip things on other people. Like I always want to invite you to even though you’re not making things mean about you to stay curious about what you may have done differently. The whole point is to be self responsible to not just be like, Oh, well, that’s on you, boo, or that sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. That’s not what I’m saying here. It’s really about
Unknown Speaker 18:48
separating the story from your inherent worth. Okay, from your inherent awesomeness. Goodness, if you want to call it goodness of us kind of binary.
Unknown Speaker 19:01
And in the example of a romantic partner, right, this can this can be more challenging to, to hold that space where you’re not making something mean about mean anything about you. It can be more challenging because there’s more intimacy there. It goes deeper into some of our, our tender spots, right, we’ve opened up our hearts and the same reasons apply. So
Unknown Speaker 19:29
people make decisions that are sometimes fear based, protection based and that have absolutely nothing to do with your love ability.
Unknown Speaker 19:40
Right? This is what I want you to remember, like not making other people’s fear, responses. Fear behaviors, mean anything about you. That’s that’s sort of the nuance that I’m wanting you to hold here.
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So personally, personal example here in 2010.
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He had lots of experiences of losing people. And it was
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challenging for me to lean into that place of not making it mean anything about me, while also examining where I was not fully in integrity with my own values.
Unknown Speaker 20:18
And so I was able to sort of dis own the parts that weren’t mine. So this is also like, not making anything, not making anything mean anything about you is a boundary, it is a boundary between the story and your inherent worth, love ability, right, like your core, where you are as a person, your foundational personhood.
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And so what I love about this practice is that I got to remind myself, like, in that year where I lost a lot of people, I got to remind myself over and over again
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that, you know, maybe it wasn’t about me. And I got to lean into the experience into the felt experience of the possibility that it wasn’t about me. So what I want to emphasize here is that it’s not just a mental practice, it’s not something that you’re just telling yourself to tell yourself,
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what you’re doing is leaning into the possibility of the reality that something isn’t about you that you’ve made about you before, that actually isn’t about you. So you have to lean into the experience the felt experience
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of the possibility, leaning into the freedom from the story, and the emotions that accompany the story. So as you’re leaning into the possibility of, well, what if it isn’t about me? Or yeah, what if I don’t make this mean anything about me, and then you have to feel in your body? What it’s like, if you don’t make anything mean anything about you, if you don’t make the situation mean anything about you?
Unknown Speaker 22:00
Okay, I’m gonna say that again, because this is like a key aspect. This is where a lot of people don’t, don’t get it. And don’t, you have to embody this thing, right? You have to feel the emotions. When you’re not making it mean anything about you, you have to feel that part.
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So, I want you to also consider, right where you were using examples where you know, shit happens, and you’re making yourself wrong, you’re having all these detrimental stories about you.
Unknown Speaker 22:34
So let’s think about an example where the opposite is true. Maybe you have hundreds of adoring fans and followers and maybe like, I don’t know, some video you made some Tik Tok video went viral. And all of a sudden, like, people are like, Oh, my God, you have like 200 more people on your email list. And right, so it’s like you’re getting all this attention. People are responding in the comments, you’re getting a ton of engagement, blah, blah, blah.
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Okay, so what if you didn’t make any money, make any of that mean anything about you either, right. Because when you do make it mean something about you, you’re attaching to their adoration, you are using that adoration as a way to feed yourself and feel lovable. And if those people go away, if they stop engaging, you might feel the loss of that love ability. But of course, your love ability doesn’t exist outside of you. Right? So, so the question is, what if you don’t make that adoration mean anything about you?
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Because the truth is, is that, you know, especially on social media,
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but also with people in your lives, like everybody has a perception of you, you could be standing in a room of 100 people. And each person is going to have a version of you in their heads. They’re going to have they’re going to be holding a version of you. They’re going to be holding a version of you that has a particular story attached to it. Right? Maybe they think you’re amazing when you’re like, Yeah, I’m amazing, but I’m also like a just a regular ass person.
Unknown Speaker 24:20
Right? It’s all based on their opinion, their perception, their projection, right? And, you know, some of those projections may be really like, fun to entertain, maybe it’s like, Ooh, yummy. Like this person thinks I’m amazing. I’m the bee’s knees. I’m so wise. You know, that’s awesome. But truly, that has nothing to do with you. And by not making it mean anything about you. You can sort of stay in your lane. You don’t become dependent on, you know, external
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accolades. You know, you can receive them but it’s like, okay, so I’m still human. I’m still
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Just me, you know, so it’s a way to keep the ego neutral.
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You know?
Unknown Speaker 25:09
Yeah, so not making your failures or your successes mean anything about you as a way to find that healthy neutrality, where you’re neither attached to something outside of yourself nor adverse to a situation or circumstance. So you’re not avoiding or attaching. So I want you to imagine this for yourself. Imagine that when shit happens, let’s say you get sick, right? The meaning we we sometimes make when we get sick, is that we somehow deserved it. We didn’t take care of ourselves, or we’re not a good person. Or, you know, I neglected myself and I mean, sick, like sick, sick. I mean, like, you know, disease sick, not flu sick. But yeah, like I did something. I must have done something wrong. karmically. This is karma coming back to bite my ass. I didn’t live my life, right? I wasn’t healthy enough, right? And if you don’t make it mean anything about you, maybe shit just happens randomly.
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Maybe should just fucking happens. And this time it was you. Right? Has nothing to do with something you did. But it was just, it’s just you now.
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And holding that space
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provides a totally different mental, emotional, and spiritual space for you to approach the the situation with, like, for example.
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You may, you may sort of open up to a different spiritual meaning like, maybe shit is just random. Okay, so, you know, we’re not making chronic illness mean anything about me? Yeah, like I didn’t. I’m not holding some fucking karmic.
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You know, bullshit from another lifetime. It’s just like, Okay, well, it just happened. And now I have this and how do I get to work with it now? Right. So just keeps you keeps you neutral. But it also kind of keeps you creative. Like, okay, so so this is happening, right? How can I use this? How can I play with this? How can I co create with this? So the it capacities, I feel like it really really capacitor states, instead of having you recycle a story that isn’t true about you.
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So let’s put this in a totally different context. Totally different. Okay, but relevant. Think about this in terms of your body weight and body shape,
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your body shape, nor its weight mean, absolutely anything about you doesn’t mean anything about you. Being a big bodied, or a fat person doesn’t make you out of control. It doesn’t make you sloppy, or bad at self care. Just the same as being slim or fit doesn’t make you more desirable or more disciplined. Yes, our culture will uphold that. But I’m talking here about the interpersonal peace, right?
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The very deep intrapersonal rather. So what if you didn’t make the way you look mean anything about you?
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How might you eat differently? If you didn’t make your shape? And weight mean anything about you?
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How might you dress differently?
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Would it? Would it open up more space? Would it? Would you feel more freedom and joy? If you didn’t make your weight mean anything about you?
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He’s kind of like, oh, yeah, that feels good.
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So I want you to practice, not making shouldn’t mean anything about you, with whatever you feel the most stories come up around and see what opens up for you. I would love to hear what happens when you not only lean into the thought process into sort of the mindset aspect of it. But the release of emotions that follows when the story is no longer attaching to the sensation.
Unknown Speaker 29:23
Right. What you’re doing here is you’re decoupling two unrelated things that hold a charge.
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Right, these two things have been associated because of our environment, right? Because of how we learned what we learned from the world. We’ve made associations that are not based in reality, right? The fact that you are thin and fit
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uncoupling that from you being a good person,
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right, or or being one
Unknown Speaker 30:00
Ah and a good person, you know or whatever, like, use it however way be creative with it. You’re uncoupled. You’re decoupling or uncoupling two unrelated things. And those two things when they’re together, they hold a charge, right? There’s a, there’s an emotional experience. So when you decouple them, when you uncouple, those two things, where does the emotional charge go? You have to release that through your body.
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You have to release that through your body. And sometimes what happens is that sensation comes up, you start to feel like, you know what I often call like the muck, the muck moving through your system, where the, you’re feeling kind of sludgy, because there is real conditioning moving through your body. And on the days where you feel that you want to be taking extra care of yourself, you want to be drinking lots of water, you want to be aware of like, Oh, you have got that monkey feeling because you’re in a decoupling or uncoupling process, you know, removing story from from ego. This is critical, critical work, in life, in love and in business. And you want to be supporting yourself through that by resting by taking care of yourself by just being really gentle on the days where you feel all that, that shit kind of moving through your system and help it along, obviously, with water movement, breath, right, just moving a little slower in your life. Okay. So I want to hear how this goes for you. I want to hear your reactions, your responses, please tag me on social media. If you listen to this, and you have like an aha moment, I want to hear it. All right. Love you so much. And I’ll see you on the next episode.
Unknown Speaker 31:54
Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Remember to hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episodes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five star review on iTunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission receives it. Until the next episode I’m sending you fierce fierce love.