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Mandy Capehart | The Integration of Grief and Restoration of Self
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
In this week’s heartfelt episode, we dive into the complexities of grief with my special guest, Mandy Capehart – a trauma-informed certified grief educator and somatic embodiment life coach.
Mandy shares her journey through grief, which led her to establish the Restorative Grief Project, an online community dedicated to supporting grievers and those who stand by them. Her book, “Restorative Grief: Embracing Our Losses Without Losing Ourselves,” is a blend of memoir and practical guidebook that offers insight into managing loss.
We touch on topics like:
- The universality of experiencing loss
- Moving beyond minimizing pain
- Navigating uncertainty in times of sorrow
- How our upbringing shapes our understanding of grief
Mandy also delves into how COVID-19 has highlighted the need for greater ‘grief literacy’ – acknowledging that you don’t need death as a reason to grieve. She emphasizes validating experiences rather than dismissing them and discusses how she uses storytelling as a tool for connection and healing.
Moreover, Mandy opens up about personal losses such as miscarriages, providing raw insights into the emotional turmoil they entail while calling out common misconceptions surrounding them.
This episode is not just about dealing with grief but learning from it, embracing vulnerability, and engaging in deeper conversations instead of hiding behind social niceties or sugarcoated interactions.
This conversation provides solace and guidance for anyone grappling with loss or seeking ways to support others in their grieving process.
Key Takeaway:
Grief isn’t solely triggered by death; it encompasses various forms of personal loss and change. The conversation challenges us to confront cultural tendencies that often minimize these experiences or avoid deep discussions.
Mandy’s insights remind us that grieving is not just an emotional process but one that touches every fiber of our being – physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Your story matters. Your pain deserves recognition. And together, we can find pathways toward restoration.
RESOURCES:
CONNECT:
Episode Sponsor: Magic Mind | Use the code “GRIEVINGVOICES” to receive one month free with a 3-month subscription. This special promotion is only for January!
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NEED HELP?
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If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk
00:00:00 – 00:00:16
Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices., If this is your first time listening, welcome., And if you are returning and listening again, thank you for coming back. Today, my guest is Mandy Capehart. She is a trauma-informed certified grief educator and somatic embodiment life coach.
Victoria Volk
00:00:17 – 00:00:47
She’s an author, speaker, and master mindset coach located in the Pacific Northwest. She is the founder of the Restorative Grief Project, an online community of grievers and grief supporters looking for movement while they heal. Her own experience with grief left her searching for resources while offering empathetic long term support without minimizing the pain of the moment. When she found nothing, she created it for herself and for you. Her first book is Titled Restorative Grief, Embracing Our Losses Without Losing Ourselves was released in 2021.
Victoria Volk
00:00:48 – 00:01:19
And this is a memoir and a 31-day guidebook for managing grief and growth in the aftermath of loss, no matter how long it lasts. You can hear more about her work on her podcast, Restorative Grief with Mandy Capehart, or consider working with her 1 on 1 on her website. She has all the resources and I will put those links in the show notes. And she’s a storyteller through and through and always in pursuit of adventure, grace, and opportunities to express gratitude. No matter the medium, her work revolves around learning how to honor our process of becoming.
Victoria Volk
00:01:19 – 00:01:29
She currently lives in Southern Oregon with her husband, daughter, Border Collie Rescue Pup and way too many houseplants. Thank you so much for being here. I too have way too many houseplants. I am told.
Mandy Capehart
00:01:29 – 00:01:43
I know., Right. I mean, I loved houseplants before the pandemic, but it was an easy hobby for me. I think I was up to, like, 95 at one point before I just said, this is a problem. I don’t wanna just let these die, but I also don’t know what to do.
Mandy Capehart
00:01:43 – 00:01:51
And so we’re down to probably a solid 40 now. We’ve recovered. They didn’t die. They were lovingly rehomed, but yeah,
Victoria Volk
00:01:51 – 00:02:05
I have not counted mine, but I know it’s not 40, but I went from like 0 to just kind of like an obsession. I just kept buying and kept buying. Oh, I need another plant. I need another plant.
Mandy Capehart
00:02:05 – 00:02:24
Well, we needed the dopamine. We needed the immediate gratification of something beautiful in our home. We can justify it because plants clarify the air and there are so many collect. It’s like, you know, us elder millennials are, like, barely on the cusp of when Pokemon was, like, practically Introduced. We gotta catch them all.
Mandy Capehart
00:02:24 – 00:02:31
We have to collect every variety of Echeveria that exists. And until then, I will not be satisfied.
Victoria Volk
00:02:32 – 00:02:35
I know it’s like people walk in, welcome to the jungle.
Mandy Capehart
00:02:35 – 00:02:39
Yeah, exactly. It was very, humid in our home for a while.
Victoria Volk
00:02:40 – 00:02:53
I bet. But you know what?, Like you said, it puts oxygen in the air. And when especially living in, like, a rainy climate like yourself or like a snowy cold climate like I where I live and dry. I need all the nature inside.
Mandy Capehart
00:02:53 – 00:02:56
I can get everything I can. Yes. That’s right.
Victoria Volk
00:02:57 – 00:03:18
So we’re not talking about houseplants today. But if we were I’m sure there’s a podcast for that there’s a podcast for everything. That’s right. But today we’re talking about grief, which fortunately for you and I is becoming much more talked about and the work that we were doing. And I think COVID but a huge spotlight on that for everybody.
Victoria Volk
00:03:19 – 00:03:44
Like, hey, nobody has to die for you to grieve. Right? And so I guess let’s, I really want to start out with kind of your origin story as to what led you into the work that you’re doing today, because I know firsthand for myself and everyone that I’ve talked to on this podcast for every guest I’ve had, their work is really born out of their story. So where would you like to begin?
Mandy Capehart
00:03:45 – 00:04:35
Yeah, we’ve got this legacy as wounded healers. And when we get to that
point of recognizing where the needle moved for us, we can start to develop a way to, offer it to others. And so for me, I don’t remember a time in my life that I didn’t have some form of grief event, whether it was a person dying, a person moving away, divorce, relationship loss, illness. There was always something or someone leaving my world, my circle of influence. And so I, as a young person, did what we all do and stuffed it down and became very outwardly loud and big and vivacious and tried to live a very happy, playful life because I didn’t have the tools to navigate the loss I was experiencing.
Mandy Capehart
00:04:35 – 00:05:08
And that’s not to say that my parents didn’t know what they were doing because in a lot of ways they did, but at the same time, they were also very young when they had me. And so as we all experienced these losses together, including their, divorce when I was pretty young, I think I was 9. It doesn’t It just didn’t translate until I was older. And so, instead of giving you a list all the people I’ve lost in stories, I’m just gonna jump ahead because when my mom died in 2016, this month, it’ll be 7 years, I think. That right?
Mandy Capehart
00:05:08 – 00:05:30
Good math. It was pretty sudden. It was after after a few months of cancer treatment and unexpected, illness on top of that. And so I spent the next 4 years quitting everything I knew. I stepped down from being a worship leader of 16 years at my church.
Mandy Capehart
00:05:30 – 00:06:15
I pulled away from the career, I almost became a youth pastor so that I could move closer to being near her. It would have been the absolute worst position for me and all the children would have like perished under my anger because I was in so much pain, but I was willing to do anything to try and get close to her while she was going through, treatment. And I’m very grateful that didn’t happen. But I realized in 2020 when January started, I was starting the year with a miscarriage with the anniversary of losing my mom with a job loss and with a former employer, spreading gossip about me. And so I was in, like, trauma city all by myself.
Mandy Capehart
00:06:15 – 00:06:32
And then I’m starting to hear on the news about COVID and pandemics, and I became really guarded and angry about it. Like, hey, guys. 2020 is my year to have a mess. Everybody get it together. And in March, when our school shut down and I lost another job, I realized this is not the world I can live in.
Mandy Capehart
00:06:32 – 00:07:17
I cannot live in a world where there are going to be generations of untended grief and a complete lack of understanding and brief literacy. So I started writing my story down. That was where the book came from, over the course of a couple months, I just went through everything that I had experienced that was encouraging and positive to me, both within the of my faith and without it looking for pathways forward that were relatable to others, that could be relatable. Not just like this is what worked for me. So it will work for you, but creating more of an invitation into exploring what might be possible through these different methods of approaching our grief and ourselves differently.
Mandy Capehart
00:07:17 – 00:08:02
And as the book was finished, there was a wildfire in our town that destroyed 25100 homes. So I got firsthand an opportunity to not only share this work of my heart and to connect with people I knew who lost their homes and were now survivors of this wildfire. There were 3 people who died as well, but I also took that into this idea of what if I became a coach around the idea of what it means to grieve and to survive. And so I took my my personal background, my educational background, and poured it all into this, practice that I’ve built. And it just has transformed everything I expected my life to become.
Mandy Capehart
00:08:02 – 00:08:09
I always knew I’d be a writer. Right? We always have those threads. I always knew I’d be a writer. I’m very, people driven.
Mandy Capehart
00:08:09 – 00:08:29
So I always knew I’d be working with people. I never expected that I’d be working as a grief and trauma educator, showing up for people in their worst moments and sitting with them through the enormity of it. So that’s my quickest way to describe why I decided grief and death were the things I wanted to talk about all day long.
Victoria Volk
00:08:30 – 00:08:38
Kind of similar to my story. Started very young. How old were you when you had your first loss that you can recall?
Mandy Capehart
00:08:42 – 00:08:58
I mean, I was probably that I can recall would be my great grandmother. My grandparents are all I mean, every generation is at 10, 20 years, 19 to 20 years of each other. So I knew all of my great grandparents., Wow. And a couple of my great great grandparents.
Mandy Capehart
00:09:00 – 00:09:16
Wow. I’m sorry. It was my great great grandmother, Selma, who died when I was 3. And I have memories of sitting in her kitchen and being with her and having her read to me. And that I would say that would probably be the earliest loss I can recall.
Mandy Capehart
00:09:16 – 00:09:23
And at that age, what do you know? You’re 3 and great grandma great great grandma’s almost just not around anymore. We don’t have framework for it. But,
Victoria Volk
00:09:25 – 00:09:37
Yeah. Do you know what’s fascinating though? By age 3, we have learned 75% of our of our awarenesses of how to respond to life.
Mandy Capehart
00:09:37 – 00:09:40
Right? It’s wild. Like it’s in there’s
Victoria Volk
00:09:40 – 00:09:53
no conscious, conscious recollection and hindsight about that. But yeah. By that, we’re sponges. So how young were your parents when they had you?
Mandy Capehart
00:09:53 – 00:10:00
I think my mom was 20, 21. My dad was 24. Sounds right.
Victoria Volk
00:10:01 – 00:10:06
And you knew your great, great grandparents? Yeah. Wow. That’s fascinating. Yeah.
Victoria Volk
00:10:06 – 00:10:07
Incredible, really.
Mandy Capehart
00:10:07 – 00:10:24
Yeah, I mean, my grandmother is in her eighties now and consistent. Like we’ve stopped correcting people. That is my mom. We just don’t correct anyone because people assume it is my mom because the age range makes sense.
Mandy Capehart
00:10:24 – 00:10:31
Right? And with my aunts, people assume that we’re sisters and I’m just like, you can have it. Take it. Like, sure. We’re sisters.
Mandy Capehart
00:10:31 – 00:10:41
It doesn’t bother me. It’s who cares? But it’s interesting the way that we perceive age gaps. That’s a whole other conversation, but anyway. Yeah.
Mandy Capehart
00:10:41 – 00:10:42
Young family.
Victoria Volk
00:10:42 – 00:10:58
What did you find yourself saying the most during COVID, to others? What was the story that was playing in your head over and over as you were kind of reflecting on your losses, as you’re writing your book, as you were working with other grievers and talking to other grievers.
Mandy Capehart
00:10:59 – 00:11:55
Yeah. I think a lot of what I experienced personally and also in the stories of others was this pain around being minimized and dismissed. So in my immediate family, I have an immune disorder in our family. And so we were really guarded and absolutely afraid of the unknown and the uncertainty of this pandemic and what would be happening. And we did lose people that we knew and where I would support others and be working with people around the fear of that was invalidating was through validating the stories that they were telling as well and through validating their experiences and helping them to validate and not minimize the enormity of their experiences, their emotions, their sensations in their body, like we as a people, and maybe just this is western culture.
Mandy Capehart
00:11:55 – 00:12:39
I don’t know. Became so quick to justify and minimize our responses for survival so
we could socially still belong or mentally not cave under the pressure of choosing all of these black and white dichotomous opportunities that were handed to us. I feel like there was so much of you’re either with me or you’re against me and, and that in and of itself is a distorted way of thinking, but it’s also such an eliminator of that gray space, that grief exists within. Right? We cannot navigate grief without recognizing it is all gray space.
Mandy Capehart
00:12:39 – 00:13:13
There really is no black and white. And so when I would come up against those black and white thinking patterns in clients and in friends and family members. It was an exercise in, do I wanna do this for a long period of time or is this just the COVID reaction to losing my job and having to pivot and having zero certainty for the foreseeable future. And so it really transformed into this understanding of, oh, no, certainty is the lie. Certainty is the addiction.
Mandy Capehart
00:13:13 – 00:13:32
What does that look like then as a griever and even as a grief professional to help individuals not minimize their fear of certainty or their fear of a lack of certainty, and come to embrace uncertainty and all of its beauty and all of its gray space and all of its opportunity, to find healing.
Victoria Volk
00:13:33 – 00:13:51
What were the lessons that you were taught about grief as you grew up within your family? Like, how did how did that because you had a lot of grief in your life growing up. Yeah. How was that shaped your belief before you knew now what you know. Right?
Victoria Volk
00:13:53 – 00:13:57
Like, what were you taught about grief and how to grieve?
Mandy Capehart
00:13:57 – 00:14:09
You know, not a lot. I think and keeping in mind, like, this is the early nineties. Right? Late eighties, early nineties. We, weren’t necessarily stiff upper lip people.
Mandy Capehart
00:14:10 – 00:14:21
We were very strong back. We can do this, push through it. There’s always a solution. You’ll figure it out. Just keep going kind of people.
Mandy Capehart
00:14:21 – 00:15:05
My dad still to this day says work smart, not hard. And so as a young griever, I can I translated that to It’s hard to grieve, so I will work smart by not grieving and just truly minimize my own experience so that I can do the task in front of me? And I think that that’s a pretty, pretty expected and universal response to grieve as a child, I also think I was watching my parents grieve. And when I was a teenager, I remember having a distinct moment of deciding, oh, my parents are human. So I’m sitting back here angry with them, grieving everything that they’ve gone through, that they’ve put us through trying to survive this ongoing grief experiences that we’re having.
Mandy Capehart
00:15:05 – 00:15:31
And yet I have failed to see them as people as well who are at that time 30. And I think now to when I was 30 and realizing, oh my God, I was no one knew what they were doing. I was a mess at 30. Even for as much as I had figured out, I was a immature trying to just prove that I knew what I was doing and I was valuable in the world. What if my parents were in similar boats?
Mandy Capehart
00:15:31 – 00:16:14
And so I think even grandparents and extended family members had their own opinions about grief. And there were some very strong, religious influences on part of our family, which was, of course, a different layer to how people wanted to navigate grief or not navigated at all., But I feel like it just wasn’t really a conversation to the degree that when my mom died, that following she died right after Christmas, not following Christmas. I went back home for the holidays and remember thinking this is gonna be either a mess or the most restorative experience we could ever have together. Like this is a definitive Christmas gathering.
Mandy Capehart
00:16:14 – 00:16:28
What do I wanna do about it? What do I wanna bring to this family? So the first night I brought bourbon and I got everyone really sick and hungover the next day. And we all pretended we weren’t hungover, which was in retrospect, my favorite thing. We were just like, wow, I don’t feel good.
Mandy Capehart
00:16:28 – 00:16:40
What did we eat yesterday? And I was like, guys, we drank too much bourbon. I don’t know why that’s unclear. Why aren’t we admitting? But that was such a perfect example of like, oh, we’re all grieving as well, and we’re not admitting it.
Mandy Capehart
00:16:40 – 00:16:54
Okay, It opened it up so that I was able to say, hey, this whole denial thing is not serving us. We’ve tried for a year to survive on our own. It does not work. And so now I’m going to start asking you guys some really vulnerable questions.
Mandy Capehart
00:16:55 – 00:17:10
And even if it’s just for me, if you need to believe that you’re answering those questions so that I can heal. That’s fine. But don’t shut down. Don’t pull back. And so it’s really become this family that I mean, still still grieving.
Mandy Capehart
00:17:10 – 00:17:31
Like I said off air, I have an aunt who’s in the hospital right now for cancer and her daughter is in the hospital as well for some medical crisis, that she’s been navigating. And these are not simple, small things. These are not I had a wart removed operations. Right? It’s still a family unit where we can say, this is horrible.
Mandy Capehart
00:17:31 – 00:18:13
How do we survive this? How do we hold each other In the midst of the uncertainty of if we’ll survive it or not, if our family members will be okay. So I think that, lack of grief literacy kind of articulated in my childhood is a big part of why now, despite the discomfort, despite the, pushback I get when I bring it up in certain situations when people just wanna have a good time. I don’t care. I’ve seen the benefit of pushing into those uncomfortable places and teaching both myself and my nervous system, how to remain aligned and resting even amid what feels like a threat to my health and my mental stability.
Mandy Capehart
00:18:13 – 00:18:21
Grief can disrupt all of that. And yet it can also be the doorway into like binding restoration in that area as well.
Victoria Volk
00:18:21 – 00:19:02
The thing I heard you say in I’ll say it how I heard it is that there’s this deep desire to have deeper conversations instead of all that surface level stuff. And, I’ve even found myself, I’ll be out and about mingling in the bar or whatever with friends and I’ll say something and they’ll look at me like, okay. Yeah. That’s, that’s too depressing. They’re kind of like, to be not to be the Debbie downer, but it’s like, let’s, I have friends too where it’s like, I don’t I don’t even know what their dreams are.
Victoria Volk
00:19:02 – 00:19:08
Yeah. But I know if I ask them, it’s like, why are you asking me that? Like, they don’t want to talk about it. Like,
Mandy Capehart
00:19:08 – 00:19:33
Sure. You know, I think often whether they wanna talk about it or they don’t have an answer or they haven’t gotten through the the layer of, but what if it doesn’t workout. But what if I can’t the uncertainty. Right? They their relationship to uncertainty is directly impacted by their desire to control the outcome and control their experiences.
Mandy Capehart
00:19:33 – 00:19:57
And I think those uncomfortable conversations, those deeper conversations are sacred ground. We’re asking someone to step forward and be seen and be known and to not have the answers. And certainly, it’s a collective approach. Right? It’s collective healing that I’m inviting people into when I say, share your deepest, darkest moments with me.
Mandy Capehart
00:19:57 – 00:20:14
Tell me what you’re afraid of, because guess what? You’re not only totally valid and being afraid of that. I’m afraid of that too. But now what do we perceive each other to be less than or weak or an trustworthy? Like, I don’t know.
Mandy Capehart
00:20:14 – 00:20:50
I see that depth and that willingness to be seen as such a a flag of safety. My aunt the other day, a different aunt was telling me how this family member in the hospital is the strongest person that she knows and gave all this evidence. And I responded, it takes one to know one. And I say that because you lost my mom, your sister, you’ve experienced heartache after heartache. And here you are In person, caring for our family members that are in the hospital all by yourself.
Mandy Capehart
00:20:50 – 00:21:13
And while I would, if I could drop everything and come to you, our lives are very different and she has that ability. What does that what does it look like to be supported by me right now? Like, you don’t have to be so strong all the time too. And I think when we can finally tell people that you don’t have to be strong, like you don’t have to keep being strong. I personally hate it when someone’s like, oh my gosh, you’re so strong.
Mandy Capehart
00:21:13 – 00:21:32
And I was like, no. What you see, because you’re not safe for me to not be strong, is the strength. You see the backbone. The soft tender side of me is available to people who aren’t going to disrespect or diminish me. And to be honest, I show that side to a lot of people now, but when I was younger, not so much.
Mandy Capehart
00:21:32 – 00:21:59
And I think being able to just call that tenderness out in people toward themselves, right? Show yourself your tender side. Be honest with how much you’re carrying and let’s see if we can’t offload some of that weight simply by Identifying and addressing it and letting it move through our life and our story and our experiences. So it’s not Debbie Downer to me to bring up like deepest, darkest fears in the bar. That is the moment of vulnerability that I can say, hey.
Mandy Capehart
00:21:59 – 00:22:14
Your walls are down and you’re with safe people, If I’m not a safe person, probably don’t invite me to drinks again, because alcohol is gonna make you say and do things you don’t want me to remind you of the next day. Otherwise, I must be a safe person because I’m here. So let’s just be real. K?
Mandy Capehart
00:22:14 – 00:22:28
Because we’ve got limited time. We don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Tell me what should tell me what hurts. Let’s talk through it and just bear witness to each other in a way that we’ve been discouraged from doing.
Victoria Volk
00:22:29 – 00:22:38
Yeah. I made sugar cookies recently and I was just thinking, yep. Just like sugarcoating. Just it’s it’s that. I mean, it’s a terrible Yeah.
Victoria Volk
00:22:38 – 00:22:46
Literal sugar coating. That’s what we do. Right. And yeah, like you said, just to get real. Let’s get real.
Victoria Volk
00:22:47 – 00:23:03
I don’t want to gloss over something you said because, I feel like it’s an important lost to talk about because there’s not just you, it’s also your partner involved. But you had, shared that you had lost had a miscarriage.
Mandy Capehart
00:23:04 – 00:23:19
Oh, yeah. I actually don’t know how many miscarriages I’ve had. We got married pretty I was early twenties and our daughter was born when I was 30. And so we had years of infertility. We weren’t trying right away.
Mandy Capehart
00:23:19 – 00:23:51
But when we did start, just years of infertility and the undeniable pain that goes with that is when they come on and say like, oh, we’re not sure why everything about you is normal. I’m like, cool. Except that my body can’t do the one thing that like It was created to do okay. Like all of the uncertainty, every question and, anybody who’s ever experienced infertility knows immediately the question is like, what did I do wrong? What am I doing wrong?
Mandy Capehart
00:23:51 – 00:24:14
Is it because I did x y z. If there’s religious trauma on top of it, there’s all of that blame that comes along from a spiritual side as well. There was so much, built in. And then we so our daughter was born in, 2014 as a miracle. Like she was a surprise and I was terrified the entire pregnancy.
Mandy Capehart
00:24:15 – 00:24:25
And then a few years later, of course, in 2020, on New Year’s Eve, I knew I was pregnant. I looked at my husband. I’m like, I’m pregnant. And he’s like, really? Did you take a test?
Mandy Capehart
00:24:25 – 00:24:41
Are you kidding? That doesn’t make sense. How how do you know? And I was like, no, I just, I have a feeling. And I tested positive a couple of days later and started bleeding a couple of days after that and just sat with it because it was the one I knew about.
Mandy Capehart
00:24:41 – 00:25:23
It was the one I had a test, a positive, Oh my God. Is this really happening? Experience, especially 4 years after losing mom and realizing, like, the hope I had placed in that little pregnancy, it was interesting because I remember feeling very much, and this is similar to how I felt in the week after my mom died, feeling very much that, okay, I can safeguard and bear in mind. This is before I wrote my book or any of the like, started doing any of this work really professionally. I’ve been speaking publicly and leading a small, church in a bar for years up until then.
Mandy Capehart
00:25:23 – 00:26:28
But, and so I talked about loss and grief plenty of times, but this was really a moment where I again decided, okay, I can choose to numb myself and step away from the hope of ever having another baby from the fullness of what this means and what it doesn’t mean, or I can choose to really lean in to both the grief I’m going to experience from this and the stillness I need to heal because it is not a the misunderstanding of what a miscarriage does to a human body is so offensive is the best way I can put it. Like the lack of understanding people have about what actually happens and what you’re experiencing. I had to give myself a lot of permission to be tender and still, and unproductive. I’m extremely busy and productive when you were listing all the things in my bio was like, jeez, I have done so many things. Maybe it’s time to calm down a bit.
Mandy Capehart
00:26:28 – 00:26:44
But, anyway, the sensation even of having the pregnancy and knowing, oh, I’ve got untold number of miscarriages in my past. What do I do? Do I Dream. Do I hope? Do I pretend I’m not pregnant?
Mandy Capehart
00:26:45 – 00:27:02
Do I wait? Do I tell anyone? Do I panic? I chose hope I chose to lean in fully and say, I’m going to imagine our life with another baby. I’m going to lean fully in and completely invest.
Mandy Capehart
00:27:02 – 00:27:26
And so when, the miscarriage began, I had to tell my husband. Yep. I’m going to lean fully into the loss here too. And not just for me, although I will say his ability to support me has often been at the expense of him supporting himself. And that’s a, that’s a whole nother topic of how to help your grieving partner.
Mandy Capehart
00:27:26 – 00:27:43
Right. But it’s been a very healing journey for us to come back together and really talk About what that meant and what it means ongoing. And yeah, miscarriage is a very, very nuanced experience of loss.
Victoria Volk
00:27:43 – 00:27:54
What would you like to say and clarify for people about what you said, how the misconception about miscarriage and what it does to them.
Mandy Capehart
00:27:55 – 00:28:07
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think It comes back to that recognition that we are holistic beings. We are heart, mind, body, spirit. We are not just a body. We are not just a mind.
Mandy Capehart
00:28:07 – 00:28:54
We are not just the emotions that we feel. And when we approach ourselves from a disjointed perspective trying to heal, trying to experience grief. We dismiss the wisdom that we have carried from all of our other experiences into this moment where we could integrate them together and actually experience healing. And so I say that in regards to miscarriage because the emotional impact, the true emotions, the things I’m feeling in my heart, the thoughts I’m thinking about the miscarriage itself, about the loss of my future, about the rationale behind what happened and why about the debate internally. Is it a baby?
Mandy Capehart
00:28:54 – 00:29:03
Is it a fetus? Is it viable? Is it not? What will people say? What will people think like the mental fireworks that are just exploding left and right?
Mandy Capehart
00:29:03 – 00:29:25
And then that piritual side. And, in my framework, there’s sort of grief framework. Spirit refers to that connection to self, to others, relationally to the world, at large. And then if there is a spiritual practice to our sense of higher power. But all of those pieces have to be included, honored, and addressed when we’re healing.
Mandy Capehart
00:29:25 – 00:29:38
And I think with miscarriages, because there have been such again, black and white perspectives discerning. Okay. It’s just a scientific process. I don’t know if you’ve read Becoming Michelle Obama’s first book. It’s beautiful.
Mandy Capehart
00:29:39 – 00:29:50
She tells the story of her miscarriage and she’s very practical. She’s like, it it was just a clump of cells to me. And so and that’s how she moves through it in the book. And I sat with it for a long time because to some degree. Yeah.
Mandy Capehart
00:29:50 – 00:30:19
Totally. Just like not viable outside of me, scientific process. And like I said, I don’t know how many I’ve had. I had such irregular cycles that I’ve probably had multiple. And yet here I am choosing hope on the front of that and saying, if I don’t lean fully in with my emotions, with my mind and with my sense of connection to this little clump of cells, then I may miss out on the fullness of what this experience can be.
Mandy Capehart
00:30:19 – 00:30:57
I think when we discredit people who have babies and who can carry life and put them into this well, and you see this in legislation right now, everywhere. We’ve minimized their personhood as autonomous individuals. We’ve minimized their ability to advocate for themselves, which is because we don’t think it’s important. We don’t see the enormity of what life and giving life and going through all of the steps of that can be. So I think that the misconception of like, oh my gosh, you’ve had a miscarriage.
Mandy Capehart
00:30:57 – 00:31:13
I’ve had some too. That immediate centering of yourself in someone else’s experience when they share with you. Right. When they are real and vulnerable and honest is a reflection of that other person’s discomfort. Like, I’m not comfortable with you telling me that you’re hurting.
Mandy Capehart
00:31:13 – 00:31:25
So I’ll just say I’ve been there. We don’t have to talk about it. I’ve been there too. And that goes to all grief experiences. People center themselves and minimize pain easily.
Mandy Capehart
00:31:25 – 00:32:12
But I think, at the crux of it would be recognizing the individual experience of a miscarriage or infertility or pregnancy loss or child loss. They’re so complicated and nuanced because there’s every day a reminder that you’ve experienced this loss where I can say, oh, man, my memories of my mom come back probably every day in some way or another, or my grandfather or any of these people that I’ve lost. Those come up so differently than the miscarriages do because I have a little girl who’s constantly, she’s backed off now, but begged for a sibling for years every day. And how do you explain to a little girl? Well, mommy can’t.
Mandy Capehart
00:32:12 – 00:32:17
Mommy’s tried. You had one. Kind of. Maybe. I don’t know.
Mandy Capehart
00:32:17 – 00:32:35
And then you spiral again right down that same mental explosion of, I don’t even know how to think about this without hearing the input from judgmental voices and critical voices Oliver. It’s a long way to answer that question, but there’s a lot about it on my mind.
Victoria Volk
00:32:36 – 00:32:45
And you bring up a very good point in that for your daughter. That’s a grieving experience too of not having a sibling. Right? Yep. Maybe that’s a book you could write.
Mandy Capehart
00:32:45 – 00:32:58
Oh, man. The other day she, well, I guess it was a couple of years ago. I found a piece of paper she’d written on that said reminder, biggest reminder of your life. She was probably 6 or 7. Mom is willing to adopt a baby sister.
Mandy Capehart
00:32:58 – 00:33:13
And I was like, oh, child. Again, like, immune disorder, constant treatment happening in our house. So our lives are not simple. Adoption would not not that that’s simple, but no easy path forward on it. It was pretty hard to read that.
Mandy Capehart
00:33:13 – 00:33:37
And then fast forward a couple of years the other day, she was saying to a friend, hey, guess what? I’m an only child, so you should come to my house because we can do anything and there’s no one taking our toys. We don’t have to include any siblings. And I just thought, thank God she’s embracing the positive because I was not an only child and yet we were years apart. And so it felt a lot like I had both the best of both worlds, I think.
Mandy Capehart
00:33:37 – 00:33:41
So it’s interesting. Yeah, that would be, that would be quite a book.
Victoria Volk
00:33:43 – 00:34:00
And I think, in grief recovery, we talk about replacing the loss. Right. And so as children, one of our first losses is usually an animal or a pet, or let’s say a dog, and then the parents say, well, that’s okay, Sally. We can just go to the pet store and get a new dog tomorrow. You know, like, right?
Victoria Volk
00:34:00 – 00:34:24
And so I was just thinking about that, like, when she asked for a sibling, it’s like, well, maybe we can start with a puppy, but then at the same time, it’s, it’s minimizing, right? The loss of hope, dreams and expectations that she had for her life, sharing it with the sibling. Right? And that’s gonna be a grief story she’ll grow into tube. And like you said, it’s I think that would be a very important book.
Mandy Capehart
00:34:25 – 00:34:38
We have to move into that space of both and. Right? We can both grieve the loss of a sibling and celebrate the life we have. They don’t cancel each other out. They don’t negate.
Mandy Capehart
00:34:38 – 00:35:04
When we were, let’s see. I was probably 14 when my stepmom’s dog died, and we loved Riley. She was the sweetest black lab, and she was full of energy, and she ran in front of a vehicle and didn’t survive. And it was probably 6 months later and that my we were grieving and my stepmom was really like, I miss Riley so much. I want another pet, but I don’t know if I’m ready.
Mandy Capehart
00:35:04 – 00:35:30
I had found golden retriever puppies for sale in the newspaper like that weekend. And we were on the way to go. Like our weekend plans were, do we go get this puppy or do we go see this musician at the park? This musician that I loved and I was convinced if I just met him at 14, he would want to marry me and we would just have to have a long courtship because I was a child. I did not marry that musician, but I did marry a musician.
Mandy Capehart
00:35:30 – 00:36:00
But anyway, I, like, remember my stepmom saying, I’m not sure if I’m ready, but I guess we can go meet these dogs. And when we got there, they were in squalor. Like my dad got in this guy’s face and said, if you don’t just hand me this puppy at this price point That I’m saying, because the guy wanted 1,000 of dollars for these dogs that were being abused. He said, I’m gonna report you to the city for illegally, breeding these dogs and keeping them, abusing them. And of course we reported them anyway, but we took home this, the runt of the litter that was covered in its own filth.
Mandy Capehart
00:36:00 – 00:36:30
And, and my stepmom realized I was ready not to replace Riley, but to invite an opportunity to love another little Cue another little creature and an experience that reciprocated affection. Right. And so tucker moved in with us and was amazing until he died as well. But, it’s, it’s remarkable. We, I know that story is so different.
Mandy Capehart
00:36:30 – 00:36:49
I know most people who would have partners can tell you stories of their partners who’ve just brought home another pet or something like that and said, don’t worry. Now you don’t have to be sad anymore. And again, it’s that minimizing of our experiences. Instead of recognizing we can integrate the experiences together for a more holistic and restorative and healing experience.
Victoria Volk
00:36:50 – 00:36:52
I look forward to that book you write.
Mandy Capehart
00:36:54 – 00:36:55
Both hands. Got it. Okay.
Victoria Volk
00:36:56 – 00:37:07
Well, and I think I think your daughter would be a beautiful you know, she could almost see herself as the character in that book. Right. And probably help you write it. Yeah., She’s a brilliant little writer.
Victoria Volk
00:37:07 – 00:37:07
She,
Mandy Capehart
00:37:09 – 00:37:24
She could write it herself. I think that that’s part of it is recognizing too, like, that is also her story, and that is something that she deserves to be the one the authority of. And as parents, it’s easy for us to say like, hey, we’ve got the perspective. We’ve got the age. We’ve got the experience.
Mandy Capehart
00:37:24 – 00:37:55
We know better. And that’s one thing with our kiddo that we’re trying to raise her with is a sense of autonomy where she can push back on us. She can ask questions that are really hard when they come to mind and that she can walk away from conversations with unsatisfying answers and not not to the degree where mom and dad said so, and that’s why. But this, like, that didn’t clarify or that didn’t answer anything because mom and dad don’t have the answer. They don’t act they’re not actually infallible.
Mandy Capehart
00:37:55 – 00:38:23
Okay. What does that mean for me? And at the same time, she’s like, she’s 9. We’re trying very hard to protect her from the enormity of all the things and keep her young and keep her innocent as much as possible as in this stage, but, but giving her a chance to just have a childhood. Like, she experienced losing her nana, when she was 1a half, and my mom had moved across the state to help care for her when I needed to go back to work.
Mandy Capehart
00:38:23 – 00:39:18
And so we had a very special relationship that my daughter doesn’t remember. And I think she deserves to experience what that mean what she has carried with her from that loss in her body and how it shows up for her. I mean, anxious kids are a dime a dozen these days with how life happens around us, but it’s a very special opportunity for us to teach them differently than we were taught and to help them understand how to move through anxiety and stress and fear of loss In ways that we really needed when we were young. And that means getting really uncomfortable and not being able to just fix it or answer it away or explain it away. There’s a lot of when you’re older, I’ll go more in-depth, but for now, please take this information and hold onto it as fact and trust me that, I’ll share more later, but
Victoria Volk
00:39:19 – 00:39:50
So far, Mandy has shared some beautiful bits of wisdom with us all, and she’s going to continue in a few moments with some practical tips. But first, I just wanted to share a word from my sponsor, MagicMind. Consistently creating new content isn’t easy, and it does require a lot of focus and energy. And it can be hard to balance them. Either you have too much energy and you feel amped up and, like, you’re ready to bounce off the walls instead of feeling dialed in.
Victoria Volk
00:39:50 – 00:40:28
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Victoria Volk
00:40:28 – 00:40:58
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Victoria Volk
00:40:58 – 00:41:19
Let’s get back to the episode so Mandy can share some more of her wonderful wisdom with us. That’s a great lead to, into my next question in people listening, who are just really walking through a really difficult time. What, what is, what are some practical things that you can suggest to those people.
Mandy Capehart
00:41:19 – 00:41:43
Yeah. Well, absolutely. As a somatic practitioner, I am very, very hopeful when people are willing to pay attention to the sensations that are happening in their body. Like, we’re really quick to disconnect, like I said, our heart and our mind and our body and our spirit because we think we can think our way through a problem. If that were the case, we would have no more problems.
Mandy Capehart
00:41:43 – 00:41:52
So, like, that’s an easy dismissal. No, girl. You can’t think through that problem. No arguments against, like, the mental exercises., I get it.
Mandy Capehart
00:41:52 – 00:42:31
There’s value in them sometimes, but, ruminating takes it too far. So I think that keeping ourselves humble enough to say, maybe there’s something in my body that I can sense that will bring me some wisdom. There are a lot of somatic practices that I share, on my Instagram page and through my podcast and the work that I do, because I want these practical Habits to become the things that we go to first. Right? So in our neuroplasticity world, we know our brain can be we know that even just imagining a thing can cause our nervous system to react.
Mandy Capehart
00:42:32 – 00:43:16
And so if that is true, then the inverse is true of the way that we heal and the way that we can experience positive things as well. So if I imagine a bear is standing in front of me threatening my family, my nervous system is going to say, hey, holy crap. You should probably strategize and run away. And so the same is true of peaceful experiences and moving through loss and even restoring relationship with people that we’ve lost. And so engaging the somatic, the body, the nervous system in ways that, might feel a little a little, uncomfortable or maybe a little have some skepticism attached to it is one of my favorite ways to bring people in because the the Feel Your Feelings crowd, which we’ve all done that.
Mandy Capehart
00:43:17 – 00:43:42
And it was very popular for a while. It, for me, I witnessed it transform into good vibes only, which is probably like the one phrase that I would eradicate from the common collective, if I could. I hear good vibes only. And I see I what I actually hear is my neutral vibes aren’t welcome. My human existence isn’t welcome here.
Mandy Capehart
00:43:44 – 00:44:11
So, yeah, I would say start with recognizing going beyond just trying to think your way through a problem or let me just feel this and then I’ll feel better. That’s not true, but Your body is in internalizing and holding all of the things that you’ve experienced and to invite those things gently and very carefully with guidance to the surface and to get some wisdom and just some compassion for the things you’ve carried is really important.
Victoria Volk
00:44:12 – 00:44:21
I wanna ask something. You just mentioned it. You said restoring of the relationship with someone you’ve lost. Can you elaborate on that?
Mandy Capehart
00:44:21 – 00:44:42
Yes I can., Okay. So this is going to, might be slightly activating for people who have been In situations and I’ll say this just spiritually or even like religious situations where we talk about prayer or we talk about, afterlife. So bear with me. That framework is where I come from.
Mandy Capehart
00:44:42 – 00:45:20
Right? I have a strong background in different Flavors of Western Christianity. But where I’m going with that is this idea that If a person is removed from us often, whether through divorce breakup, literally moving away, or death, we often think, okay, I have to find closure and it’s going to look like whatever Hollywood tells me it looks like. So we get this idea in our head about what closure is, and we pursue that. And when it doesn’t work, because it typically does not work, we give up.
Mandy Capehart
00:45:20 – 00:45:55
We just think, okay, I guess that’s it. The truth is, if I can imagine a scenario where my nervous system will literally calm back down from a bear in front of me, then does it not stand a reason that I can imagine a connection to the person I’ve lost, a conversation with the person I’ve lost, not to deify them, not to put them on a pedestal and say they were perfect and did no wrong, and I’m the problem. And now I’m having better thoughts about myself. That’s not it. But to the degree where we can say, I’m gonna confront.
Mandy Capehart
00:45:55 – 00:46:16
Here’s an example. My mom with all of her heart led a very private life. There were things after she died that I learned about. There were things as she, as a teenager that I learned about that I could never about or ask about. At one point I was wrestling with something and realized, oh, this is connected to that story.
Mandy Capehart
00:46:16 – 00:46:41
I know about my mom’s life, But I’m not in a place where I can call my grandmother or my aunt or my dad. I don’t have capacity to have a conversation and have them worry about protecting her reputation or her experience. Right. She told me what she told me because she needed that was what I was welcome to be prepared YouTube. But what I knew had affected me and I was carrying it and I needed to process.
Mandy Capehart
00:46:41 – 00:47:19
And so I sat down and started to write a letter about I’m pissed off at you for not sharing and being honest, or I’m hurt that you didn’t share this, or I see that you’re human, but, like, why couldn’t you trust me? Whatever whatever the feelings were. What I ended with was this experience that ended up being verbal. I didn’t write it all down, but I was crying and feeling seen and held by my mom unable to respond. I wasn’t imagining what I ended with wasn’t this experience of, like high spirituality where I would say, oh my gosh.
Mandy Capehart
00:47:19 – 00:47:51
I’m healed from that wound with my mom just not disclosing something. I ended this cathartic expression of just not being able to be honest about what I’ve been carrying. All of the emotion of feeling untrusted and feeling unseen or feeling unworthy of hearing this hard thing in my mom’s life. Even the losses connected to it because, you know, I learn a piece of information and my brain goes to, well, what did that mean for me if that had happened? If it hadn’t happened now in the in between, what does it mean for me?
Mandy Capehart
00:47:51 – 00:48:10
All of those pieces that felt so open ended didn’t necessarily feel like closure. They felt like integrated. It felt like I could ask those questions and not fall to pieces. It felt like I could approach it with a sense of clarity but, yeah, there are still uncertainties attached. I’m not gonna have an answer that’s satisfying.
Mandy Capehart
00:48:11 – 00:48:33
I’m not going to resolve it. I, however, notice this piece of my mom’s relationship with me has lightened. When I think of that moment. When I think of that memory with my mom, that information withheld, I’m not having this sharp pressure. So part of somatic work is about learning to notice the sensations in your body.
Mandy Capehart
00:48:33 – 00:49:16
And sometimes it’s really hard to describe them, which honestly means that people are usually onto something there. And even now as I’m like talking about this, I can feel this like finger pressure, amount of pressure, like right behind my sternum, right around my heart. And it’s still less now than it was when I think about how I felt, what, 16 learning this piece of information and feeling trapped and not feeling Able to even talk about like, even as I’m thinking 16, my throat is starting to like get tight and want to close-up because I couldn’t talk about it. And I didn’t have that freedom to come into a place where it was a safe thing to converse about. So, yes, I have lost my mom and no, we never talked about it.
Mandy Capehart
00:49:16 – 00:49:59
And yet here I am talking about it in a way that I don’t actually need to imagine that she’s sitting there with me. You know, there’s this, practice called the empty chair in therapeutic Modalities where we invite the person to that chair, or we talk to the chair as if the person is with us. It doesn’t have to even be that activating because that is a hard Practice., It can be as simple as just letting myself be really honest and vulnerable with how what I’ve experienced is true and there were ugly parts of it. And I’m going to for me, vulnerability is accepting but those ugly painful parts are true and present and not trying to minimize or push them away.
Mandy Capehart
00:50:01 – 00:50:18
And I think You know, it’s a really difficult place to get to, but we don’t have to start with doing it in our own internal work. Right. We can start with an external relationship where we’re looking for a little bit of understanding or integration
when we know we’re not going to get answers at the end of it.
Victoria Volk
00:50:20 – 00:50:52
In grief recovery, we talk about and that really just reminds me there’s an exercise that we do where you do just that really. It, and, and it’s because you can have all these feelings and not get the closure. Right. And you’re stuck in emotional jail. But if you can get to that place through the way, the way you described, the somatic work that you do with people or through the grief recovery work with me, that’s that it’s possible, Right?
Victoria Volk
00:50:52 – 00:51:12
That is possible that that emotional energy, because emotions have energy, right? Can be lessened, enlightened, and worked through and filled with a fresh, newer perspective and maybe a whole lot of compassion yourself and the other person.
Mandy Capehart
00:51:12 – 00:51:35
Absolutely., I mean, emotions are energy in motion. They are literally little tiny vibrations that we’re sensing in our body that our brain is making a thought about, is making sense of, and then we spit it out and we call it a feeling, but it’s not. It’s you know, the feeling is the physical part. And the more we can allow ourselves to like, oh, maybe I misunderstand human emotion.
Mandy Capehart
00:51:35 – 00:51:53
Maybe I don’t know myself as well as I think. Maybe I’ve really protected myself from having to get into those vulnerable, uncomfortable feelings. Even this morning, I was talking with my husband, in response to 2 conversations yesterday about people who say, well, I’m not angry. I’m not angry. I don’t have a right to be angry.
Mandy Capehart
00:51:53 – 00:52:13
I have nothing to be angry about. I’m like, oh, but you do. You do have a right to be angry. You deserve to be angry, but also your relationship to anger might need to shift because if you’ve minimized it and disqualified yourself, you’re missing the fact that anger is a secondary emotion. And it’s really protecting you from those more risky emotions.
Mandy Capehart
00:52:13 – 00:52:41
There’s more vulnerable emotions behind it that maybe pointing to the fact that you’ve been invalidated or treated unjustly., Right? Our relationship to our emotions, but specifically, the uncomfortable emotions, is often so muted when we grieve that we don’t even notice we’re muting our access to the comfortable positive emotions at the same time. Right? We just we feel numb, and then we say, well, I don’t have emotions when No numb is an emotion too.
Mandy Capehart
00:52:41 – 00:52:57
Numbness is a feeling that has information for us. And we just get to a point where we’re willing to say, okay, well, what are you trying to teach me?, That then The floodgates open and it feels cathartic instead of just a fear driven. I’m never going to stop crying if I start. So I just won’t start.
Victoria Volk
00:52:58 – 00:53:25
I’m in a Voxer group with some, some friends, from all over the world. And I happen to have listened to one of my friends. She called it a rant and she was very she was angry about something and I heard it. And after I heard it, she had recalled it and I called her out on it and she’s like, I, you know, I just recalled it because you know, it, it doesn’t serve anybody. It doesn’t, it’s not helpful.
Victoria Volk
00:53:25 – 00:53:43
And I said, oh, wait a minute, I said, you have every right to be angry. Anger is a valid emotion. And it needs to come up and out. And unless you’re ruminating on it, and you’re telling every Tom, Dick and Harry the same story and you ruminating on it. Right?
Victoria Volk
00:53:43 – 00:53:54
Like, that’s not helpful. Like that doesn’t serve you. But to get it up and out and like, like, let that emotional charge go. Yeah. That’s helpful.
Victoria Volk
00:53:54 – 00:53:57
That’s serving you. Don’t minimize that. Right?
Mandy Capehart
00:53:57 – 00:53:58
Yeah. It’s like,
Victoria Volk
00:53:58 – 00:54:02
She didn’t mean she didn’t mean my permission. Obviously. Right. Right.
Mandy Capehart
00:54:03 – 00:54:29
Giving you having your permission to be a witness is a big deal, and I think we, you know, every time I hear someone say, oh, well, that’s not a helpful thing. Actually, it is. It’s helpful because it allows you to be honest. It allows you to be seen and known. And if you are translating that it is not helpful for you to be seen and known, then there’s a lot more work for you to do, not with any judgment attached, but just, hey, that sounds like a pretty painful belief that you’ve carried.
Mandy Capehart
00:54:30 – 00:55:11
What’s possible if it’s not true? What’s possible if the inverse is true that you are worth known being known and being seen, and your anger is worth expressing what’s possible for you. I can’t tell you how many grief clients I have that conversation becomes the focus for months because there’s so much to unwind around how we have minimized and invalidated our personhood and our humanity just to belong and survive in places where we’re not going to belong. This goes back to my community loss. I was telling you about like realizing that I only belonged in this large community because I made myself fit.
Mandy Capehart
00:55:11 – 00:55:25
I made myself take on the shape that was acceptable is why when I said I’m no longer going to look sound and act like you guys, do I still belong? They said, absolutely not. No. You don’t. Okay.
Mandy Capehart
00:55:25 – 00:55:39
Does that mean all that we shared was meaningless? No. But it does help me recognize pieces of myself that I sacrificed and decide, was it worth it? Ultimately, no. No.
Victoria Volk
00:55:41 – 00:55:44
But there is no failure in learning either.
Mandy Capehart
00:55:45 – 00:55:45
No. There’s like a failing.
Victoria Volk
00:55:48 – 00:56:08
Our best lessons come in failure, right? That’s why it’s not failure. I was at a wrestling term that my when my son wrestled me was just a young squirt. And on the back of the t-shirts for the wrestling team, this other team, they had, I can’t remember exactly how it was written, but something to the effect of failure is only learning. Yeah, absolutely.
Victoria Volk
00:56:08 – 00:56:11
That’s Yeah. I’ve never forgotten it.
Mandy Capehart
00:56:11 – 00:56:14
Just education. Just information., Yep. This information.
Victoria Volk
00:56:15 – 00:56:22
Is there anything else that you would like to share today. I feel like we could talk even longer, but I want to be respectful of your time.
Mandy Capehart
00:56:24 – 00:56:44
Let’s see. I think the last thing I would invite people into is just giving themselves permission to take up space, might look different than you think. It’s not saying, oh, I need a weekend away. I need to go to the spa. Giving ourselves permission to take up space means learning that self-care is simple.
Mandy Capehart
00:56:44 – 00:56:58
It’s accessible to everyone. Often I say the first step of self-care is a glass of water, right? You take for granted the fact that you can access clean water. So for the moment, you’re probably dehydrated. If you’ve cried today, you’re probably dehydrated.
Mandy Capehart
00:56:58 – 00:57:53
If you’ve pretended you haven’t cried today, or you’re not sad, you’re probably dehydrated. Just go give your skin some love, take a drink of water, a big glass, and start with this baseline understanding that the simple approach to who you are as a human, as my husband so eloquently puts it as a meat bag, as a body, go restore a little piece of that and see if it doesn’t change how you’re feeling because we, were, I think we complicate self-care and, and honoring the simplicity of our personhood because we’re mental creatures. We overthink things. We create robots and incredibly complex Mathematical systems to try and solve all the world’s problems when really, maybe we just need some clean water and a nap. I’m a I’m a big fan of that.
Mandy Capehart
00:57:53 – 00:58:03
So if you’re feeling a little like too muchness, clean water, a glass of water, and a nap is really, for me, a smart place to start.
Victoria Volk
00:58:05 – 00:58:14
I am gonna circle this conversation back to houseplants. Okay. Because this is the best., I don’t know. What what’s the word?
Victoria Volk
00:58:15 – 00:58:21
Segue. Segway. Thank you. And to bringing the conversation back to houseplants, because what do houseplants need?
Mandy Capehart
00:58:21 – 00:58:29
Water, sunlight, and something’s good. Absolutely. Yes. I love that saying that you’re basically a houseplant with emotions. Yes.
Mandy Capehart
00:58:29 – 00:58:45
Get some sunlight, get some water, get a little food occasionally, clear the cobwebs. Do you have fungus gnats? Alright. There’s a there’s a medicine for that. There’s a combination of care and, and lendliness and things you can do, and you’re going to lose some leaves.
Mandy Capehart
00:58:45 – 00:58:50
Yep. That’s a good metaphor. And it’s okay.
Victoria Volk
00:58:50 – 00:58:56
And if they start to turn and if they start to turn yellow, yeah. Check the soil, right? Yeah. I’m looking
Mandy Capehart
00:58:56 – 00:59:11
at the plants in this office right now. There’s probably let’s see. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. There are 14 houseplants in my office right now. Half of them are happy and thriving.
Mandy Capehart
00:59:11 – 00:59:26
One of them is my oldest houseplant ever. It’s like 20 years old, and it has brown spots and it loses leaves all the time. And this year after like 20 years of owning it. It started a second sprout for the first time ever. I started asking myself, what am I doing differently?
Mandy Capehart
00:59:27 – 00:59:39
Because this is this is wild. It’s never done that. It’s just gone straight up and lost some leaves and had some leaves at the top. It looks like a weird palm tree. I can’t even remember what Parietal it is.
Mandy Capehart
00:59:39 – 00:59:58
And I realized, oh, I just started giving it more attention on a consistent basis. Not just the oh, God. I forgot to water. Because for all intents and purposes, as much as I wish I was, I’m a very My ADHD comes in strong. It’s probably why I had so many houseplants at the one point.
Mandy Capehart
00:59:59 – 01:00:20
I just don’t I’m not consistent with them. But when I realized I’ve just been consistent with this one recently and it’s beginning to thrive and new things are growing in it. I thought that, yes. That’ll preach. That is a metaphor right there that if we can attend to ourselves in a consistent and loving and simple manner, something new just might take root.
Victoria Volk
01:00:22 – 01:00:28
That’s a beautiful way to end this podcast. I knew this podcast could be about houseplants.
Mandy Capehart
01:00:29 – 01:00:31
You were right. You were a 100% right.
Victoria Volk
01:00:33 – 01:00:53
Oh, I trust that everything that came out to be shared was shared and I would love to have you back. I think we discussed this before we started to record about having you back on to talk about Enneagram and how that relates to grief and the different Enneagram types. And so I would love to explore that with you in a future episode.
Mandy Capehart
01:00:53 – 01:01:03
Absolutely. I love that topic. I think Enneagram work is so easily aligned with grief work and recovery and integration. So absolutely.
Victoria Volk
01:01:04 – 01:01:36
And I’m like I shared with you too, I’m deep diving into human design. And that’s, you know, comes down to your birth time and place and where, where the, where the stars were and all of that at the, at the time of your birth. And, it’s been a huge, I had a lot of shifts in my perspective towards relationships, just in exploring my own design. And, so it’s information. It’s another tool in discovering who we are and learning about ourselves, and how we show up in our grief.
Victoria Volk
01:01:37 – 01:01:38
Yeah. And otherwise.
Mandy Capehart
01:01:38 – 01:02:11
And also too, I just remembered as you were talking, I will tell you that anybody who wants to get like a head start on what grief and Enneagram work together can look like, I’ve seen the benefit of pushing into those uncomfortable places and teaching both myself and my nervous system, how to remain aligned and resting even amid what feels like a threat to my health and my mental stability. Grief can disrupt all of that. And yet it can also be the doorway into like binding restoration in that area as well.
Victoria Volk
01:02:11 – 01:02:15
And where can people reach out to you if they want to learn more?
Mandy Capehart
01:02:15 – 01:02:34
Yeah. So good. So everything is at Mandy Capehart. So my website, mandycapehart.com Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Pinterest, TikTok, but barely all the things, at Mandy Capehart. And then The Restorative Grief Project is my free online coaching group that is posted, excuse me, hosted on Facebook.
Mandy Capehart
01:02:35 – 01:03:18
And it’s just an environment where we can practice grieving together and practice supporting one another and learn how to respond when people hit us platitudes and and learn how to invite our beloved people into the world of grief support without criticizing how they’ve shown up or not shown up in the past. Like, this is an environment and a place where we just hold space for each other and learn what that means to practice breathing with intention. So, Yeah. I love getting messages and DMs and new connections online about these really uncomfortable conversations because they deserve. It turns out every single one of us deserves to have space to fall apart.
Mandy Capehart
01:03:19 – 01:03:21
So that’s the aim of all of it.
Victoria Volk
01:03:22 – 01:03:28
I love that. And I will link to all that in the show notes. Awesome. And thank you so much for your time today, Mandy.
Mandy Capehart
01:03:28 – 01:03:32
Yeah, absolutely. Victoria, thank you for having me. It’s been my pleasure.
Victoria Volk
01:03:32 – 01:03:37
And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Cancer, Energy, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Mind/Body Wellness, Podcast, Reiki |
Kiki Tyler | Best Friend Loss & A Midlife Awakening
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
In the symphony of life, each person’s journey hits a unique set of notes, creating a melody that resonates with their experiences.
Welcome to another episode of Grieving Voices, where we explore the therapeutic and transformative power of sound healing. Today’s guest is the incredibly talented sound healer, Kiki Tyler, who takes us on a journey through her personal story of grief and how it led her to discover her purpose in helping others heal.
Kiki Tyler is a renowned sound healer known for creating immersive sonic landscapes that promote healing and self-discovery. She harmonizes body, mind, and spirit using various instruments through resonating frequencies. Her intuitive approach and extensive knowledge allow her to facilitate deeply restorative experiences.
In This Episode:
- Learn about Kiki’s transition from experiencing deep personal loss to finding solace in sound therapy.
- Hear the poignant tale of how losing her best friend inspired her to become a healer.
- Understand the importance of allowing oneself to grieve openly without societal pressure.
- Discover how grief evolves from sharp pain to fond memories that inspire growth.
- Gain insights into navigating friendship dynamics after loss and honoring those connections moving forward.
- Learn tips on how you can help loved ones cope with their losses based on real-life experience.
- How encountering multiple losses prompted significant lifestyle changes, including setting boundaries for better work-life balance.
- An overview of distance Reiki sessions and virtual sound baths – demystifying quantum healing across physical spaces.
Takeaways:
Kiki’s story encourages us to reflect on how we handle loss within our networks — supporting colleagues during their times of need fosters deeper connections and community strength. It also poses a question worth pondering: How do we honor ourselves and others amidst adversity?
Remember — It’s okay to feel and express emotions; vulnerability isn’t weakness—it’s human strength unveiled amidst adversity.
RESOURCES:
- Reiki
- Biofield Tuning
- Episode Sponsor: Magic Mind | Use the code “GRIEVINGVOICES” to receive one month free with a 3-month subscription. This special promotion is only for January!
CONNECT:
_______
NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk:
(00:01:37 – 00:02:16)
Thank you for tuning in to Grieving Voices. Today, my guest is Kiki Tyler. She is a sound healer known for her transformative ability to weave intricate sonic landscapes that guide individuals on journeys of healing, expansion and self-discovery. With a deep understanding of the therapeutic power of sound vibrations, Kiki creates immersive soundscapes using an array of instruments, resonating frequencies that harmonize the body, mind, and spirit. Her intuitive approach, combined with her knowledge of sound therapy techniques, allows Kiki to facilitate deeply restorative experiences, helping our clients release tension, restore balance, and unlock their inner potential.
Victoria Volk:
(00:02:16 – 00:02:57)
Through her gentle and compassionate guidance, Kiki Sound Healing Sessions offer a sacred space for profound healing and inner alignment. Thank you so much for sharing that beautiful bio with me and for the work that you do because, clearly, it’s needed because who doesn’t need some inner alignment, right, these days in a world that seems very out of alignment? What I’ve come to know even for myself personally and majority of people who come to my podcast, their work is from a place of pain often from pain to purpose. Right? And, that’s what I often see.
Victoria Volk:
(00:02:57 – 00:03:02)
And so what led you to doing the work that you’re doing today.
Kiki Tyler
(00:03:03 – 00:03:31)
It was definitely from a place of pain and intense grief, and it was one that I was in denial from, very close friend of mine, we had been close friends, best friends for almost 9 years. Traveled around, did fitness events together. During 2020, she was diagnosed out of the blue with stage four lung cancer. Doctors gave her 2 weeks, and she said, I’m gonna hang around a little bit longer.
Kiki Tyler
(00:03:31 – 00:03:50)
I wanna vote this year. And she was she was stubborn. She hung around for a little over 4 months, which I got to spend a lot of time with her during the lockdown. We both were safe. She took hospice into our own hands and kind of just maintained and managed her pain, and she made it fun.
Kiki Tyler
(00:03:50 – 00:04:12)
Like, she had her own visiting hours. She used cat means, like, it was her personality through and through all the way up to the end. We’re actually coming up on her 3 year anniversary of her passing. She passed peacefully in her sleep on December 12th. And I was close to their husband and worked closely with him kind of just clearing things out, packing up for things, donating things.
Kiki Tyler
(00:04:12 – 00:04:30)
So through all of that, I didn’t realize I was in denial. I was shoving everything down and showing up for him. And plus the lockdown, and we couldn’t have the traditional funeral or life celebration or say any type of goodbyes. It was a very unique time for me.
Victoria Volk
(00:04:31 – 00:04:36)
I’m just trying to wrap my head around because she would have been quite young at the time.
Kiki Tyler
(00:04:37 – 00:04:37)
55.
Victoria Volk
(00:04:38 – 00:04:41)
I mean, I’m looking at you, and I think you look really young.
Kiki Tyler
(00:04:42 – 00:04:53)
Thank you. I yes. I’ll be 43 in March. But, yeah, she was like the older another older sister for me. We just it. It was it was great.
Kiki Tyler
(00:04:53 – 00:05:00)
She’s here in spirit. She’s actually one of my spirit guides. Purple she dyed her hair purple. It was one of her favorite colors. She was a huge Baltimore Ravens fan.
Kiki Tyler
(00:05:00 – 00:05:25)
And, usually, there’s purple, purple orbs or things when I’m doing healing sessions or when I’m working with my sound bowls. Like, I can always feel her here. So that was a beautiful transition, but, I’m kind of skipping ahead. I had all that denial, and I didn’t know what I would to do with it. I and then I went through anger, and a girlfriend had invited me to a women’s retreat.
Kiki Tyler
(00:05:25 – 00:05:37)
You know, what the heck? I’m tired of being cooped up. Like, I need to do something.
We were all safe and distanced. It was outdoors mainly, and that’s when I had my 1st reiki and sound experience.
Kiki Tyler
(00:05:37 – 00:06:05)
And we were we did a beautiful sunrise yoga world, and there were reiki walking around asking if you wanted to receive. And I was like, I don’t know what it is, but sure. And it was like the tap had opened, and I was just sobbing and crying, and it was the waterworks. I was ugly crying laying on the floor, but it was like this huge weight had been lifted off my heart and my shoulders. And I kinda opened my eyes, and there were tears coming down the practitioner’s eyes.
Kiki Tyler
(00:06:05 – 00:06:17)
Like, she was an empath, so she was feeling what I was feeling. And I remember connecting with her immediately afterwards. And what was that? How can I learn more about it? Like, I’ve never experienced anything.
Kiki Tyler
(00:06:17 – 00:06:39)
It was intense, but it was also very liberating. And the other woman was a sound practitioner, and she was doing, chakra tuning, like alignments with her tuning forks. And she was doing little 15 minutes, and I was like, sure. Let’s try it. And, you know, I had a headache from all the crying and dehydration.
Kiki Tyler
(00:06:39 – 00:06:55)
I was about a 5, 6 hour drive, so I had low back pain. I didn’t tell her any of this. She intuitively scans me, pulls out her tuning forks, and picks 3 that that she was drawn to work with and she’s playing them over me. Headache was gone. Low back pain was gone.
Kiki Tyler
(00:06:55 – 00:07:04)
I slept like a baby that night. It was amazing. So, of course, same thing. What was that? What did I just experience?
Kiki Tyler
(00:07:04 – 00:07:09)
How can I get more of it, and how can I share this with the world? This needs to be, like, mainstream knowledge.
Victoria Volk
(00:07:10 – 00:07:34)
My story too, I fell into reiki and it finds you. Right? I think when the student is ready, the teacher appears and then, that’s I kinda fell into it by accident too. I put accident in quotation. But I just wanna share this because I’m still thinking about what that would have been like for her and your your friend and to be, I mean, relatively young.
Victoria Volk
(00:07:34 – 00:07:44)
And to be told, you have 2 weeks. Like, 2 weeks? How many people I mean, like, what did she take that for an answer?
Kiki Tyler
(00:07:45 – 00:08:01)
It was hard. Throughout that period, we had just said goodbye to another dear friend of ours who passed from breast cancer who had made it through 3 different rounds of chemo. And they were also really close. She was going and she saw her friend do that. And that could have been an option, but it would have only given her a handful of months.
Kiki Tyler
(00:08:01 – 00:08:17)
And she saw what it did, and she’s like, that’s not worth a few extra months. Like, I want to be happy. I want people to remember me this way, and I don’t want them to see me whether it way like that. And I kinda wanted to go out on my terms, and we did different pop-up classes. We visited her apartment complex.
Kiki Tyler
(00:08:18 – 00:08:29)
She was just a really bright light, like, throughout the whole process. And she was there for me. She was there for other she was worried about every of it. She’s like, I’m okay. I’m not in pain.
Kiki Tyler
(00:08:29 – 00:08:53)
I’ve made my peace with it. Worried about my husband and my cats, but other than that, like, she reconnected with family, made sure that she saw the people she wanted to see, made amends with the people she wanted to make amends with. She was in a really like, I very strong. I have a lot of respect for her. I don’t think I I would handle it that way, but you don’t know until you’re in that situation.
Kiki Tyler
(00:08:53 – 00:09:19)
Between 2018 and 2020, we had lost 4 different instructor friends to cancer of some kind or another. So it’s we I always do the fundraisers when it comes around, whether it’s breast cancer, colon whatever it is. Sick. We go and we dance and we would be part of them, but that’s when I had a lot of people reach out and say, are you gonna do 1 in her honor or her memory? And the questions are, what are you gonna do?
Kiki Tyler
(00:09:19 – 00:09:35)
How are you celebrating? And a lot of people reached out to me because we were the we were the dynamic duo. Like, we would co-teach and and host a lot of events together. And I was like, guys, she doesn’t want this. She just wants to hang out with her friends, visit her, have a coffee.
Kiki Tyler
(00:09:35 – 00:09:56)
She doesn’t want like, if there are no medical bills, she’s fine. She’s not gonna need help with anything, thankfully, again, she was very blessed in that area. And she stayed at home, so she didn’t even have traditional hospice care. She had a nurse come once or twice a week, manage her pain med meds, and that was about it. But, yeah, very young.
Victoria Volk
(00:09:57 – 00:10:12)
You know, not a lot of people would have the wherewithal to choose to have a death that they want. And do you think it was just the work that she had been doing? Because she had been doing the similar thing as you, I imagine.
Kiki Tyler
(00:10:14 – 00:10:39)
I don’t I don’t know. I know she and I talked a lot when our friend Donna had passed, and it was really hard for both of us to watch and she was withering away. I mean, I don’t know the dosage of the chemo, but she was on her 4th round, and she had lost, like, 60 or 70 pounds. She would had very low energy. And I know Sonia was very much like, I don’t want that for myself.
Kiki Tyler
(00:10:39 – 00:10:54)
I don’t want my friends and family to see me go through that. I don’t wanna see me go she was just very clear on what she wanted and didn’t want, and she controlled the narrative of her exit and her final chapter.
Victoria Volk
(00:10:54 – 00:11:14)
And I think if we all can take anything from you sharing that is that if you have an opportunity to do so, to not be afraid to speak up for yourself. Right? Yes. Have the kind of death that you want to have. Because I know that can probably be very difficult for the for the loved ones.
Victoria Volk
(00:11:14 – 00:11:21)
Right? Like, do the chemo. Do the treatment. I want you know, I don’t want you to they don’t want their loved one to go. Right?
Victoria Volk
(00:11:21 – 00:11:24)
So I can’t imagine. I’m sure she got a lot of pushback maybe.
Kiki Tyler
(00:11:25 – 00:11:36)
She did. She controlled her socials and how people communicated, and I was kind of a little bit of a buffer. We talked about that. I was like, how can I help you? Even just announcing it and sharing with certain people.
Kiki Tyler
(00:11:36 – 00:12:00)
She told her close family, but she asked if I felt comfortable sharing with people and just making announcements to more of our closer circle. And I think that opened the door for people to reach out to me instead of her, but it was why isn’t she getting chemo? Why isn’t she fighting? I wish she would have changed her you know? And I know and understand now those suggestions recommend they were coming from a place of love, but also fear.
Kiki Tyler
(00:12:00 – 00:12:15)
Like, they didn’t want to lose her. And I don’t know what was going through their mind. I just knew what going through my mind. I wanted her to have the happiest transition possible. So if I can make that happen, and she didn’t want parties or she didn’t want fundraisers.
Kiki Tyler
(00:12:15 – 00:12:19)
She didn’t wanna go to chemo. Like, I wanted to honor her wishes.
Victoria Volk
(00:12:20 – 00:12:30)
Some people may be wondering after she passed in with the anniversaries and things, how do you personally honor her memory?
Kiki Tyler
(00:12:31 – 00:13:10)
I mean, she’s with me every day. It’s hard for me to teach a dance class where I don’t think of her. I actually had to take a break for about 6 months from teaching. I thought I was not gonna teach again because of how raw and real. The grief was once I finally did allow it out and up, but It brings me joy.
Kiki Tyler
(00:13:11 – 00:13:35)
It brings others joy, and that’s one of the things we both wanted to do together. And I used to not even be able to cry in public, and now I’m crying on a podcast. So progress, It’s okay. It’s okay to feel. It’s not a bad thing.
Kiki Tyler
(00:13:35 – 00:14:01)
It’s not a sign of weakness. I mean, I sat on the couch and I cried when we cried together, just absorbing the weight and the gravity of the news. I don’t think, as a society, we allow people that time to process. We kinda wanna rush through the pain. We wanna rush through the hard parts, and that’s where the most growth happened.
Kiki Tyler
(00:14:02 – 00:14:18)
I wouldn’t be where I am today. I wouldn’t have unlocked and reconnected with the gifts that I have, if I didn’t go through those experiences, not saying I want them or wish for them, but I needed to go through those shadows to really appreciate and honor the light.
Victoria Volk
(00:14:20 – 00:14:36)
That’s beautifully said, and thank you for sharing. And just so people listening, it’s not like you’re never gonna be sad. Right? Like, the sadness doesn’t go away. You still would rather be teaching with your friend.
Victoria Volk
(00:14:36 – 00:14:53)
Right? Like, that’s not gonna go away. But can you describe how it’s different now versus how the grief is different now than how it was maybe even after a year, you know, the magical year.
Kiki Tyler
(00:14:53 – 00:15:07)
Right. I feel like mine was 2 years, but that’s because I stunted my grief personal, and I was in denial. So, it does get I don’t even wanna say easier. It’s it gets different. Right.
Kiki Tyler
(00:15:07 – 00:15:18)
You look back and you remember things in fondness and the pain isn’t as sharp. You know? You miss them. Like, there are times I’ve gone to text her and I’m like, alright. I’m just gonna talk to you.
Kiki Tyler
(00:15:18 – 00:15:29)
You’re here. I know you’re here. You know? Like, I have voice memos or, you know, Facebook has the time hop or the time memories that come up. And I’m like, oh, that was such a fun dance.
Kiki Tyler
(00:15:29 – 00:15:37)
I’m gonna put that in. Like, I saw that. It’s for a reason. I miss you. I love you, and I’m gonna share it again.
Kiki Tyler
(00:15:38 – 00:15:46)
But, some days it just hits you, and you have this sharp memory and you just wanna hug them.
Victoria Volk
(00:15:50 – 00:16:22)
You know, and best friend loss, even friend loss, is something that I wouldn’t say it’s minimized, but it definitely doesn’t get the attention that other losses get, death of a spouse or significant other or a child. Yeah. Of course, a child or a parent, grandparent, or what have you., But friendships, how would you describe how what your friendship meant to you and the importance of friendship in someone’s life.
Kiki Tyler
(00:16:25 – 00:16:54)
That’s a really deep question. I have friendships on and I don’t even like to say levels. They’re just you have different people in your life, and you can go to them for different types of support, different types of advice. She was that all around girlfriend or sister that I could call, and I knew she’d support me. I knew she’d call me on my BS.
Kiki Tyler
(00:16:54 – 00:17:26)
She was not the I’m gonna tell you what you want to hear person. She’s like, I’m here for you, but we’re not gonna sit in this type friendship. And It’s been hard to I don’t wanna say replace, but to fill those shoes, and I avoided making new friends. After that, I still stayed close with my current friends, but there was this, is there ever gonna be anybody close to her? And it’s not to replace her.
Kiki Tyler
(00:17:26 – 00:17:55)
That’s not the intention. But when I started to make new friends, particularly in the the spiritual and the healing space, I realized there were more women out there like that and started to open myself up to deeper friendships and let them all back down because I don’t wanna get hurt again. And I was I was only blocking myself from those connections. And we’re we’re human. We’re people.
Kiki Tyler
(00:17:55 – 00:18:37)
We gather. We need that socialization. And as much as I love my alone time and I’m an introvert and I like to grab a book and snuggle with my cats, like, I also like to sit and have cacao with my girlfriends and, like, talk about really deep, cool woo woo stuff too and sound healing and reiki and, like, let’s feel better. What hurts? You know, and we just are all brainstorming instead of sitting watching dumpster fires and getting sucked into that lower vibe energy, and she was definitely that high vibe, alright, where you and the same she would do it with her students, and she was just genuine with every single person in her life.
Kiki Tyler
(00:18:37 – 00:19:00)
It didn’t matter if you were an acquaintance, she saw you once a week, once a month, once a quarter. Like, she would just treat everybody the same, and she’s she’s had a lot of admirable qualities. So I remember those skills and traits that she shared and showed me, and I honor her by emulating that. And sometimes think, what would Sonia do or say?
Victoria Volk
(00:19:03 – 00:19:24)
You know, so she had a spouse, has a spouse, who was left behind. Right?, Mhmm. How did what can you share with listeners on how, as her best friend, how you supported him and her family and if you have if you learned anything from that experience that you can share.
Kiki Tyler
(00:19:26 – 00:20:06)
Yeah. It was the 2 of them and their 2 cats, and her father had passed, and I believe her mother had, so I never met her parents. She was close with his mom, and she had just reconnected with her son. So he was starting to come back into the picture, and her son and husband developed a very fast friendship and started walking every week, where they spread her ashes. And I remember after we finally packed up and cleaned out a lot of her clothing and everything, and and cleared out that room.
Kiki Tyler
(00:20:06 – 00:20:43)
He as soon as his lease was up, he moved into a new apartment, which I mean, I spent 20 years in that place, so I couldn’t even imagine what it was like for him. But we had several, like, brunch dates, lunches, just messaging him and reaching out. He had a very good support system hit with his family and her son as well. And, he unfortunately passed of a heart attack earlier this year, which was they say it could be broken heart. I mean, it was tough.
Kiki Tyler
(00:20:44 – 00:21:07)
But I had reached out and we were seeing each other less and less, and I don’t know if I didn’t take that personally. I don’t know if that was too much of a memory for him, and he needed that space. But I promised her I would check in and reach out and at least do what I could on my side, but it was hard. It was hard for him. He would we try to make light of it, but, yeah, we sat and cried a bit too.
Kiki Tyler
(00:21:08 – 00:21:08)
Yeah.
Victoria Volk
(00:21:08 – 00:21:24)
After losing so many, you said 4 different friends in a short period of time, did that how did that make you did that cause you to change anything in your life or cause you to look at your health differently or your life differently?
Kiki Tyler
(00:21:25 – 00:21:47)
Yes. It really helped me create boundaries. And before that, I was very much a yes person, a people pleaser and a workaholic to the point where I wasn’t seen as much of my friends as they would have liked or I would have liked. And it was easy to say, oh, but I have work. But I could have basically said no.
Kiki Tyler
(00:21:47 – 00:22:34)
So there was a lot more no. There was a lot more, I’m not gonna sub as many classes because I’m gonna spend quality time with my loved ones, whether that be family, friends, girlfriends, what have you. More more time with myself to dial into what I felt were my priorities and really sit with, are these mine? Is this something that was planted whether it be from Parents or other parental figure society. It doesn’t matter where it came from, but just really revisiting my belief system and just kind of checking things to make sure I wasn’t you know, we talked about alignment at the beginning of this, and it’s so quick and easy to get just a little a little off.
Kiki Tyler
(00:22:34 – 00:22:51)
But if you if it goes unchecked, now all of a sudden, you’re all the way over here. But if you catch it, it’s easier to bring it back to the center line. I mean, it’s like, we take better care of our cars and our instruments than we do our bodies. Right? You get that gotta get that oil changed.
Kiki Tyler
(00:22:51 – 00:23:11)
You gotta get this the all the fluids and everything fixed. When you have instruments or a piano that’s out of tune, you’re calling somebody to fix it, so it sounds right. But we often ignore our our creaks and cracks and, like, our body sending that signals. So just slowing down was a big thing for me because I was go, go, go, go, go. 100 miles an hour.
Kiki Tyler
(00:23:11 – 00:23:15)
Right? Don’t wanna stop. Don’t wanna think. Don’t wanna slow down. And it’s easier.
Kiki Tyler
(00:23:15 – 00:23:16)
You don’t have to feel.
Victoria Volk
(00:23:16 – 00:23:16)
Mhmm.
Kiki Tyler
(00:23:16 – 00:23:46)
And feeling that the feeling can be painful. And I avoided the pain, and I avoided the darkness, and I didn’t want to do the work. I kept telling myself, I’m not ready, but things like this hit you. And like you said, there were the 4, and then with her, and then I had this denial and anger, and I just I had shut down. My partner, like, you’re wearing a lot of gray and black where I always used to wear a ton of color.
Kiki Tyler
(00:23:46 – 00:24:11)
He’s like, you’re coming home, you’re reading, like, you’re not active. You’re not seeing people, and this is when things started to open back up when we could. He’s like, I’m worried about you, and that’s kind of around the same time the retreat happened. And that’s what led me like you said, the the teacher appears when the student is ready, so I took my 1st, Reiki Practitioner training level 1. And my intention was only level 1.
Kiki Tyler
(00:24:11 – 00:24:37)
Like, I really wanted to focus on healing me and getting better. But in doing the work and tapping more into my values and my sole purpose, I’m here for a bigger reason. My purpose is bigger than me. So continued to follow that path, and now I’m teaching and then same thing with sound. Just really wanted to learn and play for myself to heal and get into a better feeling place, but then started sharing it with girlfriends and, like, can you play for me?
Kiki Tyler
(00:24:37 – 00:24:55)
Maybe you should do this. Oh, this makes me feel better. I can sleep better. I’m not stressed. So and just if I was still in the same state of a 100 miles an hour and being a workaholic, I never would have heard these pulls and these tugs on my soul to go in the right direction.
Victoria Volk
(00:24:57 – 00:25:21)
We have to pause in order to hear those things. Right? You have to be able to so I everything you shared about, like, our body alignment and getting mislined and taking care of our cars better than we do our bodies and all of those things you said I just said in a healing session just a couple of days ago, 1st time healing session for someone. It’s like we don’t understand. Like, we haven’t we are energy.
Victoria Volk
(00:25:21 – 00:25:29)
We are an energetic body. And just you go to the chiropractor. You don’t think twice. You know? Get your Right.
Victoria Volk
(00:25:29 – 00:25:31)
Neck put in alignment, like,
Kiki Tyler
(00:25:31 – 00:25:32)
Yeah.
Victoria Volk
(00:25:32 – 00:25:41)
Connected. Everything is connected. And so do you use sound bowls, or do you use the tuning forks like you initially experienced?
Kiki Tyler
(00:25:42 – 00:25:43)
Both. How about
Victoria Volk
(00:25:43 – 00:25:44)
the count?
Kiki Tyler
(00:25:44 – 00:25:59)
The weighted forks were the were the first things I purchased. I loved them. I worked with them on myself. I’ve shared them with family and friends, and I pretty much mimicked what I went through and just got better at trusting my intuition of what forks use, doing chakra scans. Love the singing bowls.
Kiki Tyler
(00:26:00 – 00:26:20)
That was my next investment. I now have added flute, gong, drum. I’ve got a list of other things I wanna add, and it’s kind of just following that intuition and what I’m drawn to, what the people need. And many of my Reiki clients asked for me to play at the end or they’re like, can we do half and half? And I’m very a la carte.
Kiki Tyler
(00:26:20 – 00:26:46)
There’s no, like, regimented or cookie cutter. It’s you may have signed up for Reiki, but I’m feeling like I really need to play this goal for you while I’m sending Reiki, and they’re like, I’m here for it. So I’m a 100% virtual. I have had the opportunity to teach some small group in person sound baths, but everything I do has been over Zoom, and My clients love that. A lot of times, they’ll turn their screen off or they’ll have their phone next to them.
Kiki Tyler
(00:26:46 – 00:27:07)
So I’m looking up at the ceiling or the van, and then they’re like, thanks, Kiki. And they, like, turn it off, and then they’re already in bed. So they have the best night sleep of their life. A lot of times, they’ll get visions or answers things that they were seeking and setting intentions for throughout the evening. And I love the convenience of it because I’m, like, right in our back pocket with the use of a phone.
Victoria Volk
(00:27:08 – 00:27:13)
So how would you describe how do you describe to your clients? How does this work over distance?
Kiki Tyler
(00:27:15 – 00:27:17)
The sound or the reiki?
Victoria Volk
(00:27:18 – 00:27:31)
Both. Right? I mean, well, the sound. I mean but you can even do sound like, I do sound healing. I do the tuning forks, but I tell clients, like, you can go about your day, and I can conduct a session.
Victoria Volk
(00:27:31 – 00:27:55)
And but explaining that is re like, how like, I had the hardest time wrapping my head around it too when I first started. And I still honestly, I like, trip over my words, and I feel like I’m a blubbering mess when I try to explain because it’s so mystical even to me. Like, it’s so childlike. Like, it’s you know what I mean?
Kiki Tyler
(00:27:55 – 00:27:55)
It’s magical.
Victoria Volk
(00:27:56 – 00:27:56)
It is.
Kiki Tyler
(00:27:56 – 00:28:05)
Yeah. It is. And that’s and I guess I don’t question it. So for me, it’s like, I get the same thing. People ask, oh, what?
Kiki Tyler
(00:28:05 – 00:28:15)
Like, it’s quantum healing, and then you get another look. And I’m like, okay. So Everything that we’re talking about is very etheric. Right? There’s this etheric realm, different dimension.
Kiki Tyler
(00:28:15 – 00:28:36)
So I do the healing in that realm. So we don’t you know, time is not linear. It’s past, present, future. It’s all happening at the same time. So I’m doing, Akashic answer sessions right now, and it really I was talking about this with a woman last night, and she’s like, it just blew me away that you can go into my records, and I don’t have to be, like, present on Zoom.
Kiki Tyler
(00:28:36 – 00:28:42)
And I said, no. As long as your higher self gives me permission. Same thing with Reiki. Like, I need your permission. You need to reach out and request.
Kiki Tyler
(00:28:43 – 00:28:58)
I can’t just arbitrarily, like, pop in and do this work for you. And I love that the energetic space is permission-based. And it has a spiritual aspect, but it’s not religious based. That’s another Mhmm. Question that pops up a lot too.
Kiki Tyler
(00:29:00 – 00:29:14)
But you brought up energetic bodies. So we have 4. Right? The shamanic there there’s the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. So in the quantum realm in the ethers, we’re healing all 4 bodies because they’re interconnected.
Kiki Tyler
(00:29:15 – 00:29:33)
Mhmm. And, yes, you mentioned the chiropractor. That’s great for your physical, but you could have trapped emotions, and that could be causing the back pain. So it could have nothing to do with your spine whatsoever, and your spine’s gonna continue to get out of alignment until you work through these issues. So that’s where the reiki energy can come in.
Kiki Tyler
(00:29:33 – 00:29:57)
And, honestly, I just invite people to have their first session because after I experienced it, I didn’t question anything. And, like, once you whatever your intention or will is, it’s gonna happen. And if you don’t want it to flow, the Reiki energy won’t flow. And I did a group, self-love event with a woman. She was teaching the gentle yoga.
Kiki Tyler
(00:29:57 – 00:30:15)
I was providing Reiki and sound healing. And chatting with everybody in the beginning, there were 2 ladies and one was really she’s like, well, I’ve had Reiki before, but I didn’t feel anything. So we thought I was like, this is great. I love that you brought this up. Are you skeptical?
Kiki Tyler
(00:30:15 – 00:30:28)
Are you open? What are you seeking right now? Because if you don’t want me to send, even though I’m sending it to the whole room, you won’t receive anything. But if you set the intention, I’m tired. This is a self-love experience.
Kiki Tyler
(00:30:28 – 00:30:36)
I’m here to receive. You’ll get what you need. That could be sleep. That could be deep relaxation. You could get images, answers.
Kiki Tyler
(00:30:36 – 00:30:49)
You don’t even have to share it with me, and you will get what you need. And she was floored. She had been sleeping for weeks. She didn’t share this with me. But at the end, after I had gone around, she was one that fell asleep and was snoring.
Kiki Tyler
(00:30:50 – 00:30:58)
And she was like, I felt tingly. I felt hard cold. Like, I actually felt it flow. And I said that had nothing to do with me at all. I’m just the channel.
Kiki Tyler
(00:30:58 – 00:31:05)
You know, I like to tell my clients I’m the faucet, not the water. You’re the healer. You’re controlling. It’s your adventure. Right?
Kiki Tyler
(00:31:05 – 00:31:24)
You want a lot. You want a little. It’s too intense. You are in control of the tap, so you decide. And I do like to give people a heads up when I’m in so they know if they feel tired or something like they get really thirsty or they, like, get their energy sapped because it it can impact people differently.
Kiki Tyler
(00:31:25 – 00:31:41)
But I did 4 sessions on Monday energetically connecting, not over Zoom or in person and everybody I sent their notes and feedback to, they were like, did you do this at this time? I felt really tired at this time. Was it this time? And you know. You know.
Kiki Tyler
(00:31:42 – 00:31:46)
Your body knows. All of them. All the energetic bodies now.
Victoria Volk
(00:31:47 – 00:31:47)
Yeah.
Kiki Tyler
(00:31:47 – 00:31:47)
So I don’t
Victoria Volk
(00:31:47 – 00:31:48)
Know
Kiki Tyler
(00:31:48 – 00:31:50)
if that helps, but that’s one of the ways.
Victoria Volk
(00:31:51 – 00:32:25)
Yeah. Like you said, you just have to experience it, and that’s that’s kind of how I end the conversation too. It’s like, you just have to experience but I just wanna share with you a little something that I’ve been trying out. Speaking about trying things like Reiki or energy healing, I’ve been trying Magicmind, and they are actually sponsoring this episode. But even though that they’re sponsoring this episode, I would not tell you or share about it if I personally have not tried it, and I personally wouldn’t recommend it myself.
Victoria Volk
(00:32:26 – 00:32:52)
Seeing how well it’s worked for me. I would really encourage you to try it out as well if you’re having trouble being at a 100%. It’s been a total game changer for me. I can, in fact, tell on days when I haven’t taken it because I’m just a little bit more scattered. I have more difficult time getting into a flow, and my energy is kind of more like a roller coaster rather than like this steady, calm, focused energy.
Victoria Volk
(00:32:52 – 00:33:18)
It changes my energy. It changes my ability to let’s just say, get shit done. So if this is something that piques your interest, right now for January, they have a or buy a 3 month subscription, and you get a month free. This is only for January. It’s like getting an extra 20% off, which gets you to 75% off, actually, and this only lasts until the end of January.
Victoria Volk
(00:33:18 – 00:33:44)
So if you wanna give it a try, again, it’s not gonna hurt you to try it. And it actually tastes good, and it’s like 2 ounces. It’s got so many good things in it. Neuro tropics, what do they call them, adaptogens, some of the things, specifically lion’s mane mushrooms, ashwagandha, bacoba monnieri. I’m probably botching those, but it actually does taste good.
Victoria Volk
(00:33:44 – 00:34:19)
And I can tell in days when I haven’t taken it when I end up doing productive things that have me on the struggle bus those days, actually, kinda like today, if I’m being honest. So head to magicmind.com/jangrieving voices, and use my code, grieving voices, at checkout. And this is, again, for 3-month subscription. You will get 1 month free, only this January, to help you gear up to crush your 2024 New Year’s resolutions and get fully focused. Alright.
Victoria Volk
(00:34:19 – 00:34:35)
Back to the episode. What drew me to biofield tuning, particularly biofield tuning, was, just the science of it. Like because it really gets into the science of quantum physics and yeah. And I geeked out over that stuff. But
Kiki Tyler
(00:34:36 – 00:34:36)
Yeah.
Victoria Volk
(00:34:36 – 00:34:55)
To, like, succinctly explain it. I haven’t found my language yet. I’m still I think that’s still a work in progress for me because it still feels like child play to me in so many ways. I feel like a kid in, playing. It’s just I get a lot of delight from it.
Victoria Volk
(00:34:55 – 00:34:58)
And I just saw your face light up as you’re talking about it too.
Kiki Tyler
(00:34:58 – 00:35:01)
I know. I was gonna say that was not a succinct explanation. I kinda
Victoria Volk
(00:35:01 – 00:35:05)
Went off by a couple’s hand. And that’s how I get. Yeah.
Kiki Tyler
(00:35:05 – 00:35:10)
Yeah. I feel like Harry Potter and the 1st time I’m going to Hogwarts, I’m like,
Victoria Volk
(00:35:10 – 00:35:19)
Where else? You know? Right? Right? We have and this is the thing, like, as the person receiving, you it’s empowering.
Victoria Volk
(00:35:20 – 00:35:40)
It’s an empowering experience because it’s like like I you know, walking clients through a guided visualization. It’s like, woah. It’s like you’re introducing them to childlike play for the since they we just don’t do that as adults. Right? We don’t we have really difficult time just imagining.
Victoria Volk
(00:35:41 – 00:36:26)
Like, our imaginations just kind of, like, just it’s like our imaginary world just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. The more grief that gets put on top, stacked on top and trauma and societal pressure and all these things that happen in life. It’s like the child within us just gets kinda squashed, and this is, I think, what helps, energy healing is what reignited that within me. And I think that’s where My face lights up when I share it with people. And I love first time sessions, but I just I it’s like I get so excited for them to experience it, and it’s like, I just don’t know how to explain it.
Victoria Volk
(00:36:26 – 00:36:30
It’s just magic. You know? Like you said, like, it’s just magical. Yeah.
Kiki Tyler
(00:36:30 – 00:36:42)
Yeah. Yes. Magic is real, and that’s what I tell people. And I have a woman, I’m working with now, and it started off as a one off session. She’d never heard of Breaky or Acacia Records or anything.
Kiki Tyler
(00:36:42 – 00:37:08)
And after her 1st session, she’s and she didn’t consider herself creative, like, didn’t have that visual. But as soon as I dropped her in, she was having her own journey while I was sending her healing and tapping into her spirit team for guidance on her intention she shared with me. And she was like, I need more of this. One isn’t enough. And then we’ve been working together now for 3 months because it was like you it’s like an onion.
Kiki Tyler
(00:37:08 – 00:37:22)
Right? You heal one thing, and then something else pops up and something. You’re like, I didn’t realize that. So and then same thing on my journey. So went through a phase and stage of healing grief and got to a point where I was feeling okay, but I was like, there’s more work here.
Kiki Tyler
(00:37:22 – 00:37:41)
And now that I’m accustomed to where I’m going, my emotional values, and what I want, I dove in this time last year to an inner child work. I wanted to reconnect with my inner children. Pros and cons. Right? We’ve all had you know, wounds.
Kiki Tyler
(00:37:41 – 00:37:53)
There could be trauma. I mean, I think I saw a TikTok where he said, you know, if you stub your toe, that’s trauma. If you got yelled at, that’s trauma. Like, we don’t need there’s no scale or level. It like, your trauma is not bigger or smaller than mine.
Kiki Tyler
(00:37:53 – 00:38:10)
Like, let’s just acknowledge it. Feel it. And that’s the thing our inner children wanna be seen and heard. They wanna be given the space to feel so they can heal. And certain inner children I’ve connected with, I’m like, I pulled out my coloring books and have been coloring.
Kiki Tyler
(00:38:10 – 00:38:24)
I love to do puzzles. I’ve re I’ve always been an avid reader, but I’ve gotten back into, like, my fantasy and fun books. A lot of my inner children love that. And then I got to my angry teenage years, and we’re a little rebellious. And that I’m like, oh, that’s you.
Kiki Tyler
(00:38:24 – 00:38:45)
That that that’s you who wants to go and get in trouble. Okay. We gotta we gotta check that at the door a little bit as we’re an adult now. But just opening that box and reconnecting to all the pieces of you because, like you said, we we tamp that down whether it’s responsibilities or adult team or we think we should or have to. It’s what mask are we putting on.
Kiki Tyler
(00:38:45 – 00:38:55)
And just being free to be yourself and surrounding yourself with people that not only allow it and it feels safe, but encourage it.
Victoria Volk
(00:38:55 – 00:39:13)
As a kid, I was told I was weird. And as an adult, I wasn’t told I was weird again until, like, the last 4 years or so. And I’m like, alright. I’m reconnected. I’m good to go.
Kiki Tyler
(00:39:13 – 00:39:14)
I love it.
Victoria Volk
(00:39:14 – 00:39:39)
Letting my weird flag fly. I mean, it’s embrace it. Embrace your weirdness. Embrace what makes you you what would you say to people who you know, I’m a Christian. And what would you say to people who think that the work that you do or I do is not like devil work, but like this, I don’t know.
Victoria Volk
(00:39:39 – 00:39:51)
Like, we should be ashamed of ourselves or you know, because I I might pull, not a I don’t do tarot tarot, however you say it. I like more, what are the other ones?
Kiki Tyler
(00:39:51 – 00:39:54)
Oracle. Yeah., Oracle. Thank you. Yeah.
Kiki Tyler
(00:39:54 – 00:39:56)
Yep. I can’t even think of the day.
Victoria Volk
(00:39:56 – 00:40:15)
I mean, that’s that’s how that’s how, like, much I follow the rules. Right? Like, it’s just a card, and it’s more play to me. I like to just draw a card and, it’s amazing, though. It’s, I have a specific deck that I took I take it to events that I do.
Victoria Volk
(00:40:15 – 00:40:21)
Mhmm. And, I talk about grief. Right? That’s my that’s my shtick. That’s what I talk about.
Victoria Volk
(00:40:21 – 00:40:44)
And, it’s I had I would ask I would have conversations with people, and at the end of our conversation, I would ask, do you want me to pull hard for you. Like, what do you mean pull a card? Like, most people a lot of people don’t even haven’t even heard of what these are what the cards are or what they the purpose of them are. And I’m like, you know, it’s nothing sinister. It’s you know, this is you’ll get a message.
Victoria Volk
(00:40:45 – 00:41:00)
I believe that you’ll get a message that you need to hear in this moment. 1 by 1, time after time, completely applicable, like tears start flowing, and it’s a healing message for them. There’s nothing absolutely wrong with that. You know?
Kiki Tyler
(00:41:00 – 00:41:22)
I agree a 1000%. So I was raised in a conservative Christian household, and I have no idea what my family thinks about me, and that’s none of my business. If they wanna share, great. And, there but like you said, oh, she’s doing weird stuff again. And the oracle cards, the crystals, the tarot.
Kiki Tyler
(00:41:22 – 00:41:32)
To me, I view them as tools. Right? Just like a hammer or a crowbar. And the tool is not evil. The person who wields the tool can either use it for good or evil.
Kiki Tyler
(00:41:33 – 00:41:47)
Yes. Just like a hammer. It can be used to destroy or to build. And I love oracle cards, and I do offer them. And I even shy away from the deck and, like or the the guidebook that comes with the deck.
Kiki Tyler
(00:41:47 – 00:42:07)
I like people to tell me what they see because it’s not me. It’s not my message. And my goal is to help them really tap in to their own inner voice again because there’s so much noise and so many people telling, yes, what we should or shouldn’t do in society. And, now you should have a white picket fence. You should have the 6 figure job.
Kiki Tyler
(00:42:07 – 00:42:13)
You should drive this kind of car. Whatever it is. Right? But what do you really want? And I had a woman.
Kiki Tyler
(00:42:13 – 00:42:29)
She pulled the same she started pulling for herself from this deck, and we were shuffling it and cutting it, and she kept getting the same card. I was like, do you not like the message? Because it’s really the universe is trying there it’s it’s trying to tell you something. Right. I don’t know what it is, but it’s trying to tell you something.
Kiki Tyler
(00:42:30 – 00:42:37)
She’s like, I know. I was just hoping for a different answer. I’m like, 3 of the same after so much shuffling? That’s no longer a coincidence.
Victoria Volk
(00:42:37 – 00:42:42)
Right? I think even after the 2nd time, it’s like, okay. Better pay attention.
Kiki Tyler
(00:42:42 – 00:42:56)
I usually pull for myself for guidance before sessions. And with 1 client, it was, like, 3 weeks in a row. She and I were getting the same card. Even though I was shuffling while we’re talking and everything and I was and I was like, I pulled this card, and she was like, do it again. Do it again.
Kiki Tyler
(00:42:56 – 00:42:58)
So then I stopped pulling before her sesh.
Victoria Volk
(00:42:58 – 00:43:00)
Because I was like, I don’t know
Kiki Tyler
(00:43:00 – 00:43:10)
If we’re, like, the mirror. We’re at different stages, but, like, the messages we were getting were slightly different. But that’s the thing. We could both hold the same card and interpret it differently. There are colors.
Kiki Tyler
(00:43:10 – 00:43:36)
There are numbers. There are words. There It’s like what you see and what I see are gonna be 2 different things. And it’s I guess, in the olden days where you would look for omens or you would look for you know, birds would say things everything meant something and not in a bad way. It was just we were more tapped into nature and or everything around us because things were not going that 1,000 miles a minute.
Kiki Tyler
(00:43:36 – 00:43:38)
Didn’t hear? Yes.
Victoria Volk
(00:43:38 – 00:43:44)
We viewed death. Death was viewed completely differently. Right? Mhmm. Like, we spent time.
Victoria Volk
(00:43:44 – 00:43:59)
We took pictures with their dead loved ones. They would that’s have you seen this? Like, when your when your loved one passed away, you would take a family portrait with your dead deceased loved one. Like, we yeah. Death was done so differently.
Victoria Volk
(00:43:59 – 00:44:02)
Everything was done differently. Right? Yeah.
Kiki Tyler
(00:44:02 – 00:44:12)
Yes. And and there is evolution, and there are pros and cons. And I don’t know. I work in the I tell people I work in the light. So it can’t harm you.
Kiki Tyler
(00:44:12 – 00:44:31)
It can’t harm me. You’re in control of it. So I never it doesn’t bother me, and it cracks me up because I’m sure everybody’s getting these direct messages where it’s like, I was drawn to your energy and felt like you needed a reading. That could be a bot. That could be who but if you’re authentically in the energy space, you’re not reaching out to offer readings.
Kiki Tyler
(00:44:31 – 00:44:57)
As a person, you seek out who you want to read your energy and go into your records, provide you Reiki. It has to feel good to you, and you’ll know. For me, I get like a visceral gut response if I’m not meant to work with someone. Like, even going in certain metaphysical shops, I’m walking around and I can I’m like, there’s something in that corner that’s bothering me. I need to go to the different part of the store.
Kiki Tyler
(00:44:57 – 00:45:14)
It could be a crystal. It could be a type of method of physical media. Who knows? But I’m just like, just gonna listen to it. But before I got into this, I would have paid no attention because there were so many different signals going on that I wasn’t paying attention to.
Kiki Tyler
(00:45:14 – 00:45:21)
And we make excuses. Oh, I’m sitting too long. It must’ve been what I ate. I didn’t sleep well. And now it’s okay.
Kiki Tyler
(00:45:21 – 00:45:33)
What is that trying to tell me? Where is it in my body? What have I not allowed myself to feel? Like, the questions and the perception, I’ve shifted the lens in which I listen and also in which I view myself.
Victoria Volk
(00:45:35 – 00:46:01)
So what would be your tip to grievers who yeah. I’m really not I don’t wanna, like, learn Reiki or do Reiki or get into that spirit sort of practice or anything like that. But what would you suggest to grievers listening who may have lost a best friend like you did. What did self-care look like? Okay.
Victoria Volk
(00:46:01 – 00:46:15)
I’m really ahead of myself with, like, a bunch of questions. That’s what I do. But kind of wrapping it around the bow of self-care, but, like, something that people can do to, like, dip their toe in. Yes. Connecting with themselves.
Kiki Tyler
(00:46:16 – 00:46:37)
Yes. And be easy on yourself, and I know it’s easier to say than do, but let yourself feel and just be okay. Give yourself permission to let it all fall apart. Like, just have those ugly cries. Cry until you don’t have any more tears anymore, until your throat’s raw.
Kiki Tyler
(00:46:37 – 00:46:57)
Like, just that is a human emotion. If the emotion is coming out, it up, it wants to come out, and I kept shoving it down until it was overwhelming. So it got to a point where I couldn’t even get myself to start crying, so I was like, okay. What movies can I watch where I know it’ll start the waterworks? Right?
Kiki Tyler
(00:46:57 – 00:47:07)
And rent’s a rent’s a good one for me. Like, I always cry every time I watch rent. Like, I can go to certain parts of it and I’m like, oh, yeah. I’m definitely gonna cry. So that was a trick that worked for me.
Kiki Tyler
(00:47:07 – 00:47:39)
A lot more rest because emotionally, you were draining a lot of energy. I was I felt a lot of energy being drained whether it was to push the the emotion down or to actually allow myself to feel it. So if you need to take a nap, if you need to sleep in, if you need to take a day off from work, it’s hard not to feel guilty that first time, but I promise you it gets easier. And putting yourself first is not selfish. We every time we get on a plane, we’re told to put our mask on first.
Kiki Tyler
(00:47:39 – 00:48:04)
Right? If anything happens, you put your oxygen mask on first. But in real life, we tend to put ourselves on the back burner and take care of everyone else and wonder why we’re passed out on the floor. And crying isn’t a sign of weakness, which is a big lesson that I needed to learn the hard way, unfortunately. Crying is vulnerable.
Kiki Tyler
(00:48:04 – 00:48:11)
Crying is, like, are you hurt? Are you in pain? Yes. But the pain you’re going through, no one can see. You don’t have bruises.
Kiki Tyler
(00:48:11 – 00:48:44)
You don’t have scars. Like, you don’t it’s not like you go out in a fight and people knew you got in a fight and there’s some sympathy there. Let’s say you’re getting beat up from the inside and putting yourself first does get easier as well the more you do it, and the shame and guilt does move away. Because by taking care of yourself, you can then show up as the best first interview for everyone else instead of half full and or pouring from an empty cup. And then I found myself in places of resentment, yeah.
Kiki Tyler
(00:48:44 – 00:48:55)
And it wasn’t because of anybody else. My choice pouring from an empty cup and not refilling my cup for so long. Bottled up anger. You know, emotions can change. It wasn’t anger.
Kiki Tyler
(00:48:55 – 00:49:00)
It was sadness, but I wasn’t allowing myself to feel to heal.
Victoria Volk
(00:49:00 – 00:49:17)
What were the messages around grief that you received as a child since you had a really difficult time as an adult allowing yourself to cry. Is that something that you witnessed as a child? Like, the people around you didn’t express the show emotion?
Kiki Tyler
(00:49:18 – 00:49:37)
Not negative emotions, not dense, heavy emotions like happiness and joy and positive things. But If you were crying, something was wrong, what’s wrong? And or I’ll give you something to cry about. Yeah. That was a lot very common for that generation.
Kiki Tyler
(00:49:38 – 00:50:00)
I know for my brothers, they got different messages like suck it up, boys don’t cry. There were a lot of different things that I heard over the years, whether it was from coaches, in the sporting events, or parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. It could have just been mainstream media. You know? It’s hard to pinpoint where it came from and that really doesn’t matter.
Kiki Tyler
(00:50:00 – 00:50:30)
It’s more, is that what I believe now? And kind of that unlearning. So when I say, like, allow yourself to tear it all down, like, rebuild what you believe and what feels good. And on the esoteric side, the woo side, like, the divine masculine and feminine, I was functioning very highly from my masculine, and I had suppressed a lot of my feminine. The crying, the flow, the letting things be instead of, like, the assertive, the action, the force, the push.
Kiki Tyler
(00:50:30 – 00:50:59)
So I did allow myself to be more in flow for a time and not so much action, which was really hard for me to retrain my it’s okay. There was a lot of guilt of me not acting or not showing up for other people. So that’s gonna happen, but you’re still in charge of whether you say yes or no. And saying no the first time is hard, but it gets easier. And now I have boundaries over when people have access to me.
Kiki Tyler
(00:50:59 – 00:51:10)
And that’s everyone, significant other, parents, like, whether I accept or respond to text messages, whether I call people back, and it’s really about me protecting my peace and my happiness.
Victoria Volk
(00:51:11 – 00:51:13)
Amen to that.
Kiki Tyler
(00:51:15 – 00:51:17)
Yay.
Victoria Volk
(00:51:17 – 00:51:23)
I was gonna say that old, what is what movie is it? There’s no crying in baseball. You could say
Kiki Tyler
(00:51:24 – 00:51:25)
Oh, League of Their Own?
Victoria Volk
(00:51:25 – 00:51:31)
League of Their Own. Yeah. They say it. There’s no crying in baseball, and you could say, there’s no crying in grief. There’s no crying in grief.
Victoria Volk
(00:51:32 – 00:51:38)
That’s wrong. That’s so wrong. Yeah. There can be crying a baseball. Like, maybe we need to embrace that message.
Victoria Volk
(00:51:38 – 00:51:59)
There can be crying a baseball. I don’t think I asked you this yet, but I’m curious. So I’m gonna ask it because there’s probably someone listening who’s probably curious too. Did this experience of all this loss of young people, young-ish people, I imagine, make you a little scared for your own health.
Kiki Tyler
(00:52:00 – 00:52:11)
It didn’t, but I guess that’s because I’ve always been very active. I’ve definitely made better food choices. I sleep more. I drink more water. I’ve always been one to get my annual physical.
Kiki Tyler
(00:52:11 – 00:52:29)
I love get that’s like my, report card for my health, how I’m doing. Like, how’s my blood sugar? How’s my cholesterol? I could have very easily gone down, and I think old me was very paranoid. Like, try to head everything off at the past that that people please, like, try to figure it out.
Kiki Tyler
(00:52:30 – 00:52:50)
But I kinda went the opposite way. And I was like, worry isn’t helpful. Like, it doesn’t do anything but stress you out, could reduce your time here, and it doesn’t prevent what could or couldn’t happen in the future. So I’m gonna still continue with my regular checkups and stay super active. I love to move.
Kiki Tyler
(00:52:50 – 00:53:23)
I’ve always loved to move as a young kid, and I’ve definitely made better eating choices and food choices, but it didn’t. I didn’t. I’ve a few of our friends in our circle have, and they’ve started to get more mammograms and get me, like and when I say the other end, I mean, like, probably overkill just in my personal opinion. Like, the I think there’s balance to that as well because you can get too much information and, like, get to nitty gritty, but find out what works for you. Right?
Kiki Tyler
(00:53:23 – 00:53:37)
What works for me might sound a little crazy to you, so that’s cool. Like, leave it. Don’t take it. But if you don’t get annual physicals, maybe think about doing that, you know? Find a primary care physician that you connect with.
Kiki Tyler
(00:53:37 – 00:53:54)
I actually changed doctors because I wanted one that’s more open to holistic remedies and not someone that’s gonna write me a prescription right off the gate. I am not very much into big pharma. And I’m like, well, why are you just giving me something for the symptom? We didn’t even talk for very long. So how do you know that’s the root cause?
Kiki Tyler
(00:53:55 – 00:54:13)
So I’m like, I have a whole list of things to share with you that my body’s been communicating to me. And I don’t know about you, but I live in my body. Yes. You went to med school, love doctors, but they don’t live in your body. So you have very specific information that you can share with them.
Kiki Tyler
(00:54:13 – 00:54:21)
So when you find one that you connect with and who ask the right questions and that is in alignment with you and what how you wanna take care of your body.
Victoria Volk
(00:54:22 – 00:54:37)
Step 1, pay attention to your body. Yes. So you have to pay attention to your body to recognize the signs. Right? And you’ve described many of them throughout this podcast you’ve described several of different signs of that our body gives us.
Victoria Volk
(00:54:37 – 00:54:49)
I believe you have. So Yeah. Just If it wasn’t there before, it’s something new? Take a look at that. Investigate.
Victoria Volk
(00:54:49 – 00:54:52)
Get curious. What gives you hope for the future?
Kiki Tyler
(00:54:52 – 00:54:53)
The alpha generation.
Victoria Volk
(00:54:55 – 00:54:56)
Do you say more?
Kiki Tyler
(00:54:57 – 00:55:18)
So I am one of 6. I’m an aunt. I have no babies other than my fur babies, and I’m really close to my nieces and nephews. So my youngest niece is 7, and she’s part of the alpha generation. And In spending time with her, she’s extremely curious, and she teaches me so much about myself and about life.
Kiki Tyler
(00:55:18 – 00:55:42)
And I love she’s tenacious, and she doesn’t take no for an answer. But when it comes to technology, her older brother, I guess he’s Gen z, he’s the one above that, they he’ll text me at the table. I’m sitting right across from him, and they’re more comfortable with text. My niece, not so much. She’s like, excuse me.
Kiki Tyler
(00:55:42 – 00:56:08)
Excuse me. And they’re bringing it back to what I call the old school ways, like looking people in the eye, having a conversation. She wants your undivided attention and spending time and watching her with her friends. So I know this is a small sampling, but it I’m seeing patterns and ripples, and it’s just very refreshing in there. I’ve done some research and read several articles too, but they’re the new wave.
Kiki Tyler
(00:56:08 – 00:56:25)
Right? They’re gonna bring things back to, like, the humanity of it., Just the Connection., Community, the connection, all the c’s., But they’re very curious, and they’re not afraid to ask all these questions.
Kiki Tyler
(00:56:25 – 00:56:38)
Like, you think she would have outgrown her twos or threes or whenever the why phase was., I was like, oh, she’s gonna be like me, and she’s gonna be a why person forever. And she challenges me. She challenges her mother. They’re so smart.
Kiki Tyler
(00:56:39 – 00:56:56)
They’re very, I don’t wanna say cynical, but they can they challenge things. Well, why if that’s this, but it doesn’t work here. Why? And they let they really keep you on your toes. But they’re very refreshing.
Kiki Tyler
(00:56:57 – 00:57:06)
And I enjoy spending time. I’m heading there. This weekend, we’re doing our cookie bake day. And, she loves that, like, tradition. They’re very big on tradition.
Kiki Tyler
(00:57:07 – 00:57:19)
And I don’t even wanna say rituals, but family traditions, like, what we do every year. Like, we’re like, oh, I don’t know if it’s gonna happen next year. What do you need? Oh, you’re getting older, so we’re doing this forever. Okay.
Kiki Tyler
(00:57:21 – 00:57:22)
Can’t say no to her. Right?
Victoria Volk
(00:57:23 – 00:57:37)
So perhaps around the anniversary of your friend Sonia’s passing, it would be hopeful and refreshing to spend some time around that energy for you. That’s self-care too.
Kiki Tyler
(00:57:37 – 00:57:47)
Yep. Absolutely. Yes. And she loves going there’s a metaphysical shop by them. They’re in Virginia, and we go together.
Kiki Tyler
(00:57:47 – 00:58:06)
And she’s like, this this crystal is calling to me. I think it needs to come home with me. And she saw me do some oracle readings for my sister, and she grabbed the deck went upstairs, and she has an American Girl doll. And she’s I go up, and I’m like, where did she go? And she’s like, oh, I’m just giving a reading to my dolls, and she had them all lined up.
Kiki Tyler
(00:58:06 – 00:58:23)
And she’s like I was adorable. They paid attention. They’re so observant. Like, they see and hear and take in everything like a sponge, and their perspective is so fresh and innocent. Like, it has not been tainted.
Kiki Tyler
(00:58:24 – 00:58:41)
And she’s not plugged into social media, so it’s still that fresh new. She’s not bombarded. She doesn’t have all of these different voices and things in her head coming her way, telling her how to think, act, breathe. It’s she’s just like, this is who I am. Take me or leave me.
Victoria Volk
(00:58:41 – 00:59:54)
And I think that’s the message that the youngest of the young need to be reminded of constantly, that they are enough exactly who they are. There was a quote I heard yesterday, when I’m I had a call yesterday with, Fellow Youmappers, Youmap coaches, and the founder. She’s always got something brilliant to say, but she said society judges you on what you do, what degree you have, the work you do. There’s so many different judgments that people can that people will draw just based on what you do and not on who you are. And so I think the hope for the future is that we allow the youngest of young to grieve exactly how they came out of the womb knowing how to grieve and allow that to keep going and to allow that to keep happening and to express themselves and to question and to let curiosity be their leader, and just always reminding them that they are enough just exactly as they are.
Victoria Volk
(00:59:56 – 00:59:58)
Yes.
Kiki Tyler
(00:59:58 – 01:00:10)
We all are, and we forget that. And that’s an amazing point to you bring up because this has come up with a couple of my clients. We tend to overtalk. We tend to overgive. It’s a compensation.
Kiki Tyler
(01:00:10 – 01:00:37)
There’s this un layer of unworthiness in multiple areas of our lives. It’s not always business or with products or it can be in relationships too, and you deserve to be loved just for being you, not because of what you do or the gifts or skills that you bring to the table. That’s like a cherry on top. That’s the added bonus. Whether you have them or not, you’re enough.
Victoria Volk
(01:00:39 – 01:00:48)
And I think that is the beautiful place to end today unless there’s anything else that you would like to share. Oh, wait. I actually have a question.
Kiki Tyler
(01:00:48 – 01:00:51)
Okay. 6 more.
Victoria Volk
(01:00:53 – 01:01:28)
What is the meaning that you feel you have drawn from your grief. How have you created meaning from your grief? And what would be your advice to other people in creating their meaning? And when I say creating meaning, it’s not like you have to do something grandiose or you have to, create a nonprofit or write a book or it’s none of that. It’s and it’s a very individual experience.
Victoria Volk
(01:01:28 – 01:01:48)
So I’m just curious how maybe it’s even not even creating a meaning, but how have you reframed? Maybe that’s a better question. Have you reframed how you view grief since your experience?
Kiki Tyler
(01:01:50 – 01:02:31)
Well, it has evolved. I feel like in the beginning, I viewed it as pain and something to avoid. And then, in that 1 to 2 year mark, it was memories, and how can I remember her and honor her, and then it has turned into purpose? I wanted that relationship, that friendship, that whole life, to me and it did on its own. Like, it I don’t it doesn’t need to meet for me to do anything for it to be anything better, but I wanted to reframe it.
Kiki Tyler
(01:02:31 – 01:03:09)
It’s exactly the word from pain to purpose, and it has had it’s a very pivotal moment for me. Yes, it happened during the pandemic, the shutdown, everything else, but I have now reacquoined that as, like, the midlife awakening instead of the shutdown or the pan like, we don’t have to be defined by our grief. We get to choose How we define it for ourselves and it changes in each chapter of our life. Like you asked me the same thing next year, it could mean something different. And that giving yourself permission to change your mind.
Kiki Tyler
(01:03:10 – 01:03:34)
I feel like we feel like we have to lock in and and get married to something, whether it’s an idea or a feeling or we can only do one thing. And we’re so multifaceted as human beings. It can be both. It can be painful and purposeful, right, and everything in between. And telling stories like this, sharing with others.
Kiki Tyler
(01:03:34 – 01:04:05)
I mean, if you came to me a year ago, I would not have thought this is the 3rd podcast I’ve been on where I’ve talked about her and cried, and that was not something I would have pictured for myself, but it’s helping others get through it. And just talking about it is also therapeutic for me. And each time it gets a little easier. And I think I’ve cried it all out and then someone asked a question or I remember something, and it’s like, it’s fresh, but it’s still beautiful.
Victoria Volk
(01:04:06 – 01:04:40)
And I think the key point in sharing the story, right, it’s not sharing what happened. It’s not like you’re reading a recipe card of that relationship or that experience and how the person died and all of that. Like, did so many relive over and over and over, if there was a traumatic death, things like that, depending on what they witnessed. It’s sharing the story, the emotional story. That’s where the healing is, is sharing the emotional story and reframing the meaning of of what that means for you moving forward.
Kiki Tyler
(01:04:42 – 01:04:55)
Yes. And that’s a good point as we feel like we get trapped in that moment of when it happened and we forget to live for ourselves. So grief is important. They were a part of our life. It’s a way to honor them.
Kiki Tyler
(01:04:56 – 01:05:23)
And this is about how we can continue to honor ourselves and move on with their memory with us. But thinking about everyone else in our life, like, they’re gone, but how many beautiful souls presently in the future are gonna impact your life? And you might be head down right now, but when you start to look up, they’re gonna be there.
Victoria Volk
(01:05:25 – 01:05:29)
And not to mention the impact that you have on other people’s lives.
Kiki Tyler
(01:05:30 – 01:05:31)
Yes.
Victoria Volk
(01:05:31 – 01:05:36)
And what kind of impact do you want to have? And that’s the choice we all have.
Kiki Tyler
(01:05:37 – 01:05:57)
Yes. We feel like we forget choice. Like, we feel like we’re forced into it. And sometimes just hearing someone say they did this instead gives you that sign, that permission slip, whatever it is you needed to hear or see or feel to make a small shift.
Victoria Volk
(01:05:59 – 01:06:01)
And that’s why I started this podcast.
Kiki Tyler
(01:06:02 – 01:06:03)
I love it.
Victoria Volk
(01:06:03 – 01:06:07)
Thank you so much for sharing with me and my listeners today.
kiki Tyler
(01:06:08 – 01:06:09)
Thank you for having me.
Victoria Volk
(01:06:09 – 01:06:14)
People reach out to you if they wanna learn more, connect with you? Where can people find you?
Kiki Tyler
(01:06:15 – 01:06:33)
Yes. So I am Kiki Tyler, Facebook, Instagram. Kikityler.com is my website. I love connecting with new women. I also have a group for healers, spiritual people, those that wanna learn and grow in their gifts, and I’d more than welcome to come into that community.
Kiki Tyler
(01:06:33 – 01:06:43)
And, yeah, love to hear from you and support you whether you’re in grief, have gone through it, haven’t been part of it, but want that community.
Victoria Volk
(01:06:45 – 01:06:49)
I dare to say we’ve all been a part of it. Yeah. We all grieve something.
Kiki Tyler
(01:06:49 – 01:06:51)
Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Volk
(01:06:51 – 01:07:00)
And your gifts and your light is very much needed, and, we need more light. We need more light in the world, my friends. So thank you for being the light for so many.
Kiki Tyler
(01:07:01 – 01:07:03)
Thank you for having me.
Victoria Volk
(01:07:03 – 01:07:07)
And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life.
Emotions, Energy, Grieving Voices Podcast, Mental Health, Mind/Body Wellness, Podcast, solo episode, Spirituality |
Biofield Tuning: Raising Voltage & Harmonizing the Body
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Biofield Tuning is a type of sound healing that helps to relieve emotional and physical stress. It is a holistic wellness modality that uses the vibration from tuning forks to induce targeted relaxation and to recalibrate our vibrational rhythms from stressors that deplete us. Your biofield or aura is the electromagnetic energy field that surrounds your body, which extends 5-6′ in all directions from your body. It is connected with your conscious and subconscious mind, including all your memories.
Because we are electrical beings, what affects one part affects the whole. What happens within the body is expressed in the body’s magnetic field (or Biofield). And what is stuck, perturbed, or tangled in the magnetic field informs the body – they are connected. Through Biofield Tuning, we can use electromagnetism within (and around) the body to rewire, recharge, and raise the body’s voltage.
In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle describes the “pain body” as “the remains of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.” In Biofield Tuning, we work within the energy field to bring harmony so the body can operate at its fullest energetic potential and expression. This harmony brought to the body can be incredibly supportive to those grieving.
***SURPRISE! Through October, I’m offering ✨10 discount codes ✨ for NEW Energy Healing Clients. Use the code grievingvoices10 to receive 10% off any energy healing session. You don’t have to schedule in October to receive the discount. If the code does not work, all ten codes have been redeemed. ***
RESOURCES:
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NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, whatever time it is you’re listening to this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in and for pushing play and for being here. If this is your first time listening, this is a great episode to start with, but if not, thank you for tuning in again.
Victoria Volk: Today, I want to talk about something I haven’t talked about yet on the podcast and shared with you, and that is about biofield tuning which is an energy healing modality that I offer in person and over distance. And I’ll get into a lot of stuff today, so let’s get into it.
Victoria Volk: So the founder of biofuel tuning Eileen McKusick. She created her own set of tuning forks and the process of biofuel tuning. And she mapped out the biofield through her twenty-plus years of research and then working with individuals and groups. But biofield tuning is a type of sound healing that helps to relieve emotional and physical stress. It is a holistic wellness modality that uses the vibration from tuning forks to induce targeted relaxation and to recalibrate our vibrational rhythms from stressors that deplete us.
Victoria Volk: Your biofield or aura is the electric magnetic energy field that surrounds your body. It extends five to six feet out from you and it is connected with your conscious and subconscious mind, including all of your memories. A biofield tune introduces a coherent sound into the energy field, allowing the body’s nervous system to release subtle energy that creates dissonance in our lives. By activating a tuning fork in the biofield that offers your body the information it needs to recalibrate itself. During a biofield tuning session, a client lies fully clothed on a treatment table while the practitioner slowly scans the body, with an activated tuning fork beginning from a distance. If the session is conducted at a distance, the client may rest quietly and comfortably in their home or go about their day. Although I do find clients appreciate the opportunity to connect and rest during this session but either way, the energetic turbulences that must be addressed will come up regardless of what you do during the session. As your practitioner, I feel for resistance and turbulence in your energy field. I also listen for a change in the overtones and undertones of the tuning fork. And when a turbulent area is encountered, I continue to activate the tuning fork holding it in that area.
Victoria Volk: And research suggests that the body’s organizational energy uses the tuning fork steady coherent vibrational frequency to tune itself. Soon the dissonance results and the resistance gives way. This resistance seems to correspond to the release of subconsciously held tension in the body. One might interpret this as a kind of targeted nervous to biofeedback. Eileen founder has come to see this process as consciousness hacking, a side door entry into the psyche, working with what has been hidden in plain view, which assists people in making changes they otherwise could not on their own. Holding an activated tuning fork in the area of the traumatic memory or another challenging period produces repeatable, predictable outcomes. The sound input helps the body digest and integrate unprocessed experiences. As the biofield dissonance subsides, clients generally report feeling lighter and diminishing or resolving of their symptoms.
Victoria Volk: So we can think of the human body as a tuning, self-tuning instrument just like you can use a tuning fork to tune a piano. You can also use the tuning fork to tune the body as I’ve talked about. And as I mentioned, biofuel tuning uses these tuning forks to scan through the body’s electromagnetic field and then finds that distance and resistance. And anything with electric current running through, it has a magnetic field around it. A changing magnetic field can cause electric changes, charges to move, essentially moving energy. Because if you remember from high school science class, energy can neither be changed nor destroyed. It can only be moved.
Victoria Volk: A vibrating tuning fork produces electricity and therefore magnetism. The tuning fork acts like a magnet, moving charges within the body’s magnetic field, shifting how electricity moves through the body. Pain can be experienced as too much electric current through the wires or the nerves. And we know that magnetic fields guide electric currents. So by shifting the body’s magnetic field, and thus shifting the electrical flow in the body, we can release pain, tension, stuck emotions and trauma.
Victoria Volk: Pain is essentially a manifestation of too much electrical current through the wires, and we can redirect that energy by manipulating the magnetic field. And with tuning forks, we can sense the rhythms of the currents in the body in a similar way to how punctured needles are used. Essentially, I and other certified biofuel tuning practitioners are bioelectricians.
Victoria Volk: In his book, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle describes the pain body, which he describes in which we describe in biofuel tuning as being perturbations and stuck energy, Eckhart states that “the remains of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body”.
Victoria Volk: In my work with grievers and from my personal experience, I can tell you that traumatic events or experiences which don’t have to be significant tea traumas, by the way, and grief overall manifest in the body. Through countless conversations with people and the deep internal work I’ve done to work through my past, I can tell you that when we have experiences that throw us off kilter, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, etcetera, our voltage goes way down. We become more susceptible to illness or injury due to reduced focus and concentration and have less energy to sustain us to meet our goals and sometimes even our daily needs. And after this point, we find ourselves on a slippery slope of feeling depressed, lacking passion, and just getting by day to day, living a lackluster life where we begin to forget who we were before life knocked us down. Where we no longer see possibilities, but instead roadblocks and find it far too easy to make excuses for ourselves.
Victoria Volk: If you’ve experienced periods of challenge and adversity in your life and believe you’ve addressed those things, take a moment to take a bird’s eye view of your life from that period on. Zoom way out. Look at your life. Do you recognize shifts within your energy? How you showed up for yourself, your partner, friends, colleagues and how you’ve functioned at work and in life. Have you resorted to alcohol or other means to relax your afraid nerves? Have you needed a crutch to sleep at night? Does food or shopping fill a void created by a feeling of lack in some area of her life? Such as love, affection, recognition, or attention because we are electrical beings what affects one part affects the whole. And what happens within the body is expressed in the body’s magnetic field or biofield. And what is stuck, perturbed, or tangled in the magnetic field informs the body. They are connected. Through biofuel tuning, we can use electromagnetism within and around the body to rewire recharge, and raise the body’s voltage.
Victoria Volk: I can tell by looking at someone’s posture, stride when they walk or overall how they carry themselves, where they may have an area of dissonance or resistance in their body and magnetic field. For example, the shoulders are telling because the left shoulder’s energetic imbalance relates to sadness, grief, and loss. Meanwhile, the right shoulder imbalance relates to saying yes when we mean no and emotional caretaking. And by looking at someone’s posture, it’s easy to visualize which shoulder on the person is likely a source of energetic imbalance. Every energy center, which you may know also as chakras, relates to an area each governs such as the third eye governing the pineal gland and the brain, as well as what the energy of that center relates to emotionally and its function when it’s healthy or imbalanced.
Victoria Volk: A healthy third eye center, which relates to our intuition and thought processes gives us a clear third eye perception, mental focus, and acuity. An unhealthy low energy, third eye, would have us struggling with focus and experiencing a distrust or disconnection from our intuition. Furthermore, depending on which side the imbalance also occurs, the right or left side means something a little different too. An imbalance of the third eye chakra on the right side which is the masculine side relates to overthinking the past whereas the left, the feminine side relates to worrying about the future. Add in a traumatic experience where your sense of safety and security was jeopardized, or taken away, which this relates to the first chakra, the root chakra located in the tailbone, and your entire central channel is likely compromised and imbalanced. In such experiences, grounding practices are a supportive way to help yourself. There is so much more sciencey information I could go into in this episode, which I totally would love to share and geek out over with you. However, I fear I’d lose some of you listening who are more interested in what’s in it for you and who it’s for. And who it isn’t for and more commonly asked questions, which I’ll get into in a moment.
Victoria Volk: However, suppose you’d like to dive into the science behind biofield tuning. In that case, I recommend checking out Eileen’s book tuning the human biofield, where she digs into deep into the science of energy itself, including but not limited to biophotons and thermodynamics. Much of which is above my head, but is precisely why I was drawn to biofuel tuning. As a skeptic myself, I was searching for what feels like truth to me and needing the facts the science behind biofuel tuning is what peaked my curiosity and drew me in.
Victoria Volk: So, alright. Well, let’s get to some FAQs about biofuel tuning. And here’s just a quick down and dirty of a few facts about some Q and A about biofuel tuning that if you’re listening, if you’re thinking this might be for you, this is a great segment for you to listen to. So conditions that biofuel tuning may help with include, but are not limited to, concussion recovery, which I have to say, if it’s been less than six months since you’ve had a concussion, you should probably wait to have biofuel tuning. Anxiety, addiction, adrenal stress, digestive issues, PTSD, fear or phobias, panic attacks, vertigo, menstrual issues, depression, pain, fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions, migraines or headaches, restless leg syndrome.
Victoria Volk: And those with the following are not candidates to receive biofuel tuning however, could receive Reiki, which is another healing modality I provide. So if you’re pregnant, have cancer, a terminal illness, a pacemaker, pain stimulator implants, or are very sick these are precautions that we take with biofuel tuning. Eileen has stated that these conditions or precautions and that as practitioners, we use common sense that, you know, we should be using common and because every situation is different and nuanced, in some circumstances, it’s best to avoid biofield tuning altogether and other times where a gentle approach may be taken such as using weighted forks It is the practitioner’s discretion. And I and personally, I think that less is more in these circumstances. So what can you expect during a session? There is no guarantee that a specific result will occur from biofield tuning. However, what can happen is you can experience detox like symptoms. As the body releases tension toxins in constricted tissues are released, which may produce flu like symptoms exhaustion, waves of emotion, loose stools, and in extreme cases, which are very rare, rashes, and vomiting. However, clients also report feeling lighter, having more energy, clarity of mind, and a feeling of energetic ease and flow.
Victoria Volk: So how many sessions would I need to experience before I can expect to receive benefits from biofuel tuning? So biofuel tuning just like any healing modality is cumulative. So every session builds on the one prior to it. Like chiropractic trains the bones to find their balanced relationship, biofuel tuning, trains the magnetic electrical system of the body to flow in a balanced rhythmically, harmonious way. So if a person has had long term, extreme, nonbeneficial inputs, it may take longer to achieve balance. Younger people respond more quickly than older people. Generally, a minimum of three sessions is recommended to begin, often a presenting symptom can be cleared within three sessions. If there is no change in a condition after three sessions, then it is likely that biofuel tuning will not be able to help with that particular condition.
Victoria Volk: Is there an age limit for receiving biofuel tuning? As there is no age limit for receiving biofuel tuning, however, less is more with seniors, those who are over age sixty five and with children who generally should receive shorter sessions. Children between the ages of two to six can become hyperactive after a biofiltering session. So I do offer thirty minute sessions for seniors over sixty-five and children who are thirteen and under.
Victoria Volk: Can biofuel tuning treat issues like depression or bipolar disorder? Yes. Eileen views, conditions such as depression and or bipolar disorders as tonal imbalances, rather than chemical imbalances, which can be readily addressed with biofuel tuning. For example, during a biofuel tuning scan, a bipolar person will exhibit high tones associated with anxiety and mania as well as low tones linked with depression, but a mid-tone range will be absent. In such cases, the practitioners’ biofuel tuning to quiet the high tones, and lift the low tones, which will strengthen the mid-tone range. This helps the recipient achieve a more balanced state.
Victoria Volk: Does biofuel tuning work on animals? Animals respond beautifully to biofuel tuning. Biofuel tuning has helped pets stops being fearful of thunder, more trusting of strangers, stop fussing with hot spots and generally enter a healthier relaxed state. Pets respond well to in person biofuel tuning and when they receive it from a distance.
Victoria Volk: How does biofield tuning work from a distance? I lean herself scoffed at the idea of offering biofield tuning at a distance until she was convinced to give it tried by a friend who was a doctor. What she found, astonished even her. There was no difference in the client’s experience. To understand how distance healing works. It helps to understand what the ether is. One of the biggest omissions in our collective cosmology or understanding of the nature of life is ether. Essentially, either is the ocean of clear light that all creation arises from. Information travels through this medium much faster than light speed because the information of the entire field is accessible at any point. While the term aether is not in our popular sycambe. The concept of the phenomenon persists and has been referred to by many other names including the zero point field, the source field, the torsion field, the field, the acacic field and even the higgs field, whose definition is an invisible energy field that exists throughout the universe. And is very similar to the definition of aether. This can potentially explain the mechanics of how distant healing works. For example, with intention, transfer your awareness from your left foot and then into your right hand. Notice that there is no sense of that awareness having to travel in a linear way through your body. In the same way, a client can place their intention, their awareness, and their consciousness on a treatment table regardless of where it is in actuality. It is through this same kind of intention that vibrational patterns can be found at a distance with a biofield tuning practitioner’s tuning fork and modulated into a more coherent and harmonic expression.
Victoria Volk: As the nonlocal interconnective medium that unifies us all in real time, aether is the missing link in so called paranormal phenomena such as remote viewing and distance healing. Of course, this is all very sciencey. And in a nutshell, I always like to simply say, time knows no space, time or sequence.
Victoria Volk: And I’ve had several clients who use to always be in-person clients and receive biofield tuning or reiki and have since switched to distant sessions because of the convenience mostly, but also because they haven’t noticed any less benefit to receiving. So what is here’s one last Q and A.
Victoria Volk: What is biofield tuning detox? Which I mentioned previously. The biofield tuning recipient may experience a detox response after a session which is completely normal and means the body is releasing the stress and trauma. Generally, these symptoms pass within one to three days. And the following are possible symptoms of detox, fatigue, waves of emotions like crying or being angry or sad, loose stools, exhaustion, headaches, or dizziness, flu like symptoms, or in very rare cases, skin rashes, mucus, fever, vomiting, excessive thirst. If clients have an extreme detox response from their biofuel tuning session, I ask them to contact me. Otherwise know that a detox is good. It means the energy and toxins are moving and are being released, and I always say that are out than in.
Victoria Volk: Alright. So there you have it. A lot of info packed into one episode about a modality that I’m thrilled to share with you today. If you’ve never considered or received an energy healing biofuel tuning, it’s a great place to start if you want more bang for your buck, so to speak. I say that as someone who strictly offered reiki for several years before discovering biofuel tuning. So if you loved learning about this modality, please share this episode with a friend who may also find it interesting. And to learn more, you can check out Eileen’s book I previously mentioned or her website biofueltuning.com or my website to learn more. Check out the show notes for all the links. And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Death/Dying, Energy, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Podcast, Spirituality |
Dr. Amirah Hall Part II | Quantum Energy Tools to Discover Your Divine Design
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
In this Part II episode with the previous guest, Dr. Amirah Hall, we dig deeper into the energetics of our life experience.
A near-death experience catapulted Amirah into a realm of energy work she had not anticipated finding herself doing. However, it’s also probably what saved her from herself. As she states in this episode, we tend to stand in our way.
Through a set of what she calls quantum energy tools, she developed a daily practice that is grounding and that initiates herself into the present moment. From a place of awareness, she shares a way that all of us can shed the parts of ourselves we’ve identified with that are not ourselves but an experience in our lives.
Amirah believes learning to manage our energy field is part of our purpose. She added that we need to remember the truth of who we are: we are light and energy.
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CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Victoria Volk: Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices. I am excited that you’ve hit play on this episode because this is part two with Dr. Amirah Hall. If you have not listened to episode one, it was episode one fifty-five and it went live and was published on August fifteenth twenty twenty-three, in that episode she talks about her experience of having an end of I’m an End life Doula, I had death on my mind I guess, a near-death experience while in Egypt and what that experience was like for her. But in this episode, I kind of wanted to dig into a little bit more about how the gift presented itself in her life and what that experience was like. And the skeptics that probably came along with that and probably the grief too of realizing yet you have this gift and what do you do with it? How do you use it for the good of humanity? And the impact it probably had on her life as well. Also, we’re gonna talk about some spiritual practices that all of us can do to sharpen our tool of intuition and maybe some advice too for empaths are highly sensitive people who are really sensitive to their environment or subtle energies and things like that. So I’m really excited to dig in. We’re gonna also talk about something that happened on the previous episode. So if you haven’t listened you’ll want to go back to a specific part of that first episode with Dr. Amirah Hall, and we’ll dig into that too a little bit. But Here we go. Thank you for joining me, Dr. Amirah Hall. Welcome back.
Victoria Volk: Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure.
Victoria Volk: Okay. Well, let’s just start off by saying in the last episode around thirty-seven minutes and fifty-five seconds in around that time, you started talking about your experience of coming across Deepak Chopra, who was very helpful on your journey as you talked about in the last episode. But when I was editing that episode, there was an audible male, very distinct male voice that said yes. And I want you to go back to that first episode. I left it in intentionally. I had a little teaser in the show notes, so I don’t know if you caught it, if you did listen to it, but now go back and check it out. And this really ties into the skepticism that there might be out in the world because I had my entire family listened to it. I think I listened to it a dozen times myself. I am a natural skeptic. It takes a lot to I want the proof. Right? I’m always looking for the truth and the proof I want evidence. And as I’ve been working on myself more and more over the years, more understanding of energy and subtle energies and how I mean, I went from believing that when you died, you went in the ground and that was it, as a child like that was my understanding of death to becoming an end of life doula, understanding that death can be this beautiful transition, that it can be something that you can choose how it happens and plays out with dignity. If you are blessed with giving that choice, not a lot not everybody is. Right? With terminal illness. You have a you have a say in that. My perspective of death is greatly changed. Put it that way. So when you started to realize that this was your gift around where were you in your life? And how did you respond to that first knowing or inkling?
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, I don’t know that it was look, I’m very much like you, very skeptical and discerning. And even though I had been a seeker of truth and light or spirituality for a good part of my life, I was still extremely skeptical. And because there were so many far out ideas, I think being somewhat dis being discerning period is a good thing. I think it’s sort of a protective and a guide to help us. But there’s a certain point when what literally happened was I was a six figure income earner back in nineteen ninety eight. I was doing extremely well. I was in sales for a high-tech industry, selling a service contracts for backup emergency power equipment. And I was doing really, really well. But when I came back after my near-death experience, my whole world fell apart. I was depressed again. I was lost. I was losing friends. I was explaining some of the situations and experiences I had in Egypt. We’re very metaphysical, very mysterious like watching going by these granite statues and then seeing one of them wink at you or watching a hand raise, their arms are straight by their side. And I literally saw like the hand lifted as if to wave at me while I was going that by. And I wasn’t the only one that saw it like, I would my mouth would drop and I would just literally go, like my eyes wide open. Did I just see that? Yes. And look to my left or my right and other people saw it too. And you’re like, well, that was our validation in the moment that we weren’t losing our minds. And so many mysterious things happened to us in that journey. When I came back home, and I tried to explain some of these things. I mean, it just goes off deaf ears. Right? It’s just people like, yeah. Right. What were you guys smoking something over there? Or why do you think that was so? Or maybe you were dehydrated? So So all these we had prepared ourselves. We’ve been meditating. We had we’re so immersed into letting go, letting go of our perception of what we think we know is true or not. I had no preconceived ideas of a granite statute waving at me. It was beyond my scope of possibilities. And so that that started everything. But then when I would interview, okay, so my life fell apart, lost my friends, quit my hobbies, I just wasn’t the same. I knew something was diaphragmatically different after my NDE. But when I started feeling somewhat better, I started interviewing. And going to a company and I’d get to the third interview thinking, okay, I got this it’s a slam dunk. Right? They didn’t hire me. And it happened three times where I get to the third interview, and then they didn’t take me on. So that was a critical moment for me and I remember the thought. Okay. I surrender. Now what? Now what? And I had been starting a process of learning how to release energy blocks that was my form of healing. When I found a healer that said to me, oh, you’ve got stuck energy. I went, great. Give me a path, give me a solution, give me the ABCs, one, two, three, whatever, I will do it. And that where I started. So I started feeling really good and started going back on my track, but universe shut me down. And like I said, I had no intention of doing this work professionally. And so I started to, I think it would I don’t even know if it was a realization that it was a gift. I didn’t think of it as a gift. I just knew it was now my purpose because what I’ve come to believe in training thousands of people over the last two decades is that everybody has the abilities. I don’t know that they’re gifts. I think it’s just a matter of us developing like, we can all learn to speak English. We can go learn French too. We can learn to write. We can some people learn to write poetry, and they start immediately, they’re good at it. But as they develop, it gets better and better and better. Same thing with a sculpture. We could all go learn the club take the class, but you might be exceptional at it. I might suck. Right? Or mine are pretty rugged. So we could all develop these abilities because they’re deep within us they like a statue, literally, we have to start carving and shedding the outer layers to reveal the inner beauty. It’s all there. I believe that our creator so magnificent has input us with this, let’s call it a software, let’s call it a divine design, and it’s there for us to discover. And so all of our journey is here to explore and to reveal that inner light, that power, that ability to shine or redirect in whatever capacity we’re ready or want to discover.
Victoria Volk: I mean, there’s a lot of people listening who can resonate and relate to their life falling apart and who have not had a near-death experience.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Right?
Victoria Volk: And so when you are in that lowest of lows, what are some suggestions for people to start to maybe open themselves up spiritually? Because I think what happens is, especially with grief, trauma, things like that, like we become spiritually thirsty. It Yes. Our spiritual life greatly suffers because we start to shut down, we start to, we don’t see ourselves clearly. We don’t see other people clearly. It’s almost like we’re zombies in our own life experience. You just going with emotions and on autopilot.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yeah. I refer to that as walking in the land of paper dolls, sleepwalking. I was just going through the motions. And, yeah, life is bitter, ugly, flat, two dimensional and we become apathetic. We become detached. We are angry. We are angry and well depressed is sort of a broad extension or description of all the feelings, but lackluster unmotivated, just not given a shit how about anything or anybody? And it’s a deep-rooted anger and fear. So for me when I lost interest in my hobbies and my artwork, I was creating jewelry at the time. And I had built a business in selling internationally. And I just didn’t care anymore. Those were my signs. And I think when you’re that low for me, it got to a point where I didn’t have any family nearby. My family didn’t really get it what I was going through they were really detached also, they were in Canada. So I didn’t have a big support group at all. And so it came down to, I guess, a switch in my head like, if I’m gonna survive, I’m gonna have to do whatever it takes. And none of the other possibilities or what was presented to me, maybe it was I wasn’t suppose, remember this was back in nineteen ninety-eight.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So now we’ve got this plethora of resources. And that can also be overwhelming. I think it’s to the opposite extreme. Right? But I sort of plunked around until something resonated and that for me was energy work. Now when people say energy work today, it’s not the same. I know there’s a lot of energy workers listening to this, but hardening being sort of the old krona on the block here, I would say that a lot of people really haven’t done their work. That’s what I’m witnessing. They haven’t done the true deep work because they didn’t have a system that they could rely on consistently and or having a mentor that would stretch them, reach them beyond what that limit or that ceiling that they can’t see their subconscious mind.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So the tools that I learned were really about me surviving. It was just about me doing something different because I couldn’t take the pain anymore. And sometimes we just have to get to that breaking point of just going, I can’t effint take this anymore. I’m just done. So it’s either die, completely let yourself sink into that deepest abyss possible or okay, I’m gonna kick like if you’re being pulled in a current riptide, you just all of a sudden go, I’m gonna kick bloody hell. I am gonna kick so hard I’m gonna move out of this. And the tools that I teach, I call them quantum energy tools. They’re simple guided visualizations. And quite honestly, I didn’t believe in them when I started. But I’m just like, what the hell I got through? Yeah. I got nothing else here, so I’m gonna go for it. And I created these tools that I used to this day, myself, every single day, and all my students and all my trainings and all of the profound transformations that I’ve witnessed have been based on these basic principles. And the number one thing, whether you mentioned empaths, you mentioned sensitive people, you mentioned depressed people, you mentioned anybody that’s sick, we don’t know how to ground. Nobody taught us how to ground. Every device you buy now has three prongs on it. Right? The electrical appliances. The third prong is a grounding wire. Why? Because if there’s a surge of energy, if there’s a surge of something, it will not mow up your device. But we get served or bombarded all day long and we have no way to discharge. It gets stuck in what we don’t even understand is what I call the energy field, the aura. And some people think they know what it is. They say they wanna see it. Well, what? Why? If you see it, the reason is not to see, oh, you’ve got a happy life learning how to manage our energy field I believe is part of our purpose. All of us is as we remember the truth of who we are, it’s that you’re light, you are energy, and this energy is continually moving for anybody that says put up that white light around your or I’m gonna say. You know, to that, it because it’s almost like hitting the pause button on your remote control. It freezes everything. It slows everything down so nothing can move. The idea here is that we want to keep our energy moving. We want to release the block so back to grounding. So that’s the very first thing I teach based on so there’s all these devices now. I call them shiny objects you can go and you can, why the grounding mat and you put it under you while you’re working and you go or go out urthing as they say walking in the grass. Okay there may be some validity to that because I know I sure feel good when I go in nature and just let go. What do we do? Right? We just let go. Why? What is it about that energy that just helps us?
Dr. Amirah Hall: So I visualize from the base of my spine, I attach a cord. I like to imagine a laser beam or even a USB cord or a wire, and I have a magnet at the base of my spine, and I have a magnet at the center of the earth. And that line just invisibly is drawn to the center of the earth. And then boom. So you can ground right here and now and so can I? And we can be more present. What that almost does is it almost brings in our energy field. So the problem with empaths, I call them out of control healers because their energy field is so far and so wide It’s filling up the whole house or the whole building or the whole world, and everybody else’s energy field steps into theirs.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So we’ve not been taught how to bring that energy field into, let’s say, arms length around us. And when it’s arms length around us, it’s much easier to manage. Right? I teach a symbol on the edge of my aura so that people think where Amirah is out there in that symbol. So anybody looking for me or their energy or they don’t like something I say or they do Either way, that energy goes into that symbol, not into my energy field. So it’s a decoy not a protective field because you’re an idiot if you think you can protect yourself from energy moving, idiotic belief system.
Victoria Volk: I’m so glad you mentioned that, and I have never heard that perspective, but it it absolutely clicks with me because what I’m learning just as of late because that is the message. Right? Like, especially in my reiki training that was the message I received was imagine this ball of golden light wrapped around you and protecting you and it’s partly intention. Right? If the intention makes you feel good, but it’s still not going to stop your energy field from rubbing up, bumping up against your environment because everything is energy. And we’re always communicating with our little antennas. Right?
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, it’s naive at. Right? And as we’re growing up as humans and learning about the quantum field, science is expanding. Right? And it merging with spirituality. There’s something to be said about the golden light, and I use that too. However, it’s not gonna protect you. And it is it is a high when you can bring it into the physical body gold is the highest frequency that we can hold in the physical body for an extended amount of time. It’s probably not going to stay there forever. But even if it’s for a few minutes or even if you realign with that high frequency, it changes the dynamics of everything within. Right? So, but there’s no absolutes to any of this. And anybody that’s talks about, oh, bring in red light for the first chakra and orange, but that’s BS too.
Dr. Amirah Hall. And here’s why I can say that is because I’ve got to how I really develop sense, a clairvoyant sense, but my third eye. So when I look at the energy of the second chakra, let’s say, our emotional center are empathic. We’re sucking it all up. Right? From everybody and everything. The news from I look at I’m picking up feelings and thoughts from people that are look there was a friend of mine in California, and I reached out to her I said, hey, is everything going okay with you? And she goes, oh, yeah. I’ve been thinking about you for the last couple weeks. Should we set up a. So I was feeling it. Right? So I reach out to her because her energy at some level was creeping in and finding a plug in to me because she wanted to communicate with me. So I hate people like that. I just wish they’d pick up the phone or I wish they’d send a text. Right?
Dr. Amirah Hall: But then I do that with my students too. I’m like, okay, I’m not sure who this is, so I start reaching out to everybody. Back to the second chakra, when when I look at any of the energy fields, I see wheels within wheels of spinning light. And the best way I can describe that is it looks to me like a kaleidoscope. Have you ever seen a kaleidoscope? Mhmm. So they’re moving. The patterns are always changing. The colors are always changing. Right? So how in god’s name can orange be the color to bring that into harmony? You, Victoria, might be needing to work on something that’s, let’s say, I don’t know. I mean, you’re looking for a recipe from your grandmother. There’s something with your grandmother that you’ve been feeling like you wanted to connect with or or demonstrate or resurrect. Right? Maybe a tradition. Well, it might be for you to bring that shocker into harmony might be a soft blue. Is blue to one of your favorite colors by the way?
Victoria Volk: It is my favorite color.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Because I see that. Yeah. So I just see that that’s more for you right now. Next week, it could be turquoise. It could be agreed. It could be a yellow. So as we evolve, as we resolve, and grow, and change, there’s other aspects to us that want some healing or looking for attention. And so those would be different colors that we might bring into that space to bring it into balance. Does that make sense how it works?
Victoria Volk: Absolutely. I mean, because you’re speaking my language of biofield tuning, which is using tuning forks in your energy field to, like, basically bring harmony through sound, to the energy field. And when you brought up the nature piece, I think what happens is our bodies become in sync. You know, it’s like those
Dr. Amirah Hall: We reverberate Yes. Up the vibes and they they help us they’re literally grounded.
Victoria Volk: Calibrating us.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yes. They’ve got roots. What do they do? They’re grounded.
Victoria Volk: Yeah?
Dr. Amirah Hall: So we’re trying to remember that part of us, I think, when we go to nature, because we are interconnected to everything. And so we need help with that as humans because we’re so much in our intellect. We’re so busy our mind is just and so we don’t know how to have that balance. The trees are great teachers to us. So grounding is the number one thing.
Dr. Amirah Hall: The biggest problem I find empaths have. Highly sensitive individuals is they’re not grounded. And so then we work through the process of one, second most important thing is clearing energy that’s not you. Because the simple truth is when you start releasing what you’re not, your mother’s beliefs, your dad’s beliefs, the family patterns, your your unconscious biases, or thoughts that you had that, let’s say, that white light could protect you. Right? All of those belief systems, when we start reducing those, minimizing those, all of a sudden, the true you, the true essence, and the true gifts can just shine bright.
Victoria Volk: I resonate with that because the opposite of releasing who you’re not is getting to know who you are. Is getting to know of yourself,
Dr. Amirah Hall: But it happens gently in the process of releasing what you’re not.
Victoria Volk: Right? And that’s why too, like, every session in biofuel tuning is so different. Like, this session is the same just like you said. It’s like, right, you know, this analogy of peeling back the onion, but let’s say the artichoke you know, it’s like yeah, pulling back an artichoke. It’s the same. Like, once you get to the heart.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yeah. I’m chiseling away at a piece of wood to create a sculpture or concrete. Yeah. And so I think tuning forks are awesome I know in ancient history, ancient mystery schools, they used sound walls, they used bells, they used rattles, to help us, that energy. It sends like a ripple. What I use is a tool that I explode things in my mind. So it’s like a stick of dynamite in my mind. Let’s say, I feel like some pain in in my left leg. And gee, I never felt that pain before. What is that? All pain is stuck energy. Whether it’s mental pain, emotional, spiritual, or physical, stuck energy. And so to release that block, I just didn’t visualize. Blowing up a stick of dynamite or another simple. And that gently releases it out of my field. So in a very short amount of time, so what I’m doing in and so the beauty of your tuning forks is it’s taking away stuff we don’t know about. The beauty of getting conscious to knowing what we’re clearing I find is a step in raising our conscious awareness because it is about being conscious. Conscious healers. And the and the other thing is tuning forks aren’t always available. Singing bowels or bells and those things aren’t always available. So for me, I the work I do is teaching independence. And self reliance.
Victoria Volk: I love that. So aside from the stick of dynamite, besides rounding and things like that like, these mental it’s all it’s really just using your imagination that can help
Dr. Amirah Hall: And that is clearvoyance. Most people don’t realize that. They say to me, I wanna open up my third eye. You know, this is like the big buzz. Right? The truth of it is is you’re doing it all. But you’re not conscious to what you’re doing. And so all those thoughts that you’re creating your experience with. So when we start using visualization, which is using your inner eye, using your inner abilities to connect with what you might call imagination, that’s really the same thing. And so when we direct the energy, then we are empowering ourselves for healing.
Victoria Volk: Is meditation a piece of your work as well?
Dr. Amirah Hall: Again, there’s thousands and thousands of different types of meditation. All the work I realized my efforts ended up directing me to and the NDE showed me proved to me is that I’m an energy being. However, I’m being a human right now. And in this human experience in the three d lace, we need practical experiences. Our job is to stay present. We are not present. We are not grounded and are consciously aware of what we’re doing from minute to minute. Have you ever been driving down the road and missed your exit?
Victoria Volk: Just happened the other day I was driving. I had to go somewhere and just totally just kept on driving.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yeah. Have you opened an Amazon package and threw the thing that you bought in the garbage and held the package in your hand?
Victoria Volk: No, but I have looked for my cell phone when it’s been in my back pocket.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Have you ever cleaned off your dinner plate and thrown the fork right in the garbage with all the food, you know, stuff like that.
Victoria Volk: The mindless. Yep.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So that’s a moment where your spirit wasn’t present. You were to wear. You snapped out for just a nanosecond. In some cases driving past years and it was longer than that until you got back in your body and you realized, oh my god I’ve got now another five minutes because I gotta go back and forth. It’s learning how to be aware. Learning how to be present is the power of actual manifestation.
Victoria Volk: And I’m glad you mentioned that too, not just the manifestation piece, but because I can tie this to I can tie this to grief, I feel like I’m being called to in that when we are so emotionally wound up, and our energy is just bound up within us, it’s almost impossible to be present in that moment. And we can’t focus. You can’t concentrate. And so accidents more are more likely to happen. You’re more likely to get hurt or trip or fall or call the wrong person or weird stuff like that, but you don’t tie it to grief. You don’t tie it. Yeah.
Dr. Amirah Hall : And then the poor empath or a person that’s grieving, and then and the trauma is just building, and building and building and then you do, like, I did, you withdraw. Mhmm. And you stop really living and you stop we become a victim and blaming the big ugly world. But the truth is, it’s all us. It’s all us. Our creations.
Victoria Volk: And you know what? That’s empowering to know for anyone listening because you have the power to change it. That’s it.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Might not feel like it. Right? Believe me. It may it may not feel like it. I’ve been there where I’m like, oh, god. I just don’t and I for a whole year, I just barely dragged my butt to the class. And I sat there thinking, I’m seeing black. I’m not doing anything. And then all of a sudden, it was like the lights turned on. I was my own biggest enemy, and I was resistant in a lot of different ways. In ways that I didn’t even know I was, I wasn’t intentionally trying to be resistant. But that, you know, family programming and anger and fear and doubt were layer and layer and layer that just kept me living small. And it really was only just the last couple of years that I I mean, because of, I guess, so many things have changed in technology, and I guess I got sick and tired of seeing these charlatans and fraudsters out there professing lies to people and nontruth about this work and the truth behind being an impact that you don’t have to be use that as your crutch. I am an empath. I’m probably the biggest out of control healer. Right? It’s not something that you can unlearn and I don’t mean not to be compassionate. I mean learning how your energy is interfering in somebody else’s healing and you don’t even know it. You know, we, as empaths, we’re typically healers, wanna help people, wanna see everybody do better. Right? And feel good. But what makes me think that my energies actually gonna heal them. It’s a lie because that person’s energy needs to be their energy in their body and that needs to be refined so it can heal itself. It’s different than Amira’s energy. In fact, my energy and many of my students we always do an exercise of separating energies when we finish the class. Because energy between you and I is exchanging, even if you’re thousands of miles away. Anybody listening is probably feeling my energy.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So after this, I will be bringing my energy back. And so the same is true with all my clients is I give them their energy back as there’s an exchange. So the idea as we progress is we build a more condensed sphere of our own frequency. Within the body and outside the body when it becomes more condensed and more higher percentage of uniquely you and your spirit, I mean, the world of possibilities just becomes infinite.
Victoria Volk: So what does that look like? Is it another visualization of almost like this bringing in of, like well, again, myself?
Dr. Amirah Hall: A healthy aura is about arms length around. So it is part of that process, but it’s a process of that I take people through is clearing the chakras as well as clearing the layers of the aura and all so just a continual amount of clearing becoming more aware. Clearing becoming more aware. We become more brighter. Look at our body. When we’re feeling good, We smile at people. We give gifts. We just are more generous and more creative and more flexible and more you know, letting the guy get out of, you know, of the parking lot before you and sit, we’re just more patient than laughing. So I don’t think after we do that, there’s much to do. It’s just enjoying what things light us up.
Victoria Volk: I’m curious if you’re familiar at all with human design.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Somewhat. Yes. I haven’t explored it extensively. I’ve got some friends that have done it. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: I’ve been recently diving a little deep. And I dabbled in the rabbit hole over a year ago, and I’ve recently, I don’t know, timing I suppose and it’s really connecting with me. But what I’m learning though I’m a manifestor energy type for human design. And we have this repelling manifestors have this repelling closed aura and when I first learned about that, it was kinda like, oh, well, people just don’t like me, you know, and the thing is, I don’t see like, I’m within my closed my own aura. I’m within my own closed aura. But it’s not that I’m repelling people. It’s that my energy, either you’re ready to receive it or you’re not, and then there’s something there’s a this energetic exchange. Right? Like, it’s too big or too much for you at this time, but maybe in the future it won’t be. And I’m trying to find how this connects to the energy work that I already do, the energy work that I do, and just really starting to explore that. And I was just curious if you had any insight into that or if that’s.
Dr. Amirah Hall: What I find is I really appreciate your intellect, and I really think it’s a great skill. However, I feel like most of us and I find I get sucked down rabbit holes too, and I like to think I’m intellectual, but I’m not. I don’t know. By the way, meditation, I think, sharpens our intellect, and our sharpen our just ability to know things. They resonate. But I feel like the problem that in the west is that we are over-intellectual. And the problem with energy once you define it and quantum physics has explained this. Right? Mhmm. If you if you define something, it becomes that. So I don’t like to define and say you’re a manifestor. What manifestation to me is everybody is a manifestor, first of all.
Victoria Volk: Oh, yeah. We’re always manifesting.
Dr. Amirah Hall: When somebody locks in a description and says that you’re this, oh, really? I mean, I can prove that different. I can prove that by clearing certain aspects within your space, all of a sudden you redefine yourself, then what? How does their theory or their protocol hold up with that? I don’t believe that we can lock ourselves into an absolute box. I reject those. A repulsive to me because that’s not the nature of energy. As his energetic beings were continually evolving. And so for right now, you might be that. That’s fine. However, if you find that your energy field is repelling people or opportunities or insights or inspiration, then it’s time to shift that, so that it’s not. And that’s all. So I don’t wanna define you that way. Does that make sense to you? Mhmm. Are you a Virgo?
Victoria Volk: I’m a Pisces.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Okay. So then your very nature of Pisces is you’re just swimming in and swimming out and trying to explore and Pisces has a very difficult time with boundaries. They don’t wanna be pinned in. Right? And so I just Yeah I think defining it is actually limiting us. Because I see and know that there’s just such infinite possibilities. I mean, we could really go down some rabbit holes, Victoria. But, I mean, imagine if that was just one dimension and one aspects to you and then other lives, you’re completely different. So how about if we merge all of those aspects together and be the most resourceful, integrated, aligned, present, incredible, abundant, beautiful soul in the present.
Victoria Volk: That’s what I’m working on.
Dr. Amirah Hall: That’s awesome. That’s really awesome. But it’s not in your head. This is the mistake that everybody makes. This is not in your head. The work does not occur there.
Victoria Volk: Oh, absolutely. I totally agree. I actually had a client be like after she worked with me through her grief stuff, in the grief work that I do, she was like people always say, you have to do the work. You have to do the work. And she was like, what’s the work?
She’s like, now I know what the work is.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yeah.
Victoria Volk: It’s the real
Dr. Amirah Hall: You’re in the crowd.
Victoria Volk: Difficult stuff. Yeah.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, it doesn’t have to be difficult.
Victoria Volk: That’s the but the most difficult times in your life, like really looking at them.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, and there’s a difference between looking at them or going to talk therapy and you talk till your face is blue about something. I don’t like that. I like honestly, I’m a quick down and dirty kind of girl. I like, you know, give it to me bottom line. Give it to me simple. And let’s get the results fast. That’s kinda how I operate. And that’s why I created these tools that I use is because they do the job. Now let’s get on to having the good stuff. You know? It’s like, hurry up. I don’t wanna I don’t wanna keep living it. I don’t wanna keep rehearsing it. Because the more we talk about it, the more we anchor it, and we’re just connecting with a memory from a plastic experience that’s got an emotional charge to it.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So what if we could just have a magic wand or a stick a dynamite blow that crap up? And then start living the space that we really are. And honestly, I think that’s the biggest adjustment is when we start realizing all the baggage that we’re hauling around isn’t us. We’ve identified with it, but it’s not really who you are. Who who? Now we’re on to it.
Victoria Volk: Well, and then we take on the emotions and then that adjusts our behavior and then those behaviors. Yeah. The heat and then it’s just more grief and more
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, that’s just how I am and this is who I am, so you have to accept me. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. None of that is true. It’s all a lie. And so, some people are probably rolling their eyes right now and some people are going, I get it. And so we get to we are creating our destiny. We are creating in this moment your present time energy field, whatever it’s consisting I’m holding on to known and unknown that’s conscious and unconscious beliefs and memories and experiences. All of that is creating your future.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So if we create a simple way to start releasing what you are not, because you’re just memories, you will still have the thought of an experience sometimes. Sometimes even some of the memories kind of fade away. And then you have more freedom, more energetic space to focus on what you do want to create. That’s what’s coming into the work. That’s becoming conscious creators, which I believe humanity is being primed for. When we talk about waking up, that’s coming to the awakening moment that we are creating our reality.
Victoria Volk: So what do you see coming up for all of us as a collective in the next year?
Dr. Amirah Hall: So that’s interesting that you would say that. I tuned into a couple guys on YouTube and, honestly, recently, I haven’t tuned into anybody because I don’t want to hear. There’s a lot of doom and gloom. Okay? And I do believe there’s I think there’s a lot of people that wanna suffer. And there’s a lot of people that wanna create more scarcity. I’m on the other end of the spectrum and you can call me idealistic or pollyanna or whatever you want. But, hey, when the economy went to shit in California the worldwide. Right? California was so depressed. And people were losing their houses and their jobs, and I just couldn’t take it. I bailed and I went to Dubai for five years. Now, I say, bailed. Listen. I sold my house. I sold everything and put what was left in a five by five foot storage unit. I went with one way ticket. I didn’t even research Dubai because it was well, it was in twenty ten, but I didn’t research it. I knew one person, and I ended up working with members of the royal family. I ended up working in five-star spas because I didn’t know anybody so I needed to make and build a following. And, honestly, there were times that I would crawl, you know, curl up in a ball and cry at night thinking I was an absolute fool. Because I didn’t know where my next client was gonna come from. And I depended completely on the work I do.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yes, I was afraid at times. But I also knew that was my point where I needed to be, and it turned out incredible. I learned so much. I explored so much. It was in a grand adventure. I learned so much from the Muslim people and their true beliefs and religion. Know they believe in this energy work. They talk about the gin, these unseen beings in their in their religion. They don’t talk openly too much about it because they don’t wanna call them up or conjure them in. Right? And so I just look, you know, I just have an adventurous part to my spirit. So for me to be around that culture and just to let go and be around incredible wealth, to just drink it, just like going to the forest. Right? You feel and plug into the trees. That’s what Dubai was for me is plugging into that. So when I look at scarcity versus sufficiency, I remember that, right, experience. I’ve just threw myself out there. I put every part of myself out there. And I more than survived. I thrived.
Victoria Volk: It’s interesting. Oh, I’m sorry.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Go ahead.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. It’s interesting you bring that up too because this human design rabbit hole I’ve been going down the aspect of environment really is an important piece of it because when you aren’t aligned with the environment that is conducive to you thriving, you can struggle. And so Yeah. Our environment plays a huge role. I mean, if we’re surrounded by stuff and just piles and junk and I mean, what does that I mean, I’ve always believed that the quarters, you know, it’s a reflection of what’s going on internally. I’ve always believed that, you know, change your environment
Dr. Amirah Hall: Yep.
Victoria Volk: Change your environment, things like that
Dr. Amirah Hall: And change the people you hang out with.
Victoria Volk: That includes the people that you surround yourself with.
Dr. Amirah Hall: If you can’t change the people you’re with, then change the people you’re with. You know, certain resistances that people have, and they’re just not good for us as we grow and thrive. And there’s a lot of people that don’t wanna see somebody thrive. They’re more comfortable being in lack. And then they compare, I came from a family like that. They didn’t celebrate wins. They didn’t cheer me on. They’d rather drag me down. And there’s sometimes we have friends, sometimes it’s somebody that you thought was your best friend, but you start to wake up to the fact that they don’t really celebrate the things you do, then it’s time to find new friends. And the other thing is once we step into coming into our alignment, our true divine design, then we attract people that really effortlessly and very quickly to support us, get a giving us our answers or a new direction.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Dubai was never on my radar. And it was only a client that I had worked with in her life completely changed. She was a doctor in Chicago and everything completely radically changed and she went back to where she was born and which was Dubai. She said, the mirror you need to come to Dubai. And I said, why? Great. Find me somebody to help promote me and I’ll go in. See, I had an open mind. Mhmm. And through caution, I set up some steps that would be reasonable, practical. I went for two weeks. Came back with the two pockets full of cash. And when I love this, say who doesn’t. Right? And so I went, okay. I’m gone with no plan. And I’m a business major. Right? I had a business degree and I knew how to set things up practically, but it it just didn’t work like that for me. And so I think my whole life back to one of your earlier questions that I’ve been trusting my intuition, but it wasn’t validated. Like, I didn’t have an environment or family that would talk about any of these things. And I didn’t have a family that was risk takers. So but even trusting our intuition, like, I would need to go to the grocery store now for this. I don’t know why I could wait later, but no, I need now. Well, I might run into somebody that or or a situation, or maybe I’ve avoided an accident, or maybe I just picked up something and then somebody drops in and so I had it. So whatever those intuitive managers are, I learned to trust mine. They’ve always been with me. But I did close them down for a good part of my life. And depression, grief, trauma, all of those situations, we’ll shut that down. And all the work I do now is to help people thrive in whatever all capacities of their life and to be aligned with who they truly are because that’s that’s the true abundance. That’s the true gift of a lot. That’s our purpose to know who we are.
Victoria Volk: That’s a fantastic way to end this episode because I, one thousand percent agree, we are on the same mission of that, helping people understand themselves, get to know themselves. And lose all these aspects of ourselves that were put on us. Yeah. Whether through expectations or lack of boundaries as kids or these beliefs and patterns and all of those. So how can people work with you?
Dr. Amirah Hall: They can go to my website amirahhall.com and that’s Amirah A M I R A H and Hall H A L L. And I’ve got some free gifts on the website. You can chat with me and we can talk about your next step. I have a reset program that’s a great place to start. It’s a video training. And I also have a master class that’s available on my website that about energy. It’s called manifestation mastery. And, yeah, so there’s a number of things I’ve got a YouTube channel. I’m out and about. And so
Victoria Volk: Anything exciting new coming up or that you’re
Dr. Amirah Hall: I have a class coming up. It’s called intuitive superpowers. It’s a masterclass that’s coming up. But that’s Wednesday. That’s tomorrow.
Victoria Volk: Oh, shoot.
Dr. Amirah Hall: So that won’t work but goal to get on my newsletter and to get on to my list so that you can keep updated for any upcoming events other than that. Yeah, that’s the most current that I’ve got. I will be launching a six-month training, which is an in-depth development of not only your intuitive abilities, but your abilities to manifest. It involves the shock or healing. It involves the mastery it learn and developing the third eye, developing your corevoyant abilities and all your other spiritual abilities. So it’s a robust and mentoring program of six months. So that will be launched in October. So if you’re interested, reach out to me and we can see if that’s appropriate for you.
Victoria Volk: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming back and for doing this part two with me. I’m glad we got to dig into this the practical things that can help people move forward and anything energy stuff I love I love talking about all of this juicy stuff that really was not an aspect of my life up until maybe four years ago. So I’m still very much a newbie.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Well, congratulations. You’re doing amazing. You’re doing awesome work. And it’s such a delight to witness your you look to me like this beautiful flower that’s blooming right under the sun. It’s lovely.
Victoria Volk: Thank you so much. And thank you for being you and for doing the work that you do.
Dr. Amirah Hall: Thank you.
Victoria Volk: And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Educational, Energy, Grief Tips, Living Unleashed, Mind/Body Wellness, Resources |

The Grief of Being Out of Alignment
Have you ever thought about how your body responds when you’re doing something you’d rather not do? When you say “yes” to something you wish you had said “no” to?
When you find the courage to say “no” to something or someone, do you feel guilt or shame if the other person responds to your “no” in an unkind way – when they don’t respect or honor your “no?”
Or, do you say “yes” because you’re a people-pleaser? Do you want to see everyone around you happy and don’t want to be the reason someone is angry, upset, or disappointed in you? Even if that means you are going against the grain of what your heart (and energetic body) wants you to do?
On the flip side of all of this, have you thought about what you feel when someone tells you “no? Are you honoring and respecting the “no’s” given to you?
Whether you are asked to change seats on a flight, take on more responsibilities at work, or join a committee, if it’s not feeling like a “heck yes,” there are two ways to approach your response that will serve you.
- Make a “yes” okay with you.
- Say “no,” which is a complete sentence. Period.
I have taken the first approach many times. I have said “yes” to things with good intentions and because I really wanted to, but then found out the “yes” wasn’t what I thought it would be. Have you found yourself in that situation? You feel like something will be no big deal, and then you realize the experience becomes quite the opposite. You do still have choices in that scenario. You can either find a way out of the situation and respectfully bow out or change how you feel about it. You may have to do some internal digging, but it is possible to make an unpleasant experience pleasant simply by shifting your perspective (making the “yes” okay with you).
I feel like I’ve become a master at that one. Most of my life has felt like test after test for learning how to shift my perspective (and energy) around how I feel about certain things. You may recognize these people (like me) when they say: “Well, at least…XXX.” I have always tried to think about a scenario or someone else who “has it worse” than I do. Especially in my younger years, I was also trying to minimize my own experience, which is also a common thing many grievers will do.
What does all of this have to do with grief?
Everything.
What Happens When You’re Out of Alignment
Grief is sneaky in this way. It’s like a spider finding a crevice and creating this masterful web that seems to attract, not lunch, but rather scenarios that will continue to test and challenge you. It just seems to take us so damn long to get the memo. Meanwhile, all of these scenarios and experiences stack up. And, if you’re not committing to experiences or people that are in alignment with the energy you want to be in, then it’s easy to see how this kind of grief, of not honoring yourself, is self-inflicted.
What you may begin to experience, then, are anxiety attacks (or ever-present low-level anxiety), headaches, canker/cold sores, bowel issues, rashes, frequent colds/viral infections, body aches/pains, unexplained fatigue, adrenal fatigue, feelings of burnout, etc.
When this self-inflicted grief goes on long enough, you will eventually find yourself feeling like a victim – to life and, if it goes on long enough – your body. And, all because you are not honoring your needs and desires – of what would feel to be in alignment with who you are and who you desire to be.
More than two years ago, I would not have recognized the signs and signals my body would give me. I would not be aware of my energetic body response, and I definitely wouldn’t have paused long enough to tune into either of these things. Today, however, it’s a very different story.
Our body is always speaking to us. We only need to tune out and tune our antenna inward to know what we need to do. Then, follow that inner wisdom with action that aligns with our heart, mind, and spirit.
The day you can do this is the day that grief’s grip starts to loosen.
Love +light to you today. Thank you for reading. If this message speaks to you today, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Reach out to me on Instagram / FB or email me at victoria@theunleashedheart [dot] com 💛

P.S. I recently launched a FREE Energy Type Quiz! If you want to dive deeper into understanding your energy type and learn some tips, too, click HERE to get started! There’s a free guide to download as well!
Educational, Energy, Grief Tips, Mind/Body Wellness, Pespective, Reiki, Resources |

The Conflict of Self-Sacrifice and Being a Helper
As a helper, boundaries for yourself and others are important to prevent burnout. Without boundaries, knowing when to say “no,” or recognizing when enough is enough, you may find yourself filled with resentment, anger, bitterness, self-criticism, maybe even self-loathing if you are your own worst critic. You may find yourself saying things to yourself that you would never speak out loud to another person. Helpers are often the ones who put on an “I’ve got this” face and yet, on the inside, are crumbling under pressure.
Caregivers/Caretakers are especially prone to burnout. Becoming the one who everyone relies on and goes to for physical, emotional, or financial support can fill the heart with so much joy and purpose, or it can fill the helping heart with dread and the soul with angst.
Challenging Beliefs
One recommendation I have for preventing burnout as a helper is to evaluate your beliefs about helping. When I talk about helpers, I want to clarify that I refer to those whose natural inclination is to help, almost like a compulsion. Natural helpers can’t help but help. I’m not referring to those who help because they feel pressured to do so or are motivated to help because they gain something in return. I think there’s a difference, which is why it’s important to make the distinction.
Anyway, in your childhood, what leads you to believe that helping beyond your physical, emotional, or financial means is how you get your worth?
- Were you raised to believe that only those who help to the point of self-sacrifice are rewarded?
- Do you believe that, as a helper, only you can do what needs to be done? Were you put in roles where you frequently had to step up and take the reigns because, if you didn’t, the project, experience, job, the family would fall apart?
- How much of this belief are you and you alone putting on your shoulders?
- Are these high expectations you have for yourself or others have for you?
Imagine the grief you may be causing yourself not addressing this or allowing yourself to observe how you respond to others when you feel called to help! Others are not responsible for your self-sacrificing ways. The bitterness or resentment you feel is due to a lack of boundaries, self-care, and self-worth.
I have been on the receiving end of helper-burnout. As a Reiki practitioner, grief specialist, and end-of-life doula, it is up to me to maintain boundaries as a means to protect or regain my physical and emotional energy.
Addressing the Conflicting Feelings
If you address your physical and emotional needs as a helper, you will no longer have conflicting feelings about being a helper. Those feelings are an indicator that something is off, not working, or needs to change.
How to address these conflicting feelings goes back to creating and maintaining boundaries. But, if you’re not being an observer of what is happening emotionally when you find yourself in challenging situations, you won’t know where boundaries are needed.
Start with what pisses you off. What is happening when you find yourself wound up with emotion, maybe even fired up (not in a good way)?
- What is it about the situation that fills you with anger?
- When, in your childhood, did you find yourself needing to be responsible for helping others to feel better (physically or emotionally)?
- How have you put yourself second to the needs of others?
- In what ways could you balance out the desire to help and meet your own needs?
As a child, I had a lot of responsibility. It wasn’t something I chose, it was just how things were and the cards I was dealt. No experience is wasted; therefore, I can appreciate the lessons I gained during those years. However, those years also shaped my beliefs about what it looks like to be a helper, and it was at the expense of my own heart and in conflict with what my soul wanted.
We can even do this to the extent of choosing a profession that our parents wanted. I have come across this in my work with others. People go into a profession that isn’t at all aligned with their heart and soul simply to make their parents happy or proud. When really, either it’s a projection of the parents and their unmet hopes, dreams, and expectations they had for themselves, or it’s an inner-wound that leads the person to believe that, again, their self-worth comes from the approval of others.
When we put our desire for freedom, which includes emotional freedom, on the backburner, we put ourselves in shackles to the needs and desires of others. We learn that personal needs come last, lose our voice in speaking up for ourselves, and learn that our self-worth hinges on the approval of others (how much we helped them). This approval-seeking, therefore, becomes a learned behavior.
The conflicting feelings you feel right now about being a helper is grief, my friend. It’s the loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations you had for yourself, your relationship with others, and your life. It’s wishing things would be, could be, or would’ve or could’ve been – different, better, or more.
Are you feeling conflicted about your strong desire to help and yet meet your needs?
Would you like me to dig more into the energetics of this? Well, you’re in luck! Today I launched a quiz that will help you learn your energy type! From it, you will learn what energizes and drains your energy, blind spots of your energy type, and what to do to turn things around or maintain (if you’re not feeling energetically challenged).
CLICK HERE TO LEARN YOUR ENERGY TYPE TODAY IN UNDER 2 MINUTES!
UPLEVEL YOUR HELPER ENERGY; YOUR HEART WILL THANK YOU!
