Wild Souls
Welcome to the Wild Souls podcast. I’m your host, Cat Mansfield. Together, we will return to our wild instincts; reconnect to our body, to our connection to something greater, to the Truth of our divinity + infinite potential. We are here to have the raw conversations about all aspects of this human experience- the incredibly painful and the unbelievably pleasurable - the dark and the light, the death and the rebirth. This podcast is about holding space for the whole spectrum of human experience as we navigate each of our unique + divine healing journeys and step deeper into our soul’s calling. These conversations are meant to be a resource for deep self inquiry, a guidepost in cultivating a deep, unwavering self love, and ultimately, empower you to create a life so on purpose, so aligned with your authenticity, you can’t help but embody your wildest soul. Lets dive in.
Wild Souls
59. Rewiring the Mind: How to Feel More Vibrant + Alive Today w/ Catherine Duncan
Catherine Duncan, a remarkable integrative spiritual consultant & the author of "Everyday Awakening," joins us to share her transformative insights into living a vibrant life. Catherine illuminates her journey of moving beyond the mind's constraints, offering wisdom on embracing the present moment through mindfulness + introspection. As we navigate the beauty + hurdles of self-awareness, Catherine reveals how anchoring ourselves in the now can help alleviate unnecessary mental suffering, allowing us to truly feel alive.
Listeners will gain a profound understanding of the power of emotional awareness + mindfulness in managing anxiety & rewiring the brain. This episode empowers you to transform your experiences + relationships by linking higher emotions with new states of being.
Her work as a hospice chaplain lends deep insight into the transcendent power of love, even amid life's practicalities. Join us for a heartfelt conversation that promises to inspire your journey towards a more vibrant + authentic life.
Everydayawakening.com
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Welcome to the Holistic Hotties podcast. I'm your host, kat Mansfield. I'm a yoga and meditation teacher who's traveled around the world in search of all things healing and true. In searching for healing, in searching for truth, I uncovered the answers to all my ponderings. I grounded into peace amidst the chaos, I found myself. This podcast is about breathing life into who you already are. It's about remembering the truth of your power, the truth of your perfection. In each episode, we'll talk about the beliefs, the self-imposed limitations and the mindsets that are keeping us small, and how to cultivate safety in our bodies so that we can feel safe enough to be bigger, to take up more space and to truly and deeply love ourselves. On this journey together, day after day, we're choosing intention. We're choosing growth. We're choosing to dissolve our veils and breathe into our most authentic and thus most radiant selves. We're choosing to feel good naked. Let's dive in. To feel good naked, let's dive in. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Holistic Hotties.
Speaker 1:Today I'm speaking to Katherine Duncan. Katherine is an integrative spiritual consultant and is passionate about whole person healing and her private practice learning to live. About whole person healing and her private practice learning to live. She companions individuals who are struggling with chronic illness, life transitions, grief and loss, and those searching for more meaning and purpose. Catherine is also a consultant for Minnesota personalized medicine and integrative medical practice in Minneapolis. She's a board certified chaplain and certified spiritual director. Certified in positive neuroplasticity with Rick Hansen and a range of alternative healing modalities including Reiki healing, touch, qigong, the emotional freedom technique and sound healing. Catherine is the author of Everyday Awakening, five Practices for Living Fully, feeling Deeply and Coming into your Heart and Soul. And today we have such a beautiful conversation. We touch on so much from neuroplasticity to really integrating and moving through grief portals in our life. I'm so excited for you to hear this episode. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Hello Catherine, thank you so much for being here today. How are you doing? I am good, great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Great to meet you too. I'm so excited to have this conversation and to dive into the wealth of wisdom that you have to share with us all. So I thought we would start with getting a better understanding and idea for your journey and some of the experiences you had that led to the creation and the birth of your book Everyday Awakening.
Speaker 2:I had a vision of my book 10 years before I started writing it. I'm a mystic, I'm an intuitive, I see a lot, I get a lot. And 10 years prior to writing my book, when I started it, during the pandemic in 2020, I saw a cover. I saw a book. I told my then you know my husband, my young teenage kids at the time that I'm going to write a book. I told my then you know my husband, my young teenage kids at the time that I'm going to write a book, and they were like great mom.
Speaker 2:But my book is about what does it mean to be alive right now and how to feel vibrantly alive, living with that oneness of the world and the universe and our heart and soul? And this has been this theme I've been contemplating, thinking about since a young person, since 11, 12 year old, facing my death as an 11, 12 year old and my cracked my whole, being open, and I have been thinking and contemplating to this day about life and meaning and feeling the vibrancy of being alive. I really understand what it means to be alive after facing into my death a couple times and then the field of chaplaincy work I've worked in and just the gift of life has been something I've really cherished.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. I've really cherish Beautiful. Something that resonates with me. When you say that is is, it sounds like your soul. That's obviously so introspective and it's a part of your journey to really contemplate the bigger and deeper questions of life. And I think that's such a. You know, it's such a beautiful gift and it's such a beautiful journey to have been chosen for you or given to you or however. You see that it's also, in a way, can be. It's a lot to be on this journey and to have that contemplative, existential questioning all of the time. I feel like I've myself have been in that also since I was a young, young person, and it makes us who we are and it's also. It's a in a way. It can also be a burden, but it's a, it's a beautiful burden to bear. So I'm excited to dive in together to existential thinkers. And so something I wanted to expand upon in that description of your book, which is so beautiful, is the definition, I guess, if you will, of being fully alive. What does that mean to you?
Speaker 2:I think it's so easy in life to live head up, to live in our mind, to live in our fast chattering ego mind, where our mind runs, our life, and we're not even here, we're not even present. So just even tuning in, noticing, huh, you know during the day how much of my day am I just consumed with thinking. Yes, of course we use our mind for work and for planning and for organizing, but what is your anchor? Is your anchor your mind? Or can you take moments and find that anchor in just this moment, when we're in our mind, we're in the past, we're in the future, we're not even here, and I also think our thinking mind causes so much suffering? That's where we start to worry and fear and anxious and get in all these called limbic loops.
Speaker 2:So can you take moments of just like, huh, noticing, I've been in my mind, thinking and going, going, going for the last hour and then just come back into just this moment, if it's the anchor of using your breath, breathing in, breathing out, our body's always in the present moment, using, you know the sensation, using your five senses, even just feeling into your hands right now.
Speaker 2:What's there? Just feeling your hands, your fingers, just whatever energy is there right now again drops us out of our busy mind into just this moment and when we're here, when we're present, where our ego mind isn't running around, that is where that peace, that ease, that sense of deep aliveness that we drop into our essence, I think, our heart, our soul, that we drop into our essence, I think, our heart, our soul, I would say, the sense of God, infinite spirit, universal energy. That's where all that is and that tremendous amount of peace and ease and love which I think people are searching for, and it's available to us all the time if we can take a break and just come into the moment time, if we can take a break and just come into the moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so beautiful. And as we're talking about suffering, as we're talking about living in the past or living in the future or oscillating between the two, which is typically where most of us are, and in that exists so much suffering, in that we are just bathing in suffering. We're reliving old wounds, old embarrassments, old perceptions of how we were wrong, and we're living future catastrophes. We're creating all of that in our mind. And so, as we're existing in that place of suffering, how do we come to notice and really choose to stop the cycle, to really wake up in that moment, especially for those of us who might be going through it, might be in a health condition or have just lost a family member? In the depths of grief, how do we decide to see that there is something to celebrate in this moment?
Speaker 2:I share with clients. I see every day and this is something I've worked on for many, many, many years of just awareness, tuning in and understanding. When we can really truly understand that we're not our thought, we're not that thought that just went through us, we're not that feeling, we're just that stillness, that witnessing essence, that essence of our being behind the thought, behind the feeling. When you can tune in, I say, can you keep working and building your awareness muscle of where am I all day long? Oh, I've just been worrying and ruminating and ever studied has four key steps of how to rewire your mind from the negative, the rumination, the worry, to the positive, and I can share it in a minute.
Speaker 2:But as I also say that life can be hard, life can be messy and things happen and we have. We have loss and grief and the pathway to healing is also feeling your feelings. And feelings aren't permanent, they come through us. When we can just like, oh, be curious, curious, puts us in a calm, parasympathetic state. When we can be curious and we can feel into the feeling, for even just a little bit, it will start to dissipate, it will not run us. So just even that awareness is powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's research that says a true emotional response lasts 90 seconds, and if it's present for longer than 90 seconds, and if it's present for longer than 90 seconds, there's something that our mind, a story that our mind is latching onto, that is, you know, holding in there. That's creating that suffering, as opposed to really letting that feeling move through your body in that amount of time. And you know relatively short amount of time. If you think about 90 seconds, you can hold any amount of emotion, or think about 90 seconds. You can hold any amount of emotion or pain for 90 seconds, right. But when it's latched on, there's something that our mind has or ego more so, has started to believe is true and created the victimhood or the reason that someone's out to get us or whatever it is that's creating that lasting, lasting emotion or suffering.
Speaker 1:And I also am so passionate about neuroplasticity. It's something that I have integrated and has been the foundation of my meditation practice, and so I'm really excited to hear those four steps from you. And something else I'd love for you to expand upon is that waking moment as soon as we open our eyes, that moment where we get to either be the person we were yesterday or begin to unlearn all of the pain or the relationships, all the constructs that make us who we are that moment that we open our eyes, all the constructs that make us who we are that moment that we open our eyes? How do we let go of yesterday's identity and that moment of starting a new day and then maybe walk?
Speaker 2:us through those four steps of neuroplasticity. I do believe we have choices from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep and I do want to say that said, if you've just lost a loved one and there's really heavy grief and I've worked in this field as a chaplain, you know it can last for a while and I'm all about saying can you feel the grief, for example, a little bit, and then take a break and go for a walk or call a friend, or can you go pick up something in the grocery store, Because a heavy grief like that is going to be there, but it's just attending to yourself, having love and compassion, letting the grief out a little bit at a time when it's really heavy. But going back to choices, we're all making choices through our day, from the moment we wake up till the moment we go to sleep. We're choosing to be open and grow and feel into the day, or maybe we're again on autopilot, letting the day kind of run us. I mean, I have a really concerned practice in the morning I've been doing this for many years where I wake up in the morning. I've been doing this for many years where I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do, either my alarm clock goes off or I wake up and I have a few minutes of gratitude where I just, you know, I think about how thankful I am to be alive and my family, friends, my life, everything. So I think about it. But then I feel it Gratitude, love, joy, highest vibrational energies our bodies can hold. So I feel that Then I have a few moments of prayer and I see my day go well, you know just the flow of the day. I do that before I get out of bed and here, opposite how many people live. You wake up, you grab your phone or you start thinking about I have this and this and this and this and you're already in a stress response before you get out of bed. So again, mindful practices of how, when you wake up, how you start your day through the day, end of the day, our choices we're all making, and being more open and more grounded and living from our heart and soul. And then neuroplasticity. Yeah, the four steps of every neuroplasticity model that I've studied is here. They are Number one can you identify that worry thought, that anxious thought, that rum rumination, that fearful thought?
Speaker 2:When you can identify, like just again, tune in, awareness. What's going on I keep worrying about I'm just hypothetically I'm worrying about what a sister said to me a day ago and I keep ruminating and worrying about it. It's making me feel anxious. Number one can you identify that thought? When you can identify that worry thought, that fearful thought, for example, it calms your nervous system. Number two can you identify the feeling? Not always easy, but can you just be curious, like, hmm, what am I feeling? I'm feeling sad, maybe a little anxious. When you can identify the feeling, it starts to calm your nervous system. Number three can you feel the feeling? And again, I'm sure a lot of people hearing this would be like, well, why I want to feel that feeling? You know when I can distract myself and we can push feelings down. But if you can just hold even just the word curiosity again like curious, like okay, what am I feeling and where am I feeling it? Hmm, I'm feeling it in my chest, my gut, and just breathe into that area for a few minutes, I promise it will start to lessen. It will not run you so feeling the feeling.
Speaker 2:And number four I would say is the words growing the good. I trained with Rick Hansen. He uses those words like growing the good. I'm certified in his model. And what does that mean? A positive affirmation, you know, in this moment I'm okay, all is well. Or you could go to a positive image. I have two Bichon dogs, little dogs, Bella and Ollie, and I think of them and it's just like, oh, my heart just feels really warm and big. So, going to an image that really makes your heart warm and you can feel warmth and love and marinating in that and when you do that, that is what not only is dissipating those negative neural pathways but creating positive, new neural pathways in your brain and you really can rewire your brain up until the moment we die.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is so empowering? Right? It gives us so much energy and motivation to make change when we know that we are the creators, when we have the tools and we have the power to really transform from the inside out. See how, in transforming and rewiring our brain, we start to transform our everything that we experience, every relationship that we're a part of, everything that we create in our lives. And I think it's important to create that distinction between spiritual bypassing, which is everywhere, and rewiring the brain, Because the difference is creating that safety in our bodies to really feel we're not identifying the thought, noticing where it is and then pushing it away, saying no, that's not right.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go over here and use this affirmation there's no space for this emotion.
Speaker 1:This is a bad emotion, quote unquote creating judgment around whatever we're feeling.
Speaker 1:We're creating that safety in our bodies to be able to hold space for whatever emotion, for whatever amount of emotion is there, and then choosing to link a higher emotion with a new state of being. So we're using that higher frequency emotion whether it be the image of your beloved dogs or whatever it is that's raising your frequency and then pairing that with a new reality, a new way of being a new thought, an affirmation or just a new truth that feels resonant in your body and really almost visualizing the new neural pathway being carved in your brain. And it's important to realize that that process takes time because our old neural pathways have been there for some of us, decades. We could be starting this work at it's never too late to start this work, but we could be starting at 30s, 40s and these old neuropathways have been there and keeping us safe for our whole lives. So really creating that, that compassion for the process, in that it doesn't happen overnight and it requires consistency, and it requires that coming back to self and creating that compassion for the process.
Speaker 2:And yes, I agree. And this is just. This is the pathway to healing. And in this classic therapy model, it's about being able to language and name the experience, or even past experience, and getting into the front of your brain, your prefrontal cortex, naming it and then feeling the feelings. This is what's called neocortical integration, how we become integrated, how we heal and can really come into our heart and soul and live from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and especially because it's these old neural pathways that have been keeping us safe for this long in our lives. Right, it's everything we've constructed, whether it be a belief system, the perceptions of how others have, you know, interacted with us in our life, maybe even a victimhood mentality it's all in an effort to keep the little person inside of us safe from experiencing that kind of pain or abandonment or, you know, whatever the extreme emotion was that you experienced, it's all to keep us from experiencing that again. So when we're able to cultivate that, that unconditional compassion for the little person inside of us, it makes this process just so much less difficult, so much less of a task and more of a, you know, loving, reparenting of self.
Speaker 2:And choosing ourselves again, the pathway to healing and choosing ourselves. It's a choice and it takes courage, it takes strength, but we can all heal. We can heal if that's what we want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. It's such an empowering statement because it's available to all of us. Healing's available to all of us as soon as we decide that it's something that we want, that we desire transformation in our life, that we desire something different. It's available to all of us. Something I wanted to touch on is in your work with End of Life. You've spent a lot of time. You're a hospice chaplain. Is that correct? Is that how you say?
Speaker 2:it. Yeah, for years I was a chaplain at our trauma hospital and then a hospice chaplain. Now I have a private practice working with people providing emotional, spiritual support. Many people I work with today are just are longing for more. They're wanting more in their life. They just feel often a numbness, like this is all there is and I just feel kind of numb. So, but yes, I spent many years working with people, helping them transition over to the other side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's such a I mean, it's such an intense chapter of life to be witnessing for people and and to be helping people. It's such a beautiful calling that you had, and so I'm curious what were some of the most common things that people were talking about as they were approaching end of life?
Speaker 2:I would say that a common theme among people that were end of life days, weeks from dying, a realization that all that really mattered was love, love, love of their family, love of their friends. I often experienced many patients have an awakening, have a sense of oh, this is life, getting the under, the preciousness of life and sensing and feeling it before they died, which was so beautiful, it was just, it was so profound. That was some of the impetus of why I wanted to write my book, everyday awakening with the theme of you don't have to wait till you're at the end of life or you're in a crisis or upheaval. You can choose today. You can choose right now to awaken into your heart and soul and the oneness of the universe which is here, always for us, and it's a choice. Again, it's a choice and it's a practice.
Speaker 2:Um, another takeaway I just share is um, yeah, there was, I would say, in hospice a little different than the trauma hospital. The trauma hospital, not everyone died peacefully because it was so sudden. Um, but in hospice, most people I experienced and I was there a good eight years working people at end of life every day. I was with someone dying, just about every single day.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Is that there was a peace, there was an acceptance. At the end they really moved through letting go of unrest, forgiveness, to just find a place of peace. But definitely the takeaway was love. Love is, and I think that's why we're here. We're here to learn to love. I think what we take with us is our ability to love, and it starts with first loving ourselves and, really important, being mindful of how can I grow love in my heart. The more love we have, the more love we have to give to others.
Speaker 1:So beautiful. I feel that to be deeply true of my body as well, and I'm curious what you say to somebody. Let's say, you know they hear that and they agree. They're like, okay, I, I'm here to love, I'm ready to love, and in a way I don't have time or in a way I'm also have bills and kids to take care of and three jobs that I'm working, and what about all of that stuff? Because it can be easy to be in this, or it feels easier to be in this less grounded place when we're talking about these things of of we're here to love and we're here to experience love, which, which is so it's. It is our greater purpose, right, it's our greater arc. When we're here as a soul. And you know, we're also in this 3d world where we have jobs or we have bills, where we have student debt or whatever it is that might feel so overwhelming. How do we begin to see truth every day in the fact that love is bigger and love transcends those 3D things, when the 3D things feel so heavy?
Speaker 2:I would share that we, as I've mentioned, we're not our thought, we're not our feeling, we're that essence, that stillness, that I'd say universal consciousness, oneness that is our essence and I believe can be our anchor in our life. And I think what takes us out of that place that's always here for us is our ego mind. It's our ego mind that pulls us out, and then we get consumed with every day and worry and the chaos of the world, so being mindful of noticing again, where am I? How can I start to cultivate moments of presence, moments of feeling love in my heart? How can I grow love? That's why my book.
Speaker 2:I have five practices that I have lived organically for most of my life about how to come truly into living from our heart and soul, and so it does come down to some awareness practice. I'm going to work at this and, yes, I do understand life not only is messy but busy, you know, especially with kids and work, and but we can, you know, to take a couple minutes to five minutes here in the morning or midday, when you grab something to have for lunch, or at the end of the day. We can make time. But it's a conscious choice, it's a habit. It typically takes what? 66 days to form a habit, so it has to be mindfully woven into our day. How to create more presence? How can I? What's getting in the way for me feeling love? How can I work with that? How can I open my heart? How can I start to love myself? And that's why I have a variety of practices in my book to feel more love, to feel more flow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm excited to dive into those practices a little bit more. And something I wanted to add to that is something even I'm implementing into my practices is really looking and reorienting around life in a more playful way and almost like we're collecting data. You know like, don't take our word for it. Really start to experiment with this work. Start to experiment with choosing love for yourself, start to experiment with choosing love for others and notice how the universe responds. You know, without just cause, it can be easy to hear this conversation and be like, yeah, well, you know what. I have so much going on. I have all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You just your life's not as hard as mine or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:As opposed to trying on the shoe for yourself, really choosing okay, you know what, today I'm just going to be 1% more loving. However that looks to you, however that feels to you. Maybe it's noticing that person that really triggers you and taking a step back, instead of automatically judging them or, you know, saying something to them in your head that's rude. Choosing to see the humanity in them, choosing to feel compassion towards them. Maybe that's it today. But starting to really try on these practices for yourself and in your own life and notice how the universe responds. Because I think our 3D world can be busy and it can feel overwhelming and heavy at times. And the more that we decide to really lean into that support of the universe, of however somebody wants to label it God, the universe, a higher power, guides, spirits, multidimensional reality the more we'll start to see that be reflected to us in our universe, the more we'll start to experience ease, experience, synchronicity, experience, you know, just less resistance to what we're trying to do or create or be in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, do or create or be in the world. Yeah, I also share. Can you just add in one or two new practices on a daily basis, if it's a practice when you wake up, how you start your day? If it's midday, can you take, you know, even five minutes before you have lunch or after you have lunch and just be. You know you could yes, you could incorporate a breath exercise or you can incorporate a meditation or somatic body movement. There's lots of different exercises, but even just being, maybe you're just sitting for five minutes and just trying to just be present your mind's going to run this way and that way and just try to just breathe and be here for five minutes and just see what's here, just present.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are honestly some of the most as I reflect on. I just turned 30 and I was reflecting on my 20s. I spent a whole day just journaling through every year and chapter and love I experienced of my 20s and through each chapter. Some of the experiences or I guess memories that really stood out that I wrote down were just the nights where I was alone in my room just watching the shadows on my wall and kind of marinating in the presence of.
Speaker 1:in this moment I am 26, in this room watching the light dance on my wall, and it will never be this day or this moment, or I'll never be this old at this exact time again, and there's such a beauty in the fleeting of a singular moment that allows us to really take it in with such reverence.
Speaker 2:And every one of us, everyone hearing this right now every one of us has had experience. Maybe it's for a fleeting moment, but where there's just a oh, time stops, a magicalness of the moment. Maybe it's, you know, windy late afternoon. You're seeing the wind going through the trees, or you're by a lake and the sun's setting, or all of a sudden, a whole flock of geese fly over, but just like oh, there's just a moment of magic, a moment of like, aliveness and preciousness, and like one with all. We've all had that and this is everything yeah I'm talking about, you're talking about, but just, can you feel that, can you open into that, can you grow that? And that peace and that oh, that was aha moments can be truly where we live from can truly be our anchor.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, and so let's go ahead and dive into some of the practices. Maybe do however many you feel called to share, but some of the practices that you have created for people to start living fully and feeling deeply in my book.
Speaker 2:I'll just share the five and then I can share maybe a couple. The first is come back to the present moment. So it all starts with, as we've been talking about moments of presence, being here now. I love, by the way, side note, ram Dass, huge person in my life for years which is being present here and now and opening into what is here. And when we can do that, then it's about connecting with something greater.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm a minister, I'm a chaplain, I'm a spiritual director, but I've worked with people of all faith traditions and no faith traditions. So it's really like, as you were saying, what is? It is a sense of energy, higher power, brahman, allah, true nature, essence. I mean I'm. Language is limiting and the longer you live, I think, on this earth it's just the all that is. There isn't even a name, um. The third is grow your trust and then embody love and hold openness.
Speaker 2:So, within those five practices, I share snippets of stories, a few from my life, some from friends and clients, and then exercises of how do you do it, how can you come more into the present moment, how can you feel more flow, feel more trust, and so a couple exercises to share I'll just if you want to hear a couple quick ones.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of my favorite breath exercises and there's so many ways to teach breathing. You know everything from alternate nostril to square breathing to deep belly, but there's so many. I have for many years enjoyed just the breath exercise of being grounded, sitting, standing and just breathing in and imagining peaceful energy coming through the top of my head, my neck, my shoulders, my chest, my hips, my legs, my knees, and breathing out through my feet any stress, any unrest. So, breathing in peace, bathing through your whole body, breathing out any stress, any unrest and normally people's minds, you might wonder. But just come back and breathing in peace, breathing out stress you can imagine stress like even gray smoke leaving your body, just letting go of what you no longer need to hold on to. That's one of my favorite breath exercise.
Speaker 2:You can also breathe in love, breathe out fear. I have found that personally and professionally with many, many clients really helpful. Another quick takeaway would be even just putting your hands over your chest area I think they now call like a self-soothing practice, but even you know, at night I'll go to bed often and I'll put my hands on my chest. I'm like, oh, here I am, just really grounds me and I breathe. Just feel my heart feeling love, just feeling the warmth of my hands. And you can add, you know, a loving, kindness phrase may I be at peace. Or, if you believe in something beyond, give me peace and just imagine peace, love and your whole being.
Speaker 1:That's so beautiful. Yeah, I mean I in the, in those as you're guiding them, and it's it's just this in the moment, just presence, overwhelming peace and lightness that moves through us, and those are so, so accessible and so, in a way, simple. We can do them anywhere. We can be in our car, we can, we can do them in just a minute. It can take a minute out of our day and really, like you've been saying, anchor into this moment, which, which there's where all the freedom lives, there's where all the choice lives in this moment.
Speaker 2:All the breathing room spaciousness. I also, every single day of my life and I teach this with many, many people I work with, work with what's called energy boundaries. I'm very empathic and intuitive. As I said, I'm a mystic. I get a lot and when I learned this 20 years ago, it was like life changing. And again, if you are a person not everyone is, but where you're a little more sensitive, you can pick up a lot, you sense a lot. Maybe you go in the grocery store and you really can feel everything and there's so much chaos out in the world and even you know. You turn on the news, you turn on CNN. It's like yikes. You know what I mean? There's just yikes.
Speaker 2:So I just consciously work with energy, so I only take in a certain amount of energy and it's just life changing. And you can do that by setting intention. You can do that by seeing, you know, a white light around your being, like into an eggshell or a bubble, or there's a variety of ways. I talk about that in my book as well. And here's what's so exciting Medical textbooks. There's one called integrative medicine by David Rakel and his latest book he has a snippet on just this. So the medical community is trying to recognize oh, we are energy, everything is energy, we can work with energy, so that's exciting.
Speaker 1:So exciting and I think those practices of creating energetic boundaries are so important. I started doing that for myself as well and I noticed when I'm more intentional about my energetic boundary practices which for me is it's a visual meditation where I breathe up the back of my spine, exhale down the front of my spine and almost like I'm creating a shield around my spine you know where our prana lives and then I go side to side and I do that for about four breaths each way.
Speaker 1:So by the end of the meditation I've created this shield around my energy around my spine and I notice what a difference it makes, especially if you are, you know, in a job or occupation where you're around a lot of people, or you're going to be, you know, at a festival or something where you're just susceptible to so many different energies. I think it's something that needs to be spoken about more is just really creating that boundary and, almost like you know, consenting to which energies you allow into your energetic field, because it's just as effective like somebody else's energy can affect you just as much as you know their touch or them, like really being in your life. You know their energy field, especially if they have a potent energy field, can really influence yours. So I think that's such a beautiful thing to touch on as a practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and something I wanted to dive into a little bit more, as you know, as you mentioned, is in your experience, the mystic is an intuitive. You know being a little bit more connected to the interdimensional nature of our being. And with your experience in hospice, the chaplain, with end of life, I want to talk a little bit about grief and can you speak to your own insights from your own near-death experiences being connected interdimensionally, having been with so many people? End of life. Can you speak to your take on grief's role in our life and some ways to really orient around grief?
Speaker 2:It's, of course, normal when we lose a loved one to experience some very deep grief. Um, that's part of life being in this earth, being in a human body. Loss is real and it can be really hard. Um, so, I think, letting the feelings come through you, honoring self--care, self-compassion, growing that, letting grief move through you, you know when, for example, a grief when someone passes, often that first year, really hard, and sometimes even the second year, but yet can you hold I go back to you know equanimity, this equanimous state. Can you hold all of life? Yes, the grief, but also the beauty being with all of it? Um, from my mystical experiences, take this with a grain of salt, but death is not an end. I have seen so much, um, and I've had many people I was with as they died within days to a week, come back and see me in the middle of the night and just kind of nod and thank you, and then they'd be gone.
Speaker 2:So, just for every one of us, the path of healing as a, as specifically around grief. The path of healing, what is that for you? What soothes your heart and soul? You know just even the basics exercise, sleep, exercise, sleep. Nutrition so important and support and community and being with loved ones. All of that is part of health and well-being, and um and one other quick note to share is I just I think we, every one of us, can live multi-dimensionally. What do I mean by that? Where that anchor of how we live is in this moment, in the present, and then we use our mind for accessing information or work or planning, so we can live in all these planes and I'm typically I see spirits every day, I get a lot, I see a lot, and that's part of it Also. It's just, there's many layers. We can live at one time when we're really fully alive and awake in this moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that also feels so true to me, I guess, the interwoven nature of spirits and guides and loved ones who have passed on you know, even if we can't see them in our 3D world, they're there just beyond the veil and something that I think I shared with you before we started recording. I'm in a pretty intense grief portal. I lost my father on Christmas, this past Christmas, and so it's been a pretty intense grief portal, and something that keeps moving through me, or something I guess I want to talk about, is well, first of all, guilt that comes with grief. I guess, as I entered the grief portal, I didn't expect for guilt to be such a key player in the experience, whether it be guilt for any way that we were human and showed up in that dynamic while they were still alive, or guilt for experiencing joy or euphoria after they've passed, when it feels like the only way to really recognize and pay tribute to them is to be in the grief. So feeling guilt for experiencing joy and and that almost notion of feeling guilty for trying to move on, quote unquote. And and then even how guilt or grief can play into the way that our body is working, even despite taking care of ourselves, focusing on our nutrition, moving our body.
Speaker 1:I think it's been really interesting for me to notice how grief has moved through my physical body in different ways, whether it be just random physical experiences or sensations in places in my body that have never been there before and a doctor will say this recently happened. A doctor will say everything looks normal, everything's fine, and I believe them. I'm sure that all my blood work comes back fine, but the more that I sit in meditation, the more I realize it's. It's grief moving through me, it's a pocket of grief manifesting in this way, and it's just been such an eye-opening experience and portal. So can you kind of expand or what are your insights on guilt and grief in this human experience and how we can really breed compassion for the way that our body is processing that grief?
Speaker 2:I think, again, processing it, feeling it, letting it move through you is really important, but also taking breaks if it's very, as I said, heavy grief, where you can take breaks and you know, go out and go for a walk, get out in nature, do something that's healing to help you move that energy.
Speaker 2:But if there's guilt, for example, can you just tune in to what that guilt is. I think the more we can have a consciousness of it, an awareness of it, getting it in the front of our brain, feeling it, we can move through it. And I would be curious, if someone has really heavy guilt, for example, with a loved one who dies, with a loved one who dies, you know, are there threads of this from family, of origin, from childhood? Were there experiences? Does that need to be looked at? You know, maybe relating to childhood and things that didn't happen, or guilt feelings that started arising then? It sounds like there could be for some people maybe a thread tied in from early childhood and I want to uncover, explore, to get that into the awareness, to be able to move through it, to heal, and then you know just the awareness that can you keep feeling it, letting it move through you when you need to talk, journal, write, feeling it, to integrate it. You know, guilt, shame, anger, fear are some of the lowest vibrational energies we can feel.
Speaker 2:So, even just like, okay, I've been really in this place of feeling this, these feelings, and now what can I do? That would be life giving, what could fill my heart. Maybe you know it's going to do yoga or going on a long walk, or you know spending time with a cherished friend. Just you know, choosing what would be life-giving to really fill your heart with some love and light and peace, and maybe, if you have a spiritual practice or a prayer practice or tuning into that to really fill your being, I think is really important into that to really fill your being, I think is really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can agree, especially as I've been in this portal. Something else you mentioned is really giving yourself permission to take breaks. I found that to be so important as sitting in my meditation practice and really being with the waves of grief as they move through me, and then also giving myself permission to be like, okay, that was a lot. That was a lot today, it was a lot. Let's, let's give ourselves space to exactly find something that is life giving, find something that is lighter, that is. That is pure joy for me, whatever that looks like for everyone listening, whatever it is that gives you that spark and giving yourself permission to take a break and then come back and know that we'll process again and in taking a break, it doesn't it doesn't negate the importance of that person that has passed.
Speaker 2:Not at all. Nope, trying to open into all, all of life in this moment.
Speaker 1:Nope, trying to open into all, all of life in this moment. And something else I wanted to just add to the conversation is something that's been coming through for me in meditation. Is this knowing, when it comes to guilt or shame, or just really being trapped in that, in those lower frequency feelings as we're processing grief, is that as a meditation and really connecting to oneness, calling in spirits or or even my dad's spirit, this knowing that guilt is really like our human projection as to our experience? You know it's, it's, it's such a human emotion and when we're on the other side which I'm sure you have so much more insight into, I, but this is what's come through for me is that when we're on the other side, it all is love, it's all love, and so that guilt, that shame, it's all.
Speaker 1:It's our stuff in this human world. It's our way of trying to create meaning around our experience, create understanding around loss, create some way of creating a border and a paradigm around what, the intensity of what we're experiencing versus when we've crossed. There's nothing but just pure love and understanding for it. We're all doing the best we can. We're all doing the best in this human world that we know how to, and there is nothing but love, and like the ultimate, highest purest form of forgiveness, ultimate, highest purest form of forgiveness. And so when that stream, when that download moves through me, it started to really dissolve and allow for the guilt to separate from the guilt of even just being here, still when he's not, you know, it's allowed me to separate from that and see it for what it is, which is so much more of a human creation than my true, than truth.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful, lovely.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Well, I would love for you to be able to tell everybody my audience how they can find you. I know your book is available everywhere bricks are sold, but tell us a little bit more about how they can stay in touch with you.
Speaker 2:Yep, my book is called Everyday Awakening. You can go to my website everydayawakeningcom. My book's Amazon, Barnes and Noble. It's everywhere and you can also go to. I'm on all social media channels. Catherine with a C, Catherine. Like you, Catherine, Catherine Duncan, on Facebook and Instagram. So I'm everywhere.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. Well, I will link all of those in the show notes that people can follow along on your Instagram so that people can find where your book is and stay in touch with you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for your presence and all of your insights. It's been such a beautiful conversation.
Speaker 2:Great to talk with you, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening to this episode. It was such a gift to drop into that conversation with Catherine, especially as I talked about in the episode, as I'm moving through this grief portal in my life. It was a valuable conversation and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope something resonated from this conversation. Don't forget to follow the podcast so that you don't miss any new episode that is released, and I'll be back next week with another conversation. Bye.