Find Your Lady Tribe

Harnessing Qi for Lifelong Vitality: Aligning Body, Mind, and Spirit with Laurie Morse

• Brenda Billings Ridgley • Season 3 • Episode 10

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Embark on a journey of self-discovery and energy mastery with my special guest, Laurie Morse, a virtuoso in Chinese medicine, as we unravel the enigmas of life force and qi. Laurie's decades of wisdom illuminate the path to a harmonious balance among body, mind, and spirit, offering a beacon of hope for those transitioning from the grind of corporate life to a soul-nourishing career. Tune in for an episode that promises not just to enlighten but also to equip you with the tools for cultivating your vitality for health, longevity, and a life teeming with purpose and joy.

This conversation is a treasure trove for midlife women seeking to rekindle their passions and forge profound connections. Together, Laurie and I share the alchemy of aligning your chi and the transformative effects this can have on friendships and community. We provide practical advice for embedding spiritual practices into your everyday, from the way you breathe to the intentions you set. Grab your favorite cup of tea and join us as we share heartfelt anecdotes and offer resources that guide you to attract the life and relationships you've always desired. Whether it's a stroll with friends or a heartfelt chat over wine, learn how to enrich your life with the energy of HEAL (Health, Expression, Abundance, Love).

Connect with Laurie:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauriemorse/

https://www.facebook.com/aculauriemorse/

https://www.instagram.com/aculauriemorse/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs8FX_k-UKdFy7XFS94VywA

Free Gift!:

https://sacredhealthacademy.com/kickstart-your-energy-5-day-reset-e/

Connect with Brenda:
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Speaker 1:

Welcome back, beautiful souls, to another season of Find your Lady Tribe. My name is Brenda Ridgely, your host. You know there's a certain kind of magic that happens when women of a certain age come together. We've weathered some storms, discovered our strengths and are ready to tap into the wisdom we've accumulated to create our next big thing. This season we're diving deep into the wall spring of longevity. We'll explore how to nurture our minds, bodies and spirits so we can not only live longer but live vibrantly. Whether you're dreaming of traveling, starting a creative pursuit, building an empire or even saving the world Yep, that's right, saving the world. This season is your guide to building the foundation for a life filled with purpose, joy and an unstoppable sense of self. So grab your cup of tea, settle in and get ready to be inspired. But before we get started, I want to remind you to subscribe. Give us a thumbs up if you're enjoying the show and share it with your fellow midlife goddesses. Together, let's create a wave of empowered women who are redefining what it means to age gracefully, powerfully and with a whole lot of Lady Tribe spirit.

Speaker 1:

Hello everyone, welcome back to Find your Lady Tribe. This is a place for midlife women to connect and rediscover your passions, your purpose and your people. And this season is all about longevity, and I'm so excited to be having a great conversation with Lori Morse today. Lori is a master health mentor who makes it fun and effortless for spirit centered women to increase energy and improve health, no matter their age. After practicing Chinese medicine for 30 plus years, she'd seen proof that the way to truly heal is by harnessing the natural principles of life force and the elements making it possible to bring a body, mind and spirit into high-level alignment to feel good again and enjoy a life they love. She's gathered these secrets for decades from her private practice and an online sacred health academy that serves many. Welcome, lori, thanks for being here today.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, brenda, it's a pleasure, I'm so excited.

Speaker 1:

Well, I'm fascinated by what you have to share today the whole topic of life force and qi and getting down to what is all that really? And the Chinese medicine spin is just fabulous. So why don't you just start off by sharing with all of us a little bit more about you and why you do what you do?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I guess the easiest and quickest way to get us there is I was in corporate for 10 years and it was sucking my soul dry, so I would wake up. I would say to myself I want to wake up and feel passion for what I do, like Mozart and you know Monet and all you know all the, all the people that and Monet, those were the three I would use, and so I read all those books and you may or may not remember these, but what Color Is your Parachute and how Do what you Love and the Money Will Follow. I had stacks of books like that and I remember sitting by the pool and I would do all the exercises and I know I knew I started realizing it would be around health. I had no idea about, you know, Chinese medicine at the time. This was like literally 35 years ago, and so I worked for health clubs and I would work in health food restaurants and I was just trying all these other things that were seemingly health related. And one of the perks I got as a manager of health clubs and it was women's only health clubs is I would get a massage and this woman, who I love to have massage me once a month was going to Chinese medicine school, so she would tell me she was basically telling me all the gossip who was sleeping with who. So I didn't really pay attention to like acupuncture or Chinese medicine or any of that. But I ended up finding my way to that school, that same school, and that's fun story, but I don't know if we have time for that. I want people to learn more about qi, but through my path of Chinese medicine. So the Chinese medical model has this word, qi, and it's simply a Chinese word for life force, and it has taught me.

Speaker 2:

Life force has taught me literally everything I know. And I can say that because every particle and wave, if we look at it from a quantum physics perspective, is a particle of light and this is a life force and we are made up of all of that. So we're matter, and this is where elements come in, because all of the elements of Earth become the elements of our functioning organ systems and you know all of the movement that we have capacity for in this, you know thing that we call a physical body, and so life force is seen and unseen. So the life force we don't see is like the wind, you know, obviously, something is blowing the tree and making the sway branches sway, but we don't see that, but we can't say it doesn't exist either, and that's a similar experience in our, in our body. So we have the unseen branches sway, but we don't see that, but we can't say it doesn't exist either, and that's a similar experience in our, in our body.

Speaker 2:

So we have the unseen life force, or so we have the seen life force, and the seen life force is literally our fingers and our toes and our blood and our tears and our, you know, the rain and that kind of thing. So that's what, where yin and yang comes in. You know the seen and the unseen aspect of life force. But the thing I want to make sure we are 100% clear about is everything is this energy, everything is this life force, and nobody teaches us how to cultivate it or manage it. And so that's what I became really passionate about and that's why I'm here now.

Speaker 1:

I love it and thank you. I had a similar experience in corporate America and you know that's a big reason why I do what I do as well. So I think it's so. The talk talking about energy is so just fascinating because I remember I don't know, it may have been 10 years ago or whatever when I first kind of was getting into Abraham Hicks and and I think there was a show called what the bleep or whatever.

Speaker 2:

Do we know it was a movie? Yeah?

Speaker 1:

Basically, where it says that we all are just energy and even you know, we're all energy particles put together and each of those cells have their own life force. Yes, yes, we are all connected energetically. We are a bunch of little individuals and in these little shells, we actually are connected vibrationally. So, yeah, what life forces.

Speaker 2:

Well, life, okay. So that's a perfect question. So we could say that life force is everything, right, it's the quantum field, it's the intelligent field, and this is how we can say we're connected. The other way, we can say we're all connected, because most of us, at the human mind level, look at certain things going on in the world and go I'm not one with that, you know, right, right. But if we know that we have a higher presence, like a higher version of ourself that is actually literally made of light, and that part of ourselves extends itself as these molecules of matter that make up this bubble of biology that we are, and then when we connect with that part of ourselves, that higher part of ourselves, and say, like I am one with this part of my higher presence, which means I'm one with all higher presences, right, then we can. That's a different feeling state, that's a different way of completely being able to embrace that we're one with all of life.

Speaker 2:

And what distinguishes life force is vibration and frequency, right? So you know, a desk is a different vibration than a finger, which is a different vibration than the wind, right? And so there's this spectrum of frequency and vibration that makes up. You know, in Chinese medicine it's called it. You know, before there was the two, which we could say is masculine and feminine, there was the one, and then, after the two, there is the five, and that's the five elements, and then there are the 10,000 things. It's more than 10,000, but it's the miraculous creation of life that we get to enjoy on planet.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we could just really talk for days about all of this because it is just so massive and it's just this mind shift and you know we could get into the conversation about. You know who's showing, what things are showing up in your life and you better check your energy, right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think that would be true for every breath we take. And I'm not saying we have to get that like intense about it, but if something continues to get our energy, what I now know and this comes from, like my healing hat right Is that it only is coming up because it's ready to be tended, it's ready to be returned to love, it's ready to be untangled and offered to love. It's ready to be untangled and offered to, you know, like the field of energy, which is partly us too, like we don't, we can't be separate from that. When we talk about, you know, like addressing the source of all life, or spirit, or the divine, or the universe, it has to be exquisitely personal as well as universal, right, because that's constantly an exchange. But when it's ready, you know, healing true healing is the transformation of energy that's no longer serving into energy that is serving. We tend to, in our program beliefs of cultural craziness, think that we're wounded and broken and irreparably so. But that is not true at all. It simply means energy is ready to transform.

Speaker 1:

Interesting. So maybe this is. I think you just kind of led into my next question, which is why is life force and chi or the same so important for health, wellness and longevity?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, it's the most important thing, because how we manage this life force, energy, chi it doesn't really matter what word we put to it determines our health. So we know that when people don't eat healthy, don't move their body, don't care about whether they sleep or whatever the needs are of their body. If they don't eat healthy, don't move their body, you know, don't care about whether they sleep or whatever the needs are of their body if they don't cultivate social connections, because we know that is an extremely important part of our health and well-being. If people take drugs for 20 years, that is going to drain the chi tank, so to speak.

Speaker 2:

So all the decisions we make day in and day out and I'm not saying they have to be perfect, but they have to lean into the best quality we have access to at the time, and of course that changes over time, especially when we hit midlife. Right, I'm writing my third book right now and it's all about moving through menopause with grace so that we can access this vibrancy and this thriving nature that this time of life is a portal for. But we never get shown how to have that be the case, right, we just sort of crash and burn and then we don't know how to pick ourselves in our pieces back up. I mean, women do figure that out, but does it have to be so difficult? I don't think so.

Speaker 1:

Right, yeah, I think we're all kind of just figuring it out because we are living so much longer and better lives that we're like fed up with it. No, we're not going to put up with this.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, those old stories about menopause Exactly, and we're meant to like, gather the wisdom of the years we've lived, of the life we've lived, and and literally springboard from that wisdom into this next rebirth literally springboard from that wisdom into this next rebirth, right Love it.

Speaker 1:

Oh my gosh, that's amazing. So you touched on it a little bit. But how does our relationship with energy affect our social connections? Because, as you know here, that's what I'm so passionate about here is reconnecting to everything and, in particular, our social relationships that have become so distant through social, through zoom, through online dating, through apps, through the pandemic.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Hard stuff. Yes, exactly. So I think the first, the first place to start, is with being present with our own, like our own connection with ourselves. So we could, we could say that like our connection between our head and our heart, between our breath and our matter, you know, cause that's the unseen and the seen, and then we can take it out to our connection between just who we are and whatever we're doing, and nature, the nature that's all around us, whether we're in an urban or, you know, not, urban environment. There, you know, there are trees, there are plants, connecting the practice of connecting with life as it is being unfolded in every moment. For you, for us, is a, is a cultivation of energy right, and that is very different from the distractions of life. You know all the shiny.

Speaker 2:

What do they call those shiny whistles, shiny objects Shiny objects, shiny objects, yeah, and the squirrels and all that, yeah, yeah, it's like that and we're not present. We're not present with ourselves when we're following all those rabbit holes, and so that actually sucks our energy dry. So just the practice of coming to our center, taking a breath, literally getting in our body, you know, work exchanges and that kind of thing, I think, is if we leave that out, it it's hard to cultivate deeper relationships when we don't have a depth of our own knowing in ourselves, right?

Speaker 1:

So you're saying spend a few minutes on just yourself, centering, so you're showing up as truly who you are.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm saying spend, spend regular time at least in the morning, if not throughout the day. I drink a lot of tea, right? So every time I go to the bathroom I use that time to drop in. I call it sink soften and source, meaning connect to source, and that gives me. That's a fuel in and of itself, it's a personal medicine for us all and it's the foundation from which we can connect with any other part of life. Is that what you were asking?

Speaker 1:

Well, yes, basically in relation to going out into the world and being social.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, okay, yeah, that's what I mean by any other part of life.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so having done the practice, whatever the habits, put them into your routine, to be sure you're, you know, grounded of sorts, and yeah.

Speaker 2:

So that's a good point, because there's all kinds of ways that people teach, like how to go networking and how to go out and be social and how to you know how to cultivate friendships Right. What I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong with any of those things entering place and this internal connecting place. We have 70 trillion cells in our body and every one of those cells has a blueprint for wholeness and part of that wholeness is connection right, like. I have this acronym for HEAL that dropped in I don't know 25 years ago. So the acronym for HEAL, the H is health, the E is expression, the A is abundance and the L is for love, and that means to me connection right.

Speaker 2:

So these cells are wise and intelligent and they will guide us if we are in a relationship with it, like right, if we connect into this embodied part of the intelligence and wisdom and guidance that every human being carries. But nobody teaches us how to cultivate Right. And then, when we go out, instead of being anxious and oh my God, am I going to remember to say this thing to that person, you know, instead of being anxious, we can just sink into ourselves and let the guidance of our being be more in the forefront than in you know, tossed in the back right, and I can tell you, with a little bit of practice, that part of ourselves teaches us that it's trustworthy, that words will always be there, that we can look someone in the eye and have a true connection, that our hearts can actually connect and it can feel right and good and authentic, instead of trying to make that be something you know like in a forced way.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes, and I think this is a really important conversation for us now as midlife women, having come off maybe decades of just kind of the treadmill of life with right being, you know, diving into our roles as wife, mother, career woman, whatever, and not really, and kind of having lost touch, maybe with our core self right, that's a really good point.

Speaker 2:

I have found at 63 that the second half of my life has been so much more nourishing and connective and satisfying than I even knew how to think about in the first half of my life. And there's that also, that middle ground between the first half of life and the second half of life, where we kind of feel like we're losing ourselves and we're losing our identity.

Speaker 1:

And hey, lady, just wanted to take a moment and interrupt right now in the middle of the show, to ask you to subscribe. Yes, press that button right now. This show is all about you, the midlife woman. Let's do this thing together, so join us, subscribe now.

Speaker 2:

I know that you have a link that my gift to your listeners is a five-part mini class on how to. It's the power of grounding you mentioned grounding earlier the power of connection, the power of embodiment, the power of presence and the power of grounding. You mentioned grounding earlier, the power of connection, the power of embodiment, the power of presence and the power of purpose. And it's kind of like we put all those things together, like tapping our head and rubbing our belly and walking and chewing gum at the same time. You know, you do one at a time first and then you put them all together.

Speaker 2:

And if, if all one ever did is practice that every day, you know, or at least you know, a time in the morning and then maybe a time or two during the day, like I mentioned, you can use the bathroom as a you know an association to do it, to remind you. It would almost be like that is enough. And even people who are real farther down their spiritual path or their you know their journey, I have observed that they tend to forget this core basic. So, no matter where, where one, where a woman is in their connection and their spiritual you know practices, this is, if this is left out. It's, it's like a piece of your foundation, of your house being left out. Wow.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, I can see that now for sure. Wow, yeah, I mean I can see that now for sure. So, lori, how would you encourage middle-aged women, someone who maybe feels disconnected from herself and her social friendships, and maybe you can give two to three tips on how she would just get started getting into these practices or habits to connect with her chi?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I could talk until midnight about these things, but I will keep it to two to three tips. The first thing is literally practicing what you and I've been talking about, brenda, and I really encourage the women to go get the free gift because it will, step-by-step, give you how to do that practice. And then the other thing that's dropping in is envisioning yourself connecting with the kinds of women or friends or, you know, business people that you, that you want to have relationships with. Don't see faces and don't put names to those visions, but just the qualities like open-hearted. You know they're willing to have a reciprocal exchange. You know they're, they come from love. You know, whatever's important to you I'm making all of this up but you know, get really clear in your heart and your head, like, what are you looking for? And the reason why is because then you, it will ring true for you when you, when you meet a person like that, and it's okay if that person doesn't sort of resonate in the ways that you've articulated to yourself, it's okay. It's just you know you get to move on to the next person and connect and try. You know, try in those ways that would be more like in a networking event, but it's also true for cultivating, you know, new friendships in the second half of life. And the third thing I would say and I know that the minute this word comes out of my mouth there's going to be people that bristle that is to just be willing to have a relationship with your creativity.

Speaker 2:

Not talking about being an artist or a sculptor or a you know, a you know famous photographer with stuff on the walls of the Smithsonian. I'm talking about because we're being creative all day. And here's why the life force that we are is automatically creative, which means we are too right, because there's no separation from that part of ourselves. So we have a creative impulse, no matter what you think. I hear people all the time say I can't draw a stick figure of my life. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just being in this relationship. I have personally found that as I cultivate creativity, it's like I'm cultivating. It's like a date night for me, or date day or whatever for me and my life force, and and and we all know how important date nights are, or date to our friends and our partners and like that.

Speaker 2:

So just be open to that.

Speaker 1:

Oh, those are great. I love all of them, but in particular, I'm going to go to number two. That that's, I absolutely teach that to basically sit down and brainstorm and create the friend that you need, the friend that you want to attract. What does she do for you, how does she support you in your life, how would you show up for her? And really, I mean you can put it down to what specific things like, what they look like, just for fun. And once you are actually, we are here to create. To your third point we are here on this planet to be creators yes, 100%, and we absolutely can design our future, our friendships and all of that.

Speaker 2:

So that's just fabulous and whatever the way you want to be, whatever your authenticity is, image yourself and envision yourself walking into circumstances and that is you or even leaving a gathering or whatever, and saying to yourself I feel so good because I stayed true to myself.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes, fabulous. So, Lori, you know, I know you have a few books. Why don't you tell us what they are? And also, how do we all find you?

Speaker 2:

Sure, well, everything that we've talked about is on my main website, which is wwwcreatetoealstudiocom. You can get free stuff there. The only thing that's not on there my second book is on there, and you can get that for free, or you can get the title and go to Amazon if you'd prefer Kindle or hard copy. But the other book that is not on there is how to Reverse Heart Disease Naturally A Guide for Women to Not Die Before Her Time. So, yeah, and then my third book is this you know how to Move Through Menopause with Grace?

Speaker 2:

I'll let you know when it's out It'll be out in a couple of months.

Speaker 1:

We may have to talk again about either of those topics because again, there's so much to talk about. To unpack 100%, yeah, and everybody who's listening you can find in the show notes. I'll have direct links to everything that Lori just mentioned and her free gift that I encourage you to check out as well. So, gosh, lori, I always finish with this question how do you?

Speaker 2:

tribe. Finish with this question how do you tribe? Well, I tried on everything that we've talked about, but the way it actually plays out like boots on the ground in life is is walking with girlfriends and having wine. Having a glass of wine with girlfriends and I mean for those who walk with their girlfriends, it's like so much comes out. The connection is deep and it's, it's spacious and it's there's just no limits to how that connection can be cultivated.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely yes, and I and multitasking when you're walking right.

Speaker 2:

Because you're getting two things at once. You're getting movement, exactly, you're getting air, you're getting vitamin D, all the things, yes.

Speaker 1:

We love that. Oh my gosh, lori, I just really enjoyed speaking with you so much and thank you for being a part of the, a part of the tribe. Now, um, when three or more gather, we are a tribe.

Speaker 2:

A hundred percent. I love it and thank you for doing what you're doing. It's. It's good work. Yeah, my pleasure, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Until next time.

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Brenda Billings Ridgley

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