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Conscious But Grounded
Conscious but Grounded is a podcast about spirituality: high vibe living in the real world. I ask questions like: how do we connect to the magic, spirit, source, the universe - but with our feet firmly planted on the ground? How do we show up in a conscious way and harness that to make big paradigm-busting change in the day to day of our lives?
Conscious But Grounded
S1: Ep 1: the who, what and why...
This first episode is just me, going RIGHT LET'S DO THIS! So, expect me, talking around several different areas around spirituality. I want to create this podcast as it comes, channeling as it were - unscripted. If you vibe with my work then you might like it. I share my story, my spiritual truth, and the type of things this podcast will be about.
I really hope you enjoy, relate - or that it provokes some food for thought?! Please leave me a review as it makes a big difference! Thanks so much.
Links:
Hey! I'm Rachel! I am a qualified Holistic Life Coach and Mind Body Practitioner, Embodiment Coach, Yoga 500hrs (plus lots more extra yoga quals). I'm also an award winning content creator and have 20 years' experience in digital. I'm a mum of 3 kids and I live in the Peak District - oh and I have ADHD and I am sober. My passion is helping midlife women turn meltdown into magic!
Offerings:
My luxury retreat for midlife women! (free workshop in the pop up too)
Book a coaching taster spot with me half price
Goddess Codes Chakra Masterclass (GODDESS7 to get for £7)
Find me here:
Hi, welcome to, uh, the first episode of Conscious But Grounded. I'm gonna put my glasses on here, so if you're looking at the video version, you can see me just, like, putting my glasses on. So, this is a wild experiment I'm Really excited to just jump right in. I'm kind of jumping right in but it's also been a long time coming. I've started a podcast before, I actually did about seven or eight episodes, it's called The Sober Woo, it's like really nice talking to people about the link between sobriety and spirituality. And I've dibble dabbled in it since, and I've always known that a podcast is definitely what I want to do. So I'm going to introduce myself, and then I'll talk a bit more about what this is going to be. I'm proper winging it, guys. But I'm also, I've been procrastinating about this for a long time, and then my coach finally gave me a little bit of a gentle kick up the arse and said, yeah, that's the name I like, and that's the approach I like, so I've gone with it. So, I'm a bit croaky today. But I kind of like it, it's kind of raspy someone, I went, I just got back from a yoga class and the teacher actually congratulated me on my arm. I was like, yeah, I love an arm because I can be quite kind of throat chakra y and quite Deep in my voice, you know, so I'm Rachel The likelihood is that many of you will already know me and that's probably why you're like, what's this madness thing? She's doing now. What's what's this madness? Let's have a look And and and maybe a lot of you will be like this isn't for me and that's totally fine I've been on a real journey for the past Well forever. I'm 45, but for like the past five years. I've been on a mega journey of exploration, spirituality, getting sober. It's been a very on off journey that we'll definitely be talking about in this podcast. So, yeah. And finding myself was it all sparked by perimenopause? Maybe. I also think menopause is just a gateway and a window into your next phase of life. So I feel like it's like a, a In the same way that becoming a mother is that matrascence. It's like the stepping into the next phase of, of menopause and perimenopause and all those things. It takes a long time but it's a gradual unfurling of what kind of leaving behind my maidenhood, you know, the capability of becoming pregnant and things like that. And in that kind of, I'm still in the mother role very much. I've got three kids. 6. So I've been on a journey the last five years and I've trained as a yoga teacher. I'm running my yoga business now which is rachelbradyyoga. com I offer in person, online yoga and also residential and day retreats so please check those out. But what I want this to be is a space where I can just talk about anything that kind of comes under the umbrella of, like, yoga. spirituality, embodiment, yoga. And my struggle has been like, which one do I focus on? And like, I really wanted to, for it to be quite a broad umbrella because I am a multi passionate person. I used to kind of think of that as a problem, but really it can be a gift too. I'm just going to put my phone on to do not disturb. So bear with. Yeah, so I feel like I am multi passionate. And this is real, this is messy you know, you just heard a ping come up then. I feel like I could write a script, and I've done that before, and people congratulated me on how professional it sounded but I don't want to, I want to channel, I very much believe that we all have the ability to channel from source and from spirit directly, whatever you vibe with, whatever you think that is, whether you think it's inspiration, whether you think it's a flow state, whether you think it's coming directly from God or the universe. whatever. I'm a big believer in that and I do that. So we will go off on tangents, we will go off on digressions, but hopefully there will be a coherency to it as we grow and as we explore and I make more episodes. This first episode, my intention for this episode is to just put the first one out there, conscious but grounded, episode one, the who, what and why, you know. So who am I? I told you a bit about myself already. I've been on a journey. I'm a mom, I'm a yoga teacher. I used to work in digital marketing. Then I left to be with my kid full time and I started a blog and that was called Well Worn Whisk and then it was Really Well, no, then it was Mrs. Rachel Brady and then it was Really Well Rachel, so I'm always changing the names, you know, that's just me. And I did that for like well over 10 years and I was quite successful at it when I stuck my head down and got on with it, you know, and it was a yoga, it was a YouTube channel as well. And it was mainly around food, also homemaking and then just chattiness as well. And I gradually kind of came away from that, but I still feel in my heart that I'm a content creator, that I'm just somebody that loves to share, that loves to explore big ideas, that loves to connect with people beyond boundaries of physical. locality and that's just totally what I'm about and I love that. And so I feel like I've been really wanting to get really back into my content creation for a long time. I've just started a sub stack that's called the yoga householder that's if you google yoga householder sub stack. I'll also put it in the show notes below. My old blog is sadly no longer live because I was paying like 20 quid a month to keep it live and and it's just like at some point you're gonna you have to let go and like in spirituality they teach that a lot just keep letting go keep surrendering and I definitely think letting go is a whole episode in itself if not more than one episode. So I wanted to just introduce myself so I feel like I've kind of done that sufficiently we will get to know each other obviously more and more as we progress through these episodes. and connect on social media and so on. So what is Conscious Book Grounded? So the name Conscious Book Grounded dropped in. It just dropped in. So Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Big Magic talks about Ideas and creative ideas will, will kind of float around in the ether until they find someone that, that, that they feel like could be a good place to land and plant themselves. You know, I'm not, this isn't verbatim what she said, but this is kind of how I interpret it. And they kind of tap you on the shoulder and it's like, are you willing to receive them? Are you going to run with it? Are you going to birth that baby? And if you're not, then it'll go and fly off and someone else will. And Conscious but Grounded came to me a long time ago. Well, maybe a year or two ago, and it's just been mulling around my head. I flirted with other ideas, but I knew that I wanted to just, like I, like I mentioned, have this kind of wider subject area so that it gives me scope to talk about lots of different things. And what does it mean? So conscious, being conscious, be people like now. Maybe it's an echo chamber thing, maybe it's just in my circles, but talking about waking up, right, talking about being awakened, like a spiritual awakening becoming conscious, the higher self, all these different things. Really, what that means is open to interpretation, but for me it means And this, you know, I always feel like I've got to tread carefully around this. So, so if you're listening to the podcast, just take it I'm taking it as permission for me to be a bit more free and open with my beliefs and what I believe. Take it or leave it, okay? Take what you like and leave the rest. It's always my invitation to you. I believe Becoming Conscious is about remembering that, We are sacred, you know, spiritual beings having a human experience. I believe that becoming conscious to me means like, really, and sometimes it slips, and sometimes it drops in and then it slips away from me again, that innate knowing that we are just this kind of cluster of cells, as is this phone, as is this essential oil, as is this table, not cells, you know, cluster of energy, of energy. And that we are, everything will go back to the earth, you know, everything is going to crumble and disassemble and dissolve back to the earth and then become something else again in a group of atoms, energy please excuse, like, science is not my strong subject, but it's more just like that innate knowing and I feel like, and again, at this point, I'm, I'm sure that many people will be eye rolling, but I used to feel fearful about speaking about these types of things because I don't have a scientific background, but I've always just had this innate knowing about There being more, you know like, and just this innate, since childhood, like kind of staring into space, thinking like, why are we here? What is this about? Am I really here? Is this my body? Like, it's so wild that we're looking out through these eyeballs, right? And my perception is one thing and your perception is another. And I've always just had these questions and these. just this intense preoccupation with that, knowing that it will become clear to me and clearer to me as my life goes on. And that's really been a lot of my journey and, and through my yoga studies with my teacher and my fellow kind of yoga students and things like that exploring things like the yoga sutra, exploring spirituality, training in Reiki, starting to understand what energy is, starting to understand from a spiritual point of view starting to understand and recognize the innate oneness in everything and everyone but, and this is where the book comes in, the conscious book grounded it's very easy if you're inclined to magical thinking, so called magical thinking, you know to kind of be away with the fairies a little bit and, and, and almost not want to come back to earth and land and not have, you know, You know boring conversations about, I don't know, life, like, the gas meter, or the friggin PTA, whatever, like, life, you know, life. Life is here, we are here, this cup of tea is here, I have to go pick my kid up at half three, you know. Life is life in and we, it's very dangerous and very unhealthy to kind of step away from that. You know, I mentioned the term householder before. I wanted to call my substack that. I called it something else initially and the universe knocked that sideways and was like, that's not right. Next. And I ended up calling it the yoga householder. And so in spiritual circles, householder means somebody who's on the spiritual path, very devoted to the spiritual path, like me. That's me. But who is very much in the real world running a household. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're a homemaker or a stay at home mom. People often think that. It doesn't. You can have a job, you can It just means that you haven't given an given yourself to renunciation and gone to live in a monastery. and nunnery or so on. So it's people who are devoted to the spiritual path that haven't completely renunciated. And so that's the the grounded bit, right? So I'm conscious, I'm awakening, I do my advanced sutra studies, I read my Patanjali, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali book at bedtime. I I explore yoga in its fullest expression. I do breathwork and meditation. I burn sage, as I just did before I, before I started. I connect to my spirit guide with my card, with my tarot. I am creating healthy routines and rituals to become my highest self. I believe in the highest self. I believe in spirit. But I'm also grounded. So I'm conscious, but I'm grounded. And also. I used to resist the grounded bit, because it was like so fun being away with the fairies. Like, why would I want to come back to Earth? And I used to get really annoyed with people around me, like, Don't talk to me about the dishwasher! We're friggin you know, we're friggin Balls of like miraculous potential of energy and you know, you could have your crown chakra wide open, be receiving signs left, right and center and the fairies, you know that the feathers, the numbers on you can actually become two. ungrounded. And the crown chakra can be open, wide open, and it's actually dangerous for people energetically draining you, for you to become grandiose or arrogant in your spirituality, and not have your feet on the ground. So it's really, really important to close practices. You know, at the end of a Reiki session, we're very, very consciously closing it down. We're closing that channel off in the same way. I've come out of a yoga sutra discussion group and I come back down to earth and I realize that not everybody is on this journey. So I'm presupposing that you've listened to this podcast either because you know me and you're curious as to what mad thing she's going to do next or you're like drawn to the things I sometimes talk about. And I say sometimes because this has been a gradual coming out for me. Like I started a business in lockdown called Mumfully. It was about self care and people still say to me, why did you not run with that? Because it was so good. And I'm really passionate about self care still. Don't think that I threw the bath baby out with the bath water. I didn't, but I remember just sitting with it and going, this is missing a sparkle for me. It was about talking about self care and those very kind of predictable ways, like, have time, make time for a bath, or like, da da da da da, you know, I'm exaggerating, but, and I wanted it to be more, I wanted it to be spiritual, I wanted, and like, the more I was getting into my spirituality, I was like, quite afraid to talk about it, like, none of my family are spiritual in that sense, I was raised an Irish Catholic I went to a Catholic school, and, and those types of things, I've always talked to God at night, like, always but I'm, You, you are putting yourself out there, first of all, when you make content about anything, you're putting yourself out there. Second of all, if you make content about spiritual matters, then you are really putting yourself out there for criticism, for mockery, for X, Y, Z. But I wanted to talk about this because I really, really feel, hand on heart, that there is a huge awakening, and it was 1444, just then on the little timer thing I've got going I think there is a collective awakening happening, you might hear those things being banded around, if you're in spiritual circles you absolutely have, it's the age of Aquarius and na na na but if you're not, you also might be a bit like, sick. Spooked by some things that I talk about or you might be a bit turned off. I would also ask you to hang in there if you're feeling a bit triggered or a little bit like even annoyed by a lot of these things then then sometimes you know that feeling of like you're watching someone on Instagram you kind of like her and you're kind of like I kind of like this girl I like what she's saying and then all of a sudden she just annoys you and you unfollow her and then a month later you're like I think I need to follow her back. Follow. And you're like, that is, that's, that's the gold. Why did you unfollow her? She triggered something in you. And it might be something that you might want to look at. Why did you follow her back? Because, because there's something there. And the world and the universe is saying to you, like, look into this little shadow part of yourself. There's something there that you need to edge into, to lean into, into yoga. Like, find your edge. So, conscious but grounded. I told you I was going to go off on a million tangents, right? But we have to just trust the unfolding, we have to just trust that the universe wanted me to do this in this way. So conscious but grounded. It's so vitally important to me as a person because I could easily be away with the furries, I could easily get annoyed at my husband that he's not on this journey with me, and I do. I could easily get angry and frustrated when my teenager kind of questions Things I take as fact, you know, my faith and things like that and I do and I think it's really important like Gabby Bernstein often talks about this when she has somebody phone in about like Oh man, it's all good being spiritual when I'm on a call with Gabby or when I'm doing a meditation, you know, or I'm like in this yoga class and there's like vibing and then I'm like sipping on cacao and I'm in my women's circle and it's just like, yes, and then you go into the real world and someone fucking pisses you off in a road rage incident and you're like, Fuck you. It's, it's easy to be spiritual in a chill spiritual surrounding. It's really hard to be spiritual in the real world. And also it's okay if you're not, like, and if you do go fuck you to somebody, like, yeah, it's not ideal and I don't, I try not to be like that, but it's impossible because we're human. But the more equanimity we can have in our life, the more unbothered, like hashtag unbothered, we can be around these external triggers. This is the measure and the barometer of how far along we are on our spiritual path. And as a real person in the real world, as a yoga householder you know, it's hard. It's like, how do we show up and be grounded. And grounded, let's talk about grounded for a bit because I feel like we've talked a lot about the conscious side of it. So grounded is like the day to day task that we have to do to live a human life, like pick up our children from school, cook the dinner, and all the rest of it. It also means, so if we bring it back to the chakras for a minute, the conscious is the root chakra, and then let's travel down the body. We've got the third eye chakra, we've got the throat chakra. We have got the heart chakra that connects the upper chakras to the lower chakras. So after the heart, we've got the solar plexus, which is the core. Then we've got the sacral chakra, which is the hips here. And it's the reproductive organs in this area here. And then we have the root, which is the bottom of the spine or the perineum, whichever way you look at it. So the root is like the tail, right? And it's like the primeval. And it's like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the first level, it's the groundedness. It's like Have you got shelter? Have you got money in your pocket to get some food? Have you access to clean water? Are you in a safe home? It's root chakra stuff. It's the roots of the tree planting in the ground. And it's like, if you don't have this firm foundation on the, on the ground, then you can't go to the next step and the next step and the next step. And in the chakra model the root chakra and the crown chakra are, are actually kind of like partner chakras. and then we can do the same so like the third eye is partnered with the sacral and the solar plexus is partnered with the throat and then the we have the heart which links them all and so what i'm trying to say is the root chakra the grounded part of life is fucking really important like don't think that you know, paying your bills, like, and, and, and I'm very guilty of, like, finding that side of life quite boring and wanting to be all up in my crown chakra, like, all the way with the furries. And often people with substance abuse history, as I have around alcohol, and I've definitely used recreational drugs before, often are seekers. Like, that was what my first podcast was about, The Sober Wheel, I'll link to it below. And it's like. We're often seekers. We fucking love being in altered states. Like, I love my first cup of coffee in the morning and I am getting a struggle to give that up. I love cacao. I mean, I can also tap into the subtle energies of things. Because I'm a highly sensitive person. But it really feels like as somebody who, I also am diagnosed ADHD and I have been questioned about and I've discussed with a psychiatrist before, as you'll see in my old podcast the discussion around bipolar. Because I've had, I have really shifting energies, like right now you're seeing me in a very, very social up in my high energy. I'm in my ovul I'm entering my ovulatory phase of my, of my cycle, so I just finished my period. So I'm entering into that fertile phase. I feel my cycle so viscerally, so embodied. You could meet me on the street, and if you know me, you could probably have a good old guess about where I actually am in my cycle. So it's a really good idea as well. We can talk about this in more episodes, and we definitely will be talking about this. around cyclical living, like how can I tie in? And this is a big part of embodiment, like living as an embodied woman. And we've been so drawn away from all of these things in society, right? Like everyone wants to operate like a man, like on a 24, you know, like 24 seven productivity, that operating in that very go, go, go energy. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for men either, but especially doesn't work for women because we have periods of our cycle where we're meant to rest and we have that more kind of fallow yin energy and we're meant, then we have periods where we're meant to be more yang and more like go getting and more chatty and more attractive and that's to attract a mate to come and impregnate us. So. At this moment in my cycle, I'm definitely all in the energies. And I don't, and so I have to be really careful to remain grounded. So for example, I went to put the kettle on to have another coffee, and I recognize I've already had one today, I don't need another. Because I'm already in this high energy state. However, had I been, if it was two weeks away from now, if I was in the second half of my cycle, I think I would have been okay to have another coffee. Okay. What I'm trying to say to you here is I've grown this real awareness around what keeps me grounded and how important it is to stay grounded. Like, yes, I'm going to, I want to be all in the energy and all talking about these like big spiritual themes, but without the grounded energy, without my feet filming off the floor, I took, I just took my shoes off as well, so my feet are planted on the floor. It's gonna sound like gibberish and if anything it might already start to feel like gibberish. So what I try and do in my life and in this podcast and that's what the theme of the podcast is, is how do we stay conscious and in this high vibe energy That the world so needs going forward to come up with sustainable solutions to all the problems that we're having. We're going to have to think outside the fucking box here. We're going to have to blow the roof off what we already know. But how do we do that with our feet on the floor? So if you're at a business meeting and somebody, you've got this mad creative coming up with all these brilliant ideas for the new campaign. But you've got nobody there taking minutes and making a plan. It's all nonsense and it can be thrown out. So, in life, we need to be conscious, we need to have this high vibe. We, you know, we want to feel good and sparky and, like, let's go. And we want to feel, like, tapped into imagination, creativity, channeling from source, channeling these massive life changing You know, paradigm shifting, that's what we need right now. We need to shift paradigms, we need to blow stuff out of the water. Big systems are crumbling in, we're seeing that happen right before our eyes. And it's like, what needs to come forward is the Divine Feminine. And that is a very conscious but grounded energy. So the, the Sacred Feminine, all the stuff that I talk about when I talk about embodiment. Go and follow Deepak Chopra. Go and follow his post about what he's saying about the sacred feminine coming forward. You know, about 20 years ago, Gandhi said no, hang on a second, it was the Dalai Lama said, Western women will save the world. And by that, what he meant was Western women are the unsubjugated, if you like. They're the ones that have come through the other side. and they're in a position and they won't be held back by some root chakra issues of women in other societies, which is basic shelter and all those different things. Like the majority of Western women don't have a lot of those issues. And so they're unable to rise up and come up with these big ideas, but it's important to stay grounded. And on a micro macro level, being conscious, but also being grounded, it's never been more important. Like, yeah. if we are too away with the fairies in that kind of, if you're thinking to men, back into mental health conversations. So if you're thinking in terms of like, if somebody's having a manic episode, so this is not a much wider kind of more pumped up version. It's like without being grounded, some things that people say when they're in those spaces will be magical and will be true, but because they're too much in that energy. it can't happen. So it's really important to have this idea of balance, right? And also recognizing that some things that we do think of as mental illnesses and things like that are actually just ways that trauma are showing up in the body. All of this discussion around, you know, what we know now to be that the body keeps the score, the mind body connection, a more holistic approach to things, less about less about rationalization and, and, and kind of empiricism. And I think there's an author that's really great. It talks a lot around this called Sharon Blackie, and she wrote a book called When Women Rise Rooted, and she has a sub stack as well. And she talks a lot, and in her book, Enchantment, she said something that I read out at a retreat that I gave recently, and it was very much. She is articulating what I want to say a lot of the time and she kind of says that basically she came out of a psychological academic background and she had a breakdown because she knew in her heart that there was just this very dry, like, lack of magic allowed in scientific circles. And This kind of pushing down of things like the mythic imagination and this pushing down of like thousands of years of like deep embodied knowledge that we have as indigenous people. And so what she does now is try and unite both things. So she's still a doctor of psychology, but she also she talks about women in mythology and things like that. And then she kind of is at the intersection of like feminism and psychology and spirituality. Which is just fascinating. And so I'm big time digressing every which way and I knew the first episode would be like this because it's like how do I express what I want this to be about? But hopefully I'm giving you a flavour of that. And I really thought it was worth just explaining and trying to dig into and brainstorming out loud if you like my, the title and what it means to me. So to me it's like being conscious but grounded means Having your crown chakra open to like new paradigms, new ideas, having a connection to source, to nature, to universe, to God, whatever you want to call it, to love, and then also having our root chakra with our feet firmly planted on the ground so that we can have that energy flowing between like the 3D, which is like where we are now, everything in front of us, and we also call that prakriti in yoga. And then it's like the 5D, right? The purusha, the soul, the ether, the, the magic, the things that we not, can't necessarily see, but are indistinguishable, inextinguishable. So I'm gonna leave it there because I want it to be around half an hour and I can't believe how fast that went. So what you can expect coming up, I'm gonna do like 10 episodes of just me talking and trying to get a feel to what this is. And I want it to be around half an hour.'cause I feel like I love to listen to a podcast and just like put my AirPods in AirPods, whatever the hell they're called. My teenager always laughs at me when I call them AirPods. I AirPods and just like go for a dog walk or whatever Okay. Or run or whatever. I'll go to the gym. So if you're wanting to come along with me on this magical ride with our feet firmly planted on the floor follow me on Instagram at rachaelbradyyoga, go to my website rachaelbradyyoga. com. Please leave a like and a review, like a feedback, tell me if I'm waffling too much, give me some things that you'd like me to talk about and we will just keep learning and exploring. Exploring and creating this new paradigm together. Thank you so much for listening. I can't believe you got to the end, so well done. All right. That's all. That's all for now. Bye.