Release the Past, Reclaim Your Joy: A Conversation with Lesley Christine

What if the thing keeping you stuck… isn’t your life - but what you’re still holding onto?

In this episode of Joy Unfiltered, Rachel sits down with emotional clearing expert and meta-psychology coach Lesley Christine to explore how unresolved emotions shape our energy, decisions, and ability to experience joy.

Lesley shares her powerful personal story—from burnout and a life-altering flood to full-time RV travel, emotional healing, and ultimately helping other women release the invisible weight they’ve been carrying for years.

Together, they dive into:

•  What “emotional clearing” actually means (and how it works) 
•  The role of intention in releasing stored emotions 
•  Muscle testing and intuition as tools for self-awareness 
•  Why journaling is more powerful than you think 
•  How grief and joy can exist at the same time 
•  Leslie’s RECLAIM framework for helping women rediscover themselves in midlife 

This conversation is a reminder that joy isn’t something you earn after everything is perfect—it’s something you practice, even in the middle of life’s hardest moments.

And sometimes… the breakdown is actually the breakthrough.

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS (Bullet Section)

•  Emotional “baggage” isn’t just mental—it’s stored in the body 
•  Intention is one of the most powerful tools for emotional release 
•  You don’t need to relive the full story to heal from it 
•  Journaling helps surface subconscious beliefs and patterns 
•  Joy and grief are not opposites—they can coexist 
•  Expecting good things can literally change your experience of life 
•  Small daily practices build emotional resilience over time 

⏱️ EPISODE CHAPTERS

 03:00 Leslie’s Story: From Burnout to Emotional Healing
 08:30 What Is Emotional Clearing?
 14:00 Muscle Testing + Intuition Explained
 22:00 The Role of Intention in Healing
 28:00 Journaling as a Release Tool
 36:00 The RECLAIM Framework
 44:00 Joy + Grief: Can They Coexist?
 52:00 Expectation, Mindset & Finding the Good

👤 GUEST BIO

Lesley Christine is a certified meta-psychology coach, emotional clearing expert, and creator of Living the Game of Life, a platform inspired by the teachings of Florence Scovel Shinn.

Through her RECLAIM framework, Leslie helps high-achieving midlife women release emotional baggage, reconnect with themselves, and create lives filled with clarity, peace, and joy.

She is also the publisher of the 100th anniversary expanded edition of The Game of Life and How to Play It, bringing timeless wisdom into modern life.

🔗 LINKS

Connect with Lesley:

Website

Substack 

Book

Instagram

Living the Game of Life

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Joy Unfiltered. I'm Rachel, and this is a podcast about joy. Not the shiny performative kind. Not the everything happens for a reason kind. This is joy as a strategy. A way to stay steady when life feels loud. A way to stay human when things are hard. A way to lead, love, and live without burning out or checking out. Some episodes will be just me. Some will be honest conversations with people who have lived their way into a deeper, truer joy. No fixing, no bypassing, just real stories, real tools, and room to breathe. Let's get into it. Well, welcome back or welcome to Joy Unfiltered. I am Rachel, your host, and once again, we have a fabulous guest with us today. I am so excited to talk to Leslie. But before I turn it over to her, let me just introduce you to her. And those of you who are watching, you know that I've got to get my glasses on before I do this. But Leslie Christine is a certified metapsychology coach, an emotional clearing expert, and the creator of Living the Game of Life, a community and platform inspired by the timeless teachings of Florence Sculvel Shin. Through her reclaim framework, which we will get into today, she helps high-achieving midlife women release their emotional baggage and the inner pressure of success so they can feel at peace, trust themselves again, and design lives of clarity and joy. Don't we love that around here? Leslie is the publisher of a hundredth anniversary expanded edition of The Game of Life and How to Play It. Can't wait to talk about that, which brings new life to Shin's classic by weaving in modern stories, embodiment practices, and a reflection prompts of a new generation of readers. So welcome, Leslie. I'm so glad that you are here today.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Thanks so much. I'm so happy to be here with you. Looking forward to this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Yes, and we didn't even talk, we barely talked even before we got on. So I don't even know where you are calling in from today.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Ah, I'm in Northwest Arkansas.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Northwest Arkansas. All right. Well, hopefully the weather is beautiful for you.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

It it is unusual this week. We had snow at the beginning of the week, and I think it's gonna be up to 90 today.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Oh my goodness. I, for those of you who listen or don't, I'm in Minnesota. Um and we've had kind of the same. It was we had a snowstorm blizzard on on Sunday, it was two degrees on Monday, and it's gonna be 70 tomorrow. So what is happening? I don't know. It feels a little like my my midlife um hormones all over the place, right? All right, well, let's get started. So you are calling in from Arkansas. So give us a little bit of background on who you are, how you got here, and how you came to kind of um do what you are doing today.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

All right. Well, this is the area that I grew up in, but I have not lived here my whole life. Um, when I finished college, I moved off to Chicago and from there continued to move all over the place until my family started to travel full-time in an RV. So we did that for five years. So following our joy for sure. And when we got into our RV, I was no longer in a corporate job that I really disliked, which felt great. And I was doing the thing that I wanted to do the most, which was travel. And I felt like something was still kind of off. I was like, I should be happier than I am. This is exactly these are all the things I said I wanted, what's going on, and that's when I got into the emotional clearing work because I found that what was actually off was inside of me and not the situation that was going on on the outside. So I started the emotional clearing work for myself so that I could let go of all the stuff that I apparently was still holding on to. And when I did that, I found that I smiled more easily and I started laughing all the time, and I just had a better ability to handle the stressors of life. And then I got tested a couple of times because, of course, the pandemic came up a couple of years after that, and we we handled that so well. I was not, I would not have expected it because we had before we went and traveled full-time, we had had a flood at our house. That was sort of the thing that kicked off a lot of change in my life, and that was highly stressful, and I did not handle it really well. So it was really interesting to me when the pandemic came up. I could see the difference because of how I managed going through that challenge. And then a year after that, my partner got sick, he was given um a terminal diagnosis, six to nine months, and we made another big change in our life, but also the way we moved through that was different. So once I had done the emotional clearing work, it seemed like everything just changed with the way that I experienced life and I loved it. So I wanted to do it with other people to share it. I just got really obsessed with how it all works.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

I love that. Well, and thanks for um kind of being super transparent and sharing your story. And I wrote down a couple of notes. I definitely want to get to the whole discussion about joy and grief together because clearly that is something that I'm assuming that you have gone through as well. But let's start kind of a little more basic. For those of you who are listening, we all might have our own thoughts of what emotional clearing means. But what did that mean to you? What kind of tools did you use? Like what did that process look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 6:35

So I had met a friend who was an emotion code practitioner, and she shared that work with me and did a little bit of emotional clearing work with me. And then I read that book and I just started following breadcrumbs from there. I started looking up everything I could about emotions and learning as much as I could. Uh, part of what they do with the emotion code is use muscle testing. I learned how to do muscle testing for myself, and I just started muscle testing everything. And with muscle testing, you're basically getting a yes or no answer. So you're asking questions, getting yes or no answers, and that's how you narrow down and find different things. So I started finding all kinds of tools. I was just collecting them, and then I would try it on random things. I was like, what kind of an answer will I get to this? And I didn't know for a long time whether I was making things up or whether I was really getting real information, but I started to feel different. And then when I started when I started trying it on other people, they were able to give me feedback. So then it was a little bit different when I got feedback from other people versus from myself because I wondered, am I just giving myself the placebo effect here? Am I just thinking I'm doing something and not really doing anything? But but I really truly did feel different. I think we should actually study the placebo effect way more than we do because there's there's something really important going on there that that we should know more about. But when I got feedback from other people, that was when I was like, okay, I am like really finding real information here. And I just found it fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

That is great. So, well, a couple of things. Well, one, yeah, the whole thing about the placebo effect. I agree, and I've done a little bit of um, a little bit of work, but certainly, I mean, that exists, right? I mean, I've done studies about how medication works, and you know, that that does exist. So, you know, that's okay to hang on to that. But I agree with you about the whole, like, am I making things up when I started meditating and I thought I was listening to my guides, which I really am listening to my guides, but at first I was like, that sounds a lot like my voice. Like, I was am I just again of like what is how do you trust what the information that is coming in? So I I am actually not very familiar or maybe familiar at all with muscle testing and the and the book, the um emotion code. I would love love to know a little bit more specifically. Well, like what is like am I actually going and doing a bicep curl at the gym, or what is muscle? What is muscle testing?

SPEAKER_01 9:14

There's a lot of different ways you can do it. One way that a lot of people have heard of it, because muscle testing's been around for for ages. Ever I'm sure. I just haven't heard about it.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Yeah. One thing that one way that a lot of people know is called the sway test. And so you'll stand up tall. And if you are to say a yes, what you should feel is your body sort of leaning in. It's like moving forward to the yes, right? And if you say no, you should feel your body tilt back a little bit. It's just subtle, it's like super subtle, but but you can feel this movement. And the more you play with it, the stronger it gets, and the more you can feel it inside. And what was interesting is I started to know the answers that I was gonna get before I even used the muscle testing on them, which didn't always help with my trust of what I was getting. I I was actually starting to tap into my intuition more, but I didn't quite realize it. I was like, oh, I am making it up because I have decided first. And then I realized, no, I'm actually like receiving the information before, even before I muscle test for it. Now, the way that I like to do it is actually sitting and I hold my hand out and like I hold my hand straight out and then I press down. And so strong, when I press down, it'll be strong if it's a yes and it'll be weak if it's a no. There are other methods that use the fingers that I used to love and now I can't even remember how to do them. And then sometimes I started to play with the whole idea, and I would start to go, okay, well, what does a yes feel like in my body? Like without pushing on anything, right? And I started to look for what just what does it feel like and what does a no feel like? So I'm like constantly playing with different ways to get the information because one of the things I love about it is that you can kind of use it for all kinds of things, and you don't necessarily need everybody around you to know that you are doing this.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Sure. And so this is something that the yes and the no is in context of a particular question, or am I just using the words, yes and no?

SPEAKER_01 11:29

When you're first trying it and just playing with it, just saying yes will you want to see what the yes gives you and what the no gives you. That way, when you ask the questions, you know what answer you're getting. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

And also sounds like this is a protocol that I could be using myself, but also you are using that with clients. So it can be used in the context of a coaching or a therapy session as well.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Yep. Yep. So what I do is I tap into the person's energy and I will ask, Am I am I connected to them? Am I receiving answers for you, not myself? And once I get a yes on that, then then I go about and ask the questions, and I know that I'm like getting answers for the other person.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

And you learned this protocol. Is that is it in the book, the emotion code that you started? The emotion code.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

The emotion code pointed me to muscle testing, and then I just started like playing with the idea of muscle testing. Like I got really interested in that, so I started asking all kinds of questions. Sure. The questions that you ask are so important, I think, just in in general in life, right? Even down to something like journaling, right? You ask a good question, you start to get answers that come through that are really interesting. Um, but just knowing that I could get these responses for yes and no, I started playing with that. Now, what I actually ended up certifying in is the metaphysical anatomy technique. They don't actually use muscle testing in that, um, but but I I love to use muscle testing personally because it just makes it feel so tangible to me, the information that I'm getting.

unknown 13:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

So talk a little bit then about what um as a certified metapsychology coach, like what is that? And then yeah, what is that? And how and how do you then work with with people through that, through that certification?

SPEAKER_01 13:37

So, with the metaphysical anatomy technique, what we do is we have people talk to us about what's going on, and they will find the emotions themselves. So I can find emotions for people, but they usually will bring forward what the emotion is that they're feeling. We look for where in the body it is, and we look for the instinct that it that it brings up in you. And I think that's one of the things that differentiates metaphysical anatomy technique is we're really looking for that instinct. Does it make you want to run and hide? Does it make you want to fight, right? What does it make you want to do? And then we clear whatever the emotions are, clear them from the area of the body where the person is feeling them, and we balance the instincts so that so that everything, everything just kind of it ends up leaving you feeling neutral in the end. So something that would have caused a heightened emotional reaction. Maybe in the beginning of a session, someone is telling me, and we don't go into the whole story. It's not, you don't have to tell the story of all the things that happened to you. We're just looking for the emotion, where you feel it, and what does it make you feel like you want to do? And people will just have tears, and you can see the emotion on their face whenever they first start even thinking about it, right? And by the end, they're just like, Yeah, I just I don't feel it anymore. Like it's just neutral. And that's one of the biggest things it does.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Yeah, and that's I think that's great again, because you're not saying that you are solving the problem or that there's not some real thing that happened. There's a real event or there's something that happened, and they and we get to feel about it, right? But using that energy then to, it's almost like I'm I am um, I am calming my nervous system, I am regulating, I am, I am, you know, I talk about this a little bit like joy, right? I am just being present so that then I have the capacity to make decisions about whatever that that was. Because if I'm feeling if that energy is neutral, right, then I get then I have the um bandwidth to to handle whatever that that situation was, right? Am I getting that? Am I getting that correct? I don't want to put boards in your mouth, but yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

I feel like um people can look at it and then like, oh, that was just a thing that happened to me in my past, just like I, you know, I went to work yesterday, right? It's just it's something that doesn't cause a heightened emotional reaction. And previously it did, right? But we can get it to a point where it doesn't bring up that heightened emotional reaction. It's still a part of your story, but but you don't have the reaction to it anymore, and that can be a really powerful place, especially about there's a lot of people that they're like, I can't even think about that, I can't bring that up at all. Like, you know, I have to avoid this thing at all costs, and now they don't actually have to anymore because it has been neutralized, right? Um, I feel like what I explain it as a lot of times is it gives you capacity to hold more bandwidth. It's this it's you know, same thing, right? But it just um one of the concepts I came up with recently was people talk about how you have your cup and you got to fill your cup, right? And that's all the self-care stuff. But my theory is that maybe there are two cups, and one of them you got to fill with the self-care, but the other one the world is filling for you. All those things that happen to you, all the stress and stuff like that, the natural disasters, things you can't avoid in life. There's like stress pouring into this cup, and you've got to empty it out because if you don't, one little drop is gonna make it spill over. And so that's what I do. I like that enough. I help empty that cup.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

I like that. And when you're working with energy, um, is that do you talk about it or think about it in the same way that someone is aligning their chakras or that they do like in Reiki or Healing Touch? I mean, is so when you think about energy or emotional energy, is where are the where are the overlaps or are there overlaps in that?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

So I've never actually done Reiki. I don't know a whole lot about Reiki, even though anytime I say to anyone that I do energy work, that's what they think of. That's the thing that everybody knows, but I don't do Reiki. Um, I think for me, a lot of it comes with the intention.

unknown 18:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

So my intent once we have found something that needs to be released, the intention is to release it. And it's uh we're spending this time of really focused intention to release that thing. I'm uh in an energetic space with someone else. I've checked to see that I'm connected to them through the muscle testing, right? We are in this space together holding this intention to release this emotion that has come up. And I can't fully explain what happens because I don't fully understand how it happens, but through that intention, we start to release it, and then I use muscle testing to figure out has it released. And I at one point in time started checking for percentages, like, did it release 100%? And that's what I'm always going for. And so sometimes it will have released part way, but that helps me guide where I'm at. Like, okay, it's releasing, like we're we're getting there, but we still have longer to go. And it's just holding that focused intention, and there's lots of different ways that you can do it. Some people will see color, like they'll imagine color, right? They'll they'll imagine something that might seem like it pops. Um, there's all kinds of different ways, but it's all about this focused intention to release.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

I that it does. I yeah, that's I wrote that down a couple of times now. Intention, intention that I um, which is which is great. And I love when you said too, I don't know how it works. And I feel like sometimes people get, I don't know, afraid or off put when they are like, oh, it's so woo-woo, and it's I don't know how it works. And my response sometimes is, yeah, and I actually don't know how my cell phone works or how Zoom is working right now and how I can look at you right now. And I don't have to know. I just know when I click the button on my computer, your beautiful face popped up. I mean, I don't know how that works, and so I can trust that. So it's interesting to me that while we are trusting that piece of technology, we don't trust this other energy that's out there because we don't know how it works. You don't really have to, right? It just does. It just does.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

Totally. The phone is my example too. I'm like, I don't know how this thing works, but it makes phone calls. I can talk to my dad, even though he lives a couple of hours away. I can talk to you, even though you're off in another state. I can talk to people on the other side of the world, and that's amazing. And I'm gonna use it, even though I don't like I don't need to know how it works. You know, the microwave might heat up my tea, and I don't know how that all happens.

unknown 21:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

I I just think it's and this is not this is not to say that you know anybody's perception, their world perception is is wrong or or whatever, but it just it makes me it makes me giggle sometimes when I think, okay, you trust in those things, but why not trust this? Because this also works, right? If you try it, it also works.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

I think part of it is because people can't, we can see each other right now, right? And we're we're talking to each other, and I think there's something about the stuff that's internal, it's an internal experience that can't fully be explained, and nobody. Else can see it. I think sometimes that's why people struggle with trusting those things. Also, the the I made it up. Like, did I make this up? And so we sometimes tell ourselves those stories. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Well, I'd love to know more about kind of moving on to some of the other framework pieces. So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about the reclaim framework and how you how that came about, how you work with it. What is it?

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Yeah, I feel like I've like sort of reinvented my life a number of different times. Um and when women come to a place in midlife, often we have given so much to our jobs, to our kids, to our families. We've given so much to everybody else, and especially women, because we tend to be a little more, many of us lean toward people pleasing. So we're like constantly trying to do for other people. It's, I think it's a little bit in our nature. And as we get into midlife, we tend to care less about what others think. We start to really have this greater sense of self. And of course, sometimes, like for me, that came about after I did the emotional releasing, right? Then I really got to be solid in myself and who I this is who I am. And I'm not worried about, I don't know, the trends or what people think about me or or how I look anymore. I'm I am who I am. And the reclaim framework is all about reclaiming yourself. And so things we focus on are first releasing all that old junk, right? You got to get rid of all that old junk as it's that that has uh come with you throughout your life, that has the baggage, right, that you've piled on every all the different things that have happened to you. You've sort of collected a thing, and it's time to put all that stuff down so that you can reclaim yourself. Um, from there, we work on embodying who you really are, right? So accepting yourself and embodying that, clarifying your vision of what you want for the future, and then you begin to align your energy. And all this time, this is like a process that you know goes over the course of six months, and all this time it's all about releasing at different levels. So when we get to the point where we are starting to align the energy, we are looking at things at releasing things around um around like resilience, around bringing in more ease in life, like what's getting in the way of these things. Right. Uh, then it's just about continuing to implement the things that we've put into place, right? At different points in this, we're looking at your values, we're looking at setting boundaries, right? We're looking at how can we set life up to where it can be the way that I really want it to be. So implementing it, finding more confidence in yourself, and then just maintaining what you have put into place so that you can expand out into your future.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

I love it. And I was taking notes as we were doing that. So let me see if I got it all right in terms of the reclaim. And I love a good acronym. Um, so we're releasing, we are embodying who we are, we are then clarifying the vision, aligning our energy, implementing and maintaining.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

That's it.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Love it. I love that. And so when you are, you said something about six months that is well. So when you work with um with women, when they and I'm assuming is it all women, or do you ever have do you have men as clients as well?

SPEAKER_01 26:06

I pretty much work with women, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Okay, yeah. And so when they're coming to you, um, is is this reclaim a six-month process? Is it kind of you start coaching and you see where that takes you? What is what does the framework look like for the coaching process?

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Everybody is gonna be really individual because people are people are gonna come in different places, right? So some people are gonna come and they're gonna have just an enormous amount of baggage. And some people are gonna come and they're have gonna have done a lot of work already. And if you've done a lot of work already, you're probably gonna like scooch right on down the path. You'll be like, oh yes, I've got this. Oh yes, I've got this, I'm I'm good with this. Um, so it all depends on where the person is. But the primary part of my work is the release part, right? So, what are we working on releasing? We're releasing different things at different stages, but if we need to stay in one stage longer, then we'll do that. And then, of course, I share with my clients different journaling prompts that they can do. I think that journaling is a really fantastic process. I think you can actually do a lot of release work through journaling. People just don't quite realize what's happening, but I started to test for that as well, right? The muscle testing is just like my scientific way of getting information, even though I'm probably people would not think it was super scientific. But I started to do journaling where I would I would test for things before I journaled, like how am I, you know, what am I feeling about this? And then I would test again after journaling, and I would be like, oh yeah, I have released some of that. And a lot of times what I'll do is I'll come up with a phrase. So um the phrase might be like it might be something simple like I love myself, right? And I would test that with someone. Like, if if I love myself tests as a no, then you're not, there's something going on inside that's getting in the way of that. And then I also have a whole list of like, I believe I love myself, I'm worthy of loving myself. I give myself permission to love myself because each of those little words hits something slightly different. And, you know, sometimes we can maybe believe that we could love ourselves, but we still don't feel worthy of it, right? They hit different places. Or if you grew up in a family where permission was this big thing and you always had to have permission for everything, you might feel like you don't have permission to do something. So I look at all kinds of I have this whole list of different things that I check for uh when we're doing the release work, and we'll find the things to release based around those. So then my intention is always just what's in the way of this, right? Why don't I love myself? What's in the way? And then we'll be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 29:09

And are those things that oh, sorry, no, go ahead. Go ahead. No, are those things that you are asking then your clients, or are those also or and or are they journal prompts that that clients are using or you're using then on your own?

SPEAKER_01 29:26

So the journal prompts are for the clients. So the journal prompts are looking at things like in the beginning, they'd be looking at um what is a story or belief that is shaping my life today, right? So what do I truly believe about myself? Um sometimes things we don't always notice until we start writing about them. We're like, oh yeah, like sometimes we haven't questioned these things before. What are past experiences that feel like they're still there? They're unfinished, like I never really got over this thing. You know, if we can start pulling that stuff to the surface, then we can start resolving it and move on past it, right? We can start to understand it a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

And is journaling for you then uh more or for either for you or for your clients, more just answering those questions and free writing? Is it that they're doing it for a specific time? Like what journaling means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right? So even if you know, so just so that I know what you're thinking about journaling, what does what does that actually mean when you say that?

SPEAKER_01 30:37

So I look at it as free writing. Yeah. Just you know, here's the question, just start. It's not that you're looking for a specific answer to a specific question, it's what does this question bring up for you? And go as long as you want, right? Get it all out, keep going until you've got it all out. Um, because it for me, journaling is about finding out a little bit more what's inside. And sometimes as you're answering the question, you have realizations about yourself that you didn't have before.

SPEAKER_00 31:13

I think that's very true. And I think for me, um when I started journaling, I think I was actually trying to force the writing, and it took me a while to just really release and let go. I used the book when I first started journaling, it was um the artist's way. So doing like three pages of free writing, right? And so sometimes when I was like three pages, like what am I gonna write about? And so sometimes I would just write, I don't know what to write about. Like I seriously would just like, I don't know what to write about. And then once maybe a page went by or something, then it was amazing to me the things that I came up with. And now when I asked myself a question, like I I can go in with that curiosity. Um, I'm not really sure where this is gonna take me, but it's either it's probably my guide's like gonna take over and give me these answers. But I think for people who haven't journaled before, there is some fear about journaling. I've even heard the fear about journaling that they don't want to write down on paper because they don't ever want somebody to find that when they die. I'm like, okay, but people actually feel about journaling, right? So how do you think about it? Yeah, I had that for a while.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

I had that for a while around certain things. So I had certain things where I was like, I know I need to get this out, uh, and that I need to journal about this. And I don't want it, I don't want it on paper. And so I found this website that was designed, I can't remember what the website is right now, but I'm sure there's multiple of them that do this kind of thing. It was designed for writers to get them writing without stopping for people who were like hesitating to write. And what would happen is that you would type on this website, and if you paused for too long, it would release it would erase everything that you wrote. It just disappeared. And so I would go to that website and whatever the thing that that I felt like I don't want record of this, but I want to get it out, I would go in and type, type, type, type, type, and at the end, gone.

unknown 33:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

So I did not write that stuff on paper. Now you can write things on paper and then do something kind of fun, like like burn it, you know, if you do it in a safe way. Um, and I've done that kind of stuff before too. I think that that can be really helpful because there's something really symbolic about when you burn it. It's like like you got all that out, and now you're really releasing it. You're transforming it, right? It's no longer words on this paper, you're transforming it into ash, really letting it go.

SPEAKER_00 34:02

Oh, I love well, both of those things. One, I had never heard about the the website, but what a great way to allow people who do have that fear or trepidation to start to um experience the the power of journaling. So I like that. I also like the and I've done that before, written things and then and then released them in the way of actually burning them, right? In a safe way. Um so do you think and this just brings a different question though. I mean, so I think that that's great for those people who need something different because they have that that fear. Is there a difference have you found um between typing something out and physically writing it on a piece of paper? And what does that like how does that change the interaction even with the journaling or the process?

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Yeah, I think that there, I think that when you write with your with your hand, like pen to paper, it actually triggers a different part of your brain than when you're typing. And so it gets into a more creative part, but it also slows you down because most people can type a little bit faster than they can write. And so as you write with your hand, you start to think about the words a little bit more, right? It slows the whole process down and it makes it a little bit more thoughtful. Have you ever started to write a sentence? And by the time you get to the end of the sentence, you're like, oh, I didn't even know where that was going. Like I didn't have this preformed sentence in my head, I just started and it came out as I went. And I do prefer writing pen to paper. Um, but I think that sometimes journaling when you're type like typing to journal can be helpful for a couple of different reasons. One is that it's easier, like I've got my journals on my shelf over here, and for me to go back and find something in them, it's like a needle in a haystack. Like, I don't know about what year was this thing I'm trying to remember. I have to go through them all. And so I do like putting some information on like on a document on my computer so that I can search through it, so that I can find it. So if I'm journaling about something really personal, I tend to put it in a notebook. But if it's something about maybe my business or some things that I want to do with that, I do that online. That way I can search it, that way I can copy it places and you know do things different things with it. But I think that there's really something important about putting pen to paper sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

Yeah, I agree. And the science, you know, suggests kind of the same exactly what you're saying. And I think the other piece is that again, for people who hesitate to journal or who just haven't experienced it, it is a practice, just like meditation is a practice. We practice meditating, we don't do meditation, right? We are practicing the art of meditation. And I don't know what you think, but for me, the same thing is about journaling is that my journaling is really different than five years ago when I started having actually a journaling practice. Um, and that's okay. There's no, there's no judgment, it's just different. And I have come to that space, which I didn't think was possible before. You're right. I don't know where my thoughts are gonna go when I start. And you're right, even at the beginning of a sentence, I don't know where it is going to take me. Now, I call that my spirit guides, guiding my, you know, guiding those thoughts, whatever, whatever that is. But also just to tell people who haven't started yet, it doesn't necessarily happen the first time you do it. Right? The magic doesn't happen the first time. Maybe it does happen the first time, and that's amazing, but it doesn't, and it will change over the course of your life as you are practicing it. Would you would you agree?

SPEAKER_01 38:10

Oh, yeah, definitely. So writing about different things now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:17

Well, because that you're at a different part of your life, but also just as you are practicing anything, you are just gonna be different at the process, right? So yeah, yeah. So and it, but I think it's powerful. I mean, I and I love that you use that as part of the process to have your clients have your clients do that. Um, I do kind of want to shift a little bit because I am curious. You had alluded at the the kind of at the beginning that as many people, but um grief and and I don't want to say tragedy, but grief and change, and you know, you even talked about the flood, and I was thinking, yeah, it's a physical flood, but maybe it was a metaphorical flood as well of things changing kind of in your life. But would love your thoughts on how um grief and joy or or challenges and joy or even challenges and neutralness, like how those things fit together and how they maybe even support each other.

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Uh, one of the things I feel like I write about the most is how your biggest challenges will bring about your biggest blessings. I firmly believe this now. Um, I I also am working around the idea that you don't have to have a big challenge to get a big blessing. So I'm trying to make sure I don't go too far into that. But with the flood, at the time that it happened, it felt like the worst possible thing that could happen. Um, and I uh we had a huge just like the next six months after it is almost a blur. It was like thing after thing after thing, and it was just so hard to go through. I would never want to go through it again. And it took me a couple of years being past it to be able to look back and see, oh, with I would never take that back. Like I don't want to go through it again, but I would never take that back because of what came out of it. Um, so before the flood, I had been working in the insurance field, which was never my interest. I was an art major in college. Like I call it my accidental career. This is not where I'm meant to be. That did a number on my sense of identity and self-worth. I started to feel like I wasn't good enough for anything else. I, oh, I had had all these dreams, but I just wasn't one of those people who got to have the thing that I wanted. Um, and I would sit, I have no window in my office, and I would go out and sit in my car during lunch just so I could be outside and have some sunshine. And I started watching YouTube videos of people who were traveling full-time. And that had always been a big dream of mine. When I was in college, I went and backpacked in Europe for like 14 months. I went to a French university for a year, I backpacked for a summer, went to school for a year, backpacked for another summer before coming home. I was born in England and my parents backpacked with me when I was like nine months old. I was the backpack. When I was growing up, my grandparents lived in Germany and in Japan and in Alaska, like all over the place. So travel was always a huge part of who I was, who I wanted to be. And and I felt really stuck. And I would sit in my car and I would watch families that were RVing full-time, and I was like, that is what I want so bad. And oh, if only I could have that, I would, I would just love it. And I I felt it so much that it felt like it hurt, uh, which I don't think was actually a very helpful thing. Like that's I've learned a lot since then, but I I just felt like I felt the it was because I was feeling so disconnected from the thing that I really wanted. Um, and the flood broke everything inside of me open, and it made me look at my stuff differently because I'd thought, but I can't RB full-time because I have to have a house with all this stuff, and how can I pay for both of those things at the same time? And I go to work in this office, and you know, I can't just leave that. So, like, what do I do? Um, it it completely broke all of that and made me kind of go, we could have lost everything. We didn't. We had a second floor of our house, we ran everything upstairs, like we were okay, but it made me feel not attached to my stuff. Where I think some for some people, they might feel more attached to their stuff in that kind of situation. I was like, Oh, I don't want all this stuff anymore. Like, I just I don't, and we got rid of 90% of it. And that we we had a whole magical situation of getting the RV. It was actually given to us. Someone found out what we were doing, and when all kinds of things went wrong, and they were like, Oh, I have an RV, you can just have it. It was a fifth wheel, so we managed to get a fifth wheel and took off traveling. But it was a couple of years into our situation where I went, without the flood, I would probably still be sitting in that office. I would probably still be wishing to have this life, and here I am, sitting outside of my RV on a random Tuesday morning with the mountains right outside of me and the desert spread out in front of me. And yeah, so I started to look at challenges way down. Differently. And then when the pandemic hit, I went, Oh, last time we had this big major challenge, it brought me to exactly where I wanted to be. So I'm going to choose to expect that good things are going to happen from this. And we ended up thriving through the pandemic in a way that was just really unexpected. Like it was not, it, you know, it was a horrible time for everyone, but also it wasn't a horrible time for us. We were, we had already gotten ourselves set up because we were in RRV, we were out in the mountains in Arizona, not, you know, not in close proximity to other people. We had outside areas that we could explore every day. You know, we stopped doing a couple of things, but not that many. We were already homeschooling our kids. Like there was not that much big change for us. Um, and so we actually felt like we moved through it really well. And then when my partner got sick, I was like, all right, we're practicing this now. You know, we the flood brought about exactly what I wanted. The the pandemic, we thrived. So I do not accept this terminal diagnosis. And whatever happens through this is going to make life better, not worse. And we ended up moving back to my home state, which was something I had wanted for years and that my partner wasn't interested in. But because he had gotten sick, he was like, let's move by your family so that you have a support system when all this happens. And now we're all happy here. And um we I think I lost track of where I was gonna go with that, but like we, oh, he's he's gone on his own health journey and he's in better health now than he was before. It's been five years. Like he was given a terminal diagnosis of six to nine months. It's been five years this month, and he's doing great.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

Oh my goodness, all over the earth. The goose bumps, the whole story. The whole, the whole story, I think, Leslie, when you talked about even the through line, really for me one is one the universe really does have our back, right? And we just need to listen. Yeah, and sometimes the universe has to smack us over the head and sometimes it does, and we need to listen, and you did, and you did listen, but the other thing that I think is so powerful, and I talk about this in micro ways about joy, you just lived it on this really big stage, is that you expect you, I wrote that down because you said you expect that good things will happen. I think that if we practice, and then you also said you practice this, right? So that when these other things happen, it is about noticing, expecting these things are gonna happen, training our brains to look for the good things, because the good things are there, they're there, the universe is there, the sun comes up every day, the tides come in, right? The good things are there if we look for them, but we have to practice. And if we can practice, you practice on a really big because the universe said we're doing this big, so you practice on this really big stage, but the learning I think for people that are listening is that we can practice these things every day on the micro stage.

SPEAKER_01 47:32

Because I want to share with you some of what happened during the pandemic is I started teaching kids online. This was just something like my actually, I was trying to do the coaching at that point in time and that disappeared for me. But these classes just exploded. That was like a little tiny side thing that I was barely doing anything with. It exploded and took all my time. One of the classes that I taught was Beginners Meditation for Children. And in that class, what I found was because we're at the beginning of the pandemic at this point in time. And these are I'm working with kids that are between the ages of like five and 13, and they they have no control over their life because they're kids, right? Their parents are the ones who have control everything, and they're but they are seeing what's going on in the world, it's very scary. And for some of them, they didn't have the ability to like turn off the news, right? Because their parents wanted the news on. And so some of them were having to listen to this stuff all day, every day, from the very beginning. And so I recognized that really early on. And what I did is I started asking them to share with me something good. So at the beginning of every class, I would go around and we would have everyone share something good. And so on a daily basis, multiple times a day, I was sitting with kids and I was talking to them about what was good despite all of the challenges. So, yes, that's all happening, but also, you know, and even if you can't find anything else, like maybe you had a delicious breakfast, maybe your lights are on. And I know that doesn't seem like a big thing, but if they ever, if your electricity has ever gone off, you know that that's a huge thing, right? You have water that just runs right out of the tap. And, you know, kids don't always think about the fact that, like, not everybody actually has that, right? They don't, they don't really know that that's not always something that people have. So we got to very practiced at on a daily basis, finding what was good. And for me, sometimes it was like the sun is shining and it feels so warm on my skin, and that is beautiful, and we can just hold on to that tiny little moment. And even if everything else feels like it's going wrong right now, that sun on the skin feels so good. And let's just enjoy it.

SPEAKER_00 50:04

One thousand percent. I mean, we one thousand percent, and that is really what, as we're kind of coming to the end of our time here, but that is really what I hope people take. I mean, it I love them to take this whole thing about the do the do the research, or Leslie's gonna tell you how to get a hold of her, but do the research about the whole muscle memory piece of things about how the intention of your energy, how to release things. I mean, I think there's so much good stuff, but also your beautiful journey of how you have lived your life and how that intention to finding the good um really has catapulted you and brought you, it seems, um, brought you so much joy because I can feel the energy. I felt the goosebumps through the whole, through the whole story. So I know my guides are here telling me, yes, this is this is what is happening. And I am thrilled beyond belief that we were able to have this time together. I know that the two of us could continue this conversation in so many different ways. I know that you are a really busy person and have other things to do today. But before we leave, one, is there anything else that you want to leave the listeners with? And then two, how can they get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_01 51:21

Um I would just leave everybody with recognizing how powerful that you are and how powerful that your mind is, and the fact that the things that you think about are the things that you're bringing about. So pay attention to your thoughts, pay attention to your feelings. And if they are, if you are thinking about the things that you don't want, you've got to change that in some way. You got to figure out how to change that. And that doesn't always mean it's easy and that's okay. That's not a problem, but it's still your responsibility to take control of your own life and shift it in the way that you want it to. And if you need help for that, of course, get help. Um, and the best place to find me is in my community over on school, S-K-O-O-L, living the game of life. So it's based on the work of Florence Gobel Shin with the game of life and how to play it. Uh, that's what I feel like I'm doing, right? I'm living the game of life and uh trying to live it better all the time. And so if you want to come and live it better with me, come on over and find me on school.

SPEAKER_00 52:36

I love it. And again, I am absolutely delighted we were able to have this conversation. I encourage all of you to go join her community, um, get in touch with Leslie. And again, just to remember to expect the good things because they will happen, I promise. And again, thank you so much for being here, Leslie. Thank you for listening to all of you who are listening. Remember, I am Rachel, and from my heart to yours, I am celebrating you today and every day. So have fun, live well, enjoy.