Locked Out of Knowing: Reclaiming Your Power and Discernment

Locked Out of Knowing: Reclaiming Your Power and Discernment 

In this episode of Star Women Rising, Melinda explores the invisible structures that quietly shape what we believe, what we question, and what knowledge we’re allowed to access. 

These “gatekeepers” aren’t necessarily people. They are systems, beliefs, institutions, and even internal conditioning that filter what is considered credible, acceptable, or true. Over time, these structures can distance us from our own intuition and inner wisdom. 

Melinda shares personal experiences with wellness, spiritual discovery, and questioning systems that often encourage us to look outward for answers rather than inward. From healthcare to education to media narratives, she explores how these frameworks can unintentionally limit our ability to trust ourselves. 

But this episode isn’t just about identifying the gatekeepers—it’s about learning how to move beyond them. 

Melinda introduces a powerful and simple breath practice designed to help quiet the noise, reconnect with your inner knowing, and cultivate discernment in a world overflowing with opinions, information, and external authority. 

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by conflicting advice, questioned mainstream narratives, or sensed that your intuition was trying to guide you somewhere deeper, this conversation will resonate. 

Because sometimes the most powerful truth isn’t found outside of you—it’s already within. 

Star Women Rising is part of the Chickology Podcast Collective, where real women share real stories and rise together. 

✨ Take a breath.
 ✨ Listen inward.
 ✨ Trust what awakens within you. 

Subscribe, share with a soul sister, and explore more powerful shows inside the Chickology Collective. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Star Women Rising, where cosmic roots meet earthly power. I'm Melinda and together we'll awaken the fire within and above, exploring intuition, soul wisdom, and the ancient truths written in the stars. This isn't about escaping the world. It's about remembering who you are and rising stronger in it. Star Women Rising is part of the Chicology Podcast Collective, Real Women, Real Stories, Rising Together. Let's jump right in. Before I get started, I'd like to invite you all to check out some of the uh amazing women and the Chicology Collective, some amazing podcasts with some real stories, real life, real women, just like just like you and me. So today I want to talk about being locked out of knowing and maybe offer some ways to breathe past the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers, they are not people. Gatekeepers are uh they are structures, structures, beliefs, and systems that filter out what information is allowed to reach you. They define what is credible, what is valid, and they shape how you perceive truth. They can exist in institutions like media, academia, religion, social norms, what's acceptable to question, internal beliefs, your own doubts or conditioning. They're not necessarily bad. They serve a function, they protect coherence. But when they become rigid, they block new spirals of knowing. One of my biggest pet peeves that I'm going to address in regard to the gatekeepers. I mean, I have a lot of them, but the main thing is how people are are kind of locked out of knowledge or wellness. I I'm I've always been a big wellness person. I think that's part of the the Virgo thing, you know, physical wellness, but I'm also the spiritual aspect. And a good example, and before I say this, I'm going to preface this with I am not a doctor. I uh these are all my own personal opinions, my own personal experiences. If you have medical issues or anything like that, seek advice from a professional. Now, having said that, I want to talk about a good example would be the medical system. My it's it's funny because we just have come up with this recently. My son had some issues going on. Nothing, nothing major, but he he went to the doctor several times. They ran tests and they kept telling him, oh, everything's fine. But clearly it wasn't. He was still feeling uh poorly. And he ended up going to our functional medicine doctor, who I love dearly, and running labs and and those types of things, and ended up finding out there there were some issues that he needed to deal with. And my son was just beside himself. It's like, why do I pay for medical insurance when I can't get the treatment that I need? And when I go and they tell me nothing's wrong when clearly there's something wrong. And this is a system that, you know, you're told that this is this is the gospel, right? That what they say goes, but he was not getting any any satisfaction from that. But the flip side of that was he was having to pay extra money to go see someone else. And it's not, it's not cheap to do that. So he's paying for insurance, but he's actually having to seek treatment outside of the establishment to get the results that he he's seeking. And so he's he's paying extra money. My my functional medicine practitioner is is a very reasonable man. He is not out there trying to gouge, to gouge anyone, but I will tell you, you know, the systems will tell you that, you know, that's that doesn't work. And it's funny to watch people, you know, I have there I have people in my circle that you you tell them, no, I'm using this modality and they kind of look at you cross-eyed, like, what are you doing? That's you can't do that, that's not right. So these systems that are designed to essentially lock you out, lock you out of wellness, lock you out of knowledge, like you these, you know, the media tells you, don't look over there, don't listen to those people, you know, just listen to us. Or if anyone who's gone to college and not just college, I think even the education system at high school, when you're writing term papers and they tell you only these people are credible sources. And if you get your information from outside of these credible sources, you get a bad grade and it's not valid. And so these structures are really designed to keep you dependent on the structures. I've I've talked about this before, but it's really a big pet peeve of mine. And and not only that, then there's also the aspect of people get priced out, right? You can only you can only get this information if you're willing to pay X amount of money to get this information. And uh only I have this information. So you you're locked out. Like not everybody can afford to, you know, pay a shit ton of money to go hear somebody's information that they have the corner of the market on. So it's actually really a big pet peeve of mine, and it's certainly something that is not just in the medical communities, but the spiritual community, even my experience with my grandmother that, you know, my dad was Catholic, so he was going to hell because he was not in the right, the right fold of the right system or same system, but he was in a different aspect of it. So this is something that has kind of just got under my skin for many, many years. So I thought I would thought I would uh address that today and and also offer some ways to get through that. You know, wellness has become a commodity, and it really is about what you can afford, who you know, so many options out there. You you watch commercials, they've got 8,000 different gadgets, there's eight million different supplements, apps, gurus, surgeries, whatever. You know, there's so much to choose from. And there's a difference between going into it coherently and just being a consumer. They're banking on you being a consumer. And don't get me wrong, I have my share of gadgets. I actually feel like the gadgets that I did invest in were very solid, but there's plenty of things out there that are probably not supplements. There are there's a bazillion different supplements that you can choose from, but not all of them are cut the same, not all of them are going to work the same, and they may not even work for what you need them to work. And I'm a supplement person, don't get me wrong. In functional medicine, I've been able to get well using supplements, but I had the right supplements to deal with the right issues that I was having. And we're all so inundated with quote unquote information. You know, every there's you it becomes so much that you don't even know which avenue to take. You can look up one thing and you'll have 17,000 opinions on this one thing, and they all say something that you know contradicts the other, like there's no agreement. So then it just leaves you even more confused. And it also kind of leaves you with information overload, which creates paralysis, right? You then you're just left not knowing what you can do. And try it, it's it's a pet peeve. It's a pet peeve for sure. But there is there is a way that you can get through these these gatekeepers, but you know, it requires that you have the the ability to question because some people just go through life and they don't they don't question. They don't uh you know, you're told this and you abide by that. You have to be a little bit of a maverick. I I think I described my mom like that previously, and my mom was a bit of a maverick. You have to be willing to question the system, step outside the system, and there's also this level of you need to trust yourself. Trust yourself. I've done it, I've done that with physical aspects, I've done it with spiritual aspects, and and I've done my share of just taking somebody's word for it. And you know, a good example, I talked about how I always had this really strong feeling that everything means something. I don't always know exactly what it is, and I don't always have to. But there were schools of thought that said, no, everything doesn't mean something, you know. But if I had listened to that, I think I would have missed out on a lot of magic. I was always paying attention, you know, paying attention is surely that means something. Like there's subtle things that mean something. So this is this is really about getting through these, these uh structures, these systems that are designed to keep you looking outward for clarity as opposed to looking within yourself. And we have our own internal gatekeepers, right? We internalize patterns of silence, whether we just don't feel comfortable, what we're told. I mean, when I grew up child of, you know, I grew up in 70s and 80s, children were not, it wasn't even seen but not heard. It was don't be seen and don't be heard. Like you when the adults got together, you get out. And so not being seen and not being heard was absolutely part of my upbringing. I get it. I'm not bitter. Adults are sitting around and they're talking about adult things with adult content. And I understand that that part of that was a protection mechanism. You don't need to be sitting up in here listening to our potty mouths or whatever the case, listening to us talk trash about, you know, your friend's mom or or whatever, because as children, I think we also did a lot of repeating things. So you we've learned to internalize just being quiet, just being silent and not speaking out, not saying our piece. And I think in that we also with the conditioning through the systems, the school, whatever, we have developed patterns of blocking our own knowing. Not, you know, we're always taught to look to the experts. You gotta look to the experts for your own well-being. Uh I think these are deeply rooted in our society. And the conditioning starts very young, the programming, very young, that you you block your your own knowing. Kind of like uh, you know, like my my son's situation where, you know, he he knew something was wrong. He he knows something's going on, but he's, you know, going to the doctor and they're telling him everything's fine. And if he had just gone with that, he probably would have caused himself some pretty, you know, something really s minor could have potentially turned into something horrible and major. So we have to listen to our own inner knowing and recognize when you're locked out from within, you know, this. I think in the spiritual trail, you know, we we're looking to someone to guide us. We're looking to someone to tell us which direction to go, what's true, what to believe. You kind of latch on to maybe somebody who resonates. Oh, that sounds good. And I can tell you the spiritual journey trail is chock full of people that have all types of information that may or may not be good and well-meaning people. Not that this, not that people are intentionally being deceptive. They're they're going from what they've also learned and experienced as well. But in doing that, we we tend to lock ourselves out from within. We don't we learn to not trust our own intuition, our own instincts for anything, even our own survival. You know, just several years ago, we had a big, big ordeal where people were being locked down and there were, you know, different modalities of of dealing with this really horrible health issue that was going around. And, you know, the the system is telling us, no, you have to do this our way. If you don't do this our way, you're gonna die. And if you don't do this our way, you're gonna spread it to everybody and we're all gonna die. And there are others that are saying, no, you know, there's there's other options. You don't have to, you don't have to do it that way. And then they were being called out and shut down and censored, and and the people who were not discerning for themselves possibly met some really rough fates. So we we don't trust ourselves to know. And I can tell you when that happened, my mother and my husband both got very sick, but before that all before that happened, we had already made a decision that if we were going to die, if we were going to cross over from this horrible health issue that was going around, that we were gonna do it at home. We had already decided we didn't want to be locked away from each other. We didn't want to not have family there advocating for us. So we had already made a game plan that that was not gonna happen. But we also decided to look at what the other people were saying when they were saying you don't have to do it this way. There's other ways of treating this. Both my husband and my mother were treated alternatively, my husband with actual alternative medicine and my mother with pharmaceuticals. And literally, my husband, who was purple in the chair, couldn't breathe within a day of hitting a nebulizer, was up running around like nothing had ever happened. My mother, within a couple of days of the pharmaceutical treatment that came from the other people who offered other avenues, was up moving around in about two days. And honestly, her recovery was faster at 70 something years old than some of the other people who ended up hospitalized and actually actually made it out. But we were discerning for ourselves, we were making decisions for ourselves, and we were saying, yeah, what you're telling us is seems a little bit radical and it seems a little bit much. And there's other people saying there's other ways, and they're being censored and they're being shut down. So, and and this is not a judgment. This is conditioning. This is a system that has programmed us to feel like we cannot make decisions for ourselves and that we do not know what is best for ourselves. And it was, if you know, those of you who remember, it was very controversial. There was there was uh a lot of just craziness and chaos. And we actually also happened to live in a in a place where our children were still able to run around like nothing was going on. And it was we had a very different experience, and not that we didn't get sick, we did, but our experience was very different, and we were able to treat it in our homes. My my mother was that was literally down for two months incoherent, and that that was a very crazy, chaotic, hectic situation. I had a really good friend who went and picked up medication and took it, drove it up to my mom and helped her get it squared away, and within two days she was better. That's an extreme example, but it goes just speaks to you know trusting ourselves or you know, the gatekeepers, these gatekeepers that are telling you you can only do it this way, whether it's in, you know, the medical industry, whether it's the news, only our news is is the correct news, only our news is the truth, the school system, only these people are credible. We are absolutely programmed to think that way. We are giving away our power to decide for ourselves. And if you look around, it's they're cracking down more and more. And every time you turn around, they're wanting to push more and more restraints on what you can and cannot do, how much information there need about you to keep you safe. I don't need anyone to keep me safe. I can keep myself safe. I can keep myself safe, I can keep my family safe. So we've got to learn how to go within and bypass these gatekeepers that are making us doubt ourselves. So, with that, I want to offer um a couple things. I want to put out an invitation to pause and to pause for a minute and not scroll. You know, you I like scrolling. I'm a YouTube kind of person. I like YouTube because I can actually pick and choose what information I view as opposed to watching the TV where they they tell me what I have to look at and I only have so many options. I can only I only have so many channels, and on any of those channels, they are are determining what what I'm going to view. I do like YouTube, so I'm just like anybody else. I like to learn, I like to gather information, but I think sometimes we can do that to a degree when we're seeking, we're looking for something external to validate our what we're experiencing, what we're feeling, or where we think we're heading. And that can become absolutely crazy and chaotic. So bypassing the gatekeepers, this is an invitation to pause, put down the devices. I'm going to give a simple breath practice that you can use that will help you to go within and maybe hear your inner wisdom because it's been it's not gonna shout. Sometimes it does, but rarely. But you can connect with your own inner wisdom by just pausing, taking some breaths, and listening. So the breath pattern that I want to share is called the 4484 breath of discernment. And this is what you do: you inhale for four counts, hold for four counts, exhale slowly for eight counts, and then hold for four counts, and you repeat that for four cycles. So you do those breaths, the four cycles. And what it does is the inhale draws in clarity, the hold stabilizes the field, the long exhale releases noise and distortion. The final hold anchors stillness before the next breath. So when you find yourself maybe with in a bit of a chaotic field of not knowing and not sure what to do, you can always pause, sit with these breaths. Now you can use them anytime. Some of it's, you know, they have the box breathing and some this these types of breathing work for different, different situations. Box breathing, if you're feeling anxiety. I know before bed, people will sometimes use that to just try to shut their mind off. But these breaths are valuable and will draw you inward so that you can hear your own inner wisdom. And there are many different breath patterns that you can use, different counts for different, different uh different things. This is this is for your discernment. So it will require that you pause, you know, before you make a decision, pause, do this breath cycle for four cycles, wait a minute, and then make your decision. You'll find that life starts to shift a little bit for you. You know, we we get everything's we gotta do it now. Go, go, go, rush, rush, rush, gotta know now, gotta do this now. We don't pause, we don't take a break, we don't take a breath, we just react. This will keep you from that reaction, just immediately reacting. Works for discernment, works for if you feel like you're about to slap the shit out of your teenager because they've pushed you to the limit, put your coworkers' lights out because you've had it, pause, breathe, hold, and then make your decision. Do what you need to do. I use this with my grandkids when they get a little excitable or they get, you know, they have, I call them meltdowns. They look like meltdowns. You know, they're completely emotionally collapsed over whatever, you know, whatever it may be. But I'm really trying to encourage them to just breathe, breathe through it. You're not going to avoid having to make tough decisions. You're not going to avoid those situations that make you want to knock somebody's teeth out. But what you will do is you will give yourself some space to breathe and then make a response from a more coherent place, a more discerning place. And I think now, more than ever, this is becoming crucial with the way this world is kind of heading and taking away more and more of our liberties and freedoms and our ability to think for ourselves. I think it's it's crucial that people start taking that back. We are powerful beings. We have we have knowledge, we have wisdom within ourselves. We don't have to, we don't have to look outside for it and risk the person who really does not have your best interest at heart. So remember, 4484. Inhale four counts, hold four counts, exhale slowly for eight counts, hold for four counts, four cycles. Very powerful. And I I don't know if there's information out there on on different different breath cycles. I'm sitting here talking about scrolling, but I like scrolling for helpful information, all the crazy, crazy stuff breath. It's out there. You probably find different breath patterns for different situations that may come up over the past two weeks. I have started I've started focusing more on breath, and it has been tremendous. It has absolutely been a game changer for me. So I want to challenge you. Do it. Try it. What does it hurt? I mean, just carve out a couple minutes of your super busy hectic day because I know how it is. And even being retired, I feel like I'm more busy than I've ever been in my life. So I get it. But make time, make time to tap into yourself. Learn to trust yourself. You will not regret it. So on that note, thank you for joining me here on Star Women Rising. If today's conversation stirred something in you, trust it. That's your fire awakening. This podcast is part of the Chicology Collective where women everywhere are reclaiming their voice, their power, and their light. Be sure to subscribe, share this with a soul sister, and explore more shows under Chicology because we rise higher when we rise together. Until next time, keep reaching for the stars and rooting deep in your power.