Episode 1: From Woo Woo To Wisdom

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Mind Body Spirit Accelerator.
I’m your host, Sara Sabin. Transformational coach, certified brain coach and trained intuitive.
And your bridge between the spiritual, scientific and rational worlds.
This is a podcast for those who feel like the information that you've received has not enabled you to create what you want. And you’re looking for something more complete to fill in the gaps.
In this episode, I share:

•  My story from analytical professional to “woo curious” to turning my back on all of it, frustrated with the incompleteness of the information that was available
•  How the spiritual world is designed to make you dependent.
•  Some of the myths, themes and tools I will share through these podcast episodes.

I want to hear your thoughts, comments and questions. 

You can send them to me at
sara@sarasabin.com

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Mind Body Spirit Accelerator. I'm Sarah Sabin, intuitive coach and brain coach, and your bridge between the esoteric and practical slash scientific worlds. In this podcast, I will cover all the things that are going to make you feel incredible in your life today and make you optimistic about tomorrow. So, this is my inaugural first episode podcast of The Mind Body Spirit Accelerator, and I am super excited to be here. My decision to do this podcast was made about a week ago now. So it will be a while from now until this episode is published, maybe a week or two, which I realise in the grand scheme of things is not that long, but I took the intuitive download to start this podcast and I ran with it. So here we all are. I'd like to start by saying who this podcast is for. And it is for everyone, but especially for those of you who've decided that life has let you down in some way. So it could be in a few ways or in all ways, but somewhere along the line you've decided that maybe life really does suck, and that's just the way it is. Maybe it sucks for everyone, and you just have to grin and bear it. How your body works, how intimacy works, how your career should work, how some spiritual concepts work. Maybe you've heard about certain concepts or certain formulas, and you've observed what's going on around you with other people that you surround yourself with, and you just feel like something is missing. You feel like the information that you have received has not enabled you to create what you want. So it is missing in some way or incomplete. So maybe you've struggled with body image, maybe you've struggled with infertility issues. I know that is a big one that I hear about a lot. Maybe you feel like your career is at a standstill, or your relationship is at a standstill and feel stuck, and you just feel like you're spinning your wheels. What this podcast is going to help you do is make you feel incredible about your life today. Bear with me. And make you more optimistic about the possibilities of tomorrow. It will make you more of an embodied expert in what you are hoping to master. And no matter how advanced you are, it's always helpful to go back to the basics. Sometimes I find myself doing this literally all of the time. And I'm trying to find a solution to a problem, and I'm thinking it's something really complicated, and it's not. So that's when I tend to revisit the basics. And it tends to be the simplest thing that I've forgotten about, like a really basic foundational technique, such as, for example, I feel like I'm putting myself lost, and that's causing a whole heap of issues in my life or my relationship or at work or whatever it is. And I catch that and I'm like, oh right, it's that. That's kind of pretty basic for me. I can just shift that very quickly. And the way that I start by doing that is I'll just shift how I look at that right now, and that's gonna make a difference. So for those of you that know me, great. You can hear my story one more time if you're inclined to do so. And for those of you that have never come across me before or are coming to this podcast at some stage now or in the future, I'm going to share with you a little bit about my story. And I will start by saying, I am not woo-woo. I hate woo-woo. I hate fluffy language, I hate vagueness, I hate incomplete formulas. Probably I'm saying all of this, and part of me loves all of those things because I love problem solving. But the upshot of all of these things is I like to break things down very scientifically, um, put it in simple language that's practical with tangible action steps. Because my question after everything I hear is great, I've had this realization, but what the hell do I do about it now? And that's been something that I've heard people say about therapy, for example, great, I'm now the most self-aware person in the world, but I don't know what the hell to do about it, to change some of these patterns that I find myself in. So this is going to be a show that will tell you foundations and tangible steps that you can take that will make a difference. And just to add here, never take my word as the gospel truth. Go and experiment for yourself. A line I have used a lot with the hundreds of clients I've worked with over the years. Don't take my word for it. Go do it, prove it to yourself, and then you're gonna get on board with it. So, for anything that you want to create, there are ingredients, and it's far more complex than the spiritual world would have us believe, where they're like, Yeah, just look at a vision board or write a list to God and bury it in the garden, and then just be super positive all the time and source or the universe or God or whatever entity you subscribe to will bring you whatever it is that you've put on your list. Sorry, no. Even if that has worked for you at some points in the past, or has worked with some things and not others, it was not manifestation, and that's a whole other story. So I will go into more detail on what I found manifestation to be and what it is not in later podcasts, so watch out for that one if you're interested in the law of manifestation. But getting back to my story, I grew up in a household where I never felt safe. So I did not have a model of a good relationship between my parents. They were both very, let's call it emotionally volatile, both individually and as a couple. There was constant stress about money, there was constant stress about whether we'd lose the house and whether I'd have to sleep on grandpa's sofa. So my answer to all of this feeling of instability was if I just do go to school and I do well, and I'm gonna become a lawyer and then become a millionaire, and I will live happily ever after. That was pretty much the formula I set for myself when I was probably in my early teens. And it was also supported by what my parents thought. So they thought that that was the best possible path for me as well to go to school, get a profession, and yada yada yada. So that's what I did. And I worked very hard at school, went to a really good school, was able to go to really good universities in London and in Paris. So I did a double law degree, and I basically followed the formula. However, life had other plans for me. Or more specifically, my higher self had other plans for me. So the higher self is the version of you that has basically planned out your life and path for you. Not that you always follow that path, but you have a life path, and then you have choice of whether you're going to follow it or not. So, anyway, my higher self had other plans for me. I will go into more detail on the different versions of self in later episodes, but getting back to the story. Essentially, I could not find a job for shit after I finished university. And that was not because I was incapable. I had got good grades, and there was no earthly reason why I shouldn't have been going for interviews at top law firms. All of my peers uh doing the same course as me were getting these interviews, and I wasn't. But there I was, and it was a very bad period in my life in general. Or bad in inverted commas because obviously these bad periods have learning opportunities and also can uh change our paths as well. But as I saw at the time, I was in a really bad relationship and was in the lack of interview situation I was in at the time, and the relationship as well was emotionally abusive, so it was really all of it was affecting my confidence. My grandpa, who I was very close to, was also nearing the end of his life at the time, and everything was building up into a perfect storm. And the irony of all of this was I thought that I had picked the easier route that I could have taken after university. So, just to explain about the English legal system, you have lawyers that work in law firms and you have lawyers that go to court to argue cases. And if you've ever seen English dramas about the legal system, they are the people that are wearing those weird grey wigs and black cloaks. Those are the barristers. So they're called solicitors and barristers respectively. And I decided to go down the solicitor route, so applying to law firms to try and get interviews, which I wasn't getting, because I thought that actually that was quote unquote the safer option. Even though I had actually been told that I was excellent and I should go down the other route, and I'd done all of these mock trial competitions at university and actually won some of them as well, but in the end, I told myself I couldn't go down the barrister route because of my background, so I wasn't, I don't know, upper class enough, or I wasn't an Oxbridge graduate. For those of you outside of the UK, that means either Oxford or Cambridge University. Um, I told myself it was expensive and I couldn't get to do it for that reason, and I didn't want to take out massive loans, and I told myself all the things. And at the end of it all, I came out of university without a job and without any seeming prospects in the law space, and it was pretty soul-destroying for me. I say pretty soul-destroying, I remember being utterly devastated. And at this time, I did not know anything about the esoteric or spiritual world or anything like that. So I didn't think, okay, is there something energetically that might be going on here? Is there some vibe I'm putting out? I wasn't thinking about any of that. I was just thinking that practically there must be something wrong with me. So I ended up taking a year's job in recruitment, and one night I also snapped and broke up with my boyfriend that I mentioned before that I had at the time, because he had done something which constituted his usual going absolutely crazy bananas over nothing, and for me that was the absolute final straw, cherry on the cake of three and a half years of awfulness, and I was done, although not entirely done, not entirely done straight away, but sort of done. A few months later, and that was after I broke up with my boyfriend. I went to South America for five months backpacking by myself, and I'd never done anything like that before, so it wasn't like I'd had that experience as a teenager. I was too busy working and studying when I was a teenager to go do that, but that's what I went to do, and I was 25 at the time, I think, and it really changed my life for so so many reasons. It was the break I needed from my former way of operating, and it also really ignited a lifelong love of travel, so I can get excited about travel for me, for everyone else. I love planning travel itineraries. I've even done that for a client. She said she wants to go to, she's from the US, she wants to go to Italy and south of France. I was like, let me plan your itinerary for you. So if anyone is interested in that, please feel free to reach out to me. Anyway, so age of 25, went to South America, travelled for five months to I think it was six, six countries in South America, came back, trained as a tax accountant, and that was a fairly uneventful time in my life. I'd still not come across anything vaguely spiritual, really, at that stage in time. And for anyone who is curious why tax accountancy, I don't know, I just love tax law. I did at that time anyway. I found it really interesting. My first foray into the spiritual world was when I started doing yoga, and then gradually, gradually my eyes started to open, and we can call that the entry to the spiritual world point. So maybe that was around the ages of 27, 28, maybe, and I think the very first yoga class I did was just in my local gym, so not very spiritual at all. But then I started going to more of these dedicated yoga studios, and as I've alluded to before, prior to that, I was misrational, misanalytical, misobsessed with tax law, and rolled my eyes at anyone spiritual talking about anything spiritual. So it was an area that suddenly became an interest for me or a curiosity at that stage. And I started to get more into yoga. I can't remember exactly how that happened, but I graduated from the gym to yoga studios to other stuff. And once I started doing it, I was like, oh, this is cool. Like it's exercise, but it's intentional, and you've got this breathing element, and you've got this spiritual element, and all of that. And I started going to yoga retreats by myself, and I started meeting more people that were open to the spiritual world. And then I was like, wow, oh my god, it's not just yoga, there are all these things. There are healers, there are all these alternative modalities of healing, there's meditation, there's breath work, there are all the things. And I suppose meditation actually now would be mainstream, but at the time it wasn't as mainstream as it is today, because that was some probably 15 years ago now. I don't know, don't know where the time goes, but yes, probably around that time. So even meditation was a revelation for me. And I started coming across all of these things because I was coming across people that were in that world, and I started becoming more and more curious. But I will say I never went down a full-on rabbit hole that I noticed some people went down. So some people in the spiritual world really, really, really went down the new age route. So we were dancing in the woods to the new moon, ayahuasca, all of that stuff. It was something that I was curious about, but I never felt the compulsion to actually do. So I never went fully down the new age route, and actually, really interestingly was interesting to me anyway, but what I found interesting in the last few years is a lot of people that were deep in the New Age have suddenly converted to strict Christianity, let's call it that, which perhaps is a whole podcast in itself for another day. But I was never, I suppose, new age enough to go from one extreme to another, because that is something that I notice. If you're extreme in one area, you will go towards an extreme in another area. I was talking about this yesterday because you've seen on Instagram and TikTok a lot of former vegans are now fully carnival. So, again, that one extreme to the other, which for me is an area of fascination and something that would make a good topic for another podcast. So, back to me and my story. I was just curious and I was open, and I just tried things. So, as I said, I did all the yoga and the meditation, I did breath work, I still do breath work today. Actually, one of the few things that I do still do from the old world, the old world of me delving into the new age. So I really encountered different forms of healing over the course of let's say ten years. So, better healing, I encountered reconnection healing. Reiki and interesting story, I met my now husband because he was running a yoga retreat in Spain. That's how I met him because I went solo to a yoga retreat in 2014, and he did a reconnection healing on me that actually switched something in me, and I was like, wow, this guy is super interesting. The rest is history. I've tried Reiki, I've tried sambles, I've tried chakra balancing. I'd like to say that I've tried a broad spectrum of things, and I'm really happy that I did that because I always did it with an open mind. And PS, I don't do most of these healing modalities anymore, actually, which some people actually find surprising. I think again, that's a topic for another time, but you will notice recently that a lot of new age spiritual gurus are unfortunately being outed for very dodgy abusive practices, and unfortunately, some of that filters into some of these modalities that I've talked about, but that's a topic for another time. So I found one thing common with a lot of these healing modalities, and that was that it would help me for a little bit, and then it just wouldn't. So, for example, I did Theta Healing, and it's through Theta Healing that I had the intuitive hit to start my coaching business in 2019. Fun fact, prior to that, I thought coaching was actually bullshit, so that really was uh an intuitive hit for me to suddenly get into that, and for that I'm forever grateful. And I really did go to an amazing practitioner of Theta Healing who was like, You should also train as a Theta Healer, and I was like, Mmm, dunno, doesn't feel aligned, but thanks, thanks, but no thanks. And then after that one intuitive breakthrough, it never really had the same impact again for me. I've had chakra balancing, and that made me feel good for a few days, but then it wears off, and I've had lots of different types of healing that worked for a short period of time, and then the good feel effect wears off. And that's the pattern that I started to notice a lot with these spiritual modalities. It is this endless cycle of dependence. So you can't do a chakra balancing once. When I say do it, like I mean go to a practitioner that does it on you. But you can't expect to do that once and expect that your chakras are balance for the next month or even week, to be honest. It works for a day or two, you feel good, and then you revert back. And then maybe you keep going back to that practitioner, whatever it is, or you keep trying different modalities because at the end of the day, you believe that you need something or someone outside of yourself to heal yourself, and that is one of my major bugbears with the spiritual world, the dependence that it can cause. And the other one is that you're being taught, or where you are being taught to do things for yourself, you're being given these really incomplete formulas. So, what do I mean by that? Well, again, let's take manifestation as an example. What is out there about manifestation is not helpful, and it's not even really manifestation, as I said before. It may have worked once for some people that they look at a vision board and then they feel happy and then the thing manifests, or they think source or god or the universe has brought them that thing, and that's it. It's not as simple as that. For anything that you want to create, there are ingredients to create it that will mean you get the perfect result every time. And those ingredients are more complex than just looking at a vision board, and also a key point here that is lost in the spiritual world is to create anything, there are energetic and practical components, and you can't just bypass the practical, sit on your sofa and meditate, and that's it. Sorry, not sorry. Oh, kind of sorry if I've burst your bubble here. So, for anything that you want to create, there are ingredients to create it that will mean that you get the perfect result every time. So, if I was to put that into an analogy, baking a cake. If you only have a list of half the ingredients, your cake is probably not going to come out that well. But if you have the right list, your cake is going to come out well every single time. And you might get lucky on one or two occasions, and the cake tastes okay if you have half of the ingredients, but that's kind of luck, whether it works or not. So, what I'm trying to say is that actually you can learn to use these or learn to apply these ingredients for yourself. And the things that you go for healing for, you can start to pay attention to some of the ingredients that go into healing the body, for example, and therefore you don't need to go get your chakras balanced every week in order to feel good. You're beginning to have the steps to do this for yourself. The other thing that you can do, and for me, this was the real eye-opener about 18 months or two years ago. Again, lose track of time, but around that time, I started to really train my intuition so that I can call up my intuition on demand and not need to, for example, go into a theta healing where they take you up to the seventh realm and you're in a theta state and you access information that way. You can actually learn to call in information for yourself by training your intuition. And in a nutshell, what I want this podcast to be about is empowerment for you to be able to do things for yourself that A make you feel happier and more optimistic, but B create those things that you want, the amazing relationship, the fulfilling career, fill in the blank, whatever it is that you're currently working towards. And you don't need to master every single ingredient at once. So step by little step makes a big difference. So master one ingredient, you master the next one, you master the next one. So I'm gonna be covering some of the foundations that go into making a healthy body, a healthy relationship, a healthy career. Not today. That would be a lot for one episode, but over the course of this podcast. And the amazing thing with all of that is it usually starts with a simple perception shift. So as I said at the beginning of the episode, I'm helping you to see the perfection in where you are today so that you feel more optimistic about tomorrow, and that optimism expands momentum. And I am not talking about toxic positivity here, I am not talking about papering over emotions. That is another lie of the spiritual world. Just ignore bad things and just smile and be positive all the time. Love and light, love and light, love and light. No, can't say that enough. This is about also learning to accept and process your negative emotions as well, to be in those, so that when you are positive and optimistic, it comes from a true and genuine place. And obviously, great side effect of that, it's gonna help you creating whatever it is that you want to create. So, to come back to my story, I have to keep reigning myself in here. I went from completely rational to really open to the esoteric world and then shut down to all of it two years ago because I was like, I'm sick of some of the people in the spiritual world, and I think that was a big factor as well. Like the woo-oo people floating around with their head in the clouds. I was just like, I am so done with this, it's never been my thing. And also, as I've talked about in this episode, I started to see all of the limitations associated with these concepts in the spiritual world, and the fact that they seemed incomplete, and the fact that it created this kind of dependence, and I do not like being dependent on anything or anyone. So two years ago, I was like, screw all of this, I'm done with this, I am back to analytical rational self until I came across my mentor, which I think must be about 18 months or two years ago now, and he started really developing my intuition, and that enabled me to delve into filling some of those gaps that I've talked about in uh let's call it creating the life you want. Because let's face it, the world is full of people that get what they want and they aren't happy anyway, because they didn't create it because they really wanted it, it was more like, oh, I feel I should go get this so that I'm validated, or I think this thing will make me happy, or because fill in the blank, whatever reason it happens to be. Maybe you want people to respect you, maybe you want people to think you're wealthy, so that they're jealous of you. Maybe you think having a particular handbag or driving a particular kind of car is gonna earn you respect, and I know this well from my career journey, choosing to do things for the wrong reasons. So I'm queen of setting goals, reaching them, and feeling completely empty, and just being like, ugh, well, it must be I need more of this now. I thought it was all about having a six-figure coaching business, achieved that quite quickly in my coaching journey, and I was like, uh, I don't really feel happy about this. Like, cool, maybe I just need more and more and more. Or I started a tech startup because I'm like, oh, that'd be a cool idea. It's a good thing for a woman to do to be in the tech world, or it was about money. But the more I achieved what I thought I wanted, the more empty I felt. And a lot of the time, people don't even know why they want the things that they want. I didn't know the real reason why I wanted the things that I wanted, I just thought it was normal to set those goals, even if I wasn't particularly attached to them. My point here is that if you want something for the wrong reasons, it won't actually bring you the happiness that you want anyway. And initially I thought about calling this the happiness podcast, but thought that sounded maybe a little bit on the weary side. I don't know. Maybe I will later change the happiness podcast, who knows? But essentially being happy with where you are is one of the routes to get to where you want to go and be happy as well, and I mean genuinely happy where you are, not pretending that you are happy. So, where am I today in my story? I've been with my partner, well, husband now, for 11 and a half years, and we have gone deep together into the foundations of relationships and intimacy and ingredients to make a really strong relationship. And side note, we have a podcast together as well, which is called The Bone Zone. Highly amusing if you like if you like listening to a lot of banter. I interrupt Richard all the time during the podcast, so feel free to check that out if you want to know more about our couple dynamic and relationships. I have also worked a huge amount on what I call emotional mastery, so being able to really understand and feel my emotions and not suppress them or toxic positivitize them. Don't think that's a thing, but I can move through my emotions now so that I can feel more emotionally balanced and emotionally neutral more of the time. And just a quick side note here: emotional mastery is not about transcending your emotions, it's about accepting and being with your emotions. And as I've said before, I have also gone deep into training my intuition as well. I will also be covering in later podcast episodes something called the law of reflections, and basically what I mean by that is whatever you feel about yourself shows up externally as a mirror to you. So that can be a person doing a certain thing or a situation or a circumstance, and it can be also something that shows up in your body. So there is a connection between the mind and the body in neuroscience, somatic marker hypothesis, and that's something that I will be going into in quite a bit more detail in later podcasts. But in a nutshell, as soon as you have a thought, your body is already responding physiologically, which is why the idea of mental rehearsals are very effective for success, and that is completely different for visualization, in case anyone was wondering. It's a different set of criteria. So the law of reflections is an area I'm going to expand on in later podcasts, as I said, and all of this together will give you a series of more complete foundations so that you can stop feeling that life sucks and create what you want. What you really, really want. If anyone was a teenager in the 90s, they might remember that from the song by the Spice Girls called Wannabe. So everything that I teach is step by step. So there might be 10 ingredients in order to make something work, and it's about mastering one ingredient at a time, or maybe two if you want to be ambitious. And once you master that, the great thing is you don't tend to go back. So that was always the problem with the spiritual world, like this kind of flip-flop of everything's great, I've had this healing, now I'm not so great, oh, I'm great, now I'm not so great. Once you master something, you don't tend to have this Cesaw effect. You might need to remind yourself and reintegrate it at certain points, but it is always there. So these steps are steps that you integrate and build upon little by little, but even doing one or two of these things, so let's say out of 10 ingredients you have two, that's already going to start making a big difference to the way that you feel and also start to shift your external environment as well. So, for example, in a relationship context, you could integrate a particular action and suddenly notice that your husband is behaving differently towards you. And it may be small at first, but it becomes this kind of snowball effect because actually, rather than looking for evidence that your husband is disrespectful or whatever, you are now like, hmm, I integrated this step, I've noticed a change in his behaviour, and I'm feeling more optimistic. And now your focus has started to shift from looking for things that are wrong to looking for things that will move you in the right direction. So I'm gonna stop there just to say this is going to be a podcast that is gonna give you tangible, practical action steps without the woo-woo, or maybe some woo-woo language, but I will define, I will define any language that I use. So, thank you all for tuning in today. I am super excited to begin this podcast journey with y'all, and see you in the next episode. Bye for now.