Welcome to the I. Q. Meets EQ podcast. I'm Jacqui Brauman, principal solicitor at T. B. A. Law and Ceo of legally wise women and I'm here as always with Ush Dhanak former corporate lawyer then head of HR now an emotional intelligence coach. Good morning Ush Morning, Jackie, how are you going? I'm well, how are you? Good. I'm really good. Yeah, it sounds like we both got our mojo, but compared to our last recording, I think so. I think so a little bit, but I'm still not punishing myself for not being highly productive. Like just there still seems to be a bit of a time warp and there doesn't seem to be as many hours in the day as there used to be, yep, I'm running out of time. I can't get everything done and it's okay. Yeah, I think that, you know, you've nailed it with saying that it's okay. I think there's just so much happening at the moment and I'm sure we'll talk about it in podcast as well, but just vibrational lee right with, with how people are feeling where the ads going. So I think that's just people are feeling things that they're not used to feeling.

Yeah. Yeah. So you're not used to feeling going to the gym? No. So yes, couple of early start new training sessions. So yeah, I totally feel like I've been hit by a truck. It's a good feeling once the pains gone because it's like, oh yeah, I remember I can do this again. That's great. I'm so proud of you back into working out early in the morning. I know, good stuff. Yes, I've been doing that now just to get back into that new routine. Right, Good, good. Well, yeah, we really have sort of kicked the New year off in february instead of january. Yes, that's that's what we said, didn't we? Probably said that in december as well, that january was probably going to be right off and everything is going to start in feb. Yeah, So yeah, nothing really new for me. No, nothing to report this month though, being february, you know, we have valentine's day in feb. We thought, didn't we to do self Love month instead of Yeah, instead of buying into all the other commercial staff.

So it's all about self love. And I even say in this interview that, you know, it's not something I would have talked about when we first started the podcast a couple of years ago. That's right, yeah, it's a bit foreign, wasn't it, for you? Yeah, yeah. And as you're sort of here in the interview as well, like I do struggle to a little bit to use my words and for my questions because as you said, like, it's a little bit new for me, and it's not something that I'm talking out loud about, it's something that I've been pondering a lot and working through and pulling and reading resources and all that sort of stuff, but I brought Tina Bruce in to have a chat. I'd come across her in a group that I'm in. She had written a book a bit over a year ago called Mother's Medicine, which is about her progression through from career into motherhood and then through pain and addiction to painkillers and out again the other side. And you know, I thought for self love, her story is just going to be perfect.

She was before in her career, a clinical cardiac technician, but now she's all the way through the other side and she's teaching intuition yoga and having retreats for healing. So let's dive in and have a listen. I'm really looking forward to this. Tina Welcome to the podcast. How are you today? Thanks, Jackie really well. My kids go back to school tomorrow. Yes, very, very well today. Very disappointing summer that we've had though in terms of weather, isn't it? We're just sitting in this fairly cool Melbourne Day. Yeah, I know it is quite confusing. That's probably why we went to Queensland for a couple of weeks. So yeah, I agree. It is confusing. So we're focusing on self love for february. And you were the ideal person that I thought of straight away because you had sent me your book Mother's Medicine bit over 12 months ago and your transition, you know, epitomizes IQ Eq as well.

But also epitomizes like a journey of self love and so I'm so excited to speak with you because I've sort of got to know you that way, but I'd like to know you deeper when you were growing up, what did you want to be? Well, I really wanted to be a vet. I had, you know, my sights set on becoming a vet and holding an animal hospital. It's funny though, I think I was turned off when I watched a documentary and I saw a vet um literally disappear up a cow's bomb and I was like, maybe that's not for me. So it didn't eventuate obviously, but funnily enough, my nine year old daughter really wants to become a vet. So, you know, I don't know, we'll see, maybe the next generation will pick it up. It's quite common actually. There has been so many women that we've interviewed who wanted to be a vet. It's some kind of like cuddling the little fluffy, nurturing an animal or something, making the world nice, that connection.

So many kids have to animals. Yes, Yes, very much so. So I know you didn't end up as a vet, but you certainly went into, you know, the medical industry. So tell me then, you know how you went through your last years of school and ended up where you were. Yeah, so the steps I took, I'm a Brisbane girl. So I actually studied and completed a bachelor of business at Qut in Brisbane and when I completed that at 21, I moved to Melbourne and I thought if I'm going to start a career, I should do it in a bigger city. So I moved down here and followed a girlfriend and I arrived here and instead of doing the overseas trip, which most of my friends were doing, traveling at that age, you know living in London, having that stint in the U. K. I just landed my first job straight away. And so I went straight from uni into corporate big farmer and got a job in a pharmaceutical industry in the company that hired me as a drug rep.

So that was my first job out of uni. And I did that for a few years and then I moved into medical devices. So I then I trained myself and was trained to be a cardiac technician for a medical device company which specialized in pacemaker implants and defibrillator implants. So very technical science, the role which didn't really have a lot to do with my business qualification, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do. So I just found myself in this highly specialist medical role. So yeah, that brought me into a lot of situations that were highly stressful in theater, in surgery, with cardiologists implanting devices and assisting them for that process. And then following up their patients in there clinic as well. So, balancing those two things and it was a great job. I mean it was exciting, you're at the forefront of technology, some incredible lifesaving devices and helping patients and it was great until I had my first baby.

And then, you know, the obvious demands of motherhood started to creep in and you know, this job requires you to be on call on some weekends. So getting calls in the middle of the night to go to the emergency department and check patients and it just wasn't working so clearly. You know, when you all of a sudden become the primary carer of your Children in your family household, I couldn't do the job and feel confident that I was, you know, meeting my employer's expectations and my families. And so I just felt like many mothers do that split in both worlds of just feeling like you're failing. And so eventually I actually burnt out and my health suffered and I got shingles which then developed into a chronic pain condition called post herpetic neuralgia, which is when the nervous system stays highly alert and in pain.

And then I developed an addiction just to top things off a prescription painkiller addiction to opioids for three years. And so that kept me, you know, well and truly in a chemical prison and forced me eventually to resign. So I left that career behind and then just had to focus on my health. Mm hmm. It feels like there was a big kick really from the universe that it was just like you can't you can't do all the things or this is not for you anymore. But pretty intense. Yeah, it was but I'm so grateful now because it led me onto the next path of my career, which was starting my own business first as a yoga teacher and helping to heal other women in my community and I've just, I absolutely know that I am living my purpose now and that this is what I'm supposed to be doing and everything served me up until this point to help heal other women who are going through similar things.

Yeah, So going back to when you were running around on call, I suppose it's either the hospital or the specialists that you're sort of at their beck and call to all sorts of different places as well as trying to serve after care and then feeling like you weren't doing that well and you weren't being a mom as well as you wanted to be. How much self love was there in your life at that point? None. I was like, what's that? No, it was all about pleasing other people. I was that chronic people pleaser and constantly needing to seek approval from others outside of me. So, I was very disconnected from my intuition from my self love and my own worthiness, which, you know, you punish yourself in a lot of ways when you just outsource your power all the time to other people. So you're just draining of energy hemorrhaging power, trying to meet the needs of others rather than look at your own being and think, hang on, what is it that I need And do I actually love myself or what does that feel like?

Yeah. Yeah. Or people even get to the point of who even am I? Because I've done everything for everyone else and I don't even know what I want. Mm hmm. Yeah. The big questions coming out. Yeah. Yeah. And so you have I mean having shingles what horrible thing to have. I mean it's usually you usually think that it's more elderly people that get it and then to develop the ongoing pain issues from that. So you your like you said, your system just thinks that it's still got shingles all the time. Or it's just your body's overreacting all the time and feeling pain when there's nothing to feel pain for. Yes. Is that how it is? Yes. Yes. So in all that where do you even find the clarity of mind to start thinking differently instead of still further punishing yourself for getting yourself into this for doing this to yourself?

And then you've got this downward spiral of even more like I feel worthless because I can't resolve this. Where's the turnaround? It's usually at the break the breakdown. So the breakdown is often the breakthrough. It's the moment of surrender when you just you know, you're basically okay, I'm I feel helpless in this situation. I am handing this over to a higher power helped me and that surrender moment and then the most incredible things begin to happen because you start to experience the shifts of this connection to your spirit. You begin to begin to call your spirit back because you're walking and rushing around, not actually in your own soul, like your detached, you're completely disassociated from it because you've got rushing women syndrome and you're you're running around. So it's the moment you surrender and call your soul back and say help. I've got nothing to show me what to do at that moment.

You call out to your intuition and then things start to things start to shift and move and and you receive guidance and you intuit information or little nudges here and there to say, oh, call this person or for me it was pick up the phone and ring this doctor. That was the starting point of my healing journey and starting to build your support team around you of healers, mentors, doctors, coaches. I had a lot. I had a whole football team of healers and a support team to help you find that self love. Because what is deeper than the pain, what is deeper than the pain you're experiencing physically is subconscious fear, trauma and grace and suppressed emotions in your heart. And so when we suppress our emotions, we hold onto so much and that's what blocks are intuitive power because your heart is actually the center of your intuition.

And it's different to what a lot of people think, which, you know in the yoga world. They say, oh it's your third eye and no, it's not. It's your it's your heart. Your heart is the center of your emotional intelligence because it has its own electromagnetic Field which is 500 times greater than the cranial brain. And the reason why it does have that is because it has its own heart brain. So the heart has got About 40,000 neural cells in it called neuro cardio sites. And they form a nervous system within the heart. So the heart actually becomes pre cognitive in that it receives information before the cranial brain does and it does this on feeling. So it picks up on feeling and that's how superpower. But when we're stressed and we're running around, we literally block ourselves off from that intelligence and our intuition is our highest form of intelligence.

I may have just gone off on a tangent there, but where that was brilliant. Yeah, I keep coming back to, as you said, you must have you must have to hit a rock bottom because when you're juggling and it seems to be working, you can't trust anyone but yourself. So you can't hand anything over because you don't love yourself enough to trust yourself or any anyone else that anyone's going to catch you If you fall, it's like a catch 22 big time, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. And you know, the heart is a paradox in itself because it holds both trauma and transformation. It is both, you can hold softness and soreness in the one place, it can be full of emptiness but it can also be full of opportunity. This heart has the room to be able to hold everything of your experience and that's where we have to start.

So that's where I guide people to begin with connecting to the heart brain. Yeah, so in your journey to both heal the pain because you had to both get off the addiction bandwagon and then also deal with the pain that you were still having. You obviously were able to do a lot of work as you were saying with coaches but you've also found that yoga was actually a physical movement that helped you through that too, which again I find fascinating because I've done like more physical like fitness yoga for a long time, but not something that I would wouldn't consider healing movement. So tell me sort of how that has helped a lot as well. Yeah, well I found that actually engaging in practices embodiment practices were really key to my recovery because when you're heeling trauma subconscious fear programs and all that sort of stuff, it's in our body, our issues are stored in our tissues and and actually facing and starting this process is from the bottom up is the best way to release it from our cellular memory.

The gateway for me was actually yin yoga which is a slower form of yoga where you're based on the floor and you're held in shapes or poses for about five minutes. And what it taught me was that I could sit in discomfort without trying to numb or run away or escape the uncomfortable feelings. And it taught me how to sit with my uncomfortable feelings without escaping them. So that was the entry point and those little classes that built up and up then led me to meditation. And everyone knows the benefits of meditation now. But I mean obviously for recovering from pain but also inviting in self love, meditation connects you to your heart, to your intuition. And it's like that saying, I used to have meditate before you medicate because your body actually, once you create the feeling state through your heart, your brain, it sends messages to your brain to then produce the chemistry which is filled with all the feel good hormones of the endorphins, your natural opiates that you produce.

So you've got this whole inner pharmacy of good chemicals that meditation produces. So then that helps you wean off medication if you're taking painkillers, that you can help yourself by just tapping into your own inner chemistry. Yeah. Right. Because I think people know like the surface level benefits of meditation, you know, it's supposed to be able to give us some more mental clarity and calm some stress and you know, generally help us to perform better. But as you say, there's like a chemical reaction that goes on in meditation as well which I think people need to no more about. I think that that is just so fascinating that there is a more of a biological reaction going on than just sitting still. Mm there's so much going on. And even though you're sitting in stillness energy or you know emotions are just energy in motion. So you're just shifting energy and you're increasing your frequency or vibration as well through meditation.

And so we come into what's called heart coherence and heart coherence is defined by the heart. Math institute is when the heart and the head Are aligned energetically at 0.1 Hz frequency and they've measured this and done a lot of studies just by guiding people to cultivate feelings of gratitude and appreciation and compassion and when we start to embody these feelings then the physical benefits are reducing cortisol increasing oxytocin increasing your immune system markers and developing resilience really to be able to emotionally regulate yourself. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating that they've got to the point of being able to measure measure frequency and have something really tangible for those skeptics who were like our self love and self care, you know, I probably as you were when you were before you became a mom and you were still full on career girl.

And as a lot of us are who are just starting to realize the benefits of emotional intelligence and more than just that like masculine driven logical approach because you know, I've been in that space myself. You know, self care sort of just becomes another thing to tick off the list and actually doesn't feel like there's any love behind it at all. And so if self love is more than just self care, how how do you define self love for yourself? Mm hmm. I would say it's accepting life unconditionally on its terms. And yeah, having the spiritual maturity two except that you're enough. Yeah. No matter what you're enough. It's a big learning thing to have, isn't it?

I think so many of us are operating from not enough. Always as you said, people pleasing, always comparison, always trying to show that we're good enough for everyone around us to actually be able to sit back and go, no, my baseline is that I am enough. And everything that I do from there is a bonus. Yeah. And also Jackie, we're conditioned to not feel enough. If you come from a corporate world or background, they would, they used to incentivize us to for how many hours encore we worked and put us at the top and say, oh look this person, this staff member worked 30 hours last week, let's give them a gold star. Like they would reward that kind of burner and hierarchical structure. So that patriarchal structure doesn't serve us and it only creates disease.

And if we don't bring in feminine leadership our balance of feminine energy then it's just you know become a cog in the wheel until you burn out. Like that is often the way for so many women. So it comes back to that balance. So I think a lot of us also operate from fear of well either we haven't seen it modeled any differently so we don't know that it can work a different way or even just from a fear of lack and scarcity but now that you have transitioned into something that is completely different from the corporate role that you have and you are actually healed and helping other women and running a yoga business and I know that you do so much more than that as well. You teach a lot. Tell other women who are fearful of actually doing something like that themselves, that you are financial, you're fine.

Yeah, yeah. You still go on your holidays with your kids to Queensland like you just said like you live in a beautiful place, I can see it behind you. I'm okay. Yeah. Take the leap I think no, I think the really important thing is that your intuition will constantly guiding you on what to do next. So if you're unsure if you're in doubt about taking the leap, just take some time every day to sit with yourself in silence and just really listen, learn the art of listening to yourself and that is an act of self love when you can just stop and be still and just ask yourself, what do you, what do you want to tell me today? What do I need to know? And you'll get the answer. Mm Hmm. And that's a great piece of advice for any woman at any age. But is there a particular piece of advice you'd like to go back in time and tell your 21 year old self? I would tell her that you are strong enough to handle pain.

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Really powerful. Yeah. And I think that it's okay to feel all your emotions and that it's safe to be in your body. Mm as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's really powerful. I think as women were also raised to feel unsafe all the time just because of our bodies. She is not fair. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a there's a great quote. I wrote it down somewhere. Oh, here it is. Good old Alan Watts. He says you are something the universe is doing in the same way a wave is something the ocean is doing. And I'm like, yeah, that's so true. If we see ourselves as we're not having this experience in life, we are the experience and more open our heart is you, the more universe you let through the more of the multiverse. You let flow through you and just guide you to where you are to go next. Regardless of what the stories in your head are telling you and, and all of the little limiting beliefs that we acquire.

Yeah, that quote sort of makes me think of something I've been thinking of for a while, which is that, you know, life will keep happening no matter how hard you push or how little you push, won't it? Because it's, as you said, it's the wave and the wave isn't pushing. No, the waves just keep coming. Yeah, Yeah. So other than sitting in silence with yourself, because I'm sure you do that regularly. Is there any other little rituals and check ins that you do to keep yourself well and on track Now or is the primary one going to be giving yourself that time to check in with yourself? Yeah, I probably have a few. I have lots of rituals from the obvious ones of yoga and meditation. I walk my dog every day. My dog is very spiritual. He's always present and every time I look into his eyes it's just unconditional love and it just takes me straight to that self love and he's telling me with his eyes when he looks at me, you know, I love yourself tina.

Yeah. Okay, got it. Thanks banjo. Um, so yeah, walking my dog every day. I have a bath pretty much every night. Yeah, nice. So I'm a bit of a bath addict, but love washing the day away with water element. Just really helpful or you know, if it's not a bath, it's a swim in the ocean or something. And I do quite a lot of breath work now as well. So using the breath conscious connected breathing, mm hmm. And other than that, just checking in during the day with little mini meditations of heart coherence, which is really simple. And all you need to do is just bring two fingers to the center of your chest and just hold them over your heart and just close your eyes and think about a memory or a person or an event that brings up feelings of gratitude or appreciation and allow that feeling to build within you and get you back to center.

Yeah. Such a simple little thing. And as you said, that can get you into that coherence, which gets you in that special hurts measurement that you're just talking about before. Yes. And it's such a little thing to do. But you're right. Like you can have great rituals at the start of the end of the day, but then you get on with your, your day and you just forget it all And you never check in. And it's important to do little bits during the day too, isn't it? So Tina where's the best place for people to check you out and connect with you? You can check my website which is tina Bruce dot com dot au. You'll see on there that apart from hosting regular classes, I do retreats every year and I've got two coming up one in bright victoria, one in Byron Bay, which I bring in cultural awareness as well. So I'm very passionate about indigenous wisdom and I have only seen it enhanced my own intuition when we bring in the ancient medicine and wellness practices that they use.

So retreats and I do have an online eight week course starting next thursday, which is called empowering your intuitive health. So if you're interested in being guided through a rebirthing experience for your health, then check that out as well. Fantastic. Yeah, I had looked at your retreats, particularly the one in bright because I'm originally from Wanga rata, so it's not too far away from where I grew up. Beautiful place. That's for sure. So look, thank you so much for your time. I think that what, you know, you've taken the conversations we usually have on this podcast to another level and that's what I wanted to do for february with self love because it's something when I first started the podcast a couple of years ago, I would not have touched but here we are. So, I'm ready to dive in deeper and have some more of these deeper conversations. So thanks for thanks for starting to guide the way that's for sure. You're so welcome. Thanks for having me, Jackie right alright, this is right up your alley.

It is, yeah, I think just to start at the beginning, you know, and just the journey that that she's had is you know, how she's managed to get through what she's got through right from a resilience point of view and how that addiction has has really just changed her and I think you know one of the things I noticed was that her self awareness has increased that, you know, potentially if that incident hadn't happened and she hadn't gone through what she had, she wouldn't have been able to love herself and do all the work that she has on herself. So I think that's just beautiful really to to see how she's come through the other side and you can go the other way can't it as well so easily, you hear her stories where people have gone through something like that and they can't get out of it and they can't pull themselves out and then it, you know, impacts all other aspects of their life. Yeah, very much so, and I was going to say as you were talking about, well she really didn't have any other choice, but she said, she did, like you said, so many people don't fully come back and heal themselves and they just stay in that cycle for decades.

So yeah, I find it really incredible because she did hit a breaking point and maybe some people don't get quite low enough to break out of it because I did ask her at one point in their, you know, when women have the Russian woman syndrome that she called it, which I loved, how do they even work out to trust themselves instead of people pleasing and draining themselves and meeting others needs. And she said, look maybe there's nothing that gets people to that point unless they do hit a rock bottom. So yeah. And I think it's also, you know, in my experience of working people like this, it's it's the definition of rock bottom, right? So everyone's going to have different levels of breaking points for them. So, you know, someone's rock bottom might be the end of the world literally for someone else. So I think that's really important. But it's it's a case of, you know, being able to acknowledge that you hit rock bottom. I think it's bigger and not only to yourself but to people around you.

So the courage that takes to go, you know what I ain't doing so great. And I'm at that stage where I'm going to have to need some help to get back up mm hmm, mm hmm. I took so many notes in this one And all my notes were sort of in the 1st 10 minutes and then I ran out of space and I'm like, oh because there was just so much in this because she really like I'm on that cast, I can acknowledge that like I do have a deep awareness of I'm doing all those things that Tina was doing before she hit rock bottom except the opioids, I don't have an addiction, but I have an addiction to anxiety and frustration, definitely. So you know, I'm doing the people pleasing and I am very disconnected, I meet others needs, I give all my energy away. I've spoken to you before about not completely knowing who I am and what I want because I don't think about that.

I look out externally too um define myself by how others see me. So it's an interesting thing to be aware of it, but not having the trust to have this self love to to turn that around and that's I guess, you know, the self love month that we're talking about and I said to Tina after we'd finished recording that I have conditional self love, I don't have unconditional self love. Yeah, I was going to say this claim, that sounds exactly like what you would have and I think, you know, first hats off for you to even acknowledge that you recognize those signs. And then I think it's a case of it can get quite overwhelming because you can almost go, oh my God, you know, I can see myself going down this rabbit hole or down the same thing and then because you don't know what to do or what to tackle first, you end up just putting it away right, and you say yourself, it'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine before you know it, then you hit the rock bottom. So I think it's a case, you know, for anyone, not just you to go, okay, well all of these things are an issue and then you go, right, pick one that you want to work on first and you know, one strategy for that one thing.

Mm hmm. And it's the consistency of it then that you're going to have to go, okay, well, I'm going to, you know, implement some form of self love for this issue, whether that's creating a new boundary or you know, making more time for yourself to have the bath or being able to learn how to say no to things, pick that one thing and make it consistent. Mm hmm. Yeah. When you were in law yourself and before you sort of had your own turning point, I imagine that you were probably in a very similar space, punishing yourself and not really much self love. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But I didn't have the tools then to go, you know, what sort of plan can I put in place And my plan was to quit my job, which isn't the best thing to do when you're not feeling great because you know, things compound and then you start worrying about other things. But you take me with you don't you, you take yourself to another job. That's right. But I sort of knew that unless I did something that was quite a bit of a circuit breaker. I wasn't gonna be able to get out of what I was doing or feeling. So that was mine, but I was talking to this woman actually, she's going to be one of the people we interview on the podcast shortly.

Her name is Sheila Dixon and she is a soul reader. So I've sort of been using her a fair bit over the last six months and she, she sort of connects with you at the soul level to say, where are you from? What do you enjoy doing? What is your purpose? Because sometimes we don't know at our soul level and she taps into it and it's fascinating because talk about the theme of self love, but one of the things she said was, you know, my soul comes from a certain planet cord Hadar where we're called Head Arians and she said, you've come on to planet Earth and one of the main purposes of Head Arians is to show unconditional love and love other people. But sometimes Head Arians take a bad situation to almost experience the other side of that spectrum to actually teach themselves lessons. And I think not even for self love, I think a lot of people do that where they put themselves in extreme situations, not by choice all the time, but at that soul level to really experience what things shouldn't be like, which then becomes the catalyst to move into what you want to do for change.

And then the interesting thing she said about love was, you know, you don't look for love externally from other people. I know it's a saying that we've all heard, but she said love isn't a thing, Love is so tap into that emotion, tap into that feeling by doing the things that make you feel that way internally and that's not easy to do. It's really not easy to do, but you know, it's something I think everyone can benefit from reminding themselves that we have to bring it on for ourselves. Yeah, it's a good reminder that we sort of cover up ourselves and what we really want for ourselves or perhaps never even explore who we are and what we want for ourselves because of the systems around us and society and everyone saying this is what you should do and this is the path and this is how you, You know, you go to school, you get a degree, you work really hard, you buy your house, you get married, you have some kids, you work till you're 65, you have some trips in retirement and you go into aged care like great, what a path seriously where in that is.

Do I actually address what I want to do. So there's some of that, but also when you're talking about returning or not returning back to love, but allowing yourself to feel the self love Tina had given us that interesting little technique which I had actually been starting to try and consciously practice for awhile about bringing your heart and your brain into coherence because who else other than like a clinical cardiac technician can talk to us about the hurts of the brain and the and the heart and how the heart has all those neurons and there is actually, well the heart beats on its own without the brain being alive. So yeah, it's very, we're starting to get the science behind it. But to bring yourself into that coherent state only takes a little bit of thinking about your heart and then thinking about something you're grateful for or someone that you love and you get into that state. Yeah, and there's one meditation I've done actually with someone, his whole thing is teaching how we should have interviewed him in this month as well, but um teaching how to, to love other people and love yourself.

And he did a meditation with me because just before christmas and it was a heart to heart meditation and it was one of the first meditation have done with another person on zoom, which was really interesting to and part of the meditation was he said, okay, I want you to open your heart. And it was interesting when he said that because I didn't even know how to do that. Like how do you open your heart, like it sounds really easy, right? But like how do you do that? So I'm like, oh God, I don't know how to do it. And because he picks up on it and he reads energy and he says, no, you haven't opened it. Like you need to open it some more. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm trying to visualize in my heart and opening and then what he did was he goes, okay, because I'm going to connect my heart to your heart, and we're going to transfer some energy. And honestly, at the end of it, I felt so different, like a massive shift in how I was feeling. But my biggest takeaway from that with him was I don't even know how to open my heart. And he goes, yeah, many people don't because it's not something we talk about or say, we don't say, oh yeah, I'm going to open my heart today. I know, and I think it takes practice. If you imagine all the walls we put around the heart subconsciously whether that's in the form of an inner critic or a form of, you know, self sabotage or imposter syndrome, if you think about it, there are just boundaries to protect our heart because we don't want rejection and we want to be liked.

But for someone to say, open your heart, that's the whole level of vulnerability that we're not used to. Absolutely no, we don't even really open our own heart to ourselves. I think even when we love and care for others, we quite often don't love ourselves, we don't even like ourselves a lot. Sometimes, as you say, like you you hide your deepest self even from yourself as a way of protection, but also sometimes as a way of self punishment. Like how how brutal your self talk can be to yourself and you would never say it out loud to another person. It is horrible. Yeah. Um and I think you know, when that happens to me, I just go okay, you know, and it was mentioned yesterday in the interview, but emotions are energy, emotion, I said that all the time and also, you know, you are not your thoughts, it was one of the first things that got drummed into me learning eq So what I do with that is when we have those thoughts, it's really important to write them and then literally read them and then go, okay, well I'm not that they're just thoughts that have come in my head.

It doesn't define you as a being, it doesn't define your heart, it doesn't define who you are. It's a passing thought. Um and the other analogy I used for that is it's like, you know, imagine the sky and then your thoughts are different elements of weather. That's a good way of saying that it's not going to be rain all the time, it's not gonna be sun all the time, it's not going to be, you know, thunder all the time. There's going to be different elements in the sky and you are the sky because it's funny to say in a way, if you think about it too much that your thoughts are not you you're like, well who is that horrible person in my head then, and how do I stop her from talking like that? Um but you're right, because you can be an observer of your own thoughts totally and and the more you're able to observe your thoughts, the more you'll be able to disconnect with the negative feelings that that your thoughts can give you and then I think the key is in that space, just inject yourself with self love, right? So when you're aware that you are not, your thoughts go, okay, well my thoughts are clearly there for a reason, it's just it's showing me that I need the, you know, the extra medicine or the extra self care and the medicine of love, not thank you, but you know, it's like, I need to need to give myself that in this moment in time.

But it all starts with awareness, right? We talked about that with you all the time unless you are able to pick up what's going on for you and talk about it or say something about it, nothing will change. No, no, and then, but awareness stiller is can only be the first step, Karnak because then you need something to, as you said, you write down the thoughts and then you consciously tell yourself no that's not you. So you've got to do something to eventually start turning that awareness into some kind of action but I also like how you say that you know emotions are energy in action in motion. Yeah, that makes sense because tina also talked about how emotion that we don't allow to move then get stored in your body and how when she started actually facing her healing and getting off painkillers and then even having to heal the pain condition that she had, it was about sitting in those yoga poses for long periods of time with herself to allow herself to feel the emotion that had become stuck in her body.

So interesting Yeah, because we suppress those emotions and if they're not released that energy of that emotion is in your body goes somewhere. Maybe that's Yeah totally, because that's what you know what what gets triggered and you know I'm a big believer and I remember you know my grand who was like the fittest person ever and out of the loss of losing my granddad, she triggered the cancer cells and you know she lost her life really, really quickly, I remember going to the doctor saying I don't understand how this can happen because she's just been so fit, she's like fitter than I am and she said well he said he goes you know we all have certain things that are stored in our body and certain emotions will trigger a reaction. So for her it was that, you know in depth grief and heart loss. You know, she married my granddad when she was 13. So you know, it was that intense. Oh my God, what am I going to do? So absolutely. I think, you know, we have to have an outlet for what it is that we're feeling, but we can't do that until we know what we're feeling.

That's right. We need to actually feel our feelings. Yeah. And you know, name it and again, EQ is all about, you know, the 1st 21 days of any EQ training you do is and it's a killer mentioned. Yeah, yeah, emotionally. And you have to write down the emotions that you feel because we're not used to it. You know, you know, it's rare for me to find someone that I've coached that can go, you know what I can easily eight times a day write down what it is. I feel it's a muscle we don't exercise or use. And when you pointed out that exercise, it was probably over 12 months ago that you did. You also talked about the lack of vocabulary that we have for our feelings as well and how much more subtle they are, but also the surface level feeling might not actually be what we're actually feeling. So the anger is he's an actor or um something else? Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, is it fear, is it humiliation? Is it rejection? Like what is, you know if you can link it back to even something that's happened that can help you get to the core level of that emotion, if you just sit there going, I need to pick a word for how I feel, it's not easy, you know, look at the things that are triggering you, what are they making you feel?

You know, is it people, is it circumstances, is it things that are doing, you know being done away that you don't want them to be done? What is it, what is the trigger? And then have a look at those patterns so much in this conversation and you know, I like where we're taking this, I like that we're starting to be able to talk about this stuff because it is part of the journey and I que meets eq it was all about bringing in you know all that change that we realize throughout our career in our life that facing things from our logical brain is not what gets us where we need to be and I mean the progression of time is just as much of a journey for the both of us as well as as well as our listeners learning from our guests, so I love it Yeah, and I think you know the only thing I would add to what we learned yesterday was also to connect the gap as well, so you know they are literally three brains that have their own little ways of working.

So you know, if you can connect that brain heart and then gut, because a lot of the intuition is from the gut, so if you can really understand, you know what's going on for you there, you'll be able to be more intuitive and make make better decisions in the right decisions. Yeah, that's right. Trust you get and I think, I think a lot of people with their intuition think that the intuition feeling stays. But no, you get that gut feel if your intuition and you've got to trust it in that moment because you're not going to get it again, like you're not going to go, oh, but I just need confirmation that that was my gut feel. No, that was you feel that's right. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then go into witness mode, like I do that as you know, as many times as I can during the week. It's it's one of the easiest way to sort of step out of your own head and you know, really look at what it is that's going on for you and how you're feeling about it. No, well, there you go so much for our listeners this episode. That's for sure I know right so much. Yeah, I hope it helps everyone on their own path to self love or at least recognizing that may be where I am and you've got some conditional self love.

You know, I only love myself when I feel like I'm meeting the expectations I've set for myself, not unconditionally. So let's we've got another guest for self love month. So let's see where that takes us. And then I'm excited after that. We then got men's march. So we're going to start having some men on every now and then, which will be very interesting. That's going to be great. Yeah. I think just one thing I also want to mention, it just reminded me of someone that did reach out was sometimes it's hard to reach out and actually asked to help. Like we say it all the time, I just reach out, reach out. And I think two tips that I learned from this one lady that reached out was find one person, first of all that you can trust and talk to and sometimes reaching out to one person is all you need right? Because you shared that that feeling and then the other tip that and this is what she used was she wrote it down and wrote a letter or email someone about what it was that she was feeling because it was almost like that dreaded cold sales call that no one likes doing right.

And for her it was a case of I don't even know how to talk about this or to express it and she goes, the biggest thing for her was she didn't want, she was sort of, you know, over thinking what the other person was going to feel if she said all of this and you know her way of writing it down and sending it. She didn't have to deal with that person's reaction in the real time. And then that person obviously did reach out and support and help. But that in between moment that she was stressing about had gone, Yeah, yeah, it's um it's great because again, a lot of us don't have the skills to talk about our feelings, do we? So? Exactly, yeah. Thank you so much for people to take away and please for those who want to reach out to us, you can do that. We have all our episodes at I Q meets eq dot com dot au. But if you want a more private way to reach out with both on linkedin, so you can message us there or email us, where can they find jewish? Yeah, I am on eq dot academy and on instagram and linkedin.

Thank you. And yeah, I'm at Jackie at legally wise women dot com dot au. So happy self love month, everyone. Yeah. Big love. Right