227: The Journey of Feminine Consciousness

As women around the world are feeling a stirring to transition from one stage of consciousness to the next, we are shedding, peeling back old layers of who and what we are “supposed” to be…

 

Paula Conroy (@thefrequency.global) is the founder of The Frequency and a facilitator of women's transformational circles. After 15 years in the corporate world, Paula felt an undeniable "knock from within" that her path was shifting, leading her to the transformational work she now offers individuals through a lens of feminine principles.

 

• The HEROINE’S JOURNEY and feeling the call to let one stage of life die to birth the next

• The power of a CIRCLE through storytelling and ceremonies -- to remember our interconnection with ancient feminine principles

• Cultivating RADICAL ACCOUNTABILITY by hunting down internalized patriarchy and marginalization within

 

WATCH this episode on Cherie’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SoulRoseShow
..

Follow Paula on LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/paula-conroy-0823454

 

Follow Cherie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cherie.burton/

 

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Episode Transcript

(00:03):
Hello there. I'm Cherie Burton and this is the soul Rose show where ancient
feminine wisdom meets the modern path of soul evolution. I am ever so
grateful to every one of you who tune in to listen to this podcast. It's
been running for five years now. I want to acknowledge Vanessa Mariel, who
left a beautiful review on Apple Podcast who said, I've been listening to this podcast
since the beginning. Week by week, month by month, Cherie and the wonderful guests on

(00:25):
her show help weave a cocoon of feminine wisdom and reflection, something that I have
been actively seeking the past few years as I feel the stirrings of change within
me. We are in the midst of a revolution, one which is inviting feminine consciousness
to find her footing on our planet that is tired, polluted and full of violence.
Here, beacons, voices helping to usher in a new era of
balance, health, beauty and love. I love this podcast. If you're looking for ways to

(00:46):
explore this burgeoning revolution inside of you and outside of you, then you have been
fortunate enough to arrive here. Listen up. And she put listen up in all. Caps
with an exclamation point. I appreciate that Vanessa so much and leaving
reviews helps others to find this content, others who may really be
needing this for validation, insight, and to assist them on their paths of
transition and growth and expansion. Today we're exploring the journey of feminine

(01:08):
consciousness. Paula Conray is a founder of the frequency. She's a
passionate advocate of the positive evolution of humanity and the practice of living in
alignment with the frequency of consciousness and love. She spent 15 years
working in senior leadership roles in the corporate world, so she
now works as an expert facilitator and transformational
circle holder. This is really up for me right now because I just launched my

(01:30):
women's wisdom circle this week on the first day of spring here in the northern
hemisphere. Paula is in the southern hemisphere and. Just heading into fall. But anyway,
we have this beautiful discussion around shedding and peeling back old
layers and the heroines journey and the power of circles and then hunting down
inside of us those places where we might be sabotaging
our own transformation through internalized patriarchy and

(01:52):
marginalization that lives inside of us unawares.
Paula from Australia, welcome. Hi
Sherry. It's so wonderful to be with you today. And I have to say it's
all an instant connection to you just based on our pre conversation. And the work
you're doing is so aligned with what I'm

(02:16):
passionate about and. What I see as a great deep.
Need right now for women and men, but especially women. I think as we're coming
more into this mature feminine cycle of the earth,
of the consciousness. So why don't you share a little. Bit about
why you're so, I know you had this journey with
corporate. I talked to a lot of women who were in some kind of space

(02:38):
where they were, I guess, just kind of going through the motions. I don't want
to put words in your mouth, but they were feeling like this sort of despondency
within and a. Spark kind of dying inside of themselves. And knew they needed to
pivot. And so I'm curious about your journey from being in that corporate space
and now the work you're doing. Beautiful. Thank you. And yeah, I have to
just mirror that back to you because for me, frequency is everything.

(03:01):
And when I came across you and. The work that you've done so far. And
the podcast you've created and the women that you've interviewed and the men that you've
interviewed so far, I was like, oh my gosh, look at how this has worked
across the globe and this has brought this beautiful woman into
my life who I just see so much resonance with. And I was like,
the mystery is just extraordinary. So, yeah, I love the

(03:23):
resonance and I love the connection. So it's wonderful to be with you and feel
all the good feelings. So thank you. And I spent 15
years in corporate banking, working at a senior leadership level for the
majority of that time, managing multi jurisdictional
teams across many different parts of the organization and
managing a really large balance sheet. So I spent a large part

(03:45):
of that career in a very exciting, expansive
phase where it was fast paced, it was big, it was
exciting numbers, there was big deals on the go, and there was a
sense of community within the organization as well. I have to keep
remembering and reminding myself and others that ultimately these large
institutions are made up of many people, and people are fabulous.

(04:07):
So we sort of villainize sometimes these organizations, and in
fact, they're made up of a lot of wonderful people. So I had wonderful
family members there that I worked with for many, many years until
I reached that stage of my journey where that
internal knock from within me was getting louder and louder, that
this is not my path any longer, that I'm meant to be doing

(04:29):
something differently. And Maureen Murdoch's beautiful work, the
heroines journey, talks about, know the point on that boon
of success when everything seems to be working on the external,
that something starts knocking from internally saying
there's another life for you. This life that you're living is calling
to die. It's calling to be left behind, and there's a journey

(04:52):
you need to go on to let this life die. And it's difficult.
Deaths are difficult, they are painful, and there's a lot of
letting go, and it could be quite messy in that process, but
it's a necessary portal that you're being called to, given that you
are a part of nature. And nature is constantly teaching us
about the death and rebirth cycle. Every season, we see

(05:14):
nature fully die and compost herself into the ground
in order to be able to be reborn in the next cycle.
And if I'd known that level of
elegance back then, it would have been super helpful. But I didn't. It
was rather a downward spiral of messiness and confusion
and discombobulation and lots of attachments

(05:36):
to my old way of being and my old identity that was
calling to die. And yet I didn't know how to let that die
because I was terrified of something new not being born. I didn't
trust in that journey, in that descent into that
unknown place. And it was really through lots of clear
intentions and lots of calling it in. Please, can I be supported through

(05:59):
this process? Please, can people be delivered? Please can you help show me the
way so that I can navigate this transition, this rite of
passage from this life that I've been living for so long and that I
had so institutionalized into. Into a life that
I'm being called to, that I don't really know what that is. And that void
is very scary. That mystery is very scary. But by the universe, the

(06:21):
frequency attracts these things. People did get delivered to me along the
way, and I got shown a different way of being, and I got helped
and supported through learning this ancient. Wisdom that
is inherent in these rites of passage processes,
in remembering what a. Rite of passage is. What is
this transition from one stage of life to the next? And how do we do

(06:42):
them? Well, because they are inevitable. And that's really how
I found my way from that corporate world into the world that I am in
now, which is self created around supporting other people,
specifically women, to transition from one stage of life to the
next in a really healthy way and to be supported, to
remember themselves as sovereign, as self sourced

(07:04):
woman connected to sisterhood in a healthy way, and
really healing that deep feminine within them through the understanding
that can come through practicing these types of ritual
ceremonies and learning more about the journey of feminine consciousness
and how to integrate that within ourselves and our masculine and feminine
sides in order for then us to be able to understand.

(07:26):
This is how I need to give myself back out to the world in healthy,
integrated service, as opposed to predisposed to my
old way of being, which was hypermasculine and then a bit
loose on the feminine side without the healthy banks of the masculine being
able to. Support feminine, to expand that raging river of the feminine.
So, wow, that is a lot. And that is a beautiful,

(07:49):
rich description of where you
found meaning, where you found purpose, which is very
similar to myself and so many other women right now,
finding just this dying ember inside. I had a
beautiful life. I had a lot of security
and safety and safeguards and structure.

(08:11):
And I was like, oh, life is great for the most part.
Everything's flowing, everything's nice. And I kind of have this
theory. That it is when you get that. I don't want to freak people
out by saying this if they have a measure of comfort in their life right
now, but if you're on the path. Of evolution, which your soul always
is. Let'S be honest, and you probably wouldn't be on the planet right now

(08:33):
or. Even listening to this episode if you. Were the kind of person who was
not interested in evolution. But let's just say you had this. Measure of comfort,
which I did. My theory is that the universe waits,
your soul waits for that moment when. You are feeling the
most stabilized, the. Most in
alignment, the most supported, really.

(08:55):
And that does bring comfort. But being comfortable is
not necessarily the path of evolution. But I think what we're
striving for, the ultimate comfort, if you will, is coming
home to yourself, not your exterior supports, not
the places you've been paying homage to. Like you said, you were part of. A
beautiful institution, and there are beautiful institutions out there,

(09:16):
and we need them. But they have a shadow aspect as. Well, because they
don't want sovereigns. They want the quote, unquote check clock in, clock
out group mentality. And to have to
say yes to the path of liberation, it can be a threat
to many institutions. So, yeah,
it's when you're dealing a measure of, hey,

(09:39):
things are good. And I think that was the global upset that we
experienced in 2020. There was a measure of
all is good, it's good, life is whatever. There was always
a lot of trauma, and there was always a lot of unrest on the planet,
but that COVID period of time actually put us into. And
catapulted us into the death cycle. Would you not agree?

(10:00):
Absolutely. I'm 100% on the same page as you, and it resonates with
me deeply. What you're sharing. I think it was about in 2017.
We were sponsoring one of our conferences, and the
keynote speaker was a gentleman called Deng Adut. And
he was a child soldier turned refugee
turned human rights lawyer. And he was shot in the back from

(10:23):
Africa, from a country in Africa, and brought to Australia. And
he had then set up his life in Australia. And I was having an extraordinary
conversation with him about his journey and privilege
and all those sorts of things. And I said to it, what is your
view on all this privilege that you see around in Australia? And you
come from a place where you were put into child soldiering at a young age,

(10:45):
you were shot in the back. How does that sit with you? And he said
to me, which has stuck with me forever, which was in Africa, we have a
saying. I'm south african myself, so I'm from. The continent of Africa.
So I had a great resonance with him. But he said, in Africa we have
a saying that when your belly's full, you can go out and do the
good work. So it resonates deeply. Know, once we've

(11:05):
got to the stage where our lives are seemingly looking pretty.
Well sought out, it's almost as though. There'S a conscious shock that comes
in, in some way, shape or form that wakes us up to our
next level of evolution, our next level of becoming.
And our human consciousness is notoriously asleep. When things are
easy, we just keep carrying on with the way going to. Autopilot in a

(11:28):
way. Exactly. Nothing's challenging us. So it's just like,
okay, yeah, that's. Really where the wisdom in rites of passage
is so extraordinarily potent, because when we look at
what the transitionary phase or the transition phase of a rite of
passage is, and maybe for your listeners, I can just talk a little. Bit about
those three stages of a rite. Yes, please. So rites of

(11:50):
passage was coined by a Belgium anthropologist back in 1908,
Arnold van Ganep. And he had studied these indigenous
cultures from around the world and recognized that they brought a
certain degree of ritual and ceremony around
key transition moments of their community members lives. So be
that moving from child into young adulthood, be that moving

(12:12):
into a marriage or moving into a death ceremony or anything that was
marking a key transition moment, having a baby would bring
about ritual and ceremony, because these communities
recognize that a rite of passage is not just for the individual
that's going through that rite of passage or that transition. It's
actually the whole community has the potential to be

(12:33):
uplifted when that individual transitions through the
stage of their change really well. And if one
doesn't transition well, it has a detrimental effect to the
whole community. And so in our modern day life, where community is
something that's broken down or very distorted, we've
forgotten how to bring back cohesive community in this way by

(12:55):
practicing very healthy rites of passage. We may, for example, have
a wedding that's beautiful or have a funeral. But there's certain
components of what makes that ceremony
transformational, that get missed in this modern day that
we have. And often it's like a
sprinkling of additional ingredients into the mix to move

(13:17):
something from being a transition to being something that has the potential to
be transformational for the whole community. I love
that emphasis, that in interconnectivity with the community, that
if we all kind of go together, right, it's no person left
behind. Because if one person is suffering, then. The collective, if people are really
tuned. In in these sacred communities, they know this. The

(13:39):
ancients knew this. Like, they don't leave anyone behind, because. They all suffer
to a degree if. One person is out of alignment or not feeling that. Yeah,
there's that deep resonance with that. And this is part of this reemergence
of feminine consciousness. The feminine principle is
this flower bed, this feeding of the flower bed of life,
whereas the masculine principle is the seed. And

(14:01):
when we recognize that the flower bed is the kind of glue
between all these little plants and all these seeds that are
growing within this experience that we're having of life,
everything's interconnected. Of course, one person
suffering the butterfly effect in one part of the world is going to have an
impact. Obviously, our capacity to access

(14:23):
that has been vastly numbed out due to our constant
evolution of consciousness and where we've been or where we've kind of numbed out
collectively and how we're emerging from that. But this is a
beautiful feminine principle. This move from hyper
independence and unhealthy codependence into
healthy interdependence. And recognizing that

(14:44):
ecocentric nature of feminine thought and
that ecocentric nature of the feminine principles.
And I know that you're really familiar with this, but maybe for some of the
listeners, when we talk about the feminine, we're not talking about women and
men. We're talking about qualities and traits that are
associated with feminine aspects of life, such

(15:06):
as nature and mother nature being a highly
feminine principle, and grandfather son being a highly masculine
principle. And so we're talking about these traits. That are around us
all the time, but not about men and women. Men
and women may have a predisposition for certain traits that's
varied according to the individual and where they find themselves on that spectrum of

(15:28):
masculine and feminine traits. But for the listeners out there, I just want to be
clear that we're talking about some very objective traits.
That are fitting within those camps. Yeah. So with these
three stages. So is the first one the interdependence
aspect? Yeah. So the first stage, what Arnold van
Gonnek coined. Was that in order for a rite of passage to happen, the

(15:50):
individual first needs to be separated from their normal environment. So
separation needs to happen when we want to have a fully
transformational experience. We want to take the wedding ceremony and have it
somewhere else. We want to go and have the funeral somewhere else. We want to
do the rite of passage for the youth transitioning into young
adulthood somewhere else. And, of course, we can take these principles.

(16:12):
And apply them into us in our ordinary, everyday life. Once we understand the
wisdom of that. But for it to be truly transformational, that
separation from the normal environment takes and that
container gets set up. And the reason why that happens is that when we
set up a safe container around the process that's
about to take place, the ritual, the ceremony that's. Going to take place,

(16:34):
it creates the. Safety within that container, in that separate
container for the individuals within it to actually stretch into
little corners of their self that they feel potentially unsafe. When we feel
unsafe within ourselves, we contract into that unsafety. And that
contraction then becomes stuck. And when we're stuck, we have no
potential then to be in an expansive way of thought. Or in a

(16:56):
transformational experience that we're having. So to
create a safe container. Within which the individual and community
can stretch into corners of unsafety. Is the first stage of a
healthy ride of pass. And then we move into the next stage, which is transitional
transformation. And that consists of four parts. So
stories sitting in circle and storytelling. Which has that opportunity to

(17:18):
preserve lineage. And create that opportunity to stay connected
to history of that particular community and culture. We can
tell stories from our own individual point of view. Like, this is what's happening
for me. This is how I feel. And we have that opportunity to express
ourselves. And then we also have the opportunity to share stories
from myths and legends. Which are extraordinarily powerful.

(17:40):
And, for example, the myth of Anana and her Descent down into the
underworld. Is one of my very favorite stories. The
best. So potent. There's so much built into the
mythology. And into the sharing of myths. That has the
opportunity to access. People have so many entry points to that.
So sitting in circle and telling our stories. Is all the way through the

(18:01):
process. Of rites of passage and then the next stage is the challenge
or the ordeal. And this is what we were talking about earlier, is that
there has to be some kind of challenge or ordeal in order
for transformation to occur. That if we've got
a caterpillar that's metamorphosing into a butterfly, it
has to completely dissolve itself into caterpillar soup in

(18:24):
order to reemerge. There's always a child being born
through the birth canal is going through a compression when it comes out into the
world. It's transitioning from the womb into the world.
And that compression can feel very challenging. It can be fraught
with intensity. The mother and the child both
together, and else is witnessing. And yet through

(18:46):
that process, we have life, which is extraordinary. So when
we really start to recognize that, hey, every single rite of
passage. Every single transition is going to intrinsically
hold a challenge or not ordeal, we're able to
be with that, with more grace and acceptance and not so much
resistance, we can say, wow, we can really accept

(19:08):
that. And so that challenge ordeal is the next stage. And then we move into
the stage of visioning, where we have the receptivity in our brain, the liminal
thinking in our brain after a challenging experience to be able to vision into a
new way of being, vision into version of ourselves, vision into a
collective vision for the community, and how we want to be within that,
really connect to that part of ourselves that's trying to come through

(19:31):
in this death rebirth cycle that a rite of passage is.
And then the last part of that transition phase is the honoring, or what we
call the return ceremony, where the individual who's now gone through this
challenging process and come out with new ideas for themselves, gets
returned back into the community, and they get honored for their
willingness to go through their transition and for what they've achieved through that

(19:52):
process. So the individual then can connect to. Their unique gifts and
talents, and they can be recognized for their spirit and. Who they
are and for all of. That to be reflected back to them. When so
often people in our world don't really even know
what their beautiful talents and gifts are. It's like children most of the
time, just get told how naughty they are or how bad they are or

(20:15):
how dysfunctional they are, instead of being told, hey, you're
extraordinary. And I've noticed that you are this. Or you are that. It can
get really specific. As I'm listening to, I feel this measure
of grief and just a little bit of resigned sadness that we
have really lost this in our culture. Like, when we start to go into
that dark night when we start to transition, that there's a chemical

(20:37):
awakening, let's just say, happening within us or something sparking where we're feeling
that despondency and we recognize that we've been in a comfort zone and
that we've been kind of in autopilot or in a rote
way of doing life that's often demonized. It's like you stepped
out of our. Circle, you stepped out of our community. You're not doing it the
way that we're doing it. Bad things are going to happen to you. I was

(20:59):
raised in a religion where there was a lot of ritual and
ceremony. A lot of it was very beautiful.
But where it started to feel a. Little out of
alignment for me is that I was paying homage not to
my own soul and my own connection to my crater, but to
a system, to an institution and making covenants to obey

(21:21):
authority. And very much God and Jesus were linked to
that authority. So coming out of that community meant turning my back
on Jesus and God of the one of my understanding and their
understanding. So part of my awakening and my whole sacred
feminine awakening was around. We're missing the feminine here in this space.
And while there's a lot of ritual and ceremony that's actually very meaningful

(21:44):
and layered and very metaphorical in many ways and symbolic of my inner
journey, I'm still not seeing representation of
shared feminine authority or leadership or the wise woman
or the crone, or this archetypal woman in her power
who's this village oracle, if you will. That made me very
sad growing up to not see it. But when I started to come of. Age,

(22:05):
and I mean, by midlife.
I. Couldn'T not honor that. This is what I was sad about, if that
makes sense. I had to explore that. So just pausing here, and I
love this whole, because it is the heroine's journey. And by the way, I did
interview Maureen Murdoch on this podcast a few years ago. Love her with the
heroine's journey. So why do you think that these rituals and

(22:26):
ceremonies, I mean, we talk about patriarchy all day long, but why do you
think that these rituals and ceremonies have been demonized
that go against, let's just say, religious structures or the
norms of society? The ways you do it in Australia, the ways you
do it in, know, these highly westernized
and you talk about, know, I think there's a lot of links there,

(22:49):
but have you met any resistance within yourself when you
really wanted to narrow in on, like, okay, part of my path is
teaching people how to go through these rights. Rights being the kind of root
like ritual and rights kind of going together. What is the demonization
about? Why have they been vilified in our
society? Yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful question, and there are so many different aspects

(23:11):
of that. I mean, from my own personal experience, the level of
consciousness that we've been collectively at. And if I look back for
me, for example, 20 years ago, when or 15 years ago, when I was sort
of in the heart of my banking culture, was that
we've co created this and we've co created patriarchy, we've co
created culture, and there's blame to be pointed all over

(23:33):
the show. And at the same time, there's also radical accountability that all of us
can take in order to be a part of that change. As challenging as it
might be to be a marginalized group or to be a minority group, to
still feel the. Weight of patriarchy over us is
very difficult. As women or as people of color or marginalized groups, it's
challenging, and it's also really challenging for the men that

(23:56):
are in positions of power because they are
ruling from a place of fear. It's almost as though when we're
climbing up the ladder to get to whatever. Top we think we need to get.
To, there is this determination to succeed. There's
a determination to get to the top, and yet, once we get to. The top,
the whole thing shifts. We then have to defend our position. As

(24:18):
opposed to try and continue expanding. There's a kind of
pause, right? I'm at the top of this mountain, and now I need to defend.
So it becomes rooted in a place of fear. And in
that fear, fear is such a contracted experience that we
all go through that doesn't have the porousness
or the possibility of us being able to be receptive to

(24:40):
actually being free from that. And the
more fearful we become, the stronger our dominance becomes.
The stronger our power becomes, the stronger our need to preserve what
we have comes. We can see what's happening with Russia. I mean, that is just
an extraordinary. Example of that's like late stage
capitalism and toxic masculine patriarchy gone

(25:02):
mad. We don't have leaders in our
industrialized nations, in world know, let's just say
Russia, China, America wants to. They all want to dominate. We
don't have leaders in those positions that are
operating from wisdom through
wisdom. Totally. It's coming from that deep rooted fear

(25:24):
of potential loss. And from that point of view, it's. Like, oh, wow,
okay. So I can see all of that happening, and yet when I bring that
mirror back into my own personal existence, really recognizing myself as
a microcosm of everything that I'm witnessing around me,
is what is actually happening inside of me that is
mirroring something like that. How is it that I can really

(25:46):
own my toxic masculinity,
my internal patriarchy? My internalized patriarchy?
It's the conversation we don't want to have because we want to put it all
out there and blame and point.
It's so hard to be with the. Shame of
actually being part of the problem from

(26:07):
places like Russia. Or as obvious,
there are all of. These little facets inside of all of. You
know, the work I did with. Sarah Durham Wilson was all know, hunt down the
capitalist inside of you. Hunt down the internalized
patriarchy, hunt down the ableist, hunt down all of these.
Parts inside of you. You know, if it's

(26:29):
being triggered on the outside, I always say, look for the wisdom in the trigger.
If there's something that's causing a trigger. Or a contraction for me,
there is a live wire within me that I. Haven'T yet hunted down and bought
into wholeness. And it's only really from that journey. Of that
feminine willingness, that feminine principle of being
willing to turn towards these dark corners, being willing to take

(26:51):
radical. Responsibility for ourselves, being willing to deeply. Own
our own part in it and sit with the. Or the shame.
So, so hard to see where you've. Been
complicit to your own subordination and others, and
to recognize that internal shadow. What have you noticed with the people. You'Ve worked with
or yourself when that comes to light? Yeah, I'm 100%

(27:14):
in agreement that it's a very challenging experience of
the rite of passage, of becoming and awakening,
to recognize where we have been,
human and unconscious, and myself included. That
realization of my own, as you say, my complicity, my
contribution to through my own unconsciousness, has many different

(27:36):
emotions. There is the horror at first
realizing. Even if it's on the scale, spectrum.
Of impact, my sort of contribution to that
is vastly different to Vladimir Putin's. But, you
know, there's still that recognition and that degree of ownership. And in order
to get to that place of being able to really

(27:58):
recognize that, it's through the trigger that the glimmer occurs,
that once we turn, the antidote to the pain is the pain itself.
If we are pained by the patriarchy on the outside or we pained by
something on the outside, the antidote to that is
holding that pain of our own dear and holding
it with compassion and recognizing that on the other side, of that

(28:20):
pain is actually the glimmer. Hey everybody, pardon the interruption,
but I'm so excited to tell you about the new mind body Soul membership
that I'm launching alongside the podcast relaunch. My research and
career has focused on depth psychology, emotional healing, mind body science,
and how to heal from the inside out, through your whole body, through your miraculous
multisensory pathways. And accessing these sensory pathways is how

(28:43):
you heal. So starting April 1, we're going to. Dive into this monthly
membership where I'm going to give soul based monthly mental health hacks
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(29:03):
cherieburton.com
mindbodymembership. That's
cherieburton.com
mindbodymembership.
All right, for YouTube listeners who are,
sorry, our YouTube watchers, you see, we're now wearing different
outfits. It's because we were

(29:26):
at this apex, pinnacle point of saying some super cool stuff. Lil
Paula was, and I was just riveted. And then, as fate would have it,
we had some technical issues, but we're jumping right back in as if we're not
missing a beat. And we were talking about the space of going into
radical accountability for some of this internalized
patriarchy and some of the messages that from our societal conditioning and how

(29:48):
we've internalized it and made it our truth. And so anything, polly, you want to
continue to explore there is divine. Yeah. Beautiful sherry. Thank
you so much. The question I have is why is it so difficult
to transition from this state of being that we are
collectively in, which is highly contracted by
know we can look around us and see the number of people who are struggling

(30:10):
with mental health, see the number of people who are struggling with their sense
of marginalization. It's just evident the youth
and how they're struggling to transition. The challenges we have around technology
there is a big collective contraction that we are all living through,
and yet we don't necessarily know how to move from this place
into the next. And largely speaking, that is because we have not

(30:33):
necessarily been taught yet in our culture, in our
communities, in our education system, in our
families about how to actually turn towards
the shadow parts of ourselves, these shadow aspects of self,
these shadow aspects that are not only individual but collective on a
grander scale. We haven't been taught how to be with the challenging

(30:55):
side of the spectrum of human emotions? No, we've been taught to
bypass. Bypass? Yes, like, take the pull or drink it away or do
whatever. Get yourself happy, do something you love, et cetera.
Yes. All of those are options, and yet they're just masking the
underlying challenge, which is that collectively, over generations, we
have not actually been able, in our emotional

(31:17):
being, to be able to turn towards these challenging parts of our
human experience, which are an absolute, inherent part of being
human. This full spectrum of emotion is why we're
here. It's not just for the light, fun, joyful, happy,
blissful states. In this dual world that we live in,
there is this dark side of the emotional spectrum that is

(31:40):
a very difficult experience to be with. Or the mind will
create a story that it is difficult to be with, as
opposed to actually recognizing that it's only in our resistance to being with
that challenging side of the emotional spectrum that we are actually in a
contortion and in the challenge. And that's why this
process of being. Building our capacity, individually and

(32:02):
collectively, to recognize that turning towards the difficult
feelings and allowing ourselves to use the pain
as the antidote to the pain. So really saying, wow,
if I can turn towards these difficult feelings in a way that is
healthy, and even though the mind is saying, I don't want to do this
because it's difficult, it's challenging. We've touched earlier on our

(32:24):
interaction that every rite of passage involves a challenge or an
ordeal. We can't transition from one stage of life to the
next without actually embracing the fact that we have to go
through some kind of compression, some kind of diamond forming
compression, some kind of birth canal, to move from one stage
of life to the next, some cocoon to metamorphose from the

(32:46):
caterpillar into the butterfly. It's a necessary part of
nature in our transition. And where we are right now, individually and
collectively, is lacking our capacity to understand and
embrace the fact that that is a necessary step and that
actually we are going to be okay if we consciously turn towards it.
It's only in this resistance to it that we are

(33:07):
suffering. And it's only in the resistance to it that it
persists. I have a great metaphor for that. And you did bring up birth
and labor. My children that I birthed. I have two
adopted children, but the four children that I birthed,
well, the first one was a C section. Three after that were
normal births, if there is such thing.

(33:29):
But I was never able to, for
some reason unknown to me, until I kind of looked at
it later, was never able to go into labor without
induction or medical assistance. It's
like there was some resistance there. Even though
I wanted the baby so bad, I didn't want to be pregnant anymore, I wanted

(33:51):
the baby out. There was some kind of way I wasn't letting my body
work with the natural processes. So I had to have all of this medical
intervention. But it's like once the baby is actually
ready to come, there is nothing you can do but
surrender. No one had ever taught me that process.
It was breathe, push, duh, duh, here's the intervention.

(34:14):
But it was. In retrospect, I probably would have gone to natural birthing
classes, but because I'd had a c section the first time, it was just.
Anyway, so, point being, and speaking to how you so
eloquently presented this, it's the resistance to the dark.
Let's just say it's the squeezing, it's the metamorphosing.
Those are the portals of power and insight and wisdom.

(34:36):
But because they're so masked, often in
suffering or uncomfortable emotions, let's just say
we resist it because we're biologically programmed to
run from pain. We would rather run from pain than run to
pleasure any day. Because it's just such a squeeze, it's so
uncomfortable. So when you're talking about having this

(34:58):
radical accountability for something we've been subconsciously
avoiding or in a resistance pattern with, let's just say, or
sabotaging, even unaware, how
do you climb in, for lack of a better phrase,
to really come, to be able to sit with that tension
or sit in the dark and examine those

(35:19):
places that are uncomfortable and sit in them without feeling
like, I guess we could say, feeling safe to do that,
or without feeling like we're going to die. Because that's the program, that's our ego
saying, you're going to die. If you sit in this
too long, you won't survive. Yeah, it's such an interesting
paradox. Yet the mind cannot discern between the

(35:42):
parts of ourselves that need to die and the parts of ourselves that we still
wish to live. My counsel would be, and what I've witnessed,
especially around the circles that I sit with, is that this
reemergence of sitting in circle together and being able
to support one another without needing to rescue or solve
or save or fix or make it go away, is one of the most

(36:04):
potent medicines that's reemerging in our times today.
Because in what you described there, around this lack of
capacity that we have to be with our challenging experiences to
the resistance we have towards to going into the dark isn't just
on a personal level that I'm resistant to my own dark. I also
struggle to be able to turn towards my dark in community with others

(36:27):
because other people's darkness is triggered by
my darkness. So I'm not necessarily held
in my family or I'm not necessarily held in my workplace or my
community to digest and express
and share these difficult experiences that I'm having. Because the minute I
start going into a difficult conversation like that, all the energetics in the

(36:50):
room start changing, people start closing up. There's like a
kind of frigidness that comes to people. Oh, my gosh, are we going to talk
about this difficult thing? So
collectively we lack that capacity as well. And so
where does someone go? Like, where do I go? Yeah, and just to put
a little bookmark there, a lot of times the family

(37:12):
culture isn't supportive of opening up these discussions. I mean, definitely
my family of origin, we were very close and we talked about a lot, but
it has only been until the last five years that we really looked at some
of our family patterns in detail. My older kids, that I have three
older kids out of the house in their twenty s, and it's the same thing.
We're coming back and opening up that discussion. It's not easy, it's not

(37:33):
comfortable. But you look also not only in family cultures, but religious
cultures, there's a lot of bypassing that goes on, because
the programming I received is if something's coming up that's uncomfortable,
it's because you've lost the spirit or you're being deceived
by Satan or anything that was uncomfortable or quote unquote, of the
dark in terms of uncomfortable emotions or something surfacing,

(37:56):
it was always, you're not being spiritual enough. Double down on your spiritual
practices, which is a form of bypassing see it happening
in academia and the government. It's just all over
systemically. So with what you're saying
is coming back into the private chambers of our own
heart and mind and body and doing the work here first,

(38:18):
not relying on the systems, not waiting for them to play catch up, not waiting
for everyone in our family to make it safe or all the places in our
communities that we go to. But it is so helpful when you have a like
minded tribe that matters. Like you're saying that
transparency, that's huge. For women right now.
Absolutely. And in that potency of the medicine of a

(38:39):
circle of mature adults. And for the purpose of this
conversation, I'll talk about mature woman. There is such
a transformational capacity to be held by the deep
well of presence that maturity brings. And by maturity,
I mean, it's not just a matter of growing older, and therefore
we're more mature. Sure, there's aspects of us that might mature. But when I'm

(39:02):
talking about this, I'm talking about deep levels of emotional maturity.
Come from sitting with people who have gone through their dark
night of the soul, who have turned towards their challenging
experiences in the dark corners of their life. And
digested them through the challenging experience the mind
created. Challenging experience of being in the contracted

(39:23):
discomfort of the fear or the trauma or the grief or
the sadness or whatever might be emerging for that person
to then be able to come into sort of the lamb and the wolf lying
down together. Being able to bring that part of
one's experience of being human into wholeness, with
tenderness and with love. And there's this reparenting process that

(39:45):
we go through and that initiation into maturity. Where we
recognize that all those dark corners are really just fragmented parts
of our own personal lived experience. That happened for these
beautiful younger versions of ourselves. These inner child
parts or these maiden parts, these younger adult parts that
didn't at that time have the maturity or the know how or

(40:08):
the education or the culture or the ability to digest a
challenging experience that happened for us when we were
5711 1315, whatever age it might
be. And so at that time, when that experience happened,
that younger version of ourselves contracted around that experience,
saying, I'm out of control. I don't know what to do. This is

(40:29):
dangerous. Let me shut this down now. Let me
never go there again. And every time, forevermore, an
experience is coming on that's threatening to just unlock or touch upon
that original wound. There is a huge amount of
defense that that younger, egoic version of us has created
to protect with best meaning, intentions to protect us

(40:52):
from ever having to feel that difficult experience again. But
when we bring that maturity, that process and understanding of being able
to recognize that if we are contracted in the moment, in the
difficult experience, all that's been called for is a part of us
is beckoning for us to be able to say, hey, I actually need your help.
Even though I'm fighting you with anger, with rage, with over

(41:14):
controlling behavior. All these things that are emerging as
unhealthy experiences in your present day moment are me actually trying to protect
you. And actually, all I really need is to be seen and to be
felt and for you to reach out to me and to love me back. Into
wholeness. And it's in that resistance of all those difficult
experiences we're having of over controlling or anger or rage in our present

(41:36):
day moment. That's actually the problem. When we turn
towards that little part of us that got contracted back when we were five or
seven and actually say, mama's here. I'm here
now. I've got you, honey. What do you need to share? Do you need to
cry through my eyes? Because what happened back then was so sad and you never
cried all the tears. Do you need to shout at somebody? Do you need to

(41:57):
do something that can help you move the energy that's in you,
that emotion, that energy that needs motion through your
little system? Using my body as my mature adult in this
whole dialogue with ourselves, this sovereign experience of self
sourceedness that we can cultivate in this transition into
maturity, that that little being within us can just

(42:20):
realize that, hey, someone's got me now that I'm
held, and let me feel and express. And as that emotion
melts and drips away like melting chocolate, that little
version of ourselves can integrate back into wholeness, and we can
arrive here and respond from the present moment again and
not react from that contracted childlike part that has been running

(42:42):
the show. That's so beautiful
and so rich to think in your spiritual mind's eye, just
seeing your younger self. And I have had a couple of experiences in the last
year, honestly, of younger parts of me, younger
versions of me, one around age four, one around age 17,
1617, that I had done what you said, I had closed a door.

(43:05):
I had totally compartmentalized that for my psyche. And
to revisit those younger versions of me and to hold
her in safety and with compassion is so
powerful. How do you personally create that safe
container? When we're talking about the mature feminine, which is
such a peak interest of mine right now, what that means,

(43:26):
I'd love your definition of it. It isn't necessarily that you're older. It could
be just through having all these multiple life experiences over many decades,
but it's just like taking that you're in the work. I no
longer follow leaders or guides that haven't been
through some kind of a dark night. I mean, the dark night,
like climbing into the shadow, doing the work, going into the

(43:49):
inner realms, teaching others how to access that, because that's an
initiatory piece of coming into spiritual
maturity that is making its way into the consciousness now a little bit
more en masse, but was absolutely unheard of when I was younger. It was
like, you do everything. If you want to be mature, you do everything you can
to pick yourself up by the bootstraps, put on a happy, beautiful face,

(44:10):
and move forward in that old masculine paradigm. So,
anyway, how do you personally
create inner safety as you're looking
at examining these shadows? And I know you work with people
personally on this as well. Do you have a
modality or way of being with that? Let's just say somebody's gotten

(44:31):
triggered and they are just in fight or
flight, freeze, whatever, and they're having a hard time
even establishing felt safety in that moment, much less going further into a
shadow state. Let's just say what's been
helpful for you as you've worked with yourself and others on that. Yeah, beautiful.
So everything that you're describing is so

(44:53):
tuned to all of the things that you've shared around that old paradigm and
how we were taught. And it really was just like, oh, you want to
mature, just acquire something more, get another degree,
add something more to you, because you're deficient
still. So you need to acquire more to be
more, as opposed to this new experiential

(45:15):
process, which is the journey of feminine consciousness moving
away from that masculine paradigm. And I know we've touched on this before in this
talk. Is that again, when we're talking about masculine and feminine, we're not talking
about men and women. We're talking about these archetypical
traits that we all have on the spectrum of masculine and
feminine, traits that live within all men and live within all

(45:37):
women. So this is accessible to all of us collectively. We've all
been pre kind of disposed to this hypermasculine way of being because of
the culture we've been growing up in. But the spectrum is shifting towards
this feminine journey, this feminine journey of consciousness, of being
able to build our capacity to turn towards the challenging
experiences into the darkness and not this pursuit of the light

(46:00):
all the time. Just keep ignoring, as you say, like, buck up,
honey, pick up your boots, acquire another degree, and then
you'll be successful. It's like, no, we don't need to. It's actually now it's a
reversal. We're trying to remember ourselves, remember ourselves in our true
essence. And how do we go about that? In the rites
of passage process that I work with very deeply is that

(46:23):
the sitting in circle and telling our stories in a consistent
manner is a way of peeling back these layers slowly but
surely, and titrating our way into our
capacity building. Because all we're trying to do here is build our
capacity to be able to be with the full spectrum
of our human experience. Not just this pursuit of the

(46:44):
light, not just this acquisition of more. It's
like, wow, we're trying to come into wholeness as human beings. So that
capacity expansion is such an important part. But in order to do that
capacity expansion, in order to create space within ourselves,
to be able to feel whole, we need to digest
these experiences as they come. So sitting in circle and telling

(47:07):
our stories is part of the process. If somebody is really
deeply triggered, perhaps what's only available to them in that moment.
Is sitting in the frequency of a circle environment. And being able
to reflectively listen to other people while they share their story.
While the individual is having their difficult experience in their body.
When their nervous system is triggered and signaling to them, hey,

(47:30):
something's stuck here, something's stuck here. And titrates.
Feminine consciousness is not about this big bang approach. Like, let's go on
and get up there and just win it. It's like, no, let's
go slowly. I've been there and done that. They tried to do
that. The burnout that ensues, it's just not worth it. And
the frazzling of the nervous system that happens off the back of that. We can

(47:52):
guard for these peak experiences, which absolutely have paradigm
shifting potential. We can guard for a trip to burning
man. Or potentially on a plant medicine experience or something like that. That can
totally shift our paradigm. And don't get me wrong, there's absolutely
a place for that level of paradigm shift. However, our
nervous system needs to be able to calibrate into that. With a

(48:15):
degree of understanding of what's needed for our beautiful systems to
cope. And there's also a long integration that we can touch
upon in a short while. That's an absolute necessity
to support the paradigm to shift. If we just kind
of crack open with a big masculine paradigm shifting event.
And then we come back into our. Unfertile bed of

(48:37):
our rather unexplored feminine
titration. The seasons, the cycles, the growing, the.
Nurturance, the watering of a change.
We're going to land up, falling, bang onto barren soil. And then
everything becomes discombobulated. So
for those individuals that are just turning towards this,

(48:58):
finding a circle to sit in is a really great way of being
pulled into the frequency of people opening up and cracking
up their stories. And being able to just quietly listen and
reflectively feel into one's own experience in relation to
others. To be able to recognize where the nervous system is
coiled. And what we do a lot in Rites of Passage. As well,

(49:21):
is we use mythology as we've touched on mythology before. But
for this particular kind of descent journey, there's an
extraordinary story around a sumerian myth called
Inanna's Descent, and it's all about her descent down to
the goddess that her remembrance of who she is
is not discovered. In the acquisition of something on the outside.

(49:43):
You're going down. Exactly. It's
down, down. And in that process, we're giving things up. We're giving up
that internalized patriarchy because we're finding it and we're recognizing
it, and we're grappling with it, and then we're bringing it into wholeness. We're giving
up those resistant parts of our inner child because we're finding her
or him giving her or him what she needs. He or she needs,

(50:06):
and being able to recognize that this part of ourselves is
calling for some level of attention. And we understand, in that journey of
unfolding, how to give ourselves to ourselves in
that self sourced way, in this ultimate descent, all the
way down into the bareness of the darkness of the
underworld, where she hung on a meat. Hook for three days.

(50:28):
That imagery is just, like, intense.
So intense, it's like therein lies the suffering. And yet through the pain,
the antidote to the pain was the pain itself, because when she came
off those meat hooks and Anna, there was a different
level of being in her. She rose from the underworld. And I
get goosebumps as I'm saying this. She rose from the underworld with

(50:50):
this deep level of capacity and embodiment
and understanding of the full spectrum of what it means to be a
human being, including the dark. And with that came the
potency from her to be able to come back out into the world and
then hold this frequency within her, like that deep well of
presence, that deep oak tree in the forest,

(51:12):
this full spectrum of presence where others can then
see themselves in the mirror, that she is feeling her
frequency, recognizing that there is something deeply
mature and present and awakened about her. And
that's really what my encouragement would be, is that titrate one's way
in, find a circle that you can sit in consistently and

(51:34):
learn how to share yourself and unlock those little trap
parts. When you get that unlocked, then allow yourself to
dive a little bit more deeply into things like the sumerian mythology,
into internal family system, into
the archetypes, and really learn how to do this, because ultimately,
we've all realized, us women, now that we're in our midlife, that no prince is

(51:57):
coming on his horse. Even though that's what we were. No one's coming to save
you, ladies. No one's coming to save you. How
hard that was for me.
Yeah. We have to do it for ourselves. We have to jump
on and do it. We are the ones we've been waiting for. And
that realization packs an incredible cosmic punch.

(52:18):
I can only speak for myself in this descent journey, and I think
you can go through a series of them, but I do believe that sometime during
midlife, we are called to that. It's like, okay, well, the first
half of your life, you have been capitulating to systems and
ideas and ideas. What do you want? What do you feel? What's true for you?
What lives in your embodied space of reason or comfort

(52:40):
or discomfort. And so you get to, for once, come into your
own and really examine
what you have been taught versus what you
inherently already know. Like you said, remember, a lot of
times, remembering it requires a dismembering,
and we have to literally be torn apart, broken apart.

(53:02):
Hang on the meat hook to use that underworld metaphor. I love what you're saying
about circles, because I do have a women's wisdom circle that we're launching. And the
research is really clear that women
learn best through community. We are tribal. We are relational. It's
not that men don't benefit from communities and small circles. I'm not saying that,
but especially at this pivotal time in history, women need to galvanize

(53:23):
with one another and validate and be
vulnerable and have a safe space created
so that they are able to, like you said, either be a witness, like a
merciful witness to what's coming up for them when they see other
people sharing, or to be given the floor, so to speak, or
be put on the hot seat so that they can be witnessed

(53:44):
and something really beautiful about that
container that promotes
exponential growth for the feminine
completely, because there's. This big piece as well, which maybe
we can touch on for a moment around the deep
wound within the feminine and the deep wound amongst

(54:05):
women, as you quite rightly said, there is
this potency to women working together
in a collaborative, community orientated way
that is so unbelievably powerful. It's just
extraordinary and next level. And yet we have such a deep
feminine wound, which goes back to the beginning of time as women

(54:27):
have been pitted against one another. The age of the witches,
when women had to give one another up, otherwise they were burned at the
stake themselves. And it's just unbelievable how deep that wound within
the feminine psyche is and how many women are so
distrustful or mistrustful of other women and how
unhealthy competition comes in. And again, in this whole

(54:48):
discussion we've been having around how do we hunt this down within ourselves?
And it really came to the forefront for me when I was leaving my corporate
job. There was a wonderful woman who worked in another department
who I had an enormous amount of respect for. And she
wanted to shift into a role that had big people management
exposure, which was my role. And so I kind of

(55:11):
reached out. To her and I said, I'm going to be transitioning out of the
bank and I'd love to talk to you about the potential for you to come
in and take over from me and run the teams. And so we
had some really good, healthy conversations and it was all great. I'm like, yeah, woman
working together with women. This is so great. And then by chance, one
day I was walking past one of the meeting rooms and I saw my boss

(55:31):
in a meeting room with her. And the instantaneous
stab of jealousy I got through my heart in that moment
feeling like I was getting usurped and that she was
going to be like all of these thoughts went through at lightning speed. And I
was like, wow, Paula, you've orchestrated this whole
thing. You've chosen for her to take over because you respect her and

(55:53):
you want your teams to be able to thrive. And look at this
instantaneous reaction in your that was
so shocking for me. It was like, wow, you think
you're not part of that experience of sisterhood, wounding.
And yet here it is. Thank you so much for the fodder within which
I could one and go like, wow, let me just have a look

(56:16):
at myself in that. So there is this
necessity for us to really work out as women
and not even work out, remember as women how to
come back into healthy relating with one another and therefore to carry
forward the communities that we need in this shifting
time. I love that the universe is always

(56:38):
sending. It comes cloaked in many forms, but
always showing us and bring. We can just trust that we're
being brought to the next lesson for our evolution. It's usually
in the most uncomfortable and it's the people who trigger us most.
And it's where our ego is getting chided or threatened,
where we get to look, like you said, in a work environment and

(57:01):
I'm noticing in marriage, I've been married 28 years and there's
just multiple layers to this. Even though you think you got one
layer check, something else will come forward for you to
look at and examine. It takes a great degree of humility just to
sit with the uncomfortable like and not project and not blame.
I want to come back to integration as we kind of wrap our

(57:23):
discussion, because you had sounded like some juicy stuff to share with us around how
we can integrate, let's just say a very transcendental experience. I think
I mentioned to you either on or off air, it's all blending together for me
that I did have such an experience in Costa Rica during
fourth night in a row of taking ayahuasca medicine. At third dose,
it all kicked in at once, cumulatively, from those other three or four nights

(57:45):
in a literally. And I've done a whole podcast
episode on this, but it was a time in my life where I was really,
really wanting to get to the heart of what is driving this behavior.
And some of it was judgmentalism, and there was just a lot of
uncomfortable things I was facing. My whole world paradigm was shifting. I was
starting to wake up in big ways, and I had

(58:08):
such a pronounced experience, kind of a kundalini type
of. Definitely a kundalini type of experience, but it went
even deeper. It was like lots of visuals and symbolism and
archetypes. It's still something I'm integrating, and I think
people have the perception that if you have those kinds of experiences, you're fixed,
you're good, you woke up, you unplugged from the matrix, whatever, and it's only

(58:30):
just putting you on the path, really,
to go even deeper. But like I said, I'm still integrating it in
the sense that the symbology has such rich and
layered meaning for me personally,
ancestrally and personally, and even in my
communities. So how have you

(58:50):
seen. Let's just talk about what goes wrong when you don't
integrate. Let's just say I took that experience and I
was like, I'm not going to examine it anymore. It was really uncomfortable parts
of it, and so I don't understand it,
so I don't want to dive too deep into it. There's something called ontological
shock. I'm not sure if you're aware of that term, but if you do

(59:13):
sometimes have some of these more pronounced experiences, it can actually put you into
a state of shock or even ptsd if you're
not psychologically robust enough to even. And I was
bordering at that time on being ready or not, but I think that my system
was ready, and so a lot came out. I should say my higher
self really wanted that to happen anyway. So with

(59:35):
integration, what are some ways that you have
seen to fully come into your body and really
examine some of those, I guess, more pronounced experiences and put
them into your day to day walk through life because they can be cosmic and
we have these 3d bodies and this world around us. So it
can be a challenge, especially if you're a mom. It can totally be a

(59:57):
challenge. And, yeah, just blessings on your journey there.
You're here to tell the tale. So there sounds to me as though
there was a real call from the higher self recognizing that the great
spirit that works through that medicine can indeed
take the envelope and shift it as far as it needs to go
in order to create the crack or the opening for the

(01:00:20):
type of expansion that is actually available to
somebody who has enough of a grounded sense of being, enough of
an identified sense of ego, of self. In three d.
I am Sherry. I am Paula. I am here. And even though for
a period of time there was this big discombobulation,
there is a role, I'd say, for people who have the capacity

(01:00:43):
to play that part in. Right. I'm actually going to stretch
out into the real corners here. Whereas other people who don't
necessarily have the level of foundational work that you've done over your
lifetime and the amount of time investment you've put into
the cultivation of your path with the practices and with what it is
that you do every day, that other people don't necessarily have that grounded

(01:01:05):
sense of being. And what I've observed with those spaces is
that the envelope only gets stretched a certain amount.
Not quite as cataclysmic as perhaps what you've experienced. And I've
gone through a very similar experience as well, where it was just kind of like,
go, go until my nervous system really did
kind of, oh. I totally shorted out. I had a team of shamans

(01:01:27):
around me trying to get me to breathe like it was that intense.
Yeah. And there we have it. It's like fabulous
that you were doing it in a certain setting that had. A
skilled team of professionals and deep. Medicine men and women to
support you. And same for me, at the end of that experience, though,
Shaman that I've worked with primarily, he just said to. Me at the end, it

(01:01:49):
gave me. A bit of a slapdown, really. I got a bit of a naughty
little girl. He was like, right, Paula, now don't need to shake
the jar again. There was a sense in me that. I was going
to lose my connection to spirit or lose my connection to community
if I didn't keep diving deep. Into my shadow in that
way. And it was like, no, you're not going to lose this

(01:02:10):
you need to just relax. So there was
a definite call for me in that process to
recognize that there was a necessity to up my practices
around any peak experiences, that there was
a volatility to trainings or peak
experiences or whatever it might be that didn't land in a fertile

(01:02:32):
bed in the aftermath. That I can't leave a
training on a Sunday and go straight into work on a Monday morning
anymore. And I used to do that back in the day when I was working
in a fast paced environment. It was like come off the back of some
kind of training or peak experience or whatever it might be.
And I don't have time. I've got children, I've got a family, I've got work,

(01:02:54):
I've got no leave. I've got to prioritize these things. Bang straight off on the
Sunday into the Monday. And all of that culminated then
in the tweaking of that experience where my nervous system was like, no more. And
I don't think I did anything. For another year after that.
So there's this real sense of tuning in and not necessarily
waiting like we did. Perhaps for us to get to that point

(01:03:16):
where we're tweaked is really being able to recognize that there are
many different ways in which we can support ourselves pre and post
any type of peak experience. When we run our leadership trainings here, our
rites of passage, leadership trainings, which are three days, we always
say that this has been. People open up to community. They realize how different
things can be. They open up to masculine and feminine within themselves. All

(01:03:38):
this stuff bubbles to the surface. They make connections with other people. It's magic.
People are so brimming with joy and connection
and that sense of belonging after three days, it's extraordinary.
And we always say to them, we're like, yes. And now is actually when the
work begins. This has been wonderful. Now
is when the rubber hits the road. So how do we kind of set

(01:04:01):
up our community to receive us back in a way that's going to be
congruent and integrate us back in? I made the mistake of coming
back for my trainings or transformational experiences,
coming back in with all of this news and all of this expansion. And
my husband had been holding the fort at home and looking after children
and cooking breakfast and tidying the house and doing all of

(01:04:23):
these mundane things. And here I come bursting back in with all of
my joy. I've learned over time that actually, if
I would like to integrate, if my experience is going to be integrated back into
this family really well, let me come back in
gently and slowly and let me check in with him. How
is he going? Let me see what the children need. Let me see if there's

(01:04:44):
dinner I. Can cook or something that can then support him in a nourishing way.
Bring this beautiful, expansive energy that I've. Created over the course of however
long. I've been away, and bring it back in in a way that then is
filtering into my home environment in a very beautiful way,
so that he feels nourished and supported, and then in turn, I
feel nourished and supported, and recognizing that interdependence

(01:05:07):
between us and being able to be in that currency and
that flow, making sure that I've got a circle
set up for the group that I was away with. We always do a Zoom
circle afterwards, potentially two or three. Just checking in. How's
everyone going? Like, let's just check in again. What's worked? What hasn't worked, what
have you been able to do? What haven't you been able to do? Upping my

(01:05:28):
practices, walking out in nature, spending time just really
absorbed into nature, letting go of that mind. That's saying I need to do
100 things on my to do list, and taking the 45 minutes to
just go out and sit next to a tree and breathe deeply and
let that process of integration take its time.
We think I've integrated that experience. We've never fully integrated any

(01:05:51):
experience. I'm still integrating birth.
How do you even do that? It's an ever unfolding lotus of experience
with the layers upon layers upon layers of the same thing in different
experiential journeys for ourselves. So it's
like, I feel we'll be integrating those peak experiences.
And bless you for going into that really dark place. It must have been a

(01:06:14):
very difficult experience to pull the pieces back and together and to
not to let that jar that had been shaken settle and for
the sediment to drop. And potentially every now and again, the jar gets shaken a
bit. It's like, whoa, the nervous system says no. And just really
tuning in, it's like a lesson of intimacy with ourselves, of
getting to know ourselves, of really knowing what's going to nourish us and

(01:06:37):
really learning about what we need and what we don't need in the moment.
And it just goes back to what you're saying about resistance, because
I remember some of the best piece of advice I got prior to going to
do that, and it was at a medical facility where it is legal in Costa
Rica with, like you said, experienced shamans. We had a medical team

(01:06:57):
know so I had done my research there, but one of the things they said
is the worst thing you can do is tighten, constrict, and
resist, because with anything, but especially
in that kind of a setting, and as I've been seeking and parsing out
pieces of that and the symbology and the metaphors that came through and what I
was shown, it's the same. It's like I can make meaning of that in

(01:07:18):
many different ways, but not now. Let's just
put that away. Let's record it. Let's write it down. I don't know what it
means right now for me, but I was shown this for a reason, and it
came up for a reason, and I don't want to bypass that. So I'm just
going to jot it down and I'll work through it. And I was seeing a
therapist at the time, and it was all great. I had all the support I

(01:07:38):
needed. But what we're really talking about here in our
discussion is really not for the faint of heart. It's if you
really, really want to be a force of
good and to guide people and be a facilitator, if you want to be a
light worker, whatever that means, a healer, then
we are past the time on the earth where you can fake

(01:08:01):
going through this process, the butterfly soup, if you will.
We are beyond those are not going to be
our next level leaders. They are not going to be the people that will really
be equipped if they are faking it. And it's almost
getting to the point where everyone's by necessity, going through this
dark night, even if they are in resistance. But it draws

(01:08:23):
out a lot longer if you are in resistance. So I appreciate the
discussion around whatever you can do to fortify
yourself, to have the bravery to be
in, to sit in the dark, really is what we're talking about.
For as long as it takes for you to feel that
radical self compassion, radical self

(01:08:45):
accountability, looking at what you've internalized. As long
as it takes. I think that our nervous systems are actually,
and our body's intelligence systems are so adept at
assessing readiness. So I tell people, when you
like the onion layer, we all know that metaphor. Don't take it too personally or
judge yourself when something surfaces that you thought you had, quote unquote, cleared

(01:09:08):
in times past. It's just that your body has
determined that you are now ready to take that even
deeper and explore it even more
and excavate more, and it's always for your highest
good. That's where we fall short of the trusting of that. So
I'd like to end with that. How do you foster that

(01:09:30):
trust? Because I've done a lot of work around examining this and
parsing it out. And it really, to me, it comes down to, do I trust
the process? Do I trust my body's intelligence? Do I trust my
soul, my higher self, God? And however you define that, this
alchemical work, this process, how can we
foster more trust in that instead of. Oh, because we've been conditioned to doubt

(01:09:52):
ourselves right and left, totally.
Yeah. I mean, the very first stage of that, I feel, is
this process of listening to ourselves
speak. When I see these circles open up,
and especially on the circles where people are not familiar with sitting in circle,
is that. And if I recall my first circle, I remember

(01:10:14):
the facilitator was sitting, there were two facilitators, and
after we'd done the meditation process, we were going through a sharing
circle, and one of the facilitators had, by mistake, pulled out the cord
of the laptop, and the song had just cut off
like that in the middle, and there was like a kerfuffle, and it got back
around to the front there, and it was on her share, and she was like,

(01:10:36):
oh, I just felt really unhappy. Like, I didn't feel like any space was
made for me here. And I was sitting there going,
coming from a corporate environment where you never talk about that, you take
that sort of thing out the room, you always hold this glass facade of
everything being perfect and all of us being perfectly aligned. And if you're the leader,
you are the spaceholder, and you must be perfect and not show your

(01:10:59):
vulnerabilities or not be truthful. And I remember sitting there going like, oh,
my gosh, is she really saying this in front of everybody?
Surely this is something that facilitators would take out the back and then
sort it out. And it was so alarming for me at
that moment that somebody would speak their truth in the community
of others. And there is this journey for all

(01:11:21):
of us to building that safety for ourselves
by learning how to unlock our
voice, our truth and what's really going on for us. And
there's a process we need to go through. It is an onion. It is a
lotus unfolding. It is a titration of being able
to sit in circle, tell our stories, and bit by bit, realize, oh,

(01:11:44):
wow, there are these things actually under there and
under there. And every time we uncover one, as difficult as the
mind might think it is for us to go there, once we do,
all of us know what it's like we feel relief when we found something
that we've been able to release the contraction around it,
and we've had the big cry or we've shared the story or we've

(01:12:06):
raged it out. It's like having. Feeling ill and
getting sick and then afterwards going, oh, my gosh, I feel so much better now.
There's a relief. It's a getting well process of
eliminating, in a conscious way, in an intentional way,
bit by bit, all of these things that are stuck. And with
that, as we release those, we start to build trust with

(01:12:28):
ourselves. We start to realize that we are safe to feel,
and we're safe to feel even the dark, difficult things. Because once
that energy and motion has moved through our body, in whichever
form it's appearing, we feel that sense of relief
and we can breathe more deeply. And so it's that process
of unlocking, bit by bit. And obviously, we can go all the way down into

(01:12:51):
the big, deep peak experiences, and that's something that can come. But
as an entry point, it's all around building that
capacity to learn how to feel by being willing to unlock
these parts of ourselves, share our stories and listen to
ourselves speak, and in that process, challenge our
narrative and to be able to rewrite that story. That's so

(01:13:13):
perfect. Yeah. I feel like when we
talk about being stuck or feeling disempowered, it's easy to go.
Well, it's because of this thing out here. Only that. That thing
out here is the invitation for you to look at. That's why it happened.
There's something about unlocking gratitude for
showing us. And speaking of gratitude, I'm really grateful all the way from Australia that

(01:13:35):
you have made this time for us today. Can you tell people, Paula,
where to find you online? Beautiful sherry. Thank you so much for having me. I
have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. It's been so electric and so
engaging and, yeah, very much appreciate you. And I'd love to hear from
any of your listeners, if they would like to reach out, they can find me
at my website, which is thefrequency global. And the

(01:13:57):
insta handle will be the same, thefrequency global. So it would be wonderful to
connect with anybody who'd like to explore any of these concepts further. Yes.
And I know our journey together is not finished because I feel such a connection
to you and I love that we got to break this up into two parts.
But, yes, thank you. Thank you for your brilliance and what you brought to our.
Oh, thank you, my dear. It's such a joy hey Cherie, here. Have

(01:14:20):
you gotten my free whole body healing kit mini course? All you have
to do is ask to join our private Facebook group, Soul rose Community,
and we'll send it right to your inbox. And I want you to know that
I am so grateful for every single one of you who listens to these
episodes. You can follow me on Instagram at Cherie Burton
to deepen into the discussion that you heard today. And I would be ever

(01:14:41):
so grateful if you would leave this podcast a positive review on
Apple Podcasts. This allows many more people to find these
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if you want to see our. Faces, check out my soul row show YouTube
channel. Have a glorious week and we'll talk to you next time on the Soul
Row show.