Sense of Soul - Beyond Sex and Soup: Living a Spiritual Adventure.

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Today on Sense of Soul  Podcast we have Anna Parkinson. She is a writer and healer who lives in Kent, UK. Anna gives regular talks and workshops when she is not traveling or writing.  She is the author of  “Change Your Mind Heal Your Body” and Anna joined us to talk about her new book, “Beyond Sex and Soup: Living a Spiritual Adventure.” Anna’s healing work has become a passion since she healed herself from a life threatening illness 15 years ago. Since then she has healed, taught and written about healing.  Today she teaches how to cultivate your exceptional natural abilities for health, happiness and wellbeing. You can learn more about her workshops, as well as amazing books at her website. www.annaparkinson.com  Join our Sense of Soul Patreon!! Our community of seekers and lightworkers who get exclusive discounts, live events like SOS Sacred Circles, ad free episodes and more. You can also listen to Shanna’s new mini series, about the Goddess Sophia! Sign up today and help support our podcast. As a member of any level you get 50% off Shanna’s Soul Immersion Healing Experience! https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul

Welcome to the Sense of Soul podcast. We are your hosts, Shanna and Mandy. Grab your coffee, open your mind, heart and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we have Anna Parkinson. She is a healer and a writer and the author of Change Your Mind, Heal Your Body. She joins us today to tell us about her new book beyond sex and soup living a spiritual adventure and she joins us from the uk where are you at in the uk hi i'm in kent uh which is very very beautiful it's so green and there's so many flowers and the weather can be rubbish but that's what's happening yes yeah we had a guest on who was talking about climate grief and how he's helping a lot of these younger kids deal with

that and it's a real thing and a real thing my ego at first wanted to be like oh my gosh are you serious and then I sat with it and I'm like oh my gosh I think realistically everyone has a little bit of that and that worry about where you know our world is going with climate I did a healing for an eight-year-old actually she may be nine just super super bright growing up in slightly strange circumstances slightly unusual circumstances I said hey so you know what would make you happy what do you want healed I want to save the world from pollution what right I mean it breaks your heart because they do have it kind of pumped at them yes and and it's like for the a child that age to carry so much responsibility is grief it is grief climate grief yeah i would mandy and i both have kids that young all the way to adult young adults and my nine-year-old would have said something

similar but hers would have probably been about people like i you know i wish that you know people were kind to each other or something like that but it's so amazing how they have seen so much more than we would have seen as eight nine-year-olds you know what I mean we never had to see it you know and they see it on their phones they see it everywhere their parents have been affected and they really do they they hold the weight of the world on their shoulders. Yeah. I think that actually it's really important, even more important than, I mean, everybody needs this, whether they're children or adults, but it's even more important to teach them the tools of focusing on what feels good and what they can enjoy in their surroundings

around them. Because we live in this age of communication, which is wonderful, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to meet you and Mandy. But it's also such a huge pressure of reinforcing your powerlessness as an individual. And I think that that's what children feel. Like they want to change it but they feel powerless oh and we all feel that you don't have to be a child to feel like that you know that emotional thing turns into a real physical grief a real physical problem you know anxiety and everything and somehow we still stuck in our education system in this idea that learning is all about facts.

But the definition of facts is very 19th century, actually. We need to move forward. You know, we have been taught your body is a temple. What I didn't know was what was the temple housing, you know, in that soul, that you weren't just a body. So Mandy and I have actually talked about this a lot lately, that we were so very focused on the soul, right? Sense of soul, where you almost sometimes forget that you have a body. Absolutely. That is why I called my book Beyond Sex and Soup. You know, don't forget sex and soup. You need them. We need them. And they are beautiful. That is the physical part of you. And actually, when it comes down to healing, actually physically healing some part of your body that is not

functioning, right? It's the intelligence of the body that you're going to rely on and you're going to learn how to communicate with that consciously so that your body can tell you what you haven't been listening to your body has so much memories have and you can discover all the capabilities of. I think generally we're not aware of how capable we are, how brilliant our body is. I think that for some time being, the reason I was wanting to stay up in my crown and really concentrate on the soul was because, to be honest, it's a beautiful place to live. It's a vacation. Yeah. It's a vacation from a life that is very hard. And so I think what I love the most about the name of your book and how you just described the title is that it reminded me that I have been attaching dropping into my body as just pain.

And the title reminds me that dropping into my body can also mean amazing things like chicken tortilla soup, chicken soup, sex massages. And so it's tweaking my perspective into realizing this body is also a blessing. You know, it's very interesting because a long time ago, I did a workshop, a girl said to me, she said, I've been trying to decide, you know, whether I should be spiritual or whether I should just be like, forget all about it, whether it's all nonsense and I should just kind of carry on with my life. Actually, although, you know, that was probably the seed that that made experienced has put you in a position of a particular kind of reality that it's like your destiny, if you like, to clarify, to come through, to learn the lessons that it tells you. But in learning the lesson, it's not pain it's release from pain it's releasing your beautiful soul yeah healer can guide you but actually you are the one

that's going to resonate to feel that you've really let go of something that you've carried around like a kind of shifty burden for maybe 20 years, you know. I love your massage therapy. So you know that I do too, working on many bodies, you know, this became very apparent. But then I felt like I was just rubbing people's stress. And although massage is so wonderful, and it releases amazing hormones moves around your limb. But I mean, a lot of times it's what's built up of energy, creating these fibers to cluster together to make a knot that screams at you because you've ignored something within yourself for so long. So, I mean, I've always, well, I haven't always, but I've learned to really look at those as such intelligent messages from the body. Your body has a language and it's speaking to you all the time. It just doesn't use a verbal

language and it uses, you know, but then, you know, think how many relationships and associations we have where we don't have a verbal language think of you know if you have a pet how much you communicate or to baby understands what you're doing or saying even a landscape that you may be particularly attached to and the kind of healing that i practice is very much focused on the particular areas of energy that particular parts of your body will hold on to for you and it'll hold on to those things it'll hold on to that emotion until you are ready to see it like the teacher or the parent or the boss of the factory and decide what to do with it so for example you might have a frozen shoulder and that might be the side that you would normally,

it was probably most likely to be the side that you don't, that's not your active side. So if you're right-handed, it probably would be your left side because what the body holds onto more than anything is emotion. And if someone came to me with a frozen shoulder, I would say, well, look, that part of your body is about your intuition. It's about your self-expression and it's about allowing yourself to have what makes you happy. Is this a blockage for you? And, you know, you could say, oh, well, I'm just following a map. But in fact, with all the people that I've worked with over 15 years now, yeah, we've all got the same language. Every single physical body speaks the same language. The reason that you

get there is unique to you. That's different. The reason that you have that particular reality is part of your unique journey. But all human bodies speak the same language. I found it very fascinating that my mind knew I was getting ready to move again for like the 16th time. And every time I've moved, I've thrown out my back like one time to the point where I had to call my mom and have her fly out to Seattle to help me get up off the floor. My hip has not hurt in over two years. And before I even started packing, it started screaming at me. It's almost like it knew what was coming. It knew that number one, hard on my physical body, but also that not being rooted was coming in absolutely so that's a brilliant example because like the root chakra is associated with security and when you're

a baby that security is mom and your relationship with her or what occurred in those very early years does have a big influence on what you will feel like security to you which wouldn't be the same for everybody but as you grow up it's whatever an adult would associate with security and those are job money home and if you move home and you feel like oh my goodness I've done this too many. I've been here so many times before. Your body is going to scream. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's going to say, I don't want to do this. Yeah, it did. So I took it as in like a message this time. I sat with it and I'm like, okay, I hear you. I know that you're uncomfortable. I know that you're scared. I know that you're scared. I know that you're not sure this is the best decision. I know that you're getting ready to put a lot of stress on yourself. So I have really just been making sure my self-care is on point, that I'm going slower

than I ever have and doing like maybe one or two boxes a day. And I'm not moving them this time. I'm having people move them like my daughter's friends. I'm using it as a signal and a sign to listen to my body. It's been a completely different experience. Well, that sounds perfect. That sounds like the way to do it because, you know, the only way that you can stop that pain is to listen to what's going on and to listen to what it's telling you. You know, your body is stronger than your conscious mind.

So even if your conscious mind thinks that this is a really good idea, if your emotional self doesn't think it's a good idea it will stop you doing it and it expresses itself through your body you know I became a healer because I was ill I had a brain tumor and I was writing a book at the time and it was going really well and I'd taken sort of time off from my job to do it and I didn't want to have a brain tumor I know that sounds stupid but it was like oh just deal with it you know just if the doctors had been able to deal with it I would have had them just chop it out for me and so I was trying to kind of finish this book and I was cross-eyed and I was dizzy and I was sick and I was scared and they just kept on saying well we've got to scan you and we're going to wait to

see and I eventually realized I couldn't wait to see anymore because whatever it was they were waiting to see I didn't want to see. I began to listen to myself just as you were saying Mandy I heard myself say oh this may be just a case to you doctor so and so but it's my head and it matters to me and I just eventually heard myself say it's my head and I felt like okay so I need to deal with this and I began to explore healing that I knew nothing about. And eventually I met a healer. He's not with us anymore, Martin Brafman. And he had devised this way of healing where he gave me a healing, but he also told me what was going on in my body. And it's like the body was expressing my unconscious, but my conscious mind was somewhere else.

It was on another planet. And when he brought those two together, I had to recognize that although my conscious mind didn't think this was important, it was my stuff. And already, I mean mean I recognized it I thought well if you can see all this and I know that it's about me because I recognize it I must be carrying it around so that began a process where I began to explore feelings that I probably buried when I was two or three, you know, really young. And they come up fresh as if I was opening a, you know, tin can when I'm listening. And what I discovered was that as soon as you start to really listen to what your body has been holding on for you it has the capacity to change to flower to morph to let go because you've listened and you have

the capacity to be the parent to yourself as well as the child in yourself. So all of these things, this relationship between your nervous system, which is able to conceive of spirit or mountains or volcanoes that are distant and perhaps you've never seen, but also able to perceive feelings that you've never really consciously held but are somehow there in your imagination and they're different they're different for you than they would be for another person in the same circumstance all of those things are within this incredibly sophisticated body that is changing and growing all the time and you're in charge of it it's all yours so I call that pretty wonderful that that's a beautiful answer and I like the way you described it we are so intelligent aren't we

aren't we just I mean we just get in our own way by being, by thinking that we know, but our body knows more than we know. Yeah. And some of the notes that was sent over by Gavin, there was a part that really like intrigued me. It was talking about the paradoxes. And I think that the reason it caught my attention was because it had me reflecting on myself and my own healing after I had gone through something really traumatic and had to learn to rewalk and feed myself and all of this stuff. And so it had me kind of reflecting on a lot of the things I learned about myself through a traumatic health issue as well. And there's one part you talk about how Beyond Sex and Soup highlights those paradoxes that

we encounter every day and how discovering them can help us. And then this was the part. It says that you believe because of the essential nature of our existence, we are physical beings and obey physical laws, but physical laws appear to be at odds with the quantum physical laws of the universe. The non-physical aspects of ourselves are in tune with those quantum physics laws. And my head went, after I read that. Well, that's what I wanted to explain in the book. I mean, when I was going through my own healing process, I just kept on coming after paradox, paradox after paradox.

So for example, the one that you will hear everybody say is that this pain that you went through this terror this fear this illness whatever was the best thing that ever happened to you and and you'll hear so many people say that and that doesn't mean that you feel any less pain or terror or fear or whatever it's just that actually going through that darkness is liberating and it's the liberation that you want to live with. So that's the most obvious paradox. But yes, I think that that is one example of the paradox that we live, that we are, our brain, our nervous system is in tune with something that exists beyond time, beyond geography. If I do healing, I can do healing with someone who is 3,000 miles away, because it's sort of somehow something about their physical being exists in a space that I can connect with that is outside the logic of time and geography.

So that is a different kind of physics than the physics that we live with. But nevertheless, we do live with physics. I'm going to die one day. You know, I'm getting older and that is pure physics and without that I would be miserable because you know the cabbage wouldn't grow in the ground the carrots wouldn't appear on my table I would be miserable I need that physics I love it but our physical senses are attuned to that kind of physical presence. But our mental senses, our spiritual senses are attuned to something that is beyond that physics. And we are an amazing combination of both of those things.

Yeah. And this can be very hard for someone to grasp in today's world because humans like to see tangible tools, something that they're told they can see and do. So to talk about invisible tools, people are like, wait, what do you mean? Everything that matters about you is your imagination, your loves, your memory, your feelings, your experiences. None of those are tangible. None of them can be measured. But from the inside, from the inside of Mandy looking out, that's all that matters. What you want, where you want to be, whether you're happy,

whether you're unhappy, who you love, and none of that can be measured. So the aspect of us that matters most is the invisible. And we can't measure measure it but you're right to say that humans want something physical because external our senses you know sight sound taste hearing etc they are all there to keep our physical body safe and to make sure that we survive. We tend to rely on them because it seems unsafe not to. But again, this is a paradox. So my experience is you use both. You use your inner sense and your outer sense. And that's what healing is about. It's not like you forget how to sit down on a chair just because you explore. I mean, look at these scientists who explore theoretical areas. They still walk through the door. It's so amazing because like, I feel like

that's what has been missing from like teaching us about who we are in our bodies, even from a young age and at school, you know, Mandy and I often talk about this because we see that it's such a void and also an opportunity for us to truly teach youth and understand that we are multi-dimensional, you know, all of these aspects of ourselves need to work together for the whole system to work correctly. Yeah, I think so. Even the fact that you were just talking about the senses and, you know, discernment was a huge part of my journey to learn, to actually use my body and learn how to trust those things that I was sensing within that I had been really ignoring and only seeking

all of my answers outside of myself. I can Google friends or my parents, church and everywhere else except for within myself. And, you know, oftentimes I think that even anxiety is saw as something very bad when I feel like it's very similar to as the pain, you know, it's a sign. It's an intelligent message that we can use. Yeah, I agree with you. One shouldn't be frightened of fear. But fear is simply a message that this is important to you, whatever it is, and you need to learn to walk through it yeah I like that one should not be frightened of fear yeah because when you don't acknowledge these things when you don't acknowledge fear or you don't like Mandy just did beautifully how she sat with herself and kind of acknowledged and validated what she was experiencing knowing what's coming coming, maybe she's not going to have the back pain because she's actually, you know, giving this

attention and love to her body and her soul before she even gets to the point where the pain is present. I would expect that she cannot have that pain, that she would not have that pain. I think that, you know, like you say, the pain is a message from your body, but also sometimes you can have like a not doing, and that is also a message. It's a message from fear. You want to do it, but somehow it just doesn't happen. Generally, that is a sign that the fear is there but you know that's exactly what I mean by invisible tools as soon as you go oh this is fear you turn to your or in beyond sex and so if I write about the tool that you can turn to and say okay I'm going to do this now because I need to deal with fear. And it's just like you would pick a pan in the kitchen because you're going to cook a particular thing. It's like,

okay, this I need to do angry or fearful or despairing, you can just pick up a tool and go forward as opposed to get stuck in that particular state of emotion. In Beyond Sex and Soup, it's about my experience of those tools. It's not just a manual as it were, but at every level, it's about, okay, this tool will work for this situation. Yeah. You talk about how it focuses on feelings like anger, jealousy, frustration, depression, addiction, and all these things that build up these tensions in our life. And your first book was more about physical pain. Is that right? Yeah. And so let me ask you this, were you able to heal your brain tumor through the healing and what you expressed in your first book? And then if you don't

mind sharing also where you're at with your health, I'm interested. I want to know you're okay. Okay. The answer to your question is yes. It took a while. So when I had that first healing session with Martin Brofman, it was like, oh my goodness, this is the same world that I know, but it's looking at it from a completely different perspective. I recognized that this was a whole language that I hadn't understood and I could learn that language. And so I began to learn how to heal myself and I began to learn how to heal. I worked hard. I sat there every day sifting through stuff, not all day, but I applied myself. And that's what I describe in change your mind, heal your body. And eventually the scans of the tumor showed that had a kind of wavy line over the top. And I was ecstatic because I knew that that meant it was going to go. And it

did eventually go. My husband, who is the arch skeptic, ironically, he used to call my meditation, my medication. And it was, that was exact. That was the medication I used. I used an internal process of observing, of letting go, observing, of letting go. And it took a while, but in the end, the brain tumor went. It was scanned again in 2010 and it went completely and all the physical symptoms went with it. The only physical operation I had, it had pulls in my right eye. So I was very cross-eyed and they did a little operation to sort of, you know, like pulling the reins of a horseback to tighten that up so that I could see straight again, but I'm really well. No, I'm really well. Good. My cousin, he's got a brain tumor and he's had it for a very long

time. He has that going on right now. He just had like his 10th surgery on his eye and his headaches are insane and unbearable. And he's a mover and a painter. So he's moving massive furniture and painting all day long. And I honestly, I don't know how he does it. When you've got something like that going on, you do have to stop and pay attention. Yeah. Can't just pay attention. Yeah.

Can't just ignore it. Yeah. He's definitely trying to ignore it. Well, I understand that. I was trying for a while. I have to say that in retrospect, the doctors did me a great favor because when they said, when I first went to see the consultant neurologist, he said, oh, you've got a brain tumor and it's going to have to come out. And I just said, how? And he said, well, you know, we cut the side of the face and then we can just kind of go in and then go in underneath the brain and get it out that way.

Or if that doesn't work, we just cut the top of the head off and then we just lift the brain out and go in underneath and get it out and we'll be in touch you know so I was just like what's this about you know and a little bit like your cousin I kind of thought well if I'm gonna go blind or die I'm damn well gonna finish this book first I was writing my first book I just worked really hard all day and then I had nightmares every night I'd wake up at three o'clock in the morning in a terrible state that's the thing like you know when you sleep you've turned off your conscious mind you've got off the treadmill you know you're not running anymore in the way you feel you should and your unconscious just explodes with what you really need to pay

attention to I think I feel that I was very lucky that first he scared me so badly and secondly when I finally came to meet the surgeon he said said, no, we can't operate. It's too deep. So in fact, I was lucky that they couldn't do anything. Because if they had said they were going to, I would have just said, oh, okay, what day? Are you afraid to write another book? Because it seems like whenever you're writing a book, you're going through something so painful. Thank you for persevering and continuing to write these books.

There's so much more behind books that we pick up at a library or at Barnes and Noble that we have no idea about. That is truly inspirational to me that through that kind of pain, you could still write these books. Can you just talk about those experiences? I love that question. That is the best question. I feel either I will not write another book about healing, but I will write more books. So we'll just have to see what happens. Yeah, it's very interesting. I think that the subtitle of Beyond Sex and Soup is living a spiritual adventure. Whatever, wherever you think you are,

whether you're on top of it or underneath it, you don't know what's going to happen. Your life is constantly flowing. You're living an adventure. So yes, you're right. I thought when I started to write Beyond Sex and Soup that it was going to be dead simple. I knew these tools. I was confident about them. I worked through them in workshops and I just wanted to offer that as a guide. Yeah, my life explodes or implodes because my mother gets ill. My mother was a really feisty woman. She was an incredible character. And that was not easy. It was not easy for me. And it was particularly not easy when she was ill because she thought she was in charge. But I realized as I was dealing with this, I suppose a part of me knew that it was her last illness that she was going to go she wasn't young she was 94 already

she didn't realize and actually when you're going through it you don't know whether somebody is going to go or not but everything that she was experiencing was like the loss of this beautiful life and this beautiful body and it was just gradually edging away from her that absolutely crystallized for me why it matters that we really do learn tools to navigate our lives because our lives are so beautiful and so potentially powerful that if we can just take away or at least navigate the negative stuff in them our fear our resistance certainly our embittered relationships if we can just navigate that and remove it we're liberating ourselves to have a fantastic time regardless of the disasters that keep on happening. You know, human beings are like children in the playground on the earth. We're very small. We create a lot of problems and some of us behave really badly.

And even if there's people in one corner of the playground who are behaving really well and they want a teacher to come in and sort everybody else out, there's still going to be people who behave really badly. And that's hard. You know, we want things to be perfect. We are not perfect. I have got to know the story about your grandfather and how he had this hidden piece of paper in a book that just lit up your life. Tell us about it. Okay. So my grandfather, he went to Calcutta before the first world war, if you can believe this.

And he did yoga. And even when he was an old man, he used to stand on his head. That's how I remember him. But every day he would stand on his head, you know, with his tie falling down over his face. And one day I was just looking at this book that had belonged to him. And it was written in the 30s. It was a book about yoga. And, you know, in the 30s, nobody did yoga in the West. It's all quite kind of delicate, you know, just like little bends and things.

But anyway, inside this book, there was this piece of paper and it said most secret at the top. So, of course, I had to read it. And it was like a description of affirmations from obviously his yogi teachers to him they weren't like normal affirmations like you know I am strong and beautiful and all that kind of stuff it was like if you wanted to improve your artistic ability you would say I am an expression of the divine and the voice of divinity is expressed through me and everything that I do is a perfect expression of divine law or something like that which was like way way out I was so impressed I thought I have to put this in a book. We just don't even touch the surface. You know, I found a bunch of little notes I got from my dad

and they have been just some of the coolest things, you know, to be able to find after he passed. Some of them were from like the 70s, like before I was even born or right after and to see the way his mind was then. Oh, it's really interesting. And that's kind of like a theme that runs through my book in the end is that the more you explore, excavate this stuff,

your stuff from you because you need to for your life, the more you actually touch that continuity of who you actually are and what your life is passing on and living through you. Yeah, exactly. So true. Shanna, I have a question for you. Anna chose her two things that she really loves about being in her body is sex and soup. What would yours be called beyond what? Oh, you better. I know what you're going to say. Beyond Reese's peanut butter cups. And oh, coffee. I thought you would say snow cones. Oh, snowballs, Mandy. Snowballs. Snowballs. Sorry. Yes. You know, I really that's yes you're right let's replace

god I don't know which one I'd have to add three that's awesome what about you then Mandy I think I would go with coffee unfortunately is one of mine too oh my gosh this is hard because there's so many things. I think I would say beyond coffee and human connection. Like I just thrive on human connection, like so much, like without it, I couldn't survive. Yeah. But you don't have to go beyond that because that's what our life is for. I think we all need it. Yeah. I could definitely do it without sex oh my gosh maybe that's part of your hot flashes and turning into a groan

oh my goodness and now it's time for break that shit down what I want to tell the world And now it's time for break that shit down. What I want to tell the world is that whatever it is that you have going on, whether it's anything physical or emotional, if you take responsibility for that, you can shift it for yourself and you can change the world by shifting it. So just start with your stuff, give yourself the time to deal with it.

And if you read Beyond Sex and Soup, you'll have the tools to deal with it too. Where can our listeners pick up your book and where can they find you? You can pick up my book at any bookstore, I believe in the States and also obviously online from Amazon and so forth. And if you want to find me, my website is annaparkinson.com. Well, thank you, Anna Parkinson for coming on Sense of Soul today. We adore you and we thank you for sharing your story with authenticity and vulnerability and persevering through those tough times to share your healing, to help others. It's been lovely. I really enjoyed it.

I've enjoyed meeting you both and it's been great to talk to you. Yes, absolutely. And again, Gavin, we love you, you guys. He has some of the best authors, hence Anna thank you Gavin thank you so nice to meet you thanks for being with us today we hope you will come back next week if you like what you hear don't forget to rate like and subscribe thank you we rise to lift you up thanks for listening