Sense of Soul - Chanting for Good Healthy and Stress Free

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

Today on Sense of Soul Podcast we welcomed Madhur-Nain Webster, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists, Certified in Kundalini Meditation and Author of The Stressless Brain, which is the culmination of her lifelong experience with Kundalini Yoga and years’ worth of psychotherapy.  Madhur-Nain was born in Amesterdam to accomplish yoga teachers. Her bringing up was centered on the spiritual traditions and practices of yoga.  Her genuine love of humanity and fascination with the human mind and behavior inspired her to pursue a career where she could influence people and enrich their lives.  “Breathing keeps you alive, meditation keeps you sane." Order this amazing book, The Stressless Brain at http://madhurnain.com  . Each purchase includes 37 digital mantras and musical downloads, free of charge. When you order from her website (above), you’ll receive a free gift + free shipping*. Please Rate, Review and Subscribe to Sense of Soul Podcast and visit our website www.mysenseofsoul.com.

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 we have with us the author Madder Nan Webster, who was born in Amsterdam to two accomplished yoga teachers. Her bringing up was centered on the spiritual traditions and practices of yoga. Today, she is a licensed marriage and family therapist and is certified in Kundalini meditation. Her genuine love for humanity and fascination with the human mind and behavior inspired her to pursue a career where she could influence people and enrich their lives. She's here to talk about her new book, The Stressless

Brain, which is an introduction for people to use meditative tools to change transition and ultimately heal their stress and anxiety. It is such an honor to have this beautiful soul with us today. Thank you so very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited. I love talking with people and playing off each other's thoughts and feelings and ideas back and forth. I love it. So how did you get your beautiful name? from community slash cult so I was born with this name it's a yogic name it's actually a Sikh name also used in the Hindu faith as well so mutter means sweet honey lotus has many meanings and nan means eyes so my name means sweet eyes or lotus eyes so I kind of figure as a therapist I'm able to see the beauty out of the muck. Oh, I want to rename

myself. I love your name. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Let's talk about that for a moment because you know, the word cult, you know, people are going to be like, Ooh, what does she mean? Explain that. Um, it's interesting because if you think about it, all religions, and this might push a few buttons, but all religions started as cult. Yeah. This pressure of you don't believe this, then you're out. And this can happen in a sorority. This can happen in a religion.

This can happen in a family system. It can happen in university or in our government. So I think that it is this pressure having to conform. And whenever we have that pressure and religion is really, I mean, it's a really great example of the extreme of that. As a little girl, and I love my grandparents, they're passed away. I love, love, love them. And they were raised Catholic and I was raised Sikh. And they used to be like, you know what, Mother Nan, you're going to be going to hell. And I was like, what's hell? You know, and, but they didn't mean to be mean. It's this piece of when we believe something and our belief becomes very narrow and we start feeling like we're going down a hallway

that never ends in our thinking, that becomes a bit cult-like. And especially when we go into the place of you need to believe what I'm believing, then that is kind of cult-like because, you know, that taps into also codependency. I'm afraid to speak my mind because you might cut me off. You may stop loving me. You may think something's wrong with me. That's also what happens in a cult, happens in relationships. Yeah. I mean, it's even with politics, like in 2020, a half a dozen clients who I was just working with them because one was Republican and one was democratic. And I'm just like, and they were fighting and fighting and it was just so intense and like almost on the verge of divorcing because of a difference in politics. It's, I mean, it could have been like, you know, if you're Mormon versus

Catholic, or if you're Jewish and Muslim or Catholic, or so it can't, it's, again, it's this, this piece of, you know, how do we like, you know, if you think, you know, like I really love, and I was reading on your website, that purpose and meaning and life and connecting to the sense of the soul, it is the sense of, well, who am I? And, you know, when my sons say things that are like, opposite of my belief, I asked him, like, well, how does that work for you? What are you getting out of it? Like, you know, I was telling my 18 year old son today on the phone, like, you are an adult, you got to figure this out. I can tell you my opinion, but ultimately it's your life and you got to stand within what you choose. Yeah. It's hard. I've never thought of codependency the way

you brought it up. Shannon and I have talked about codependency and we're both in recovery from being codependent. I had a woman I was waiting on last night. I'm serving at a restaurant part-time who said she was in recovery and naive me. I just assumed she meant alcohol. And she was like, no, from codependency. And I sat there and I thought, I love that people are admitting that and saying that and freeing themselves from that. Yeah. Well, and actually they do have like AA, they have CODA. You know, we're trained that as children with our parents. It's the cycle of relationships. And I think that, you know, I tell my sons and I tell people like, I really want my

children to be 10 times greater than me. 10 times. I always joke, my kids were little, like, I didn't know they would surpass me at age four. But part of it is how can we love without putting hooks as a parent? And because that helps them then as they become adults to not put hooks into their partners and picking healthier partners. Codependency is a lot of when we are afraid to say something or do something because the other person could withhold something. Love, communication, sex, money, kindness. You know, people can like stonewall. Silence. Silence in Japan to completely shun somebody by being in a person's presence, but not acknowledging them at all is like the worst torture. You know, I want to dig into this a tiny bit deeper. I think that it's one of the hardest things for mothers, especially to grasp is how do you love your children without having those hooks? Like what are some actual tangible examples? Because when I tried to explain to

people that there was a moment in my life where I was able to detach with love those hooks and understand that I don't own my children, that they are not, they're not my property. And I was able to, as Shanna always says, loving them without attachment. People look at me like I'm crazy. Like, how do you do that? I mean, they're literally attached to you with an umbilical cord. They are attached to your nipple when they come out, you know, to feed them. Like, how do you not attach yourself to your child and you're still able to love them? Yeah. My hair was down to my waist. And when my son left for college, I cut it all off.

And I decided it was a bit of a ritual of cutting it off. The braid itself is a foot and a half long and I'm going to donate it. And I mean, I love what you're sharing. And it's so true, Mandy, like they're not ours. We were the vessel that brought them to donate it. And I mean, I love what you're sharing. And it's so true, Mandy. Like they're not ours. We were the vessel that brought them to this experience of this human experience of life. And they're not ours. And a tool that I've used for years and years, and I teach it with my clients, is when you find yourself feeling hurt, because sometimes out of hurt we we hook people our our children our spouses our lovers whatnot our family and out of love we hook people and what I do is when I find this this it's it can be a neurotic feeling so you first step is you got to start noticing how

am I feeling because I always tell people if you can Because I always tell people, if you can't reflect, you can't correct. If you can't see your behavior, you can't change it. And the second thing is I am continuously blessing my children and letting go of my attachments. And for me, God is not a bad word. So I'll say, you know, God bless my first son. I let go of my attachment. God bless my second son. I let go of my attachments. And I'll say it again and again, because I'm cutting those hooks. Whenever we have these exchanges with people, I've talked about this for years with clients, we have these invisible strings between our partners, our children, our family, our friends, some of them are healthy, and some of them are unhealthy, but the hook I've always thought of them as like, I'm not a fisherman or anything, but a fisher's hook has two hooks.

There's one that snags the fish and one that hooks the fish. So it can't release an emotional trauma, drama, and love our hooks. And because our soul doesn't have a hook, our souls like, wow, I'm feeling love and our souls going, wow, I'm feeling hatred. Wow, this is amazing. It doesn't have an attachment to good or bad. That's our mind. So when I say God bless Susie, God bless Mark, God bless, you know, you know, my ex partner, even my partner, even if it's someone you love and you want in your life, you can still bless them because quantum physics talks about an exchange of energy. What you put out, you get back tenfold. So that's the first step. Second is I let go of my attachments. And that starts to unhook those hooks because it leads with love, you bless bless and then you end with letting go and you do it again and again and it starts to what you're looking for is to neutralize it's not good bad right wrong stop go it's just neutral which is the soul the meditative mind is neutral. Once I realized that this was something that I, I, first of all, I didn't know

anything different. Like you said earlier, I was taught this. My mom was like that. Her mom was like that. I realized it was this generational was that self-love. I was looking for love to fill me up in my children, which had been done for generations. Once I was able to fill up that cup for myself, I wasn't looking for them to make me happy anymore or to make me feel successful or to make me look good because I was full. This amazing, beautiful man from Puerto Rico told this story about, you know, he's talking about impermanence and change. And he said, from the moment we leave our mother's breast, that is like almost like a death in some way. And because now you're going to the bottle, right?

And you're transitioning to this new stage. We can't keep them on the breast, right? We have to allow that growth, that change. It's inevitable. And if we try to hold on to it, I mean, you'll be breastfeeding your 40-year-old child. And we know a lot of people who are living at home with their parents. You can call it strings and not make it seem woo woo. I call it ethereal cords. Like, oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You will. And then you want to know what was hard for me

is that when all of these moms like, oh my God, my kid's off to college. How am I going to live without them? I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. I'm so depressed. I haven't left my house for like months. And I'm over here. Like, I feel fine. Like I feel great. It felt wrong. And then I felt bad as a mother, like, wait a minute. Why, why am I not? So because of these worldly conditions, I'm being told that I'm supposed to be miserable right now because my kids are going off to become adults. And I don't feel that way. You know? Well, I think, you know, a big piece of our society is, is that women's identity is through motherhood or being a wife. I ended up having so much anxiety, so much pain, medicated, came to the point where I felt so empty and so destroyed. That was actually a good place because in that place,

I was able to kind of hear my soul, like knock on the door saying, Hey, are we ready? Or that alarm clock going on. But in that place, that was kind of like, so I started therapy and whatnot. And codependency was one of the first things that I had to hit on, um, starting to discover like what is causing, you know, you to feel out of control of your life, that this anxiety is now controlling you. It was connecting with that self-love that helped me get out of there. But before that, the only thing that was dealing that was drugs, alcohol, you know, medications and codependency. Yeah. Can you be codependent on things that aren't physical other than individuals? Can you be codependent on emotions? Can you be

codependent on animals? Can you be codependent on God? Can you be codependent on, I mean, yes, you can. I mean, like, I mean, like ladder park, can you be codependent on God? Can you be codependent on? I mean, yes, you can. I mean, like, I mean, like ladder park, can you be codependent on God or mine? The first thing that popped into my mind is that spiritual bypassing and spiritual superiority is like, oh, I'm so spiritual. Like, and I'm like, that's not what spirituality is. I mean, spirituality is, you know, there's the mind, there's the body, and there's the soul. When one is, in my experience, you know, everyone's different, but in my experience, when we're truly connected to our soul consciousness, time stands still. And the

minute you're aware, you're out of it. You're back into your human form. And that's the thing, like you can sit for meditation and you can go deep into this connection with your soul or your meditative mind. And 22 minutes can feel like three minutes. That's when you're one with everything. When we come back into the thought like, oh, I'm thinking my spirituality, you're back in your human form of your mind. And the mind is, is, you know, as a complex organ, it's the most amazing complex organ of all time. I mean, science, quantum physics, neurology, we have no idea what the mind can do. And, and so, you know, the things that I try to work with clients on is, is that the mind thinks in polarities, the mind thinks in right, wrong, good, bad, and, and it's impacted by these lenses from our past trauma, drama relationships with our, you know, family of

origin. So, so there is that piece in, and just to kind of, you know, shake up the bottle a bit. People can be codependent on self-help. Yeah. Daniel guessing. Yeah. He wrote a book on that. Yeah. Self-help addict. Yeah. Because people can be, it, um, you know, they have to go again. And again, when I was 22, I got married at 22, very young, 25 years married this, this, this year, lots and lots of hard work. Let me tell you that. And the thing is I was got involved with course of miracles. So I don't know. It was just back in the mid nineties. I was involved with the course of miracles and I would go to these retreats of like three, 400 people. And there'd be these cathartic experiences and people would be crying and wailing and talking about their father and their mother. And I was just like, wow, I was like young. And I was trying

to figure out my upbringing and my pain. And I was just like, wow. And I learned a lot. I was just like, you know what? I have a psych, I have a history in my family of a lot of angry, you know, family members and cutting people off and disowning them. And I was like, I'm not doing that. Like when I was having conflict with my parents that in my early twenties, I was like, I kept blessing them. They were mad at me when I left the religion and they, but I just kept blessing them and blessing. I was 23 years old. I was like, I'm not, I'm breaking the cycle. And by the third event that I went to, I was looking around, I'm like, it's the same people. And they're saying the same story. And I was like, wait a minute, aren't we supposed to be growing? And then the story changes. Like, so I realized I take what I need, I change and I move on.

It doesn't mean that I I'm done with the course of miracles and what I learned. It just means I've integrated it. And now I'm moving on. I'm walking down the path. I'm not staying at the cul-de-sac. Right. And that's how I felt in the medication. I was not, even though I was maybe improving, my story wasn't changing. There was nothing changing permanently in my life.

It wasn't until I said, let me explore a little deeper. And that's when I, you know, started meditation. What I thought was freaking amazing was that I, here I am, I was releasing some of the hormones that I was actually taking in pill form. So science and research has found and proven that through meditation, we actually can release GABA amino acid, which is a natural calming amino acid that is released in the frontal lobe of the brain. You can buy this now in Pharmaca at CVS at Whole Foods online, like, and people who have really severe anxiety, you can just chew it and it goes straight into your into your your mouth, into the skin and it goes straight to the brain. But meditation is free and you can do it multiple times a day, even just one minute.

It doesn't have to be this 22 minutes or an hour, two, three times a day. It can be short little stints as long as you keep hitting that, you know, hitting that every time, every day. And so, so that's one. Second is meditation. Breath meditation helps just to relax your sympathetic nervous system, which is the fighter, you know, like the reaction and fixing and, you know, the, the, the amygdala fight, flight and freeze. And by meditating, you're increasing the parasympathetic nervous system, which relaxes you. And so studies have found that even three minutes of meditation lowers your blood pressure. So this is scientifically proven. And I've had a client, not a client, excuse me, a meditation student who kind of like tested it at home. I was like, oh my God, my blood sugar was lower and it was very high before. Another thing that

can happen. I'm a huge supporter. I love chanting meditation and you know, it's, it's really woo woo for a lot of people, but I love it. And there's a few things that I like to tell people. One is, is that when we chant, we actually can work on changing the thoughts in our head. So what happens is, is that when we, when we get triggered in our life, like something triggers, it's a certain word we hear or tone of voice, or, you know, like someone's sweatshirt color or something happens. And it's similar to a past trauma drama, our mind we have is mirroring neurons. So that's one thing. So we then see it and we go click into this neurological path. We have an old pattern. Chanting meditation cuts and breaks those old patterns. One of the ways it does

that also is, is that when you chant and you hear your own voice, it goes into the ear, bounces on the eardrum, hits the hypothalamus and then calms the frontal lobe. That's one. Second, it increases the white matter in the upper partial part of the brain. That was proven in a study that chanting, singing in hymns. So if you're a Christian and you're religious and you're like, I don't want to sing any of that

Sanskrit woo- woo stuff. I mean, maybe your pastor says meditation is bad. Well, just go sing hymns, like find a beautiful hymn and chant it, sing it around your house. That increases the white matter and white matter helps us to emotionally process our drama, trauma life. So when I'm having a really hard time and I'm feeling triggered, I will chant out loud as my mind is thinking because the chant, I love to tell people meditation is a washing machine for the brain and chanting a spot remover. That is amazing. I can't believe it. And when you say chanting does like just in your mind, if you're

not physically saying it, can that count as chanting like internal chanting? 50%. It's not it's good. It's a good place to start. So people who are new to chanting, like in my book, if you're interested in getting it, it comes with 37 free downloads of meditation so you can listen first i tell people first you know first two three days just listen do the meditation along listen to my voice then you mouth along you just move your lips no sound you just move your lips for a couple days do it i don't care if you do that for a month then you go into whisper and then you go into chanting. I have found, I've never found someone who doesn't like it once they do it, but most people go, oh yeah, I prefer chanting over silent. Well, and it's that vibration in your body. It raises your frequency, the different sounds. I

mean, I don't even know what I'm saying half the time, but my body does my body and my soul are like, yes. So here's the thing is, so there's two things. One is there is actually a reason why it's good to chant in a different language. It's not your mother tongue. Because remember, if we're chanting, you know, I'm a beautiful soul is connected to everything. Then our mind might go, yeah, but not everything. And I'm not always beautiful. Sometimes I'm fat. Oh, I'm feeling kind of fat today. Oh my, that's kind of bloat. That's what happens with our birth language, right? But if we're saying

hummy, hum, brum, hum, hummy, hum, brum, we have no idea what that means. I mean, we could go read and says, it means I'm one with everything, but our mind doesn't get hooked. So you can do it in Latin. You can do it in French. If you're, if you don't know what French, you know, it doesn't matter. It's just repetitive. I'm blown away. So do you know that this is actually how I kind of like crossed over from trying to meditate, right? Because that was difficult to try to meditate, to try to shut my mind off, to becoming this just energy that was experiencing is because of the chanting. I didn't even know what the freak I was listening to. I had no idea. I would sit there and I was, I was making some crocheted rugs and stuff. And I would just put on this, it was a Hindu chant. It was love is God, God is love.

And it just said it over and over for some reason. It just, it had me now my kids are saying in it, they knew it. And then it was just like this magical thing that happened. And then all of a sudden it was like veil lifted yeah and I woke up amazing it's chanting I it's huge both of my sons had their own little chant and I would sing it to them until they were too cool for you know having but once in a blue moon when they're not feeling well they'll be like mama can you come rub my back and then I'll I'll chant and rub their back even though they're young men now. The thing is, is that emotions can become commotion if we don't harness my individuality. And this is an experience that the emotions and experience that's happening to me. I am not the emotion.

Wow. Well, we're going to have to get into something that I saw on your website okay of course synchronicity is always guiding me over the past month and a half I've been having a lot of digestive issues and they come and go if I eat if I eat too much I'm in pain the next day I can't eat but then I feel better and I'm like oh I. So I'll eat again. And then I want to die. And so this has been consistently happening really since I had COVID. So I had COVID in December. I don't have my sense of smell or taste or anything. And now I have these digestive issues and kidney issues. So Mandy was looking up his researchers and she had found a connection, maybe to the Vegas nerve, Like, man, maybe we need to go to Vegas to get this healed. I was like, my vagus nerve was on point when I lived there.

That's funny. I hadn't heard that one yet. I like that. So I am, I was kind of, you know, thinking, well, that might make sense. You know, that could be a possibility. Maybe there's some nerve damage or something from COVID. The other night I was like, I need to focus on this more. I need to try to connect with this and just really, you know, see if I can try to do some inner healing, you know, from the inside out. I just like typed in healing meditation, right? Wasn't looking for anything specific, was just going to fall asleep to it. And I saw Deepak showed up like first and I was like, oh, I love Deepak. You know, shout out to Deepak. And so I put it on not knowing anything.

And I don't, I didn't even read it. You know, put my headphones on and laying down. You start saying, let's activate the vagus nerve first. Breathe in for four, hold for two, exhale six. I did it over and over and over. And just like the first five minutes, girl, can't even tell you all of the nauseous that I felt. It was gone. Yeah. Then I go to research you, you know, for this podcast and there it is again. I don't know much about it. I think that most people don't know much about it. So can you help us out? Yes. So I kind of have a little bit of a Chester cat and grin on my face

because we, you know, the yogis have been talking about the vagus nerve forever. I mean, it's been part of my language for my whole life, 48 years. And now it's all, you know, in the last three years, it's very popular. Everyone's talking about the vagus nerve. So I'll talk about the science first. And that's one of the things that I want people to understand is yes, I have a woo woo background. I do. And I do use a lot of woo woo interventions. I love research. I love science and I love psychology. So I'm always crossing over. Yeah. I'm always like, well, here's the woo woo. And then here's the science that backs it up. And I always tell people, give something three chances, give it three chances. Like you can't know the first time, the first time you're skeptical, the second time you're a little bit curious and the third time you're experiencing it, and then you can decide. So the vagus nerve is actually in the center of our chest and the vagus nerve is connected to every single organ and gland in your

body except for your adrenals. And the reason why is because when you stimulate the vagus nerve, it's a natural relaxer in your body. You don't want to relax your adrenals because it's your fight or flight. And you need that to be on because if, you know, if someone breaks in your house, you don't need to be like totally relaxed you want to be instantly on so that's one thing second is is that the vagus nerve can be stimulated through rhythm and patterns so i did read an interesting study many years ago in new york that these doctors created a machine that they can for price, put into your body and you push a button and it will stimulate your vagus nerve. And I'm like, inside your body. Yes, inside your body. You can do this with your breath and with chanting. So all chanting.

Here's the thing is there's a difference between chanting and singing. Chanting has a steady rhythm. If you listen to the Gargarian chants, or if you're Catholic or Christian, it's a rhythm. There's a rhythm to the chanting. If you listen to Buddhist chanting, Hindu, Sikh, you know, yogic, it's, there's a rhythm to it. It's not singing. That rhythm stimulates your, your, your organs and your glands and specifically your, your organs and your glands is specifically your, your vagus nerve. When you stimulate the vagus nerve, it actually can lower inflammation of your body. Inflammation in your body causes depression and multiple other issues. So I go ahead. Did you want to say something? Just, I find this just so amazing because that's exactly what I experienced to be true,

but I wasn't chanting. So now I'm thinking as soon as we'd off the phone, I'm just going to go chant and chant and chant. I just want to feel better. I can tell you a couple of yoga exercises you could do every day that also helps us stimulate the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve, when you stimulate it, it helps with depression because you're lowering inflammation in your body. And it also calms you. It helps the parasympathetic nervous system to be more active. So I actually have a CD called Meditations for the Vagus Nerve. And there's eight of them, I think, on there. And they're all breath meditation.

So I know a lot of people do the inhale, exhale. I take it a step further. It actually sniffs. So it's a hold your breath, suspend your breath out. And I have music that goes, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru. So for you Christians out there in June, I'm coming out with a Christian meditation CD that will be in Latin and in English. So one of the ones I'm doing is actually called Let God's Will Be Done. And so it'll be in English and it will be in Latin for those of you who really just really feel connected to your Christian roots and belief system. But there is like that, that sniffing, it stimulates because your lungs hold grief. And so you're sniffing and you're slowly increasing the sniffs as you fill the

lungs, you hold your breath. And then you slowly exhale as you are emptying your lungs. And at the end, this is very important. You want to pull the navel, the belly button into the back of the spine on the exhale use. So you've completely exhaled all the CO2. You sit in that, in that space, and then you inhale again. And that will help. There's been a few nights where I can't say, cause it's so bad. And the only thing that would make me feel good and Jamie thought it was crazy, but the only thing that would make me feel good was to breathe like this over and over. And he thought I was like in agony. I was like, listen, it's making me feel better. It's not that I'm in that much pain right now. It's actually helping me just listening to my body that night, I was able to connect with what my,

I needed with my breath. And that wasn't, that's amazing. That's a perfect example. However, we're able to really truly just be present with our body. We might have the answers there on, on how we need to breathe or what we need to do. It's just a couple of yoga tips. These are things that help our lungs and help stimulate the vagus nerve. So I do these every single morning. So you put your hands and fists and you put your elbows to the side. You inhale, you put one arm out and exhale in and inhale other arm, exhale in. So you're going, so you're doing the breath and the movement. The movement works the lungs and your lymphatic system.

Because when you bring when you bring your elbow back, and you're pushing, punching it forward, your lymphatic systems being stimulated. And when Yeah, but do you want to say something? Is this similar to like, the Qigong and why they're bringing their arms in with the movements? It can be I've never done Qigong. But I know that when you do that movement, you're stretching your lungs. So what I tell people, yoga is meditation for your organs and glands. Meditation is meditation for your mind. Why does our world have it so backwards? It's like if you have a child, when your child gets to the age, why don't we teach them how to love themselves? Why do we not teach them how to love themselves? Why do we not

teach them how to breathe correctly? You know, when my boys were little, because you know, as mothers and fathers, not just mothers, Hey fathers, this is you as well. When our children are little, it is our job to, to soothe them, to soothe them when they're little, when they start becoming like past seven, this is when we're teaching them how to self-soothe. So when my children would be having a meltdown or being out of sorts, I should say to them, what do you need? Are you hungry? Do you need a hug? Do you need to sleep? Or do you got to poop? And they would be like, ah, and then I would hear, oh, I'm going to the bathroom or like, okay. And then someone, okay, I need a snack.

So when you start saying to your children, these are the things that help you self-soothe. You got to choose. I'm not in your body. You tell me. And then when they become adults, they have that tool inside of them. Well, you guys want to hear something really disturbing. What? Oh gosh.

In my family, we don't fart. The women in my family don't't fart and the women in my family don't hurt and you don't poop well okay we don't let me tell you tell people about it but i'm learning to fart i actually use this analogy a lot with clients to say emotions if you hold your emotions inside it's like holding your poop inside you will die i know it's the same it's like holding your poop inside, you will die. I know. It's the same. It's the same. Right. So there's a couple things. Again, I'm not a doctor or anything. But so one of the things is that, you know, aloe vera gel can be very soothing for your gut. Yeah. And also, you know, the yogis believe that our digestion is how we emotionally digest. So you could do some journaling of like, you know, what am I

holding on to? What am I not releasing? You got to let it rip. Recently I have been, my body has been detoxing a lot. I don't know how, I did not think this podcast was going to go towards a poop conversation, but here we go. We are doing it. We are doing it. We're talking about the shit literally that people normally don't want to talk about. There's this big shift energetically that has happened. And I feel like my body is going to be like this detox of stuff. Let that shake go. And so what you were saying before I thought of that, because it's interesting that that's happening. And I feel like my skin has cleared up all kinds of things. So do you believe that energy can affect what we're holding on to? A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Most mental health issues affect us physically.

It doesn't happen like the one day it's over years and years of like we were taught I can't be angry. That affects our body over years. If we were taught that anger is the only emotion that we can express. So anger affects the liver. If we were taught you can never cry, you can never feel sad or too sad. And we're always like wailing and always in drama, then that affects our kidneys and our bladder. Well, that's what I have. So this morning I found out I have kidney stones and so that's, yeah. So that's fear. So that's fear. Yeah. Fear to fart. I'm telling you, fear to fart. You know, we don't need our amygdala in the ways we originally did when we first were on earth. You know, we don't have tigers jumping out of us. We're not literally every day fighting for our

lives. Can you control this vagus nerve? Like, so that it's not overreacting, um, in ways that we don't need it to like we used to. Yeah. Well, it's not your vagus nerve. It's actually your mind. So that's why I tell people is, is that, you know, you were saying earlier, Shanna, that, that, you know, people have this misconception that meditation is silence and being in stillness. That's not what it is. It's not like people who've been meditating for 50, 30 years, if they can get you know 30 seconds of complete stillness of nothing that's a huge achievement it's not so here's the thing is is that there's the brain and there's the mind the mind cannot stop functioning the brain cannot

stop functioning or you would die so what meditation does is that it changes the quality of thoughts and the quantity of thoughts so over the period of time of meditation is you start creating these moments these pockets of stillness and your quality of thought so the quality of thoughts is what triggers your amygdala and also triggers your your vagus nerve and your glands, like your glands secrete into like, oh my, you know, like when you're driving and someone cuts you off and you're like, your, your, your amygdala is going fight, fight, freeze and, and, and your vagus nerve and your, and your adrenals and you're just going like, and, but it's not a cyber tooth tiger. It's over,

it's done. But people keep driving down the road and maybe talk to their co-pilot for five minutes. What a jerk that driver was. Who cares? That person does not even know you exist. Yeah. And so but what happens is that our mind, remember, thinks in polarities, right, wrong, good, bad, stop, go. We have to work on teaching the mind to serve our higher self, rather than that we're servants to the mind. And that's what meditation does, especially chanting. Right, it creates that space to be able to make that choice. Do you think that when it just like retrains your brain? It gives you a little bit. Yeah. I mean, that's the beauty is we can change at any time. We just have to want to, we have to be able to watch you. And the first step is, is to acknowledge, okay,

what I'm doing isn't working. And then, and then we go to, well, what am I doing? And then we go to, well, what meaning do I give to what I'm doing? And then we go to, where did I learn to put that meaning in what I do? And then we go to forgiving our inner child, forgiving our parent, letting it go, changing the patterns. Yeah. I think people are skipping all that because they're like, Ooh, I want to heal. I want to, I want what you have. I want to be spiritually, you know, able to connect and maybe like connect with Claire's and all this stuff, but they, they wanted to skip the whole healing part and go straight into the deep meditation, need a spirit guide. And I'm just like, wait, what? No, wait, hold on. I think. I think that when I was at the beginning stages, I wasn't even able to

look at myself. It was, I don't like what's happening. So how can I change this out here? So it was until I was brave enough to look in the mirror and connect with myself and know that that's where it started, that that shift and that change started. Yeah. You know, people come to me and I'm known as a no bullshit therapist. Like I have a full practice waiting list and I'm known, like, I don't like, I don't want to waste your time and money and I don't want to waste my time. And, and I'm known for that. And part of it is that sense of how do you stop to self-reflect? And sometimes we just don't know how, and that's okay. And this is why I love yoga, especially Kundalini yoga. It's really weird. It's different. It's birthed out of a weird cult, blah, blah, blah. But here's the thing is I've seen it change people and I've seen it help people learn how to feel like how to be in the moment.

We don't know how to do that. We're constantly next experience, next food, next wine, next sugar, next shopping, next sex, next person, next, next, next, next. Like we have a hundred thousand TV channels with all the different apps. Like it's just overstimulation. It's about coming back and being with yourself and sitting with your shit, you know, no pun intended. Or your heart. Oh my God, Shannon, you know who I keep feeling like I have to give a shout out to my grandma, Terry, my grandma used to always fart and talk about pooping and how important it was. And the more you fart, the healthier you are is what she'd always say. And, um, you know, it's, it's true. We're talking about it. It's true. Um, I love that you're a no bullshit therapist, um, because

you know, your, your time is valuable. Number one, but also our society has been trained to, I want what I want and I want it now. They want to skip the hard work, right? So it is very interesting and that you're right. We have not only forgotten to feel, but we've forgotten how to feel. Yeah. I also want to say that I love that, that you still use something because you know, it works. You don't care what it's called. I do the same. Like in my sessions, I can't stick to just one thing, one protocol that I learned in

a book. I know that certain things work and I'm going to add them in. They may, I don't even tell people, but I love how you do that because you're aligned with it. You know, you trust that. I know that this works. We get stuck on the language part that scares people away with certain things. You know, and part of that is just, unfortunately, the more education and growth of our society,

the more ignorant many have become. So it is that sense of, you know, how to be how to sit with ourselves and how to be with ourselves. And, you know, we're not taught that. And part of it is like, if you think of children, that awareness can happen really until their late 20s, because their brain isn't even fully developed. But you can plant seeds, you know, us as parents, you know, need to be consistent. And we have to do our own work. And it's never too late. It is absolutely never too late. Even if your children are grown or teenagers, you as parents, we take the responsibility to change, heal, and grow.

That will be a ripple effect to your children. They will see it. They will feel it. And they will learn from it. I love that. Let's talk about this book. Can we really have a stress-free brain? You can have a stress-free brain. It's about having a stress-free mind. So the brain is just an organ. You know, the brain's making our mouths talk. It's keeping us from falling over in our chairs. It's keeping our muscles tight. It's, you know, keeping us breathing. Our mind is what's focused right now on what we're doing. So like I said earlier, what the problem is with most people is A, they think that what they think is real.

And it's not. Like there's a quote by the Dalai Lama, don't believe everything you think. Second is your thoughts are often an interpretation of your reality around you. It's not fact. The fact is the door slammed. Me thinking my husband's pissed off at me is my interpretation it the wind could have done it it could he you know he might have had his earbuds in and had no idea you know he's busy in a conversation and didn't hear it but my interpretation is he's mad

at me and now I might spend an hour wondering why he's mad at me and now I'm getting my I'm revving up my glands and I'm maybe calling a girlfriend. I'm talking to her. And then it's like, really? So, so this being, you know, having a stressless brain, it's about the machine, having it operating on a level that supports our life. And then the chanting helps to deal, monitor, shift, change our thinking. We need this, Mandy. We need this. We all do. Oh gosh. Shanna told me before we got on with you,

she said, this is going to be great talking to you today. It has been,, we do just a quick chanting. Yeah, for sure. Oh my God. Thank you so much. I'm like ready to hear. Okay. Okay. So topic, how about internal conflict resolver? Oh yeah. So this is meditation to remove conflict. Now I would like to tell people this is not magic. It just works one time, but you're going to have an experience. If you want something to have a lasting, deep experience, you have to commit to it every day. It doesn't have to be like 22 minutes, which is what a lot of people say. You can do yeah, I need to take myself to a little longer because I want it because you're, you're, it's like your mind's catching up with what you're doing and now you got to go a little longer, but it's okay to start with a minute or three. So, so let's do three minutes. Does that sound good? Perfect. No, that's even more than enough. And I love how you said, try it three times, you know, take that chance and get curious and experience.

I love that. I wrote it down. Loved it. Okay, good. So your eyes are going to be closed and your eyes will be focused at your brow point. Take your hands and bring them into Venus lock. That means you interlace your fingers and you're going to put them at just at your center, right between your breasts below, which is where your vagus nerve is. Hold it there. And we're going to be chanting hummy hum, brum hum, which means we are we, we are one, or we are we, we are God. So I'm going to not speak when the music is playing,

so that you can hear the music. There'll be about a 30 second intro. And you're just going to breathe long and deep when the chanting starts, you will breathe when you need to. And it sounds like this. Hummy, hum, rum, hum. Really quick note. When you're doing the mm at the lips, that stimulates the vagus nerve as well. So come sitting, hands in Venus lock,

the center of your diaphragm area below your breast. Eyes are closed. Focus at your brow point, which is between your eyebrows, up an inch. That's the Ajna center, the center of intuition. Breathe comfortably. And when the chanting starts, you can join in or you can just listen, whatever feels comfortable for you. HUMMY HUM RAM HAM HUMMY HUM

RAM HAM HUMMY HUM RAM HAM brahm honey me Hummy hum, brum hum. Hummy hum, brum hum. Hummy hum, brum hum. Hummy hum, brum hum. Hami Ham Bramham Hami Ham Bramham Hami Ham brahm ham

Hami ham brahm ham Hami ham brahm ham Hummy hum, brum hum Hummy hum, brum hum Hummy hum, rum hum Hummy hum, rum hum Hummy hum, rum hum Hummy hum, rum hum HUMMY HUM BRAM HUM HUMMY HUM BRAM HUM HUMMY HUM BRAM HUM Bramham amazing i feel like super tingly all over my whole body almost like whoa

i'm about to levitate you might see my head go up. I love that you offer so much gifted to people. That's what I love about our guests too. I mean, you guys dump your souls into this work and then you're like, here, I'm going to gift it to you. Grab my book and you get 37 free digital downloads, but there's more. If you go to SoundCloud and you find me, all my meditations, all of them, three minutes is always free.

And the instructions are on my website. Was that really only, was that really three minutes? That was three minutes. What? I love how time is just not even a thing. Thank you for keeping it simple too. Because, you know, as humans, we already complicate and overthink everything, right? So it was easy for me. I was very present with the vibration of my lips.

What was that? Brahmam means we are we, we are God, or we are we, we are one with everything. The yogis believe that we are, you know, we're part of everything. And that I have to give the analogy of if you think of all the beaches in the world, we're each a little kernel of sand, we're one. But all of us together, we're, we're a big beach, and that's why, you know, when you have lots of people doing a march or creating a movement, it creates change because we're all connected. But sometimes the one little kernel is kind of hard to do. But when you meditate, we're connecting to like the three of us were connected.

And whoever's listening, if they did it with us, even though they're somewhere in the world, they're still connected to the three of us. It was interesting. So Shanna and I, you know, both are Reiki practitioners. And I felt the first thing that came to mind was that all my chakras were being balanced. Thank you. Where can people find your book? So they can find it obviously on Amazon and Barnes and Noble everywhere. It's half the price on my website and I do free shipping in the U S so I encourage people to, to come to my website and purchase it right now. I just released

my audio book. So it's me reading my whole book. And I'm going to tell you that was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but that's, that's coming. That's out. It's on my website. It's coming to audible. So I'm not sure when that will be. Well, I'm going to definitely get that because I am all about Audible. I clean my house and listen. It's amazing. The nice thing with the book, the Audible book is when you get to the meditation section, you can hear the instructions and you can choose to stop.

And then it has the whole 11 minutes right in the audio book. So if you're cleaning, you'll just listen and you can listen, or you just skip that chapter and go to the next one. So it's right in there and it's all like embedded and such. So. All right. So we do this thing and it's so perfectly aligns with the topic of poop. We do this thing at the end of our podcast called break that shit down. And that's hopefully what we did for Shanna's digestive system today. And now it's time for break that shit down.

Nobody can make you feel how you're feeling. You have to be able to stop so you can reflect, so you can correct. Like that. That's a good one. Reflect and correct. Yeah. If you cannot see what you're doing, you can't change it. I mean, because you're not even aware but if you're like wow I just snapped at so-and-so if you're like oh I just snapped at someone then you can you then you're aware and then you can be like okay what was that about what

and then this is the big thing. What are you making up in your head? What's your interpretation? Yeah. Another thing that I saw that you quoted that I just want to throw out there because I have it on my notes because I loved it so much. You said breathing keeps you alive. Meditation keeps you sane. Yeah. Maybe I'll leave you with one very, one of my most favorite stories about my son. So this is when he was probably eight years old and he's my older son. We're driving in the car and he's having a complete come apart meltdown. And I'm trying, you know, I'm trying to manage him. You know, that's what we try, you know, good, bad. We're trying to manage our children and I'm trying to talk them out of it, distract him saying we're almost home ignore him and threaten him right the more you know and he's escalating and I'm just like driving trying not to lose it so I start chanting so I'm driving

in my car and I'm chanting out loud because he's just losing it in the back and I'm just chanting like I'm going and he's like stop chanting and I said I'm chanting for me, dead silence in the car. And my son goes, mama, will you chant for me too? And the whole energy instantly changed. I chanted maybe for 30 seconds and the whole energy changed in that car. And we were done. He was done with the meltdown. And I said, of course, and I started chanting for him. And for me, like, like, that's the thing is, is that chanting and meditation or singing hymns or Bible verses, or, you know, again, affirmations, okay, good, but they got to in different language or something that our mind gets too hooked with our mother tongue language, but there's something that changes in us and helps us to let go of our hooks and our stuckness. That's a beautiful story. Yeah. You have been

amazing. Thank you so much. You two are so much fun. I want to hang out with you all the time. Come to Denver. Come see us. I woke up and had a rough morning. You have lifted my spirits with your high vibrational love. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you, Shanna. And I just really enjoyed the two of you and have a wonderful day and other listeners. Thank you. Thank you. You were just what the doctor ordered. 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.