Sense of Soul - Finding Peace Within in the Midst of World Chaos

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Today on Sense of Soul Podcast joining Shanna from Australia, Jem Fuller. He is an award winning author, TEDx speaker, Leadership Coach and international Retreat Facilitator. Jem is a trusted coach and mentor for senior leaders across government, private and not-for-profit sectors. He specializes in conscious leadership, communication and culture. Watch his TEDx talk. 
Throughout his wonderfully colourful and varied life around the world, Jem has been on a mission to explore, understand, connect and communicate with people from all walks of life and cultural backgrounds. Over the last 20 years of leadership, coaching and facilitation, Jem has been sharing strategies that improve the way we think, focus, act and communicate; profoundly enhancing individuals His first published book, The Art of Conscious Communication for Thoughtful Men, focusses on improving the ability for men to access their emotions, allow more vulnerability, and deepen their relationships both personally and professionally. Jem is a leadership coach, author and speaker, working with executive and senior leaders across government, private and not-for-profit sectors. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.  You can find his book and learn more at www.jemfuller.com Check out www.senseofsoulpodcast.com

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, I have with me Jim Fuller. He is an award-winning author, a TEDx speaker, a leadership coach, and international retreat facilitator. Jem is

a trusted coach and mentor for senior leaders across government, private, and non-for-profit sectors. He specializes in conscious leadership, communication, and culture. Jim is the author of The Art of Consciousness Communication for Thoughtful Men, which focuses on improving the ability for men to access their emotions, allow more vulnerability, and deepen their relationships both personally and professionally. And this is just his first publishing of The Art of Communication, where he is creating a series for not just men, but for also women and couples. Gem was recommended by a prior guest, Chad E. Foster, who I had on years ago, the author of Blind Ambition, who himself has an amazing story of going blind in college and

turning his pain into purpose, pursuing his success with blind ambition. An episode you should definitely check out. But today, joining me from Australia, Gem Fuller. Hello. Hey, Shanna. Hey. Where do you live? I live in Colorado. Wow. So you're surrounded by beautiful mountains. I'm in the plains, but a very high part of the plains. So I see the

entire mountain range from one side of the state to the other. Amazing. And I'm about 30 minutes from the foothills. And do you love nature? I do love nature. I love nature i love nature it's my daily practice in my backyard you know with the birds and the trees and nature has been my one of my greatest teachers yeah however there definitely was a time where you know as i think as most children are so connected to nature and then there's a place where I was like I could not connect with my younger self and I was afraid of wildlife and trying to return back to my childhood self. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More conscious and connected with nature.

Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, I love nature. yeah so we live well we live on a farm but we live on the coast so the ocean and the horizon of the ocean you know so as you were saying you can see that the whole mountain range so we can see the horizon all the way around from the ocean and we have waves sometimes the waves are big and scary and sometimes they're a fun size to surf so melbourne is the nearest city to us we're about an hour and a half drive away from the city and we live in a small little surfing town our local beach is called bell's beach which kind of got famous in the Patrick Swayze movie Point Break. It was the famous Australian beach that he went to at the end.

Oh, yeah. But the World Surf Tour, so Kelly Slater and all the world surfers, although he's retired now, they come to our local town every year on the surf tour. Yeah, so I love nature. And then my partner Talia and I take people to the Himalayan mountains in India each year. We used to before COVID, then COVID came and we had to stop, but this year we're going back in September. So we love the mountains as well. Very much. Do you do like a retreat there? Yeah. Yep. Oh my gosh. I bet that's amazing.

Yeah. Well, I'm going to live vicariously through your journey today. Yeah, beautiful. And so how do you know Chad? We got introduced through an Australian man called Juergen. And Juergen is one of these people who creates global networks of people, just cool people. And part of what he does is he just introduces good people to good people. And so I meet a lot of people around the world and, you know, out of all the people I meet, a lot of them, you have a nice conversation and then you never speak to each other ever again. That's fine. And then some of them you just fully connect with and you

become friends and you stay in touch. And Chad was one of those. We met the first time we met each other, our Zoom time together just went so quickly. At the end of it, we were like, dude, we need more time. Really? So we booked in more time and we just connected again more deeply. And since then, we've just been introducing each other to our networks. So I've introduced him to a whole bunch of super cool people and he's been introducing me to super cool people.

And so here we are. I get to meet you. Yeah. Chad's what an amazing guy, huh? Incredible. Incredible. Yeah. His story was so inspiring.

Yeah. He's great. Great, great, great guy. And tell me a bit about your story. I've been on this journey for about a decade. Everything I was doing in my life was based on everyone else's dreams and beliefs. And I'm a mom of four. But never had I ever thought that I could think outside of that condition box.

I was told to stay within that box box and I was a pretty good girl. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I'm very defiant. Very defiant. And ancestry is a huge part of my journey. Huge. What is your ancestry? Yeah, it's very, very complicated.

So I am French Creole. Uh-huh. So I'm French Creole. So what that means is that my ancestors are of masters and slaves. Really? I'm also Cajun, French Cajun. So my ancestors were from Canada. So my family has been here since the late 1600s. Well, my Louisiana lineage and got all kinds of crazy stuff in my tree, all kinds of amazing history. But what I learned was really who I was through that because this was denied. So almost every lineage had denied who they were. Uh-huh.

Mm-hmm. So it was really hard for me to find him. It was like my family was in the witness protection program. And so I got really good at it. And since that I've helped like 200 people or more with their trees. It is so fascinating because you learn so much about yourself. And my dad's family is from Czech Republic, and he's only like third generation here. And I learned that his family had denied ever telling anybody that they were Jewish. So I was nothing that I thought I was.

So it's very, I mean, people were denying their culture out of fear, but yet still carrying down that trauma through the dna yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and not only the trauma but because of having to or feeling like they had to hide it so that they could survive or have some social standing then there's the trauma but there's also the suppression and the shame yeah i can't even imagine you know living that way and I think that many cultures did and you know it's funny as I would have been considered black yeah like not long ago and I wouldn't have been able to marry outside of my race yeah yeah it would have been illegal for me to marry someone white now isn't that insane oh the whole thing all of that's insane. Saying

what people can and can't do based on the color of their skin to me is completely insane. It doesn't make any sense. It's like saying, because of the color of your eyes, you can or can't marry that person because you've got blue eyes and they've got brown eyes. It's all saying that person's got red hair or that person's got blonde hair, so they can't marry. It's the same. That person has this color skin or that color skin. It not make any sense to me you know at all and I remember um in 1998 I was sitting on a bus a public bus in northern Pakistan I was traveling and I was sitting and it was just after this is so this is 1998 so this is before 9-11 right but it was just after there'd been an attack on the American embassy in Africa and Osama bin Laden claimed it he said yeah we did that and so then the American government at

the time in 1998 was sending cruise missiles into Pakistan to try and kill Osama bin Laden this is before before and I happened to be there as a backpacker hippie just traveling around the world and I was in Pakistan anyway I was there when they declared when they declared jihad when they said right war is on oh wow I was on a bus with a university student a Pakistani Muslim devout Muslim university student he was a bit younger than me but he spoke English because he was studying at university and we were connecting and talking and having we had a really lovely connection and he said one thing to me that just it just made so much sense and he said to me if we cut your skin here and we cut my skin here we have the same color blood yeah and he looked me in the eyes and he said we're the same you and me

we're the same we just got brought up with different ideas different ways to worship different ideas of how to connect with spirituality different ideas of how to cook food different languages on how to communicate love but we're essentially the same. And that was just so true, you know. And, yeah, it upsets me when I see humans locked in fear because whenever someone is opposed to someone else, it's only coming from fear. Yeah. Every, yes.

And it's a shame because when we come from love, there's no need. We don't need to kill each other we really don't anymore you know i understand in in years gone by when there was scarcity and we had to fight for resource and fight for land and fight for blah blah blah i understand that but it doesn't need to be like that anymore if we could all come from love and i know this sound i sound like a hippie i know but if we could really come from love there's enough resource right i think if you can understand like that man had said that we're all the same yeah yeah yeah i talk about it in my tedx talk i talked to him yeah i was so good i loved it yeah I listened to it twice I listened to it when you first came through and then I listened to it again today it's very good you

know you're so right though and I feel like with awareness and and that's what happened to me because for sure I saw as a Christian growing up is separation. You know, this is what I was taught. I was taught separation. But, you know, if I went through my life not knowing those stories, I feel like I just would have stayed in line with all of the conditions that were prior to me. But once I became conscious to it, and I realized, wait a minute, we are all the same.

We just have different, like that guy said, we have different beliefs in different ways and different cultures. So I feel like this is the most important thing that needs to be done right now. We need to vote in conscious leaders, but learn to communicate in different cultures. So I feel like this is the most important thing that needs to be done right now. We need to vote in conscious leaders, but learn to communicate coming from a place of compassion and love. It's all about power.

It's all about ego. It's all about my bomb's bigger than your bomb. Yeah, and it's a systemic problem. It's the system, the political and power structures. It's the system that's a problem because you can't get to being in a position of power without succumbing to all of the ego and the fighting and the war and the power struggles. And it's a patriarchal system. It is.

Which is a system of dominance. And even for females to be successful's a patriarchal system. It is. Which is a system of dominance. And even for females to be successful in the patriarchal system, they have to play that game. It's a game of dominance. It doesn't matter whether you're male or female or however you identify, whatever gender you identify with, that doesn't matter. If you want to be successful in the current system, it's a dominance system.

You have to dominate other people, it's a dominance system. You have to dominate other people. And that's the problem. And for us to change, and I really hope this happens, and I'm meeting a lot of people like you who get this and are doing what you can. Just the fact that you produce a podcast is you doing what you can to try and have these conversations and share them but what needs to happen is that there needs to be the tip

of the balance the swing of the pendulum back to a more feminine earth mother wisdom which is a human-centric connectedness it's a more intuitive spiritual it's less logical and get a result and win a war thing it's it's more of a it's hard to describe but you know what i'm talking about when you have disagreement that's okay but doesn't mean you need to kill each other means we need to figure out how to communicate more effectively you know it means we need to we need to remember that we are of this earth we're not the rulers we're not the dominant species. It's not our earth to rape and pillage. We are of the land.

We need to come back to a First Nations Indigenous vibration with being a part of nature and have the humility to go, we're of this and what can we do to serve the greater good, the Mother Earth, the universe, each other? We should be coming from a place of service, not of trying to control, you know. And I know this is a big ask because humanity as a species has been dominating and raping and pillaging the Earth

ever since Homo sapiens started to do their thing. But I really hope that we are evolving and I really hope that we are, that consciousness is raising to higher levels of vibration but i really hope that we are evolving and i really hope that we are that consciousness is raising to higher levels of vibration i really hope i mean i know people like you and me and our communities are and i just hope that that becomes more and more and and yeah i hope anyway i'm an optimist i can't i can't help but hope that we will go the right way you know i mean i look at my children, right? They're way less conditioned than I am.

And I actually have kids from almost three generations. Yeah. I mean, they're just getting more conscious and more conscious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, and they'll never, ever put up with that. I mean, they care about the earth. I mean, I've had my youngest child cry over stuff. I've never even heard of,

you know, that's going on around the world. How old are your kids, Shanna? Oh, so my, I have a daughter just turned 25 today, but she's not my second child.

You do not look old enough to have a 25 year old. Yeah. I have, I have, my oldest son's going to be 27 and I have a 20 and then I have a gen alpha. No way. Oh my Lord. Did you start having kids when you were 10 or something? No, I was in my twenties. Wow. Amazing. You, you look, you look way younger than you are, but you have the wisdom of someone older than you are,

I'm sure. Well, good genes. Yeah, good genes. All the way from all those different places. All over the world. Pagin and Czech and everywhere. But yeah, you are so right though. And I think that there is this great awakening though. And if it was happening prior, maybe it it was but i do know that there was no way anyone was speaking on it like we are able to today able to today and this is where technology is helpful you know and i understand that there's um you know there's some pretty scary experiments

that are happening without us even being aware of it well where some people are aware of it but it's without any guidelines. You know, the whole social media experiment that we're running on ourselves, there's no guidelines there. And now the AI experiment that's happening, there's not enough guidelines. So we'll see what happens with all of that. However, it's not all bad. You and I wouldn't have been able to have this conversation so easily in the past.

And here we are, and we can talk about important things and share them them and then lots of people can hear and listen and evolve their way of thinking which evolves their way of communicating which evolves their relationships so evolution in the right direction is way more possible than ever before there can be these global conversations and it's funny you know shanna over the few years, I've been having lots of conversations like this with lots of people. And it's been heartening for me. It's been making me feel a little bit more optimistic because there are a lot of people that get this and are raising their vibration and their level of consciousness. It is happening. So when I, I mean, I don't watch mainstream news.

I haven't consumed mainstream news. I haven't consumed mainstream news for, wow, almost 30 years now. I still know what's going on around the world, but I'm very selective around where I consume news from. And it's getting harder to do because there's so much fake news, but I know the bigger things that are going on in the world and I know how upsetting they are. But for me to operate on a day-to-day basis and be the best father that I can be and be the best husband that I can be and brother and son and coach and leader, for me to be the best version of me, I have to focus on the positives. I have to focus on the hopeful side of things. I have to focus on what we can do, not what we can't do.

I have to meditate every day. I have to continually practice coming from a place of equanimity, which is a calm centre, to do my best, to do what I can do, you know, and that gives me hope. So I do love my life. I really do, even though I see stuff around the world that's very upsetting. I mean, violence upsets me,

really upsets me. So when I see people not only killing each other, but doing it in really horrible ways, it's deeply upsetting. So then I just have to come back and meditate, come back to a place of love, look at where I can contribute. Who can I help? Who can I hold? Who can I hug? Who can I help them live their life in a little bit of a better way? That's all we can do, right? Yep. However, you know, big or small, absolutely. I had saw a while back, Jimmy Carter, who was president, I think when I was little, he said, we will never be able to make peace by killing each other's children. Yeah, right. The only thing I can connect to is the ancestral part of the land.

Yeah. And I think that that's one thing that I don't think Americans quite get. So when you were going over to other people's land, you know, we so came and took the land from the natives here yep and never mentioned it really again yeah yeah yeah oh you should see the state of things in australia it's incredibly it's it's embarrassing to even feel that i'm a part of it and i mean i i grew up here i wasn't born here but I grew up here and I feel a real connection to country they call the land here country I feel a real connection to country here

and I the parts of being Australian that I feel proud of is that we are super multicultural we've got people here from all around the world and we've got one of the oldest single indigenous race of people on the planet i mean the the australian aboriginals here they they trace their lineage back 60 to 100 000 years of them being on this continent wow yeah it's the oldest indigenous race but the way that the i'm gonna i going to group everyone who's not First Nations, I'm going to group everyone and call them whitefella, but it's not. I mean, whitefella in Australia is now every culture from around the world. But all the people who've only been here for just a couple of hundred years,

that culture, it was complete genocide when they came here, like just 100% genocide and and still to this day there hasn't been the reparation there still hasn't been the appropriate apologies or recognitions and you know we've been making steps forward a little bit but really it's just so embarrassing i mean we we tried to have a referendum here just last year just so that the first nations people could have a voice not that they could tell the government what to year just so that the first nations people could have a voice not that they could tell the government what to do just so that they could have a voice in parliament and say this is what we think on certain issues it got turned down it got voted no

not even just to give them a voice not just a voice in parliament just to say, hey, this is what we think about this issue or that issue or whatever, you know. Who manned that land for thousands and thousands of years. Oh, yeah, 60 to 100,000 years, you know. And it's crazy to think that we've come in with all the answers, that we wouldn't come in and go, wow, you've been living here for 60 to 100,000 years. Surely we can learn something from you. Surely you understand this land, Mother Nature. Surely you understand her better than we could ever pretend to. Yeah.

How do we save her? We're looking to do different because what we've been doing has just been damaging and isn't working. Yeah, yeah. So now we're looking to the people that we took over their land for the answers. We're pulling in their practices. Finally. I hope it's not too late.

I know. It's so disturbing. I found with my journey that, for instance, when I got healthy and I started to make boundaries for me, then I started to notice in my house, things shifted. And so as I got healthier, everything around me got healthy too. My children started to pick up different things and they changed because I changed. And this even extended to my elders too. I mean, through my ancestry, my mother and her family who were older than me, who were very hard, those baby boomers and the silent generations.

But even through that journey and speaking with them, they changed a little, a lot actually on a lot of things. Yeah. they changed a little a lot actually on a lot of things yeah so i thought it was amazing because how i saw and how i see healing it's like if i heal it's going to then have this ripple effect outside to the world so i've always been that person that wanted to save the world i really do if i could i would yeah yeah yeah i'd put on my wonder woman outfit and get my lasso and yeah I can't so I know that just working on myself just working on me yep is actually enough yep and that's what you know wise people have known and tried to share with us for a long time Buddha that's what Buddha was saying.

So the Dalai Lama says today. And when I first started to experience what you shared then about when I did my own internal healing, my external world changed and the people in my external world seemed to change as well. And when I experienced that properly for the first time, for me too, it was miraculous to begin with. It was like, wow, this is a miracle. And then since I've been contemplating and practicing and meditating on this and teaching this through my work, now it makes a lot of sense to me. It makes a lot of sense to me. And it's still a beautiful miracle, so to speak, and there's still some mystery, some

beautiful mystery always but but i understand how it works more and more you know because our experience of life and internally and externally our whole experience of everything we can only understand it in our mind right so we there's all this information available to us around us from our environment. And so there's things we can see or hear or touch or taste or even energetically that we can experience. And so we receive all of this information from around us. And we project this information in this beautiful hallucination inside our mind so we have some idea of how we think things are going on. And the quality of our mind flavors our experience of life.

You know, very simply, I mean, just say you're in a really terrible mood. You just got some really bad news and your state of mind is really negative and dark and you walk outside the environment around you seems negative and dark just say it was raining on that day to you it was it'd be cold and wet and raining and horrible and you'd be like oh my god everything's going wrong this day right but if you had been in a different state of mind so just say you'd had some wonderful news like a dear friend of you yours just called you up and said they just had their baby and they had a beautiful, healthy baby. And you were like, oh my God, I love life. Life's amazing. Your state of mind is different. You walk out into the same day. It's exactly the same outside, the rain and everything. And to you, it's beautiful. And you're

like, I'm singing in the rain. What a beautiful day, I love love. It's all different because of your state of mind. So if we can curate, rather than just being a passenger or a victim to what goes on, if we can curate our state of mind, then we can curate our experience of life. And so then what we project outwards, not just what we receive inwards, what we perceive, but what we perceive but what we project and what we perceive are the same thing so we start to perceive and project life in a different way and so the version of your child that you're looking at becomes more beautiful and they respond to that because they feel seen in a more beautiful way so they become a more beautiful person because

of the way that you're perceiving them, which means the way you're projecting them. And it's all symbiotic. It's all interlinked. And it's so beautiful. And for anyone who feels stuck in really hard times, and I remember oh so clearly what that's like, because it feels like it was just the other day when I was at rock, rock bottom and stuck. And it was like you, it was just over 10 years ago. For people who are there now, if you can just hear one thing, you don't have to stay stuck there forever. And the key to unlocking the door to your liberation from suffering is in the way that you are with yourself, the way you treat yourself, because it starts with you. Start loving yourself proper.

Start practicing radical self-acceptance. Start a daily practice of self-love and self-okayness, and you start to change the quality of your relationship with yourself, which is the quality of your mind, and the outside world starts to change. And I love that that's possible because it means we're not victims. We don't have to stay stuck. We can create a sense of liberation and freedom and a beautiful life. So true. I'm going to hang on those words because also I think that loving without conditions, we say unconditional love as long as you can fit in those jeans or as long as this or that, as long as you're getting good grades. There's all of these expectations and conditions. Yeah. You know, and I love, I don't know if you've come across Byron Katie's work.

So Byron Katie, her book called Loving What Is was the first of her books. Anyway, I love what she says about reality and how when you come back to reality and stop arguing with reality because reality will always win if you argue with reality reality is always going to win 100 of the time and so i love this and where i've taken this in my own self-contemplation is that when i look at myself in the mirror and i and you you hear those thoughts of if only I was a bit skinnier or a bit taller or a bit stronger or a bit this or a bit that or whatever, all those thoughts. And then you look at yourself and you say, all right, well, let's come to reality for a second. If I could take a snapshot,

if I could freeze frame time right now, reality me i am exactly exactly precisely who i should be right now apparently because here i am so the way i am in this moment right now not in the future when i've evolved a bit not in the partner right now apparently i'm exactly who i'm supposed to be wow oh my god that's so nice to know i'm exactly the way i'm supposed to be. Wow. Oh my God, that's so nice to know. I'm exactly the way I'm supposed to be with all my bits and bobs, with all my quirks, all my this and that and all of it. Apparently it's how I'm supposed to be. So I'm going to go radical, radical self-acceptance and I'm going to look myself in the eyes, in the mirror and go, hey, Gem, I love you just the way you are in this moment. Now, I'm not saying that I don't want to keep improving and getting better and yada yada

and becoming more conscious and that's all fine in the future. But right now I look myself in the mirror and go, hey, just the way you are, unconditional love. And I say it out loud. And when I first started this mirror work, you know, more than. And I say it out loud. And when I first started this mirror work, you know, more than 10 years ago, it felt so weird. I was looking at myself in the mirror going, oh my God, you're crazy. This is stupid. What are you doing? You're crazy, just the way you are right now. Yeah, right. And I used to do it and I would be like,

don't tell anyone you do this. They might think you're crazy, but now I don't mind sharing that I do it because I know that it helps. Yeah, it does. That self-talk. I mean, actually, I think one of the things most importantly is to listen because I tell you what, that was what kind of was the catalyst of my journey. I got tricked into my journey through mindfulness and I listened to myself. And I listened to myself talking shit like nobody would have ever talked to me. And in that moment, I realized I had a voice that was very loud. And I had this other aspect of myself that was listening. What really came up for me was I would never tell my daughters the things I was telling myself. And why should we be so horrible to ourself and not to anyone else?

Why would I deserve to be spoken to so horribly when my children don't or I don't believe anyone does. So why am I different to anyone? This is all the thinkings that I've been through. Why am I so different to anyone else in my life that I deserve to talk to myself in that way? It's like, wow, that's crazy. You know, I'm just as innocent, so to speak, as anybody else. I was just born.

Here I am trying to figure it out, trying my best, making mistakes, tripping over, getting back up again, trying to figure it out, having kids, trying to be the best dad I can be, sometimes making big mistakes there as well and just trying to figure it all out. It's like, hey, cut yourself some slack. Yeah. You know, I wrote a book on conscious communication in the pandemic. And now I'm very, very grateful to Mango Publishing in Florida. They picked me up and signed me as an author. And they're about to re-release my book again in the States. And then I'm writing a series of books on conscious communication. And in the book,

the first of the four parts of the book, it starts with you. And I talk about how the quality of the words that you use when you're talking to yourself. So when you get out of the shower and you're looking at yourself naked in the mirror, start to pay attention to the quality of those words. Like you were saying, Shanna, when you went to that mindfulness class and you start to become aware of that voice and the choice of words that you're using, we are abusive to ourselves when we're not checking it. And just shift out the quality of those words. I'm not saying you can't still hold yourself to some sort of standard. If you still have an idea of you want to live by your values and you aspire to be a certain type of person, and one day, I don't know, maybe you're sleep deprived,

you've been up all night with your baby or you're tired or something went wrong at work or you're not in your best state, and then someone does something to you and you snap and you behave in a way that you're not proud of. And then afterwards, you want to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and you want to say, hey, come on, you can be better than that. Rather than being abusive and going, you blah, blah, blah. I'm going to insert here cuss words, right? Rather than doing that, you can still hold yourself to a standard, but do it the way you would coach one of your kids. Hey, come on, sweetheart. You can do better than that. I believe in you. You know you can. Come on, pick yourself back up again.

Do you know what I mean? So we can still hold ourselves to a standard, but just do it positively. Absolutely. I can show you pictures from like eight, nine years ago where I looked much older. I'm not even joking. I was like sunken in and very skinny and just not look good at all. I have been embracing the crone. I connected with with that wisdom within me that comes with age. And with this also comes a place of solitude and of peace and just a place I have never been. And I'm enjoying it and I'm embracing it. I'm not rejecting it. And so I think that you're right. It's just a shift though in my mind i could have easily said oh my god i gotta dye my hair until you know it falls out yeah i need to change my my body my face and all of these things but old is not ugly older is wiser it It's wiser. And you know what? My grandmas were beautiful. Yeah.

No matter how hard you try and stay young, no matter how hard you try and stay a certain age, you ain't going to win that battle. It's not going to happen. You're fighting the universe, you know, and the universe is this expanding, evolving thing. We have this perception of time. But when you accept it it's like this beautiful connection with a part of you that you've never met before kind of you just made me

think that if you resist aging then as you age you're going to do so not so gracefully it's going to hurt you're going to maybe not do you're not going to be very healthy. And in your last 20 years, you're going to be hobbling around in pain, perhaps, right? But if you embrace it with the love and the wisdom that you're talking about, maybe you will age beautifully and you'll still be in your 80s and 90s physically and mentally beautifully happy. It was actually the moon that taught me this. So when i said that

nature's been my greatest teacher yeah so as you become more conscious right uh which the name of your book the art of conscious communication i had this i had this experience where i always hated the new moon i just feel it you know i'm affected by it so i'd say is it a new moon. I just feel it, you know, I'm affected by it. So I'd say, is it a new moon? And it would be, you know, and so then I had it in my head, new moons are bad for me. So I'm in Colorado, so it's cold. And I, it was one morning and there was like cars being broken into. So, and you're not allowed to anyways, sit with your car on, you know, but it was so cold. You had to heat it up. So I'm sitting on the porch and I look up and I see there's this new moon and it's like one of those like wishbone moons sliver. I even looked up and I said, well, what are you good for? You know, I like the full moon, the full moon just makes me

howl and I feel the energy and I love it. It was really cold that morning so I could see my breath and all of a sudden she spoke to me. I think my daughter was late to school because I was writing and writing and writing. But she said to me, even though you can't see all of me, just like your breath, you can't always see your breath but you know it's there and you can only see one side of me this is only from your perspective yeah yeah yeah right and you may no longer be curved and slender like the maiden and this was the maiden moon uh-huh but she's always a part of you like you are always whole and so am i yeah yeah yeah yeah i love and it was the i didn't even know what moon it was but then i looked to see it was actually the maiden moon and the mother moon is the full moon which i've been in for so long yeah it it was seriously like was communicating

with me but the thing is is how many times has nature done that a million times probably nature's nature is always communicating it's just that we're not receiving we're not we're not hearing not conscious we're not awake most of the, most of us are asleep, locked in our ego or our survival or whatever it is. And, you know, Mother Nature, the universe, she's just there the whole time singing us love and wisdom. It's always there. But most of my life, I've ran. I mean, I've always been that busy, busy, busy, busy person. And I felt that, and I know a lot of people do, that if you're not busy and you're just, there's nothing to do,

you find something. So it's all about to seek chaos. Yeah, because if you're not busy doing something, you're wasting your life or you're wasting time or you're not going to be successful or you're not going to yada, yada, all of that conditioning that we were talking about. This is one of the main reasons why I love running the retreats that we run in the Himalaya in India but also in the remote northern jungles of Bali and I've also run retreats in the deserts of Australia and the reason that I love running these retreats in this

remote remote stunning beautiful nature is, so for example, where we go in the Himalayan mountains, we take our clients trekking away from everybody else. There's no people where we go. We've got pack horses carrying all of our supplies, the tents and the food. I've got my local brothers over there who are mountain men. They know the mountains back to front.

And we go off the grid. Your phone doesn't work. We're off the grid. And the mountains are to front. And we go off the grid. Your phone doesn't work. We're off the grid. And the mountains are so big, Shanna. I cannot explain how big they are. Well, they're the biggest mountains in the world. And they are. And energetically, Mother Nature, you can't ignore her.

You can't be switched off to her. You can't hide with your phone. You can't distract yourself with your phone or your work or your car or your thing because there's none of that there and all you can do is just sit in this majestic ridiculously large mother nature energy and you can't not hear her it's just stunning and i watch all of my clients just and one of the days when we're trekking and it's my favorite day of the program. I'm kind of giving away a little bit of a secret of the program if anyone wants to come, but it'll still be amazing for you.

In the morning when we're standing around the fire, eating our porridge, drinking our chai, getting ready for the day, I say to our clients just two things. Today, we spend the day in silence so there's no talking today that's the first thing and then i say to them and the second thing is today we walk slowly like really slowly and they were like okay and we start walking we walk so slowly shanna that if you flew over us in a helicopter, you'd think we were standing still. That's how slowly we walk.

Most of our clients are Westerners. And I can see their minds going, I can't do this all day. I can't do this all day. We'll never get anywhere. We're not going to get to the top. How do we get to the top? And I see their minds going, oh, no, oh, no. And then one by one, usually within the first hour of walking in the day,

and we're walking all day, their minds kind of just like pop through. And it's like they break on through to this meditative state. And we go into this beautiful walking meditation throughout the day. And then when we get to the end of that day and we're gathering firewood around the campsite to start making the fire and cook our dinner. And then I bring language back into the group again so we haven't been speaking all day. And every single person, and I've taken over 100 people on this program now, every single person comes up to me

in their own way and says, Gem, today was the most profound day of my life you know and that's when i'm just on the inside doing my biggest happy dance ever because that's me going oh my god i'm living my best life that's me that's the my favorite part of the work that i do um and it's just really quite incredible so you got me onto this beautiful tangent because of nature is, nature is, she's there whispering to us always. And when we open to her, the whisper becomes this beautiful, loud song. You know, for the longest time,

the moon was one of the only living things that I felt I could be really, truly vulnerable with. You know, because growing up, I mean, I was like, don't tell people your business. It's a bad thing. And then my best friend, who is like the most vulnerable person I've ever met in my life, maybe sharing too much. But, you know, she taught me that is through that vulnerability that we connect and so you you're pretty vulnerable I can tell you know you look like you're an open book I am I am but I'm like but like you I wasn't before I kept my my vulnerability

I kept it very very pushed down deep inside and my anxieties and my struggles and my shame, you know, under a thick blanket of shame, you know, and that didn't work out well for me. And thankfully I had my midlife kind of awakening slash opportunity, which most people call a midlife crisis. And I'm very glad that I had that and lost everything except my two sons, thankfully, but everything else. And then began the, you know, the chapter that I've been in now for about 12 years. And a big part of it has been vulnerability and sharing because we can't heal if we don't share.

And now I'm completely an open book and it was interesting when my publisher, my first publisher said, right, your book's ready to go. We're about to release it to the world. And I hadn't even really thought about how open I'd been in there and how vulnerable I'd been in there. And they said, right, it's gone to print and it's out. And we sold a couple of thousand copies right off the bat.

And then I remembered how open I'd been in there. And I was like, wow, Gem, you just took your deepest, darkest, what used to be your most shameful, shameful stuff, and you've just shared it openly. And I went, wow. And there was a liberation in that. And so now my life, the stories of my life from the past, they serve a purpose. And that purpose is for me to try and help other people. I loved the name of your book because I feel like it's the most important two things, consciousness and communication. And it's, you know, oftentimes

we think about communication is with others and we talked a little bit about that but i think the journey is inward it starts inward yeah yeah yeah yeah it does it has to because no matter how much you go outward and try and and do good work you know just say for example you want to try and do something to make the lives of others better in some way if you have an internal world of unresolved trauma or you're still hanging on to stuff from the past and you and you're not okay with yourself which means you're not okay with your past that's a lot of static in here in your mind when you do it when you've got a an internal world that's all um traumatic and chaotic and and static then you can't really truly perceive the outside world or someone else very

clearly because you might be sitting with someone and you're trying to be there for them but you're perceiving them through all of your static so you can't see them very clearly which means you can't be in communication with them very clearly it's only when you do the work on yourself to come to some peace and it's ongoing it's daily you know but to keep cultivating a peaceful interior world then it can be less about you. Because it's not like, oh, I'm dealing with all my stuff. It's like, I'm getting better and better at being more okay with me. But then when I'm sitting here with you, for example, Shanna, it's not so much about me. It's about me being curious about you. And I can see you more clearly because I don't have so much

noise going on. Whereas if I met you 15 years ago, I would have still been trying to see you, but I wouldn't have been seeing you so clearly. You wouldn't be able to receive through the heart rather than the brain. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And so conscious communication, I'm passionate about communication, obviously, as you are too, because I'm passionate about connection and we can only connect through communicating. And communication obviously doesn't need to be words, right? There's so many ways to communicate. But I'm passionate about connection because we need each other. Yeah.

We need each other. We're a social species. We've only been able to evolve working together um living together going through it together so we need each other and i'm really passionate about connection and to do that we need to be able to communicate and communicate is an understanding to communicate means to share of ourselves with each other and to understand each other um and to do that the more conscious we are the more effective we are in our communication the more conscious we are the more effective we are in our communication the less conscious we are the more we're being driven by ego and this and fear and defending

our ideas and defending our sense of anything so if i'm if i'm pro-choice and someone's pro-life and then we're and i'm stuck in being unconscious i I'm just getting angry at them. That's all I'm doing. And we're just fighting and we're just trying to cancel each other on Twitter. It's like, what the hell are you doing? If we really want to evolve as a species, we need to become more conscious and communicate more effectively with each other. That's really what it comes down to.

You'll save Mother Earth if you do so as well i mean there's no way you could be conscious and not care about every living thing around you that's so true it's just i mean it truly is the answer to everything so thank you for writing your books so tell me about the ones that are coming your series well yeah so I um when when my agent in the states was going around trying looking for a book deal for me um and they approached this publisher in in Miami and they said so you've got you've written so that the first book is the art of conscious communication for thoughtful men okay I was writing the book generally and then I had a book writing mentor here in Australia and she said to me you know is The Art of Conscious Communication for Thoughtful Men. Okay. I was writing the book generally,

and then I had a book writing mentor here in Australia, and she said to me, you know, I think you need to pick a niche. You need to pick an audience to write for. Niche, we call it here in Australia. Yeah, okay. You need to pick a niche. Anyway, she said you need to pick an audience to write for, and I think men could really do well with this book right now

because similar to the States and Canada here in Australia the outdated or it should be outdated it's still current but the cultural stereotype that men have been brought up into is that they don't communicate their feelings and so their ability to communicate their internal world is pretty limited i'm generalizing but that's generally the way it is and she said i think men need help with communication so i just booked the art of conscious communication for thoughtful men and when i went to and i care more than just men i care about humans and the planet and everything in working on yourself and men i mean yeah everything though all of that you know and so i went to this publisher and i said hey look if you want if you're

interested there's a whole series of books here i can do the art of conscious communication for couples for leaders for teams for parents um you know there's a whole book i would love to co-write the art of conscious communication for women with my partner talia because yeah she's a whole book I would love to co-write, The Art of Conscious Communication for Women, with my partner Talia because she's a woman. But, yeah, so there's a whole series of books, and I'm just waiting to hear from the publisher which one they want next. I think they've been suggesting maybe the next one is for couples, which I'm really excited to write about because Talia and I have been running retreats for couples for 10 years now.

It's called The Conscious Couple, this retreat that we run. And we both are really passionate about sharing just some kind of fundamental practices that help couples become more conscious as individuals within the relationship, but also as a relationship, how the relationship can become more conscious. And, you know, we both feel very, very blessed to be in a conscious relationship. We have never, we've been together for eight years. We have never, ever, not once abused each other, said horrible, abusive things to each other. We've disagreed on things. Eight years, I could count on one hand in eight years the number of times

where it's got a little bit emotional and we've been a little bit upset with each other because of a disagreement, but we've still never been abusive. And the resolutions from those disagreements come so quickly. But generally speaking, day in, day out, we're just super nice to each other. We adore each other. We're super attracted to each other. adore each other we're super attracted to each other and that's such that's so good for your children you're then raising conscious children

yeah we it is it really is we're so we we feel really grateful about that we both came to our relationship with two kids each so we're a blended family and so I brought two boys and Talia brought a girl and a boy and they're all, they see each other as siblings now. They're all completely blended. And they are actually now getting to, and it's because it's been eight years, they trust it. It's not just like it's six months old and they're going, oh, this is not, I can't trust this.

We're eight years in and they trust it and they just go, oh, wow, Jem and Talia are just this respectful and nice and considerate of each other every day. And that's what a relationship can be like. They see it. It's actually really cute, Shanna. Our 17-year-old is madly in love. And him and his girlfriend, him and his girlfriend,

they're just such a gorgeous couple. They've been together for, I don't know, coming up a year or something and he treats her so beautifully like he always puts her first he's always aware of where she's at he's always considerate he serves her food first he cleans up after like he's just he treats her so beautifully yeah a little bit old-fashioned but that's me and and i said to him not long ago, I said to him, hey, I just want to say how proud of you I am the way that you treat your girlfriend. I'm just so proud of you.

And he looked at me and he goes, Dad, where do you reckon I get it from? I know, right? I had a heart melt, one of those parent heart melt moments, and I'm just like, oh, that's the moment. Good job, good job good job I know because it's not always like that there are times when you go oh no but this was one of those moments that's even your that's your gift to the future what you just you know yeah that's your gift to the future too so it's it's like that ripple effect I was talking about yeah that's

right yeah you know had you never gotten right with yourself inside and all that, then he would have never said that to you. That's so amazing. Yeah, it really was a beautiful moment for that. And if I had have stayed the way I was and my relationship with his mum when we were together, now it's much better because we're co-parenting and we get along fine. But when we were together, it was toxic and hard. And we were horrible to each other.

Yeah. Almost every day. And that's what my kids were seeing and that's what they would have modeled. Yeah, toxic. Yeah, environment. So anyway. Such a blessing. Yeah.

Yeah, you know what? I'm like you when you said that, you know, you have conversations like this and feel hope. Thank you for bringing me that tonight. You're very positive, very wise. And I really wish that I could come to one of your retreats. That'd be freaking amazing. Yeah, maybe one year.

We're going to always do them. I will do them as long as I can walk. Yeah. You're going to be doing them. I will do them as long as I can walk. Yeah, you're going to be doing them. Walk slowly if you have to. That's right. Thanks for being vulnerable and for putting it out there and sharing. You're welcome. And thanks for having me on your show in your space.

You hold your space so beautifully. Thank you. You really do have this lovely mother energy. And, yeah, it's been really nice to connect with you. This conversation has been very timely for me too. I think everybody needs these good conversations every once in a while. I guess that's why people listen to them. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, tell everybody where they can find you and find your book and and i'll also put links to all of that stuff in the show notes yeah sure gem fuller.com is the website gem with a j and then everything else as well insta i'm most i'm i share mostly on insta that's gem fuller but also facebook gem fuller linkedin, LinkedIn, Jem Fuller, it's all that everywhere. But if you want to reach out and get in touch with me, I'm still super accessible. I love connecting with good people. If you've got any questions for me, if you're curious about how I see things or anything really, just go to the website and

reach out to me through there and I'll get the email and I'll we'll start a conversation but thanks so much it was so nice to meet you I'm so glad and thankful that Chad connected us yeah me too thanks for listening to sense of soul podcast and thanks to our special guests for joining me if you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.