This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 056 / A Radical Awakening with Dr. Shefali

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Oprah has endorsed her work as “revolutionary and life changing.” She’s authored 3 New York Times best sellers. And in her new book “A Radical Awakening,” she shares her journey, in hopes that it will help women awaken to their authentic selves… so that we can all live free. It is my honor to welcome Dr. Shefali to the “This Is Woman’s Work” podcast. While many people know her for her message of conscious parenting and mindful living, in this episode she shares how we can embrace our femininity by unmasking the lies we’ve been told. I know it can feel like the voices of others and gender expectations and even your own head trash are all playing on a loop at maximum volume. But the track of your truth and inner knowing are playing too… even if it feels hard to hear sometimes. I promise it’s there and it will never stop playing. What do you have to say about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be you? Because that’s the only voice that really matters. “Turn your pain into power, embrace your truth and live free.” This is Woman’s Work. To learn more about Dr. Shefali and her work you can visit: www.drshefali.com or connect with her on Instagram: @doctorshefali To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

Coming up on this episode of This Is Woman's Work. And we come to creating those fearless boundaries when we decide that nobody on the outside owns us anymore. When we take that ownership of ourselves back to ourselves, that's when we become fearless. I am Nicole Kalil, and you're tuning into the This Is Woman's Work podcast, where we're redefining what it means to be a woman, what it looks like, what it feels like, and what it is to be doing woman's work. And while I firmly believe that it is up to each of us individually to know and define that for ourselves, I'm also aware how hard it can be to do that when living in a world where the expectations, the shoulds and the shouldn'ts, the good and the bad

of the feminine has been mostly filtered through, regulated, and defined by the masculine. From business to politics, religion to our bodies, our sexuality, and even who, when, and how we should love, there is an abundant amount of commentary, and it can be a real struggle to look past all the noise and decide what's uniquely right and true for you. But for all the voices that have made me feel like I was wrong for wanting what I want or for being who I am, there have been voices that come along and speak directly to my inner knowing. They remind me of things long forgotten and ignored. Someone who speaks truth and speaks to my heart so much that it feels like a weight has been lifted and I can be who I'm meant to be.

Our guest today is one of those voices, and while I can truly say I'm always excited to introduce my guests, excited doesn't quite cut it today. Honored and grateful come to mind, but even that's not totally right because my mind is not where the feeling is coming from. It's probably most accurate to say that my soul is singing. Oprah has endorsed her work as revolutionary and life-changing. She's authored four books, three of which are New York Times bestsellers. And in her new book, A Radical Awakening, she shares her journey and hopes that it will help women awaken to their authentic selves so we can all live free. A clinical psychologist, international speaker,

and teacher of wisdom, she blends Western psychology with Eastern mindfulness, spreading her message of conscious parenting, mindful living, and how we can embrace our femininity by unmasking the lies we've been told. So without stringing you along any further, it is my honor to welcome Dr. Shefali to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. Dr. Shefali, thank you so much for your great work and for joining me today. Oh, what a lovely welcome. Thank you for having me. It's my honor as well. I feel like the honor is all mine. Thank you. Okay. So let's start by, if you could share with us, what is a radical awakening and why did

you choose to write this book? Well, a radical awakening to me means two very specific things. The first one is the awakening that occurs when we realize that we have been living a conditioned self, a self that has been conditioned. So it could or may not be the authentic self. So when we wake up to that, and I think everyone at some point of their life wakes up to the idea that, oh my goodness, I've been living my father's expectation or my mother's dream or culture's way of being, or who am I? Or I've just been following along the prescription list. So that awakening is the first awakening when you realize that the culture has been conditioning you and most of it was unnecessary or was a lie. And then the second awakening is when you realize that you are co-creating that continued oppression.

And that is the most radical awakening when you begin to see yourself as an active co-creator of your own suffering. And therefore, you hold the key to the liberation. And I wrote this book because I just, I went through both of them. You know, I went through the first awakening when I was in my early twenties, but I wasn't yet ready to take the key to my own liberation. And my second awakening in my mid forties, probably exactly 22 years later and realize that I had not finished the first part, because there has to be this understanding of how we now co-create our patterns. So I'm in my mid forties and everything that you're saying

resonates with me. I would say I'm in progress of that. So how did we lose our authentic self? You gave a few examples, but how did we lose it and how do we recover it? Yeah, it's so typical to lose it because we're all conditioned by unconscious parents for the most part, who themselves are living in fear and shame. So they raise us to live in fear and shame and to seek approval from the outside. So when children are raised, and that's why I do a lot of work in conscious parenting, when children are raised to seek constant approval and validation on the outside, they begin to puppeteer themselves to meet the expectations that they imagine would give them love and worth. So they keep being puppeteered. And with each turn of the puppet,

they turn further and further away from their authentic self. And then the entire life becomes a comedy show or a tragedy really of playing that false self. And the more you're false, the more you recruit other people to continue playing the false self. And then it's a theater of madness. And then maybe if you're lucky, you have enough pain in your life and you wake up and you realize you've been living an illusion. And then you begin the real journey to reclaim yourself. I mean, it's very exhausting and tiring

and tedious and arduous. And that's why I'm trying to prevent it by not making our children go through all this in the first place. So I want to get to the pain part in a minute, but before I do, would you be willing to give some examples of some of the lies that we've been told that you're talking about unmasking in your book? Well, really, I try to be gentle, but really, almost everything is a lie. So like some of the examples are, and I'm going to be very gentle, so I don't provoke too many people, but some basic lies are around, you know, girls need to be good. You know, that's a basic lie. No, we don't need to be good, because the whole idea of goodness is really a disguise to be perfect, and no one can be perfect. Or, you know, good girls need to

not rock the boat, and good girls need to be obedient and be people pleasers. So that's all one set of lies. But then we have other lies about education, you know, we need to succeed and compete and overachieve. Those are lies because none of that brings happiness anyway, but we're told it does. Or we need to get married or we need to have children. Like that doesn't bring happiness either necessarily. Or, you know, the ideas around love are kind of all lies because love leads to marriage. And that's the only way you can love someone. Love is forever. This is how love looks.

The ideas around beauty, you know, those are a whole bunch of lies. And youth, that we need to stay eternally flawless and youthful. Lies around motherhood, that we are as good as our children is a lie. We're good and they're good. And neither is enmeshed in the other's identity. So I go through all these lies in the book and teach women to unravel them.

And with each unraveling comes a freedom because once we realize that they've been lies, then we get permission to discard them and begin forging our own path. So how do we do that? How do we deconstruct and break free from that list? I just felt like there were a couple even internal jabs in myself knowing that I still carry some of those beliefs with me, but how do we deconstruct or reinvent for ourselves? Yeah, it's not easy because, you know, we have been raised to live in the bubble or the matrix,

as I call it. So now to give it up is really not a choice we want to make because we've constructed a whole false reality there. And it's an intricate reality where we've, you know, bought into stuff and raised our children with the same lies. Now we're like, you know, realizing that the emperor has no clothes. It's really, it's really not convenient. So yes, it's for the, for the courageous who really want to live authentically. And once you begin to want to live authentically, you can't help but call the bullshit for what it is. But then you find that you're everywhere, you know, and then what is real? And then you realize that what is real is not what culture propagates. What is real is something deep within you. And in this book, I even talk about the spiritual journey

of finding your deepest core essence. And it's a quest. It's this very deeply personal spiritual journey that you have to go through to reclaim what is not culturally conditioned. There's very little there that is really not culturally conditioned today. And you have to find it.

And then you have to hold on to it. And you have to discard culture. Culture is pernicious and toxic. And it's here to make money off your lack. And unless we can see culture for what it is and see through it, like we're teaching our young girls today, you know, don't think that that girl on the magazine is flawless. She's been photoshopped to make you feel bad so that you buy all the things in the magazine, right? Just like now

we're doing that. It's like that with all things in culture. And how do you know the difference for yourself between what's authentic and real for you versus something you've been conditioned to believe. I sometimes find, I always talk about the voice in my head is head trash, and that's different from my inner knowing. And there's ways to differentiate between the two, but how do you do that for yourself? Very good. Exactly. I would have said the same thing, that there's this conditioned voice that you have to get to understand is not your real knowing. And how do you get to understand it by constant self-observation, talking to a coach or a therapist, doing the inner work of journaling. Then you begin realizing that that voice that you thought was yours is really your mom's voice or culture's voice or your

granny's voice. And it wasn't your voice. And that's a real shock. That's what I said. The first awakening is to realize you've been conditioned and all that you thought was you, you realized was grandma or whatever. Terror, horror, absolute epileptic paralysis because you've been thinking it was you. So that's a real Debbie Downer when you realize that your whole life was conditioned

and now you have to break free. Yeah. So constant self-awareness and knowledge will make you realize that there's a different kind of energy that comes when you are in your inner knowing versus your heady trash self, like you said. For example, when you're facing a beautiful sunset, there's a very different energy around you that's very different than when you are taking an

exam and nervous. So how do you explain that difference? It's something you experience as palpably different. One is in your body, you're transcendent, you're in awe, you're in clarity, you're in oneness. The other one, you're in lack, scarcity, competition, and judgment of yourself. That's how you know the difference. One is very about very much steeped in oneness, powerful, present, grateful energy. And the other one is steeped in lack, competition, fear, reactive energy. So if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. And you've talked about pain. And you mentioned that even in your book, Turning Pain into Power. Tell us a little bit about that. How might we use and leverage this pain for our own power? And maybe a follow-up

question, not just for our own power, but for the power of others and the world that we live in? Yes. Yeah. Great question. So pain is always a part of our journey. And like you said, if we don't leverage it, then we're just going to get overwhelmed by it. So how do we leverage pain is we understand that we are in pain because we are in resistance to the isness of reality. And we are typically in resistance to isness because of our belief system. Our belief system tells us, no, the isness should not be the isness, it should be something different. So our belief systems propel us down the path of the should. And that is in contrary energy to the isness. And the minute you get into that contrary energy, you have even greater pain and suffering.

So when we can understand that whatever's happening in our lives is happening to reflect back to us how we are in resistance. And the reasons why we're in resistance is because we're attached to these belief systems. So now we detach from the belief systems we're attached to these belief systems so now we detach from the belief systems we deconstruct the belief systems so then the pain gets leveraged

because the pain becomes a teaching opportunity for us to discard belief systems that are causing us to be in resistance which is causing suffering so once we understand that ah this dysfunctional relationship is happening because I believe things should be different and I'm not accepting the is-ness, now I accept the is-ness and now I have three choices. I can change it, I can stay in it, or I can leave the whole situation. So what do I choose to do? And thinking like this puts us in a very active position in our lives where we're no longer simple martyrs or victims of our lives. We're very active. Okay, I'm in resistance because I'm attached to a belief system.

What is my belief system? How do I deconstruct the belief system? How do I now make a conscious, intentional choice? Do I want to stay? Do I want to accept things the way they are? Do I want to change things or do I want to leave the situation altogether? Now I make conscious choices. And is it true, in your opinion, that what you resist persists?

Your resistance is coming from an internal belief system. So as long as you keep not understanding what that belief system is, it will keep showing up in your life in some way or the other, you know, and until you understand it. So for example, if you believe that you are not good enough as the most ubiquitous belief system, that belief system is going to show up everywhere. So if your boss tells you that he has to let you go because of economic downturns, you're going to take it as it's because you're not worthy. Or if your kid gets a C grade, you're going to take it as it's because you're not worthy. Or if your kid gets a C grade, you're going to take it as because you're not good enough. Or if you put on 10 pounds, you're going to take it as you're not good enough. So it's the belief system that persists

all the time. And our resistance to let it go is what keeps the cycle going. One of the beliefs that I held on to that you were really instrumental in having me look at and change my belief around was in relationships, specifically about love and what it is to be in love or what love is supposed to look like or not look like in marriage. I had all of these ideas that love is the only thing that matters. And if you're in love, everything will work out and you'll stay together and be happy forever. Why are relationships one of those places where we lose ourselves the most? How do you think about love in relationship? Yeah, I think about it very different now than when I was young. I too,

like you and every woman out there, and men, but mostly women, was sold on this idea of romance, and it should end up in a marriage, and a ring, and fidelity, and it's forever. And those are really toxic beliefs because they make us feel that anything that doesn't look like that is not love. And really those institutional ways of looking at love actually create panic within us when it doesn't look like that anymore. That's why, you know, many people end up hating their partners who they said they loved because those people were trapped in an idea that love should look a particular way. So if it doesn't look that way, that means you don't love me, therefore I hate you. So most of the love that I used to have and that I see most people having is really just need, control, possession and attachment. It's not real transcendent love.

And the greatest proof of that is because we haven't yet walked into love ourselves to ourselves. We ourselves are not unconditional in our own self-love. So when we are not unconditional and we're needy and we come to the other person with this need, then there's so much expectation and there's fantasies on the other person and projections. And that other person is just a fallible human being themselves. And so they can't meet your needs because you're looking for your past healing to occur from. And so they can't meet your needs because you're looking for your past healing to occur from your childhood and they can't heal it. So then it ends up in this kind of very transactional tug of war and unhappiness and suffering. But we don't realize

our idea of love is in the wrong place. So self-love then is the first priority in order for us to have healthy relationships, whether it be with a spouse or an intimate relationship or children. And there are probably a ton of examples, but one of the examples that always comes to mind for me, how I recognize that I didn't totally love myself as the way I spoke to myself in my own head. I would never say the things I was saying to myself to somebody that I claimed to love. So how do we begin to replace the noise in our head with kinder, gentler ways of treating ourselves? Well, I think, you know, for us women, especially, we have to come to a point where we say no more, you know, I'm no more going to live according to a standard,

I'm no longer going to live to please others. And I'm no longer going to be hungry for approval. And I'm going to live this one life in the most empowered way possible. When you come to that declaration that you're tired of living, putting yourself last, putting yourself down, making yourself small, that's when you wake up. So pain becomes our portal of treating ourselves like crap. I mean, how many decades are we going to keep doing this, and believing that somebody else has the power over us. So one day, I mean, there is no other how except the person has to one day, themselves reach their own rock bottom

of abusing themselves and putting themselves in abusive situations, where they have to go, what am I doing to myself? You know, I can't keep blaming other people, changing partners, changing jobs. It's me who allows themselves to be compromised. It's me who allows themselves to be sacrificed. It's me who stays silent. And when that epiphany happens, that wake up call, then maybe the woman will pivot and say no more and then say yes to self-love because she realizes it's her. She is doing this to herself because she's too afraid to lose the approval and validation and praise of those around her. So talk to us about how we can treat ourselves with self-compassion and self-love. Maybe if you could

give some examples in your own life. Yeah. I think the greatest way to begin this path is through, you know, making a pledge to yourself that you're not going to be inauthentic as much as you can. So if you want to say no, you're going going to say no if you want to not answer the phone you're not going to answer the phone if you need time out you're going to ask for it you're not going to bullshit and pretend as if you don't have needs or don't have requirements but you're going to also not expect other people to know your needs and requirements you're going to make conditions occur where you give it to yourself. So if person X is not treating you with love,

you're not going to berate person X. You're going to move on to person Y who treats you with love. You're no longer going to fight reality, but you're going to create your own reality. And we have that power. So women need to see themselves as their own destiny makers,

as their own life makers, as their own life creators. They get to create the conditions. They get to create the timetable. They get to be the leaders of that. And I think we've so been cut off from giving ourselves that power that we allow others to steer the ship. And then we're just going along.

And now we're in our 60s, not knowing how we got here. Yeah, I hear from so many women that I talk to, they struggle with saying no. And they struggle with creating and communicating boundaries for themselves. And that's what was popping up in my head when you were talking is that, you know, we get to decide and communicate what our boundaries are. Yeah. Is that, okay. And we come to creating those fearless boundaries when we decide that nobody on the outside owns us anymore. When we take that ownership of ourselves back to ourselves, that's when we become fearless.

As long as we imagine that there's somebody on the outside, and I mean, including our parents, our partners, our children, who can decide our emotional well-being, we will forever be enslaved by that idea. It's when we take charge of our own emotional well-being and take other people out of the equation, fire everyone who we made in charge of our well-being, that's when we begin to own our own destiny. Now, is that the queen energy that you talk about? Tell us about how we enter our queen energy and what that means. Yeah, that is exactly the queen energy where you are perceiving yourself as self-governing and self-regal and self-honoring where you're not begging anymore you've moved from the the helpless maiden waiting for people to recognize her or you know approve of her to the the queen's chair where you sit with your own majestic self-ownership.

And this is not about being dominant or being narcissistic. This is just owning your own self. And I think when we don't own ourselves, we're actually more narcissistic because we expect others to take care of us. So being in queen energy releases other people from feeling like they have to take care of you. That's just like an amazing energy to walk into a room with because you're just going to handle yourself. I can get my own drink. I know what I want to eat.

I know how to sit. I can be on my own. Nobody needs to take care of me. Now, it doesn't mean you don't need people to be around you. Sure, we all like company, but it's not coming from this dire state of lack. I like that you said that too, with queen energy. It's not about being above somebody else. So for example, I can celebrate my queen energy while simultaneously honoring and celebrating yours. I think sometimes we think if we were to love and totally appreciate and honor ourselves,

that somehow that would be us looking down on other people. Correct, correct. And people will say, oh, who does she think she is? Because women have been trained to be small. So whenever we become mighty, pluming our feathers and being strong and showing our beauty or our energy or our vivacity, intelligence, people won't be comfortable because the standard message and protocol for women is to play small. So whenever you have a woman who's loud and brash or loud and opinionated or loud or whatever, she will be called lots of judgmental things when it's her right to speak up in a loud, even strident, she's allowed to be loud. And I think it's seen as a judgment of her character if she occupies that energy, because we've been all conditioned to be very meek and good and nice.

So there are a few other things in addition to the queen energy. I wanted to hear from you what it means. So you talk about the triple threat. What is that? Just that we've just been raised hungry for approval, validation, and praise from others. And as long as we are hungry for that, they will own us. We will never be able to own ourselves. So becoming our own approvers, our own permission givers, our own validators, our own self-celebrants, then we take that power away. We're like, oh, I already had a birthday party for myself. I already organized the whole day. You know, now we're not waiting for somebody else to give us a surprise birthday party. You know, don't do that. I mean, it's lovely to be taken care of. But if you want to be taken care of your way, go ahead and do it. You know, we have this mentality. Oh, we want other

people to take care of us. Okay, it's lovely. But when that doesn't happen, we shouldn't fall apart, we can go ahead and take care of ourselves. And we need to get out of this mentality that when somebody else does it for us, it's more important than if we do it for ourselves. That reminds me, when I think about confidence, I think a lot of people seek confidence externally. They're looking for it in praise, validation, compliments. And from my experience and observation, the more you look to seek your confidence from

that, the more addicted you become and the more you need of it. And it becomes this thing and it ends up doing so much more damage to us. Okay. So that really resonated with me. Talk to me about the pill that kills. I talk about unworthiness as really the pill that kills us all, because at the base of this all is that we were trained by our parents to not feel worthy as we were, but only when we fulfilled their conditions. So we grew up with this pervasive sense of, I have to keep doing more. I have to keep looking better. I have to keep being skinnier. I have to keep doing, I have to keep making people

happier. So we don't realize that all this caretaking and all this people pleasing and all this doing is not coming from an authentic place of flow and ease and grace. It's all coming from this very big desire, this need, this hunger to be seen as worthy. Do you see me as worthy? Do you see me as worthy? And until we can catch ourselves, you know, asking ourselves, am I doing this right now because I want to be seen as worthy or am I doing it right now because it's coming from flow? We will not be able to make that shift and understand what we need. And I know most of our parents didn't do this to us purposefully. And I know as a mom, and I know you're a mom too, that we would never want to purposely do that to our children. And I know

I've switched a little bit to a different book, but could you give us some ideas of what we might want to be conscious of as parents to make sure that our children aren't looking to us for their worthiness? Yeah, it's first, you know, understanding that it's so limiting for our children to look to us for their worthiness. We have to really see it as a block, not as a helpful thing at all. So when we fully understand that this is going to be a block in their lives, we can pay more attention. So how do we pay more attention? We don't project judgment on them when they don't do things our way, or we don't force them to do things to fulfill our dreams and expectations. We become really clear about what is ours and what's really coming from them.

Is this coming from my need or is this coming from my kid's need? You know, you're constantly checking to see, am I just blindly projecting? Am I just dumping on my kid? Am I just steering them in this way? Because it makes me comfortable. So that parental self-consciousness allows us to kind, I mean, we'll never entirely not do it, but it'll be, it'll stop us from doing it full frontal and stop us from, you know, doing it so grossly and egregiously and allow us to really be in pause and reflection and, and then, you know, make our choices with our children. So this level of consciousness allows us to just slow down, be present, and really watch what we're dumping on

our kids plates, because it's coming from our need. Okay, my last question, and this is a big one for me personally, how do we embrace emptiness? You talk about that as a way to de-identify from our roles and from, I think, the lies that we've been told. But the idea of embracing emptiness is still

a work in progress for me. What does that mean? On a very basic level, it means to understand that all of this is an illusion in a way. None of this is going to stop us from dying. None of this really means anything in 50 years from now, if it even means anything now. None of this really matters in terms of our spiritual evolution. All of this matters because culture has said it matters. So when you have that perspective that all of this may be an illusion, you kind of can detach from it, like COVID taught us to do. You know, the pandemic taught us that, okay, where are we going? We're going nowhere. So we've not worn our fancy shoes, we don't wear fancy clothes, because it's taught us that all that really matters is the present moment and surviving through this present moment.

And all that we had thought was important proved not to be important when we have death around the corner. So in the same way, when we realize that perspective, that death is around the corner, nothing's going to prevent us from dying, whether we like it or not, we're really irrelevant in the large scheme of things. Then we begin to understand that these roles we play are just an illusion. So it means emptiness means to arrive at the detachment from our great enslavement by these roles to realize they are not what makes us permanent when they're not what makes us eternal. And they're not that they're nothing that makes us significant or worthy either.

Yeah. Okay. If you're listening and you want to dig deeper into so many of the things that Dr. Shefali shared with us today, you can visit her website. It's drshefali.com. So D-R-S-H-E-F-A-L-I.com or follow her on Instagram at Dr. Shefali, but spelled out this time. So D O C T O R Shefali and visit your local bookstore and grab to the two books we talked about today, a radical awakening, which is coming out May 18th, as well as the conscious parent that Oprah gives to every expecting parent

that she knows and His Holiness, the Dalai Lama wrote the forward in, which is really pretty cool. Dr. Shefali, will you share a little bit about the course that you're doing? Yes. So along with this book, A Radical Awakening, I'm doing a 10-day deep dive to get into the concepts of the book and really take people on a journey. If they go to eradicalawak awakening.com, there's a 10 day deep dive course, and they actually get three books for free from that course. So they can just sign up for this course, get a great teaching, change their patterns, change their life. So a radical awakening.com and then sign up for the course. It's going to start around mid 23rd, the course. Awesome. I bought the course for myself

and one lucky listener. So Dr. Shefali, on behalf of all of us, thank you. And on a personal note, I'm forever grateful to you for gifting me this bucket list moment. So thank you so much. Thank you, Nicole. I'll close with this gentle reminder. You are the only you there ever was or ever will be. And that is not an accident. You are here for a reason. You have purpose, even if you don't know yet exactly what that is. Your truth, that purpose, and even your confidence is there living inside of you, waiting for you to listen.

I know it can feel like the voices of others and gender expectations and even your own head trash are all playing on a loop at maximum volume. But the track of your truth and your inner knowing are playing too. It may feel like you only occasionally hear it. It may be a long time since you've heard it, but I promise it's there and it will never stop playing. What do you have to say about what it means to be a woman? What it means to be you? Because that's the only voice that really matters. In the words of Dr. Shefali, turn your pain into power, embrace your truth and live free. That is woman's work.