You are listening to that mystic podcast, and I am your host, Reverend Dr. Joya. I am dedicated to speaking about embodied mystical feminine spiritual awakening, where we talk about turning our pain into awakening, our breath into prayer, and our everyday life is our devotion in motion. Together, we remember who we are through the grief, the beauty, and the holy mess of what it means to be an awakened human. Enjoy the show. Come to this week's episode of That Mystic Podcast. I'm your host, That Mystic Joya. This week, beloved ones, has been really intense. I've been waking up every morning and going for walks and having massive downloads while I'm walking. And it's interesting because now that I'm having all these massive downloads while I'm walking, it's made me excited to get up and go for a walk that early in the morning. And that resistance was something I had to plow my way through. And that's what I want to talk about this week. Is this foundation of breaking our way through resistance because we often don't even know that we're in resistance. We mistake this voice inside of us that talks us out of our own growth, that talks us out of what we truly, truly, truly want for being the voice of truth. But when it's really the voice of your ego doing its job, which is simply to keep you the same. That's what your ego's job is. To not let you change, to keep you the same. And as I've been doing this really deep work of grief, going through grief, I'm now in another phase of grief. And I think it's because of the resistance that kicked up that I worked through. And now that I've broken through that resistance, there's a deeper grief that's arising from my body. Somatically stored trauma and grief. That's been there for as long as I have. And I actually think some of it is older than me. Which really it is. If we're inheriting generational trauma, it's definitely older than you. And I had some beautiful realizations in the last five days that I want to share with you guys. So in the second phase of grief that I'm entering, the first one was grief about Weston and how much I miss him and love him and all the things, all the brokenheartedness that I now live with, that's now a part of me. But I also instantly moved into acceptance in that process with him and his death. And doing all of these things that I have been doing through my own healing journey, which wound up being the things I needed to do through grief to help me to get to where I'm at right now, which is making meaning from that grief, from that experience, from his life, what it means for my life, the rest of my life. It's been a lot to work through. And so in this resistance that's been coming up, it arose last week because I'm working with a friend of mine to get my body in order. Grief does a number on your body. And so I've realized that I'm having these uncomfortable sensations arising from inside of me that I'm like, oh, these are warning signals. I better, I better do something about this. And so I've been working with a friend of mine to change my eating, drinking way more water, and of course getting up and going for walks in the morning, getting some movement, getting some exercise in. And when I first started working with her after the first week, I had this experience in which I opened my phone and I found a video of me and Weston laughing. And I watched it and I laughed with it. I felt that stab in my heart of how much I miss him. And then this thought popped in my head that said, I want him back. And I went into that thought and I started crying and said, I do want him back. I want him back. I want him back. And it threw me into such a depression, such a tailspin, it lasted a few days, which of course sent me back into my habits of not eating well, not drinking enough water, definitely not getting up and going for my walks in the morning. And so after the third day, when it arose on the third day, I realized, holy shit, that was the voice of resistance. My own ego weaponized my own grief against me. That is how sneaky and how tricky the ego is. And it's really our protector, our protective mechanism that we put in place. And so I had this thought that I was like, well, dang, if that can get that strong strength that keeps my smallness in place to be in support of my light, what would that look like? And so I started pushing through this resistance anyway. And I'm going to tell you how I did that. And I'm going to tell you the ways in resistance in which resistance shows up that you may not even realize it because it's such a sneaky, sneaky, sneaky thing. Resistance arises in that moment between it's the gap between what we say we want to do and what we actually do do. Which is why transformation is not so easy. Because our ego's job is it wants to keep us the same. It doesn't want us to grow. It wants us to sit day right where we are. This is homeostasis. Even if it's chaotic, even if it's painful, even if you're creating your own wounding and your own stuckness, your ego is like, well, we know how to manage that. We're doing it. It's ours, it's our pain, it's our crap. Even if we're friggin' miserable. Somebody once said that the ego will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. And if you're trying to transform and doing that work of transformation, you know exactly what that means, right? And so I've been making myself, not making myself, I've been choosing to get up and go for these walks in the morning. And my reward for doing that is these incredible downloads that I've been receiving. And I was wondering about mindfulness, because when I began my journey of healing, as so many people in the West do, I began it through the mind. Surely, if I could just think positive enough or change my thoughts, then my life will change. But when you've done the work for a while and nothing's changing, or you get to a place where you kind of max out on what changes will be allowed, and something stops you, it's like you hit a wall within yourself, and you're like, What is this wall? Why can't I get around this? What the hell is this? And I know I was stuck behind that wall for a long time, and I was always like, What is this wall? I feel like there's this energetic wall I just can't get around. Well, the answer is it's your nervous system. Your nervous system won't let you change, grow, expand. And one of the gifts, one of the gifts from grief and the grief process and the way our that we're designed is that when it unplugs your default mode network, the part of your mind, your brain that tells you who you think you are in the world, all of those ego identities are unplugged with it. So transformation is happening through the process of loss, which is why if you can work with that energy consciously, you transform yourself the way you want to transform yourself, because a new identity is being written, regardless. So the mind is the first access point, and we can catch the mind though, even if we begin at mindful mindfulness, through this amazing process, which is the first pillar on the feminine mystic way of awakening, the way of the feminine mystic, is awareness, acceptance, and allowance. So we know that the mind, our thoughts, are the easiest access point because we can become aware of what we're thinking about. It's where we have our conscious awareness. We can hear our thoughts, we can catch the loops, we can notice the stories we're telling about ourselves, we can notice the judgments, and just notice that running commentary that's going through your mind. And when you start to pay attention to it, that's when you can actually do the work of changing your thoughts. So this is a great place to start because your thoughts do matter. But your thoughts are really, if they're not intentional thoughts that you're putting in, they're really side effects that are bubbling up from your nervous system and from your feelings, from your heart. Because the body and the heart speak in sensation and feelings. They don't have words, but the mind speaks in language. So even though the mind isn't the one running the whole show, it's where you can see what's running. So in the mind, at the level of the mind and the thoughts, you can notice your thought loops, you can notice the stories you're telling, you can notice all of the all of the shoulds or the shouldn'ts or the should-haves, anything with the word should in it. You can notice the voice of your inner critic. You can notice the voice of judge, the judger, the comparer, the mental resistance, the procrastinator that tries to talk you out of things. And so you can start here because you can hear it, you can name it, you can catch it happening in real time, and then you get to challenge it. And if you're not used to this process of challenging your own thoughts, at first it's kind of like it's shocked to be discovered. It's like, whoa, I'm noticing myself. So, awareness, let's talk about the practice, how you do it in your thoughts. First, you notice the thought. And it's really important for us to pay attention to our thoughts because these are the st the stories that we are listening that are keeping us stuck. We're obeying them. And I think it was the grandfather of psychology, William James, who said most of humans' problems come about because they listen to themselves rather than talk to themselves. So we want to learn to talk to ourselves and to make conscious choices for our own life. So first notice the thought. Oh, there's that story that I'm not good enough. There's that story that I'm afraid, there's that story that I'm comparing. There's that story where I'm putting myself down. There's that story where I'm judging them. There's that story where I'm projecting and I think that I know what someone else is thinking. There's so many ways to notice those thoughts. So when we do just notice it and label it, you say it, oh, there's that story that. Oh, here's this thought. And then allowance. Let it be here without it making making it mean anything. This is just a thought, not truth. You don't have to believe everything you think. This is just a thought. This isn't the truth. And you'll be amazed when you start doing these practices. The mindfulness tradition I started practicing meditation in is vipassana, which is noticing your mind. And so you'll notice that as you start to pay attention to this one thought, oh, hmm, I'm witnessing my judging thought, that I'm judging this person. This thought is here. It's just a thought, it's not the truth. And you just sit with that, you'll notice that within a couple of seconds, your mind has wandered off to a new thought. And what we want to do is train our mind to get on board. Which is why mantras, prayers, prayer formations, as I call them, are such powerful tools to work with because it gives your mind something to do. And so my favorite one that I constantly say, most of the time, is so simple. And it's just love is I am that. Be only love. Love is I am that. Be only love. And I just think that in my head over and over and over again. It gives my mind something to do. Or I practice noticing. If I'm very present, I can simply just start noticing. In my mind, I'll say, I'm gonna notice all the things that are yellow, or I'm going to notice what is beautiful. I'm gonna notice all the things that are pink. And you could intentionally give your mind something to do and play these games with yourself. The next level of being is our heart, our feelings. And it's harder to access here because if we've been wounded and hurt, our heart hardens and can even shut down like mine did. But you can notice the feelings underneath the thought. Sometimes those thoughts can trigger feelings inside of you. Notice the emotional signature to it. Feel what's there: the grief, the shame, the fear, the rage, the embarrassment, the longing, the ache. And it can be a little bit harder because feelings don't often have a language. They're pre-verbal. And they're stored from childhood before you had words. And often you were taught to suppress them. Was anybody else told to not cry? Don't be so loud. Don't be so joyful. Don't be you. And so the practice through our feelings and the heart center is awareness. What am I feeling right now? Breathing into it, what am I feeling right now? And when you notice it, say this feeling is allowed to be here. And then the allowance is I don't have to do anything about this feeling. I can just feel it. Don't have to label it, don't have to resist it, don't have to fight it, don't have to not feel it. And you'll find that when you do this process, there's a a lifespan of feelings. They'll arise and then they'll pass if you don't tell yourself a story about them. And this is true of all feelings, including heavy, heavy, heavy feelings of grief. This turning toward your feelings is the foundation practice to getting through your wounds, working through your wounds, working through this deep grief. We all are carrying grief. And whether that grief is acute, meaning it's something that's happened right now, or it's grief that's stored and living in our body, it's there. And so when we access it and we can feel it, we can feel those feelings and allow them to be there and feel like we don't have to do anything about it. Just let it do what it wants to do on its own. Just feel it. There's a freedom in that, and those feelings will come and those feelings will go. And then in the body, which is probably the hardest to access for a lot of people because we are such a disconnected from the body society. But you can notice the tightness in your chest. Is your jaw clenched? Is your forehead wrinkled in a frown? Is there a knot in your stomach or in your shoulders? Do you feel a heaviness or an exhaustion in your body? And how about the bracing or the armor that we build? And it's so hard, like I said, because so many of us are disconnected from our bodies. And trauma lives here. And so the body has learned to numb itself. And the body speaks in sensation, not language. And you were taught to ignore the body's signals. So to start to land back in our body, we can notice what where do I feel this in my body, especially if we're feeling emotions. We can do this with all three, our thoughts, our feelings, and our body. Work them together. I'm having this thought, it's bringing up this feeling, and I feel it here in my body. My body is holding this for me. That's acceptance. An allowance is I can be with this sensation without needing to fix it or make it go away. You don't need to do it. It can do it on its own if you allow it. So we start with the mind because that thought loop is our alarm bell. We can catch ourselves in our thoughts of thinking, I'm not enough. I can't do this. This is all my fault. Anything in my world should be different than it actually is. Everybody in my world should be different than they actually are. I'm afraid. Whatever the excuses are, it's your cue to pause, breathe, and drop down into the body. What am I actually feeling beneath this thought? Oh, the thought I'm not enough is saying, the thought that I'm not enough is creating shame, a fear of rejection. I'm feeling some old grief over all the times I wasn't seen. I'm feeling rage at being passed over. Just let the feelings be there. Don't rush it. Just feel how you feel. I feel shame. Okay. I'm feeling shame right now. It's allowed to be here. And then drop into the body. Where do I feel is in my body? Shame might arise as a hot flush in your chest, a collapse in your posture, or your shoulders hunched over, are you bent over a little bit? A tightness in your throat you can't speak. Heaviness inside of you like a lead balloon. Stay with the sensation and breathe into it and just let it be there and give voice to it. My chest is tight. Okay. I'm breathing with this tightness. And you'll find that through this process of noticing it through awareness, accepting it through love, and allowing it to just do what it's going to do, that it will pass so much faster. And maybe sometimes even for the first time. So these are foundation pillars of my work that I work with women and teach on the way of the mystical feminine. So again, they are for your thoughts awareness. I notice the thought, acceptance, this thought is here and I'm not fighting it. An allowance. I can let this thought be here without making it mean something about me or needing to change it. That's just judging or resisting our resistance. For our feelings, it's awareness of noticing what you're feeling. Accepting this feeling is allowed to be here. An allowance. I can feel this without needing to fix it, change it, or make it go away. Body. I notice where I feel this in my body. Acceptance. My body is holding this sensation. Allowance. I can be with this sensation without needing to make it stop. And it matters because you can't start in the body if you're not aware of your thoughts. Because if you're unconscious of your thoughts, you believe them completely and you're on autopilot. You think that this voice in your head is commanding you and telling you what to do, and you just react without thinking about it. Because sometimes that voice is so familiar that we mistake it for our constant voice. And then we are on autopilot, we don't know these thoughts are there running us, and they control our entire experience of life. So you have to start with thought awareness. And once you catch those thoughts, you can drop deeper because the thought is the surface, the feeling is what's underneath the thought, and the body is what it's holding. So you start at the surface where you have access and work your way down into the depths of your body. Because we know through the vagus nerve that travels from the brain down into the body, that it actually communicates from the body to the brain more than the other way around. So our body's intelligence is saying danger, danger, and it's sending a message to our brain. Hey, procrastinate. Why don't you go and read this magazine? Or why don't look something shiny over there and detracting you from what you are really wanting to do. And then know that it's going to change up its game because the ego is just as smart as you are, and it wants to keep you the same. So notice that any thoughts that you're having that are stopping you or trying to stop you from the mission or the track that you're on, that is resistance. So the three practices that you can do for each level are the following. These are ones that I do myself. Mind level practices, of course, are meditation. We have to learn to meditate. I know it's hard. In the beginning, I used to hate to meditate. Now I sit for about two hours a day. I love to meditate. Notice the thoughts. Just label it thinking, thinking, thinking, and bringing yourself back to breath. This is traditional vipassana. And it starts with noticing the breath, and then noticing when your mind wanders away, and then bringing it back to the breath, and noticing when your mind wanders away and bringing it back to the breath. And you'll notice that it happens all the time. And just notice those thoughts. And you can even stop right now and just notice the thoughts running through your mind. Sometimes they're just a quiet hum in the background. But then you can catch them like, hmm. I wonder if I did the laundry. I wonder how my cat is. Did I change the litter box this morning? Do I need more cat food? I wonder if there's any cat cute cats I can go pet at PetSmart. And you see how the mind goes and it just feeds and feeds and feeds, or at least that's how my mind works. Journaling. Catch the loops on paper. What is repeating in your life? And if you're not aware of the thoughts, then look at your life. What's repeating? And then ask yourself, is this actually true? What's underneath this thought? And you can dig deeper for yourself. And then cultivate cognitive awareness, which is naming it. You have to name it to tame it. Oh, that's my inner judge. Oh, that's my inner critic. That's the trap. That's the story. That's the loop. So just notice it, name it to tame it, without the judgment. The heart level practices are here are the feeling work, which is allowing your emotions to be without story. When you're going through loss, when you're going through grief, when you're going through transformation, it's going to bring up feelings, but don't tell a story about them. Sound them out, which is the body level practices. I'm getting ahead of myself here, but just allow them to be and name it. Oh, this is grief. This is rage. This is fear. Let it be here without fixing it and breathe with it. Give yourself self-compassion. We want to tend and befriend ourselves and the experience that we're having. Of course you feel this way. This totally makes sense. It's okay to feel this. And then the grief work is let yourself cry. Let yourself rage. Let yourself feel what it is that wants to be felt. And it will have its own starting and stopping point if you don't tell it a story. You won't cry forever, I promise. Even though it can feel like it sometimes. You won't. And then the body level practices are somatic work, beginning with the sensation, just noticing where do I feel this? Oh, I feel a tightness in my shoulder. I feel this tightness in my heart chakra. What's the quality of the sensation? Is it tight? Is it heavy? Is it hot? Is it stinging? Is it cold? Is it buzzing? Can I breathe into this? And then do some movement, shaking, walking, dancing, some gentle yoga. Getting out of the head and into the body is so important. And allowing the body to just express what it's holding. So you take those emotions, you take that energy in motion, and let your body move it out. Dance it out. Paint it out. Move it out, sound it out, drum it out, run it out, cook it out, garden it out. Whatever it is for you that allows it to express. Because what's not expressed gets depressed. And then sound, of course. Vibration that goes directly into the body. You're healing yourself with your own voice through toning, through singing, through humming. And it bypasses the thinking mind completely and shifts the nervous system. One of the most powerful practices you can do is even for one minute, putting your hand on your heart, taking a deep breath in, and hum. Hmm. And you can practice with moving your hum around inside of your body. Can I make them, can I feel my hum in my hands? Can I feel this hum in my belly? Can I feel this hum in my chest? Can I feel this hum in my toe that's hurting? You can move it around into your body intentionally because your bones carry resonance. They're resonance conductors. Awareness, acceptance, and allowance are the foundation because most people get stuck in resistance because they don't recognize they're in resistance. And when they do recognize it, then they make the mistake of judging it or resisting it. This shot, this thought shouldn't be here. I don't want to think this. I don't want to feel this. I shouldn't feel this way. Make this go away. I don't want to feel this. I'm going to shut this down. I'm going to go eat. Or I'm going to drink alcohol or I'm going to pick up my phone and scroll. Or I'm going to go shopping. Or I'm going to go gambling, or I'm going to go have sex, or I'm going to go, whatever it is. There are a bazillion ways to distract ourselves from how we're feeling. But resistance will keep you stuck because what you resist persists. So we want to move ourselves into the practice of non resistance. We want to let things. Flow through us. And as we intentionally do this work, we're removing the obstacles to our light. We're increasing our capacity to hold our own light and to carry and transmit a higher frequency of love. And it all begins right here by loving ourselves first. Awareness says I see what's here. Acceptance, I don't fight what's here. Allowance, I let it be here without needing to change it. This is the way through. All true transformation takes us right through the valley of grief. We descend inward. There's no other way around it. All of those things that we never worked through in childhood, all of those things we didn't work through in our 20s, all of those, all those little things, we thought we were just sweeping them under the rug. But what you sweep under a rug, you eventually start tripping over. Because nothing ever really goes away. And they become unconscious patterns that live our life because we are now creating through our wounds. Because you're never not creating. And we are the acting agents within that field. And I saw it as a projection of light, as a movie projector. Like imagine that you are a movie projector and this light is shining through you. And you are projecting your movie out into the field, onto the screen of life. But if you have a lot of wounds, you're projecting your wounds through the lens of the wounds. And that's why we want to do this work of going in. And if you're in loss, if you're in grief, if you're suffering from any of those things that are painful, well, the good news is that's a perfect opportunity to go in and do this work by allowing those emotions to be present. You have now signaled your nervous system that it's safe now to express older stuff that's there. And you can see why telling a story about it is not that important, right? You don't need to go tell your whole tell the whole story about what happened to you. That doesn't release the emotions of it. I know for years I was able to tell my story of what happened to me without feeling it. But that's because I was disconnected from it from the feelings of the body, the feelings of the heart that held those experiences. Because we have three brain centers, which I just went through. Our head, our heart, and our nervous system, our gut, are literally neurons in each one of those three places. And neurons that fire together wire together. We increase that myelin sheath that makes it easier for that neural pathway to get formed, which is why change is so hard. And it's why change in grief is happening. Change through loss happens because the part of you in your brain that tells you who you are in the world is automatically unplugged. So it's like all of your neurons get unplugged from one another. Boom. Which is why life seems so funky and chaotic on top of the pain. But know that every decision, everything you do, every thought you think that you obey, you are wiring yourself to that loop. And so, yes, read the resistance is the change of that loop that's wired. So just expect that there will be resistance because there will be. And this is the mystics' journey from the head to the heart to the body, because we're embodied mystics. We're bringing heaven to earth through us. You start in the head with your thoughts and your awareness, because that's where you can first catch the pattern. Then you descend into the heart, into the feelings where the wounds are held as feeling memory. And then you descend into the body as sensations where all of our trauma is stored somatically. And everything in our life, even our healing, even if you don't do anything else, healing from your grief and from your loss, this right here, if you can practice this, is a major step in the right direction. So you don't get wired and stuck in the worst freaking day of your life. Awareness, see the conditioning, and notice the patterns. Acceptance, allow what is to be what is. Doesn't that just make you feel more react relaxed thinking about that? Makes me feel more relaxed thinking about that. It's like, oh, I'm not my thoughts, I'm not my feelings, I'm not even this body. I'm a soul. I'm a multidimensional being of light having this human experience. And I'm learning how to manage my equipment because nobody taught me. Because we were taught from other wounded beings. So start with the mind, awareness, acceptance, and allowance, because this is where you can first see, but don't stay in the mind. Descend into the heart and into the body, because that's where the real healing happens. The mind opens the door, but you yourself have to choose to walk through it. And sometimes, yes, that means going against how we feel like we want to go. Just notice that resistance, get up, put your shoes on anyway, get out that door, start moving. Because I don't know a single person who ever said, I am so glad that I procrastinated up changing for all those years. It matters that we wake up in the game. It matters that we wake up in the game. It's the most important thing we will ever do is to awaken ourselves. And there is a beautiful Chinese proverb that says, When women awaken, mountains move. And that's what we're here for. That mystic sisterhood launches very soon. I'm so, so, so excited about this community where I'll be posting some deeper conversations and deeper dives into all things mystical, consciousness, grief-related spiritual awakening, talking about all of the gates and all of the things that I will be teaching from from now on. I'm so grateful to be doing this work. I think I'm going to bring in a lot of myth stuff as well, and of course, start talking a lot more about the Magdalene, my love of my life, and sharing her wisdom with you as well. So join my newsletter list at thatmystic.com so that you can be the first to be notified when That Mystic Sisterhood launches, which will be very soon. And you can also find some classes that I have coming up this month, uh, some sound healing, some movement, some different things going on. And then also, I am co-hosting a retreat next month in Sedona. So excited about that. You'll find the link to there on that as well so you can get some more information and would love to have you there. It's going to be a completely transformative rebirth retreat for women with two dear, powerful sisters. We're all collaborating on this. So we invite you to check that out and sign up if it feels in alignment for you. With that, I wish you a beautiful day. Notice your thoughts, don't judge them. Notice your feelings, don't judge them. Let them come, let them go. Feel how you feel, express it out of you, and be the love and the light that you truly are in the world. And next week on the show, I have Barry Scheimelfarb, who is an incredible man. Oh my gosh, we had such a great conversation about women in leadership, about his incredible healing space he has in Carmel, California, and his own journey through cancer and how he put himself into 100% not remission, but to be cancer free. This is a conversation you will not want to miss. That's next week on the show. Until then, be blessed, and I'll see you soon. Bye, everybody. Thank you for listening to That Mystic Podcast. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and your reviews are deeply, deeply appreciated. And I invite you to join That Mystic Sisterhood, a community of women awakening together. You can find it at That Mystic Sisterhood.com. And if you'd like to reach me, you can always find me at ThatMystic.com. Thank you. Bye bye.