EPISODE 25: WHAT DO THE STARS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT YOUR LIFE?

Sep 24

Takeaways

After becoming a yoga teacher and a Reiki practitioner, I became surrounded by people who could read auras, tell you about your chakras, connect with otherworldly forces, guide your life based on your astrology, and more. But, what happens when there are people who are truly powerful — yet also dark? Hear about how I met a "false guru" and how the experience of unhealthy boundaries actually catapulted me to pursue my dreams of moving to Kauai, where I learned about Human Design.

This week's interview on Wednesday features Victoria Jane, a Human Design coach trained by renowned Human Design expert Jenna Zoe, and you'll learn about how to live with less hustle and more flow. On Friday, we'll dive into a mindfulness practice to connect you deeper to your own intuition.

I also mention:

Transcript

This is going to be a fun week ahead. For any of you who've ever been curious about astrology intuition, any of the woo stuff. I was deeply trenched in when I was teaching yoga and living in North County, San Diego, which at the time there were some that said that there's this hub from Mexico up to Southern California, where the Dalai Lama said that it would be the birth of a new age and that that new age would come through the power of women.

So it's exactly the community that I was surrounded by. People who could read, you know, auras who could navigate your chakras, who could connect with different higher beings and channel all of that. Um, so you hear about that a bit in my story today, but this week I also interviewed Victoria Jane. She is a human design coach and her tagline is to help you live a life with less hustle and more flow.

And I loved speaking with her and in the Patreon edition, if you wanted to listen to it, you could get a sneak peek of what one of her readings would look like because I recorded the reading that she did for me. So she helps you bring awareness to each person's unique energy and intuition. And when I discovered human design, which we'll hear about in today's story, when I was living on Kauai, it really felt like it was this liberating moment for me, that I finally understood exactly why I was the way that I was, and I didn't have to feel guilty about it anymore.

I didn't have to feel apologetic. I could just simply live in exactly who I was and human design, which you'll learn about on Wednesday combines modern physics with ancient wisdom, which includes the chakra system, astrology, Kabbalah, the eating, and it gives you this comprehensive view of your human nature.

So that's on Wednesday. And then on Friday, we will go into a mindfulness practice to help you connect to your own sense of intuition, your higher, knowing your greater wisdom. A lot of people ask me about how to tap into that. So we'll find that quiet space for you to connect to the truth that you already know within.

For today's essay. We'll talk about how I met a supposed guru, how I discovered human design and why it's super essential to trust your innate higher wisdom as you're navigating through this mastery practice of your own life.

Welcome to the fuck saving face podcast. I'm your host, Judy sway and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today. I was driving on the one-on-one in North County, San Diego by the ocean.

When I got a call from an unknown number, normally I wouldn't answer, but since I was in the car heading home, they gave me some into high. A man said with a British accent, I saw that you might have a yoga studio space. I'm curious about renting it because I want to hold a workshop. No, I told them I actually rent a space from a wellness facility, but I can give you their name and number if you'd like to contact them directly.

Oh, okay. He said. What kind of workshop are you offering? I asked here he is. It's um, he paused, it's a new kind of energetic healing. Hmm. Well, I'm a Reiki master. So I get energy healing. We shared a few pleasantries. I gave him the studio's information and hung up a few minutes later. He called back. I'm sorry to bother you.

He said, but something is telling me that I should connect with you. So I know this sounds odd, but would you be interested in meeting for coffee sometime so I can talk to you more about my work. Huh? I responded unsure a lot of friends when I lived in LA asked me all the time. Why aren't you dating more?

You know, so many people in you're always out. Why aren't you getting asked out all the time? I dunno. I said, guys never asked me out what they'd say surprised, confused, but I knew the real reason. I didn't know how to handle relationships. I didn't know how to manage attention from the opposite sex. So instead I'd become a great friend or I come off as angry in public.

When I'd walk around the streets of LA, I've been stopped at least over a dozen times with men saying you should smile. What are you so mad about? Better understanding feminist ideals. Now I realize how ridiculous the statements are, but at the time there was simply someone calling me out on my attempts to protect myself and keep people at Bay.

I didn't trust anyone, least of all myself, but for some reason, I decided to say yes to meet this man for coffee after all, it could just be professional. At the time I would hold up regularly in a tiny little cafe in Leucadia. I became friends with all the baristas and the owners. I even had my bond by Ash party before I moved to Hawaii, there were, I had way too much to drink.

And thankfully my friend Moto took me home that night to take care of me. And he continued to take care of me the next day as we had to run last minute errands before I was about to take off on a plane to Kauai. That summer day, I walked into the cafe and Skylar, one of the barista said, Hey, Judy, how's it going?

It's great. I said, setting up my laptop as I usually did, except apparently I'm meeting some guy today. She smiled broadly. She never seen me with anyone else other than a female friend. Anyway, he's this British dude. But beyond that, I have no idea. I decided to move my seat to their outdoor patio. There was a nice day and I wanted to take advantage of it.

About 15 minutes later, a tall man and a black v-neck t-shirt blue jeans and boots walked up towards me, Judy. He said, hi Lawrence. Over the next hour, I would explain to him why I loved yoga. He asked me what it was, cause he never could get his mind around how people were so into yoga in Southern California, in Encinitas, especially.

And I would say that it's because it's an opportunity for you to connect your breath with movement. And whenever you bring all of your awareness to your breath, you automatically drop into the present moment. So then if you have a really great instructor, who's helping you to breathe and encouraging you to connect your breath with your movement.

That movement also helps to reprogram your brain to help you learn differently, to help you absorb new lessons. So that's why I feel when you walk out of a really good class that you truly feel infused with new wisdom, new light, new abilities, to understand that you can handle the things in your life.

Since you've taken that breath to drop into the here and now and in the here and now you are safe and in the here and now you also have opportunities to connect to that sense of oneness. And when we're connected to that sense of oneness, we start to feel that loving energy from the universe, the nurturing and the understanding that we all have this capacity for greatness within that, we all have this ability to live into our full potential and that there is infinite potential in this universe that's ever expanding.

Wow. He said, no one's ever explained yoga to me like that before now I understand why people do it. And then he would proceed to show me his intuitive abilities, how he could read my past present and future seemingly exceptionally well. I was honestly a bit blown away having been entrenched in the yoga community for the last decade.

I knew a lot of woo people. We were people who read auras and chakras, tarot cards, palms, and even channeled spirits. Once I taught a class with a woman who channeled yin. The co-founders of the studio, where I was teaching the soul of yoga had changed my life and they provided an opportunity for me to become a teacher, to tap into this love that I have of teaching other people and this love of yoga for some reason, the first time that I brought my hands together.

Palms touching at my heart center in prayer pose, it felt like coming home. It felt like since I was young, knowing that I had a greater purpose, knowing that even through all of the difficult things that I was experiencing with my family, with my parents, with school and friends, that, for some reason I knew I was going through it because I had a bigger purpose and I couldn't explain it.

I was so young. There were times in my life. I also thought about leaving the mundane world and entering into a Buddhist temple to become a monk. So when I found yoga, it was an opportunity for me to connect all these parts of me that felt so familiar until a way that was seemingly more acceptable in a broader community.

And in addition, when I discovered Reiki, this energetic healing, where you are connecting to the universal energy, that's around you and you become the conduit to bring that universal energy to the person that you're working on. Even that the first time that I practiced the laying on of hands, it felt like the sense of coming home.

So it wasn't weird for me to be called by a Tricia. One of the co-owners of the yoga studio to say, I can't teach class today. And I know that a lot of people are looking forward to this woman who's channeling Kuan Yin. So I checked in with a masters and I said that you're the person that I should call.

Would you be interested in teaching the class? I looked at the clock. I had about 15 minutes to get ready. And of course, if Trisha asked, I was going to say yes, so I did. I had actually met this woman the night before we had gone to a workshop where we had an experience to see her in action. I never seen anybody channel anyone before, and this woman was older.

She had long whitish blonde hair, and she asked us to sit in a circle around her. She said that sometime along her journey, she just felt infused with this energy and that she could connect to this higher wisdom. I endeavored to be open-minded because this is not the way that I was raised, but I wanted to learn as much as I can to connect to different forms of spirituality.

Well, and then I was around this mentor and I watched her as her eyes went sideways, they went Oriental. And that totally turned me off because I knew that I lived in North County, San Diego. I knew that the predominant majority of the people that I was around with similar to the town that I grew up in West LA, where it was mostly Caucasian people.

No one else in the circle, all of these also white, older individuals even flinched, except for my friend, Lindsey, who I had vaguely known because we had done the same yoga teacher program before. And she was sitting across from me in the circle. She was also young about the same age as I was. And when that comment was made, she turned and she looked at me, her eyes went wide.

Lindsey was raised in New York. She had been around many different cultures and embraced all of them. So she was also surprised that no one else was even flinching. That became the catalyst to our really great friendship, where we were able to speak truths to a lot of the cultural dynamics in the communities that we were part of that no one ever spoke about.

On this morning that I had to teach the class, the room was packed. Everyone came to see Tricia. They didn't know that last minute I would be teaching instead. And Trisha was such a beacon of light within our community that everybody loved and adored her. The hallway were even filled with students. So I simply began teaching and knew somehow when to pause for this woman to share insights from the goddess of compassion.

At the end of class, a woman came up to me and said, you were the perfect person to teach this class today. You embody all of the qualities of Kenyon. You're compassionate, you're kind, you're loving. And she said, I'm the woman who painted the portrait of Kuan yin that sits at the entryway of this yoga studio.

I looked at her amazed. It was precisely that portrait of Kuan Yin that encouraged me to sign up, to become a teacher with this studio. After my grandmother passed away, she was the only unconditionally loving force in my life. Everyone else would constantly berate me and attack me for simply being an existing.

But my grandmother loved me no matter what, when she passed, I didn't grieve her death for over a year. I didn't cry. Other than the day of her funeral. When I had to read a eulogy that I had written, but only because I was nervous that my aunts and uncles and cousins would be in the audience, these people who hated me and they had to listen to the words that I wanted to say about a woman who never stopped doing for all of us.

The time that I finally grappled with her death was when I was in my eating disorder program. And I was working during the day at Herbalife, which their number one product is weight loss. So in the kitchens, it would be stocked full of weight, loss, smoothies, supplements, and all of these other products to help you lose weight.

So during the day, all day long, I would write about other people's success stories when it came to weight loss. And during the evenings four days a week, I would go and talk about how much I grappled with my body with finding the weight. That was right for me. It was during one of these experiences when I was asked to interview distributors under the age of 30, which is what I was at the time.

And because I had been procrastinating on this project, I had to jam it into two days of back-to-back calls with people, asking them their stories of how they achieve financial success, of how they found love of how they created the bodies that they wanted, of how they now have children and cars and homes.

And it was all the things that felt so, so far away from where I was that night, when I went to my intensive outpatient eating disorder program, I was in art therapy. And the second that I opened my mouth to share, I simply burst into tears. The entire room fell silent. They had never seen me in the course of a year, even get close to teary-eyed.

They didn't know what to do. I was finally breaking down and breaking through. After this moment, I realized how much I missed my grandmother, how much I no longer had a force in my life who was unconditionally loving, despite what anybody else might be telling me. It was also during this time that I was going to a lot of different yoga classes so that I could find my own path towards healing.

And at one of the studios on Santa Monica Boulevard downstairs, there was a little spiritual art shop complete with thousands and thousands of books from all different faiths, as well as thousands of duties that you could buy. And in one of the glass cases, I saw the goddess Kuan yin. I remembered how that was the day that my grandmother would pray to how she would wake up every morning and light incense and bow her head with a black and white portrait of my grandfather and a little pot filled with ashes from all of the incense sticks throughout the year that she had already burned.

There was an ivory statue of the goddess of compassion Kuan Yin. And at the time I had no idea who she was. I did not know that it was this tiny ivory statue that gave my grandmother the faith to go on. In junior high, I was asked to do a history project where I had to interview my family. So I asked my father about his life, about immigrating from Taiwan.

And he said that my grandmother who had become a widow with five children, the youngest is still an infant. When her husband passed away from a heart attack, did not know what to do. She did not know how to survive. Because her eldest son had gone to the us. They decided that it was time to emigrate the entire family over.

And she was on a boat, completely seasick, completely heartsick. According to my father, she was almost comatose at times with her grief. But when she looked into her luggage, this ivory statue of Kenya had fallen in there. Somehow it wasn't hers. And she thought that it was a sign from the universe. That she had the strength and the ability to go on that she would be watched after and looked after.

And yin is the goddess of compassion and of lost children. So after she passed and after I realized that I no longer had someone in my life, I decided to start talking out loud to her in my private moments, in my moments of quiet, I would reach out to her when I was going through any sort of hard time in my relationship with my boyfriend.

When I knew I had to break up with him at work, dealing with my eating disorder and how to heal it. Kenyan began showing up in my life too. Anytime after I spoke inwardly or out loud to my grandmother, somehow I would go somewhere and Kuan Yin would be there. It happened when I was on Kauai. And I didn't know if buying a used Jeep, a stick shift car of all things that I had never driven before that I'd only learned how to drive stick shift earlier that week in a 15 minute lesson with a friend was the right thing to do.

So I asked my grandmother quietly as I took a bus from the North shore to the West side of the Island. And when I got out of the bus at an unexpected stop, when the bus pulled away, there was a two-story statue of Kuan Yin, or how one time and yet another failed relationship. I knew I had to leave. I didn't know how to gather the strength.

So I asked my grandmother, I pulled up my car. I parked it in a spot, getting ready to run into teach class and the car parked next to me, it was an old Honda civic with a bumper sticker on the rear window. The word said Namo Amitabha. And that's what the monks chanted in my grandmother's hospital room.

After she passed away for 24 hours straight Namo Amitabha. I had never seen it written out before. Or finally, when I wanted to leave yet another relationship and pursue this path, that was completely unconventional to what I had wanted to do before, which is to become a yoga teacher. I interviewed a few different studios in San Diego, and I didn't know how to choose which one.

And it was a fairly substantial financial investment at the time. So when I went to go to the soul of yoga to see if that might be the studio that I should sign up with to become a yoga teacher, I walked into the front door. And then from the floor to the ceiling was a hand painted portrait of . I knew that I had found my place.

I knew that my grandmother guided me there. So I asked Lawrence if he would be open to seeing my craniosacral healer, Gary, I said that Gary was remarkable that he was so talented and that, uh, he be able to help Lawrence understand his gifts even better. Cranialsacral therapy, similar to Reiki is a gentle hands on technique and it helps to move the fluids in and around the central nervous system.

Gary was this big Scottish guy who held space for me. Like, no man I'd ever met. He was older when he was wonderful. He definitely had special abilities that had been passed down through generations in his family. Once he was working on me and said that he could sense that something was wrong with my uterus to suggest that I go see a doctor.

I did. And the Western doctor found an abnormal test that I would have to address another time. Gary said, Whoa, this is super trippy, but I can sense you in a past life here in the room with me, you're this old Japanese woman who I can see sitting in the corner. She was extremely respected and revered by her community.

And this is so wild because it's you, but it's you in a previous life. As he was saying this, it reminded me of a trip that I took in my mid twenties to Japan, a place that for some reason, felt so familiar to me, even though I had never been there before, while there with my friend she introduced me to one of her friends who, after getting to know me said, have you ever been to Koyasan?

I had never heard of it before, so I didn't know that it should be on my itinerary. The small mountain, top Buddhist community is one of Japan's most magical places. And in order to get there, you've got to take the train to the end of the line and then take a tram up the mountain. It's located in this remote wooded area, South of Kyoto and Osaka, and it's home to more than a hundred temples and monasteries.

When I arrived, it was raining and misty and cold. And I had gone there by myself, completely unprepared. So I was soaking through the bone in my clothes. The only place that you can stay when you’re in Koyasan is at a shukobo, temple lodging. So I checked into this incredible temple where there was an expansive room with rice paper, sliding doors, and I was the only person there.

I also had no idea that. One of the famous landmarks on Koyasan is the other worldly Okunoin cemetery. Okunoin is one of Japan's most sacred sites and the location of Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum. So if you follow one of the stone paths through the beautiful wooded cemetery, you'll end up at Toronto hall, which houses more than 10,000 eternally lit lanterns.

The temple that I was staying at was at the base of the cemetery. So once you walk out the back doors, you would be able to go into this wooded area and because of the Japanese aesthetic, where they allow for nature to become part of the landscape, the stone paths, meandered around trees, around grave sites, around everything.

Beautiful. The next morning after I arrived, I packed my digital camera, made sure that it was fully charged and then walked along these stone paths with towering lush green trees above me. It was completely silent and not haunting, but eerily beautiful. For some reason I found a gravestone. It didn't seem like it was anything exceptional or spectacular, but it really caught my attention.

So I pulled out my digital camera to take a picture. I turned it on. And then the second that I tried to click to take the image, my camera lens froze. I looked down at the camera in my hand. Well, that's weird. I thought I had literally just charged it completely the night before. Why is it getting frozen?

I had never done this before. I played around with several of the buttons and then finally the camera lens retracted and the camera turned off. I restarted it, turned it back on, aimed my lens to take a photo of the gravestone. And once again, when I clicked on the button to try to take the picture, it froze once more.

Something inside of me thought there's a reason for this. There's a reason that I'm not allowed to take a photo of this gravestone. So I tried to turn off the camera, but this time the lens was stuck in the on mode. I just stuck it in my bag and continue to walk about. And then that's when I discovered that temple with no one in it, except for all of the lit candles.

And it was breathtaking. I went back that night. I stayed in the temple and the next morning I decided I wanted to walk through the cemetery. Once more, I made my way back. I made my way to the same exact headstone I had double and triple checked that my camera was completely charged. And I tried to take a photo once more, but the exact same thing happened.

It froze the camera had worked that morning when I was taking pictures of anything else around the room to test it out. But when I got there, it froze and I knew then that there was a reason more secret than I could understand of why I wasn't able to take that picture. I relayed this story to Lawrence one afternoon when we were walking on the beach so that he could better understand who Gary was, Lawrence stopped, he turned and he looked at me and he asked, do you know why that happened in Japan?

I paused. I did, because that headstone was me in a past life. Exactly. My friends. Didn't like Lawrence, the few who met him, they didn't like his vibe. They thought he was skeezy, but I couldn't see it. He agreed to see Gary so that Gary could verify his talents. And Gary did. I happened to schedule a session with Gary a few days later, privately and just me and him.

And he said, Judy Lawrence does have talents. That is undoubted true, but he is dark. I want to tell you to run, run fast, run the other way. Like so many other intuitive people that I've worked with and had sessions with. He wasn't telling me anything. I didn't already know. He was simply putting it into words.

I've known you for a couple of years now, and I have seen you go through so many unhealthy relationships. When are you going to learn your lessons? He said this gently without judgment, because he only wanted my greatest good. And I took his advice. I would later literally run from Lawrence. He drove by my apartment in Cardiff and I had to tell him to never come back.

I was so bothered by the experience of this false guru, how gullible I was that I ended up posting on Facebook that I needed to go on a trip, a quick impromptu trip. And if anybody had any suggestions, my friend Shelby, who lived in Maui responded, why don't you just come visit me? So I did. The universe was conspiring in my favor because this spontaneous trip to Maui became the catalyst of my moving to Hawaii.

I was able to book a first-class ticket on Alaska airlines with miles that I never knew I had, I was able to book a ticket to Kauai to visit by myself, even though I'd start the first part of my trip on Maui with Shelby. My mother who I talked to sporadically found out that I was in Hawaii and sent me an email in broken English, this intuitive connection that our family has, even if we are not always close telling me that it's okay to heal through hurts and wounds and that everything will be okay in the end.

But this was a time. This trip was a time for me to find myself, to find my peace and to find my next steps. Serendipity after serendipity continued to happen while I was both on Maui and on Kauai to the point that I met a woman who teaches stand up paddleboard yoga, who happened to go to high school with the very same friend that I was staying with in Maui.

She recommended the next person to me to go on a kayak trip down the beautiful Nepali coast. I had no itinerary for this trip either. I was just going with the flow. And even though I called the kayak company and they told me that there was no room that they would put my name on the wait list. I went to go have dinner at a bar that this woman Marissa had recommended to me.

She said, don't worry about it. You're a single woman. Just sit at the bar. The bartenders are friendly and you'll make conversation. There was a man Ivan who sat down next to me and he started to spark up a conversation with me. He asked what I was doing on Island, what my plans were. And I mentioned that I had called about a kayak tour on the Nepali coast.

Oh, I'm the owner of that company. Are you Judy? Who I spoke with earlier? Yes. The bartender then came up to me, asked me what I wanted to drink and asked to see my ID. Ivan said, Oh, she's not that old. She must be so young. And I told him, I'm actually older than I look. It's something that I get all the time because I'm Asian.

So I pulled out my license and he saw it that it said July 16th. And he said, no way. Pulled out his license, his birthday also July 16th. He said, well, there's a reason that you sat down next to me at the bar tonight. I'm going to make room for you on that kayak tour. I met him the next morning and he took me on a kayak tour, complete with dolphins, leaping out of the water beside us and a full, huge rainbow on the horizon.

And he brought me to call allow, which is again, somewhere I had never heard of before that people would come here and basically check out of life, going along the trail, living in the woods, in the mountains, in the heart of the Island. It was there that I met a woman, an Asian American woman who said, if Kauai wants you here, she'll bring you here.

And you simply need to ask if she doesn't want you here, she'll kick you off. It was something that I would hear again and again and again, that if the Island wants you there, she'll bring you there. And if she doesn't, then she won't. She said, ask the Island and then go home and see what happens that night in my Airbnb.

I did exactly that. I cried when my plane was supposed to take off the next day to go back to Maui and then to prepare, to bring me back to California. I extended my trip. There were no additional fees, surprisingly. And then suddenly I got an email from a random stranger who had found my place in San Diego on Airbnb that I had spontaneously put up before I left for my trip.

And she said, I moving from New York to California and I need to find a place to live, but there's nowhere that's available. Would you be interested in renting your apartment to me? Long-term starting at the end of the month. Every person that I met on Kauai kept telling me, I don't know why I meant to tell you this, but I think you're supposed to be here.

I'm getting chills. You're supposed to be here. A few days later, I flew back to California and my friend brought me to her apartment near the airport. That's where I would be staying the night before driving home. The next morning, that night, unable to sleep from the jet lag. I opened my phone and started looking on Craigslist for a place to live.

There was a studio apartment. It sounded exactly like my apartment in Cardiff by the sea here in San Diego, but on Island. I sent her an email. I explained that I'm a yoga teacher and a writer, and I wanted to move to the Island. The next morning, I drove back to my apartment and I marveled at all the serendipities and synchronicities that unfolded during my trip.

Did all of that actually happen? Am I supposed to move there? I then said aloud to the universe universe. If I'm supposed to move to Kauai, would you please show me a sign? I got back unpacked. Plugged in my laptop, turned it on. And one of the first emails that I saw was from the landlord of the studio apartment on Kauai.

She said, I've gotten so many responses for the studio apartment, but for some reason, I want to give it to you if you want it, it's yours. And given that you're a yoga teacher, you're going to love the fact that there's a deck here where you can practice. And there are wild horses who come up to the pasture and the back.

Three weeks later, everything that I had was sold or redistributed in more magical unfoldings of serendipity and synchronicity, so that I would arrive back on Kauai in the studio apartment. It was here on Island that I would meet Genoa in a writing group that transformed my life. Genoa is a leading human design expert.

And I had never heard about this before. He offered if I wanted to come over to his place so that I could learn more about it with a regular steady group that they had. I walked in unsure of what to expect. Everyone had notebooks. They seem to be very, very clear on this. Very, very detailed. That seemed too complex for me.

Genoa had asked for my birth date, the location, where I was born the time. And then he brought up my chart that looked like intersecting grids in an outlined form of a human. And then he proceeded to explain every single one of my nuances and tendencies, my behaviors and life events in a way that just had me laughing out loud.

I couldn't believe he was basically describing every single element of who I was and all the life experiences precisely how they unfolded for me and how I translated them. After that session, I felt unbelievably liberated. I felt like I had been given permission to be exactly who I was, the way that I was built to be.

And it felt so freeing. I hope that on this Wednesday's episode and this interview with Victoria Jane, that you will also be able to experience a new way of understanding yourself. I always think it's fascinating that we are on this journey to learn how to master ourselves simply ourselves, but that we were never given a manual to start off with.

So human design can become one of those manuals for you. If it speaks to your heart, all of the things that happened. All of the moments that I thought were the worst have actually turned out to be incredible blessings. If only I would live long enough into the future to be able to have that long view perspective on it.

So even though working with Lawrence was a terrible opportunity at the time. And even though it was yet another relationship that Gary was showing me that I needed to stop getting into. It actually became the catalyst for me to move to the place that I had dreamed of living all of my life. And I wouldn't have taken the opportunity.

I wouldn't have taken that plunge. I wouldn't have been so spontaneous and making that plan if this seemingly negative thing hadn't happened. And along the way, I learned so much about myself. Because of the experience. I still didn't take heed to Gary's words because I probably wasn't ready that I wasn't ready to live out of the shadows.

And I still had relationship patterns that I needed to process through, which is on Island, where I met my husband. And even that relationship, even though it was devastatingly hard at times, it brought me so many blessings and gifts that an enabled me. To be able to shine a light on all the areas in which I needed to grow all of these moments, all of the serendipity and synchronicity, the heart aches and the deep, deep love have become part of my story that I'm continually writing.

What story are you writing? If you need help coaching yourself through a challenging moment right now, please reach out to me. I'm here. I've always believed that it's so essential to understand the stories that you're telling yourself and the stories that you're telling others around you, because that's what frames your reality and what frames your levels of contentment.

You can tell better stories and I can help if you're interested, email me at hello at fuck saving face. That's fuck. Without the you see you on Wednesday. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you liked what you heard and know someone in your life who might also benefit from hearing this episode, please feel free to share it with them.

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