Podcast appearances and mentions of anna holden

This podcast is all about leaving the 9-5 grind, and my next guest literally JUST did that! Today on the show, I have Anna Holden. She is a chemical engineer turned Florida-based elopement photographer and business coach. When I tell you she just left her 9-5, I mean that her last day is next week! ‌ Anna shares with us how she went from being a chemical engineer to an elopement photographer, and the identity crisis that went along with leaving a career that many would consider prestigious. Along with that, she delves into just how important it is to have a support system, and how she strategically and successfully built her business all while working her full-time. ‌ This episode is sure to leave you inspired and motivated to take control of your own journey. ‌ In this episode, we chat about: Why Anna decided to quit her job The identity crisis she experienced when she decided to switch career paths How she was able to build a business that brought in $75k while working full-time The impact her support system had on her Having a strategic plan before you quit ‌ Connect with Anna: Photography Website: https://hazography.com/ Photography Instagram: @‌hazography_ Coaching Website: https://hazography.com/laboratory Coaching Instagram: @‌annaholdennn ‌ If this episode made you feel stoked, be sure to share it with a friend, leave a review, or DM me on Instagram at @‌stokedwithmeganmacphail and let me know your thoughts. You can also connect with me on my website: www.meganmacphail.com

Is it a good ol' fashioned radio play or an episode of Faithfully Memphis?!? How about both!This week on Faithfully Memphis, learn all about Ms. Anna Holden, a 19th century Episcopal woman who played a pivotal role in the history of St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Collierville and Immanuel Episcopal Church in LaGrange, Tennessee. Anna Holden's story is brought to life by St. Andrews parishioners Laura Hall and Sarah Walne in a first-of-its-kind episode of Faithfully Memphis. Learn more about St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Collierville at standrewscollierville.org.

Anna Holden is the founder of D&D Disability, a company she began to help bring disability awareness to D&D. She works with a team of consultants to create supplements to allow players to bring disabilities into the world of D&D. I actually had the privilege of working with her on a supplement for POTS, which stands for Postural Orthostatic Tacychardia Syndrome, and it was honestly a really cool experience to think of my own chronic illness in a fun way and translate it to D&D mechanics. We dive into Anna's processes for writing and creating these supplements, as well as the journey D&D Disability has taken over the last year. Anna is also a talented dice maker and is able to use these dice to support herself full time. We also get to have a fun discussion about how she's been able to grow this dice business in conjunction with D&D Disability and while managing her own disabilities, which really is a full-time job in itself. Anna is making some extraordinary strides in bringing more visibility to disabilities, and it was an honor to bring this interview to you. If this is your first time tuning in to Roll Play Grow, welcome. This podcast is a part of Lightheart Adventures, which is a small company I co-founded with my husband. We offer a weekly blog on our website where you'll find tips for running games, free monthly one-shot adventures, product reviews, and more. You'll find that blog at lightheartadventures.com. Brenton also creates beautiful dungeon maps, both on DM's Guild and on a commission basis. He is currently working on a series of map packs for Wild Beyond the Witchlight. There will be 5 packs total, one for every chapter, and they offer a look at some additional locations in the adventure. You can find all of those by going to DM's Guild and searching for Lightheart Adventures as the author, or by going to lightheartadventures.com/shop to find all of our DM's Guild and DriveThruRPG publications in one spot.Some other ways you can support us and this show are by subscribing to this show and leaving a review. Reviews help me reach more people, and if you leave it on Apple Podcasts, your review might even get featured on an upcoming episode! That is all for now, so please sit back and enjoy this conversation with Anna.Find Anna, D&D Disability & Three Fates Dice at:D&D Disability WebsiteThree Fates Dice WebsiteAnna Holden Carrd.coFind Roll Play Grow:Show PagePatreonLightheart Adventures WebsiteLightheart TwitterLightheart InstagramDice Envy Dice Envy creates beautiful dice in a variety of materials. Use lightheartadv for 10% off your orderDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show

Anna Holden is an intuitive, medical intuitive, sound healer and teacher who specializes in working with Highly Sensitive People. Enjoy our ramble through the Irish myth of The Children of Lir (aka The Six Swans) as well as Anna’s relationship with her body and creativity. This is an entirely self-produced podcast. If you appreciate the Personal Mythmaking podcast, please support the show at: www.patreon.com/janellehardy Connect with Anna: www.sensitivityuncensored.com Connect with Janelle: www.janellehardy.com

Janelle Hardy is a dancer, artist, and writer who teaches the Art of Personal Mythmaking, a transformational memoir-writing program. She loves weaving embodiment prompts together with creativity and ancient tales (like fairytales/ myths/ folklore/ etc) as a way of supporting growth and healing. This interview features a 7-minute guided visualization to unblock creativity by tapping into the body. GUEST LINKS - JANELLE HARDY janellehardy.com The Art of Personal Mythmaking Outline Your Memoir free workshop HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Janelle: So this is a really round-about sort of story because I didn't really know when I started teaching the work that I do, that it was actually about memoir-writing. I'll leave you with that statement and then circle back to it again. Slade: Okay. Janelle: I'm from the far north of Canada. The far north-west, which is the Yukon Territory, and for context for people that aren't Canadian (even some Canadians don't know where I'm from). It's beside Alaska and above British Columbia. It's beautiful. It's so wild. I'm not living there now, but I talk about it because I feel so connected to that place. I'm also from a family... I think I have a common experience to a lot of people in North America and in colonized countries where my ancestry, you know, I'd be considered white, but my ancestry is varied and mostly unknown. There were some family secrets that were whispered as I was growing up. That experience of growing up really attached to a landscape. And then learning that my roots in that landscape are only as deep as my grandparents having moved up there and met each other and settled down there, and wondering, Who am I? Where did I come from? And then struggling with some health challenges that didn't feel like they belonged to me really kind of pitched me on this path of curiosity and inquiry and kind of roaming all over the place in terms of what I studied and where I lived. So... See, this is the trouble with collecting my thoughts around all of my offshoots of interest, which, for a long time, really mystified me. I was really into painting. I was also really into writing. I was also really into dance. I wanted to be a dancer. I also wanted to live in other cultures, so I was an exchange student to Japan and to Russia and to another part of Canada, Ontario, which doesn't really sound like being an exchange student, but the Yukon is really different than southern Canada, in terms of lifestyle and how people think about themselves and their relation to the country that they're in. For example, in the Yukon, we refer to 'going outside' as leaving the Yukon to the rest of Canada, or outsiders coming to the Yukon, right? So there's a real strong identity wrapped up in being a Yukoner. And then, the other part of my realization was, I feel this intense claim to being a Yukoner to being part of this world, and it actually doesn't belong to me. There's a history of First Nations people there that is thousands of years old and is being erased and denied. So how can I reconcile my love and longing for this place with the understanding that my roots don't originate there and I don't get to claim it as only my own. All of these curiosities and wonderings pushed me out to study and travel and do all sorts of things, including becoming a single mother at 23 and having chronic fatigue. Throughout all that time, the one thing that kept me steady was a creative practice. And it didn't matter what the creative practice was. I'm a really big believer in creative energy and the life force, that kind of erotic creative life force that's in all of us. When it's in flow, we get to choose the medium that suits what we're trying to express best. And for some people, they just latch on to the one medium and they're a writer and that's all they are. Entirely. For other people, it's kind of peripatetic and maybe a bit dilettantish. Sometimes I've labelled myself as not being able to commit to something, but I've let go of that label and realized that I have the ability and desire to use different mediums to explore different facets of my creative energy, depending on what it is that's wanting to come through. So I might go through a phase of dance and choreography, which happened a lot in my mid-20s. That's a time when I earned a masters degree in dance. And then I really got into painting. And then I got a horrible creative block for years, where I had all the ideas and I actually couldn't write. I couldn't paint. I couldn't... It was so painful. It was so painful, this state. But it also taught me a lot. So I felt the bubbling force of my creative desiring, creative energy, and I had all the ideas and I encountered my own resistance and procrastination, no matter where I went. During that time, some of the jobs I was doing involved writing for a local coming events magazine and a couple of national magazines. What I noticed was, while I really enjoyed it, and for some reason was able to write about things when I was being paid, although the pay was terrible, but I was able to do the task when I set the intention outside of myself. And then I also became really angry that I couldn't prioritize my own desire for creative expression enough that I could work on my own projects during that time. I was only able to do it if it had a functional function in society, which was making some money and being of service to an employer. So all of that to say, most of my writing has always been creative non-fiction. It's almost never fiction or fantasy or imagined stories in that way. It's always been about finding a way to share an experience I've had in the world, either my own personal experience in order to understand myself, or, in the case of when I was writing these profiles on artists that were coming to perform in the Yukon, interviewing them and being able to describe their personality, physicality, art and the venue in a way that would invite people in. Slade: It's kind of freaking me out how much you're really speaking to me in this moment. I've been working a lot with issues around the struggle that I have, writing fiction, versus all of the prolific amount of stuff that I put out into the world around my paranormal memoirs, and Shift Your Spirits, and these interviews. And I can write articles. I can write blog posts. I can write for this audience because, like you said, it's sort of my job and there's something very liberating, weirdly, about, it's an official thing and I have to do it every week. I didn't even really think of it in terms of the blocks that I have around my novels as being particularly about something attached to, Oh it's just this thing that I'm making for myself that doesn't have this official, sanctioned place to be in the world. It's not being asked for by other people. It's something that I'm bringing through for myself. And it was really interesting. I don't remember the exact words of how you said that, but I thought, Oh! I get that. I understand that. That's a piece of the puzzle for me. So the wild synchronicity is that you and I are here, speaking for the very first time ever, and we're having this conversation. And I had just told you before we started recording that I have had an energy healing session, a clearing, around creative blocks. And I've also been to a chiropractor and a massage therapist yesterday, because there's a physical manifestation in my neck, like nerve impingement and my spine and neck. You... Something I want to say really quick and then I want to bring you back to this idea of blocks and how they're related to the body, but I wanted to say, when you were talking about your journey and how hard it was for you to sort of justify the idea of committing to one form of creative expression, one of the things that was a real turning point for me in my life was when I accepted the fact that I couldn't choose and I didn't have to. And that I would be all of those things together, and that's just what my path was. That, you know, I am an intuitive, and a novelist, and a interviewer voice talent. You know? Whatever! I am all of those things and I think most creative people are really eclectic. And sometimes the things that... And this is something I've been talking about a lot with clearing creative blocks. There is a purpose that you choose for yourself and then there's sometimes a purpose that's chosen for you by the world. And I feel like, as creative people, sometimes it's that hit song, it's that one performance that you did. It's that one job that you landed that just was the right place at the right time. And maybe you become known for that one thing. And people ask that and expect that of you. It becomes this identifying thing that YOU didn't necessarily choose as much as IT chose YOU. So it makes perfect sense to me why you're all those things. And knowing that you work with creativity and writing and mythmaking, and that you talk to me about how you work through creative blocks through the body, makes complete sense to me. That you're a dancer. It really is the intersection of all those things, right? It's you being a little bit of everything that you are. At least to me, in this moment, it's what you represent. To get back to this idea of the creative block and how it's connected to the body, talk to me about, first of all, when you were really blocked, what you discovered set you free. And then how you've learned to guide other people through that. Janelle: Okay. That's a really good question. My answer won't apply to everyone, but I think there's a lot of useful tools people listening can get out of my misery. Slade: Yeah! Absolutely. Janelle: Being creatively blocked as a creative person, number one, I think it actually makes us sick. Because it takes a lot of effort to shut the flow down. Being in the flow and having energetic as well as physical movement as a constant experience is actually our natural state. But we live in cultures, and by saying 'we', I'm kind of speaking to the experience I grew up in, being in North America, in an English-speaking culture colonized originally by England, and Canada, still being governed by England, tenuously. So we have a cultural inheritance that is really damaging. And the cultural inheritance is the idea of productivity being important in service of capitalism, of making money, of being an employee to someone else, having skills that someone else wants to pay to make money off of you for. We also have an inheritance of domination and we carry with us... And this is most intensely felt for people of European white ancestry, but anyone of colour growing up in a culture like this also receives these unspoken rules and values as well. We grow up learning that self-control involves contraction, tightening and dominating. Ownership of our body and our emotions and our inner state. We grow up understanding that what is considered attractive and valuable and wonderful in our culture is really limited. And if we don't fit, we need to feel shame and try to improve ourselves. Can you kind of get a sense that all of these non-verbal values that we grow up with involves tightening and shrinking and contracting and shutting down, in order to be okay, or be acceptable? Slade: Umhmm. Janelle: So with this kind of cultural inheritance, as well as a lack of deep grounding and roots, most of the cultures living in the Americas of all backgrounds no longer speak their indigenous languages. My ancestry's not English. It's quite a mix, but Scottish people never spoke English. Welsh people never spoke English. Arcadians never spoke English. There's a small bit of First Nations in my ancestry from Quebec and Canada. They were not English-speaking cultures. When language is lost, we also lose a great deal. We lose music, we lose language. We lose a connection to our roots. And then all we have to grasp onto, and we lose our stories. All we have to grasp onto is this very one-dimensional colonizer culture that really profits a lot off of teaching shame and shrinking us. The way that that relates to creative blocks, I think, is that it's really hard to be in flow if you feel like you're not good enough in any way. What some people do is, they figure out compensations around the tightening and the contracting and the shrinking. But then what happens is the creative flow comes and goes in 'bursts of inspiration' and flashes of insight and really intense, forceful rush of creativity that people get, afraid of not jumping in and staying up all night, buzzing away with it, because if it goes away, when will it come back? It might be three more years, right? We have all these ideas about our inherent creative flow that are warped by a constant experience of being taught to shut down and contract and deny that flow. In our bodies, we really feel it through tightening, through physical tension, even though most people in North America live very sedentary lives, there's actually no reason, if someone is doing a lot of sitting or desk work, to feel as tense as they do. As a bodyworker, I've spent 12 years working on peoples' bodies hands-on, it's astonishing how much tension there is in people that actually don't use their bodies. Part of it is related to this idea that we need to make an effort. We have to be appearing to be working hard. We have to be tightening up just in case... It becomes internalized. 'If anyone looks at me, I'm clearly a hard worker because I appear that way because my brows are furrowed while I tense my shoulders and type.' Or whatever it is. Slade: Right. Look busy. Janelle: Yeah. Looking busy. Busy making... That's a whole other tangent of how much energy gets devoted to making ourselves appear to be busy rather than just using our precious energy to create and do the work with ease, right? Back to getting creatively blocked, these are all things I've figured out as I've done a lot of healing work, offered it as well as received it. And had the excruciating experience of being blocked. Being blocked, the flow was locked up but it's like it's boiling away inside. The other things that really stopped me from just creating were perfectionism, this idea that it has to be brilliant and wonderful or it's shameful. Which, again, goes back to the cultural ideas of, it's not okay to just play. It's not okay to experiment. We have to have an idea and execute it as if it's the greatest thing ever. And how is that even possible when we're stumbling along learning a process, right? I got trapped in perfectionism for quite awhile. I also got trapped in being too serious. So being serious. I'm an empath and a highly sensitive person and introvert, so seriousness comes quite easily to me. Actually, one of the best antidotes came from a mutual friend, Anna Holden, who said, 'Cultivate a sense of amusement.' Being serious is not a good thing when you already tend to be on that side. But there I was stuck, well before I met Anna, being too serious. So I would have these light-hearted happy ideas and then I'd crush them because they weren't serious enough, they weren't... It's not really art if it's not serious! So I crushed those impulses and I just got caught in this spinning circle of contraction and perfectionism and seriousness. The thing that really helped, receiving bodywork really helps. Loosening up the physical restrictions helps with the energetic flow as well. I can't remember how many years ago, I had a summer up in the Yukon. I was still living up there. It's so beautiful up there. It never gets dark. It's just incredible. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a lot of work going on. I was also solo-mothering my daughter but I had time and I had art supplies! I didn't have money for extra art supplies but I had these watercolours. I had a whole bunch of watercolour paper, because my other problem was, I would collect things for the ideas. So I was always collecting stuff to collage with but then not collaging. I was always buying bits and pieces of art supplies but never allowing myself to have the pleasure of making art. I hit this point of deep frustration and fury and irritation with myself and I was like, 'UGH. I'm just gonna sit outside in the sun this afternoon with my paper and my pen and my paint brushes and my watercolours and a jar of water and I don't fucking care what comes out. I'm just gonna sit out there with my stuff and see.' And then, this is the liberating experience was, I started drawing feathers, and colourful circles and balls. I just let it flow. The nasty, critical perfectionist mind, of course, was still hanging out in there. That little eyeball's watching when I'm creating, saying things like, 'What the hell, Janelle? Feathers? Circles? Happy colours?? This isn't you. This is so... This is stupid! Stop it right now!' The part of me that was so tired of that mean, vicious voice shutting me down, it's like, 'I don't care. I don't care. I'm just letting things come out and I'm as surprised as you are that I'm drawing pretty, colourful feathers. But I don't care. I'm just gonna let it go.' I had to let go of my egotistical ideas about my fancy, serious artist creative projects that were gonna wow everyone, and just be okay with making pretty pictures for awhile, you know? Slade: I can so relate. I mean, I've had a lot of conversations this week with me as the patient, you know? Me as the client, talking about this issue with perfectionism and the paralysis that comes along with that. The desperate need that you... It's not like you're not aware that you're doing that to yourself. You KNOW that you are and that's what's so frustrating is that, like, 'Oh! How to make this shut up??' I think it's interesting that you said, really early on in our conversation, we literally make ourselves sick. Because when I was at the chiropractor yesterday with my neck locked up, which is still, it's still sore to turn my head and all that. And that's a common thing that happens to me. That's a place in my body where anxiety tends to go. Some people have stomach stuff. Some people are like neck and shoulders people, or back or head. There's different places in the body that tends to manifest, but mine is always that spot. My first instinct to explain what had happened was to be like, 'Oh, I hurt myself working out.' Because I do work out a lot and I can overdo it or do something with bad form and get a little bit of an issue or something. And that was the first place that I wanted to blame it. It wasn't until I talked to the energy worker, and again when I was talking to the body worker last night who was adjusting me, they were both challenging me that the blocks contracted muscle. The issue was that, like you said, everything was clenched. I was being challenged to accept the fact that this may not be a sports-repetitive-motion injury at all. This is stress induced. This is psychic. And when I say psychic, I mean that in a big term. I mean that in the fact that we can tie ourselves up in knots, whether you believe in psychic abilities at all, you're still capable of mentally, like you said, shrinking yourself. The issue of making yourself small so that you are more acceptable in some way... Janelle: Mmhmm. Slade: It's like all those themes are playing out for me. So I'm sitting here listening to you talk about that and I'm thinking, What a beautiful synchronicity for me to be having this conversation with you right now. I'm really curious. You talked to me about a kind of guided visualization that you do when you first start working with a group of people or some clients before doing a workshop or something like that. Is that something you'd be interested in kind of walking us through right now? Janelle: Yes! Slade: Let's do it! Janelle: I love doing this. I'll give just a little bit of context first... Slade: Okay. Janelle: ...about why I think it's so important to include the body in everything. Slade: Yes. Janelle: Number one is, our body is our ONLY home in this world and we seem to forget that a lot. Number two, back to the cultural stew that we're growing up in, we also inherited these ideas that rational intellectualizing and the thinking functions of ourselves is more important and more valuable than the body-based knowledge and experiences that we also have. So I feel like, bringing the body in is simply reminding people that I work with, and myself, because I can fall off of remembering this easily as well, but the body is JUST as important. If we include our body, the body's psyche, rather than being floating heads and thinking brains, forgetting about the body, we just feel so much better and also intuitively, gut-feelings wise, clairsentience, these are ways of knowing that come through the body first. And if we don't learn how to tune in to the body, we miss out. So for this visualization, first off, are you sitting? Slade: I am. Janelle: Okay so we'll do it from a seated position, because I'm sitting as well. You mentioned that your neck and your upper back often gets uncomfortable. Can you describe just a little more about what's going on? Slade: There's a tension between the shoulder blades and up into the neck. You probably have experienced where you wake up one morning and you can't turn your head all the way to one side or the other without experiencing it being like locked, you know? Having a crick in your neck is how we say it around here. Janelle: Yeah. Slade: Yeah. I asked the body worker last night, I said, 'What's the technical term for that?' She said, 'I think it's nerve impingement.' Yeah, does that help? Janelle: Yeah, it does. So one of the premises of the kind of bodywork that I'm trained in, which is Hellerwork Structural Integration, also known as 'rolfing', is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's never just where the issue is that needs attention. This may or may not help with the crick in your neck, but I know it'll help loosen things up and for everyone that's listening, if you're seated, that's the place to be for playing along with us. Because I'm going to describe this visualization from a seated position. Slade, I'll get you to notice where your sit bones are in relation to the chair. It's easier to tune in if you're sitting on a hard chair, but it's okay if your chair is soft. What you want to do is really have your whole body stacked over your sit bones, so that you're at the highest point. If you're not sure where that is, all you do is let yourself roll back on your pelvis so that you're sinking onto the fleshy part of your bum. You'll notice that your whole body starts to sink and your back rounds forward as you do that. So just take in a nice breath. Actually, if you let your head hang forward, you get to experience a lovely little stretch down your neck and all the way down your spine and through your shoulders. It's kind of a luscious thing to do. What we're doing is a pelvic rock. And then you're going to start rolling forward, tipping your belly forward, and you'll notice, slowly is better, you'll notice as you roll forward you start to get taller. This is how you know where your sit bones are and whether you're on top of them or not. Because when you're on top of them, you're at your high point, the tallest point. Just for contrast, you keep rolling your pelvis forward. You're kind of tightening your lower back and pressing your belly towards your thighs. You'll notice they start to sink a little. Your belly feels like it's spilling out onto your thighs. I'll get you to just tilt that pelvis back until you reach that high point again. And then you're just gonna do another pelvic tilt, rolling back, this time keeping your attention really in your spine. So noticing all the incredible possibilities for movement. Often our spine gets viewed as a one-unit rigid sort of thing but the reason we have so many vertebrae is because we want to have so many options for movement, so many joints to be able to turn and twist and arch and contract. So just notice the incredible ability for your spine to move, and also, really noticing those frozen stuck spots too. And then bringing yourself back on top of your sit bones again. I'll get you to draw your attention down into the soles of your feet. You're just going to press one foot into the ground. Let it go. Press the other foot into the ground. What I want you to notice is how pushing into your foot starts to move your pelvis which starts to move your spine, if you let it. So remember this: a lot of embodiment work and connecting to the body is learning how to let go of all of the layers of tightening and contractions. It's never actually about adding more effort. It's always about noticing sensation and movement, and where you can let go of armouring and tightening and efforting to hold yourself together. Get yourself together. That's a really common thing people say. And that involves a lot of tightness in the body. So as you're just pulsing from foot to foot and noticing the very subtle ways in which your spine is moved by what you're doing in your feet. What I'm going to get you to do now is bring your inner eye right into your tailbone. You're going to notice the tailbone hovering under the sacrum as the bottom of your spine. Draw that inner eye up into the sacrum, which is part of your spine that is fused to your pelvis, right? This is why when you're rocking your pelvis back and forth your spine goes along with it, because it has no choice. If we don't have movement in our pelvis, we don't have a lot of movement in our spine. So hips that are a little more wiggly than our current culture finds acceptable is actually ideal. Draw your attention from your sacrum up through your lumbar vertebrae, which is your lower back. These are big bulky ones. Just, in your mind's eye, picture, even if you don't really know what they look like, just picture these great big bones with these amazing cushions in between them. The joints have a sponge that is designed so that it absorbs pressure and a downward movement compression. And then it has the ability and leads the release of an upward lift. You can move your back as well as you're doing this pressing down, and picturing every single little disc between your vertebrae all the way up your spine, squishing down on them. Lift, an upward movement and so much spaciousness, right? Now I'll get you to bring your attention up your spine to where your ribs join your spine. The really beautiful thing to imagine is that your rib cage is not a big block. It's more like a bellows, an accordion. If you slowly twist from side to side through your shoulders, what you'll notice is, your rib cage basically goes along for the ride. And as you're twisting, allow your head to keep reaching back so you get a little bit of a stretch. You might also notice where you're a little limited in motion. As you're just doing a gentle rotation, a twist from side to side through your rib cage, keep your attention in your spine. Imagine that the twist is only happening from your spine. And then the ribs, as they're attaching to your spine, they kind of fan out. They have a capacity for way more movement than we allow. They fan out as we twist away to the side and then they come back in. There's also muscles between every rib that has the capacity to expand and contract. So if you take a really big breath in, and really breathe and notice what's happening in your ribs, but also send that breath into your spine where your ribs attach. And just notice. It's all about noticing, and then exhaling. Just do your breathing at your own pace. And then just doing a little rotation in your spine between your ribs. Noticing the movement in your ribs from your spine. Drawing your attention up to your neck and to your head, floating on top of your neck. We often separate the neck from the rest of the spine by naming it the neck, and having the idea of a stopping point at the top of the shoulders and a stopping point at the base of the skull. For this exercise, I'll just get you to imagine there are no stopping points. So when the neck is moving, it is in response to the movement in your mid-back and your mid-spine. See if you can draw in this elegant idea of capacity for movement as well as compression and release in the cushions between the vertebrae. Invite a little more freedom in. So most of this is slow, steady and gentle. And it's all about bringing your attention inside your body. Do one little last scan of your spine. Just noticing, and then opening your eyes if they're closed. If they're open, just kind of sharpening the focus. Letting your eyes land on some sort of tangible object in the room, and just noticing three details about it. And then letting your eyes land somewhere else, noticing another three details, specific details. And then bringing that attention that you're sending out through your eyes back to your ears, into this conversation and the more mundane regular world way of connecting. Slade: Lovely! That was wonderful. Thank you! relaxing sigh Now I have to remember I'm in the middle of an interview, right?? That's so cool. Too bad it's not on video. It would be quite an interesting thing for people to have witnessed. That is very cool. I'll put something in the introduction to prompt people who might be driving that that's coming up and that way, if they want to wait and do it. OR if you're driving and you just listen to that, and you're like, Oh that was really cool, go back later when you're home and do that as a guided visualization. There is a guided visualization in the middle of this episode! That's so cool! So how does that help with the creativity? Janelle: It just does. That's my fastest answer. More specifically, if you think of creativity as being a state of flow, unblocking flow in the body unblocks flow creatively. The other really cool thing is that, especially if your creative energy and output has been generated more through thinking and through head-based processes, it's like we just opened a few doors and windows to give you a better view, give you better access to your creative energy so you're getting more of it. Slade: Ooo I just saw this cool image in my mind's eye of like, when you have a door window open at one end of a space, and you go and open a door window in the other, you create this draft. You create literal flow. Like, it will slam the doors closed. Janelle: Yes! That's perfect. Slade: Very cool. You talked about somewhere in some of the material I was reading of yours, you have this phrase, 'letting the body lead you towards your stories'. What does that mean? How do we do that? Janelle: Okay. You can actually, what I just walked you through, that visualization, this is fun. You do something physical. You have a pen and paper and a timer. Right after that, you're in a bit of a different state, right? You do some flow writing. And if you keep your brainy brain part of things out of it, the part that wants to figure it out and is dreaming of writing awards already, if you keep that out, you do some sort of physical exercise and then you go straight into flow writing. It's like unwrapping a present, because something will show up. And if you stay open to not-knowing, it's really thrilling what will bubble up and come out. Actually, you mentioned you work out a lot. You can actually play with doing that after a workout. Or if, I don't know how you work out, but if, say, one day it's a legs day or something, you can very explicitly have the intention that you're gonna really tax your legs, you're gonna focus on that part of your body, and then you're gonna let your body write through you. You're gonna let those legs tell you something about them, or let them release a memory or story. It's pretty fun. The delight is just in the utter magic of what happens when we let ourselves be led and guided by our body, instead of trying to force it. Slade: Those of you listening who do my energy reboot are probably noticing the similarities. One of the things that I recommend to people to do to reconnect to their creativity, it's not so much about being blocked. Because obviously I can't be giving advice about that just yet. But as far as reconnecting to the creativity, or reconnecting to your sense of your Higher Self speaking to you, I recommend a combination of walking meditation with timed proprioceptive writing. Janelle: Yeah! Slade: Those two things in tandem, and I say, don't overthink it, just do it. It may not happen the first time, but what will emerge is through that grounding exercise, being in the body, you actually reconnect your antenna, so to speak. And then the writing allows you to start to translate that, to give a voice to record it and let it through. One thing attaches the hose and the other thing sort of turns the knob and lets it flow out. Does that make sense? Janelle: Oh yeah, total sense. I'll add a clarification to writing and staying in the body, rather than kind of tapping into a more unseen sort of energy or force that's more outside of the body. I totally agree with you. The body grounds us and you can be a more clear channel for that kind of guidance. And if you want to really specifically stay with the body, in your writing, and really tune into the body's psyche's stories, guidance, etc., it helps to just focus your attention in sensation and then be really specific with details when you're writing sensory details. So whatever's coming up, always asking the question, so allowing the flow to come out, but having a, in the back of your mind, just this reminder of, Oh, it was a beautiful day, so what are the specifics? What tells me it's a beautiful day? And what will tell the people reading this, if they ever do, it's a beautiful day? Or, Oh, my leg was sore. Okay. Let's get waaaay more specific. What part of the leg? What does sore mean? What's the sensation? Finding words to describe the physical experience. That will help to contain that kind of flow writing within the body. Slade: Well it's interesting too because for story telling, I mean, if you were editing a piece of fiction, one of the things you would look to make sure that you're doing is giving your reader multiple sensory information, so you know, to ground them in the story, to make sure that you're introducing smells and touch. And that everything isn't just always somebody looking at someone else, or thinking. You have to be really conscious to put that in. And I know everybody thinks that this magically happens, but sometimes you do have to consciously remind yourself to insert that. We have a tendency to focus on one clair sometimes, more than the other. We're either very visual or very feeling, sensory. And sometimes you have to balance those out with whichever one you don't see showing up. Does that make sense? Janelle: Yeah. It just makes it richer. Slade: Yeah. It's gonna be better for both you, as the person creating it, and if it finds its way to an audience, then they're going to be able to inhabit your experience that much more easily as well. Oh gosh, I love talking nerdtalk about writing. Janelle: It's fun. Slade: You're hitting all the buttons because you've got the psychic and the bodywork and the intuition, all the stuff, so we're loving this. Tell me about this transformational memoir writing process that you do, called The Art of Personal Mythmaking. I know you have a workshop that's kind of specific to a time of year and everything, so tell us about that and when you're doing it. Janelle: Okay. This is kind of a fun story too. So for a long time, doing all these different things, I thought, What the heck? This doesn't make sense. When are the threads gonna cross? And then about three or four years ago, this process showed up to me. I can't really claim credit for the personal mythmaking process. It just showed up to me as it's own entity. I offered it in person as a workshop for eight weeks. It was not about memoir writing at that time. I didn't think it was anyways. There was a really great response and I thought, I could teach this online! So then I kind of revamped it. I offered it again. I still didn't know it was about memoir writing. Everything was about writing your life story, healing through examining life's story, tapping into the body and using creative writing and I have a bachelor's degree in anthropology, so I love being an anthropology nerd and bringing in culture and all of that stuff. I was still confused. And then, I think just over a year ago, I realized that if someone really committed themselves to the full process, they have the rough draft of their memoir written based on how I was taking them through the process and the creative writing prompts. So I went, AHA! This is amazing! People asked me what I was doing, I said, I'm teaching this process and you actually get the rough draft of your memoir written by the end. And everyone's eyes would start to shine. And they go, Oooo! And I thought, Oh wow, that's what this is about! It's healing but it's also actually a very practical outcome as well of getting to the point of getting it out of yourself, onto paper, to rough draft stage. So all the process work, which, you know, it is amazing how many people have been dreaming about working with their life story and writing their memoirs for decades. Slade: Yes. Janelle: And either haven't started or they just have a bunch of overwhelming snippets of writing here, there and everywhere that they've tucked away in a metaphorical drawer or file on their computer and it's just eating at them. So I thought, this is not good. This is creative blocks where you start to get sick. If there's a story dying to be born, and we close the doors and shut it down out of overwhelm and fear, two common reasons people don't dive in, even though they have the desire, that's not good! We're making ourselves sick if we have stories to tell and we're not telling them. So The Art of Personal Mythmaking is a transformational memoir writing e-course and writing circle. I teach it online. Each week has its theme. I use fairytales, well more specifically, ancient tales. So any kind of tale that has lasted more than a generation basically, as a guide and a structure for outlining memoir, but also... I don't know. I feel like fairytales are like having a pretty wise grandma or grandpa, helping us out, to understand being human. And they can actually really help us with working through our life story. So I combine working with ancient tales with working with the body and creative writing and creativity. A lot of people, you know, they're just stuck in creative block or a fear of not being good enough. A desire to write but being so afraid of being a bad writer that they don't try. So getting past those things is really crucial to actually getting the writing out. And then coming together in a discussion and circle every week is so rich and so beautiful for people to be working through these themes in a supportive environment and be witness to the incredible richness of every single person's different way of understanding and writing about the same prompt is so beautiful. I don't know if I've described it very well. I get so excited about my students. Slade: You do it twice a year? Janelle: Yeah. Slade: And when's the next one? Janelle: August and February. So right now, we're looking at February coming up. Slade: Okay. So February 2019. We're recording this in September 2018 if anybody is listening from the future. They can go find out if you're still doing this workshop. And you may be doing it still in August and February. Or it may have evolved into something else! I suppose if we're on your mailing list, you'll remind us that this is coming up and one of the gifts that you have for people who subscribe is a two hour Outline Your Memoir workshop that you offer. Janelle: Yes. Slade: Okay. Tell us a little about that. Janelle: Actually it's a little different... It is free. It's a little different than a gift that just shows in your inbox. It's actually a live two-hour workshop. The way I work with people is really connected and relational and productive. Don't know if that's the wrong word but ... So I actually walk people through the process. So although it's a free workshop, it's not a workshop that I record. I have a couple free writing courses that do just show up in your inbox, but Outline Your Memoir is actually, you show up with your pen and paper and I offer it every two months or so. I walk you through the process of getting some structure to what you want to look at and work on and finish the two hours feeling really resourced to keep going. Slade: That is really cool! First of all, let me just say, Janelle, thank you for taking time today to speak with us and walk us through that process. Make sure everyone knows where they can go to find you online. Janelle: Right. I'm JanelleHardy.com You can probably also google 'Personal Mythmaking'. I don't think anyone else is really describing their work that way, so Janelle and Personal Mythmaking will get you there too. Slade: Wonderful. That was great. Janelle, thank you for coming on the show. Janelle: Thank you! Such a pleasure.

You know what I love? Unicorns (listen to the episode to hear why this is relevant). Know what else I love? Anna Holden. Anna is magical, highly sensitive, clairvoyant, and her filters are about as good as mine which means non-existent. You'll love her too, lol. Anna and I talk about the realities of motherhood (er...ego shattering I believe is the word Anna uses), the dangers of drinking the law of attraction kool-aid fuckery, how fun it is to stew in the messy middle, finding your creative stride, and the work Anna and I are doing to minimize our harm as Spiritual White Women (Rachael Rice's Going There episode is another great conversation around this). Listen in for real talk (especially for moms), laughter, commiseration, and minimal filters.  You ready to go there? _____ ANNA HOLDEN is a professional intuitive, energy healer and spiritual teacher. She mentors burgeoning psychics and healers in her professional training program, The School for Sacred Rebellion. She also runs The Refuge for Sacred Rebellion, a spiritual enlivenment platform for highly sensitive people, and she hosts The Soul of Sensitivity podcast, a show that explores the intersection of sensitivity and spirituality. Connect with Anna Website | The Refuge | The Soul of Sensitivity Podcast | The School For Sacred Rebellion _____ For show notes including how to learn more about the amazingly awesome, Anna Holden, head over to jenvertanen.com/goingthere35 and if there’s one thing I want you to remember ever it’s this… You were born to raise hell, not live in it. I believe in you so effing much and I’m here if you ever need an emotional sidekick to help you through tough times. Until next time…love you already, _____ Love the fly-on-the-wall intimate conversations I’m hosting on Going There? Yeah? I could use your help... It would mean the WORLD to me if you leave a rating/review on iTunes/Apple Podcasts and share with folks most needing these messages of hope, resilience, healing, and yes…laughter at some of the darker sides to life. Website: www.jenvertanen.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/jenvertanen My Fave Really Hard Questions: https://www.jenvertanen.com/really-hard-questions/ (because you guys know how much I love digging deeper!)

In this week’s segment, I’m sharing my thoughts on claircognizance and the perfect tool, in my opinion, to develop it. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Can an Atheist be Psychic? Automatic Writing Lessons Sylvia Browne HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Several months ago I received an email from a listener of the podcast, I presume, and I think she was responding to one of those requests that I would have made where I said, you know, send me your questions if you have any that you'd like me to answer on the podcast. And it wasn't an interaction like I have with you guys who become supporters on Patreon. I often message you guys through that platform when you come on board and we have a little back and forth around your favorite shows, which topics you'd like to see more of. If you do have any specific Q & A, I pull those out and I keep a record and an ongoing list to work from. So, this woman just sent this to me, an email and it was a very large collection of questions. And I remember thinking like, this is great.  This is like a syllabus. I can just work through this over time and do a whole bunch of different episodes. There were cases where even one of her questions could have produced two or three different episodes depending on what part of the question you decided to focus on. Case in point, she sent me one question that kind of blew my mind a little bit because she was under the assumption that you have to communicate with spirits in order to be psychic. And she even said, "How can you be psychic if you can't communicate with spirits directly?" And I think I may have touched on this in an episode where I talked about spiritual atheism a little bit. I don't know if you recall hearing that. I'll have to go look it up and see if I can find it. I know I did a bonus episode on Patreon with Heather Alice Shae and we talked about that a little bit, but I do know that I talked about atheism and ESP and the kind of idea that spirit communication wasn't necessarily the same thing as like biologically tested science, you know, laboratory experiments around extra sensory perception.  And so those are very different topics and they don't always have to go hand in hand. So I was blown away by her having this assumption that she couldn't be psychic unless she started to essentially be a medium, I think was even where she was going with that. And so I had this question in my list of possible topics of something to talk about. But what I really realized when I started trying to answer this question is that it is a question about claircognizance. When I read that, how can you be psychic if you don't communicate with spirits? I thought claircognizance. Hello, that's just, you know, straight download, that's psychic Wifi and you don't really have to go through anyone to get that. You're not being relayed anything. It's just there. I've done an episode also where I talked about my reading process in great detail and it's evolved over time.  When I first started this website, people were sending me questions about their spirit guides, because at the time I was telling stories about my experiences with angels and spirit guides. And so my first readings were about identifying spirit guides and telling people what names I got for their spirits. And you know, I remember at the time the Montel Williams show had Sylvia Browne on like once a week. Do you remember this? And that was one of the things people would stand up in the audience when he would go around in the mic and let them ask really quick psychic questions of Sylvia and she would just do these cold reads from the stage, really quick, just rapid fire. And that was one that a lot of people would stand up and ask, "Can you tell me who my spirit guide is? Can you tell me the name of my guide?"  So I don't know if that had something to do with it, but it was a big part of the conversation when I started doing readings back in 2006. And now I very rarely have anyone ask me about their guides, even when we're on the phone and we're talking about a whole lot of different stuff. And that's cool. It may or may not matter. Most people are focused on something that's going on in their real life and how to affect something in a practical way down here in the real world. To tell you the truth, that's what I'd be spending my time on as well. I want solutions. I want strategies. I think that it's an interesting conversation to have, especially with other people who are involved in spiritual development or working on their psychic abilities. It's fun to go and have a coffee chat together amongst ourselves about all that stuff.  That's the kind of thing that I'd like to talk with students in the Automatic Intuition community about.  I think it's interesting, but when we go face forward with the clients that's not necessarily gonna have that much of an impact on someone's life. So my readings are very much evolved over time to the point where I just think of them now as claircognizant. I really don't pay that much attention to guides, personally. And what I mean by that is I don't individually try to identify who I'm speaking with. If I do call in my guides for myself, I do that kind of as a general group. I just sort of think of them as a collection of guardians and energy and spirits and stuff. I have a nickname for them, which I'm not going to share because it's kind of like, it's a little silly, but it's also private. It's kind of like a magic word. So I'm not gonna tell you what that is, but I have a little word that I say, whenever I want to call them to me. But even that is a very abstract sort of thing.  Claircognizance to me is the most important intuitive sense. It produces like 99 percent of the content in my readings. It produces a lot of the oracle messages. It produces a lot of the articles that I write. All kinds of stuff. I think of it as just being this sort of pure download. But speaking about the clairs and why claircognizance may be a little bit harder to identify or develop, is because first of all so much psychic development out there -- and you've heard me talk about this before, Anna holden mentioned it on a recent episode as well -- that most psychic development courses are focused on clairvoyance. It's easy to understand because our entire language feels to me like it evolved out of a need to describe visual information to one another. And we also, in this modern era have a lot of metaphors around film and television and video and close circuit security cameras.  When you think about a word, a term like slow motion ... I used that incorrectly in a book, in a novel that I had set in 1917, and I caught it and edited it before it went out the door. But I remember thinking, oh, what, wait a minute. That's a video editing term that's something that's like VCR era. I don't think that they would have had any conception of what slow motion meant because you didn't see things in slow motion until TV started showing you this slow motion effect. So anyway, we have all this language to describe clairvoyance, we can talk about obviously the imagery that we see itself, the colors, who's there, where they are, what's happening. We can speak that to another person.  We can also use terms like fast forward, freeze frame, rewind, go back, watch it in slow motion, watch it in replay. Ce can do that in our minds conceptually with clairvoyance. So it makes it very easy to talk about clairvoyance. We also commonly have dreams and we share those with one another and again, it's a kind of language sharing, a visual experience. So I would say clairaudience is also easy to share in the same kind of way and talk about, because it is language. It comes in as language or it comes in as music and more than anything there's a sense of time associated with clairaudience. Like I was sitting in my room typing at 3:15 and I heard the sound coming from the hallway. There's also the sense sometimes of something being whispered near you or it could be an interior voice, but the idea of being able to place a clairaudient signal in time or space is easy to talk about. It's also easy to simply relay what you heard.  So if I'm talking on the phone to someone and you're in the room with me, I can listen to what that person says and then I can repeat it to you, even word for word. Again, clairaudience is something that's very easy for us to have a dialogue around.  Now. Claircognizance is interesting because even though I feel like it's the pure source, the channel with the most content, the easiest way to actually retrieve psychic information without thinking about it ... It's a little bit hard to talk about. And if you're new to it or you're trying to develop that particular skill, it's a little hard to say when it happens or how it happens. It's kind of like an I Dream of Jeannie special effect. You know what I mean? It's like --  blink, it's there. Blink it's not there.  If you go to that security cam footage metaphor, in terms of clairvoyance, you can watch something appear on screen. You can stop it and you can rewind it and you can zoom in on it, all that kind of stuff. But with claircognizance, it's like you go to the security cam footage and it's missing. It's like that scene in the movie where someone edited the security cam footage and ... blink, it's just gone.  Clairsentience is ... Well, you know, it's difficult to talk about feelings, right? It's hard to describe emotions in writing. It's hard to convey emotions to other people. When we think about empathy, which is a kind of clairsentienc, it's an ability to sort of feel what someone else is feeling or compassion, which is slightly more removed, but it's the ability to willfully and intentionally project yourself into the emotions of someone else and take them on and try to connect with them.  It's hard for us to project our emotions at someone. Even when we think about telepathy, we think about telepathy being more in terms of clairvoyance. "I'm going to look at this card with the triangle on it and I'm going to beam that at your brain and then you're gonna see the triangle."  I do think that with clairsentience, it's the reason why fiction is so powerful and storytelling. Why storytelling and filmmaking and television and acting is such a huge part of our world. Here we are, we're so developed, we have this amazing information technology. We have philosophical concepts and we think of ourselves as being highly evolved over thousands of years even though we have very far to go. But have you ever stopped to think, why is Hollywood such an important place in our universe and why our actors paid so much money?  Why are professional athletes valued at the level that they are? I think it's a clairsentience thing. I think it's because they have an ability that allows us to live and experience things vicariously through them. When you read a book, you're essentially reading another life. You are plugging into another reality. There is a connection between acting and writing and even sports performance. You think about the Olympics or you think about the game day shows where they have these biographies and these emotional backstories and they really get you invested in what's happening. So you are living through these other people emotionally.  Clairsentience is something we talk a lot about protecting ourselves from. Also being able to ground the energy. Clairentience is often something that we're trying to manage. that's changing for me a little bit, especially after talking to Anna Holden from Sensitivity Uncensored.  If you haven't listened to that episode and you are an empath or highly sensitive person, check that out because when it comes to someone coming to me and saying, "How do I develop who I am as a clairsentient person?" I think Anna is onto something that's really powerful and empowering and willful and kind of punk rock ... Like everything I wouldn't have thought to associate with empathy. So check her out. I am processing a lot of what I'm learning from her and rethinking about how I approach it.  But on this particular segment, I really wanted to talk about claircognizance and developing that tool in particular. I think you can find a lot of information out there on developing clairvoyance and almost any workshop that you go to at a new age center is probably going to have some type of visual component or vision work in it.  I want to just to take a few minutes and say claircognizance is my jam. It's something that I find a lot of people in the Automatic Intuition program coming in with some aptitude for. If I do see that in the assessment of the attunement that we do, I will usually suggest to them that they develop their claircognizance because there is a bit of an overlap with clairaudience.  Clairaudience is about language and it's about receiving instructions, information, shining sentences, cool titles, names for things. You know, sometimes it's a haiku, sometimes it sounds like a greeting card. Sometimes it sounds like a directive or a warning. It can be any number of experiences. It can be lyrics in a song that speak to you. I always say, when you have a song stuck in your head, notice what those lyrics are and stop singing it for a minute and imagine, okay, what if that's a message? What if that's the back of an oracle card and you're doing a divination experience?Imagine what is it that you're thinking about right now? What is your subconscious trying to communicate to you through the song lyrics? Sound and music are coming from a slightly different part of the brain than language too. So there's a lot that we can talk about regarding clairaudience. I do consider myself primarily a clairaudient intuitive. That's what I identified with for a long time. This idea of me saying, you know what, it's all claircognizance for me at this point is a bit of a newer development. I even need to change my About page, to tell you the truth, to more accurately reflect that. It's easy for me to mentor someone who has some kind of aptitude for claircognizance or clairaudience because I think that there is enough of an overlap that we can work with them simultaneously because.  If if someone asks you a question and you just kind of know the answer to what they're asking you, you just have this great piece of advice. It just spills out of you and you may even be aware in the moment as you're speaking it. I'm like, wow, who was talking? This is really great. I've never even thought about this before, but now this is great. Information is coming out of my mouth and that's a bit more of a dialoging or channeling experience. But the reason why I say that's related to clairaudience is because our minds have to almost immediately -- not almost -- our minds literally translate everything into language and words, just so we can think about it. And it's a micron of ... I don't even know how to quantify how quickly that happens, but the moment you think something, even if it's an I Dream of Jeannie blink and it's there, your mind immediately attaches a word to it or starts to tell a story about it or forms language around it. Because that's the only way you can handle it. Even in your own head. That's the only way that you can really think about it.  So when you go to communicate claircognizant information to someone else, even in the moment, improvisation, conversation -- as fast as it's happening -- it is getting translated into language. So to me, the lines blur a little bit sometimes between claircognizance, clairaudience and what we would call vocal channeling or being a transe channel. My general rule of thumb in mentoring intuitive development is that the tools that work with clairaudience are also likely to produce the most and the best information around claircognizance. To me the most reliable and the simplest and the most obvious tool is automatic writing, which produces the most volume of detailed content. And that's very easy to share with the client.  So if you're thinking in terms of producing a reading for someone else, if someone brings you a question and you use some clairvoyance, you might get a symbol or an image. You describe that to them and it may be a string of those things. But it's kind of fragmented.  One of the things that I've noticed with automatic writing is it tends to be very language heavy, very conversational, and it has a lot of descriptors built into it. Just in terms of the number of words it produces, produces more detail. Sometimes in those little bits of random detail that you just think of as word choice, when you look at it, there's actually a pattern of something that will speak to the client. Like say for instance, you start using a whole lot of metaphors around something like music, without knowing their musical background, it may be really meaningful to them that you are using language that we associate with sound and music. So even though you might be talking about something metaphorically or symbolically, you might start telling a story.  The cool thing about automatic writing is it just produces a lot and it gives a lot for the client to have feedback around. And it's also already in a format that's very easy to share. It's almost instantaneous. You asked me a question, I retrieved the answer. I dream of Jeannie Blink and here it is. I'm typing it to you as fast as I possibly can. Send. Send an email off to that person. It's one of the purest forms for me of doing a reading and it's one of the reasons why I looked again at doing email readings. For a long time, I decided that email readings were somehow lesser than talking to me on the phone. I will say that there is something that happens when you speak to me live. It's a whole other ballgame, and there's more that can take place. But when it's just an answer to a question, and it's really specific and sort of limited in scope, I think automatic writing is amazing.  I do have a tutorial by the way, just to plug it. It's called Automatic Writing Lessons and that's been on my Shop page for years and years. It's a very basic, personal take on how to do proprioceptive writing, freestyle writing, automatic writing. You can use it in a lot of different contexts. It's a technique that uses a timing device as a way of invoking speed, and speed in my conception is related to the intuitive channel.  The intuitive channel is really fast. The thinking mind is a little bit more ponderous and slow. So when you're trying to develop your intuition or you're trying to isolate the intuitive channel, speed is your friend and you want it to happen as fast as possible. You don't want to think about it. You don't want to edit it. You don't want to take it apart or fix it in any way.  The detail that you can bring through in automatic writing is really incredible. Here's the thing though: you'd never know it without the feedback from outside your own head, from outside your own experience. You really need someone else to judge it because to you, it could just look like something that you made up. The best way to test this and probably one of the only ways that you'll ever know how your intuition is landing or how accurate it is. You may be surprised. A lot of people would do this automatic writing exercise and think, oh, that seems like a ho hum run of the mill kind of  monologue that I wrote down, not even realizing how many psychic hits and how much detail there is hidden within it. The only way that you ever find that out is by getting feedback from the person that it was intended for.  I really learned to trust my intuition because of the feedback. From doing it over and over again, I've just learned to trust that the process produces something and not to overthink it or question it. Not to be hesitant about it. The feedback from client after client saying, "Oh my God, how'd you know this? I can't believe you used this word. I can't believe you said such an such." That kind of feedback is where you start to realize, oh, I'm tapping into something here. It does have a meaningful impact for the other person.   You really can't judge it. That's the key. You need someone else to judge it. Do automatic writing sessions using questions that are provided to you by someone else. Now you might be tempted to do this with someone you're close with, like one of your kids or your mom or your best friend who is also into this kind of stuff, and maybe you do card readings for each other or something like that... That's okay, but it's actually undermining you a little bit whenever you do readings for people that you know. On some level you question whether or not your subconscious has retained information about them that you don't consciously remember. You worry that you are extrapolating and making up educated guesses based on things that you already know about this person. Even though you don't really, you may tell yourself, oh, I'm doing automatic writing for this person. Somewhere in the back of your mind, if you know them, you are doubting a little bit that some of those other things might be factors. If you want to really develop your claircognizant ability and you want to test it and really get a sense of where your hits are landing and how, use questions from a stranger. That may sound really hard to do, but actually the online world and social media makes it very easy for us to be connected with people who are virtual strangers.  We might know their face and we know their name and maybe know little bits about them. I would bet there are probably a lot of you listening who belong to spiritual groups or interest groups around new age topics or psychic development, stuff. Groups where there's a bunch of people that you don't really know. They're members for the same reason you are, which is around a topic. You may only be focused on a few of the people that you've interacted with, but you actually do have, on social media, access to thousands of people who you don't know, who you really don't know anything about. If you were to present to them, hey, I want to test myself, I'm going to try to do some automatic writing. Is there anybody who wants to participate with me? You can get some volunteers really quickly and you can do some practice readings, using the timed automatic writing technique.  Get these people that you don't know to present you with questions. The cool thing is if you want to do one for a friend of yours and then do one or two or three for total strangers, what you will notice is it's actually really liberating to do a reading for a total stranger. To do an automatic writing exercise, with a question as a prompt from someone you don't know ... if you produce any words at all, it pretty much has to be your intuition. Because that's all you have to rely on an answering their question. You really don't have things stored in your subconscious that you remember about them from earlier interactions. You don't have their backstory to extrapolate from. Because they're strangers.  This is a really basic, great strong way to develop claircognizant ability and the feedback is where you will learn. You have to kind of retro-engineer the feedback. What I mean by that is that sometimes the things that I feel the weirdest about writing down, like say for instance, I'm doing a reading for someone and it's all in text, it's an email and I'm doing automatic writing and I'm clickety clacking away, 100 words per minute and there's this whole story  unfolding and it makes sense. And then something will come through that kind of doesn't belong or seems odd or seems to break the flow of the story in some way. Now, as a writer, as a storyteller, if I was editing that story, I would edit those things out. This doesn't make sense. Why is this detail about a blue stuffed animal in the middle of this paragraph? I would take things out that didn't go along with the other kind of symbolism and conceptual stuff going on in the text.  But with automatic writing, with claircognizance, with testing your psychic ability, don't edit anything. Don't remove anything. You can clean it up for spelling and add some punctuation. Add paragraph breaks. I always appreciate people who format their writing is such a way that it's easy to read. But don't remove content. Don't remove thoughts or concepts or details or phrases or word choice. Don't change any of that stuff. The stuff that I most want to remove is usually the stuff that the clients respond to the most strongly. It's the thing that they have the most association around, the biggest stories around.  Had I only done five or 10 readings and looked at them and thought, now that sounds ridiculous. I would have never known that. Those things that feel ridiculous to me are really good stuff. Those are some psychic kits. And because I've heard that over and over again, I'm like, there it is again, the thing that I thought was weird and dorky, they have this entire story around it. What happens then is the 11th and the twelfth and the 13th time I do it. I just allow myself to feel that and write it down. At this point when I start to get one of those sort of uncomfortable, weird details, I'm like, yes, nailed that. Give me those, because I know that there is power in those and I've learned to trust that what I experience as discomfort in that moment is actually getting at something psychic.  It might not be that for you, it might be something completely different. You may feel like a real magical sense of flow during those parts that are truly landing with the other person. You won't know until you let them evaluate them. The thing that's really hard to wrap your mind around is that you are not a good judge of your abilities. You need someone else to judge it for you in order to get any kind of distance and objective perspective on it.  So don't edit. Resist the urge to remove anything. Write, really quickly clean it up a little bit just for punctuation and formatting. Send it back to that stranger who provided you with the question.  And ask them for feedback. Let them know up front that's what you're looking for, that you're doing this in exchange for some constructive, compassionate feedback.  That is my absolute number one best tip for developing your claircognizance. The rest of it, I think you'll find in the experience of using it.

Are you an HSP? An empath? Just feeling overwhelmed and like you're "doing life bad"? You're going to love this interview with Anna Holden. Anna Holden is a professional intuitive, energy healer and spiritual teacher. She mentors burgeoning psychics and healers in her professional training program, The School for Sacred Rebellion. She also runs The Refuge for Sacred Rebellion, a spiritual enlivenment platform for highly sensitive people, and she hosts The Soul of Sensitivity podcast, a show that explores the intersection of sensitivity and spirituality. WE TALK ABOUT: clairsentience and empathy highly sensitive people as an indicator species reclaiming the sacred self This is not your run of the mill conversation about being a psychic sponge and carrying the weight of the world around with you and being burdened with everyone’s ugly shit. Anna refers to herself as a "sensitive revolutionary" ... and she has a whole different empowering angle on this topic. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss Heidi Frank Palmer https://subtlebodysolutions.com/ GUEST LINKS - Anna Holden sensitivityuncensored.com Soul of Sensitivity podcast Anna's Free Guide You Are a Goddamn Magical Unicorn The Refuge for Sacred Rebellion The School for Sacred Rebellion HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Anna: I'm Anna and I work with people who are highly sensitive, empathic, intuitive, and usually these people find me because they're overwhelmed. So I work specifically with people who are highly sensitive to help them develop their intuitive channels and strengthen their sense of sensitivity so it's not overwhelming them, and that they're able to work with it. I see that, I mean, I really see sensitivity and being an empath as a really huge gift that we're not given any tools around, any sort of know-how around, so I kind of create a structure and a language to be able to work with those things. And I do that one-on-one, I do that in my membership group, and I do that in different courses and an intuitive school that I'm working on. Slade: Very cool. I want to come back a little bit and talk sort of about your manifesto, and the whole thing about sensitivity in particular how you kind of relate that to everything. That's something I want to dive in a little bit deeper on. One of the things I'm interested in - I've been asking a lot of people this, so I'm going to ask you - when you meet someone for the first time in real life and they ask you what you do, what do you say? Anna: Oh Jesus. You know, it really - it's funny, because I listened to the episode that you're referencing and I'm like, 'I'm taking notes', because this is something that I still struggle with, you know? It really depends. Sometimes I tell people I'm an intuitive. If I feel pretty comfortable with people I'll tell them I'm an intuitive. If it's somebody who is just totally out of this realm, I'll call it, sometimes I'll say that I have a healing arts practice. Sometimes I will say that I work with people who are highly sensitive to help them manage overwhelm. Those are usually the three places I will go, but I find it, I really find it a struggle. And for me, it's the sense of, how much do I - or it's kind of this battle between how much can I own about what I do and how much is actually going to get in and how much is safe in this situation? Slade: Yeah, well, and you know what? Also, some people ask that question very politely with the expectation that they're probably going to get a boring answer. Anna: Mmhmm! Slade: You know, like, 'I work as a clerk in a shipping department', or whatever. And sometimes people, just to be polite, might ask a bit of follow-up questions, but most people, myself included, when I ask somebody what they do, they may tell me and I'm like, 'Oh, okay, cool!' And I just kind of gloss over it and move on with the conversation. So I think that we feel especially under-the-gun about our identity in some way that we're projecting onto the situation a little bit. But I do, you know, I live in the Bible belt, so I don't walk around calling myself a psychic to every stranger that I meet. But I will say that I have learned, over time, more and more, how many people DO get me, and DO like what I do, and sometimes I'm pre-judging them and thinking, 'Oh, they're probably super conservative and traditional, and this would wig them out.' And then I find out later that they're not at all. And then I feel like as ass for, you know... being weird about it. Anna: Oh, I so resonate with that! Because sometimes, I've said this before, particularly in the early parts of my practice, where I was like, I feel like the witch on the edge of town that everybody goes to but nobody talks about. Slade: Yes! Anna: Where it's like, sometimes yeah, I'll tell people I'm a psychic and they'll come up to me later on and be like, 'I really want to know more. I just feel really drawn to knowing more.' And it's always kind of funny when that happens, that there is an opening. Oftentimes people are really searching for this, and particularly people who are more conservative often are really, you know, looking for some of this and when - we can create an opening for curiosity, I suppose. Slade: Well and another weird full-circle thing that I've discovered is that sometimes people of religious faith, even though I think, 'Oh, they're really traditional in their faith', people of faith generally are more open to conversations about faith. They're more open to the subject matter of supernatural phenomenon. They believe in angels and guides and archetypes and deities and all this kind of stuff actually. So sometimes they're weirdly open minded about the metaphysical part of it, almost a part that the intellectual crowd would dismiss us for. Sometimes the little old ladies who go to church every day, they're the mystical one. They're totally like down-low witches, you know what I mean? Anna: Totally! Yeah, you know, the way that I relate that is, so I grew up in Utah in Mormon country and my - I was not raised Mormon, but my mom's family is very Mormon. I think she's the only of her eight other siblings that left the Mormon church. So when we go to family reunions, there's always been this like, you know, we kind of get very reserved and we stop cussing. There's just not a lot, besides traffic and weather, that we talk about. But I was really surprised in that - and I feel kind of bad that I was surprised, like not putting as much, kind of faith in these cousins, particularly a couple of women that I grew up with, where we had this fantastic conversation about sensitivity and energy and different energy tools to help her sensitive kids and she was so open to all that, and a very, very devout, religious person. And I realized, wow, that is MY prejudice. That was ME getting in the way of what turned out to be this really beautiful exchange. Slade: Yeah, that's very cool. So obviously you didn't always identify as a professional intutiive or as a psychic new age person, so how did you become one? Anna: Oh gosh, yeah. What's kind of interesting is that I was a scientist first. I have a Bachelors degree and a Masters degree, Slade, in science. In conservation science and environmental science and really, I kind of chalk that up to I'm-really-interested-in-nature. I'm really... I find so many answers in nature and I realized recently - not recently but I've realized over the years that I really have an intuitive, you know, I have intuitive telepathic conversations when I'm in nature. That was kind of the place that I lived - in this very analytical, very scientific place. But on the other side of that, I was always seeking, and, you know, growing up in Utah as a non-Mormon, where everybody (I did a whole podcast on this) everybody that I was around. The town that I was in was a huge percentage Mormon, I think, in the '80s, 80% Mormon. So pretty much all the people that I went to school with had this really strong sense of relationship with God that included a lot of rules and books and, just things I didn't have, but I was really interested in having a relationship with something higher because I saw spirits and animal spirits and all kinds of things. And so, in my early twenties, I started exploring that kind of on the side. I started - well, after I went to college, I started studying. I studied some reiki, I studied qigong, I read the Tao Te Ching, I dabbled in Buddhism, just trying to find a sense of connection and along the way, when I was Colorado (I had taken a year off of school to follow a guy, ahem) I met this great community of intuitives like, the first psychics that I've ever met, and had really ground-breaking, earth-shaking experiences of validation, of really feeling seen for the first time in my life. And it gave in me a sense of direction that I had never really had before. So, over the years, I continued dabbling in meditation and different energy healing arts and it was funny because I think at that time in my early twenties, I read my first Caroline Myss book, the Anatomy of the Spirit, and I was like, 'Ohmygosh. This is so cool. I totally want to do this.' But thinking that it was really out of reach, you know, believing that it's something you're born with or you're not and... Eventually, in my mid-twenties, I asked the main intuitive that I worked with, 'Hey, do you think I could do this?' And she just, she kind of laughed, you know? She was like, 'Ohmygosh, Anna. Of course you can do this!' And so I just started taking some basic energy management meditation classes and then eventually decided to join a full clairvoyant training program. And clairvoyant, I mean, clairvoyance, you've said this on your podcast, where it's like clairvoyance is the only thing people are teaching which I totally agree with that. And for me, it was really helpful because I am very clairsentient, in a way that's actually kind of damaging and hard on my body. So learning to be clairvoyant was really helpful, and I actually then didn't right go out into the world and get readings, or to give readings rather. I had to, I kind of was very type-A, I had to get all the certifications first and studied yoga and ayurveda and stuff. That's the general story. I then eventually, when I moved to Seattle about six years ago, I was going to set up as an ayurvedic practitioner and the laws in Washington are a lot stricter than where they were when I was living in California. I was like, Crap! I can't set up as an ayurvedic practitioner. Well, I guess i'll just give readings then. So I feel like I kind of fell into being a professional psychic but that was definitely the place where I was supposed to be. Slade: Mmm... By the way, your website is called SensitivityUncensored.com, if anybody's listening and they want to kind of look at you and check out your site while we're talking, because there's so much about the personality. The imagery on your site, the language on your site, that really drew me in. And seeing some of that, I immediately connected with you and couldn't help but feel that you must've been motivated to create something in a response to all that goody-goody that's out there that I sort of feel like I try to respond to as well. So I was wondering, what motivated, just kind of the vibe of your site and the concept? Anna: Yeah, oh that's great. That's part of the reason why I was drawn to you, Slade, it was the less hearts and flowers. So I was like, 'Oh, thank God.' Someone else, you know? Slade: Yeah! Anna: Well there's a couple things. First actually, was that I recognized that the clients, the highly sensitive clients I was attracting, one of the real challenges they had was this real sense of seriousness, that everything was so serious. And, like you know what happens when we get serious all the time. Our energy shuts off. It stops flowing, you know? So part - so they learned, working with me, that we're not going to be super serious. We're going to go through important, difficult stuff and we're not going to do that in a life or death, with a life or death energy, you know? We're going to go through a little bit more lighthearted so that we can stay just above and work with what's there. So that was the first thing. The second reason is that I had, before that, kind of pigeon-holed myself with my previous website as like, the perfect healer. I think you know what I'm talking about. It was really annoying, Slade, my website. And I think about it now, I cringe. It's like when you are in the year 2000 with a 1981 haircut. You're like, 'Oh, that should have been updated.' So I had felt like I had created this pressure for myself to show up perfectly, which is like, I'm nowhere near perfect, and it just wasn't the vibe that I actually worked from. So the website was a bit of a 'coming out' in a way for me, being like, 'Hey, yeah i'm a healer and I do things really, really differently.' And then kind of the third thing is, I have avoided for years calling myself psychic because I don't tend to like a lot a lot of the psychic community, kind of that new-age vibe because it's like the Law of Attraction and that's all that exists. Which, like, I just want to vomit a little with that, and I see a lot of clients getting really hung up on some of these new age principles that have been spun really poorly, taught really poorly, kind of from a, I like to call it, Puritanical way, where it's like, 'I did everything right. Why isn't the Universe giving me what I want?' And i'm like, okay well we just kind of - that's not how it works! Slade: There's a kind of fundamentalism that has crept in to it all. Anna: Exactly! Yeah! Slade: Yeah. I totally know - well, I have to say, in keeping with kind of lightness and the vibe of your site when people first land on it, they'll know what I'm talking about. You have to go check this out because I honestly kind of felt like, and I don't mean this to sound in any way like you're smaller than me or less mature, something like that, but I felt like you were like my little sister who I thought of as being like an elementary school kid who suddenly got really cool and turned punk rock over the summer, and I was like, 'Wait a minute!' And I looked at you and I was like, 'Oh wait, she's cooler than me!" And it felt like something I did respond to, you're right. The less hearts and flowers thing. But you had it dialed up in a way that was particularly feminine, I think, but in a badass kind of way, you know, like a babydoll punk kind of vibe. There's something kind of retro '90s grunge about it. I don't know how to put words on it but it was really refreshing and exciting to me to see that, and I do think that you're in a safe space, talking to this group of people who follow me or listen to this podcast. They will totally get you and they will appreciate it and they will laugh in all the right places and be excited. Anna: Right, right. Slade: But you have this manifesto and again, the language that you use, everything is very, kind of, cool and grounded and kind of in your face in a good way that kind of wakes you up. But it's not trying too hard. It feels very natural. It feels, like you said, you came out of some pristine kind of shell that you were trying to be in, and sort of let it all out and, you know what it is? It's like a cool, it's like a cool hair cut. You know, like when you cut all your hair off and you dye it blonde, which I know that you recently did. Anna: Yes! Hahaha... Slade: It's like your site kind of feels like the spiritual 'coming out' version of that. Like, I'm going to go into the bathroom and I'm gonna shave my head and then I'm gonna come out and be like, raccoon eyeliner watch out. Anna: Yeah. Slade: But having said all that, that definitely is like a, WHAT? You know, like it made me stop in my tracks and want to come in. But then when I started to read your actual manifesto, kind of your About page, about where you're coming from and everything, there's some real depth and philosophical originality going on here. So, I want you to kind of talk to me about this concept of Sacred Rebellion, and it's clear from your domain name, Sensitivity Uncensored, that there's this relationship between highly sensitive people and then this concept of rebellion. Explain all that to us. What is that manifesto? Anna: Yeah, absolutely. So I, you know that when I wrote the manifesto, I mean, that comes straight from inside. I feel every word of that manifesto. It wasn't something, when I created my website, that I was like, and then I will have a manifesto! It was like, one day I was like, I have a manifesto! And it must be written! And... I think this is actually where my science background comes in, because something that I observe about the people I work with, people who are sensitive, who are empathic, who are intuitive, we have so many answers for the problems that are plaguing the world. I mean, we are like, I liken this in science to the indicator species, you know? A way you could say that more commonly is, the canary in the coal mine. We can, we feel what's happening. We have a knowingness about what's happening when we're clear. Sometimes we see, we hear, and we receive tremendous amounts of guidance. I really believe that there's a critical place for sensitive, empathic, intuitive people on the planet, and that we currently have a culture that is not set up to recognize our gifts. Nobody is going to step aside for that to happen right? That has to come from us claiming our space, finding our power and our place, wherever we want that to be. I'm not saying we all need to get on the front lines and be social justice warriors or something, you know? But coming into our power and having enough personal sovereignty to do our thing in the world. No matter if that's, you know, being a professional psychic or being a really good interior designer, or an artist that just moves people. I just feel like it's so important. And so, the Sacred Rebellion is that claiming. The Sacred Rebellion has two parts. First, it's about personal practices and personal tools that help us come to a place of spiritual and personal sovereignty, where we are much more able to clearly able to discern between what is our STUFF to deal with and what is the stuff of someone else or the world. Basically being able to discern between energies, right? So that we can do US. That's the first part of Sacred Rebellion. It's a re-claiming, a claiming, remembering. The second part, and I think this is so critical, is the 'so that'. We do that work - SO THAT - we can be in this greater world, earth, doing our part, for humanity, the earth, consciousness, whatever. So, and you pointed this out, so much of my work is really grounded because I believe it has to be. If we really want to change the situation of the planet and really help, you know, human consciousness raise up or, however you want to, however you want to talk about that goal. So, again, the Sacred Rebellion is about doing those two things and doing them in community with other highly sensitive, empathic, intuitive people. I mean, I think I've heard you said, Slade, sorry, you had said, Slade, that, you know, we're spread out, as intuitives. You have that theory we're not all bunched together, and how isolating that is. Slade: Mmhmm. Anna: And I'm like, 'Okay! Let's group up!' Like, we need community, so that's where my Refuge for Sacred Rebellion is that place where we come together and do this. Slade: Yeah, talk about, a little bit about this. It's kind of a program, right? Or it's, I mean, it's a community. You explain what it is, the Refuge for Sacred Rebellion. Anna: Yeah. The Refuge for Sacred Rebellion - it's a membership group. It's a place for highly sensitive, or sensitive souls, empaths, intuitives, others, people who have felt 'othered', to come into community with other highly sensitive empathic psychic others. And I co-lead this with a woman named Heidi Frank Palmer, and she was a long-term client/student of mine who's right up with me, and we are co-leading the space. What we, our goals for this space is, are to create a real sense of community. To provide ample opportunity for us to get to know each other, to share what's happening for us daily and where we're at in our stories. We do this through a Facebook group. We also have monthly discussion calls about different subjects that are either guided by us or guided by other members. Basically the things that creative people struggle with. Like, we break it down. We have what we call 'office hours', kind of stealing something from my college professors, where we kind of hang out online, and if you want to, you can come and ask us questions and get advice as part of the group. And then, twice a year, I teach the Fundamental Tools for my School for Sacred Rebellion and intuitive development Program, and this was, these are a set of tools that I created and originally was calling, 'Sensitive Self-Defense'. It's like spiritual hygiene for sensitives. It's a bunch of meditation tools that really help us take those first steps to getting spiritually sovereign. I used to sell this course for so much money and whatever, and now it's just like, you're in the Refuge, you'll get these tools. Twice a year, we go through it together. You can join us. You can not join us. They're available within the membership area of the website so you can refresh, or work through, at your own pace. Basically we are trying to create a place where you can come, you know, come together and go through this experience of being a sensitive, creative, intuitive soul on this planet at this time. Slade: Hmm, okay. I was hoping that you would have some advice for sensitive people. You kind of touched on that idea of the first thing that you need to do, that kind of sensitive self-defense, and I encounter people who refer to themselves as HSP, Highly Sensitive People, empaths. One of the first things that I teach everyone who comes into my intuitive training is a different kind of shielding technique that's not just a, you know, wall of white light and bleach. It's like, it's too much, you know. I always tell people there's a difference between a blindfold and sunglasses. Anna: Yes, yes! Slade: So what are some tips you have for someone - because the thing about people who are empathic and highly sensitive is, they're the most likely to be shut down. They're the most likely to have walls. They're the most likely to be like, so withdrawn within themselves that they're not seeking, they're not reaching for this stuff like some of us are. So when you encounter one of those people, and you're kind of triaging that highly sensitive empath, and you need to give them a pair of sunglasses instead of a blindfold, what do you advise? What's the first thing to do? Anna: Such a great question. So, the thing that I notice about these people, I mean, this is everyone I work with, is that, I mean, rightly so, they're inside themselves, right? Because the world is fucking harsh. So I just see no judgment in that. They've been doing what they learned to do to protect themselves, you know? Good job. Now it's not working so let's do something else, right? So, what I notice is that HSP, what they do is they eject. Like, their aura usually, not always, but usually the first thing I see clairvoyantly when a HSP comes at me is, they're not in their body. Slade: Mmm... Anna: Because their body is painful. It's too painful to be in their body. It's scary. It's over-whelming. There's so much sensation, you know? So they're just like, I'm ejecting into the spiritual, the theoretical space that is so much easier for me to be in. So before I actually offer sunglasses, and I used to do this, Slade, I used to just offer protection first, and it didn't work for HSP. Slade: Okay. Anna: Because for them, what I find, is they've got to get grounded first. Slade: Okay. Anna: They HAVE to be in their body. So that stuff actually, the first thing that I give them is, I teach them how to create a really dynamically solid grounding cord I'll call it. So it's not like you're stuck to your chair, you know, but it's a way to plug in and to really fill up the space of your body. And then after that, I offer actually a little bit of like, I call it 'turning on the tap', how do you then get nourished with air and water, now that you're in your body, and then I give protection. Because I think about it like, I think about protection kind of like the alarm system of a house. Right? And say this alarm system works like, will only protect if you and all your shit is in your house. You know what I mean? If they're not in their bodies, then what's the alarm system doing, you know? Slade: Mmm... Anna: That's kind of what I, that's how I explain it at least. And this is just came from me working with THIS population for so long, that I was like, Why isn't a protection working? Oh. Because they're not there. Slade: I had an image come to me while you were speaking. I'm just going to share it, that for me, I had this kind of fitness image come in, which was the idea that without core strength, you're not really in a position to work a bunch of kung fu and martial arts, you know what I mean? Anna: Haha.. Totally! Slade: You can't throw a punch if you don't have a strong core. You can't spin around and kick someone in the face if you don't have balance, you know what I mean? You can't put all these muscles on top of something that doesn't have a centre. Which I think, in general, is a lot of what, when people call themselves spiritual seekers or they're working on all these tools and all this stuff, I often find that they're orbiting the body... Anna: Yes! Slade: ...playing with all this stuff that's kind of like in the upper chakras and you've heard me talk about this and the whole idea of re-booting, re-grounding energy and working back up again if you feel like you're frazzled or fried or whatever. But that's coming to me as a part of this picture of what you're describing, like, it doesn't make sense for you... like, you gotta be in your body first before you can manage the kind of shell of energy. Anna: Well, absolutely. I mean, for most HSP, this is our natural tendency, to take up space in the upper chakras at kind of the expense of the lower. And this, then, just generally makes us feel like we do life bad. Slade: Yes! Anna: You know? Most people who are not sensitive and empathic, you know, no judgment on that, but they naturally tend to just hang out in their lower chakras, so it's like, easy to get a job, and kind of easy to make money and they're not too worried about what their Spirit's doing, you know? It's just like, it's basic. And then, HSP we're all up in our upper chakras going like, why can't I get a job that I like? Like, why... Slade: Yes... Anna: Why is this... And it's like, Yeah! There's a gift about occupying those upper chakras. And, you do have a body. And, you don't have to occupy those lower chakras in the same way that everyone else does. So let's find a way to occupy them that, you know, really resonates and validates who you are as a Spirit. Slade: Yeah, it's like your Wifi isn't going to work if the little box isn't plugged in to the wall. Anna: Yes! I love that - that's totally it. Yes. Slade: Yeah, and the thing is, is like, when I talk about people doing that, and I do talk about it because I see it in clients and I see it in myself. There's been this ongoing theme this year where I keep returning to real basic stuff about the body and wellness, and nutrition, and simple fitness. And the thing is, is I don't think that any of that stuff has to be complicated. I think, actually, everyone's impulse is to over-complicate it by a bunch of outfits and special shoes and like, go for a marathon and, I mean it's good to have goals and stuff but I think that if you are sort of working in all those upper chakras and they're not working right for some reason, like you said, I feel like I'm doing this wrong, then look at really simple grounding. Do you walk around outside? Anna: Yes! Slade: Do you feel sunlight on your eyelids? That creates a vitamin in your body, you know? And getting back to your, sort of, I want to say it's kind of neo-pagan, in a way, like the way that you connect from your science background in conservation and ecology back to the sort of you know, earth as life force as a living entity, all that kind of stuff. So there's that connection to it as well, and that's really simple, basic, animal, like you said, lower chakra kind of stuff to work on. And we're all guilty of it. Anna: Oh, yeah. Slade: I mean, I spend most of my time trying to climb up in my third eye and balance on my divine crown all day long and, you know, all this kind of stuff and, you know, everything from the heart chakra up is like getting all this attention and it was a real life-changer for me when I was forced to rebuild my body, first with yoga, and then on some other kinds of fitness. But it came out of a really, like, ohmygod, I had surgery, and my core muscles had been cut into and I had to rebuild my basic strength and I did that after doing all the psychic stuff. So I don't want anybody to think that you can't be perfectly great psychic if you've got, you know, if you're chubby and you're working on it, it's okay. You can still do all this stuff. Anna: Oh, god, yeah! Slade: I used to do all this stuff. But do look at, if it's not working, maybe this is, what we're talking about is the reason why. Anna: Yeah, totally. I just want to add, you can be chubby and not working on it. Slade: You can. Anna: There's nothing wrong with that. Slade: Absolutely. Because, like you said, some people who are really sensitive are not spending time in the body, it's on autopilot in some way, and that could include being sedentary and sort of eating on autopilot and all kinds of things that go along with that. And you are spending all your time in your head. And years and years ago when I tried to quit smoking, I was trying to treat it as an addiction and I went to a doctor who asked me a gazillion questions about my lifestyle. It felt more like a psychiatric assessment, if you've ever been to someone, you know, to be kind of assessed for depression or something like that. There are these elaborate quizzes that you take and it was that kind of process. He told me at the end of it, he said, you're not addicted to the cigarettes, you're addicted to the endorphin that the body releases when you starve yourself and you're using caffeine to stimulate and to stay in your mind and you spend a lot of time doing activities that are super super mental. And it's like your happy place is to feel like a robot, like you're riding around inside this machine and your body is not really you. You're just your brain. And that, I don't know how that changed my perspective but that was the clue to me realizing what was really happening, and it was that I was disassociating. Anna: Totally. And, even like addiction energy is kind of an upper chakra energy anyway though, so it's probably just, you know, easier to focus on and it's funny, as you talked about that, the image I got is like, oh! That kind of helped you drop into your body and kind of let go of that concept of addiction. Slade: Yes. Anna: Super cool. Slade: Total tangent there but I feel like it's all related. It's all related. Anna: Yeah! Slade: I keep having this image, like a... There's gonna be some links that I'm gonna share but there's some images of you on your website, on your psychic school, on your intuitive school program page, that are out in nature and they're very, um, they're very much the, that kind of intersection of spirituality and nature and... That's what this has all been about for me, is kind of bridging those worlds, so to speak. I think that that's really what you're doing, from my perspective. But I'm interested in what you hope to contribute to this kind of new age world, spirituality, personal development... What do you kind of hope to offer? Anna: I think we're... Yeah, that's such a great question. I think you're the first one to really ask it to me. So, you know, I think what I'm really trying to contribute is, there's been a really large focus in this realm of the upper chakras, of transcending the human experience. And I think we've got to stop doing that. To be honest, if we want things to change on the ground, if we actually want to improve this world that we are in, in these human bodies, then I don't think that we can have spirituality divorced from the body, and divorced from what happens in the body. So what I'm hoping to leave behind is, is that. It's how to have all of this juicy, creative, inspirational, psychic stuff, you know, as an in-the-body experience. And actually have it connect us more to our humanity and to, then, how we interact with other humans in the community. I see so much spiritual bypassing these days. I see so much pain and trauma inflicted on other people, saying from some kind of spiritual elitism viewpoint that I think is so harmful, and I see it because we're using our spirituality kind of divorced from our humanity, from our soul, from those deep soulful chakras. So I think that's what I'm trying to do, and really help HSP and empaths step into their power, because there's a power and there's a place for all of us here, particularly us sensitive empaths, and it's so easy for the culture that we're in to feel like there's NOT a place and I just... There is. I think I'm going to say that until I die. There's a place for us and it's really important. Slade: Mmm... We have to talk about your, the free book that you offer on your website and I'm really excited about this. I don't think that, if I'm projecting into the future, I don't think I'd title the podcast this, but I wanted to just steal it and make it the title of the podcast. The title of your e-book is, 'You Are a Goddamn Magical Unicorn', which, I have decided, wins the award for the best title on a subscriber incentive that I have personally seen, and I've looked at a lot of them because I coach people around this, and I was like, Yes! That is awesome. So, 'You're a Goddamn Magical Unicorn'. It's free to everyone who goes to your website. What's it about? Anna: Yeah. So this is actually a guidebook for HSP. It's kind of like, oh! So you found out you're highly sensitive. Here's your instruction manual. Not instruction manual, but your guidebook. And I wrote it from that place of, we are being too goddamn serious, you know. We, there's so much tiptoeing around our sensitivity and just... I just wanted it to be out there. You are special and goddamnit we need you. So this is, I'm not gonna lie, I may have had some whisky while I wrote this, but this is a guidebook written in, take the title, it's written in that sort of tone. It also, though, offers really practical suggestions for getting in your body for grounding. It offers guided meditations. You also, if you sign up for my newsletter, you get a book and you get the guided meditation that's in the book as an audio file. So you get both. Slade: Okay, cool. Anna: Yeah. And I think I even, ohmygosh, I think I even created a unicorn mandala for you to colour in there. But basically it's like, Here's what high-sensitivity means, like, this is what it means biologically. Here's how herd animals, because all mammals have highly sensitive individuals. So here's how mammals handle high sensitivity, which I think is super cool. Like, the highly sensitive deer or like zebras of any herd are so revered, because they're the first ones to know that there's danger. Slade: Mmm! Anna: So everyone is like, What are the sensitives doing? We will follow the sensitives. And it's just in humans where we get all backwards. And so, I talk about the herd mentality in a very fun way and then I talk about, yeah, taking up space as your own highly sensitive being, and here are three ways you can get started. Slade: Okay. That's awesome. That's exactly kind of what I was kind of hoping that you would have somewhere to send someone. When someone approaches me and they say, 'Help, I'm just kind of like, curled up in a ball here.' I always want to say, 'Do this.' And you're right. I teach them how to protect themselves first, and I like what you talked about on the show about the need to be in the body first and all that. So I think that's an incredibly cool resource even if it didn't have such a kickass title, it sounds like a really awesome piece of information, so definitely we will link to that. Go to your website. It's right there on the homepage and you can't miss that cute little image. So what's next for you? Do you have any big projects on the horizon here? Anna: Yes, yes. I have been building what I'm calling the School for Sacred Rebellion for awhile now. And this is kind of the next step from the Refuge. So the Refuge for Sacred Rebellion is that place where we all get started together. Within that, you learn those sensitive self-defense tools that are kind of like Spiritual Hygiene 101. The School for Sacred Rebellion is my intuitive development program where we go through all of the clairs. We learn how to do, um, you can jump in kind of. Part One is doing basic aura healings. So actually working in, I call it 'Activating the healer' because I believe we're all healers so let's just find yours. Let's find your healer and bring them to the forefront. And you can kind of stop there, and that provides you with a tremendous amount of resources just for working with your own energy and doing healings on yourself and with others. And if you want to dive deeper into those intuitive arts, it goes into Part Two, which is developing clairvoyance, claircognizance, clairsentience, clairaudience, all of that and at the end, we finish with this really cool integration mentorship, because I don't want to create little Anna-bots, you know, like you're having to go out in the world and do what I do. The people that are, that this program is really for are, you know, people who are already doing some form of healing work. I mean, it doesn't have to be for this, but people who are like, 'Yeah, I'm a massage therapist', 'I'm a yoga teacher', 'I'm a doctor', and I would just love to have more to offer my people. So you go through this program, you learn which of the clairs are your strengths, how you want to put them together and then in the mentorship, we, you basically get a bunch of one-on-one and group support in how are you going to go do you now, in this world? Slade: One of the things that I notice about it that I thought was really appealing was the fact that it's broken up into stages, almost more like, if you go to college, and you take, like, 101, and then you come back the next semester and do 201, you know, 102, however they number it, I can't remember, it's been too long. But I like the fact that you can kind of come in and get a stage of the work and then get off and work at that level, or you could keep going, or you could come back and go continue on with the next thing. Anna: Yup. Slade: But rather than it being ONE big huge long program that you commit to from the beginning, you can kind of go through it, you can break it up a little bit more, which I think is gonna really appeal to people, both for financial reasons and also just because absorbing and processing some of this stuff, you need to sit with a tool, like what you just described, you know... Anna: Totally. Slade: ...discovering the self-healer within you, that's something you could sit in that might carry you for months, as you're processing that and integrating that into your life, before you feel like you need to come back to the next thing. Rather than kind of stuffing your face with too much stuff and then trying to figure out later, why did I buy all this, you know. Anna: Yeah. Slade: I want to mention, too, that the course is really not officially launching until the summer of 2018 but Anna has decided to share the page with us. Like I said, check it out just for the cool photography, if nothing else. There's some really great imagery there, great information, and if someone does go to that page and they're interested, they can go ahead and start working with some of these programs? Anna: They can, well, yes and no. So my - if you get to the school and you are just super stoked about it, and you really want to be in it, then get into the Refuge, because the Refuge is where you get those, kind of the starter tools... Slade: Okay. Anna: Like, the prerequisite tools that really guide everything else. The next round of teaching those tools is going to be early Fall of this year. And then there'll be another class of the School. Eventually, I hope to have enough co-teachers and enough bandwidth. I have a one year old right now so I don't have a huge amount of bandwidth, that I can have, you know, multiple sections of the courses going at once, so it is like, 'Oh yeah, that section is offered then and then.' Slade: Okay. Anna: But right now it's a little bit more linear, just because of all of that. Slade: Yeah. Okay. So we're getting a sneak peak at what's coming from you. Anna: Yeah! Slade: And that's very, very cool, and still, the entry point would be to get into the Refuge and start working with the tools and the community there, either way. But we'll link to it just so you can check it out and see what's on offer and see your cool new haircut. And um... Anna: Oh, it's funny, Slade. So I just want to share something with you, with the audience, which is that, so I cut all my hair off and dyed it platinum blonde, which I loved. And now I've been doing a bunch of mountain biking in Seattle, around Seattle, and I nailed these upgrades to my bike and my husband was kind of frowning, like, Okay, I won't bleach my hair anymore, in order to pay for the upgrades. You know, to kind of make it even. So right now, I'm kind of rocking '90s boy band colours. Slade: Okay! Anna: You know, like, it's like a little '90s boy band. I'm not that stoked on it but it's kind of funny. Slade: Hey, listen, one of my best girl friends is platinum and it's, you gotta be like, dedicated to platinum. It's a lot of upkeep and a lot of chemistry involved. Yeah. It's not just something you do once. Anna: Nope. Slade: Anna, it's been really fantastic capturing this conversation with you and hearing about your take on everything. I definitely learned a few things and I'm processing some things differently, having spoken with you about HSP and how to, how to work with that. I think I will go away and ponder and probably do some things differently. Definitely gonna be sending some people to the Goddamn Magical Unicorn book and... But just before you leave us, tell everyone where they can go to find you online. Anna: Yeah, you can find me at www.sensitivityuncensored.com. And then I'm also, I'm kind of on Facebook but really I'm more on Instagram @sensitivity_uncensored. Slade: Cool. We'll put all the links in the Show Notes to the various parts of your site that we highlighted. That was great, Anna. Thank you for coming on. Anna: Yeah, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

Knowing how to nurture the needs of HSP helps them to grow and embrace their magnificence. Our guest, Anna Holden, is an Intuitive Healer, Medical Intuitive, Ayurvedic Counselor, Yoga Teacher and highly sensitive person (HSP). She helps other HSP's learn to embrace and leverage their gift of high sensitivity in order to experience a higher level of health and vitality, creating their own pathway to self-discovery and personal power. Her website is AnnaHolden.com. CTHRadio unites healing specialist with childhood trauma survivors. Your host, Susan Jacobi, a thriver after childhood abuse, is the author ofHow to Love Yourself: The Hope after Child Abuse. She shares her healing journey… and her FREE ebook.CLICK here for a FREE copy of 11 Tools for Happiness. You can reach Susan directly at susan@conversationsthatheal.com.