68. Disentangling from Hustle Culture to Access TRUE Prosperity

[Music] Welcome to activate your higher purpose. Your go-to podcast for accessing the absolute magic that lives within your being. I'm your host, Haley Curtis, and I cannot wait to bring you deliciously activating conversations about how you can access more of your magnificence. So, strap in my friend as we dive deep into all things. Genkies, creativity, purpose, self-love, and stepping into your genius. Let's freaking go. Hello everyone and welcome back to the activate your higher purpose podcast. I am so delighted to introduce you to Charlotte Web today who I have invited to come onto the show so that we can dive in to some real juice around hustle culture and what that means for our lives because I was deeply inspired by Charlotte a couple of weeks ago when she shared a YouTube video answering journaling prompts that I'd popped up around hustle culture and the moment that I heard her voice and heard the wisdom coming out of her. I said, Charlotte, will you please come on my podcast? Can we talk about this in a little bit more depth? And so I'm so grateful to have you here today, Charlotte. Welcome to the podcast. How are you today? Thank you so much. I am very, very good and I am delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, such a joy. Well, you know, Charlotte, let's just dive in with, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself, you know, for all the listeners, who are you? Who is Charlotte Web? What does she do in the world? And yeah, then we'll dive in from there. Yeah, thank you so much. Well, I have been on a real journey the last few years stepping into what I would call my real soul's purpose. I was in a real state of burnout a couple of years ago. I had quite a long career in academia. I had set up an activist group that was all about gender and technology. And that was an amazing experience. I got to travel all around the world, teaching people about how to make more equitable technologies. And it was a trip. And at the same time, I just knew that there was something else within me that wanted to come out. And I did have what some people might call a spiritual awakening. It was around 2019, 2020, where from that place of burnout, from a chronic health condition, from a sense of like loss of myself, for some reason, I lost connection with myself. I knew that the only way for me to move forward was to become a more deeply spiritual being. And so I went very deep into my meditation, into my yoga, into my spirituality. And I had a profound series of experiences. I trained to become a crystal healer. I learned to read the Akashic records. And I found myself in a flow, and in a connection with people, giving them transformational experiences, or not even giving them, but facilitating transformations that had never been part of my experience of reality. And I honestly felt like I came home to myself through that process. And I came home to my calling, my destiny, my purpose, my alignment. And so now I am running a spiritual business as a coach, as a reader, and as a crystal healer. And yeah, I'm in this place now of living in my truth, much more deeply, which is incredible. Wow. What a plot twist from a life of academia to what you do now. Wow. I mean, before we dive into like the actual topic of hustle culture, instantly I've got a question I'm dying to ask you. In terms of going into that spiritual awakening, where there are lots of limiting beliefs, like an intellectualized beliefs that you have to kind of chip away to get to those deeper pieces, having spent so much of your career in more of that mind-based world. Yeah, definitely. If so, on point, because there are a lot of kind of structures and frameworks that become normative to you when you exist in that kind of space, where logic prevails. The way that knowledge is created is very specific. It is through the mind. And I felt that the opportunity to find other ways of knowing things was huge, but not massively accepted in that space. So I remember one of my teachers, Laura Coe, who teaches about the Akashic records. She made me laugh because she said she found it harder to come out as a spiritual person and to come out as gay. I felt like that. Just what would people in this world think? And that was the blockage that got to be worked through around other people's opinions. Wow. I think that so many people will resonate with that child. And definitely people that I know that I've worked with very closely one to one, they compartmentalise themselves so much that when I'm at work, I'm at work version of me. And then when I'm at home, I'm at home version of me. And then when I'm with my friends, I'm the friend version of me where we're so afraid to be completely seen in the holistic nature of who we are, yet the people that we're afraid to show ourselves to, then doing the exact same thing. We're there afraid to show their whole selves to us. And we just reinforce for each other the fear to truly be oneself and the fear to integrate all aspects of our selves within these different environments. And so man, hats off to you and the courage that it took to peel back those fears and to truly own all of who you are because it's not that the academia part of you is still such a beautiful aspect of you too, but this spiritual nature gets to come in and marry with that. What an empowering, I mean, I'm bloody inspired already and we're five minutes in. I'm saying yeah. And you know, it's interesting because I definitely found that in some cases, people were way, way more accepting than I had expected. Yeah. Yeah. There are some moments where you say it's almost like you admit something and people are like, oh yeah, brilliant. Wow, because even if people don't agree with the whole shebang, there is something people connect with about you doing like, as you're just saying, doing what you want to do. And you know, the content sometimes isn't as important as the move that you made and lots of people feel they want to do something like that as well. Yeah. Absolutely. People tend to deeply respect enthusiasm and passion and courage. Yeah, even though it might be in a direction that might not align with them and what they're interested in doing in their life. But yeah, we, I remember that kind of shocking me a little bit as well where someone doesn't have to want to engage in the work that I do. But by me showing up to do my work, I still, they still feel inspired just by the enthusiasm and the passion and which makes them want to be like, well, maybe I can go after what I'm passionate about too, you know. And that is literally how I felt when I came across your channel, it was exactly like, well, actually I do want to do the content too. I love it. I would, you know, there's nothing about your work that would, you know, that I wouldn't want to get involved with, but, but it was that energy. It was that momentum and the kind of the currency that you create in your channels that made me feel that it really inspired to just get on with it and go and be in that energy. You're just speaking straight to my heart. And I was just saying Charlotte before we hit record that I asked her to come on the podcast because as soon as I heard her sharing on her YouTube channel, there's just this effortlessness in which you speak, Charlotte, and such a wisdom and such a grounded truth coming through that I just feel so attracted to that. And I think that this is the thing we, we are attracted to authenticity. You know, even if that authenticity isn't speaking about a thing that is necessarily our thing, it's still attractive because in a world of inauthenticity, the light that shines from a person who is deeply grounded in their passion and just their naturalness of who they truly are. There is nothing more magnetic. Nothing more magnetic. So, and you know, that's magnetised us to each other for this very conversation. This is how it looks, you know. And I honestly feel like I don't know if you agree with this but I feel that as somebody that wants to step into creating a spiritual business or a sole aligned business or whatever you want to call it. finding that voice, like finding how you can actually speak from your heart in an authentic way is the biggest gift and it can bring up so much deep dark wound. It is the journey, right? Is the journey and becoming visible on social media for anyone that's listening and thinking, you know, I want to show up, I want to express myself, I want to create an audience, but there's these things holding you back about, but what would I say? Who am I to say this? You know, what will the response be? Just know that that's part of healing and growing. And it's really, really painful at times to have to sit in your own kind of like discomfort about speaking out, but that is part of the journey. I don't know if that is the reason for you. Oh, 100%. You know, because people often think like, oh, like I just want to access my authentic expression. I just wouldn't, if I can just access my authentic expression, everything will be okay, but we forget that our authentic expression is actually the harvest of sitting with our shit. It's actually, you know, your authentic expression is actually you and your absolute naturalness. It's just about peeling back the wounding patterns and the limiting beliefs and the traumatic experiences and all these layers that we've accumulated on top of that. That's the journey. And you know, I'm always said like, obviously, and it sounds like your story is quite similar where chronic illness was sort of my big catalyst into transformation, but man, if you really want to transform in this life, start yourself a business because when it comes to business, you cannot hide from your shadows. You cannot hide from your limiting beliefs around prosperity. And our belief system around prosperity is actually undermining our existence way more than you might think that it is and nothing will challenge that belief system more than having your own business. And it's either evolve. It's either sit with those wounds and transform or quit because you're not going to make it if you don't allow yourself to go into these places and peel these things back. And then, but the beautiful harvest is you become more and more and more authentic and you start accessing this voice where you no longer are thinking like, oh my gosh, like what am I going to say or what are people going to think or you rise into a realm within yourself that's beyond those questions that is actually the question is no longer how can I feel secure? The question becomes how can I best serve the whole? And as you start accessing that, that everything changes. But we have to take the courage to start stepping out there to share our voice before we think we're truly ready. You were born ready. As we start sharing our voice in that way, it becomes the portal back in to heal the wounds. And so your own service becomes your greatest healer. You know, it's the torus of the energy. Totally. It's so so true. And I keep saying to myself that, you know, this, this business right now, it, it and YouTube as well, where I make most of my content, they are like therapists slash mirrors because they really are showing you so much about yourself. And this is a devotional practice. Like if you think that business and spirituality is separate, no, no, no, it is a spiritual journey for sure. And the things that come up in creation and also in reception of holding the energy that comes with having more attention, with holding a space for new people, you know, we have to be in our shadows transmuting those wounds. And also like regulating our nervous system to be able, you know, to tolerate new levels of expansion because otherwise it's not sustainable. Absolutely. Which is just the most perfect segue into our discussion around hustle culture. I mean, in terms of, yeah, this is dysregulated nervous system, you know, with building a business that is about like, I like to call it the new era of business, where we have to shift the way that we're showing up in the world to serve so that we can play the role we came here to play in the healing of the collective because business is particularly big business at the moment. It's creating destruction. It's not creating healing. And so the new era of business has to step away from this serving of oneself to a serving of the whole. And the idea of hustle culture is so deeply into woven into that healing and how in terms of spiritual business and this type of business that you're building, Charlotte and that I'm building, there is just no space for hustle in it. Yet I see a lot of people in the world that are trying to build heart-led spiritual businesses but still getting caught up in the throngs of hustle culture and giving up or coming to resent what they first started out from this place of the heart, but we lose our way, you know, we lose our way or people that are stuck in certain careers in the way that they're showing up in their workplace that is just draining them and burning them out. And so it sounds like we have very similar stories of burnout, of chronic illness due to the way we were showing up in the world in our service. I'd love to hear more about that. What, what, what didn't you still look like for Charlotte to show up at work? And how can you see the way that hustle culture was woven into your eventual burnout? Yeah, amazing question. I guess when I look back, I definitely see you might call it a "carmic pattern", right? You know those patterns in your life where they just keep repeating over and over again. And you know that there's some deeper causal aspects and that they are also one of the things that you're here to transform. So I had a pattern from, you know, a fairly young age of working and working and working until I would be forced for some reason to stop, usually by illness, physical or some sort of emotional collapse, you know, just not being able to handle that amount anymore. And I think that the the momentum behind that hard work, it is to do with beliefs thatworthiness is associated with performance, perfection, attribution, but not in the sense of just your presence is enough in the sense of this is about how much you do, how much time you spend, how diligent you are, how compliant you are, how quality results you get, all of those things that we think are going to make us feel like we're valuable and worthy. Wanting to please other people, wanting to be the good girl, wanting to be the top of the class, you know, to please your boss, to outshine colleagues sometimes. It's very difficult for us to admit that sometimes we just want to be the best. And it's sort of like, you know, there can be shame attached to that because it's not easy to admit. No, I actually wanted to just be better than other people. Like that's what my ego was telling me would make people good, worthy, safe, respected, and all of that, not really understanding that what your soul's highest expression once is for you to stand in your heart and your light. Yeah, and you're enough. So, you know, there's lots of driving factors behind it, but also, you know, academia is a pretty punishing environment for people. Teachers are very burned out. They have so many students to look after. They have a lot of responsibility. They don't get paid enough. It is a difficult place. And, you know, I was in that for a long time and I got many, many benefits from it, but I realized after a period of time that that was not the right environment for me anymore. And that for me to navigate through the health condition that had come as a result of all of this nervous system dysregulation, this overwork, this burnout, I had to have more space around me. And I was very, very lucky because I got to move out of London, big city, to the lovely countryside where I live now. And I was working remotely and I went part-time and I just created a huge amount of space for myself. And I basically did nothing for a good couple of years. Actually, that's not true. I did a huge amount, but to the outside world, it looked like I was doing very little. But what I was doing within me was meditating along time every day, practicing my yoga, walking around the park, healing. And that was one of the best investments I ever made. Stories mirror each other beautifully. You know, and you were teaching in tertiary education. I was teaching in primary school education, you know, and the culture of the responsibility of teaching, you know, but isn't it so fascinating how us humans, it's like the human condition where something has to keep coming back around time and time and time again, for us to finally hit that point where we say, all right, if this keeps coming back, you know, I was very similar where I would I would work until my health didn't allow anymore. And then I'd step back for one point, it was eight months and then I came back, one point, it was seven weeks, and then I came back and then I changed to relief and just worked in little bits and then I came back. But it was the same story every time, right, hit that point of complete burnout of my health falling apart. And it took me about seven or eight times of that cycle happening before I allowed myself to come to accept, Haley, something isn't working here. Maybe the issue isn't that you can't seem to force yourself into this, this box anymore. Maybe the issue is that you're not meant to. You know, maybe this is showing you that this isn't your path. Maybe this is showing you, maybe this is a moment of grace and not a moment of I'm not good enough for, oh my gosh, what's wrong with my body? Like I was making myself think maybe it was actually what I'd been searching for and life just had to start screaming at me until I'd actually bloody listen. And you know, and then I had that kind of retreat time where I too would say like I did nothing, but I was doing quite a lot, you know, I still had like a business that I was running, but in terms of me, in terms of the way that I'd been so caught in in the throngs of my worth being in my productivity, right? Like that is such a big element of why we get caught up in hustle culture because we believe that the more that can come out of me, the more worthy I am, the more I can create the more worthy I am, the higher my energy appears to be the more worthy I am, the more accolades that I receive the more worthy I am. And you know, living life in that way can be all right when you're in your 20s and when you're still like kind of cruising off of this energy, but as you start to get older and older, it just doesn't fly anymore, you know, and especially if you have a body that is, you know, has more underlying things going on and chronic illness comes into the discussion, it will not allow you to keep living life in that way. And I think that moment we have two ways we can go, we can either make that the reason why we'll never be good enough. We can make that the reason why I'm never going to amount to anything. We can make that the reason why we become a victim or it becomes the very reason that invites us on the voyage of a lifetime into discovering what our true worth is, that it invites us into this disentanglement from all of the bullshit that ever told us that our worth was in our productivity, that ever told us that our worth was in one of my clients calls at the Gold Stars, you know, where she's just like collecting the Gold Stars from work and from people and you know, if like the more Gold Stars I have on my chart, the better I am, the more worthy I am, we get this opportunity to start disentangling from this. And in the process come to find, you know, and I'm not sure if you were the same in terms of this Charlotte, but I left my teaching job all disentangled from that hustle culture before I knew what I was going to do next. You know, like it's not like, okay, I worked until I had built this business and now I'm going to be able to leave, because it's still just looking for that safety and just transferring the productivity from one place to another, I stepped away like you created that spaciousness and it was actually in the fertile ground of that space that what I do now grew from. Did you have the same kind of experience? I did, yeah, because I had actually started working as a consultant when I was in academia, because all my work was about technology and equality, I found myself working freelance at the same time as doing a day job. And so I had that, so I'd created my first business which was the thing that allowed me to step away from employment, strictly speaking, and do that in a much more spacious way. Whilst I did all my trainings, whilst I practiced for a year reading the the Akashic records with people, I, you know, I practiced crystal healing for a good long time. And it was that job that gave me enough stability to explore what am I becoming? And what do I want to create next? And I remember a coaching session I had with a transformational coach, because I knew I was on the verge of quitting my job, but I just didn't quite yet have that courage to take the leap. And we had a very powerful sort of laser focused session where she kind of rationalized the fact that I wasn't making a completely crazy, unconsidered risky move. It was actually, you know, I'd got myself into a position where I wouldn't feel so much pressure to make money from my business within two months that it would shut me down. I had enough to have a kind of simple life whilst I built something great. And so that was kind of a bridge I really needed that. Yeah. And that the simple life, I think this is such an important aspect. And it feeds into, you know, materialism and these things feed into hustle culture, because we believe that we need to have more so that we can be more, which means we need to work more so we can afford more so that we can have more so we can be more. And we get ourselves trapped into these cycles and we get ourselves trapped into lifestyles that we actually can't afford, because we think that we're more worthy if we live that lifestyle. An element of going on a journey like this sometimes quite often comes with sacrificing certain things from our lifestyles that have to go in order for us to simplify our lives enough to redirect, to actually find that groove of our destined path. Yeah. And this is where so much, so much of the hustle culture conversation is around worthiness, because that's why we feel like we can't get free of that, because oh, but but I can't, I won't be able to afford to live the life that I live if I don't keep hustling, you know, but then if we never stop living that life, we never have the spaciousness to build the life that we truly desire. And so something's got to give, you know, it doesn't mean that we have to go living on the bare bones of our ass, but something does have to give sometimes. Whether it be, you know, I have friends and, you know, they've sold the expensive car that can then fund something because they realize they just had the car so that they could seem to be more successful or downsize the house. Like you move to the country, leave the expensive lifestyle of London, you know, for my husband and I, we have not lived in a house that we own for seven years, because we chose to shift our lifestyle to create the spaciousness for true prosperity to grow, you know, like it does require sacrifice, but you're not really sacrificing the truth of what you're meant to be here for anyway, you're just creating spaciousness for the truth to grow. Like do you resonate with that as well? Yeah, completely. And just to build on that as well, I feel that sometimes the things that you feel you have to sacrifice, drop away and then your relationship to them changes anyway. It's like, oh well, actually, it wasn't so much of a sacrifice because now that I've let it go, I don't miss it. I don't wish I still had have it. So I think there's a really a gift in yeah, like you say, just creating that space. And none of the status oriented stuff is truly and deeply satisfying anyway, because if you're very, very stable in your status within, then the need to affirm it with external things dissolves. Yeah. And like that's, you could say that's very idealistic and we do live in a world where it's difficult not to compare ourselves with each other, either in terms of your oppositions or in terms of where we are with our business. I mean, how many times you catch yourself maybe you don't really, I don't know, but I patch myself looking around. seeing where people ask if they further on the me, are they doing better than me? And that comparison trap is something to be so mindful about and compassionate towards ourselves and we feel ourselves getting into that territory to step back and think, now I know that I'm in the perfect place for me at this time. And somebody else in five years' time will be where I am and I'll be able to share what I know now with past needs. Yeah, yeah. It really requires a deeper level of trust from you. When we're just in the job and in the hustle culture, where we're just productivity, like just going for it, we can have this false sense of security and stability where we think that that paycheck is our sense of security and stability. And then we think that, oh yeah, I'm trusting, but it's trust only exists in the unknown. And so the amount of trust that you have to build, taking that kind of path and the way that you have to shift your ideas on prosperity. This is one of the biggest shifts that has to take place. You know, hustle culture exists, I think, to a degree because we don't believe we can prosper by doing the thing we love most but we don't believe that we can prosper by being ourselves. And when you don't believe that you can prosper by doing the thing that you love, you have a lack mindset around prosperity and you throw yourself into things that, okay, but I've just got to do this. I've just got to do this. I've just got to do this at a fundamental, if you don't believe you can prosper by just being yourself, that's where that work is. That's where that work is. And so I'd love to hear from you, Michelle, how has your definition of prosperity shifted over the years? - Yeah, it's shifted completely. And I'll just tell you an anecdote because one of the videos I made that kind of changed everything, it was a few months ago and it actually was a video about ancestral wealth blocks. - So I think that there are so many ways that our current reality contributes to hustle culture. Historically in the present, we know that lots of things shape that but also this is in our DNA and it goes back very, very far along our ancestral line. And one of the things that I mentioned in that video that it really changed everything when I read this, it was in a book that was talking about the vagabond laws in the UK, which were like, I think it was in the middle of the 16th century and Henry VIII introduced these laws because the elites wanted people to work. They were not happy with people being able to provide for themselves and just like till the land where they're in food and not have to have jobs. And these laws were brutal. They were very violent. If you were seen to not be conforming to the labor conditions that were imposed upon you which were very, very unpleasant, you would be branded. And if you were found to not conform with those laws for a second time, you would be hanged. And many, many people in this country were killed because of those laws. So we have this deep history of being punished or not backing. And when I heard that, I realized that there is this energetic imprint that's so sad to confront. It's heartbreaking to think that we've imposed these painful restrictions on each other historically. And so my prosperity kind of perspective really changed when I realized that it's not just actually at the level of our mind, it's not just at the sub-conscious mind. It's energetic and karmic and collective. And I realized that part of what I think I'm here to do is to somehow rather engage with that and help other people engage with that and heal those painful deep DNA codes. Somehow doing that, we get to understand prosperity in a way that's a bit more liberated. - I just love it. This is a reflection in the Jane Keys work. Absolutely, you know, I mean, the Jane Keys is about working with your DNA and everything that came before your DNA. You know, it's not just us in this life. It's the history of that DNA and the experiences and the trauma and things like what you just described there with these vagabond laws. Like, there is so much more than just us in this little life, in this speck of time. We've got the primal animalistic codes in our DNA as well as opening up more of our highest potential. And you know, life knows only evolution. Life knows only transformation. But to truly transform, you must acknowledge and respect the past and where we've come from to forge a new future, you know? And so like looking at these deeper karmic bonds and seeing that, you know, the Jane Keys talks about the fact it's Jane key 47, it's the shadow of oppression to the gift of transmutation, which is, you know, this alchemy where we can take our pain and suffering and alchemy is into something beautiful that eventually is transfiguration where we really start to heal and evolve. But in order to leave that oppression and come into that state, we must take ownership over not only our trauma in our wounds in this life, but take ownership over that karmic DNA where we say, you know, what, it wasn't, these are things that like I didn't deserve and I didn't create, yet they're still mine to carry anyway. You know, these aren't things that I may have done in my lifetime, but they're still mine to carry. And when we can take that ownership without falling victim to it, of going like, oh, well, you know, my ancestors were, they suffered for not working now, I'm fucked, you know? Like, as long as we don't become a victim to that, yet we acknowledge that past and we allow ourselves to grieve for these things and to feel these things, to let them in, to allow them to be part of us instead of trying to avoid them and push them to the side. And if maybe if I just work harder, maybe if I just earn more money, then I'll feel fulfilled. Then I won't have to fill this pain, but you cannot out run suffering. On your own, nor the comic suffering that exists in your DNA, we have to come to allow and accept and embrace that as part of this journey. And then it turns into a field of alchemy. It turns into a field of limitless potential where we actually get to create beauty out of these things. But you can't create beauty out of suffering that you haven't accepted yet. You know what I mean? I really know what you mean. And I think that goes back to earlier where this business or being in a business, it's a healing process, isn't it? Because like you say, confronting suffering, you wouldn't think, okay, I would like to become a collegeist coach or I'm going to create my reality as a, I don't know, whatever it is you want to do. You wouldn't necessarily think that part of that journey is sending healing to the wounded aspects of your lineage. And yet this is the gift of stepping into this process. And I think it's really important that we just honor that like you say, it's very tender, isn't it, to look at these things and to feel them. Sometimes it's really overwhelming. And I think we have to find a way to confront the different aspects as and when we're ready. Yeah. So to not be so overwhelmed. Because as we were talking about earlier, this is about expansion and growth and being able to hold these new patterns, new identities, new breakthroughs. Because it shifts to your energy completely. You might have a session where you release some energy around prosperity and after that, you bloody well need to go and lie down for the rest of the day because it's a lot. Yeah, yeah, you have to, it's not something that you, like when we're talking about human wounding patterns and we've got like a core wound. You don't start in a work today and unleash your core wound tomorrow. It's a very gentle peeling back of these layers. like we're saying at the start, there is your authentic voices, you and your naturalness, there's you and your genius, and then there's all these layers that we've accumulated on top. And so we have to be patient and gentle and tender, you know, tenderness, the gift of equality, like you're talking about your work and equality, the gift of equality and the gene keys, it's the 37th gene key and the city, which is like the highest expression of equality is tenderness. And it requires, we require approaching ourselves with this tenderness as we gently peel back the layers, but that requires even to be able to start peeling back the layers requires us to slow down. Right. And this is where life will bring you to your knees. If you keep subscribing to, I've just, you know, I've just got to keep working, I've just got to keep going, I've just got to keep moving really fast. You hit this moment, like I do, I call it a life bringing you to your knees moment where what life is doing is saying you need to slow down because it's only in a field of spaciousness and a field of patience in which love and tenderness grows that is actually the path forward. And so, you know, I'd love to hear a little bit. I know you've kind of weaved this into the way you've been describing your answers to the question, Charlotte, but how do you weave in that spaciousness, you know, and like you said, you took that big chunk of spaciousness in the beginning, but then even what does it look like to have an outwardly, busy a life where you've got lots on your building a business, you've got clients, you're doing stuff, what does it look like to be able to have that kind of outward business whilst still remaining internally spacious? I love this question. One, I do think that awareness of your own signals is really important to be tuned into, right? So, thinking about this earlier, and I know that for me, if I've got myself into a place of overgiving or overworking or anxiousness, then my outward signal is, feel like I need to check that I locked the door. If I leave the house, I'm like, 'I locked the door.' Then I know, 'Okay, you need to chill out now because this is a sign that you're not trusting yourself and that you have too much busyness going on to be present in the moment, and no, I'm leaving the house now, I'm locking the door.' So that's one of my litmus tests. Then another one is, 'How much space am I giving myself between one thing and the next thing? If I don't feel comfortable with the gaps between client sessions or the admin part of the day or whatever it is I'm doing, then again I know, okay, you need to chill out.' There's lots of these things that I look out for, so I know if I've gone too far to bring it back in. Then I suppose in terms of daily regulation, I do have my morning yoga practice pretty much every day that is kind of the backbone of my existence in a way because for me, like a strong physical practice early in the morning, it literally expends excess energy. And it's a very breath-oriented practice, so I do that to make sure that I'm good, unsettled. And I also sit in meditation, and that could be anything from 10 minutes to half an hour, so now it just depends on the day, my energy going on. And sometimes it's more of an active meditation, sometimes it's just a very silent, peaceful contemplation. But when I do those things every day in the morning first, I've told myself, and I've connected my soul and said, 'The most important thing that you could possibly do on this one day is already complete.' And that made me to move through the rest of it. And it's not to say that everything else isn't important, of course, is, but I've just prioritised that anchoring and that quietness, and that I think helps me more than anything to kind of cruise through. But it's not always smooth, right? It's not always. There are obviously dates where you realise you're not quite in your presence, and then again, it's self-compassion, isn't it? And saying, 'Okay, that's okay, take a moment, go outside, and read the rest of the day, and step back, see what you can cut out that you don't need to be doing.' How about you, though? I'd love to know. I feel like it's quite similar to what you're saying. I just love the simplicity of the, when you're questioning whether you've locked the door or not, because it shows you that you weren't present. And I do everything that you shared then, it was simple. And I think this is where sometimes we get ourselves so worked up, because we over complicate, and we try to hustle our healing. If your core and hustle culture in your work in the world, chances are, then you go, 'Okay, I need to heal myself, all right, let's go, come on, like let's quickly, let's do the healing, and we start to try and go fast with our healing, whereas it's actually, and also we think, when we're looking for a quick fix, we are looking for the fancy, complicated thing that I find just do that, then everything will be better, and we undermine the power of the simple things. And you know, there was one word you said there that describes exactly how I weave this in, and it's the word gap, the gaps. And if you can master harvesting the gaps of your day, you will master this life. And I think that this is one of the biggest issues is that we just go from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing without stopping to pause, or even witness ourselves, even remember that we're in a body, remember to drink water, remember to breathe, and then we're tense and we're breathing up in the top of our chest, and it's the end of the day, and we go holy shit. I didn't stop again, you know, oh, I never stopped. I don't have time to stop. So many people are telling themselves the story, I don't have time to stop. And I definitely used to tell myself that story, well, I don't have time to stop. I don't have time to connect. I don't have time to answer that phone call from my mum. I don't have time to go and get the sunshine on my face. But that is a bullshit story. We actually do. But the the key is not looking for these giant two, three hour pauses or even looking for, you know, when we can feel so like, oh my god, life's just not summing down, we think, oh my god, if I could just have like two weeks off work, if I could just go on holiday, it will all be okay. And then we might recuperate and then we come back and we find ourselves straight back there again a few months later. The answer isn't that the answer is starting to harvest the pauses in your normal everyday life, you know, because if we're searching for a time for everything to just slow down a bit, if we're always just waiting for a time where everything's not so busy, oh, and works it all down a bit when the kids have left home when this, when that we keep postponing our relaxation. And that time's just never coming. We have to learn the harvest those gaps, those pauses. And that's really where I bring the focus to in my life, because I do live quite an outwardly busy life. I've got lots going on in different projects. And I even though I'm not a mother myself, I do a lot of parenting. I live with my two young niece and nephew. And you know, I probably spend four or five hours hands on with them every day and then my business and my husband and everything. And I have come to learn that there are gaps where my mind doesn't think that they exist. And you know, just starting to prioritize connection over to do lists. That is so important for me in terms of spaciousness, where you know, I often tell this story of like if I'm getting something done and I'm writing and my husband walks through the door and he's like, hi, my love. Old Haley would have been like, oh, I'll talk to you when I'm done. I've got to do this. Haley now gets to see the beautiful gap in that. And I stop what I'm doing. I turn to him and I'm like, hello, my love. How are you? And I'm no longer buying into the bullshit story that I, my to do list is so intense and so important that I don't have time to turn to the person that means the most to me out of anything in this world and look him in the eye to give him 30 seconds of my time. Like if I'm not prioritizing that, I've got life wrong. And so that's the way that I live my life. Just like you said, Charlotte, that as long as you've spent that time in the morning, you know, you've done that most, the most important thing that day. And so I've kind of flipped my life on its head where now the most important thing is connection, connection to myself, connection to Gaia, connection to my loved ones, connection to my passion, connection to my heart. That is number one. And the work comes next. I used to think, and this is what hustle culture will teach you, that the work comes first and everything else is second, but when you do that, it's the connection that fuels the work anyway. And so that's why you continuously burn out because you're not feeding your soul. Narrowing for the soul, you're not feeding yourself with the light of the present moment, with the light in the connection, the light in the love. And so that's how I live my life, where connection is always highest priority. And so like today, for example, of course, I've got shit to do, like I've always, there's always something to do, you know, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse to not connect. I had a friend reach out to me today, who just needed a shoulder to lean on, actually two friends today, that reach out to me through voice notes. And instead of being like, oh, I'll get to that later once I finish this. I prioritize that first. And I have done this long enough to build the foundation of trust to know that when I prioritize connection first, I get so much more work done in the end that is beyond my mind's capacity to understand time. And the potency of the creativity and the potency of what comes out of me and the authenticity of what comes out of me is worth one thousandfold of what I could have ever done when I prioritize the work first. And so that's really, you know, and this is what I see you doing. We're flipping the definition of prosperity on its head. And as a result, our minds think, oh my god, but if I did that, I won't have any money and I won't be able to survive. And but it's bullshit. I have never been more prosperous in my life, both financially and spiritually and the whole Shabang than I am right now. And it's because I threw out all those bullshit ideas. And I started harvesting the gaps and harvesting the love that already exists in my day. Instead of thinking that I need to build it outwardly by doing something or having something, you know, and I just think that that's what I'm about. It really is what I'm about. And that feeling that so much of it's already here, so it's already within you. If you want love, experience love. And it's funny you brought that up with your partner because I was thinking as well, that's another bit of a stress. If I feel like I'm rushing through conversations with my beloved through the day, you've got yourself to busy my love. I think it is not. Yes. You know, that should be that why are we here? What is most important and when the things that are really the most important truly are being cast aside, then, you know, we get to really have a serious or recalibrate. Oh my God. I'm like covered in goosebumps. And it makes one of one of the questions of the journaling prompts that sparked this whole conversation and your YouTube video, one of the questions was something along the lines of, you know, instead of waiting until your deathbed to realize what was truly important because we hear this a lot, right? That, oh, you know, everyone on their deathbed, you ask them what mattered most or what they do differently. And everyone says, I would have spent more time with my family. I would have done more of the things that I loved. And my question becomes like, well, are you going to be the person that says that on your deathbed or are you going to be the person that recognizes that now and live out your next however many decades that you have left from that place? You know, like I don't want to be someone recognizing the power of life on my deathbed. I'm someone that recognized it in her late 20s, early 30s and I'm going to live the next, you know, 40 years, 50 years, 60 years of my life from that place. And that becomes the question. But in order to live the answer to that question, this comes right back around what we're talking about at the start. In order to live that reality, you must sit with and peel back all of the fears that stand between where you are now and living that deeply fulfilled, deeply connected reality. And that's actually the journey. That's the human journey. It's the journey of returning home and every movie, every film, every book ever made is about that same journey. And it's about are we willing to take that journey? Are we willing, like we said, to either make the sacrifices, but definitely are we willing to sit with the pain that we have to experience to access these deep, deep levels of purpose that never laid outside of ourselves for even a second? It is in us. It always has been. It always will be the question is are we willing to sit with the fears that stand between ourselves and that? And for me, it's a big fat-bucking yes. You know? Definitely a yes. Yeah. I so loved that prompt about your death bird. And it's really funny because one of the ways that I also kind of slow down is by working with the moon cycles, but not just the monthly ones. So I make my intentions on a new moon, but then six months later on the full moon and the same sign I look at what I wrote down six months ago. And that helps me see these longer term cycles of change and how things have realised themselves based on an intention that in the day that you're looking on full moon, you can't remember what you said six months ago, but like it's always really incredible with synchronicities. And I was looking back because we have a full moon coming up on Friday and I was looking back and my intention six months ago was around, it wasn't even an intention, Haley, it was something like part of what you're here to offer is related to contending with death. And then six months later I see these journal prompts and one of them is about what do you want to be considering on your deathbed. And I don't know what all of this means to me about death and how it relates to prosperity yet, but I know it's not a coincidence that we're having this conversation about the relationship between your safety and your security and prosperity in this life, in this moment now. And how you feel about your passageway into the next phase of your existence, depending on your belief system, they are in my humble opinion connected. And so if we were to feel no fear of death, would we feel any fear of money? So that's one of the things that's just like circulating around in my consciousness. I don't have answers, but I do feel it's part of the process that's very, very significant somehow. Absolutely, our fear of death is so deeply into woven with our ideas around prosperity and our ideas around purpose. When we're afraid to die, it ends up manifesting in the Western world as a fear to truly live, because we aren't living in third world conditions where we are just fighting to survive every day, that survival mode takes a different route where afraid to truly live, so we're afraid to follow our passions, we're afraid to put ourselves out there, but it's really a flavor of the fear of death. And so it's actually in our digging in, like at the deepest layers, every fear we ever peel back, it's got an element of the fear of death deep down underneath it. And so it's actually a surrendering and a letting in death that lets in life, because once you've accepted death, then you can truly live, you know, and to truly live is to follow one's heart. And so it all connects, you know, in a way and to also this idea, I love how you're talking about, you know, like looking six months and looking at goals and then setting again and, yeah, we can be such a rush to be peaking in life tomorrow. And that's then what fuels the comparison stuff of seeing, like, oh my gosh, these people are further along, like, I need a hurry up, why isn't, why aren't I there yet? And we're, yeah, we're in such a rushed peak that our work can lose its potency, like through all of my shedding of my beliefs around prosperity, one of the things that I came to like embrace that feels so nourishing to my soul was that, hey, you're going to be peaking in your business at like 65. Stop rushing to be at the absolute top level of your business today and just be so in the journey of moving towards who you're becoming, like just be so in your, your destined path that you love being in the infancy of your business, you know, I'm, I'm coming into my fifth year of my business. I'm in my infancy, like, and that just helped me to release these really constricting beliefs I had around myself that I was failing because I wasn't at my peak. But the moment that I accepted that my peak is decades down the road was the moment that I was just free to be myself right now. why are we in the such a rush. We're in such a rush because we fear death. So we're trying to get to the peak before we die, right? And we're in such a rush because we believe that our safety, security, stability and purpose comes from some sense of outward quote unquote success. And so we're rushing through life and we're missing the magic. And then we end up not fulfilled looking back being like I wish I did it differently. And so it all comes back around when we're no longer fearing that death. You give yourself spaciousness to truly live. And then you end up actually experiencing the fulfillment that you thought that hustling was going to bring you that was never the route. Totally not. You mean? And I think this goes back to another very deeply ingrained cultural conditioning, which is about deferring happiness until retirement. We get to be happy now. And if you think about it in that way of having a long term harmonious, sustainable, fulfilling, energising relationship to your business, until we think you decided that you want to hand over the reins to somebody else or, you know, put it to bed and whatever way feels good for you. Then so much easier. The idea that you're going to absolutely slave away, making yourself ill until you're 65 and then you're never going to work a day again and you're not going to know what to do with yourself. You're going to actually be lost in the void anyway. That's a lot seen like a sensible life path to me. No. We have been sold this idea that you get to have fun then. Yeah. And it's when then syndrome all over the place isn't it? When I retire then that's when I'll travel world or when I've got this extra qualification then that's when I'll feel ready or whatever the when then is. It's an illusion because it's not about the present moment is about an unconfirmed future. So I'm totally with you. It's about presence and healing that fear of death and not believing the narratives that our culture has imposed on us because we do have a choice. We are for the bliss to live in a time when technology and, you know, connectivity allows us to run businesses in ways that actually can be incredibly satisfying and fulfilling and manageable. Yeah. Wow. This experience that we're having now like bliss technology. I know. It's funny and amazing. I love what you say about retirement because I don't think happiness and prosperity isn't getting to a point where you can where you don't have to work anymore. And this is like that whole thing that we see online about financial freedom. Like freedom to me would just be financial freedom where where I have so much money that I never have to work anymore. I can just do what I want. That's no. True happiness and prosperity is wanting to work because you're so damn passionate about what fires you up. You're so passionate about your piece that you came to play in the collective puzzle that you want to work. I don't want to get to a point where I go, ah, finally I can retire and put my feet up. Hell no. I'm going to be doing this work until the day I drop dead because it is, it is prosperity to me. You know, that is where that happiness comes from. And so it's this warped idea. And yeah, I love what you say about happiness and the postponement of happiness. You know, and I think one of the reasons why we postpone happiness is that we have this warped idea that we think happiness means no suffering. So when there is no suffering in my life, then I can be happy, which is why we keep postponing it. And we keep like, okay, I just got to get through this struggle. I've just got to get through this struggle and then I'll be happy. But true happiness is actually a deep acceptance of the suffering that comes with the human life. Bliss is only possible in suffering. Like it's, it's the dualistic nature of this life. And so when we allow and embrace suffering as part of our humanness, then you actually get to access happiness now because you go, oh my god, I thought that I couldn't be happy because there's suffering here. But what if I could? What if happiness existed right alongside the suffering? What if happiness existed right alongside the pain or the challenge? And then you go, oh my god, I can be happy. Always because it wasn't about that, you know, and I've shared this quote a few times recently where we get stuck in the struggle, you know, the struggle of life and it's just so hard. And that's what we're postponing. We're waiting for our happiness. And Richard Rudd says in the Gene key of struggle, he says, even the most enlightened of beings suffer, but they don't struggle as they suffer. And I think that that's a big part of this whole thing of accessing purpose and happiness and prosperity is coming to realize, yeah, like my suffering's never going away. There's always going to be challenging this life because purpose is birth from pain. But if I no longer struggle against and resist the suffering, postponing my life, waiting for it to get easier, maybe just maybe the purpose and the happiness I've been seeking all along actually only lives in this present moment. And then we, that, like, then we really start to disentangle, you know, totally, totally. And what you're saying about I've just got to get through this thing, I've just got to get through this thing. I remember my coach years ago now, I was talking about this exact thing of I felt like I think it was something like there's eight weeks till Christmas, I've just got to get through till Christmas and then I can have a break, but I didn't want to get to the point where by Christmas, I was going to be so ill and stressed and tired. I wouldn't even enjoy my own break because I would be all I could do was to like recalibrate and recover. And she said to me, how do you want to feel on the day that you close down your laptop for Christmas? And I was like, well, I want to feel really, really energized. I want to feel really, really ready for a lovely period of a couple of weeks where I can do whatever I want. And I want to feel really satisfied and proud of the last quarter. And I want to just feel so healthy and well. And that's exactly what happened because I chose to manage the energy and to not not accept the belief that I just have to get through to a certain point to then rest. Yeah. And what it took to cultivate those feelings of satisfaction and energy was a different relationship to the work I was doing through those eight weeks. So by leaning into, well, how do you cultivate that peaceful, spacious, you know, struggle-free relationship? Then in order to get to that point where it's not the milestone of collapse, it's actually the milestone of welcoming in a lovely, beautiful experience that, you know, you haven't earned because you slaved and crushed yourself. That's where you are now. Yeah. That's the energy shifting into it. And I always remember that. And I, you know, if I know that there is a busy period coming up where for some reason all the buses have come at once, then I remember to go back and say, how do you want to feel at the end of this? Yeah. And then what can you do now? And so start feeling it already. Absolutely. I love that so much because by asking yourself that question, you take responsibility for your state, don't you? And the balls back in your court, you're no longer a victim to just the way life's unfolding and it's inevitable that I'm going to be exhausted by that time. Welcome to back into, okay, well, if I want to feel that way, then how am I working towards that now? And that invigorates a sense of purpose in your days and then it brings you into those pauses and into those gaps that you didn't think existed before, but they actually do when you go about your day with intentionality, you know, and that's like how you spend that time in the morning really grounding in and that tends to be a very common time that I do it as well. It brings some intentionality to your day because the truth is is that there is magic all around us at all times. The question is, are we willing to see it or are we going to be so trapped in a timeline and in a set of beliefs that we think, you know, we're trapped, but it's a cage of our own making. Are we going to miss the magic, you know, and I talk about like even catching the sun and right now I mean the people on the podcast won't see this, but right now the sun is literally like coming straight across my eyes in the image and these are the moments of magic where life's inviting me to take in the beauty of this moment and Gaya and the light in this moment and there's always, Gaya is always welcoming us into pauses and for people that don't believe that I say to them, well, everyone's got to take a shit. So when you're taking a shit, put your phone down and stop scrolling and accept the pause that nature has gifted you in that. moment. You know, it's everywhere. These opportunities are everywhere. And I tell you what, Charlotte, I have found this conversation so nourishing. And the light and the sun is saying the same right now. It's coming into just incredible. I'm going to open my curtains to do the same. Your morning light will be starting to pour in over in the UK. evening light is just peeking in through the window. I mean, we're going to have to have more conversations because I mean, I really enjoy your YouTube video, but I have deeply enjoyed being in your presence and getting to talk to you about these things that my heart is so passionate about. And I'm just feeling that resonating in your heart. And thank you so much for taking so much. Absolutely incredible. I really appreciate you. I love the energy. I love the conversation. And long may it last and may there be many more. Glorious. Thank you, everyone so much for tuning in. Charlotte, where can people find you if they're absolutely loving your vibe as much as I am? So I am Crystaline Charlotte on YouTube and on Instagram. So yeah, while I'm here if you feel cool too and you have a lot to hear from people if they feel like that's aligned. Amazing. So great. Well, thank you again, Charlotte. And thank you, everyone, for listening. And we'll chat to you again soon. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today. What an honour it is to get to bring what's on my heart directly to your ears. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would be so grateful if you shared it on your socials or with a friend so that together we can activate souls far and wide across the globe. I deeply appreciate you and can't wait to chat with you again on the next one. Over and out. [Music]