When Healing Becomes Your New Addiction with Nicholas Clay • 419

When does healing become just another addiction? I used to think that healing meant fixing all of the broken parts of myself. Like I could somehow surgically remove every wound, every trigger, every uncomfortable emotion, and then just emerge as this perfectly polished version of who I was supposed to be. But that's not healing. That's more like spiritual bypassing dressed up in self-help language. What I didn't realize is that healing can become its own trap. You can get so addicted to the process, so comfortable in the identity of someone who's working on themselves that you never actually arrive anywhere. You just keep circling the same wounds, having the same breakthroughs, collecting the same insights, like little spiritual trophies. Real healing looks more like standing at an intersection, recognizing that you're about to road rage at someone who cut you off, and suddenly seeing that your anger has absolutely nothing to do with him. It's about that part of you that's still 12 years old, desperate to be seen and validated. The part you've been trying to silence for decades. But our guest, Nick, cut through all of my spiritual theories with one simple truth. Everyone outside of you that bothers you in any way is merely revealing a part of yourself that you've yet to meet with love and compassion. Love is knowing that I am everything, wisdom is knowing that I am nothing, and in between the two of my life moves. And that hit different because it means that every difficult person in your life, every situation that makes your blood boil. Every moment you want to scream, "That's not fair!" is actually just an invitation. An invitation to find the abandoned pieces of yourself and bring them home. Studies show that unprocessed trauma literally changes our brain structure. It keeps us stuck in survival mode, operating from a place of fear and reactivity instead of "hontious choice." But here's the thing that most people don't realize. Healing isn't just about releasing your own pain. When you heal generational trauma patterns, you're literally changing the energetic inheritance that you pass down to the next generation. So every time you choose love over fear, consciousness over reactivity, you're contributing to a shift that goes way beyond just your individual experience. The conversation that you're about to hear is going to challenge everything you think you know about what it means to be healed. Because what if the goal isn't to become invulnerable? What if it's to become so whole that nothing can truly wound you? And not because you're defending against life, but because you're flowing with it. What if coming home to yourself means gathering all the scattered pieces of who you've been and saying, "You belong here too." Today our guest is a friend of mine, Nicholas Clay, an integrative coach and founder of Being One World, who helps people cut through the healing fog to find real clarity. And he brings together everything from ancient wisdom to neuroscience, helping clients actually complete their healing cycles instead of just endlessly circling them. So here's what you learn in this episode. Why your triggers are actually doorways to freedom? How to tell if you're healing or just recycling trauma? And the difference between spiritual growth and ego transformation. When you're growing a business, most people think the hardest part is getting clients or making money. But I think it's finding people who actually care about the work as much as you do. And I've been there. I've posted a job, got a hundred applications, and maybe three of them actually read the job description. And it's kind of soul crushing when you're trying to build something that actually matters. 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And listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com/mindlove. Just go to indeed.com/mindlove right now and support the show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/mindlove. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring indeed is all you need. Nick, I am so excited to have you on the show today. Every time we've gotten together, we've just had some of the deepest conversations that I feel like can go on for hours and I feel like people have so much to learn from you. So give us the gist. What's your story that's brought you on to the path that you're on now? The story that brought me here came from, well finance is where I started in the world to learn business and self-development and got into networking. And then from there networking led me to the path of a new earth by Eckhart Toley. So then that went from personal development to deeper inner exploration. And when I started reading that book, it was as if I was grabbing a hold of something I've been searching for my entire life and words were now being put to these deeper questions that I had earlier. And then from there, the journey just became so highly focused where that's all I wanted to seek more of because the pain that I was carrying inside of me, I wanted to be out. I wanted to release that and from the readings that I was getting, it seemed like, oh, here is actually the path for that to happen. What was it about new earth that just really struck you? The language thing, I mean, I think one of the first, one of the first things that sticks within my mind that I remember is when he talked about the pain body. And he gave an example of two people with high pain bodies. And for those that are unfamiliar, it's essentially the energetic space where our body is storing the emotional wounds that we have occurred in life. And he gave this analogy that if two people are driving towards the intersection and they both have a high pain body, that there's a higher likelihood that they'll be an incident. And I reflected upon myself and I noticed a behavior that if I was coming up towards the intersection and say somebody was adjacent, taking a left and front of me. And I could see that they were cutting the turn, you know, they weren't taking it quote unquote properly. I would edge up a little bit as if I had to make a point. And I recognized in that moment that there's a certain point in which I see what's happening. And now I'm insigating the likelihood that something would happen. And so it was me seeing the truth behind those words within myself that opened up a new paradigm of the validity of the work that he was sharing. And then I just became an eager student for the rest of the pages and for every book after. That is so true. It's so funny because this almost feels unrelated but I promise it is. I was just talking to somebody because I wrote a book this summer and I've been really focused on the idea of story. And part of my process was that I've actually been doing since I did a public speaking program was I now keep this long document full of all the stories I can think of of my life. Even if I don't know if they have a point yet and I just have them sort of meaningless in a document so that when I'm brainstorming, bringing meaning to something I can scan through one of those, I can say, oh, this moment calls to me, well, as I was writing all my stories, I was sharing it with somebody and they're like, how do you have so many stories? And I started thinking about at an early age, I actually started saying it'll make a good story when I'd make reckless decisions. And there's just things I've gone through like my audience, I don't know, all my audience knows, but the time I crashed Obama's election party at George Clooney's and got kicked out by Secret Service. And I just realized like most people wouldn't even get themselves in a position to have that story ever. They wouldn't even show up at the door, let alone go through these things, but I also interviewed somebody on the idea of creativity or actually luck, conscious luck. And we people think that they're unlucky or they're lucky and he talks about how the people that believe that they're lucky actually just put themselves in situations that bring more luck in one way or another, they're more likely to talk to somebody, they're more likely to go to the network event, make conversation rather than just sit in the back and say, no one's going to talk to me anyways, no one's going to care what I have to say. And so these are three different examples of in the negative, like you talked about being at a light and kind of micro-aggressioning or having a story or putting yourself out there to actually be in a position to have a lucky moment. It all comes from what we're holding inside of ourselves, what we believe about ourselves in our lives and suddenly being in a position to bring more of that rather than just thinking it's all happening by coincidence or accident. I love that. I like the quote or phrase, I can't remember who may have said this. That is when preparation beats opportunity. I consider myself a very lucky person, but guess what? I always enter the raffle. I always have the conversation. I always volunteer. So I have more opportunities to gain that. But I wonder too, when we're bringing it back to that, the stage that we're in, which many people live in of maybe it's, it could be something physical like chronic pain, but it could be just something like depression or negative thought spirals or just being in that place where you feel like you're in the darkness. I find that I know two types of people. There's the people that just sit in that and have no idea that there's any opportunity to change. And then there's the people that use that to sort of spur their healing. When you're thinking about what brings, like, how do you get from one to the other? How come certain people never even see the idea that healing is possible, do you think? There's many factors to that and I'll share a few that I can think of and I can only imagine there's far more that are even outside of my understanding. A few is, one is energy. It takes energy to change, came across something recently that was enlightening. Someone can be sitting down in pain and they can see the door for their relief. It's that person that knows what to do, has read the books, has gone to the course. You know, they have a lot of knowing. Yet, why does that person make the changes? Why don't they go through the process? Well, they may lack the energy to do that. They may lack the energy to get up and walk to the door and go through the door. So there's that factor. There's also the factor of upbringing. If you've grown up around a lot of negative thinking, you more than likely were told a lot of negative reinforcing opinions about yourself or about change. That begins to create this mental confinement that can be highly difficult to break out of. You're essentially at that point going on a journey solo, which I think is one of the deepest core fears that we have is to be completely alone and isolated. So if you're defying those judgments that more than likely came from close family members or friends, you're essentially going at it alone with no support and that can be scary. So it becomes safer to stay with the pain you know because you have some level of support as opposed to venturing off into something on this solo mission in the desert. So those are two factors that I would add to why it can be quite difficult to go about the journey. Yeah, I have to be thankful that it was at a very young age. My dad used to give me incentives to read self-development books and write little reports on it. So I had this sort of service level understanding of things like mind over matter. And I'm grateful for it because it was the gateway into a much deeper understanding. After a sort of period of time where I think the service level was sort of a detriment like I did I've shared before that I've I did a lot of like toxic positivity. Like I'll just pretend this never happened for a long time because I didn't really understand mind over matter beyond that. I mean it led me to my dark nights of the soul, my deepest rock bottom and eventually I pulled enough threads that I started to understand just a deeper way of that but it can be confusing for people especially in the beginning like it was for me in those first 10 years. And I know one thing that you talk a lot about is demystifying aspects of healing. What do you think people get most caught up on? For those that are in the process or even considering going down the process of healing. Well I think those in the process can get caught up on the process itself because it feels really good when you have these deeper moments or these enlightening moments and it becomes another layer of soothing. And then you find this new family so to speak, this new group of people there is this belonging and so that belonging happens in the cycle of healing. And so I think that has people stay in that because I've seen a lot of people go around an issue over and over and over again to be in this infinite pending process of healing. And then if you look outside of that, people that are looking at healing, well they may not know truly what it means or they may not believe it. A lot of people carry a fixed mindset. They don't actually believe people can change, they believe this is the way you are. So if you have that belief then you're not going to think for yourself that you can be any different. So that becomes this strong attachment to the pain in your life, most of the time not even conscious. You don't even realize that's what you're doing yet you've attached to it because that's what you've drawn your identity from. So to heal is to give up the very thing and the only thing that you know of as you. I used to be one of those people who had grand plans for a big healthy meal every Sunday night and I'd make these elaborate meal plans by all the ingredients. And then Wednesday would roll around and I'd be staring at that wilted spinach ordering take out again. Shopping, planning and cooking food really can be simple and stress-free and that's why I love hungry root. Hungry root takes stress out of meal time by filling your cart with personalized picks and planning your week of meals, getting smarter with every order. With over 15,000 recipes to choose from each week, many ready in just 15 minutes or less, it's so perfect for those nights when you have no energy left. What I love most is their smart cart technology. It actually learns what I like and what I will actually cook. So no more buying ingredients for recipes that I'll never make. Everything that shows up I actually use. They screen out over 200 additives including high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners, only high quality meat and seafood with no hormones or antibiotics and they carry brands like vital farms and Ithaca hummus that I already trust. The time I've gotten back has been incredible. Out of spending Sunday meal planning, I'm doing things that actually matter to me. Take advantage of this exclusive offer. For a limited time, get 40% off your first box plus get a free item in every box for life. Go to hungryroot.com/mindlove and use code mindlove. That's hungryroot.com/mindlove. Code mindlove to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. Go deeper on this idea of gaining your identity from this process. So for me growing up I had a mostly absent father. It created a lot of pain, a lot of anger, a lot of hurt. Just the mention of his name would trigger me and would set me off. And I constructed this identity as the victim of that circumstance. He was the bad guy which made me the good guy. And so without that villain becomes the hero. If only the world could see what he did to me and then he would have no one and they could see him for who he is, which is not entirely true because there's many different perspectives. He doesn't have the same responsibility to the world. He doesn't have the same relationships with the world as he does to a child. And so yet I was so attached to that. When I went through the process and learned some techniques to clarify the story I was telling myself and I was ready to stop having him be the villain in my life to release that pain. It also had to leave was that version of myself that showed up in pain. Which creates this opening of well that's I've had that for so long in my life. So what's what's going to show up now if I can't attack him, if I can't make him the bad guy, well then what what identity now emerges in that space. What was that next step for you when you had that awareness then suddenly it's almost like a blank slate, it's like, okay, this identity is gone. Where did you go from there and what did you discover? That there was so much more to the to the process because there was so many other areas in which I had been holding on to emotional wounds. Something about what I told myself when I started this journey was I wanted it all out and these these deep emotional statements we say to ourselves are so impactful. And when I said that granted releasing that was a massive opening for me. Then it became this exploration of what else is there and that all gets revealed by what triggers us. And so I went on this path to to explore and discover my triggers. I for the first time in life wanted to purposely be offended. I wanted to be triggered because it's the most clear way to see what still requires healing. And so after that moment, I felt empowered because to complete that with my father was what I felt was the deepest wound I had, the scariest one, it was like a release like no other. It was one of my top two like breakdown moments I've ever had. And I felt like if I can do that, then I can face anything. And so that's what happened next as I started to look deeper within myself and I started exploring as much as I as I could and as I can. How can someone know if they're actually making progress versus circling the same patterns? Mm-hmm. It's a great question. The gap. It's one of the things I teach is recognize the gap because growth sometimes can be hard to see because we're always looking for the resolution. What I mean by the gap is, some things don't just pop out. Some things take time to slowly massage and recondition out of the system. So say you have something that triggers you now and I'll just stick with anger, it gets you upset, you're angry about it. Well, when you start the healing journey, that might be an anger that you before held on to for a day, a week, a month, whatever the circumstance may be. So when you begin the process of healing, what you'll notice and what I see of my clients is that instead of we'll just use a day for an example, a set of being mad for the day, you were able by the afternoon to resolve it, let's say if it happened in the morning. So maybe it's now six hours and then you continue to practice and now you're only mad for an hour. Well, now you recover after 30 minutes. So it's that gap, the shorter the distance between dysregulation, which is when we're wounded or traumatized, getting to a regulated state, that's closing the bridge of being healed. So we mentioned earlier, you know, how do we just demystify this? How do we seek practically? Well, healing's being in a regulated state. So the closer the gap from dysregulation to regulation, the closer you are to restoring your system to where that circumstance will cause your reaction sooner. I got stuck in that sort of addicted healing for a while and actually for me, how it showed up was more around the idea that I actually wasn't allowing the stillness for the healing to integrate. It was like if I, if I just kept busy, if I kept going, if I kept going to the moon ceremony, it's kept reading the books. It's like, I was busy enough to realize or to not feel the unhealed parts of me. And so that was how I kind of got stuck in it. But another thing that I teach is, or at least that I've experienced as well in my own journey is just, I expected that when I would begin to heal that all of a sudden I'd just be completely over something. And what I found is that I might feel like it, I've released from it completely, but then it'll come back in a year in some different way. And the way I view it now is it's almost like climbing up a mountain, but you're spiraling up the mountain. And so you, all of a sudden, get to the spot and you're at the same view again and you're like, I thought I was past this. I've been driving for hours, I've been healing for years. But you're actually seeing the same situation from a slightly higher perspective every single time. And there's something in that for you. There's something that I'm ready for that I wasn't ready to see. Just like when you read a book for the third time, there's always new information. And it's something that you skipped over because it was this more basic part that caught you in the first part. And now you can get the depth, the intricacies. But is it feasible that we get to a place where we're like the monk completely unbothered or is it just that it's like, yep, that would have triggered me before. Is it just that it's so much shorter that you feel regulated or does, I don't know, because for me, I'll be honest, I'm human. There are still things that I'm like, that hurts the crap out of me. I don't react. I don't bring the karma into it. I breathe through it. I realize it's about me and about the other person. And I consider that to be pretty far on the path to healing. But does it, do you believe it goes away completely? Yes, I can if you wanted to. Again, for that to go away, the part of you, the identity of you, that's getting hurt by it also, goes away. And so the deepest level we go through this ego death, which is really scary because that essentially is what death is to our mind, our deepest essence of self, I believe is that it is infinite, it is unchanging, it is pure, and it will always be here and it always has been here. It's only our constructed ego that fears death because it's the only thing that's finite, it's created from our brain, our intellectual mind. That's the only thing that stops functioning when we see the biological death. Yeah, we can go through these deeper processes with healing. There's layers of these identity, there's pieces of ourselves that can also experience a kind of death. There's certain parts of you that may not longer be alive. I'll use the example you gave earlier, not that I don't know if this is still within you or not, the part of you that walked into that party to get thrown out by secret service, that part of you may have died, meaning that she is not there to show up, to put you in that situation anymore, yet some parts are easier to bring back in, to integrate with us than others or other parts that we get really attached to. And it's like, no, I like this person, I don't want this person to die, I'll just quote unquote make them better. And then I want to speak to a second piece, which I love what you said about the spiral going up the mountains, something that I found so fundamental and so valuable is understanding the spectrum of consciousness and the way that I talk about it so that we can grasp it is thinking of a frequency like a radio stations that bandwidth. You can tune into these different stations and you get a different frequency so you hear different music. And you look at consciousness in the map of consciousness that David R Hawkins has calibrated. We have 17 different states. Now to give you an example, I think, an easy way to look at the contrast between one of the states in the lower mind, which is anger or even even look at fear. And then you look at one of the states in the higher mind, which is acceptance or let's look at love. If you go deep enough into that and you embody that frequency, you can easily see that how you think and how you feel and how you interpret things from love is nowhere near the same from anger. If you go close enough, it's like the two are speaking a different dialect, the two are playing different songs, they're different radio stations. So what I've noticed in this healing process and this spiral is you look at a wound that may be stuck in a state of shame. So shame is the lowest state in our consciousness. Well, it may not just come out the system in one experience. What you may find is from that shame, you begin to feel grief. And when you look at the map, you see, oh, grief is a higher vibration than shame. And when you see the ladder to this, it doesn't become just another random feeling. It becomes progress. Well, even though that doesn't feel good compared to shame, it does feel better. And then you may start to feel anger. And then you may think, I still don't feel good because now I'm angry about it. Well, anger is a higher vibration. So again, it's progress because you got to remember, you're not feeling shame. You're not feeling grief, you're now feeling anger and now you have a mobilizing energy. The biggest threshold to cross and the bridge, as I call it, is courage. Takes courage to get from that lower mind, from survival into our higher mind. And that first state in our higher mind is neutrality, then you have willingness and then you have acceptance. And then from acceptance, a lot of us can resonate there. And so to your question, can we ever get unbothered? Well, if you continue to raise your vibration, you'll find reason. And I'm pretty confident that you can look at a lot of your situations that you've been through. And you can find such a rational thought process that you have around them now. But the next state is love and love gets really difficult to embody globally. We tend to have this pick and choose where we want to feel it. If you're going to reach that place, that unbotheredness, like a monk, then there is no divide in that experience. Love because something that you learn how to resonate with everyone and everything around you. And if you continue the process, you have joy, you have peace, and then you have enlightenment. And to demystify enlightenment, that is awareness without judgment. It is objective observation, just being with what is. And that's what meditation teaches us to be. We are practicing over and over and over again to detach from the judgment, from the thoughts, from the identity, from the attachments of it all, to simply be with the awareness of what is. I love that explanation, and when I zoom out, I can see the work that I've done in different areas, whereas it's now easy in certain areas of my life, like almost ridiculously easy. For example, politics, I did a lot of work when I realized how triggered I was around 2020. And I spent a lot of time talking to people who I thought had opposite views of me. And what I realized is that I had a lot of misconceptions about the meaning behind their views or the motivations behind their views. And it really brought me to the center, changed the way I viewed politics in general. And now, I do not care what is going on in politics at all, I'm completely unbothered. I'm just not triggered by it at all. The little things, however, the little personal things are the ones where I'm like, "Oh, that one just got me." You know, or example earlier this year, something happened, and I could feel myself convinced I was right and that the other person was the villain. And it was so wonderful, because I feel like the path I'm on now, guidance shows up immediately. And I actually just had this person on my podcast. It was a podcast that I found, and it just happened to be this episode all about negative reviews, which I didn't even think was applicable to the situation, but he was talking about oh, negative reviews, bring you into a karmic cycle, because you may have been the only one who had that negative experience, and now you're amplifying it for other people to see first and putting them in sort of a dark spiral, potentially. And so this was just exactly what I needed to hear, because it's the reminder that the villain in my story might be the hero in someone else's. And so for me to project my idea of it, and it was just the mindset that I needed at that moment and allowed me to kind of take a breath and sit back. But it was funny, because I was being the observer of my own experience. And I could see myself leaning into the logic, taking a deep breath, letting it go. And then in the next moment, the story was cycling, and I was like ramping up my nervous system again. And it was, it was almost fun, because I was like, oh, there you go again. And it's like, no, let's go back to this side. And I was just like cycling back and forth between the two sides. But it was funny, because I could feel like I said my nervous system, creating the responses, or beating heart, the sort of anger. But then there was the observer over here that's like, oh, yeah, because you're sitting there drawing in your own story, to your subjective story, like just come to the bright side. And I was thankful for that experience, because in that moment, I could see that it was like the little soul, one of my favorite children's books, where you're sort of agreeing to play roles in people's lives to activate these triggers, to see what still needs to be healed. But you need to, I don't know, I guess allow the process. You need to be willing to step into the observer's side to release the ego, to release the attachment to this idea that I'm right, and I'm the hero, because I just might not be. Yeah, that's one of the most difficult paradigm shifts is that you're transcending right and wrong. And that's another challenge of operating from our higher states of consciousness, is that there isn't right or wrong. Even in your share, what I heard was that you open yourself up to understanding. And that's how the higher mind works. You operate more from understanding as opposed to judgment, when your nervous system was triggered, you're coming from a judgment place. And you could easily see yourself in one of those lower states, even if it was pride, which is kind of the higher of the lower mind. And then you allowed yourself to feel both experiences, and then you had a choice. This is where we actually get the opportunity to make a conscious choice. It wasn't even about you, the other person, it was about how do you want to feel? And once you get that exposure to what's possible, and letting go of being right, you get this much better feeling, and it's also better for the system as a whole, which is another thing I think it's important for people to realize is, healing is more than just healing for the sake of it or being regulated for the sake of regulating. We often hide behind our primitive defenses where we'll default to, well, no one's perfect or I'm just human, and that becomes an excuse for our dysregulation. Yet being right about that serves no benefit for the system as a whole. We know now more than ever with thousands of studies and experiments that those negative states aren't good for our human system, doesn't allow our mind to operate at its optimal function, it doesn't allow our heart to beat well, and this gets into a lot of other science terms. Yeah, it also begins to manifest into physical symptoms, so you can be 100% right about your anger. If you live 20, 30, 40 years like that, ultimately you are incurring the price of that rightness. That's a great point. And actually too, when I look at the gift of it, it was more than just being able to work through the trigger in that moment, I actually, like I said, I was playing with it. I was like, okay, like, how do I lean more over here? Okay, tell myself this new story, but also what about curiosity? Like what is under this? And I just spent a lot of time because I could feel my mind wanting to overthink about it. So I was directing it and I'm like, if you're going to overthink about it, let's overthink in a new way. Let's get curious. And so I was really leaning in, and I was meditating a lot. And this idea of reputation kept coming up. And I flashed back to middle school being bullied. It happened in middle school and high school where certain people basically, I felt like they at that age, it's like they stole my truth. They painted over who I believed myself to be based on whatever they wanted to say about me. And it was just, in those ages 11 and like 14, that's really hard. You know, it's like high school, your whole world, middle school, your whole world. And I didn't realize how much of that I was still carrying, how much of my reputation still mattered to me, how even I can think back to different adult relationships where a riff and a friendship happened. And I remember panicking because I'm like, who are they going to tell their side of it? Their side of it's not my side. And when I went even deeper than that, I realized there are times that I've held myself back from my own success because more visibility means less control over that reputation. And it ended up being this whole exploration through the summer of realizing these subtle ways that I'm holding myself back because of this wound that started in my preteen years and yeah, it's prevailing in little ways. And so then, this moment of this person being the villain, this person feeling like they were attacking me, like thank you for this gift because these subtle things that are not coming up are now, they now have a little bit of a light on them so that I can manage them in general, just manage them, like not just let them subconsciously direct my experience. Yeah, there's so much, so much wisdom in what you said and what you're speaking to, I talked about earlier, I wanted to be triggered on purpose. It was that experience. I wanted to have those experience and everything that you got from it comes from being open to those. You also mentioned being curious, you know, that's a, that's a clear sign that you're operating from your higher self is having curiosity. And then you get this exploration and then you get this wisdom by going through that. That's what it truly is to know yourself. I think another thing that's important for you to realize and why I think this process is so important for the world is because it's true maturity. When you do any kind of study into trauma and you start to see how it plays as effect in the mind, what you'll experience and what you spoke to is that the parts of our self and when I say trauma, any incomplete experience, I'll say that in another way, any experience where you haven't fully processed the emotions. And this is what has us hold on to emotions. And then Eckhart told you what in his context would say, that's what fills up our pain body. And so you have how many of these experiences, some more than others, some people have more intense than others. Yeah, this is what's filling that pain body. And what we know about trauma is that when we have these incomplete emotional experiences, a part of our psyche is frozen in that time. So whenever we get triggered, it's more than just a reaction. Oh, I just don't want to get mad anymore. What's happening is you're drawing in that part that's still 12 years old or two years old or 17 years old and that part comes online and takes over. And this is where you see a lot of adult bodies with child drivers. And so the true maturity internally can only happen with the healing process. The alternative is to what some people do is segment part of themselves and say, well, this is my adult self. And the other 60% myself that was her, I'm just going to put that in a corner because they don't do well with life. Well, now you're walking through life incomplete. And this is where you get that feeling of something's missing. I don't feel whole. Well, you don't because you've put part of yourself in this corner or you hit it somewhere in your mind or if it was severe enough, you repress it and you hit it from yourself. So you don't even remember that you hit it until you go through the journey and things start to pop back up into your conscious mind. Yes. That was actually a line in my keynote is you can't build a future from wholeness if you're rejecting parts of yourself that make you whole, which was another thing that I think a lot of us go through myself included. When I started to heal and when I started to get my life together, I looked back and my 20 something year old self and I just would always sort of kindly but also with rejection and be like, she was a shit show. Yeah, we don't talk about her. It's like, what do you mean, though, as dark as her life was at points, as little resources as she had at certain points, she was the one that took the steps to get me to where I am. But his courage, that is love and I just remember, again, deep in a meditation so many of my visions come in meditation for those of you who are not meditating. Get to it. But I just remember having this overwhelming feeling of love for her and just breaking down and being like, oh, my God, I've been rejecting you for 16 years and who am I without you? Everything I've learned came from those experiences and it just gave me so much compassion and when I was able to find that compassion for myself, I realized how much compassion I was able to hold for humanity as a whole for other people and those experiences because I will tell you what, while I was rejecting that girl, I had no empathy for people that were in that same position because I'm like, oh, my God, no, I know what that looks like and nope, I'm having nothing to do with that. Just get yourself up and do something about it, you know, like that type of mindset and it was like, hold on, connect with that part of yourself because that's the gateway. That's what you need in this moment. You can't close yourself off to love or you can't close off other people or other versions of yourself to love without closing yourself off to love because that love is just emanating from within you regardless. Yes, yeah, and this is why I use multiple practices and perspectives and teachings because, you know, like we've gone through so many thus far and what you're speaking to now talks to IFS, which is internal family systems. And so Richard Swartz talks about these parts of self and what you're describing is what he would call an exile part of yourself, and so you exile this part and this goes back to judgments of other people we're always projecting. What we judge in others is truly what we're judging in a part of our self, yet without doing the work internally, you would never see that. It always be an external thing because you see yourself as being not that because inside you cut off that part of you saying, oh, that's not me. And the truth is everything about us is us. There is nothing within that is not you. This is what makes shadow work difficult or for those of you that may not be familiar with the term, you can think of all the parts or energy of yourself that you disagree with, that you want to say, like, that's not good or that's bad. I had that thought. I don't want to be that person. To truly have power and mastery over self, it's not about cutting self-offs, about doing exactly what you did, it's about going back to meet yourself with empathy and compassion and understanding that those parts of us that are hurt, they were under-resourced and they are doing the best that they could do. And for most of the time, if not all the time, that's when our survival parts come in play. When we're under-resourced and we can't get through consciously, well, then we default to what can protect us, and then we'll go back to the beginning of our conversation, talked about believing that you can change. It's required to have a growth mindset to go back and to meet those parts because they're also not condemned to just be the same way. And this is where psychotherapy comes in, IFS also deals with this. Another model called "Tiss" by Janna Fisher, who wrote an amazing book as well on healing, and it's quite similar. It combines IFS, mindfulness, psychotherapy, it puts in a lot of elements. It's about going back to meet those parts and reconcile with them. And another fascinating thing about where they are and being stuck in that state of time, they don't know that you've continued on with life. A lot of times, they don't even know how old you are. They're truly in this feedback loop of her. And so when you reconnect with them and you share with them, you become the adult and the secure attachment that they needed, that they lacked at that time. And this is where we go internally to heal ourselves. Hmm, even just the overview of the process brings up emotion in me because I know how powerful it was for myself. But it's interesting too, because I think that's been just one of the things I've been focused on the most in the last couple of years is just the idea of projection and what I'm projecting onto others, like what those triggers are, it's like, okay, what is that inside of me? But it's interesting too, I was just listening to Rom Doss this weekend and he was talking about his guru Maharaji and how his guru said, all the money in the world is mine. And he said, if you just looked at this little man with bare feet and a blanket, you'd think he was crazy. But when you can get to that place of unity and realize it's all yours, it's like in the same way that we can see our triggers through other people. We can see our wounds through our triggers and through others. And just realizing it's all inside of us, that can be difficult for people to accept, to work through. But there's a beauty to this too. It's like, yes, that's inside of you, but so is everything else. So is all of the joy. And if you can clear away this thing that's blocking you, you can access all of this other stuff. You don't have to be jealous of others because it's all just yours. It's like it's all here. Other people's joy can be your joy just the way that other people's pain can be your pain. But I'm curious too, we've talked about that sort of getting stuck in the cycle of healing. How do you know when healing, a healing cycle is complete? And why do you think that people kind of get stuck in that addiction to like, there's always more to heal? To know it's complete is to no longer carry the reaction. This is that flow state and when you can maintain that flow state, it doesn't get disrupted. Or at the least, you can notice that what's disturbing you is no longer drawing back to a past time. And also that it doesn't stick around for a long period of time. We've also seen our emotions that naturally, they only last about 90 seconds. So yeah, you're still going to feel it's just, your emotions no longer need to yell because you'll have such a tunement within yourself. And you can still take action. You can still disagree with something and you can still take action. You don't have to have this, this deep anger to mobilize to do something. There's far less resistance. And the second question, if I recall this correctly, is was it why people get stuck? It's so difficult if you're doing it without a third party or support because we hide things from ourselves. It's difficult to not have a bias because it's you working with you. Even if you think consciously, you're not doing it. The majority of our systems are running unconsciously. So there can be an unconscious part or parts of yourself that are keeping you from finding other areas. So you could just be missing parts of the labyrinth of your mind. That's why it's so helpful to have a third party to shine light in areas or ask you questions that you wouldn't have asked yourself. And that's what gains further insight and awareness. I think that's why a lot of people get stuck. It's, it can be a quite tricky navigation. You're going, you're going through a volume of, you know, say it another way, you're going through a story book where you are the book, you are the author, you have the pen and there's no limit on me ink. And so the level of complexity that can be had within the mind is limitless. If you're someone that overthinks or ruminates, you have years and years and years of compiling these stories. And now you go to untangle it. It's like, you know, depending on generation I'm speaking to, it's like untangling a slinky, you know, or, you know, taking a knot out of a ball of yarn or anything else, you know, combing your hair, it can be quite difficult, like taking out dreadlocks, you know, that have been in your hair in your head for 20 years. You know, there's so much sifting to go through. And so I think that's why it's, if you're just going at it alone, it's difficult. You have to constantly keep bouncing off of new minds, new perspectives, being vulnerable, sharing things. And also being okay when something's cleared up and to be okay that to move forward now that you're past it. Yeah, I had to go through a phase of that where I was like, okay, even in telling the story through the lens of healing, there are certain things where I'm like, I'm just ready to release this story in general. And it's, it's difficult as a public persona sometimes because many of those stories that I'm ready to release still really help others through. So I had to kind of go through a, a period of figuring out what the story means to me and how, how my relationship to it. And even sometimes just the subtle thought of like, okay, well now it's not for me anymore. It's, it's my gift to the world. It's, it's something that I can share that kind of brings people through an arc with me. But sometimes it's even the subtle shifts of language of like, like I went through a long period of time and I, part of me still believes this, it's like, are we ever really healed? And it's like, yeah, I can grapple with the, okay, yeah, well this area of my life, I think it's healed. But do I get to a spot where everything is just perfect? And I couldn't really decide that. Like it was hard for me to say, I'm healed now and I'm just ready to tell you all about the whole journey to complete 100% healing. But I decided to change the word to growth instead of healing, because it's sort of the same thing. And it's like, yeah, there's always another layer to peel back. There's always deeper to go until you reach complete enlightenment and ascension. Like I'm not there yet at all. So there's always another layer. And, but the, but like, removing the healing and, and I'm not identifying what, but using the gateway of growth. That subtle shift in mindset changed the way I viewed myself while I was stepping through it. So a couple of points that you made there is one this, this idea of perfect. When you say that, at least what showed up for me is this external condition. It's my life going to be perfect. Life is not the external, the object, like the objects around us. Like, well, I have the house I want in the car, I want in my family is not, that's not what this work does. That's again about control. That's the ego saying, if everything is lined up this way, I'll be okay, because it's the way I want it. And that is generally what the word perfect means to, to humans. When it's the way you want it, it's perfect. Yeah, being unbothered is different, being unbothered and walking in a state of enlightenment. It's walking in flow, it's walking in surrendering is to be with what is at every moment and not being attached to any moment because every moment there's something new being being borned. So yeah, you can get there. And it's important to realize that healing is finite, growth is infinite. So there's always this expansion, every year a tree is alive. But it adds a new ring, that's an infinite ability that we have to extend ourselves. Another important factor that came up as you were sharing I thought about going back to why people can be stuck in a state of healing is because you may not realize that some of the things that there are to clear in your system don't actually come from your journey of life. You may inherit it, unhealed trauma from your parents. This is another reason why it's important to do the work because there's no avoiding it. If you don't do the work, whether intentional or not, you're passing it on to those around you because it's at its base level, it's energy. And you know, we see this a lot now that parents are noticing that experience a lot of anxiety. Oh, my kids seem to be highly anxious. They're feeling your energy, they haven't yet developed the filters and the boundaries yet. So yeah, they are taking it in. So now you have kids that are experiencing it when their actual path in life may not have brought anything into it to warrant that because it's not theirs. It reminds me of actually my message of yesterday, I am currently pregnant and just been having an interesting first trimester. Last week turns out I was actually sick. Thank God because I was thinking this was just the worst pregnancy ever. Like level 10 headache, level 10 nausea, vomiting like 12 times a day, those were the only symptoms. So I had no idea it was a sickness. Kind of chills or anyways, long story short, found out my cousins got it too after a camping trip and now I'm feeling a lot better. But during this like five days of hell, I realized I was bringing in a lot of meaning to what the rest of this pregnancy was going to be like, oh my god, this is what happens when you get pregnant at 40 and I got, I went into kind of a dark head space. But as I started to come out of it and realize it was a sickness, I went and had soup at my favorite restaurant and read the Bhagavad Gita. Well, during this sort of dark night, part of that meaning was like, I have a lot of goals this year. There's a lot of things like, am I going to have to give this all up? Like, what about work? I've had to cancel a bunch of things and I could feel a lot of pressure that I don't want in general with pregnancy, little, little, sick pregnancy. So I was reading the Bhagavad Gita and the part that I left off on was just around detaching from the outcome of your work. And so I needed that just for my own work in that moment of like, okay, I'll release the pressure. You're growing a baby like and a business. You've got a lot of babies going on here. But that reminds me of, I was, I was reading that through the lens of my work in general. My work here, my work with mind love, my work with this podcast, my work with my book. But the work of life, like detaching from the outcome of our healing, whereas we're like, oh, I got to get to the state of perfection. I've got to get to the state of, but it's like, what if you're just devoting that to whatever your beliefs are, the divine, the purity, the love? That's the only reason. It's not for the state of perfection. It's because this is the most loving path of your life is just doing the thing, you know? Like, okay, well, what will you have me do next? Where will you have me go? What would you have me say? Who would you have me speak to? And just sort of leading your life like that, leading your healing like that. And just like I stumbled upon the exact verse that I needed in the Bhagavad Gita. And I can just be with it. Does that make sense to you? It's like, instead of saying like, I'm doing this so I get stronger. So I get this. It's just, or you're just doing it without the attachment because this is what we're doing. And this is the beauty of life is leaning into love rather than pressuring yourself to get to some state that may or may not be the highest path. Because again, the more we're thinking about where we're going, the more we're choosing about where we're going, that's often from the ego, rather than allowing it to unfold in the natural way that it can. Yeah, that goes back to the times where you say, I got to get to this state. There's no place to get to. And that just becomes another piece of control by our ego. It's a, you're already forecasting a place or a state of being to get to yet you couldn't possibly know what that is because it's outside of your knowing. It's an emergence of self. And you can't, you can't predict that. You can't forecast that. That's why it's scary. You're walking into the essence of the unknown. All you can do is focus on the process and then to be with whatever emerges from that. You don't know who you're going to bloom into because we haven't yet been that person. And when we release that, it takes us back to just again, it's like Byron Katie loving what is. You know, it's like, I feel as though when you are just focused on the process, you naturally release your judgment on either end because again, you can't be correct. You can't know. And so the moment that you try to know and then it misses the mark, then suddenly you're in a state of judgment or expectation or disappointment versus just that process. And it's perfect the way it is. However it plays out and all I know is that I'm showing up with 100 percent. All I know is I'm showing up with curiosity and following my guidance. And that's all you really need to know. And the same with work, the same with healing, the same with growth, it's like, okay, I'm going to show up. I'm going to do the work. I'm going to tune into myself and see like follow what I believe my highest path to be in this moment. And that alone is perfect. It doesn't matter if it makes a million dollars. It doesn't matter if the book makes the bestseller list. You can trust that it's reached to it, it needs to reach that I've done my part and release the rest. But I wanted to touch on one other part that I know you talk about is the idea of coming home to yourself. And we just talked about like, we don't know who that person is going to be when we get there. So what does it mean to you to come home to yourself and how do you know you've arrived? It means that come home to yourself is resting in that, that wholeness. You feel a sense of nothing missing, even though there may still be because arriving is really difficult again. How do you know you've you truly arrived? Some of that comes with trust and faith in the process. Being in love for yourself completely to the extent that phrase it this way, you walk into this room that you create within your mind. You sit at this round table and you invite all the parts of yourself. And you can say at that point, we've arrived, we're here together. There's love, there's acceptance, there's an absence of judgment. We are just that we are. And yet I would say that you extend it even further and you leave an open chair or two or three just for the possibility that you still may not see all of you. And that I think is the closest we could ever be to arriving because again, we can't know what we don't know. We can only be open to discovery. So you leave that chair there to be open to the possibility that there may still be more. And that if that additional part was to show up, it's only going to show up into a continuous growing circle of love and acceptance. Well, I love leaving listeners with one thing to bring this into their reality, whether it's something to do, something to think about, what would you leave them with? Something to think about is everyone outside of you that bothers you in any way is merely revealing a part of yourself that you've met, you've yet to meet with love and compassion. And then I want to offer a quote, I forget who said it. Yeah, it's been on my mind for the past week or so. Love is knowing that I am everything, wisdom is knowing that I am nothing. And in between the two of my life moves, I love that. Well, thank you so much for everything that you've shared on this episode. Like I said, my conversations with you always just take these little turns and you have a way of explaining things that I feel like just really adds to the conversation. And so for listeners that are interested in learning more about you and the short book that you've recently written, where's the best place to connect? Best place is being one world.com and everything bridges out from there. Your challenge for this week is to notice one person who consistently triggers you and ask yourself this question. What part of me is this person reflecting back? And instead of focusing on what they are doing wrong, get really curious about what unhealed part of yourself is getting activated. Maybe it's the part that feels unseen or the part that's afraid of being judged or the part that never learned healthy boundaries. The goal isn't to excuse their behavior, but to reclaim your power by healing what's yours to heal. And also the links to this episode will be at mindlove.com/419. So this work connects to something that ancient wisdom traditions have always known about the mere of your relationships. Are you realizing this lately that so often all of our new scientific discoveries crazed back to thousands of years ago with what ancient cultures intuitively knew? And I believe that's because they were connected to a deeper part of themselves. So they didn't need the studies to validate what they were feeling. They just knew. So what did they teach about this? Every soul contract you have. Every person who shows up to push your buttons is also just part of your sacred curriculum. Your triggers aren't accidents or inconveniences. They're precisely calibrated invitations from your higher self to integrate all of the fragments that you've left behind. And when you can meet these reflections with curiosity instead of reactivity, you're not just healing old wounds, you're practicing a form of spiritual alchemy, transforming the lead of your unconscious patterns into the gold of conscious awareness. And this is how you reclaim the energy that you've been giving away to old stories and then redirect it toward who you're becoming. So give it a try and let me know how it goes. You can reach out to me on Instagram @mindlovemalissa. You can find all of my incredible sponsors at mindlove.com/sponsors and make sure to sign up for the morning [email protected] to get daily inspiration delivered right here in box. Thanks for giving your mind a little love today and I'll see you next week.