 Hey, thanks for being with me on the show today. Today's show, I'm in conversation with a lady called Dr. Nicole Lepera. Her new book that's just come out that's gone straight to number one New York Times bestseller list is called How to Do the Work. Nicole is a leading voice right now in the world in the self-healing, holistic approach to life space because she is taking this holistic approach to our humanity, not chopping us up into bits where we go to the doctor for our body and the psychiatrist for our brain and the psychologist for our mind and the church for our spirituality, but a holistic approach to our humanity, which I think is so needed. We talked about trauma and our definition of that and how we all actually carry some trauma in us and are unaware of it, about the ego and our egoic identity and the dangers of that, about something fascinating called the polyvagal nervous system. You really wanna know about that. It's fascinating. Reparenting, finding your tribe, creating boundaries. It is a brilliant conversation. She's not only a great writer, she's a great articulator of what accomplishes things often, but she has this gift of making them simple as you're gonna hear in the show today. Thanks for being here. Leave me a comment, a review and if you don't subscribe, hit subscribe and become part of the tribe. Thanks for being here. Enjoy. Mr. Nicole for being with me on the show today and first of all, huge congratulations on the book and on it becoming so quickly a number one New York Times best seller. How do you feel about that? It's mind blowing. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel, Paul. Very, very grateful. Very happy that the book is now in the hands of people, self healers around the world. So grateful I think is the number one word that comes to mind. Has it surprised you that number one best seller? Has it surprised you, Nicole? If so, why? If not, why not? I think from when I first signed online, two plus years ago now creating the account, I went on initially without expectation for who would care as I began to share my truth, began to share my story. Quite early on I saw indication of how universally resonating a lot of what I was talking about was the followers of course were growing and people from around the world were clicking like and were kind of acknowledging that they were in resonance that they were living very similar journeys. So from that point forward, I think I committed myself to the journey to professing, if you will, the message of holistic healing. So yes and no, like I said, I intuit it how important this stuff is for all of us. So I think to just speaking as someone who a decade ago, I wouldn't even have been talking about a book being in my future. So that level of it is still very surprising. The fact that I have a book that can be deemed the number one best seller, of course. Well, I think too, I really want to appreciate and thank you for, and I don't mean to sound patronizing, but for being a woman in this space, you're probably more aware than I am now. And it's probably changed in recent years since I came into this space. You know, when I came into this space, 10, 15 years ago it was Eckhart Tolle and Gary Zucca, a seat of the soul and Michael Singer and Tethered Soul who actually came to my attention through Oprah because she had them on her show. So it was a woman that opened the door to them in terms of global attention. And I feel this has been kind of a male dominated sphere, I think anyway, till recent years. So I also am so grateful to you for stepping up into this space as a woman. Do you feel that still unusual? I think now that you're kind of mentioning it, I think about just women in leadership and business in general a lot, which I do think historically is skewed a bit more male. I think I was struck when I heard you say that at first because in the clinical psychology field, there are a lot of us women. I think even at this point in the more recent future, I mean, in the more recent past, I think in the way back past, it was definitely a male dominated profession. In so much I think I can then go as far to say a lot of the core ideas that were developed again from males, from the male gender. But coming through school, Paul, I was around the majority of women and most of my colleagues were women. So in the psychological field, I think there are a lot of women though, thinking about women in leadership or women, talking as globally I am or at the scale I am, I do think that pretty generally, pretty universally, women are doing so more frequently now than historically. I think it's awesome. One of the things I do around the world, Nicole, inspired by people like you over the years has been to bring to my audience the awareness of the need for us to, as you talk about, live from the inside out and I have an observation. I wanna ask you about this. I think we're entering a whole new world era and age to not exaggerate at all, I don't think, which is I think why your book has gone so huge because having come as a humanity through the agricultural age, industrial age, information age, what do we call what is coming next? I certainly know COVID has thrown up this debate much more in terms of people having a lot more awareness of the internal world because all that external stuff was taken from us. Do you think we're entering, it's like an age of, a new age of enlightenment to me. Don't you think, do you feel that? The word that comes to mind for me, Paul, that I'll add to this is awakening. There you go. Awakening, that is the age that we're entering and whatever that means for each of us individually, it does mean different things, what we're awakening to. Some of us not having the external distractions, having very much external induced now insecurities, where we're suffering financial losses, losses of humans, relationships. Anytime our stabilization or our grounding, anytime we're destabilized, it does, I think initially, offer us the opportunity to turn within. So some of us are, the COVID induction of this, when I don't have my external focus, now I'm left with whatever is there. And for many of us, there's deeper woundings that are becoming activated. So our path looks different, but I think quite universally, the word that comes to mind for me is awakening. We're seeing ourselves, our lives, a bit more clearly, possibly. And then of course, that's creating an opportunity for us to, those of us to actualize change, to begin to make new choices. So I think that's what's happening. The internet, I think is a tool that many of us are now using to have these conversations quite globally and to begin to share these stories of awakening, really normalizing it for, I think those of us that are going through the experience. Do you think COVID has had some hidden gifts, Nicole, in this whole space as we've kind of been forced into our own company, we've kind of bumped into ourselves more than ever before? Yeah. And like I was saying, anytime our normal, right, the typical daily habits that we do day in and day out, we get up at the same time, we take the same route to work. Anytime our normal is interrupted, as I say, that's challenging for all of us humans because to be human, we really do seek the familiar. As much as those of us hated the job that maybe we drove through each and every day, it was our familiar. We knew what to expect. We knew what would happen once we arrived there. And we prefer that quite universally as humans to the unknown, right? The possible threat that can lurk around the corner. So this is why quite universally, transitions are difficult. Those of us that go from school age to work age or, you know, we're single and then we become married or we have a child. Anytime our normal is disrupted, it challenges our familiar, our drive to be in that familiar. So that's the minimum of what's happening. And then of course, like we're talking about, it gets further complicated when there's loss involved, when the people with whom that we're home with now all of the time are, you know, part challenging relationships for us. And of course, there's many other iterations of the difficulty that come. And don't you think awakening and increased consciousness is, it is its own affliction and curse as well as a blessing, right? You know, this ignorance is blessed and the more awake and walk you become, the more you wish you didn't know what you knew. Yeah, so I talk a lot about the discomfort. So not only is doing something unfamiliar going to be an inevitable uncomfortable part of transforming or creating change for many of us, that which we're seeing and witnessing now and maybe experiencing much more consciously does come with other difficulties. There's value for many of us. And I know this firsthand, I lived a large majority of my life until I began to become conscious and to heal from my spaceship as I call it, detached, associated, safely protected from all of the thoughts and feelings that I was accumulating in my body and my emotional system for 30 plus years. So as I began to tune in to what was going on in my physical body, to all of the energies that were coursing through me, it was uncomfortable to say the least. So distraction, our very conditioned way of being has value and I often urge those of us who are going on a journey of transformation to do two things. Anticipate the difficulty of change that we will have resistance. It isn't as logical as we think, oh, well, of course I wanna have this future. Why can't this be an easier shift? It won't be. So part of it is acknowledging the difficulty of change and creating the opportunity to change nonetheless. It's like we were born into this design of a changing world. We're born into a change. Change is like part of our human condition. And at the same time, we hate change. What the hell is that? Yes, yes, we hate change because the uncertainty, right, of what possibly could happen is much more threatening than what we know. And this is, again, where it's not logical. I know a lot of people who engage in repetitive relational patterns or maybe even self-harming patterns that actually create harm in the self or to the self. Yet, again, for us, for those people, that becomes their familiar. The practice of doing something different is uncomfortable let alone all of the feelings that many of us have. I often offer the onion analogy because it is very complicated. It is like peeling back all the layers of the onion to get, right, for many of us, the core, the pain, the wounding based on our very real earliest lived experiences. I read the book. I think it's fantastic. I'm so glad the timing of the book allowed me to read it before we got to chat together. And it is just so full of so many gems. And I really appreciate you writing it. I wanted to ask you a few questions about the book. And first of all, this term that you use of holistic living, what do you mean by that to the people that have not heard that term before? I appreciate you asking, Paul, because as long as I can remember, heard the term holistic was attracted to this idea of holistic healing and typically the medical field is where I first was introduced to it. Though I never really heard it fully applied to psychology, to the story of the theory of the mind. So what holistic means to me, and for me, I saw that as being a very big limitation, the old model of working, this idea that our mind is somehow separate from our physical body. And I just don't believe that to be true. And I believe when we're working in that very unidimensional or kind of silo approach way, going to a doctor of the mind like myself for mental issues and going to a medical doctor for anything doing with our body, I don't think we're setting ourself up to more fully heal. So holistic to me means honoring the interconnectedness of our being. The fact that we do have a physical body with a nervous system and all of the physiology that kind of is wrapped up around that experience of being human, the physical, we have an emotional body. We have energies and hormones that course through us that are messengers as I call them of things that are happening in our world. They give us information. I also believe, and this also applies to the conversation of awakening. I think we're all becoming aware of a uniqueness or an essence or the thing that makes me me and obviously differentiates me, Paul, from you. Whether or not we wanna apply a more kind of spiritual or soul-based label to that or not, I think many of us as humans are waking up to that there is a uniqueness in each of us. So I would go ahead and call that our spiritual self. So holistic to me means honoring the interconnectedness of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual and understanding that a lot of the cycles that we're stuck in as humans, living in those conditioned patterns are a result of a deeper imbalance in one or all of those areas. Why isn't this mainstream? We are still in a world, aren't we? We're chopped up into bits. You go to the doctor for your physical body to then the psychiatrist for your brain and the psychologist for your mind and the spiritual. Why is it still chopped up? Because still people that are operating in what's called alternative medicine are still viewed with skepticism by mainstream medicine and we still seem to be so slow to wake up to this holistic approach. Yeah, and the why is, there's a million different why is that people could theorize the why. It wasn't always the case when you really do look back into what psychology was even psyche, right? Study of the soul. There have been practitioners who have been professing these more holistic models for quite some time, though to speak to your point, it hasn't necessarily been embraced in the mainstream world. So when I speak of clinicians like myself and even the medical professionals because I have somewhat of an awareness of what medical school was like for them, we really can't be faulted. We really aren't given the full set of tools to really help the clients that are coming into our treatment rooms, whether again, you're in the medical field as a medical doctor or like myself, we really are operating on many of us what we were taught in school. And the reality is the body was completely absent from my program nutrition because that again is located in the body was not even mentioned. We were never urged to ask our clients what their lifestyle looked like in the day in and day out. And again, this was because we never believed that the body played a role. Thankfully now we're starting to understand particularly the role of our nervous system, they're starting to become more kind of a push for more trauma informed approaches. That's the language that is used in the field though, pretty globally it hasn't yet been adopted into the mainstream schooling model. So the why, I can't theorize as to what the why is. I just know that it is the reality that many of us especially in the West here are living in our schooling systems. Are you familiar with Johann Harris book, Lost Connections? I don't think I've read that one. Johann Harris is a British author and I ask it because his book is really dedicated to a study around the world to come to the conclusion that the depression is perhaps far less to do with the lack of serotonin in the brain and far more to do with the erosion of human connection and loneliness and so on. Yeah, I mean, connection, our interpersonal relationships. You'll always hear me citing the reality that as humans that we are interpersonal creatures, we need relationships to survive really. Again, our basic needs in childhood and infancy were contingent upon us being in relationship. As human infants we cannot meet our physical needs on our own. We need some version of a caregiver. You know, regardless of how attuned they are to our needs or not, we need them to meet our physical needs. And then of course that evolves into our emotional needs. Those of us that have supportive connections can tolerate stress more, get sicker less frequently. So relationships are incredibly important. What I've come to think and talk and speak about in terms of relationships and my intention of the final chapter in my book is entitled Interdependence. And it really is talking and highlighting the importance of relationships. However, as you go through my book and my work, I'm talking about a specific type of relationship, one in which we are authentically expressing ourselves. Because what I know about humans myself particularly, I've had over the course of my now almost 40 years, many relationships. However, the question becomes, am I showing up in my authentic self? Am I expressing my thoughts, my opinions, me in any given moment with my feelings and my beliefs and my passions? Or am I like the larger majority of many of us wearing a mask playing a role, right? So the relational work that I'm suggesting that we do as healers or as self-healers is to learn how to relate to others authentically. And yes, I believe the lack of connection. I believe it starts with self. Many of us can't connect authentically with others because we don't really truly intimately know ourself. We're protecting ourself, denying our own feelings, not allowing ourself to be us before we can then obviously gift who we are to someone else. There's also theories of depression if we wanna throw the body into this conversation where we now know that serotonin, dopamine, everything that we're talking about, the neurotransmitters that are specifically part of a conversation when we're talking about depression or anxiety, we once thought they were produced solely in our brain. So we would take medications to increase the production of these neurotransmitters in our brain. We now know that our stomach, our gut, plays just as an important role in producing those chemicals, which now implicates our nutrition, how well is our gut functioning? Building on this just a bit more, we now know that when our body is inflamed, when our nervous system is activated, when we have possibly damage to our gut, which a lot of us are causing, unbeknownst to ourselves with the food we're eating, with the chemicals that we're ingesting, a lot of the depression in particular can be an effect or a result of inflammation. So again, there's many different pathways to having the lived experience if you're like myself of anxiety or many others of depression that have different imbalances to use the language I used offered earlier that aren't, as we once believed, a deficit in our brain that can be resolved by a pill. Right. What do you think that you're talking in your book, Nicole, about the ego and the soul? And don't you think the part of our problem as humans is that from birth, we are separated from ourselves by this egoic, laboring culture we are all born into. Even before you're born, you are labelled as male or female or black or white or rich or poor and so on and so on. So before you were born, you were born with labels and then in nurture, hundreds more are attached to you. So this battle to find your authentic self from birth is huge. And I meet people all over the world when I talk about this who are in midlife and beyond and still don't know who this person is, but out of where I mean like crisis language that they've lived the first half of their life not being true to themselves, but not knowing who themselves is. Can you speak a little bit to this egoic versus soul identity that we are trying to figure out? To keep ego in terms of definition simple because there's many different definitions and ego I think is one of those concepts that we might have met in a book, but not really understood the practical application. Well, what does the ego look like in my life? So as I often do, I try to simplify a lot of these concepts so that we can gain a working knowledge to build that bridge between concept into action. So the simplest definition that I like to offer about what an ego is and to speak to your very eloquently word at points it is a story. It's a story about us or who we imagine ourself to be that yet is impacted by how we look our gender, our culture upon birth though also Paul can complicate things further can even begin to be created by our parents, our family when they just imagine when they gain news right of the pregnancy for a lot of us this story is created then. Oh right, you know thinking of in our families of oh a little boy is coming. I imagine he'll be maybe just like his father if the father is right all of these stories that we're creating now about this person who's not even here yet. We have actually no idea who this being will be in self expression and yes, the byproduct of our ego of our stories of our self identified labels such as male, female, whatever culture it is or it isn't that we are identifying with is separation. And some of us will go as far to say the second we come onto this planet in a separate body we are taken away from our oneness. I believe that's what our soul is. It's a unified field where we are connected to everyone and everything around us. And yeah, there are many lived experiences of separation where we begin to solidify who we imagine ourself to be based on our very real lived experiences. The problem being we as adults many of us until we get to our midnight life crisis or our dark night of the soul as I call it the results all of the accumulated effects for some of us physical for some of us emotional of living in that constant state of disconnection. I know I felt it. I had no idea who I was. Even though I witnessed all of these boxes having been checked of all of these accomplishments that I thought were who I was, yet I felt empty. I felt unfulfilled. I felt disconnected and I felt very confused. If you would have asked me about myself at that time some 10 plus years ago, I would have not been able to answer questions, Paul. I had no idea who I was. So for a lot of us it can be destabilizing pulling back the stories of our ego to allow in our more full self, our more full self-expression. And like you're beautifully saying for many of us this begins in utero. This is colored by how we look, by the families we're born into and by our very real lived experiences. I have eight grandchildren, Nicole, and at least two of them are weird. Great, congratulations. Right, exactly. There's not a bad ratio to our eight, but one of them is a girl and she is nine to an in 10. And a couple of years ago, the word autistic started to be used about her. So again, another label. And once that word is used, it panics the family and panics people. And she obviously is a difficult child then the language becomes to fit into the one-size-fits-all education system. There's no celebration of her unique intelligence that is not fitting the one-size-fits-all. So she begins already at seven, eight to feel something's wrong with her, something needs fixing. And of course, that's all what we shouldn't be doing, but that's what I'm trying to say to our listeners that people have versions of that going on on all stages of life, a good person or a bad person or a Christian or a non-Christian or Democrat-Republican or whatever these egoic labels are. And so as you say, it's in utero, but in the formative years, I got really angry with the way it was been framed by the school. Yeah, our school systems, especially to out here in the West are very one-size-fits-all model, hearing about your granddaughter what comes to mind my partner. She tells me innumerable stories of her experiences in schooling in particular where she too was a bit different, perhaps even could have been considered on a spectrum of sorts and has carries incredible trauma around being told day in and day out from everyone, from her teachers to her family, wonderings of why aren't you producing? Why aren't you doing? Why aren't you performing? And to this day, still a lot of pain comes up because all of her beautiful, unique talents and there are many that she has just didn't fit inside that system and weren't rewarded in that way. And unfortunately, the way she was actually didn't feel like it was valued and so a lot of us come have had experiences. For some of us it isn't even have to be as direct as in the school system, right? Indirectly in our family. I know in small ways I would hear statements like us, my last name, LaParis, us LaParis do this. We do this, we don't do that. Very a lot of indirect, even sometimes our personality, right? We're not very loud people, are we? What if I feel like I wanna be a loud person in this moment? Now the message as a child I'm being given or an outgoing person is that to do that I'm not actually part of now the most important clan, right? Which is my family and again in childhood, going back to what I was talking about earlier, those bonds are life. So instead of continuing to be us, and again I'm really simplifying all of this, we amend ourselves, we begin to wear those masks, we begin to modify who we are and how we are so that we can still be a part of those earliest groups which are the most important to us. The issue being we never evolve out of that. The way that we begin to relate, adapt, the adaptations that we're living that most often begin in our core family units become our very patterned way of being, we repeat them. We become the caretaker in childhood, right? The little girl caretaker for instance becomes the caretaker among her friend unit when she has peers and as she ages into adulthood. So the issue being, and I talk about this a lot, the habits and patterns formed in childhood, our ego included these stories that at one point we're incomplete, we're adaptations born for many of us out of pain become our marching orders into adulthood unless of course we become conscious. We view and we witness all of these older patterns that don't serve us and then more importantly we create the space to make new choices to give ourselves the opportunity to now march toward a future that's not just a replication of that past. I have another grandson, he's Jonah, he's about 11 now and he's been very OCD since he was born. He would line his toys up forensically and then he'd leave the room. But if you moved a toy and he wasn't in the room he kind of knew that you touched his stuff even while he wasn't in the room. I remember what superpower is that who knows but no one saw it as that. He has this photographic memory, he's very introverted and so on and so on, which in his early years is difficult to manage and to pair up because his sister, Sienna, she has her own weirdness. She is kind of from morning till night. She is either Ariel or she's the chick from Frozen and she's either that or she's naked in terms of what she wants to wear. So you're managing Jonah with his OCD and his sister with her flair for dressing fancy and these two kids doing life together and I watched their parents struggling to parent them as it were to be as normal as they can be with him. And I just realized that this kid is unique and we should create space for him and hold space for him. And I said, look, I know it's a nightmare now but let's just stay with this kid, something brilliant is happening and then when he's about 20, give me him for a week and I'm gonna take him to Vegas. You've been like my rain man. Yeah, right. Well, Jonah, so was that his name? I can share with you quickly Paul that Jonah sounds a lot like me, little girl Nicole as my very loving friends in high school when I started to have them over my house. Very much similarly, my dresser, my Brewera had everything lined up to my liking and they too would find it amusing to if I would go to use the bathroom or go downstairs to get us something to eat, I would come back up and they similarly would move just one thing to see if I noticed and I would just similar to Jonah all the time with increasing agitation. So I had lived that childhood. So if it's any solace on the other side to those of you parents who have similar Jonas that yeah, there is a lot of uniqueness. You're also highlighting something that I get asked about a lot in terms of parenting. How do we parent? Other humans that are similar to us that are dissimilar to us and that in their growing and developing are activating us and our own wounds. And it is incredibly challenging because more often than not when a parent is struggling to like you're saying hold space, let Jonah be Jonah in this moment. It's because of something going on deeper for the parent. Chances are the parent might have lived a similar experience on either end of it or there might likely is a deeper wounding that the parent is reacting to themselves. Just like we do in relationships with our adult partners. My partner for me, Lolly, that I was describing earlier is probably one of the most challenging relationships. There are many moments where I'm activated given whatever dynamically is happening between her and I. Same applies for children. As a parent, we can become activated by our child as well. So obviously when we're thinking about how to parent it is complicated. My suggestion always is the same doing the work of healing, becoming aware of yourself. Knowing in that moment when you feel compelled to say or do something with your child and making sure that you are consciously wanting to make that choice and not coming from that more reactive place because more often than not there is something deeper going on when we're feeling challenged by anyone in our life, our children included. Let me ask you a little bit Nicole about emotions. And the management of our emotional life. You talk a lot in the book about that and your framing of that. And do you agree with this statement, this idea that emotions are data, they are not directives. Yes, 100. A lot of people that I try to help in this area and my own internal work has been to create space between an incoming emotion before it suddenly takes on a behavior or a language or a default mode, it seems that we struggle to find any border control between an incoming rogue emotion and before it gets in, it takes on a meaning and becomes a rogue, illegal alien as it were in our internal ecosystem. So how do you help people figure out the difference between an emotion doesn't mean you need to jump in and do drama around it or give it a meaning or a name when it becomes a new default behavior? Yeah, what you're describing here, Paul is so interesting because typically what we're having the emotion and reaction to isn't the event that happened. It's our often more often than not unconsciously assigned meaning, right? So I use an example often and I share in my book about for me how dirty dishes were a huge activator as I call it for me and what I began to understand, it wasn't the presence of dishes per se that was the issue when I would come home and see them on the counter or wherever they would be. It was what my mind was saying about those dishes. So for me, I'll share my example upon seeing the dishes. One of my core narratives born out of a wound from my childhood being born to an emotionally unavailable mother who herself was very preoccupied with her own anxiety, had very little to give to me outside of us bonding around stress emotionally, that is. So one of my course of wounds is this feeling of aloneness and the language my mind has assigned to it and we all assign different languages is I'm not considered. So what I came to realize when I would see those dishes and again to paying attention, turning that spotlight of attention to my mental world allowed me to witness this narrative that was quite recurrent. And what I saw then was as soon as my mind saw the dishes, my eyes saw the dishes, I did apply a meaning. Oh, I'm not considered. That dish is an example of me not being considered. Now the reaction I'm having, everything from hurt to rage, if I'm honest, like given my resource level, actually came from the meaning that I was assigning. So that's an important piece of information. Again, understanding that for all of us that meaning typically did come from a very real lived experience, though understanding that we are applying meanings to everything that we're experiencing allows us the space to begin to reframe to assign another meaning. Now, it's not as easy as that because an emotion also lives in our body. It has a nervous system, state of activation more often than not attached to it as hormones. It has energy changes and shifts. This is again where we have to have a conversation about working holistically. That means in that moment, not only so, for instance, I saw my narrative very clearly, very early on, didn't mean that the next time I saw the dishes, I was like peace and zen. Oh, it doesn't have to mean I'm not considered in that moment and I can navigate it differently. Absolutely not. All of that wash of feelings was still there because it's stored in my unconscious. I practiced it so much. So seeing the dishes, I could offer myself, Nicole, this is not you not being considered at all. My body was still, my heart rate was still increasing. I still felt like I wanted to throw the dish at my partner's head. So now we need to teach ourselves in a new embodiment. We need to embody choice, embody for some of us, taking a couple of deep breaths, moving ourselves from leaving the situation because for some of us we need time. We need to actually deescalate from that really strong emotion to give myself the opportunity to not throw the dish this time, right? And to take a more peaceful approach. And I highlight that because for a very long time, this also applies to a conversation we were having at the start of this. Thoughts alone are powerful. I devote a whole chapter in the book to the power of belief, the power of our mind, though for many of us they're not enough, especially when our bodies are stuck in these certain levels of physiological dysregulation. This is where we need to do more than just reframe this cup into meaning something other than I'm not considered. We actually need to embody a new experience in those moments. That's where the practice of regulating ourselves, right, is important. Talk a little bit, you mentioned in chapter four about the Vegas nerve. I found that fascinating that this massive game-changing nerve in the body, this sort of primary freeway in the body, we don't know about it. It's not a term that's common, but this polyvagal theory that you speak about in chapter four, talk a little bit about that. Would you call for a minute? I'd be happy to because this actually follows the conversation that we were just having. Right. The way to regulate our body is through harnessing the power of that nerve. We all have a nerve, it's called the Vegas nerve, just again, simply it connects our brain stem and it nervates, it contains all of the major organs all the way down through our digestive system, our gut, which means it's the major highway that messages travel, nerve-based messages. We have many different message systems. I mentioned a couple earlier, hormonal, energetic, right? When our nerves are firing, they're usually traveling down that freeway, connecting again our brain to all of our major organs. So harnessing the power, it's essentially how we shift, and again, I'm really simplifying this, from our state of activation, our fight or flight, a lot of us probably have heard that language, right? How we keep ourselves safe from real or imagined threats to our parasympathetic mode, or the state where we can rest, our body can rest, it can sleep, it can digest our food, and where we're open and receptive to creating bonds, authentic bonds like we were talking about earlier with other people. A lot of us don't have flexibility to deal with a stress, fight or flight, whatever it is that it requires in the moment, and then to return back to that baseline. Most of us are stuck. We're either stuck in fight or flight, or we're so deactivated, we're stuck in that kind of hypo-activation where we have no energy, we're stuck in that parasympathetic state. We wanna be able to flexibly go back and forth to deal with stress when it's there, only when it's there, not when we're imagining it to be there, not for the decades that some of us are living in these stress responses, and to go back to that very receptive open place. And we can create that flexibility for those of us who don't have it, particularly through many different exercises, but you'll always hear me talking about breath work, through harnessing, through doing two things, paying attention to what our normal rhythm of breathing is, can give us clues into what state of activation we're in. If you tune in, if I were to ask you to put a hand on your chest and put a hand on your belly right now and to observe, and it'd probably be very faint, what your normal rhythm of breath is, what's moving as your body is breathing itself, which it does outside of our awareness, day in and day out to keep us alive, most of us will have the answer being our chest. We're in a very shallow state of breath. That for many of us might be indication that we're in that state of activation. We're ready to fight or flee. So the breath we really wanna begin to cultivate is a deeper breath, where we're either breathing down to our bellies or our diaphragm as we call it, maybe putting a hand and actually teaching ourselves how to breathe from that deep place, because for many of us, our bodies do need to learn. It is difficult. So learning how to deeply breathe from the belly or learning how to control our breath so that we can practice a long gating our out breath, our exhalation. And when we do either of those two things, we're like manually activating, we're helping our vagus nerve, we're stimulating it, and we're activating that parasympathetic switch. Now, of course, here's where I have to suggest that we practice consistently, the word that we all love to hate. This isn't, as a lot of us like to do, the back pocket tool for when I need it in the moment and then I forget about my breathing entirely. To set ourselves up to succeed, say in the moment where the dirty dishes are my number one enemy and to be able to do, like I said, calm my body so that I can create a new choice in that moment for myself, I have to teach myself how to consistently harness the power of my breath. One of the game-changing things for me and the work I've been doing is in the area of self-awareness. I know you don't speak about it specifically in the book as a subject, but clearly implicit in everything that you talk about and your own journey has been this discovery of this level of consciousness, if that's what it is, of self-awareness, the ability to know that you are not the thoughts, you're the person having the thoughts is so easy to say. That sentence is so easy to say, but I think it's taken me a good 20 years to figure out the reality of that and the gift of that. But apparently 90% of us have little or no self-awareness. It's such a rare commodity and yet such a game-changer, don't you think? Absolutely. And the reason why we have little to no self-awareness is because we haven't practiced. We actually have allowed that subconscious part of our brain, it lives in a different region, it has different brain structures attached to it. We're not firing up the place where our consciousness lives, the prefrontal cortex and like anything, any organ that we don't use, it doesn't work, right? It can, our brain, our bodies are neuroplastic. We can fire up those neurons that will begin to wire together. But for a lot of us, I think about it in terms of a muscle and the gym, right? Our prefrontal cortex where our consciousness lives for many of us humans just aren't practiced. And I think here's where I just wanna mention just a quick difference because when I hear people speaking about the work and this idea of self-awareness, I hear and I see a lot of times that word gets interchangeably used with this idea of self-analysis, right? Or endlessly scrutinizing oneself with obviously a criticism being, oh, if you're doing the work always, are you always just in self-analysing mode? Are you really even living? And I just wanna acknowledge a difference between living as the awareness, as the observer of our thoughts that can come and go and that level and that this type of self-analysation that I think is being talked about in this other version, which is another version of distraction, of living in the thinking mind, right? So we wanna harness the awareness that isn't kind of from those repetitive thoughts where we're analyzing or where we're, you know, picking apart every thought we're having and wondering where it came from. That's actually not self-awareness. Self-awareness is, again, able to pull back, able to, as the cliche goes, right? View our thoughts as the clouds in the sky, the cars on the road or what have you. That's the awareness that we're speaking of. And yes, a lot of us are not practiced in it. We haven't taught ourselves how to be an observer or how to sit in witness of our behaviors and or our mental world. I heard a therapist say the other day on some podcast that insight is the booby prize of therapy. In other words, to get insight and do nothing else with it, like you're saying overthinking, overanalyzing, but it's not progressive. It doesn't contribute to momentum and movement. Exactly. I think there's a lot of that out there too. And I think a lot of people read books like yours and others thinking to have ready to put it on the shelf. I read that. I got those terms now. I've got the new language as if it's enough, but doing the work, that's what I love about your book, how to do the freaking work. Cause that's a different issue, eh? Absolutely. And I think, and having lived the experience of being on the couch as a client myself, of reading all of the books of Jesus, going to school to be a clinical psychologist. I could go ahead as far as to say is for some of us having that increasing amount of insight around the self and not being able to bridge that insight into action can be one of the most disempowering, frustrating places to be where some of us even begin to, as I once did, wonder, what's wrong with me? Why can't I change? Why can't I have all of this book knowledge, all of this insight about why I'm doing what I'm doing and I still can't actualize the change? So what this work is about is about bridging the gap, is about honoring that if even for those of us who do have the access and the privilege to be in supportive therapies or have tools and resources around us that we go to, we still have many moments of our day where that autopilot could be dictating the terms that we're living. So for me, the work is the day in and day out stuff. The how do I become conscious so that I can continue to break the patterns that aren't serving me, even as I see the patterns in real time, creating that new action is incredibly difficult. Why? Like we've been talking about because we don't want to. We're comfortable in our familiar. We know what comes next and that feels safer than the whole world, even if it's positive, that could come if and when I continue to do these new things. It's funny. I'm smiling because it's so difficult for me not to talk to you. I'm not turning into a private therapy session. You must get that a lot, eh? But I wanted to say to you what I'm laughing at in my mind is I heard you speaking with Mel Robbins about this and I think it's quite common. I have no memory of my childhood at all. It scares the hell out of me because I feel I should. And when I'm trying to do the work and connect current trauma to past cause, to track effect, I can't track it to a day and event, a conversation, something my mother or father did or my siblings did. My dad was abusive. He was a drunkard. He was violent. And we all separated as siblings in our teens, I think to get away from him. But what happens, and you talked to Mel about something you believe happens to us, why we have no memory of our childhood? Could you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, so I discovered similarly, Paul, that I had no memory. It was a really gradual discovery at first when, you know, with friends, I would hear them talk about their childhoods, how they spent holidays and again a big absent blank for me. And then that would translate to with those friends where a couple, they'd be like, oh, last month when we went and did this thing or that thing and again really little recollection for me. Sometimes we don't remember when we have a big bad event that happens to us because of the pain that is, you know, kind of there present. We kind of block it off and we shut down. There's many other reasons that we don't remember when we don't have those big bad things. For some of us living in that detached, associated way that I described myself to live becomes our general way of being. When the emotions, when our environments feel overwhelming enough for each of us and we don't feel we've had the resources to help us. So again, me with a mother who wasn't able to be emotionally available to me left me in a pretty consistent state of overwhelm. So for me, my protection began to happen when I discovered my spaceship and I began to live away. So for many of us, we don't have the memories to go back to. And again, this is a very simplification but a great way I think to conceptualize it because we really weren't fully present when the things were happening to us. And for some of us that means the lifetime that we were say at home under our abuser's roof or in these complicated relationships, our only way to keep ourselves safe was to be some version of not present. So when we go back, there is a blank movie screen because we weren't fully there to imprint the memory itself. So the usual follow up to that question is, okay, well, can I still heal? And if so, how? And so I'll be the first to acknowledge that I don't have that movie to go back to. I don't think it's necessary to write pop the movie of our childhood trauma in to watch it to have all of the feelings, write to grip our chair and then we're healed, not necessarily. What we need to be healing are all of the conditioned habits and patterns that were born out of those moments which are available to you in probably your way of being regardless of if you know why you are the way you are begin to view how you are. What are the daily habits that you've typically, you've chances are brought with you from childhood. How do you care for your body? How do you care for your emotional world? Is there an emotional world to care for? Or have you been suppressing it for so long that you don't even know what I'm talking about when I talk about human emotions being a day to day part of life or like you and I are saying containing messages, you might never hear those messages because you might be so detached and dissociated. How is your way of being in relationships? What are the roles or the masks that you began to wear or assume? Again, very early on born out of what happened. So viewing our self-consciously now will give us the opportunity to still create healing, seeing the areas where we're not maybe acknowledging or meeting the needs of our physical, emotional or spiritual selves become our pathway to healing. We don't have to go back. For some of us it's too painful to go back. So even if we know what happened, healing isn't about like I said, white-knuckling it while you just watch what happened to you. Healing is about creating change, breaking the habits that came out of that pain so that again, you can create a future that's different. For some of us relationships that are safer and that are more authentic to who we are in adulthood. You know, one of the things I've done around the world for the last 10 years is my communication masterclass where I teach trained people in communication and you are such a brilliant communicator. Not just a writer. I think a lot of us are wild to go from our brain to our hand to write, run that our brain to our mouth to speak. And if you're more in one than the other, the other doesn't come easy, but your ability to articulate. And this is the other thing I think that really matters about great communicators like you. It is the commitment you have made to make complicated things simple so that they're accessible. It becomes mainstream available to us. I think so much of this stuff has been shrouded in mystery and has been hijacked by experts and mystics over the generations. So to have it simplified in the way you do in the book and now I think it's so fantastic and I'm really grateful for your ability not just to write a book but to make it simple for us to access. I think it's another string to your ball of a great gift just by the way as one communicator spent my life from the same things. Well, I came from a church world where we seemed to pride ourselves in making simple things complicated that we reversed it. The more complicated it was, the more it meant we could control it and control the people with the bits we didn't tell them. So I think what you're doing is brilliant. I think your chapter on boundaries and your work on boundaries is brilliant. I think it's a new word in recent years. It should never have been. I'm aware as you speak about it, we had none in our family as kids and we certainly had none in the church world. But you talk about this term enmeshment with regard to boundaries. Can you say a little bit about that? Boundaries, sorry, with what a boundary is. Boundary and enmeshment, particularly this term enmeshment. Right, so a boundary's a limit, right? A separation, a point of separation, say. We can have boundaries in many different areas. We can have physical boundaries, emotional boundaries, spiritual boundaries. And again, it's a point of separation where I am me and whatever that means in my self-expression and just using you as an example in Paul, you are you. What it means when we say we're enmeshed or another word that goes hand in hand with that that I very much identify with from my childhood relational experiences is codependency. And again, quite simply, what either of those things mean typically is lacking of boundaries or where we blur with someone else. A lot of times in the home, we used an example earlier where I said using hearing language such as us leperas or insert whatever your surname is. We do this, kind of a group think. We believe religion's a great place where there's a lot of that kind of group think blurring of boundaries. Here's what our belief system is and you must believe it to be part of this group, et cetera. So it's boundary work in adulthood is A, identifying, witnessing what are our boundaries, what are our limits, how safe do I feel to be who I am in my physical self, in my emotional self, and in my spiritual self, in any given relationship? And when the answer is, I don't really feel safe. I'm not really me when I'm with this person. Then we have to explore for ourselves what changes we can make because the caveat with boundaries, and I can stress this with another word that I often hear used or wondered about interchangeably, ultimatum, a boundary is for us. A boundary is inserting that limit or carving out that new limit in action we're taking for our own safety so that we can actualize and meet our own needs and or self express in our own authenticity. And ultimatum is what most of us attempt to do when we point the finger at someone else in hopes that they change so that of course we can experience them and or the relationship we're having with them differently. So boundary work, most of us in adulthood as we explore how we relate in relationships begin to find that we could use some new limits. We could use some ways that we could show up differently in any relationship across the board. And if we do come to that conclusion, our goal within boundary work, and those of you who will pick up my book, there's a whole chapter where I give not only the steps of boundary setting, I give dialogues, I give scripts to begin to use of how to begin to communicate that boundary, really highlighting again that the work of creating and setting boundaries is for us. How can I create safety now in this relationship so that I can be more me? And that means me now taking a new action and not relying on the person or again the world around me to change. So good, I appreciate the chapter on finding the interdependence chapter about finding your tribe, chapter 13. And I think I've tried to do for a couple of years now, Nicole on social media. And I think your book and all that you're posting daily you are my tribe, you are my tribe. And I think I wanna thank you for helping us to find you and to find your voice. I think your book and all that you're doing is going to help a lot of people explain themselves to themselves, which should bring them closer to themselves, this authentic version of them. But it took me years to find, especially in the church world where being your authentic self was a threat because anything outside of compliant behavior was a threat to the status quo. So for me always to be a bit of an outlier and to question and to ask these questions I always felt it a difficult fit, but I was branded as an awkward person to be kept an eye on, which adds another layer of protection and trauma to you potentially. And for years in the church world, I had to navigate that. And I think coming out of that 10 years ago, I know there's still things in me today that I spot in others. I've arrayed our four of people that are desperately trying to find their tribe, but don't know where they are and who they are. I think your book and your work is gonna help us find you millions of us. Are you up for a little bit of quick fire for a couple of minutes before I let you go? I am, let's do it. All right, some people often get wrong about you. That I'm healed, that I'm done. Yeah, me too. That I'm speaking from some guru mountain. If you find them out and let me know, I'll meet you there. Yeah, me too. Last TV show you binge watched. Ooh, Mortgage or there's some TV show on Mortgage or Matrimony. Is it Netflix kind of thing? Yes, yes, yes, one of those. I watched the whole season. I can't wait for another one. Yeah, mine was Queens Gambit. Have you seen that? Oh, I saw a couple of those episodes. I was really enjoying it. I might have to get back to that. Great show. A favorite movie? Ooh, favorite movie. Not really a movie person. So I'm having a hard time calling because I had a hard time paying attention. Isn't this so interesting? I could only, for a very long time, I could only watch short shows. Having a hard time coming up with a favorite movie. I'll let you know if another one pops up. All right, skip that. Concert, a memorable concert? Oh, sure, you'll never forget. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, when I was 21 years old, they played two days before my 21st birthday. So lots of memorable things there. Wow, I've heard that amazing live and the guy can't even play with a broken leg, right? They're wild, so I'm not surprised. Favorite meal? Pizza. There you go. Pizza and ice cream. Wow, I should say that. I'm being honest. After pizza. There you go. What books on your night stand at the moment? I'm currently reading a book by, I think his name's Dr. Brian Rice, Daniel Rice, Brian Weiss, many soul, many bodies, one soul, one of his. Cool, okay. Epitaph, what would you like to be on your gravestone as it were? Have you thought about legacy and how you want us to remember you? I don't know what I would put in the epitaph, but I have thought in terms of my hope for this work is to empower humans to create their own world. So some version of empowerment, the word empowerment is so resonating for me in general. So some version of empowering others is my hope. Ordinary moment on any given day that lights you up. An ordinary thing that you can think, I love that moment in my day. Like my kids recently got, we had a dog years ago, I had to let go because we've gone so much. They got a dog. That dog loves the hell out of me. So that's my light when the dog comes. Something like that, I don't know. Yeah, anytime I'm in nature, I happen to live by the beach. Actually, when we get off this call today, I have a bit of a break before my next recording. So I'll be heading to the beach, the ocean. Nature for me has always been my place of connectivity. The place that I actually could be the most present when I really struggled even in childhood. And it lights me up because I'm here. I'm seeing light and so nature. Last time you hand wrote a note card or letter, a handwritten note card or letter. Last time you did that. Last week, I've been writing a lot of those and books and sending with all of the book deliveries going out, writing a lot of notes in books. So more recently than I think I typically do and it's been actually- Are you left or right handed, Nicole? Right handed. Okay. Finally, most grateful for in this past year. The community around me, people like yourself, humans that I feel much more authentically present to and connect it with. And honestly, who've been the trailblazers for me and my source of empowerment when it gets difficult looking to everyone, whether again, it's other mentors in the fields that I've learned from and or members in the community. I'm so inspired by self-healers on a daily basis, seeing them show up for themselves. So for me that it's the community by far. I love that. Thanks for doing that. And what next finally, what do you do next? Do you feel this like book is like a peak that you and I kind of come down from now or are you another peak in sight already that you're going for? What's next? I am just getting started, Paul. I'm super excited. I have so much stuff and creations I want to put out in the world. So this is just the beginning that you're hearing from me. I always plan to continue to deliver all of the free resources on the Instagram page. So that's never going anywhere in addition to a lot of things that I want to create for the world, for the community and the self-healer circle and beyond. So we're just getting started. And how can people find you? Tell us your Instagram? Yeah, absolutely. So each and every day I'm over there where it all started at the.holistic.psychologist. Like I mentioned, there's an incredible community of self-healers in the comments, very active, sharing their own journeys of healing. So if anyone out there is listening and is feeling a bit lonely or is feeling driven to find their people, know that they're there waiting for you. There's millions of us online. I also have a YouTube channel. Anyone interested in the YouTube format, World of Teaching that I offer weekly videos, you can search the holistic psychologist in YouTube. That's great. Well, listen, I want to respect your time. I say a massive thank you to you for your time and for all that you are doing. You are a beautiful human being and the planet is better off for having you on it. And I'm glad we met. Lovely to meet you. Hope we can keep in touch in the future. I wish you all the best seriously for everything in your heart still to do. Thank you. Paul, I say the same right back to you. Thank you and everyone out there listening for carving out the time to hear me speak today. Thank you for the work you're doing in the world. Well, thanks again for listening to today's podcast. I hope you found it beneficial. And I know time is precious. Come out and do photos all. But I would love if you would take the time to write a review or comment. And above all, maybe subscribe to my podcast channel. Thank you.