 All right, I'm happy to be here with Dina Tibbs. And today we're gonna talk about a topic that is important but often neglected, which is shadow work, among other things. But Dina, it's great to have you here. Thanks for joining me. Thank you. Hi, George. It's an honor to be here. Pleasure. Yeah, thank you. So let me go ahead and share your background with the audience and then we'll get into this. It's a very cool topic. So Dina Tibbs is a sole mentor and muse. She, and I'm gonna have your full bio in the notes below. So folks be sure to check that out and go to Dina's website. But I'm just gonna highlight a particular part of it, which is that you assist women in the remembrance of their sole curriculum. And you are a way shower to bringing a sense of the sacred into every part of their lives. And Dina does this through creative and contemplative practices, feminine wisdom teachings, and teaching women how to design lives and harmony with their own rhythms and the cycles of nature. Very cool. And you do it all with a lot of art, artistry. As we can see in the background there, it's amazing what you do. So shadow work. So gosh, just a lot we can start with there, but before we started recording or in the kind of an email, Facebook thread, we were discussing this topic and, gurus and mentors and those of us who are, I always tell my audience, hey, I'm not your guru. I'm a, yeah, you can call me a mentor if you want to. You can call me a coach or a consultant or whatever. But I am a student, right? I'm a student probably a few steps ahead of most of my audience on some topics, but the danger is when and I get into this danger too, when I think that I'm irreplaceable and therefore if there's any suggestions that my students are learning or benefiting more from some other mentor or coach, and I get offended and there was in fact this year an experience in our Master Heart group where that kind of thing happened. And of course I realized, okay, that's still part of my shadow and that needs to be continued to be brought into lighter to be worked on. But let me stop talking for a moment because I wanna hear you reflect on this and kind of what you have helped people with in healing from these things. Well, and I think it did stem out of this very specific situation, this conversation of that guru, mentor, teacher, healer, whatever you wanna label yourself as. And I say the same thing, I'm not your guru. I'm here to help you tap into your own soul curriculum, not go outside of yourself for it. And with shadow and you said it, it brings it to light, right? So we have to honor those shadows because if we don't, we never bring things to light. Without shadow, there is no light. I mean, that's quantum physics. And so for those of us who don't want that role or responsibility, sometimes the shadow is that people, regardless of us saying that or regardless of a healer saying, I'm not the one who heals you, I'm just the conduit for it. People will put you in that place or on that pedestal or give you that responsibility. And you have to of course then look at your own boundaries and your own shadows of it. And then there's our own shadows that say, oh, this person's learning from that other teacher and yada yada, and that's our own shadows, usually based in some other control mechanism or safety mechanism we put into place as children. Mine is often not being heard. That's a big one. What do you mean? I'm telling you all this wisdom, why aren't you using it? And I go into the shadow there, why aren't you listening? But the truth is we can only plant the seeds and people are gonna do with them what they will. And in terms of other, I always joke, I'm like, my biggest goal is to mentor myself right out of a job. That my students, my clients become, I don't even love the word master because they are already very, very wise women and I'm helping them remember that and step into it. And my hope is they far, far surpass me and wisdom. Like you said, I'm a certain amount of steps because of my own mentors and my own work in the journey. But I'm always learning. And if I ever stopped being a student then we're in trouble for sure because that's actually another archetype of mine. But that's where we get into this, oh, they're studying with another person and it's just, I once had a teacher say nothing new, especially in the ancient wisdom teachings, nothing new by nobody special. And it's just, you're gonna resonate with certain people, they're gonna resonate with you. You might use, ping somebody with something very specific you say and somebody else may be teaching the same thing and say it in a different way. And it's just one of those, you gotta face your attachment to your own work and where the shadows come up around it and then let it go and say, I'm just here to show up and share and what people do with it is out of my control. Wow, yeah, this is really, this is not said often enough. I mean, that's the thing. I mean that because most of the content creators out there, I mean, our selves include, I mean, most of us who make videos or write articles or do coaching or mentoring or whatever, like we are taught maybe not even taught, but like it's almost assumed out there that you're supposed to be the expert. You're supposed to come across, I mean, you have to build your credibility. You have to, yeah, you have to somehow be credible. So maybe my, and so being credible, how does that relate to not being unattached to what people do? And I love what you said that you had this shadow and I could relate to that too, like, hey, why aren't, I have this valuable information or knowledge or experience to share with you? Like, why aren't you as impacted by what I'm saying as I think you should be or as I was impacted? It happens to me all the time too. And I've learned to just, okay, I gotta be agnostic. Like, there are a combination of experiences in my life that made this particular piece of information so impactful for me, but my audience doesn't have that exact combination of life experiences. So therefore they might find it more impactful later on. They might never find it impactful, but maybe the question here is how do we, yeah, it's like, how do we, it's like there's this spectrum between being authoritative and being, you know, unattached or agnostic to whether or not this stuff helps people. But how do you, yeah, how do you balance that? Oh, well, you said, you know, you have this combination of life experiences. So something that resonates you, you know, may or may. So it's a combination of life experience in my view and my training. It's also that combination of archetypes you came onto the planet with and your soul curriculum, right? So not every soul is gonna be impacted by the same message in the same way or the same teaching. Yeah, I go through it all the time. I'm working with something really deep right now and I'm sharing it with my community. And I'm like, my own mind is blown. And I mean, I worked with someone last week and I don't work actually with a lot of energy healers. We can talk about that later, but every once in a while I do and this woman knocked my socks off. I mean, she moved some stuff through me that I've been working with personally for years. You know, the story of I worked through that one already. Why is it coming up again? And, you know, so this whole idea of credibility and yeah, I've got the laundry list and the curriculum bite on my website of all of the, you know, the trainings and the facilitator stuff and all of that. And the truth is no one really, in my view cares about it, but they see me in body and walk exactly what it is I'm teaching. And a lot of times when I'm sharing content, I love what you share in your article the other day about sharing content is your ministry. And it's like, oh, I'm going through this right now. It's not, I went through it, I healed it, I transformed it. Sometimes I'm sharing it right in the thick of it. And so they're seeing me in body, even that shadow as very sacred part of my story right in the moment. I mean, there's articles I write where I literally start off with some shadow story as I'm writing. As I'm writing, I'm healing it and transforming it. By the end of the article, I'm in a completely different place than when I started because for me, writing is a healing process. I love that. Oh yes, I can totally relate. And, you know, whether it's writing or even making a video, right? Like we both make Facebook live videos. It's like we're getting into it and we realize, oh wow. You know, there's a journey that we're taking ourselves right now that we come through at the end. So I love that you're free framing this content and it can be itself a journey of healing, integration, exploration, and by having people, you know, people who read it or watch it, they're kind of going through that journey a little bit themselves. So how do we do, I mean, I brought up, you know, we were talking about shadow work. Like how is shadow work done? I mean, some people who are watching or listening to this have heard of it. Some people haven't. So how has shadow work done? I mean, from your perspective, how do you work with your clients on it? Well, and of course, you know, again, so much of this is rooted in various ancient, all the ancient traditions. Yes, yes. At the truth of it. So everybody's got their different approach, of course. For me, it's, well, you're looking at much of it behind me. I work through the creative process. The being a creator and or artist archetype was one of mine in and of itself in the shadow because of external stories. We get around, you're not creative enough, you don't know how to do art. If you are an artist as a child with a gift, divine gift, that's not valuable because you can't make any money doing it the start. That in and of itself can be a shadow story. So inner critic shadow especially is one I work deeply with in the art process, regardless of what your inner critic is going off about. We almost intentionally bring it forward during the art process in a very held and safe and sacred way because these creative processes are not about the outcome or the product or because I'm trying to sell a piece of art. I don't sell art every once in a while. Somebody comes in here who wants to buy something off my wall, but that's not the reason I do it. So that's one very, I find safe way to tap into our story. And but in my work one-on-one, I'm not going in there necessarily digging for the shadows, but part of my gift is hearing it in dialogue. So it's a combination of dialogue. If a person's having a hard time articulating, then I'll go into a very specific inquiry process, drop them down into a visualization or a creative process. And I just tell people that the shadows, that's another sort of external, I hesitate to use the word patriarchy, but I'm going to story about shadow means darkness, it means you're evil, we're so afraid of the dark. And in the more sort of feminine traditions, no, we are the holders of the dark to be birthed into the lights. And if we keep the shadows pushed down, that's when you get hit with a cosmic two by four. And I have a very personal several, but the most recent Dark Knight of the Soul story in 2016 that I had to surrender to those shadows and just be with it. That was the only way to come out the other side. And what was born out of that is this whole new, newer body of work that I'm sitting with. Because before that time, it was more sort of hands-on bodywork, herbalism, those sorts of things. And I loved that part of my journey, but I discovered that's not really why I was here on the planet. And if it wasn't for all that shadow work, I was forced into it. Like those shadows were pinging me. I was not ignorant to them, but I was ignoring them until I could not anymore. And then that was like literally shut myself down for an entire summer kind of thing. Couldn't go anywhere, couldn't do anything, found two or three spiritual mentors at the time that really helped shift things for me. That's why going it alone is not recommended either. Yeah, wow, that's amazing. I love what you just, yeah, I love this reframe that shadow, the dark, it's like if we approach it with fear of the unknown essentially, right? Like then we push it, we, that's been the tradition or not traditional, maybe the Western or the more modern way of looking at it. But I love this that you're bringing in like, welcome. I mean, it's, I'll give you one, maybe silly or not silly example for my own life. I used to be literally afraid of the dark. I mean, talking about the dark, but as a kid, many kids are, but I feel like I was, maybe more, maybe that's normal. But even as an adult sometimes, you know, I go to bed actually a couple hours before my wife does. So I'm in a very dark room. I'm, we, you know, got the blackout curtains, everything. The room is really dark. I mean, you know, as dark as we can make it. And sometimes it's like, I hear noises and then creakings and like, why is that happening? And, I mean, actually funny thing was just last night, it was that experience again, like, you know, kind of hearing things that may or may not, you know, shouldn't have been there or whatever. And it's like, I found myself having the direction of I could be fearful of it, maybe turn on a light or whatever, or I could, yeah, like be befriended or know that I'm cared for, know that it's, and so kind of like an interesting analogy, right? That we all deal with physically in our lives. But I feel like it's the same thing emotionally or psychologically too. It's like, it's like that part of myself, just, you know, when we started talking about this experience that I had in MasterHeart that we had together, I guess. It's like I could either, you know, push that down and which then it comes up, you know, kind of blowing up or I could say, hmm, what's there and how can I work with that? So being willing, being willing essentially not to repress things that can have value or wants to be brought into the light, right? Yeah, and that's the gift of shadow. I mean, that's the thing about shadow work. It's like, once you go there, the biggest gifts and golden nuggets of what you have to share here in this world are literally burved out of that. They are, if we were all, you know, but I should preface it by saying, when I work with people, I do, you can do shadow work and have a whole lot of fun and be completely wild all at the same time. So it's not all, you know, but, you know, and just so deep all the time, but it's, you know, a lot of what happens out there sort of in the new age community now is it's all the light, it's all the light. Let's go to the light, you know, and a lot of that, that's great, but it's with some future goal of ascension a lot of times. And it's through the shadows that we're able to bring the sacred into every aspect, every moment of our life, including those that are not so joyous, if you will. It's a way of being that says, when things are rough, I still understand, like you talked about the unknown, guess what, the joyous stuff, the vision stuff, the dreams, that's also still in the unknown. It's all in the unknown, really. It's all in the mystery. So that embracing of the unknown comes with both, you know, let's embrace the unknown of what's scary, but let's also embrace the unknown of what's creative and exciting. It's an opening. And, you know, when you talk about being afraid of the literal dark, you know, in the natural cycles of nature, which, you know, I talk about and I teach on and, you know, I even design my business and what I do in my business around those cycles, it's like when I learned to, you know, at the winter time when it's dark, first of all, that's womb space, you know, we all started out being very comfortable and cozy as fetuses in a womb space that was dark. And it actually was coming out into the light that was super shocking. So now it's like, oh, that winter's coming. I look forward to it every year because I feel like I have permission to cocoon and hibernate a little bit because that's where nature is at in the moment. So it's like, oh, there's no reason to be afraid of the unknown. In fact, we don't know anyway, so why not get excited about it? It's interesting. Now, how, if someone is going through, well, let's just say a tough day or a tough week or a tough month or tough year. You know, how do you, what's your guidance there? Because that is, the toughness is often related, especially those of us who are here in this community of business, you know, self-employment and the tough, the difficulty can be about the unknown. What's gonna, like am I going to be able to make this work? Could be career, but it could be relationship-related too and I make this work, that kind of thing. But how do we, what's your guidance there on this? Like, how do we deal with the difficult emotions? Well, I think many of us are coming, what I'll say, coming off a tough year right now, right? And first and foremost is a lot of self-compassion and grace and love. I mean, all of this, whether you're working shadow or you're working light, at its root it's coming from love. And that's why we tell people, I'm like, I'm intense, I'm a truth teller, but make no mistake, I'm a fiercely loving truth teller. If it's not coming from love, I'm quiet. And I tell people, if I'm quiet, that's when you gotta watch out. But it's, and grace is one of those sort of spiritual words that's hard to put a definition around. But it, again, comes back to the, like we just, part of our having the difficult time piece really goes back to that fear. We're trying to grip and control that, which we cannot control in business. Do we know if this is gonna work? No, we don't, we really, truly don't. I mean, we have evidence based on what our revenue is and is this working and that sort of thing. But if there's anything that 2020 taught us, it's that, you know, Carolyn Mace, one of my, you know, great spiritual teachers out in the world, she talks about it all the time, especially this past year when she's done teachings. It's like things can change and disappear in the blink of an eye, in the blink of an eye. So what can we do? We can be really present to whatever's coming up, treat it with grace, use it as fuel for the fire, if you will, as passionate, even anger. You know, I do a class on anger and it's like, how do we turn anger into direction, into passionate direction? You know, you don't have to necessarily be a social activist, but anger can be great fuel if it's harnessed appropriately and not in chaos, you know, and burning everything down in your path. So elementals of nature, again, has its, can nourish or can destroy. And, you know, I teach people how to work with those energies so that in hopes it doesn't destroy, although sometimes, you know, I've done it in my own businesses many times. I'm like, okay, this isn't working anymore. I'm gonna burn the whole thing to the ground and start over. But that happens to be one of my archetypes that is comfortable with doing that. You know, many people are not. And that's really where it's understanding your patterns, your rhythms. I do some archetype work with folks. And of course, if they're really deep in the shadows of depression or something like that, I stay in my ethical boundaries and say, okay, we need you to also work with a mental health professional, either together or go work with that person first and come to me later when you're ready to kind of, you're not in intense trauma mode anymore. Right, yeah, that makes sense. Archetypes is fascinating too. And so do you help clients and students with identifying the archetypes that are gonna be helpful to them at this point? Say a bit about that. Well, there's all sorts of schools of thought on archetype work. I'm not a Jungian therapist, although I have deeply studied his work. So there's different approaches to it. Some approaches are kind of like an astrology chart, like you come onto the planet with some strong ones. And so we look at a little bit of that, but then we all go through ages and stages. So some show up more strongly than others. And each one of them has its own shadow and light. And it's not, that's one thing where I kind of get my frustration around energy workers out there in the world. It's not, this is not positive and negative energy. That's not how energy, it's neutral. And there's no such thing necessarily as like this 50-50 balance either. There's different sort of, we're on a continuum within our own archetypes often. And some people assume archetypes are just sort of physical or I should say human-based embodiments, whereas other people work with animal. And I'm one of those work with animal archetypes, places and spaces, for example, like I'm a bridge oftentimes between sort of the mystical and the earth-found realms. So that can be an archetype. So yes, I work with, what do we think you kind of came here on the planet with? And then what's really present for you now or which ones do you want to bring more of those aspects into your life and your work? Let's say somebody, maybe somebody was born a creative, like I said, but they had so many external stories around that, that they've shut that one off completely. And it's like, okay, what can we do to gently bring that one back into your realms, into your daily life? Because if you're ignoring that genius, we know we all, then we end up getting in businesses that really aren't ours to do because we're ignoring what we came here for. Right, right. Well, given that we just have a few minutes, I want to give people the opportunity to learn how to work with you more. Do you have, whether it's an upcoming program or service you want to mention, or what should the next step be as people watch this and want to? You know, I certainly, I'm generous with time. That's just one of my values. And so I always have, if you don't know, because I work in a lot of different realms, I always do discovery work. There is very specific to archetypal work. I have a, it's a self-paced program, but you have the option to work one-on-one with me through it as well. It's called, It's Good to Be the Queen. So that's my cheeky rendition of the shadow and light side of the way the queen archetype shows up for most women. And I broke it down into kind of four sort of versions of that archetype and which ones are your shadows and which ones are your light. And there's a creative practice, a very simple creative practice is a way to bring that in. So it's a teaching on archetypes, very specific teaching on the queen and her light and shadow and then tons and tons of practices to work with both of those light and shadow aspects. Because the whole point is you don't, you don't fix shadows. You bring them to light and you love them. Cause I get asked that question all the time, how do I fix those shadows? I'm like, you're not broken. We don't fix it. We don't need to fix it at all. We need to honor it and love it for what it is and know when it's coming up and what's triggering it to come up. So that's one way of working and then of course the one-on-one and I'm in development for some more seasonal living, harmonic living work. So that's not on my calendar yet, but I'm sure there's gonna be a spring creative process around where you wanna put your focused energy in for all the ideas that come up between January and March now, sort of the time to say, I'm discerning on what ideas wanna really take my focus. So that's coming and I did a complimentary that I can share called Intro to Harmonic Living that whenever the time is right to share links, I can share links. Yeah, there are gonna be links below the video or wherever people are watching or listening to this. There's notes and be sure to check out the notes to Dina's website and social media links and any other links that should find helpful, what we put it in there. Dina, thank you so much for the work that you do, the way that you hold space for others to do it and the wisdom that you bring just in your content and in your interactions with others. I really appreciate your generosity of spirit and of sharing. So thank you, thank you. Thank you. I'm honored. Thank you for the same. Yeah, thank you.