Living A Spirit Led Life- ZofiaRennea Morales

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Hi there. Before we start, Brian would like to share a couple of things with you. First, did you know that Brian is a life coach, a grief guide, and a mental fitness trainer?

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Hi everybody, this is Brian back with another episode of Grief to Growth. And today I've got with me Sophia Renea Morales. She's an award-winning global strategist and she's a former a physicist. She had it all: a high-powered career, loving husband, gorgeous properties, adventure, good friends, you name it. She was living the dream until her fast-paced life actually screeched to a halt and actually left her in pieces. She was brought to the edge of death by undiagnosed chronic Lyme disease, and she was left bankrupt in every area of her life. She was desperate for a miracle, and she cried in her most heartfelt prayer, 'I will do anything to get better.' And that single prayer triggered an unanticipated Kundalini awakening, a spiritual activation that unlocked her gifts as an intuitive, a healer, and a mystic that changed her life completely. She's now the host of the talk radio program Sovereign Self, and she's the creator of Conscious Enlightenment Process. As a transformation alchemist and teacher, she guides clients to find the gold within their most painful life transitions, helping people from all backgrounds notice how life wraps the best gifts in the shittiest wrapping paper. Her scientific and corporate background appeals to clients who appreciate the way she integrates a pragmatic woo and real life into her world, into her work. Seasoned with love and laughter, she guides her clients through their own spiritual crises and onto their paths of passion and purpose with warmth, joy, tenderness, and play. So with that, I'd like to welcome Zavia to the podcast.

Thank you, Brian. I'm so happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm really happy to have you here. It sounds like the work that you do fits right in with the theme of the podcast, which is, as you know, grief to growth. It sounds like you went from kind of a riches to rags story. So tell me about how that transformation occurred.

I think of it a little bit like a reverse Job. If you know the story of Job from the Bible, God and the devil made this, or had opposing theories, I guess, on whether Job had great faith because he was well blessed, or if he just had great faith and therefore was blessed. Um, and so the devil took away, like, all of his good— goodness in his life— his health, his family, his riches, all of the stuff— and left him destitute in the dirt to see if he would renounce God. And, uh, he did not. And eventually he became healthy and got all of the gifts back. Mine was kind of the reverse in that it was, let's take everything away and see if she can find some faith. Because I started from a very, what should I say, rational humanistic sort of position.

Oh, really? Okay.

Yeah.

So you were a biophysicist, was it, before?

Yes, I studied a combination of biochemistry and chemistry and played with all the big magnets and that kind of stuff. This was before biophysics was even a term.

Okay.

And so it was very early on that arc. And so that's what I studied in school. And as I got down to the end of my advanced degrees, it became very clear to me that as a scientist, you are your primary experiment. There are a lot of scientists who die of what they study, and because there's a fundamental problem with the way that we approach things. We take the minimum amount of precautions that we know that we need when we're studying something new, because it gets cumbersome to take all of the precautions and it gets prohibitively expensive. So you only take what you know that you need for this particular situation. The problem is you don't know what you need. When you're studying something brand new. Um, Marie Curie is kind of a case in point, right? She, she died literally of studying radiation because they didn't understand the precautions that were really necessary, right? Um, and I decided I wanted kids with the right numbers of fingers and toes. And so, okay, what does a scientist who's played with all of the big magnets, do as a career pivot. And at that time, I was really good with the computer side of things. And so I went into computer operations in finance.

Okay. So very, very rational type careers and very rational decisions and very male dominated. And yeah, so, so I'm curious as to what your spiritual outlook was like then.

It was, if you'd have asked me at the time, I would have said I was spiritual but not religious. But I would also have, if you'd have pressed me, confessed that it wasn't an active kind of spirituality thing. It's like, yeah, okay, there's God. And, you know, I don't really want to truck with the rest of it. My upbringing was extremely fundamentalist. And that kind of put me off the whole religion track completely, because what I saw coming out of that fundamentalist aspect was the politics and the power and control and some of these other human things that get woven into religion that have nothing to do with your relationship with God, which is what religion is at its highest and best. It took me a long time to come to the point that I could even see that religion had a highest and best.

Yeah, I think that's a fairly common path. You know, I think I was raised as a fundamentalist as well. And a lot of us either reject religion entirely, which some people do, or we'll go to like the nominally spiritual but not religious. I haven't rejected the whole thing, but I don't really— it's not part of my life.

Yeah, exactly. I have no interest in joining anyone's particular congregation. Yeah, I have a congregation of one.

Yes, yes. I've heard many people say that. I've said it myself, so I understand that.

Yeah.

So you, um, you were undiagnosed Lyme disease. So how did that manifest?

Oh my goodness. It manifested over the course of several decades. Um, looking through my medical records with the doctor who finally diagnosed me, we figure I caught it when I was about 9 or 10 years old.

Oh, wow. Okay.

Um, I didn't have any of the classic signs, and even if I had had the classic signs, at the time that I caught it, they didn't know what it was. And so, you know, obviously I wasn't going to get treated for something they didn't know what it was. Right. And actually, in the '80s, early '90s, I had run across an article that it was the thing. They had just discovered what it was. And I was reading this article about it. And I'm like, wow, that sounds— that sounds like me. That sounds like what I'm going through. And I got down to the end of the article and it says, but don't worry, Lyme is only transmitted by this one tick that's specific to this one little corner of the US. And I'd never been to that part of the US. And so I went, oh, well, shit, I guess that's not going to be my answer. Well, since then they've discovered that Lyme can be carried by any tick and it's really a global phenomenon. If there are ticks, Lyme is a possibility.

So how did, uh, so when you were finally diagnosed, was this before or after kind of the big crash?

The big crash? Yeah, it was kind of in the middle of the big crash, um, because I, I was getting— how to describe it— it felt like I had these, these rocks I was dragging around with me, and every year someone would add another rock onto the top of my pile that I had to drag around with me. And so just doing the simple things in life had gotten really exhausting, for lack of a better word. And I'd gotten to the point where I was catching absolutely everything that went around, to the point that I could stay home and still catch it. My husband would bring it home, not get it himself, but he would bring it home and I would come down sick. And it was a really frustrating time in my life because we were addressing everything that we could address. I had problem— I had cholesterol that was out of control. I had a prediabetes sort of situation. So we're working with all of that stuff, but I'm not feeling any better as a result of doing the things I'm supposed to be doing. And So that's hugely frustrating, as you can imagine, making all these lifestyle changes and it's not helping. And the other thing that's happening at the same time is I'm starting to not be able to find my words. Or like, my husband will come home and, hey, how was your day? What happened today? And I couldn't remember a single thing that had gone on that day. What the heck, right? Yeah, I— this is what happens when you're in your 70s, your 80s, your 90s. Hopefully you can push it off far, right?

Right, right.

Not in your mid-40s. What the heck? And so it finally got to the point that I really couldn't hold down a job because employers hate it when you're sick all the time, right? You know, and at some point they're like, you're just not useful to us. And so I got to this point that I really couldn't work, and then we had the financial setbacks on my husband's career that put us in bankruptcy. And so it was actually as we were in going through this process of bankruptcy that I managed to connect with the doctor that actually diagnosed me with the Lyme disease. And my awakening moment spilled directly out of the treatment for the Lyme, because the conventional treatment for Lyme is to kind of carpet bomb with antibiotics, right? And the problem with Lyme is it's very toxic when it's alive, and it's worse when you kill it off. Because when it's alive, it just kind of trickles the toxins out. When you kill it off, it explodes and just releases them all at once. And so you go from feeling pretty crappy to like, just kill me now. It's just not a, not a fun experience to go through at all. And it made my memory problems much worse. I'd gotten to the point that I would go in the kitchen to make a simple 30-minute meal, you know, we'll make a salad and we'll put a steak on the grill kind of thing. And I couldn't do that in less than 3 hours because I couldn't, I literally couldn't remember what I was doing. And I would have to keep reminding myself, well, why am I in the kitchen? Oh yes, I'm going to make some dinner. And, you know, look around and find the clues to figure out what I was making for dinner. It was really, really scary in a lot of ways. I— one of the analogies that I use for this is it's like you decide you're going to go out into the garage for something and you open the door and the garage is gone. What the heck? So you close the door and you turn around to go back into the house and the house has now disappeared as well. That's what it was like trying to, to keep track of what I was doing. And so this is what led up to the awakening moment. I, I was in the process of being treated. The guy who had diagnosed me was the regional expert in Lyme. This is the guy that people send their patients to in the state and all the surrounding states because he's got a pretty good success rate in curing this stuff. And His plan was a 2-year plan, bunch of exotic rotating antibiotics along with these clearing IVs that you would have periodically. And some of the antibiotics were also IV. And anytime you say IV in front of a treatment, you can figure it's, you know, $250, $300, $400. And we're in bankruptcy. There's, there's no spare money. So I called the insurance company to find out what they would pick up of this treatment plan. And I— God, I remember this phone call. Holy crap. I told the lady what was going on, the diagnosis. I've got this plan, want to understand the benefits. And she says, quote, we don't believe in chronic Lyme. Well, isn't that freaking convenient for you guys?

Unfortunately, I've heard this before. Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah, it's really hard to get any kind of support around clearing Lyme disease. And it's a really challenging bugger to get rid of after you've had it for a while because it takes on 3 different forms. Only one of the forms is susceptible to the antibiotics and it, it partners with other organisms to kind of protect itself and they form these coalitions.

Oh, wow.

And it, it's, it's a tough one. And so the upshot of my phone call with the insurance company was, we're going to pay for 60 days of oral antibiotics, full stop. And by the way, your doctor is out of network. That's all it really needed at that moment, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cherry on top. Boom. And so we don't have the money to pay for it. The insurance company has said they're basically not going to play. We can't get any loans because we're in bankruptcy. So what do you do? I can't go get another job. My husband's already working full-time and going back to school full-time. So he doesn't have spare cycles, not to mention he's taking care of everything that I can't take care of. And so what do you do? And I decided that my, my final option really was to call my folks. And that was a difficult decision to come to because they'd made it very clear since I was, you know, knee-high to a grasshopper, you turn 18, you move out of the house, you are on your own. Don't expect to come back and live in the basement. Don't ask for loans and money. This is not, you know, when you're an adult, you do the adulting thing and you take care of yourself. And, you know, I did that for 3 decades, but I figured this might be the momentary exception, right? We know exactly what the problem is. Once we get the problem fixed, I can go back to earning, I can repay, I can do all the things. Things. And I called my parents and the bank of dad was empty. And that was like my last Hail Mary kind of thought on this thing. And I, I was out of ideas. And that night I laid down next to my husband to try to sleep and my brain just would not wind down. Well, part of it was the disease, right? Because when your brain gets to a certain level of damage, it doesn't go through regular sleep cycles. And then on top of it, I can't even meditate, which has kind of been my stopgap to, to be halfway functional in the day was to just, well, if I can't sleep, I'll just meditate. And at least I'm a little refreshed in the morning. Couldn't even do that because my brain is like a trapped squirrel at this point, and it's bouncing off all the walls that I've already gone down. And, well, the job, or a loan, or, yeah, and all of the doors that are closed. And it was about 3 in the morning that I surrendered. And that's to paint it pretty. Surrender is a pretty word for what happened. I was just so exhausted, and I had nothing left. Surrender sounds voluntary. This is not voluntary. Yeah.

Yeah.

And the thing that happened in the quiet that followed the exhaustion was this thought that I could pray. I could talk to God. And I thought about all of my childhood history of stuff and what the religion had said about God and all this kind of thing. And I decided I was going to throw all of that out, and I was going to talk to the God that I knew in my heart. And the God that I knew in my heart cares. And would never cause me any pain. And so I said, God, I will do anything to get better. And I didn't have any expectations in that moment because, I mean, you hear these people, I've been praying and praying and praying and I haven't gotten any answers, right? I got an answer straight away. There was a little voice in the back of my mind that said, really, anything? And that will kind of slow your roll. Yeah, because anything doesn't have a lot of edges, right? I went back to what do I know about the God that I know in my heart, because my edges are I'm not gonna deliberately hurt somebody else. I'm not gonna lie or steal or do that kind of stuff. I'm not going to become an axe murderer, you know. These, these are my edges. And the God that I know in my heart would never ask me to do any of those things. So to be very specific, I said, God, for you, I will do anything. And I got my first miracle because I fell asleep.

Mm-hmm.

And I woke in the morning with a clarity on what my next step was, which was to go get one of these clearing IVs that I had no clue how I was gonna pay for.

Wow.

And from that point, there were a bunch of serendipities that unrolled around my healing, and I actually was guided down a path to an herbalist who was able to help me clear the the Lyme in about 3 months, as opposed to the, the conventional doctor who was going to take 2 years and maybe 70% chance. So that was a beautiful, beautiful blessing that came out of it. But I frequently forget to tell that part of the story because of the serendipities that unrolled into the, the opening of psychic senses and gifts and that kind of stuff that was like Wow. Yeah.

So, you know, as you're telling that, you know, my program, of course, is called Grief to Growth. And people will sometimes ask me about grief. And they're like, does someone have to die for me to be in grief? And the answer is clearly no, right? I mean, I'm sure that you would call what you went through a severe grief event. Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief? Most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up, so you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to in the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry a loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it: the community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing— listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there.

I was grieving a lot of things before I even got to this change, right? Because I'd lost my ability to have my career. I'd lost my identity as this like corporate mover and shaker. I'd lost my health, not to mention that, you know, we were serial relocators, and relocating is like dying in a lot of different ways because you give up everything that's familiar and go to a whole different part of the country. So yeah, really familiar with loss and grieving processes.

Yeah.

Not a fan. I gotta say, I'm still not a fan, but I, I go into it much more willingly now than I used to because I've discovered that the more I just allow it to be what it is in this moment and accept what it is in this moment and in a lot of ways lean into the fact that it will never be the same, it allows me to get through it faster. Yeah. If I just allow myself to do the crying and the gnashing of teeth and the moaning and wailing, I mean, literally wailing. This is not metaphorical. This is like, tell the neighbors, don't call the police. I just need to do this. Yeah, it, it gets me through it a lot faster than if I try not to do that, or if I try to have all of my shit together for everybody else in the world. Um, it, that doesn't serve me as well as just allowing me to, to have the meltdowns.

There seems to be something about that process of just accepting what is, and you use the term surrender. And I think that's similar to the start, you know, what I'm saying, acceptance. It's just like, because we fight, we fight what's going on, we resist what's going on.

Yeah, we have a lot of thoughts of, well, it should not be this way.

Right, right.

Well, it is. So yeah, there's no point in bashing your emotional head against the, well, it ought not to be this way. The child should never die before the parent, the husband should never die before the wife, or whatever your, your wrong situation is. Yeah, it is your situation.

So, and there's something else situation, you said when you, when you, when you made that prayer, I said, I will do anything. And then you caught yourself with the anything. But you said the God that I know, you know, so how is it different from the God that you were taught growing up?

Oh, the God that I was taught growing up is a vindictive, jealous son of a bitch. Okay. Who gives away land that other people are living on to his quote unquote chosen people. And then says to the chosen people, go wipe them all out if they don't want to just give it to you. That is, that's not the God that I know in my heart as a God made up by man. The God that I know in my heart is love, is everything, is acceptance, is, is so caring that he allows us to do whatever it is that we feel we want to do and experience. Good, bad, neutral, whatever it is. That's the whole free will gig. You know, if you want to experience being an asshole, you can do that. If you want to go experience being a victim, you can do that. If you want to experience being a martyr, you can do that. If you want to be a whole balanced person who is able to help and receive at the same time, you can do that. And that's, that's different than the Old Testament God I was raised with.

Yeah.

And I've personally come to the conclusion that all of the religions out there just call God by a different name. And they have obviously different rules and traditions and things that hang around that experience of the divine. That's, that's our human flavoring. We do that. We're gonna have human flavoring.

Right.

But at its core, God is divine, is love.

You described your experience as a Kundalini awakening. So if you could, for the audience, first tell people what, what that is and why you feel like you had a Kundalini awakening.

A Kundalini awakening comes out of the Indian tradition, and it's traditionally described as the unfolding of the divinity within you. And that divinity sits at the end of your tailbone, basically. And when it unfolds and you fully connect and embody with that divinity, it unfolds up your spine, all the way up through your neck and out the top of your head. And when that unfolding happens— and there are people who deliberately invite this experience and train for this experience. And then there— it just sometimes happens to people. It can be triggered by traumatic events. It can be triggered by illness. It can be triggered by drug abuse. And when that happens, it, it is either profoundly uplifting and enlightening, or it's almost hell on earth. Because if you have not worked through your shit, it will run into all of your shit on the way up, and it will cause all kinds of interesting things to happen in your body as it's trying to rise up to connect to what you could describe as your higher self, the disembodied part of your soul. Your soul has an embodied aspect, which is what sits in your— and keeps your body alive. But then what people talk about as higher self actually sits outside of your body. It's just another aspect of your soul. And so the whole thing is that this divinity becomes fully consciously embodied. So that's, that's what it is. And when you become consciously embodied like that, there are psychic things, psychic gifts that turn on. For lack of a better description. You— some people know things, some people are able to hear things from the other side, some people are able to see the energies that exist in this world, whether you want to call them crossed-over dead people or angels or demons or whatever it is. And that is literally what turned on for me. And it was all of the things. I started seeing crossed-over dead people. I started seeing fairies in the garden in the backyard. I started knowing things about people that I had no way to know, knowing things about the past or the coming future, speaking in languages I'd never learned, just spontaneously. And it made the scientist in me really concerned, to say the least. It's like, girl, you've got more brain damage going on than you realize. They're going to send the guys with the coat and the wraparound sleeves, and you're going to end up institutionalized. You best not share this with anyone, right? And it was, for a few weeks there, it was very concerning in a lot of ways. And I've come to realize that we all have support teams on the other side, whether you want to call them angels or ancestors or some combination of the above, who are here to kind of support us as we're going along. Guardian angels, that kind of thing, you know. And some people experience that to a greater or lesser extent. But my team was pretty fabulous with me as I was going through this because it was a serious struggle. The scientists did not want to accept any of what was happening here as having any sort of a woo explanation.

Yeah, yeah.

But it was— I finally came home from the grocery store one afternoon. This is the thing that I needed to get me to accept it, apparently. And my neighbor was helping her husband into the house next door. They're in their mid to late 80s, and she's staggering under his weight. He's bent over in what's clearly a great deal of pain. And so, okay, fine, I'm gonna drop everything. The ice cream can just melt. And I help him into the house, and as we're getting him into the house, she's telling me how concerned she is. His kidneys have gotten so bad, it's never been like this bad before, and she's gonna get an emergency appointment with the kidney doctor. Like, you go do that, girl. And so I'm standing with him in the living room, and I know them both to be very devout people, what I would describe as some of the best religious people out there. They, they live their faith, they do the good works in the world, they, they don't judge people who don't believe the way that they are, you know. That's is like your finest example of religious people. And I'm standing with him, his eyes are closed, I can see his lips are moving, and I just know that he's having a private moment with God. And I don't want to just watch him, it seems really intrusive. So I closed my eyes, and when I closed my eyes, I saw this little tiny flame in my mind's eye. It looked a little bit like a pilot light, but it's dancing and sputtering the way they do right before they go out. And I'm given this understanding that that's where his life force is right now. He's on the edge of just— and he's out of here. Hmm. Now, the last time I talked to God was 2 weeks ago. Not comfortable with this concept yet. And I haven't acknowledged who I'm talking to in my mind at this moment. But in my mind, I asked, 'Is there something we can do about that?' This was not the scientist, clearly, who asked that question, because the scientist knows that kidney disease is a one-way ticket out of here. You can slow it down, but you're not going to change it. But there was a part of me that felt like there might be something that could be done. And so I asked, and when I asked the question, that little flickery flame became like this bonfire, and he dropped my hands. And he's— well, my eyes flew open because he dropped my hands.

I'm like, what?

What?

Is there an emergency? And he says, are you a healer? And I'm kind of looking around to see who he's talking to because, mm, no, this faith healing stuff is not— mm-mm, scientist doesn't truck with that. And I was saved from having to come up with an answer by his wife coming back and saying that she got the emergency appointment, but they have to leave right now. And so we hustled them back out to the car, and I went and hid in my house for 2 days. And it took 2 days for the scientist to convince me that nothing had happened., and for my upbringing to guilt me into going next door to seeing how I can help. Because I was raised in Minnesota, you help your neighbors, you, you bring them casserole, you shovel their sidewalks, you know, that kind of thing when, when this kind of thing goes on. And I hadn't even checked on them, so I guilted myself back next door and fully convinced at this point that she's either at the ICU watching him pass or she's planning a funeral. And I tapped on the door and she opened it. I'm like, okay, she's home, might not be so bad, we'll see. And then she smiled at me. I'm like, okay, this might actually be all right. How are you doing? What's going on? She invites me in and she says, Jay has so many questions for you. I'm like, uh-oh, I'm already over the doorstep. I can't run away now. Trapped. And so she brings me into the living room, and there he is. He's kicked back in his Barcalounger. He's got his drink at his elbow, his book and his remote, and he's looking fat and happy. I'm like, how you doing, Jay? He says, really good. And you know, it was the strangest thing. What, what do you mean? By the time I got to the doctor's office, I was feeling pretty good. And they ran me through the entire battery of tests that they run me through, and my kidney function came back normal. Oh wow. And that was the moment that the scientist had to sit down, shut the fuck up.

Yeah. Wow.

Because Something happened there that does not fit the scientific paradigm. Scientists like to call miracles spontaneous regression.

Exactly.

Right.

Yeah, I love that term, spontaneous regression.

Yes, it's, it's basically scientific talk for, and a miracle occurred.

Yeah.

And so that was the moment when I had to really step back and look at all of the things that had happened in the prior 2 weeks with a very different lens. And that Lance started with, what if, what if it really is true? These things that I've been seeing in the backyard are actual things that I'm seeing in the backyard and not figments of my imagination. What if it really is true that these— what I want to say— these special thoughts that arrive occasionally in my mind are actually from my higher self, or perhaps God, however you want to define it. What if that is in fact the case and it's not random brain noise, which feels different? It's a different experience for me. Yeah, and that started me down this whole other path.

I love that question, what if. I think that's brilliant because again, as the My background is chemical engineering. So my background is scientific also.

And so, so you know, from whence I come.

So we overanalyze things, we look for alternate explanations. There's a woman I know, her name is Suzanne Giesemann. She's a former naval commander. She's now a medium. And she uses a term called no other explanation. So it's like, you know, sometimes we run out of, out of these rational explanations for things. But we're going to try everything before we get to that point. But that question, just what if, just leaving the possibility up, because that's what a lot of people who think they're scientific don't do. Yeah, they don't leave even that possibility open.

Yeah, exactly. And I think some of it comes from this evolution from scientific theory becoming quote unquote scientific fact. And there's a spectrum even in science, right? There's the theory, and eventually it becomes an established theory, and then it becomes like this accepted foundation, and pretty soon it becomes this fact that's quote-unquote immutable. And it takes generations for something that's been accepted as immutable to be changed to something else, like the fact that we orbit around the sun and that the world is not flat. It took generations for science to accept that, yes, there is enough data for this new outlook, this new paradigm for us to work from, that we can use that as something solid we can jump off of. And I think we see a fair amount of that in science still. I mean, even if you go back to Lyme disease, for example, it's only 30 years that we've known about Lyme disease and that we've started to discover things about Lyme disease. And it The insurance is going to be the last one to get on that bandwagon.

Right. Yeah. You know, that is—

we're lucky now the doctors are like, oh, okay, we know what this is, a thing. This is a real thing.

Yeah. You know, and we think we, you know, we look back at the mistakes science made in the past, like you said, like the Earth orbiting around the sun. And people said, no, that's impossible. That couldn't possibly be. And but we still have scientists making the same mistakes today. We know we say something, oh no, that's impossible. That cannot possibly be. And we know what Lyme disease is. We know it's only caused by this one tick. We know this. And then it's like, oops.

Well, it turns out, yeah.

So there's that what if question that I think a lot of times we're missing.

Yeah, exactly. And I think part of the reason that we see this happen is because, well, we're human. And we don't like it when the facts on which we're making our choices change, evolve, become different. It's threatening to our egos in a lot of ways when that happens.

Yeah, it is. I think we become so closely identified with our beliefs that we confuse our beliefs with ourselves. So when our beliefs are attacked, and scientists don't even realize they're beliefs, they think they're facts. But when our beliefs are attacked, we feel like we're being attacked.

Right, right. Well, and then there's confirmation bias that goes along with it, right?

Absolutely.

And there's this human predisposition to want to throw out anything that doesn't confirm what you believe.

Yeah, yeah. So after this, this awakening you had, so you— did you go back to work at a computer science job? Or what did you do after that?

No, I went full-on woo.

Okay, wow.

Okay, I went full woo for, uh, 8 or 9 years, and now I'm, I'm in what I want to— I'm in a space now where I feel comfortable walking with a foot in both worlds, and I'm kind of pivoting and positioning myself to basically do both things at the same time.

Tell me how that works.

Tell me how that works. It's a lot like walking. It's my favorite analogy for it because there is a space in this world for the scientific. We've proven that with our Western, our Western culture and technology. Obviously, there are amazing things you can do with logic and ration and reason and experimentation. But in the Western world, we've thrown out a lot of the woo. And I think that we have lost a great deal when we did that because we have disconnected ourselves from the things that bring us joy. We have disconnected ourselves from the world in a lot of ways, from nature, from our fellow human beings. In taking an excessively rational approach to things. We tend to think, well, you know, it will benefit all of us, meaning humans, if we put this development over here or this whatever it is over here without concern for the impact that has on the other creatures who are inhabiting this world with us. Right. It's going to change habitat. It's going to destroy things. And ultimately, it will begin to change what's going on in the environment, the local environment and the larger environment. And we're seeing that now with the death of coral reefs and that kind of stuff. Now it's still an open issue whether that wouldn't have happened anyway as the world has gone through heating and cooling cycles over its long history. There is an open issue on how much of that is directly related to us, but we surpassed human sustainable population in the '70s. So I start to think, yeah, I may have— we may be contributing more than we'd like to admit.

Yeah, yeah.

And so that— I think there is a place for the woo in all of that because it's your spiritual side that guides you into work that you love. It's your spiritual side that will show you the reason that you're really here in this world. And it's also your spiritual side that brings miracles into your life. And when we close all of that off, I think it really affects our, our mental well-being. It really impacts our psychology. We've done amazing things with internet and connectivity, and I love all of those things. But we've sacrificed our ability to really be present in a room with each other. And that's a much higher price to pay than we realize. And I think part of the reason we're seeing so much violence right now against each other is because we've stopped being in the rooms together. It's very hard to do violence to someone that you know and respect. You have to make them into other to do that. You have to make them into something less than human, a monster, to do that to someone.

It's really interesting you say that because I was just listening yesterday with stuff that's going on in Congress, and I guess one of the things that they're trying to do is get rid of the voting by proxy where people can vote remotely. I'm trying to get people back in a room together with each other because it's a lot harder, as you said, to see somebody as other when you actually sit with them and talk to them, which we don't tend to do a lot anymore. And so that this, this separation we have allows that.

Yeah, I saw it even at the bank when, when I would before the internet was even a really big thing because it's a global bank. And so a lot of the people that you work with on a daily basis are, are very remote from where you are. They're in South America, they're in another state. And I found one of the best ways to like diffuse a situation if there was like a hostility happening or an uncooperation happening was to bring them into the data center. I will fly you up here, come have a tour, and get to know everybody who's running and supporting your application. And after one of those visits, we would never have that problem again because they knew the people now. They knew Joe and that he had 3 amazing kids and that he really is passionate about making sure that that their system is up on time. Yeah, you know, and we knew more than also about what their situation is, because they'd have an opportunity to sit and share with us about, you know, the challenges that are going on in their branch or whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I want to shift and talk about your work some. So you claim that spirituality can bring like really practical solutions. So how does that work? Because, you know, I think a lot of people now, because we are so busy, you know, we don't take the time. I don't have the time for spiritual stuff. What— how is that going to benefit me? So what would you— how would you answer that?

I would answer that is this. Look at the things in your life that are not fitting you right now. Okay. And we all have these spaces in our life where there's something that's just irking you. It's like, I can't, I can't lose the weight that I know I need to lose to make my health better, or, you know, my, my marriage is just not working right, or whatever the thing is. And a lot of times the problem is seated in your subconscious mind, okay? And your subconscious is like this interface, I think of it, between your conscious mind and your soul. And your subconscious is here to serve you. It does a lot of amazing things for you. It, it makes you breathe when you need to breathe. It controls your heart rate. It does a bunch of things like that. Um, and when you start to connect into that subconscious mind to find out why you're having this problem, then the answers become clear because the subconscious is a faithful servant, but it's not very clever. And so something that you learned perhaps as a 3-year-old about the importance of carrying extra weight on your body to keep you safe, um, is probably no longer applicable in your situation, but your subconscious mind does not realize that. It knows that extra weight on your body will make you less attractive to certain people who might violate your boundaries in one way or another. And until you go into that psycho-spiritual side of things and take care of that feeling of safety that you need, that 20 pounds is not going to leave. 30 pounds or 50 pounds or 150 pounds, whatever the the amount was for you. And much of, much of our feeling of stuckness and trappedness comes from the fact that we have not taken the time for ourselves to go into those peaceful places where you can connect with your subconscious mind. You're not going to do that in the day-to-day rush of things that are going on while you're running from, you know, work to school and practices and all of this stuff. You have to carve out time to do it. It's like carving out time to brush your teeth. You gotta do it or you lose your teeth. In this case, you gotta do it or you will just self-destruct. And it doesn't take that much time really to do it. You just have to do it. And it's very simple to move into a very simple meditation. Some people are like, I can't, I can't sit still, I can't sit still. Totally get that. Moving meditation works also. Go take a quiet walk in the woods. Or if, like, do— doing the dishes. One of my clients is like, okay, my most peaceful space is when I'm doing the dishes. Okay, when you have your hands in the hot soapy water and just be present in that moment with the hot soapy water, let all of the rest of it go. And it's amazing what happens when you've moved into these quiet spaces, the things that will arrive for you. And suddenly it's like, there's the, there's the answer. The answer is right there. Now, if you have trouble doing that, and there are times when it will be hard to do, like the night I was in crisis, right? There's— we don't receive any demerits for reaching out for help. So find a spiritual counselor, find a hypnotherapist, find a good psychologist. And get the support you need. Find a support group. Yeah. Um, because there are no demerits for doing it yourself. You just get there faster and more easily and well accompanied.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting, you, you brought up mindfulness meditation. I bring it up all the time to clients. I was just talking to a client a couple weeks ago, and actually in her intake form said, I can't meditate. So, you know, we had a session, I said, we just did a 5-minute mindfulness thing with her. I said, close your eyes. And we went through like a 5-minute exercise. And she opened her eyes and said, so how do you feel? She goes, I feel great. I said, you just meditated. That was just a really simple 5-minute exercise.

Yeah.

But as you said, people have to find what works for them. Exactly. Because it's not always just sitting on a cushion. That's not going to work for somebody, especially some people.

Oh my gosh, yeah, I started with meditation really after my second ectopic pregnancy because I had a chronic pain condition that arrived with that abdominal adhesions. And I was, I was frantic. I just didn't know what to do with myself and I wasn't sleeping because the pain was so bad and there was nothing that was taking care of it. And I finally started reading a bunch of pain books because I know there are people who live with chronic pain. And so how do you function, right? And they kept saying meditation, meditation. And so I, I got my cushion and I sat on my cushion. It's like a mantra with— I have no idea what the mantra is going to be, but I'm going to just try. And it was absolute disaster. I'm a smart person. I have a very busy brain. It doesn't want to stop. And so that wasn't a good approach for me. And then I got a few of these guided meditations on tape things, and they're like, you need to sit in it. Sitting was not a good position for me because it made the pain worse. And so it's like, okay, fine, screw their instructions, I'm going to make myself comfortable. And so I laid down and I put on my headphones and I listened to the meditation, and all of a sudden it goes Click. It was like 2 minutes later. I'm like, I paid $25 for this son of a bitch. It's only 2 minutes long.

Oh, wow. Wow.

What the heck? And then I looked at the player and it says an hour and 15 minutes. I'm like, I fell asleep.

Oh, wow.

Son of a gun. And then I went, I fell asleep. I haven't been asleep in days. And so it's like, if that's if that's the only thing it does for me is lets me sleep, I'm all for it.

I'm so—

that's what got me on the meditation bandwagon.

I am so glad you said that. Because actually, the same client, we were talking about meditation. I said, what do you mean? Tell me what you mean, why you can't meditate. And she said, you know, she either cries or she falls asleep. And I said, if you fall asleep, that's great. That means that's what you need. If you're— especially people that are in early grief, a lot of times you're Even if you think you're sleeping well, we need more sleep when we're in grief. So if you fall asleep in your meditation, then that's what your body needed. That's okay. But we judge it. We judge our meditation.

And, and you know what, if you cry, that's what you needed to.

Yeah.

So just allow it. It's okay. It's okay to fail at meditating.

Yeah. Well, you know, the thing is, I just, I've just, I've been meditating for 15, 20 years now. And I just took a meditation class with a guy. And one of the things I realized from taking this class is like, you can't do it wrong unless you're just saying you're doing it wrong. If you're coming out of your meditation, you're judging yourself. That's, that's the only thing that you can really do wrong. But if your mind keeps going, you know, that's what, that's what your mind's gonna do.

Let your mind do what your mind does. It throws off thoughts. It's, that's what it's trained to do. And sometimes after you've done a bunch of this, it will stop throwing off thoughts, but that's not where you start, right?

And it'll, it'll slow down.

It'll slow down. The thoughts will get less distracting. Yeah.

Yeah. So, um, tell me how you work with people now.

How I work with people now, um, I have become a huge fan of hypnotherapy because basically it's meditation with a goal. And not just meditation with a goal, but meditation with a professional who's conversant in the subconscious and how it works and how it crosswires things. And so it allows us to go in and make some really fundamental changes that you probably figured were impossible at this point. Well, I'm just that way. Well, I'm genetically predisposed to carry extra weight or whatever it is, because your subconscious mind controls all that. It controls your metabolism. It controls your perception of the amount of pain you're in. Controls your breathing and your heart rate. It controls your assumption about glass ceilings and your ability to break into, you know, whatever field you want to get into. It controls all of that. And so when you deliberately go into that space with someone who can help you pick that apart and put back in there the things that are constructive for you and supportive for you, you can make progress at light speed compared to like traditional therapy. There's a study out there they did, I know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago now, and they looked at traditional psychotherapy, which we know works. We, we see the change that happens with people. It, it does pretty good. You get about a 40% improvement on whatever the the presenting problem is after 600 sessions. Holy shit, it works. It's not the fastest thing out there, but it'll get you there. It's like walking to Los Angeles. You'll get there. Yeah, yeah, you'll get there. Just keep one foot in front of the other. And then they compared it to 6 sessions of hypnotherapy, and 6 sessions of hypnotherapy on the presenting problem got a 93% improvement. So it's like getting on the plane and going to Los Angeles. It's one of my favorite ways to work with people now.

Well, yeah, yeah, I— that, uh, that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like it's kind of a shortcut to the subconscious, right? So when you're in traditional therapy, you're picking away at it.

But yeah, you're going, you're going through the, the tough bouncer at the door, right? The conscious mind is there to kind of protect your subconscious from picking up things that aren't going to be helpful. And so it takes a lot of persuading of the conscious mind that this is a good thing before the subconscious eventually gets on board. So when you go into hypnosis and this meditative state, it allows you to bypass that, that gatekeeper. Just sit over here on the side and we'll, we'll talk directly to, you know, the man. Yeah, woman. Yeah.

So I'm curious, you know, when I talk to so many people, and it's because of the nature of the program, of course, but I think it's just kind of nature of life. It's like something about going through crisis leads us to growth, which is, you know, what happened with you. Do you think that that's planned? Is there— do you believe in and planning, either, either by us or by God or whatever?

Soul contracts are one of the things that I actually studied greatly, and I would say there's a combination of things that goes on. I believe we all come in with a pretty robust plan for what we want to experience and what we want to learn, uh, and unfortunately in Earth school, we tend to learn through the the rough— the things we would describe as rough experiences: losing someone, becoming disabled, getting sick. And these are the things that cause us to look at things from a radically different perspective, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. And what I notice with soul contracts, the ones that people bring in with them, the people who, who seem to have the roughest time who've got the most stuff going on also tend to be the ones whose overall long, long-term life plan is to serve a lot of people, to make a difference to a lot of people in the world. We tend to accumulate all the 'been there, done that' t-shirts, or at least a very large percentage of them, because we need to be able to be relatable to a lot of different people. In order to do that. It's the reason that self-help programs are run by recovering addicts, recovering alcoholics, recovering spendaholics, because you can't really advise someone unless you've been there. Yeah, anything else comes off as— what I want to say— disingenuous and patronizing because they don't understand the nuances of the issue.

And, you know, it's interesting though, when we bring up this concept to people for the first time, especially someone who's gone through something like as traumatic as you went through, or why the hell would I do this to myself? Right.

Yeah.

Right. Right.

Yeah. And my personal theory on why the hell I would do this to myself is it's sort of like childbirth, right? We're on the other side. We're planning this life. Okay, and once we've been through one, we have kind of an understanding of how dense and intense it actually is. But it's like the mother who's given birth, right? If you ask her right after childbirth, would you do this again, she'd be like, hell no, yank it all out, right? I don't want to do this again. But you talk to her now when she's got a 1-year-old, a 2-year-old, a 3-year-old, and she's like, you know what, there's this different sense of proportion. Yeah, it was difficult, there were some discomforts, but it was worth it, and I'd do it again. I want another one. And I think when we were doing our life plan, it's— we've got that sense of proportion and perspective on the other side, and we've kind of forgotten how painful it actually was in a lot of ways. And we're like, you know what, I can do that again. And I want to do it on this topic this time.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. It's, it's, you know, again, being with parents who've lost children, we talked before we started recording, is that's one of the most difficult things I think there is to go through. And almost universally, at some point, we say, I would never do this again. And in fact, I would say most people on the planet right now would probably say, yeah, I won't, I'm not doing this again. You know, it's like this, this school is dense. It is very difficult. But this is why I love talking to people like yourself, and we can present that arc to people, right? Because when we're— I'm sure when you were in the throes of lying there in your bed and surrendering, you probably would have said, there's never any way I would do this again. There's nothing that could be worth what I'm going through.

Right.

But we get to talk to you now and we get to see the outcome.

Yeah, well, and here's the thing, right? Looking back on my journey, right, my soul wanted me to wake up to this woo side of things. This was not the first time my soul tried to get me to do that. There were books that jumped off of shelves and the scientist in me picked that up and went, that's weird, they should shove these things better. And I would shove it back up. I wouldn't buy it and take it home with me. Okay, I had gentler invitations into this that I chose to bypass. And so on a conscious level, at least in my journey, I have to accept that there probably were more gentle ways for me to have been invited into this different worldview. But I chose to go, I don't hear you, I don't want to go there.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah. So, and other times, there's just no other way to get there.

Yeah, it's, it's, that's, that's one of the dilemmas, right? Because I heard a woman that had a near-death experience. She was hit, she was on a bicycle, she was hit by a car, broke her back, talked about all the lessons she learned, how it was all worth it. But she brought up the same thing. She said, I wonder if I could have done this differently. And I guess we'll never really know. If there were other gentle little nudges that you could have followed that didn't take you to that place. But I think what we can see is that these things do work out, that we do, we can take them, we can grow from them. And again, I think from the soul's perspective, the soul's like, what's a broken back? You know, what's—

yeah, your body knows how to heal itself. It'll do its thing, right?

Because from that perspective, we're like, everything's going to be where everything's going to be okay. And it's really a challenge to try to keep that perspective while we're in the body. That, as you said, that accepting whatever it is that's going on and saying, yeah, even this is okay. Yeah, even this is okay.

Yeah, it's really dense. It's really intense. And it's emotionally provoking. And emotions, we're not taught how to deal with very well in this world. I know I was raised by a German and Norwegian, and what I was taught about emotions was don't have any, and if you do, just shove them down so they're not inconveniencing you or anyone else. Yeah, this is not the way to deal with emotions. Yeah, they get rancid and mean and nasty when you do that with them. And I spent years in talk therapy unpacking it, and the heat never seemed to go away until I ran into The Emotion Code, and that was hugely helpful to me. And as I started unpacking the crap that I'd shoved down for decades I also learned that they're really messengers, emotions. They're not meant to hang around and stay. People are like, I just want to be happy all the time. Sorry, that's not how emotions work. You can have some of that, you can have more of that. I mean, it could show up more often if you, if you choose, but you don't stay in this permanent happy space. There are ups, there are downs, there are neutral times, there are joyful times, there are curious times, there are worried or scared times. Because we're human. And the, the worried and scared are here to tell you that there's something going on you might want to check into, and then you let that go after you've checked into what you can check into, right? The angry times are here to tell you that someone's violated your boundaries and you need to, to look into that situation. Did you not put your boundaries out there clear enough? Were they unreasonable boundaries? What, what was the situation there? Right, and learn from that and adjust accordingly.

Right. Yeah, I think it's interesting. I think we don't come here to be happy all the time. We come here for the range of emotions. We come here to experience the different things, the contrast. It's— and I like analogies, the only thing that really works, but like, if you're watching a movie, and the hero is never in any jeopardy, never any danger, it's a boring movie, you're gonna, you're gonna turn it off. And My daughter, you know, I— she was 15 when she passed away, but she loved life. She loved adventure. She loved— I remember she would say things like, I want to break my leg. And we would say, Shayna, no, don't say that.

Why would you want to?

Because I want to be— I don't want to know what it's like to walk on crutches. You know, and when she was diagnosed, she had arthritis, and we're taking her to the lab to get bloodwork drawn. I wonder what it's like to get bloodwork drawn. She just had this curiosity for life. And we would all be better served if we could just say, whatever the circumstance I'm going through, this is an experience. You know, this is, this is an experience. And, and take it as—

you brought up curiosity because that's one of my key tools. If I find myself in one of these situations where it's like, oh, I just don't, I don't like this. I don't want it to be this way. It shouldn't be this way. I stop and I step back and I get curious. That's my key in, is curious. It's like, okay, so why is this here? How does this serve me? And that helps to get me out of that entrenched, oh, this is just terrible mode, and move into something that's more supportive for me. I heard this quote the other day, absolutely adored this quote. Um, I forget what the circumstances was. Someone lost their sister very young in life, murdered or something like that, and she'd been talking to her psychologist about it, and her psychologist said, well, you have a choice. You can choose to, you know, have that define you and, and just ruin your life, and no one would criticize you for that. You've been through a really horrible thing. Or you can choose to go on and have an amazing life anyway. It's all in your hands.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, we do. It's— everything's a choice. Everything's a choice is how we choose to look at it. But Sophia, we're, we're running out of time. I'd like you to tell people how they can reach you.

Ah, I have two worlds in— two doors into Zofia land.

Okay.

And if you're curious about the woo side of things and you wonder if you have any gifts, because hint, we all have gifts, uh, you can come through the first door, which is, um, superpowerquiz.us. And what that will do is it will show you your particular combination of giftedness, and it will put you on my mailing list, and you can nose around the edges of Zofia's world to the to your heart's content. The other door is much more direct. If you feel like, you know what, I really need to talk to her, I do a free 20-minute consultation, and you can find that at bookzofiacoachat.com. So that's B-O-O-K-Z-O-F-I-A coffeechat.com.

Okay, I'll put those, those links in the show notes. I do want to tell people I took the quiz right before you and I got on Did you? Yeah, it's cool. It's really cool. So I encourage people to go out and take it.

And what did you get?

Broadcaster.

Broadcast channeler.

Broadcast channeler. Yeah.

Yeah.

So yeah, I think it's, it's really well done. I want to compliment you on that. It's been wonderful talking today. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

All right. Enjoy the rest of your day.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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