Nurturing Your Soul with Renee Trudeau

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun. Hello and welcome. I'm Alexandra J. Johnson, and today we have another wonderful guest, Renee Peterson Trudeau. And she is an internationally recognized Life balance coach, a speaker and an author and the president of Career Strategic. And she's also a wife and a mother. And I, I think I found out about Renee maybe, maybe when I was pregnant, I'm not sure, but I bought her Mother's Guide to Self Renewal, which I love and I have somewhere, but I also have a 22 month old and it was on my desk and it's no longer on my desk, so it might be hiding somewhere. And then she generously sent me this one, Nurturing the Soul of youf Family, which I just started and I'm loving. So I am honored to talk with her. She has such a wealth of information and knowledge for all of us women and mothers. And we welcome Renee.

Thank you, Alexandra. I'm so glad to be with you.

Yes. I'm very excited to dive in. And you have so much goodness for all of us women. And I'd love to start off with self care, because I think you have a different perspective on that. And I think that's one of the biggest things for us women that, you know, if we want to rock our goddess lives, self care needs to be at the top. So can you talk to us about that?

Yes. Yes. So, gosh, it's funny. I do a lot of speaking for a living and I never get nervous. And whenever I start to talk about self care, I always feel this slight inadequacy because it has had such a profound impact on my life, more than any spiritual practice I've ever adopted. I really define self care as the art of attuning and responding to our needs and desires moment to moment. So if you think like, if you place a hand over your heart center and a hand over your belly and you just tune in for a moment and ask, what do I need in this moment? What do I need? And that's really the practice of self care. It's cultivating this level of awareness. It's cultivating this sweetness with yourself. It's cultivating really an allegiance to yourself. I was in California recently and I was leading a retreat and I asked the women in the circle, do you feel safe with yourself? Do you feel safe with yourself? And in the Entire circle, only one person could raise their hand. So this idea of I will not abandon myself, regardless of the good opinion of others, I will not abandon myself is part of my experience of self care. And it's, you know, Alexandra, as you know, this practice is wide and it's deep. I have been working in this arena, you know, as my work, as my livelihood full time for 15 plus years and I have a long way to go. And it still keeps evolving, you know, and I keep checking in, I'm like, okay, do all the women in the world have self care? Do we have this now? Are we ready to move on? I keep hearing no. And it keeps evolving, you know, depending on our life stage. Right. If we've got a 22 month old or I was sharing, I've got an adolescent now and we're just butting heads a lot. And so this moment to moment, you know, of compassion and letting go and trusting and surrendering is all part of my self care practice.

Beautiful. Okay, so I want to dive into self care in the different arenas. So we have the physical, the mental, emotional, spiritual. Like how do we start to craft a self care practice for ourselves at whatever phase we're in right now, knowing that it's probably going to change?

Yeah, that's a great question. So a big part of my self care work are these renewal groups that we have meeting all over the world. We have these personal renewal groups. And years ago I started these groups when Jonah was six months old. So that was in 2003. And I remember one of our first groups, we had this wonderful, beautiful, sweet type A attorney come back to one of the groups and she's like, okay, I did three things in each category. Physical, mental, spirit, you know, emotional, spiritual. I am rocking this self care thing. I've got it down. You know, we loved her and hugged her and like that's great, but that's not really where we're going. Really. It is about that attuning to what I need moment to moment. So not about putting things on our to do list or checking things off. You know, I think I sometimes this might even look like a big part of me staying sane in the world is doing a lot of yoga. I'm a huge yogini, so. So that keeps me sane. Yet sometimes if I really tune in. So I'm really big on entering your day intentionally, which we can talk about. But sometimes I'll tune in and I'll hear, no, you're really feeling tender around the anniversary of your mom's passing or something's. Come up and rather than go to yoga, I actually need to be still and I need to journal or I need to be quiet. That's what self care looks like. It not having to do something or checking things off. It's cultivating an awareness of being and what you really need in the moment. But if someone is new to self care, absolutely. It's very helpful to look at those four areas. Getting enough sleep, Huge. Staying hydrated, loving our bodies, moving our bodies in pleasurable ways is really important to me. Emotional, the care and feeding of our heart. So I was with a friend this morning that's going through a really rocky divorce and I just reminded her she's such an amazing goddess that I reminded her, like, allow yourself to fall apart and let me be one of those people that can hold that space where you don't have to hold it together, you know, or look like you got it together, like just allowing that to happen. And then spiritual renewal, you know, for some that is prayer meditation. For my son, it's so he loves to volunteer with the homeless. For many it's being in nature, deep immersion in nature. And then that last area of self care that we often look at mental or intellectual. Some people don't need that stimulation at all. But others are at a life stage where they're like, yeah, I'm ready to really stretch and experience other parts of who I am and serving particularly. I have a lot of friends right now who have become empty nesters. And so they're really looking at, okay, what's next for me. I mean that would be so hard, right to fathom when you're little one holding onto your body. But it comes faster than you think. And then you get to this whole world and it really becomes your second.

Life, you know, I love that. Okay, so I'm curious. Let's say we check in, check in with our heart. We do that and we feel a desire to do something. I feel like self care actually is a very courageous act and I think a lot of us don't actually step into that of really nurturing our soul. So can you talk about how we can have that, like allow ourselves the permission to have the self care that we need and to get the support we need and just say yes to it.

Right, right. Thank you. So it definitely starts with baby steps and it is a, it's one of the most courageous acts you can ever take as a woman, you know, and it comes back to worthiness. You know, when we've gone through, we'll go through the renewal groups, and we'll have a whole list. You know, why am I resistant to self care? What are the barriers? You know, and it's. People have these ideas around, I have to spend money or my partner isn't supportive or. I mean, we can come up with 120 items, you know, but what we always land at, Alexandra, is this underlying belief of worthiness. So really having the courage to examine that, am I worthy of self care? I love this idea that my ordinary self is enough. There's nothing I need to go do or prove or be in order to receive this. But it is a. That's what we call it, a practice. It's not an overnight thing. You know, it definitely is a practice. I think when you're first starting, being around other women that exemplify that, that love themselves and cherish themselves is really powerful, Whether that's through a women's circle or individually getting support, taking baby steps, even waking up first thing in the morning and doing a body scan, you know, this. You might have seen this in nurturing the soul of your family. So you're just laying in bed and maybe you've got a little tiger that's about to pounce on you any second. Taking just a few seconds to just scan. What do I most need today? Or asking three questions. I love this little quickie journaling exercise where you ask, what do I need? Or how do I feel? What do I need? What do I want? That can take three minutes. And the more you do that, the more you'll be able to really tune in and hear what it is that you need. But, yes, it takes tremendous courage. It's counterculture. Self care practice is counterculture, but it becomes a different way of being. And what I'm so. I guess I'm so passionate about it on so many levels. But when I know that I'm in allegiance with myself and I will not abandon myself, there is this feeling that I'm able to come home. There's this feeling that everything is right in the world. It doesn't mean that I'm not gonna piss people off, because I do. I mean, yesterday I'm coming back from a reentry from this amazing vacation experience, off the grid for a month in the lush mountains of North Carolina. We said no to three interviews yesterday. I mean, we're just. No, no, no, pulling back, reflecting. My team knows that my favorite thing to say is, let me sit with it. And so it doesn't, you know, really having allegiance to self. You will irritate other people. And you will piss them off. But at the end of the day, you know that you're right with yourself, which is a beautiful feeling and a beautiful relationship to cultivate.

I love that. Okay, so I'm curious because I have this one of really like knowing this about myself for 15 years, being on this journey, knowing I need a lot of self care. I know, I know I need a lot of alone time and things like that. But there is this feeling for me, and I know I'm not the only one where you feel like your life is all about self care and taking care of a child, which is massive. But there's this feeling like you need to do more. You need to be of service. Like, who am I to be getting a massage when there's people starving and I should be out there on the front lines doing something amazing, but I'm getting a massage. Talk to us about that.

Beautiful point. Beautiful point. Okay, so my dear, dear friend Nina, she has two boys and she has a baby girl that surprised her and came at 41. And Nina is an artist and she's an introvert and she's this beautiful, sensitive woman. She's an empath. And she needs a lot of self care. A lot of self care. I mean, she needs time alone in her studio. She needs naps. And she for years felt this constant struggle like she had to justify, you know, that this is what I need just to function. I mean, just to be present with my family. And she and I would talk about this phrase, which I always come back to, and that is, how bad do you want to feel good? How bad do you want to feel good? Because we know Alexandra, like, you know, I know if we tune in, we don't need to go to a coach or a guru or consultant or a book. Once you get quiet and tune in, you will hear what I call, this is your relationship with your wise self. You'll hear what it is that you most need. And knowing that also the beauty of this, because I've had this conversation with my dear friend Lisa Byrne that I think you're going to talk about as well as she's in the throngs of the intense period of parenting, that this keeps shifting. This is going to keep shifting. I mean, you're going to open up to a place where all of a sudden in energy level is available to you that you could have never imagined or space or time. But when you are in that intense period with younger children and knowing that you need time alone and time to integrate and process, you must honor that you must honor that. And when you do that, particularly with the beautiful work that you do as you model that, you are energetically sending out those ripples of permission to others where women see that and they're like, yes, that is the life that I desire.

I love that because I think you're speaking to a lot of us women, and especially the women in this conference. And I think a lot of women have this feeling of they need a lot of nurturing their spirit. Like women that come to me and probably come to you, that's what they're wanting. And so for us and me, and to be an example of that, I've had to integrate it. It felt like a weakness, but it's actually a strength of other women are like, I feel the exact same way. So can you talk about that of community? I know you talk about that as well in your work of, like, how important that is to have a community of women supporting you.

Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. I'll just share this observation because I'm actually going to have a blog post come out about this tomorrow. When I spent this month in North Carolina, that had a really profound and deep effect on me. What I walk away from, I walked away with a lot of insights. But, Alexandra, what's staying with me was how people related in this beautiful, more rural, nature based, intentional area. So there was this space and time when you ran into someone at the co op or you ran into someone on the river that you could stop everything and connect with them. There was this space and time and permission where people were going to one another's houses without calling first. You could just drop into somebody's house. And, you know, it wasn't that everybody was retired or everybody was a potter. You know, there were a lot of artists, but it was like, of course my door is open. Come in. That is the life that I desire, that level of connection and that level of community. And I think a lot of us are craving it. So one way to do that, because some of us live in big cities, right? We've got big cities. We live in medium sized cities, or we may even live in small communities where we desire that connection. But maybe we're afraid to reach out or to be vulnerable or to show up that way. But I will tell you, from the work that I do with women around the world, now more than ever, we are craving that. We are craving that community, connection, what I call belly time. So technology is great, but we need belly time. We need to together. One of my dear mentors the other day, I love her so much and she's very, very busy. And she said, I need some time with you. And I said, I need some time with you. She's almost 70 years old. And with. Finally we moved our schedules around and found an hour for tea. And then she called me the day before and she said, this just isn't going to do. And so she said, we need more time. So she rearranged her entire schedule. She does international travel and we had a four hour tea. It was like that to the marrow kind of nourishment, you know. So I would say to women that sometimes we can get into this idea and we can think, oh, you know, there are just certain people in my life that want that kind of connection. It's not true. You know, we sit at Kripalu when we do these retreats. At the very end of the retreat, we sit in this huge circle, you know, like a hundred of us holding hands. And we visualize these ripples of support and community going out through the Berkshires in the United States and North America. Women at the grocery store, women on the playground, women everywhere are wanting this more than ever. And so it's a real calling to us to become vulnerable and soften and open and reach out and ask and initiate this. So these, if you feel, and I'll say, we get that tap from our wise self. We get that whisper, that tap or that yell, you know, start the group, call her, put out a flyer, reach out, you know, initiate more depth in a circle that already exists. A very deep yearning that women have right now. And it's a huge part of us owning our power, coming together in this way that we never have before. Wow.

And do you, if I'm remembering correctly, do you help women set up groups or do you have these self renewal groups that women could come to you and help?

Yeah. So I'll just tell a really short little slice of the story because I think it's so interesting. So I was an accidental author. I never sat out. It was never a business strategy. I never set out to write a book. I was tapped repeatedly by my wife self first to start a women's group when Jonah was six months old. So I had this deep yearning and now we have a lot more yumminess out there. But in 2003, I mean, it was like La Leche League or I mean, it just wasn't there. I mean, I love La Lechi League, but it just wasn't. And I was having this deep yearning for this really soulful Conversation. How do I nurture myself? How do I nurture my passions? And. And then also nurture this beautiful soul that has come into my life. And so I started this first group called the Personal renewal group in 2003. Put out a flyer in my community, and in 48 hours, I had 20 women say, yes, I want to journey with you for a whole year. And this was just free. I was just doing this from my heart, and the tingles were going down my spine. Everything was shooting off. And then that exploded. And so the groups exploded, and they asked for a book. And so my first book, which they begged me to write, came from the Personal group. And so now we have these personal renewal groups in 10 countries around the world. So we mentor and train facilitators online. We kind of teach them the art and science of sacredness and group coaching and how to launch these groups.

Wow. Very cool. Amazing resource. Thank you for creating it. Thank you for your ladies and your women to help you. That's a beautiful thing. It's also a beautiful demonstration of what community can do. You know, it wasn't like you saying, I am going to do this and I'm gonna be the leader. It was like a collaborative experience, which I think is so different in the feminine.

It is. I'm feeling so called to say this, too, because this, the calling that I had in 2003 has come back for me now. I'm about to start a new initiative, which I am gestating right now. And. And I will say that I have been doing this very quietly and sitting with this and questioning and having tea with kind of this calling, and is it mine to do? Is it the time for this now or later? I always ask that question and what I heard when I was in North Carolina, every night when I went to sleep, the windows were open and I slept. There was this babbling creek that was right under my window that flowed into the huge Tow River. So I was here. I was having these wild dreams because I was hearing this water every night rain. And so it was like this wild, emotional yumminess. And I kept hearing, this is yours to do, and this is the time to do it. And just do it. Do it messy. Do it now, do it. Good enough. Not perfect, you know, and call in your sisters to help you birth this and go create this. So I would put that out there because so many times we get into this idea, the brand has to be right. It has to be beautiful. Everything has to be all T's crossed and I's dotted. No there's like beauty in the messiness, you know, and in allowing yourself to be vulnerable and just saying, here I go, let's do it.

Wow. Very cool. I love that. So many amazing messages in that little nuggets of wisdom. So I'm curious on, you know, I know you write about and talk about the feminine essence. Like, I feel like most of us women nowadays living in a go go, masculine dominated world, there's this craving to connect with other women, but also to connect with our feminine essence. So can you guide us a little bit in how we can connect more with our feminine essence and answer the call of our feminine soul more?

Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics. And it's kind of like a really good glass of wine. Like, it keeps changing. The flavor and the tone and the depth and the character of it keeps changing. It's something that I always integrate into my self renewal retreats. And I'll share that. Years ago, even up until a few years ago, how I would talk about feminine power or feminine essence was really around balancing yin and yang energy, which is a really powerful perspective. Just to understand the basics of this yin energy, which is more receptive and more intuitive and more flowing and is okay with waiting. This Yang energy that wants to direct and execute, that's really beautiful and powerful and necessary. We'd never get books out or things launched without the Yang energy too. And so for years, I really talked about feminine power as being kind of the interweaving of understanding. When is it time for me to call forth my yang energy? When is it time for me to call forth my yin energy? And I think that's still a powerful perspective. But as I get close to 50 and as this deepens for me, it's become much more. When I tap into my feminine power, it's actually quite still and quite deep. And it calls for me to move into the space of a deep, allowing, allowing. So let's think. So I'm getting ready to launch this new nonprofit that I was talking about in January and in the old days, I think it was, I was looking at feminine essence or feminine power. It'd be like, okay, well, when is it time to wait and when is it time to execute? And that's all helpful. But now I'm really committed to birthing this in a way that I've never birthed anything before. And that's really calling on my feminine power in a way of allowing and trusting. And it's even hard to articulate. It's really getting out of my own way and allowing source or creative spirit or intuition or the ability to manifest, to just come right through me. I don't know if that even makes sense because I'm right in the middle of experiencing it. So I don't make very much sense around it, probably. But I love talking to women about this topic. I have a lot of teachers. I do a lot of work, too, around the energetics, looking at second chakra, and how we begin to create. So many women. We're creating from here, we're creating from here, we're creating from here. But this idea of moving our energy center down to below our belly button and creating from that, that center of creativity and sensuality and sexuality and power is something I'm really playing a lot with right now.

Juicy.

Yeah.

And I think so many of us are interested in that because intuitively, I mean, for me, when I hear you talking about it, it just. That feels right. I mean, it's our womb space. I mean, that's our power center. Why wouldn't we live from that place? You know? And, yeah, I've just noticed that I have a attention in that area. You know, there's like. And I've talked about in other interviews. I forget who it was with, but pulling in your belly, like, we've been pulling in our belly and, like, holding everything in and, like, letting it go and letting source flow through and see what the heck happens, because something awesome.

Right, right, right. Absolutely. And it's funny, as you say, that I'm realizing this is helping me, because I'm realizing. I mean, I'm really living that right now, because when I came up with this idea for this nonprofit that I'm going to be birthing, I was ready to do it October 1st. I'm really good at manifesting. I'm really good at visioning and manifesting, and I can just. I love doing that. And I was like, got it. Boom. I had it all just mapped out. And then I said, wait. I said, wait. I said, you desire to create this in a way that you've never created anything before. And so what will best serve you here, really using your feminine power is waiting. So I am giving myself the permission and the gift of four months of gestation, even though I have the vision, like, I've been sitting with this for two years, so I have the vision. I'm ready to go. And 10 years ago, you know, I'm.

Flying.

You know, I'm done, done with that. So I'm really gestating on this for the rest of the year. And then in January, if it is time, it will bloom.

That's so great, too, because I think, and I know I want this in my life and other women, there's, as you sang, that there's, like, a spaciousness, there's a space to breathe, and just, like a space for it to blossom and ripen, versus we all have that masculine, like, I'm getting it done. I'm getting it done tomorrow, next week, next year. It's happening. We're powerful. But then there's also, like, something very beautiful and mystical and magical that I think we all are so desiring that.

You're talking about work, I was about to say, is magic. So I think we kind of get a broom and we brush the magic and the mysticism out of the way when we try to execute too quickly. So, yeah, you think about what could be when we allow things to get so ripe that they're, like, dripping. I mean, that ripe. Yeah.

And so then how do you.

Let.

It ripen but still keep that desire pulsing? You know what I mean? Because I think that for. Sometimes we can have the inspiration and we feel like we want to hit it hard because we don't want to lose that mojo. But how do we keep it juicy and saturated and alive as we're allowing the space for it to do its work?

I can share what I do. I mean, some of my practices, and those include keeping beautiful, colorful pens and markers and beautiful paper nearby almost at all times, because I get things in images a lot. I'm very visual, so I'll get images. I mean, I go to yoga class, and my teachers, I'm all friends with them, and they always see me taking notes or writing things down, and they're like, are you studying to be a yoga teacher? And I'm like, no, no. It all comes in yoga class or at the end after Shavasana. So I keep that with me. I surround myself. I'm very careful about who I surround myself with. So part of the journey for many women as they enter their 40s is really looking at what relationships and friendships really deeply nourish me. And there begins to be a culling and a pruning of what relationships really feed me. So careful about who I'm around, very careful about who I share this with. So comes out of my mouth. So I'm very extroverted. And I just. I love people, and I love to connect, and I love to be with my girlfriends. And in the old days, something would come to me, Alexandra, and I was just.

This is what I'm doing.

All my best friends are introverts. I think I'm just taking that. Okay, let me just be with this. Let me just be with this. Like it becomes this sacred relationship with that which I'm creating, you know, a willingness to just be with it and know that it's not going to go away. I'm not going to lose that pulse. You know, actually the quieter I am and the more I'm able to hold it in this reverence or sacredness, the more powerful it becomes. Sometimes we'll in the groups, sometimes women will create a little altar just for that which they're birthing. You know, it's a new book or an idea or a child or relationship. So they'll have a special altar just for that, you know, really feeding it and keeping it alive. So those are a few things and really just deepening. I think it all goes back to self care because as we begin to have the courage to step into a new relationship with ourself, we begin to imagine a life beyond which we've ever given ourselves permission to imagine. This is something I'm getting ready to teach in the fall that I'm really interested in right now. So I think for those of us that are really, you know, our community and our tribe here at Entheos very interested in creating consciously and moving intentionally and manifesting, you know, in a way that really is in alignment. Sometimes even doing that, we settle. So what if the question were to begin to move into that space of possibility of a life beyond that which we've ever been able to imagine? So I'm really interested in playing with that right now. And the way we get there, the way we articulate that or define that from my experience has been through a deep self care practice.

Okay, so I love that. What did you say? The life. Tell me that again. It was something awesome.

Well, it's just this, it's beyond. I was joking with my husband like life 2.0, but it's kind of like this, you know, sometimes when we get really excited and we realize we're conscious creators, start to map out I want this and I want this much time off and I want to experience this level of connection. In fact, I write about it in the beginning of both of my books. The life I desire, you know, and I read that. But I'm really ready to move into this place, place of actually getting the hammer and breaking down the wall, the glass walls of what that looks like and challenging myself to step into a place and into a life beyond Which I've ever been able to imagine.

That's awesome. So like, unlimited possibility. And we all have that. I mean, every human being has a natural dis. Desire for more. And like, we have those hits of possibility of like, oh, that's possible. And then it seems like a lot of times we instantly have that can't happen or not to me. Or, you know, what do we do with the negative thinking or the doubts or the criticism or the shame, like all of those little dark things that might pull us and our dreams down.

Yeah, great point. So I would keep going back to this practice of self care and let me explain something that I think is helpful. So no matter where people are on this journey of self care, it becomes this portal. It's kind of like if you were to envision doorways in a garden. Like you're entering a beautiful, magical garden and there's doorways. So the first doorway you come to is self care. So this is beginning to tune in, get comfortable, meet my needs. I deserve to meet my needs. I am worthy of meeting my needs. And as you deepen that practice, you come to a second door. And the second door in the garden is self acceptance. So really beginning to deepen this level. And like, oh, yes, you know, it's okay for me to show up, warts and all. I don't need to fix myself. And that comes through this practice of self care. And then you keep continuing down the path and you come to the third gate, which is self compassion. So that deepening of self care, deepening of self acceptance, this self compassion where you see yourself as this young, sweet child. What do you need? Baby Renee? I have a friend who's a yoga teacher. I love her and she calls herself baby Sarah. She's like, what does baby Renee need? I'll be like, what does baby Sarah need? But this idea of having that level of tenderness that you have with your sweet one yourself. And then the last gate in the garden you come to is self love. And so I hate to sound like a broken record, but I really think it all comes back to self care. Because if you stay committed to the practice of self care, it will take you places you've never been before. I mentioned I grew up with yogi parents and I've been meditating for a long time and I love to explore different spiritual traditions. Was raised Buddhist and Hindu. So self care is the most profound spiritual practice ever adopted. And as I continue on this path, you know, it's really how. It's how I talk to my soul. It's how I nurture my soul. And as I really go deeper in my ability to connect to, you know, my wise self and what it is I most need at this life stage, in this moment, then that just ripples out to my family, to my community, and to all the women that I work with. So when we have that I don't deserve it, or I'm not good enough or not me, I think just going back to that Self Care 101. Okay. What do I most need right now? And responding to that, it has a way of connecting you to that highest part of yourself, to that which you came from and then you're washed with. Oh, yeah, that's who I am. That's who I am.

Yes. If you have your self care practice, like integrated into your daily life, essentially, you're always going to be connected to source. Like, why wouldn't we do that?

Yes.

Yes. It's very cool. Yeah. And I know for me, you know, self care is huge, huge, huge part of my work in practice. And I notice immediately if I'm not caring for myself, like I'm irritated with my husband, I'm irritated with my child, I'm irritated with life, like things are not so sparkly and amazing.

Oh, you should have seen me in North Carolina. I mean, you can imagine. So my husband, we left him back in Austin. So it was Joan and I out in the wild, you know, in this cabin. And he's like my friends. I want to text my friend. He doesn't have a phone, so he's wanting to dig into all this technology. And I'm wanting to have this blissed out spiritual experience and commune with the divine mother out in the woods. And I was just silently cussing up a storm and just like, this is not what I imagined. And so my self care practice in the moment was just this deep level of compassion. And this is where I am, where I am, you know. And so a lot of times in the moment in parenting with my, with my almost seventh grader, I use humor, you know, and so I make fun of myself. I make fun of the moment, you know, I tease. And so that really helps us. And that's self care for me. I mean, when I'm, you know, feeling that I'm not getting to yoga, I'm not getting to meditate, I'm, I'm eating all this crap I don't normally eat, you know, and my son's going at it. I mean, it's, that's life, right? Messy. And it's where we are and so even just having little things, we know those things that anchor us. You know, for me, I have this, what I call my little 5 minute baby practice that I do where I do this little Ayurveda, little energy medicine, qigong, five minutes. And I'm a new person. So yeah, it's keep going back to compassion and those things that bring us home.

Okay, I totally resonate with you. Like, I feel like that's my life right now with a 22 month old. And since you've been born, you're kind of like, this isn't what I thought it was going to be like reorienting. Okay, how do I do this? How do I get it all done? And so what comes up for me is balance. And I know you talk a lot of balance. And how do we create that balance in our lives? With motherhood, with careers, with, you know, it doesn't even matter. I've been thinking about this as well. You know, there's a stay at home mom, there's a mom that works part time, there's a mom that works full time. It doesn't matter where you are in the mother section. Every mother is feeling the same thing. Like, how do I get it all done? How do I clean the house, how do I make the money, whatever. So how do we feel that Zen of balance?

I would say first of all, it was take all those pictures of the rocks balanced and the mother meditating, all of that and kind of just throw it out the window. Just throw it right out the window. And I think some key practices that we've used for years in the personal renewal groups. There's kind of four key practices. So we've talked about self care, knowing I can come home in the moment, self care, okay. Building a support network as there is nothing more powerful. I'm sure you've had this experience where you've had the day from hell and then you get on the phone with a girlfriend, or you go to a book club or you go to something where you really feel seen and heard. We all need to be seen. We need to connect and we need to belong. Those four things, when we feel that, we get that to the bone, nourishment. And we also know that women. There's been so much great research around when we gather. Intentionally releasing oxytocin, serotonin levels go up. So all this yummy physiological stuff that starts to happen. So self care, building our support network, managing our energy. This was a huge aha for me in my 30s because I was really good at kind of having the eight arms and doing a lot. And I thought, well, I've got another hour. I could fit that in. Then I had this huge aha. That really feeling a sense of harmony or more harmony or equilibrium does not come from time management, but energy management. So realizing that there are certain people or things in my life, Alexandra, that are going to take a lot of energy, you think about, you may have two different people you're going to lunch with. Maybe it's business, maybe it's friendship, and one person. You leave that hour lunch and you just feel like, done and you're wiped out for the day. You go to lunch with the next person and you spend an hour and you leave feeling renewed and full. Well, there was a very different experience that just happened in terms of energy exchange. So becoming more cognizant around managing energy has been really profound. And then the fourth one is being more present. You know, I was thinking, I think you sent me a question a while back, something about, what is one thing that women can do? Or what is one thing that we're all really struggling with right now? And I think we're moving way too fast. We're trying to do way too much, and we're trying to control too much. And I'm concerned about this. You know, I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it manifest in terms of antidepressants and health and on and on and on. I'm sure many of your speakers are going to talk about this, this, but just, we can't sustain this. And technology is a piece of it. Yes. But it's also. We have to really challenge this collective way of being that some of us are buying into. Really challenge it. And look at. Is this working for me? Is this working? I mean, I just. Wonderful woman and teacher, Ginger Gardner. I don't know if you. Ginger posted. When I posted on our community Live Inside out on Facebook, I said, ginger got back and I'm really moving slowly. And she said she does a lot of the same. You know, she's an author and a speaker. And she said, I was off the grid for a month, too. And I'm noticing as I return and moving very slowly that I'm so much more creative, so much more productive. I'm so much more focused. I can so easily see that which matters and that which doesn't and that which. That needs to be, you know, put aside or just completely dumped. But when we're moving in this reactive mode all the time, we're in this constant fight or flight, which is just Putting us into disequilibrium. I mean, even. Can you feel energy even talking about it? Right?

You're like, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I am completely in alignment with you. And this is. If I have one of the biggest practices, the things that I'm working on, it is this. Like, you know, I have such a deep call to retreat life. But it's not even retreat life. It's just natural living. It's not going intense. Email, phone. But it's the constant, like, stepping away from that and being comfortable with that is the path for me. It's fine. If other women want to be on email 247 and run around and do meetings, that's great. Not for me. And have that be okay. But, yes, I am.

Yes, I support you, sister. I support you. I can't even tell you how much I support you. And let me say this because I think it's really easy when people hear us have this conversation to think, well, that's really nice, but they. They probably don't get a lot done, or they may be slackers or whatever. It's really interesting for people to have whatever they conjure up, you know, But I know you get a lot done. I get. I have two companies and a big team and do a lot of work.

And.

And I will tell you that this way of being, like, I give myself full permission to take sabbaticals. If you scroll through my blog, you'll see someone's like, one more time, you're posting about a sabbatical that you took.

Yay.

I go off the grid. Like, I completely unplug, completely. And I have no problem doing it. And it feels like, oh, my gosh, it feels like going to the well. When you've been hiking in the desert for months and you're just at the well, just drinking the spring water. And what I find is, as I give myself full permission to do that, I come back and I'm able to do just what Ginger said. I'm more creative, I'm more discerning. I'm moving from that place of wisdom rather than reactivity. So, absolutely, you can accomplish and contribute and serve in big ways and live in a different way. You can do it.

Yes, totally. I love that we had been talking when you were taking your month off, and I was like, oh, I'm going to do one in this fall. And it's been a while since I've done one, but people always laugh at me, like, I'll have autoresponders all the time. Oh, I'm not checking email. I'm not sure what I'm going to check it, I'll check it. And I'm going to be off for the next three months. People are always like, I don't know if you're going to be on email or not. I'm like, yeah, that's just kind of how I roll currently.

I love it, I love it. And so then the challenge is when your little guy gets older and goes to school, school and all that and you begin to have more time to not think, oh good, let me just fill it up and cram in more work. That is the challenge.

Yeah, and I think it's such an important topic for women too. Like just the other day I wasn't feeling well and you know, I've been reading your stuff when I was getting ready for your interview. That might have influenced it, but it was more just the self care conversation. I wasn't feeling great and I had somebody over to support me with my son. And in that time I'm usually productive getting things done. I'm like, you know what, I don't feel well. The choice is I could push through it and potentially get sick. And I haven't been sick in forever, or I could lay around for the next three hours. So I laid around, I took a nap and I watched a movie the next day. I felt amazing.

Yes, Beautiful. Beautiful. That's what I'm talking about. So it's the courage to also tune into your rhythms. Like tune into your rhythms. So, you know, I know about myself that I'm a morning birdie. I'm very productive in the morning. I mean, I feel like between eight and one I can kind of conquer the world. I really don't even need to be working in the afternoon. You know, truthfully, if I'm really starting my day intentionally with my meditation and my qigong and really nourishing myself and then really preparing to move into space where I'll even set a timer. I'm like, I'm only going to be on email for one hour and I'll set a time, you know, so I don't get swallowed in. You can do this, you know, you absolutely can do this. But it's that I think there's so much benefit in really learning our own rhythms. Rhythm. When am I most productive? I've become a huge believer in rest. Huge. I really believe that for me to have the energy level that I have now and to, you know, sustain that for the next 40 years till I'm 90, that I need to keep Building in rest. Every afternoon, minimum of 20 minutes, I lie down and rest, even if I had a great night's sleep. You know, if you study yogic principles, I mean, this is building that deep, deep energy which will sustain us because I think so many of us, we push, we push, we push. And then we get to be 50s and 60s and we're like, I can't do this. I'm exhausted. What happened? So I really believer in just making rest part of our rhythm in our daily life.

Yeah, yeah. And then it goes back to what you were saying, too. Like, how bad do you want to feel good and managing your energy? Like, this is all energy management. And it's, you know, it's easy to have this conversation and to be talking about it, but it's such a big thing for us women to know and to trust that when we do these things, we're connected to source and we're going to be rock stars. You can't not be a rock star. Connecting to source.

Right. And that's why when we model it for one another, you know, even if we don't talk about it or teach it, but we just live it. How profound that is to, like, live that, you know, and to hold that, it's almost like anchoring. Like, I'm willing to hold this for other women to show this new way of being. And I trust that people, through osmosis can get this because I know the desire is so strong for a new way of being. Yeah.

Beautiful. Love it. Okay, so I'm curious on moving into healing, because I know you talk a lot about healing, and can you just talk about, like, what healing is for you and the benefits of healing and, you know, for women and mothers, what do you find that collectively or whatever you want to talk about? He healing. That's just coming up.

Yeah, yeah. So what's coming to me? I'll back up. So this morning I got back, I guess about 48 hours ago from this trip of being unplugged. And you can imagine I've got my wonderful team coming at me, and I've got thousands of emails and all of that, and I'm moving very slowly. But this morning I went to dance. I absolutely needed to go to dance class. So one of the ways I nourish myself physically are some of the ways I do lots of yoga. I do walks around town, Lake, which is this beautiful lake with dear friends, and I dance, and I do this dance with this wonderful woman, Deborah Kern. And so we were dancing this morning, and she has this Beautiful fusion of kind of Nia and creative movement. And she studied in Bali. It's just this beautiful experience that's pure pleasure. You know, I'm not there to tighten my core. I mean, those things happen. That's great. But I'm there to just have pleasureful movement. I think for women, I think two things. I think it's understanding that if you are at a point where you're being called to do deeper healing work, that you can sit there and you can be with the best psychotherapist in the world for eight hours a day and talk and talk and talk and talk. But in the. Until we begin to move into our bodies and really experience what's happening through this gift. Right. I think it's such a gift to be in these bodies before we can heal. I think it's really understanding that, that it's not going to yoga because I should, or going to walk because I should, but it is. I think it's one of the only ways we can really be human in the times that we live. It's the only way we can integrate, is walk on the earth, move our hips in pleasureful ways. I love qigong. I have two brothers that are qigong teachers. I'm the oldest of seven and we've got two yoga teachers, two qigong teachers. Embodying that and then looking at pleasure too, is really profound. This idea that, you know, pleasure is not something that we deserve on a Saturday night or every once in a while, but that it can be part of our daily experience. And that for me has been a big part of healing, is really embodying my body and pleasure and that I deserve to feel and experience this. Whether it's flowers on my desk or whether it's self massage or whether it's, you know, tuning in and hearing. I really need grilled salmon and giving myself the best grilled salmon or whatever it is. But yeah, really embodying healing and pleasure too.

I love that. I love the talking because that's good for us and it's helpful.

Absolutely.

To really ground into our bodies is so, so powerful, especially in the world of technology where we're in our minds a lot and on computers. So I love that wisdom.

And I think it's so exciting because I think about. We think about all this work that women, you know, Barbara Marx, Hubbard and all these women are doing this amazing work around evolution and conscious evolution right now. And I think we live in a time where we have the possibility and capability through bodywork to release a ton of stuff Very quickly. And so that's another. I'm just a huge fan, you know, whether it's NIA or qigong or yoga or tai chi or walking a labyrinth, but just some conscious movement is one of the most powerful practices you can bring into your life.

Beautiful. I love that. And I love bringing the pleasure into the movement too. So it's not like I'm going to get a tight butt or, you know, again, those are fine if those are your goals, but having more of just the pleasure of movement, the pleasure of like, hey, I got a body.

Yeah, I got a body and I get a dance in it.

Yeah.

One of the most. I love leading these retreats and one of the things that just lights me up and just makes me so happy is seeing these women. So we'll be in this huge circle and there's women from their 20s to their 80s. And one of the ways that I teach feminine power and feminine essence is through movement, through dance. And so a lot of the women will say, God, I haven't danced in 50 years, or I don't want to dance, or this is, you know, and will do this very gentle foray into just pleasure and gentle movement. And they will start crying and they can't stop crying because they have just lit up that feminine essence, that birthright to move our hips and move our bodies, you know, And I just get so excited when I get these evals. I leave and eval after evals, like, I will not stop dancing. I will not stop dancing. I will not stop dancing. So, yeah, that's powerful. Yeah.

Nice. I love dancing.

Me too.

I mean, who doesn't? And if you don't, that's what I say. I used to teach in Bali Goddess Yoga dance class. And it was just like, dance party. And some women are like, oh, I don't really dance. But we all like, we all have that inner dancer. You don't have to be a great dancer, but it's all in there.

It is, yeah. For ourselves, not for anyone else, but really for ourselves, you know, I love it.

It's one of my greatest joys now is to dance with my 22 month old. He's a big dancer. He's really into music. I mean, I play music and I dance a lot. But he has really just taken it on and he calls all dance Zumba. All dance is called Zumba. So let's Zumba. Zumba.

I love that.

Hilarious. He'll wake up and say Zumba. I'm like, that is awesome. Let's dance.

Love it.

That's so awesome. Okay, so I am curious, you know, I know a lot of your work is with families, and I'm wondering how we find and nurture the soul of our family. Like, how do we start to create more consciousness families and more like honoring each individual soul and just having a more nourishing family life.

So there's some great questions in Nurturing the Soul of youf Family. And actually you can get them on my website, like, I think they sell, but you can sign up and get two free chapters. And so you can get it for free. I mean, you buy the book or not, but people love being challenged to just reflect on if there is one quality that you want to celebrate in your family, that's something that simple, you know, if it's playfulness or if it's being connected to nature or if it's service to others. If there was just one quality that you want to celebrate in your family, what would that be? And you'd be surprised, like, the conversations that come up around that. Because looking at, well, what was big in my family, you know, so I grew up in a family where spirituality was huge. You know, we had this one room off right when you entered our house, and it had closed doors and you open it up and we had this 14th century creche scene of Jesus and Mary and the whole thing. And then we had Ganesha and then we had mala beads everywhere and rosaries everywhere. And then meditation cushion. And so, you know, very clearly, like spirituality and connection to source and what does that look like was really big in my family and had a big impact on me. And so looking at, wow, that was something, you know, consciously or unconsciously, that was very much celebrated. So looking at what do I want to celebrate in my family, like, for us, compassion is really big. Compassion with ourselves, compassion with one another, compassion for those in our larger community and how we can serve. So it can be something that simple, you know, sitting down. I mean, there's lots more in the book, but just something that simple and asking, what do I want to celebrate in my family? And if you have a really young one still having that conversation with your partner, you know, and even if you're a single parent still claiming that, you know, what is it that I want to celebrate? I was talking to my brother with his. He has a blended family and has a brand new baby girl. And we're saying, how do you go about kind of with this integration of families? What does that look like? And so we're talking about creating an altar and letting each of the children. Pick something to put on the altar. And having a conversation as a family about what's important to our family, like what matters to us, what do we want to celebrate? What is the soul of our family? What does it feel like? Go small or you can go really big with that conversation.

That's great. I love that, the nurturing the soul of the family. As you were just saying that, I feel that in today's world, the soul of the family is like being kicked out. You know, we have technology, we have distraction, we have. I mean, there's just so much. Like you were saying earlier, there's so much going on that that family's not eating together. I mean, I, I get really like saddened by thinking about how, you know, that there's this pressure to do too much or something, that you lose that uninterrupted time and the space to connect and just chill.

Yeah. Yeah, I can get saddened too. There was a survey that I did two years before that book came out. And I asked families around the US and Canada, hundreds of families, kind of what nurtures your emotional well being and what detracts from it and what nurtures emotional well being was space and time to do nothing. So unscheduled time allowing whatever wants to come forth in that unscheduled time. You know, I mean, you think about, you see it with small children when someone says they're bored and then all of a sudden they're playing with a cardboard box for four hours and they've taken a whole kingdom out of it, you know, and you can see with 12 year old too, you know, I'm bored. And then all of a sudden they've been playing with this huge pile of rocks and they've created this whole thing and they've been doing it for three hours, you know, and what comes up for us when we allow ourselves to get bored and to have quiet? And that's a challenge for me. I mean, I'll be honest, I'm good about creating expanses of time for us to rest. But then I see this little thing come in where we're doing nothing. But then in the back of my mind I'm thinking, well, I'm still trying to think about something or do something on a subtle level. How comfortable can we get with really doing nothing? I mean, really doing that? My husband is my teacher for this. Alexandra. He's so beautiful. He's complete opposite. He's musician, he's more introverted and he can sit in a chair and look out the window. And stare for like an hour. I mean, he does. He loves to meditate, but he's not meditating. He's not contemplating. He's not strategizing. Really? Really. I promise. I know this now for, like, 20 years. Like, really, he's doing nothing.

That's awesome.

You know, and so I think, yeah, I think we all just crave that. And we have this idea that life's going to be richer if we do more or experience more or pack in more. It's actually doing less and we experience more.

Totally.

Yeah.

I have that on my whiteboard. Do less, enjoy more. It's like my constant mantra, like, do less and enjoy it more.

Like wavelength. Yeah. I constantly am asking myself, you know, just because. Or I'll say, just because I can doesn't mean I should. So I say that a lot. Just because I can doesn't mean I should. And I'll look at something and I'll say, okay, well, if I am going to choose to do this, how can I do this where I'm expending the least amount of energy possible? How can I do less today? How can I do less this week? How can I do less this month?

I love that. And just celebrating that I have a great coach, Steve Chandler, who? I love him. I was talking to him about all the things I wanted to do. I get really jazzed. And he said to me, which has just stuck with me. He probably said it to me a year ago when my son was younger. He said, you know, you are talking about doing this in the next year. Like, what if you did it? Or the next nine months? He's like, what if it took you nine years? Like, what if it took you nine years to do all this stuff? Who cares? Like, just to give yourself the space to just let it ripen and blossom. Yeah, we're so, like.

I will say this is. I'll give a little practical story. When my first book I wrote, the Mother's Guide to Self Renewal, when it came out, I mentioned through those renewal groups that women kept asking me, we want this guidebook. All these things that we were doing in the renewal groups, they wanted it in a book. And I was resistant to it, but I sat and I sat and I sat and she, My wife's self, kept tapping and saying, okay, this is yours to do. And then I kept, Is it now? No. Is the time now? No. I mean, I went through the whole. I had an agent and was signed with one and then fired my age. I went through this whole process because it didn't feel right. And I kept asking, when is the time? Is it now? Is it later? Is it now? Is it later? And then finally one morning, I got it is now. And I sat down and I planned out and I wrote for four hours a day for six weeks, and the book was done. And so that's what can happen. That's rather than spending three years writing.

Yeah, totally.

Most people do when they write a book.

Totally. That's amazing. Just trusting. I mean, just as you're. I mean, the whole interview, too, has just been like, trusting yourself, trusting that. Connecting to that wise self and, like, trusting that you can care for yourself like you. You can live the life you want. That wise self is there. She's got your back.

Absolutely.

Mmm. Yummy. I love it. I love you. It's awesome. Okay, so can you share where we can find more about you, your website and buy your books and all that goodness?

Yeah, you can go to our website. It's renetrudeau.com and it's all there. And I'm a big believer in just giving people support. And so we have lavish support, like under, even free. Lots of free support under resources, free classes. And if anyone ever wants to join a group, we always have scholarship spots. Like, the facilitators will have scholarship spots. So whenever we can, we try to give scholarship spots for retreats. And so just. I'm a big believer in just getting that support because it makes all the difference in the world.

Beautiful. I love it. Well, thank you. Thank you. Lots of love and gratitude.

Thank you. It was such fun.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess. Sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess.com until next time. Keep rocking it and have an awesome day.