003: Liberate Your Life Force with Christine Arylo

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome back. I am thrilled to be here today with one of my longest friend tours and fellow authors. I don't even know if today's guest knows just how long I've been looking to her career for guidance from near and far. I've been lucky to get to know her even better over the last few years. I'm just super excited to welcome Christine Arilo. This is long overdue. Christine is celebrating the launch of her fourth book, Overwhelmed and Over it. Embrace your power to stay centered and sustained in a chaotic world. She is a transformational leadership advisor, teacher speaker. She has three previous bestselling books and I remember reading them before I knew her or had connected one on one. And she does a lot of work with women to make shift happen in the lives they lead, the work they do and the world they wish to create. Now we know it's not just the ladies listening today, so we're going to expand the conversation. But something I really admire about Christine is how adamantly she works to change the systems that we're all a part of through the lens of feminine wisdom. So with that, Christine, welcome to the show.

Hello Jenny and everyone. It's so glad to be here with you all today. I can't wait to dive in. We always have the juiciest conversations and we never know where it's going to go, but I always trust the flow so I'm excited to see what emerges today.

Me too. You're one of those people that I think it was Gabby Bernstein made a mutual intro before Life After College. My first book came out and I was having coffee with her and she just said, you remind me of my friend Christine. She's like, you guys have such similar energy. You both have a corporate background. You gotta connect. And I remember I had read your books and when I first encountered, I think it was your first book. Choosing Me over we. Wasn't that. Was that your first?

Yeah. Choosing Me before we. It was my first book. 2009. That book came out about. About choosing good relationships. It turns out there's a lot of really successful smart people out there where we don't totally choose the good relationships. That was the first one.

And I remember thinking to become an author was this just far away dream. I didn't know the first thing about making it happen. And so you are one of those guiding lights. And then as I've gotten to know you better, you are someone where every single time we connect, it doesn't matter how long it's been, whether it's in person or over the phone, I'm just jotting down furious notes. You're just such a wealth of knowledge. And I have to say from this new book, there was this line that jumped out to me. It's actually in the appendix on self sustainability and taking a stand. And you talk about liberating your life force. You also talk about liberating your heart, liberating your time. So we'll come back to some of those. But so let's just start with liberating your life force. Why is this so important to you and why now?

Well, let's just define what life force is. So life force is your chi. It's your prana, it's your energy. If we were a cell phone battery, it would be your battery charge. If you were a car, it would be how full your gas tank was. And one of the things that's true about overwhelm and burnout and exhaustion and all of that is that we, we get warning signals way before that those symptoms show up in our physical body where we get, you know, sick or we get some kind of physical disease in our body or worse, we get like, you know, just mental distress and emotional distress or life blows up. And when you can be in relationship to your life force and you can kind of. It's kind of like a cell phone battery. So it's like when you let your cell phone battery Go down to zero. You know how it always, like, takes a lot longer to charge up, and then it's like you would need it right in that time, but it's like there's no. There's no. There's no juice. And so one of the. One of. One of the early things that I learned, and I'll just to share with you all, I've been researching this overwhelm phenomenon for 10 years and writing the book for three, partly because I'm like, a person who wants to achieve a lot and get a lot done and was really bred that way, but learned that I was a really crappy receiver and that I had been really trained to work in ways that made me drive and stress and strive and grind in ways that just weren't sustainable. And one of the internal imprints that I found that was running inside of me, like, almost like my own internal operating system, was that it's better to give than receive. And so that made me create what I call a burnout cycle, where I would give and give and give and give and give to my work for three months. This is post after I had left corporate and I was doing my passion, and then I would just fall over and go. And I'd just be like, you know, I would get sick. I'd get a cold or whatever, and every three months, I'd end up in my acupuncturist office. And he would stick needles in me and then say, here's some herbs. Come back, you know, in two weeks. And after a year of seeing him, he. He got wise to my burnout cycle, which I had been in for years and years and years and years. No one was smart enough to catch on. And I remember Jenny and everyone. He put his hand. His name was Dr. Fang, and he lived in Oakland when I lived in Oakland. He put his hands on my belly, and he just said to me, retain, Retain. And I was like, retain. Oh, my God. It was like one of those epiphanies like, retain my life force. Oh, I should not just spend it all and then recharge or get to get sick. In order to take care of myself and slow down, I should develop a practice that empowers me to retain my life force or know when I'm dipping into my reserves.

That's so powerful. I love the image of the chalice in the book. Christine has all these great graphics glyphs throughout. And you say at the bottom of the chalice, I never serve from my reserves. It's just so powerful that the image of the chalice is that. And you talk about that serving from that overflow, that big part of the cup, but by the time we get into the stem and the base, we're already burnt out. And I could relate so much. I mean, I just got sick, a raging ear infection, which, of course, I asked myself, what am I not hearing? Or what do I need to block out from my mind? The pandemic slowed us all down. And then still, when I got sick and actually had to take five days of doing nothing, I realized just how much slower down I needed to go. And it is crazy how sometimes we consciously, subconsciously, we get sick, and that's our form of rest, but it's so extreme, and we don't have to live that way. And I love the stand you take and what that acupuncturist said to you about retain, how did you put that into practice? So he says this to you, retain this one word. How did you make that integrate that? Because it is. It is an addictive cycle, this burnout cycle. And sometimes I think we can feel stuck in it despite our best efforts. So where are you now with this?

Yes, well, I'm all about, you know, connecting into a deeper level of wisdom. Like, acupuncture has been around, you know, for 5,000 years. It always kind of cracks me up when people talk about alternative, you know, things. I'm like, so acupuncture in Chinese medicine, it's been around for about 5,000 years. They have something to teach us, right? And so that retaining part, what I. What I. One of my superpowers is taking esoteric, deep wisdom and translating them into practices that we can use in our daily life. So the first thing I did when Dr. Fang gave me that word, and it was shining every. It was a little bit like Dorothy, you know, where she clicks her heels three times, like, I just want to go home. I just want to go home. And I was like, retain, retain. There's something about saying things three times. I don't know exactly why we do that, but there is something about that. And it was funny because I was. I was. I was just getting ready about seven months, eight months later for my second book. And my second book. When my second book happened, I. I knew I had. I had 24 events scheduled within three months. And I was actually out on the East Coast. I think I might have even seen you when I was out there. And I knew that if I tried to do that book and I tried to do those events and tried to, you know, do that the way I had been trained in my more traditional achievement oriented, corporate and, you know, traditional leadership training, I was going to exhaust myself and I knew that I needed a practice and so I just, I made up a practice and I can teach it to you all right now. I mean, I use it every day when people ask me like, if you were to say, what are the top three things that really help you make sure that you're sustained with your life force? Your money, your resources, everything and keep you out of burnout. This is one of the top three. Would you like me to.

Yes, yes. Thank you.

It's super simple and it's called the life force. Reading and receiving practice. And I just want to say to everyone, one of the things I see that happens a lot to us as humans is that we, we discount the simple as insignificant. So this is going to be really simple. It's going to take us less than three minutes. But once we do it, you'll understand why it's so powerful. So everyone go ahead and just close your eyes for a moment.

And just take a deep inhale and exhale just to bring yourself back to your body. We're going to check in with your body and your heart. So we're going to check in energetically, physically and emotionally into yourself. And the first, because your life force operates on all of these different levels, it's not just physical, it's emotional, it's energetic as well. And so just imagine your body as the chalice. And as like Jenny said, there's the cup that's like, you know, full and that's where we want to serve from. And then there's the stem and there's the base. We're going to do a life force reading. So kind of imagine taking a sensor and connecting it to your chalice or dipping it in and asking your body, on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being full, 0 being empty, and 50 being half, where is your life force at right now? What's your life force at right now?

And you should just get a number you're connecting with your body, which is your intuition. So what number did you get, Jenny?

I did this actually this morning as well when I was reading your book. And for some reason before I got to the hundred, I got to a scale of 1 to 10. And the first number that came to me was a seven. And as I sat with it, I realized, no, it's not a seven, it's a five. So I ended up at a five. Cause I realized seven and a lot of surveys, even Tim Ferriss said he learned this advice somewhere where you should eliminate the number seven, because a lot of people will pick it just by default. So I noticed my default response was 7, but my truer response was a 5. In that moment. Now I'm energized, though, because I'm talking to you and you're amazing.

So when I'm doing something like this, I feel super energized, but it doesn't give the full life reading per se.

Yes. Well, I love that I'm at a 64. And the reason I use the 0 to 100 scale is that 50 is the reserve line. So it's like that half, right, that half number. And I love that you're super honest. You're so amazing. I love you for so many reasons. One, that you're so curious and inquisitive and you really get in there and you just like exactly what you said. Because I see so many people when I do this a lot, whenever I'm doing a workshop or whatever, people, they lie. They don't lie because they don't lie because they're like, I'm gonna lie to Christine. But it's like they're so not connected to what actually is going on in our bodies, in our energy field and our emotions that we want the higher number.

And that's exactly it, by the way. I knew that I wanted to say something higher, and that's what I was catching myself. And that. That tricky thing of getting quiet enough and still enough to just say, is that true? So it's, you know. Oh, yeah. Because you want to say, oh, yeah, let me give myself an A. Talk about being the overachiever. Right. It reminds me of, you know, you want to get a good grade, even if you're the one giving it to yourself. It can be tough. So sorry to cut you off, but yeah, it can be tough sometimes to say, but what is it really? Because then that means there might be some hard truths or challenges or unknowns about. Well, darn it, that's this number. Despite my best efforts. What does that mean? And that's what your entire book addresses, by the way.

It is. Well, and the truth is, you know, from a. From an empowerment perspective, you can't actually be in your power and acting from true self empowerment if you're not. And you don't have true self awareness and self honesty, because self honesty and self awareness precedes self empowerment. And so I think that's part of the challenge of how a lot of us have been Trained. We've been trained to be strong and confident and, you know, don't be weak, you know, like all of that stuff. And it's distorted us to believe that we have to be like these machines who only rest when they break down. And instead of being human beings, there's.

So much broken, you and I, I love. This is why I love our conversations, because we just kind of go to town on how much is broken in our society and our work systems, our expectations of ourselves and others. And you. It is really a superpower. I feel that you have X ray vision of not just what the problems are, but you've honed in so much, like you said, taking these esoteric practices and completely reframing how we think about things. You mentioned your book launch when you came through New York City. And I remember I wanted to take you to a Kundalini yoga class. And somehow I mismanaged our walk and talk timing, so we were inevitably running late, which being both of us longtime yoga practitioners, you know, teachers, really, it's like disrespectful to come in after the start of class if you can help it. And you just said to me, you said, oh, don't worry, we'll. We'll slow down time as we made our way there. So I want to ask you about that because that was even years prior to Overwhelmed and over it when you said that in that moment, I never forgot it. What did you mean by that? Like, when you say something like, oh, don't worry, we'll just slow down time and maybe I'm misquoting you. It could, you could have put it differently. But almost like I remember you just saying, oh, don't worry, we'll bend time, as if it was like the most normal way to kind of get there. And of course, it creates a more sane, joyful way to get there, given that it was going to take however long it was going to take.

It is. It's a superpower. It's called. The superpower is called creating space. And the. What I. What I said, I totally remember that walk. I remember. I remember exactly what you're talking. Remember exactly what you're talking about. I said, we're going to stretch time. And it's. Which does require us to slow down, actually. And it also does really bend. It kind of bends it too. And it was interesting when I was working on Overwhelmed, and over at the fourth section is called Liberate youe Time, because then I was. I've been researching this, the system, the deeper reasons really why it is that as smart as we are and as talented we are, as much stress management and self care and green drinks and yoga and all the stuff that we do, our lives actually have become less sustainable, not more. And if you look at the surveys of happiness, they've gone down. The surveys of depression, it's gone up even before this year. And so I'm all about like, let's get into the deeper, deeper reasons. And one of the reasons is this way that we relate to time. And so I'm just going to say something. As I remember writing this whole chapter and Jenny and everyone, I was like literally up in my writing studio like feeling like pulling my hair. I'm like, how do I talk about time and space space like Einstein did in a way that it's going to make sense in the book that's actually going to help people do. What I say is fault is spot false time pressure. That is self induced spot false time pressure that's systemically created and see and use these superpowers which Einstein talked about. A lot of the quantum physicists know, yogis have known forever is that time is a man made construction. So just think about this for a second. Time isn't, it's real, but it's man made. So it means it's not natural. The start of the calendar year used to be vernal equinox, March 20. Julius Caesar changed it to January 1. The calendar used to work on a cycle of 13 moons with the moon cycles which are natural every 29 and a half days. The moon cycles, they just cut out a month and made the 12 month calendar, the Roman calendar. This is all man made, even seven days a week, 24 hours in a day. But we like, we march to it like it's natural, but it's not. And the same thing with time pressure is we just think, oh like I have to like get there or I have to make it happen by this deadline. And when you learn how to work with time and the superpower of creating space, it allows you to kind of elevate out of time pressure that's not real. Like so for example, in that instance with the yoga class, I sensed into what's called the field. So the field is like the quantum field. It's an energy field. And I'm. It wasn't like we were like, you know, downtown and we had to go all the way uptown. We were, I think we were like in midtown or something and we, we were close enough and I'm like can we get there? And I'm like, yeah, we, we can totally do that. We just need to slow down, stretch time, and we will arrive exactly in the flow. And we've all had this right, where you're like, you think you're running late, and if you slow things down and just by breathing and you stretch time, you end up showing up exactly in the right flow, and you can't. It's not a magic trick. You know, it's like if you're two hours away, I can't get you there in 15 minutes. But it, but it is this, this piece that we keep coming back to, which is slowing down. And I have to just be honest with you. While this has been my spiritual and my personal and my leadership lesson for over 15 years from both of my primary teachers who actually don't even know each other, they have said multiple times to be slow down a rilo. And I think I might maybe have finally gotten it, but it seems so, like, simple, but it's actually at the cornerstone of everything. And we can unpack that if you want or go wherever you want.

This is just brilliant. There's so, so, so many gems in here. I love your example of the yoga class because of what you're saying, that of course you can get us across town, transform two hours into two minutes. However, if we chill, know that we're not that far away. Okay, we could be a couple minutes late. But you never know if we're feeling into the flow on that day. Maybe the teacher starts five minutes late and it's not that disruptive. Or we arrive in such a Zen state that we're not creating extra chaos and stress from the moment we walk in the door with crazy energy. You know, we're, We're. We'd float in with joy because we weren't stressing ourselves out in the, in the car right there because we were meant to walk. We were in Washington Square park, and it was in soho. It was close enough. And what you said about my friend Julie put. Put it in her book the Work Revolution, about true urgency and false urgency. And you mentioned deadlines. And of course, I think, you know, step one is we ask ourselves, is this, Is this really due? When I said it was due, just because I said that was it or someone else. And then there's all this false urgency as well, around our expectations of communication. And this is something. This is one of my Achilles heels in life too. If anything, I'm a. You know, they call snail mail. Like, physical mail is snail mail, but actually my snail mail is email. I'M like an email snail.

Because I haven't yet found that sweet spot of. I know for sure that I don't want to react to incoming emails, LinkedIn messages, text messages, as if they're as urgent as they sometimes convey. Like, boom, pop, I'm here, I'm right in front of you. Answer me. That conveys a certain sense of urgency. So I think there's all these norms in our culture as well that almost developed by default without as much conscious thought and intention around what is the turnaround time for a text message? You know me, Cristine. Sometimes it'll be weeks. It'll be weeks. But the people who can stand to be my friend would know that. Well then whenever Jenny replies, it's perfect and it's nothing personal. And you know, of course sometimes there's. But I think that's the whole flow of it, that I wouldn't be who I am if I was constantly reacting to things. And as you said, I love that you shared being so open that stretching time and slowing down are some of your kind of superpowers in progress, if you will, that these are things that you're working on? Because I also think there's a side of this where we get really excited. You know, if you love your work and you're passionate about it sometimes the, the speed. I almost picture us in an open top convertible and like we want to fly down the highway with wind in our hair. That feels good sometimes too. But it's about how do we recharge along the way.

Yeah, there's, there's so many, so many pieces of it. I love, I, I love your response about the snail mail and email. I totally, that is true about you, but it does, it's just, but it always feels in the flow with you in our conversations and our communications like, and that's the piece we're really all looking for is, is flow. And when I teach flow, the acronym is focus your life force on what matters. And the equation is focus plus fluidity equals flow. And this is how I approach my business. It's how I approach my work. It's what I, you know, I teach people on how to create sustainable success is that you need both, you need both that focus. But you also, if there's, if you're over focused and there's no fluidity, there's no water, there's no space, there's no space for synchronicity. And so you're just always pushing like a linear line that focuses the masculine energy and it helpful and we want it. But if that's all you have, you're just like a machine who's driving and striving and grinding and pushing to some either preconceived timeline deadline that you have in your head that you've made up and. Or which I creates what I call self induced toxic time pressure and. Or it's systemically created either by the system that you work in or like you're saying, Jenny, the over culture that's created these realities of like instant gratification or even someone you work with and you work for. I mean, if, if you work for a person or with a person who is being driven by their own deeper fears around not getting things done in time, not getting there, not making it happen. I mean, this is the piece about the root part that's really challenging to be with. Is that the reason we do this, why we put our own pressure on ourselves, why we say okay to deadlines, which by the way would be a little, little practice to, to, to embrace you all. Deadline. One of the ways we start shifting our relationship with time is to change our time talk. And the word deadline, I got rid of it out of my language library years ago when I learned that the word deadline actually means comes from the Civil War. And it was a line that was in a prison camp that if you crossed it, you were shot dead.

So intense, right?

And we use it all the time not knowing the root of that word, but that's the consciousness that we're bringing in. And so of course we all feel like, oh my God, oh my God. Even if you don't know that. And so you had to use a couple more words like completion date or due date or when I intend to have it done. But then what it does. And in, in what, what I want, the principles I teach from a leadership perspective is instead of thinking about timelines, think about time spans. So a timeline is linear, it's flat. It's all you can do is push forward on a linear level. And it takes a lot of effort. Like if you were just to take your hand and push forward, all of your energy and life force has to be there to push it forward. And there's no space in a line. But time spans in the visual that like for example, is in the book. And the vision visual I use when even planning and pathing for my own business is like it looks like a rainbow. It's a span, and it starts on the left and it goes up to the top, which is like the midpoint, and then down to the bottom, which is your intended completion date. And you can, if we all have intended completion dates. But that's where the fluidity comes in. It's like you have to be fluid to like be able to move what's going to happen in the world and what's going to go on. Deal with the uncertainty and you can kind of stretch. Here goes back to the stretching. You can stretch out a time span and not, you know, and it's still, you're still going to complete it, but you still have space in it. So when you're working within these time spans.

It allows you to exhale like I'm just exhaling right now. And, and it also gives you some level of like surety and takes away some of the uncertainty and some of the lack the time pressure. I'm a card carrying member, you all in the impatience club. I have been forever. I try to rip it up, I try to give it back. I always want to be where I'm not. I know this about myself, which is why I developed all these practices to basically chill out and be able to work in the flow versus having to push and grind and strive and hustle, which is exhausting.

It is exhausting.

I don't want to do it anymore. You know, I'm just not, I'm just not interested. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a equation for burnout.

Absolutely.

Planet and us as people.

I think you and I having hit burnout cycles so early in our career is like I just have so little tolerance for hustle culture. I mean, I remember, oof, just, just leaving Google, just unwinding my whole system from the intensity of that environment that I layered on a side. Hustle on top of took months of me being a couch potato and just coming off that. And of course in my head I called it couch potato. But what I was really doing was letting myself bounce back. And I just love, love, love what you're saying. The phrase self induced toxic time pressure is so good. And it reminds me in terms of changing our time talk when you were saying that about your lexicon. And words are very important to me too. This is something I talk a lot about in heart based business. You know, I've heard podcasters talk about cold leads for their email list and I'm thinking to myself, do you realize that these, quote, cold leads are listening? These are real people like me that I'm listening and you're calling me a gold lead. And language is so important. And as you were talking, it Struck me a lot of our time metaphor is like I'm under the gun or under the wire. Even the notion of a podcast, this one's totally free flowing. And that's what I told you before we hit record. Let's just see where it takes us normally. And in my earlier podcasting days, I had a bullet list. So what are bullets like? It just goes with that war metaphor, that linear list, the timeline that you described versus the time span. And I think what you're saying also requires developing the superpower of trust and the skill to trust the flow. That if you expand, if you drop the self induced toxic time pressure, things will work and they might even work better and they will work better for you and they will align with your energy and the cosmic energy and the flow of your own life and the flow of the cosmic consciousness. You know, and I think it's a skill because I think, I think there's a lot of fear that. And you know, I used to be this way too. But if I'm not hard on myself, like I remember doing this with weight. Talk about another construct of what number is on the scale. Talk about an arbitrary, completely arbitrary number. Time, money, weight, it's arbitrary. And I remember I would judge whatever that number showed as good or bad. This was probably in high school, early 20s as good or bad. And it might vary by 10 pounds. And the emotional state that that would instigate in me, just absurd. And we do the same thing with money. We could see what we have as a little or a lot. And how we see it affects how we are and how we exist in the world. And so I think what you're saying around a lot of these shifts, it just, maybe you could just speak to that, of your journey of trusting the flow. And if you, you remember or if you have like one story of a time, I think that would be helpful for people who are feeling a little anxious or trans transitioning to this more flowing, serendipitous state.

Yeah. And it would be normal to be feeling anxious and around that, you know, because we're, we're all of these constructs that we buy into that we don't even know we've bought into that create these imprints within us. They give us this false sense of safety and security. And one of the things that it's done to us as a culture and it's done to us as a people is we are really divorced and separated from our intuition, which is our superpower. We over rely on our intellect and we, we're not taught. I mean, I just did a talk for 20 12th graders. There's a big piece of my work in the world is teaching people about their intuition and how to work with their intuition and what intuition is and, and we will woo woo it and poo poo it away. You know, it's like, well, that's not really relevant right at all.

By the way, I think intuition is the number one best business strategy ever. And I can't imagine why it gets relegated to oh no, don't trust your intuition. I mean, you got to educate yourself and educate your intuition and learn. That's what you talked about right at the start, self awareness. But please keep going. I'm so on the intuition train with you.

Well, because if you think about it, so this is the piece we have to like take a step back and you all and realize that we are swimming around in a fishbowl that Clarissa Pinkola's Estes, who wrote Women who Run with Wolves, calls the over culture. And what I love about our definition about the over culture is basically, it's the crazy mad system, this fishbowl that we live in that we all try, tried, we've all assimilated into and are just trying to survive. But we're like fish. We don't know that we're in a fishbowl. We're just like swimming around, you know, trying to like eat our, get our fish flakes and you know, get our castles and then get the next castle. This is like how we're trained until you wake up one day like, you know, Jenny and I woke up and we're like, wait a second, what are, what we're in a fishbowl. What are we doing in this fishbowl? You know, like, we don't want to be in a fishbowl. And, and when you're in a fishbowl, you're dependent upon someone else giving you the fish flakes. You don't realize that you are actually in co creation with the universe, which is not just some Hootie Doody, woo woo po pooey woody like theory. It's actually real. And the scientists know it, the religious scholars know it, the yogis know it, everybody knows it. But you know, if people really got, if you all really got, if we all really got how powerful we were and that if we took our intuition and we really were able to wield it and understand it and we wielded our intelligence like our true that the yogis call your higher intelligence or this quantum scientists call the imaginal field and we could tap into that. That is the land of possibility. That is the land where we can actually create systems and ways of working and being that aren't like. They're like binded the current systems by a culture that really got birthed. You go back many years, but go back to the industrial revolution where all these systems, education, government, healthcare, et cetera became part of how we live was to fuel a country and a world based on consumption, accumulation, domination, grow bigger, faster, faster, faster. And maybe we needed that to get the infrastructure in place. But what's true is if we keep putting those same ways of working and being into place that are all about what's logical and what's rational and exponential growth and you have to keep making more and growing more, this planet's going to combust and it's going to kick all of us off of it. And so we're at this point in our own lives. If you really trusted. So it goes back to your question Jenny, of really trusted that deeper knowing within yourself and led from your heart and led from that deeper knowing and were really knew how to connect to your heart and your soul and really know what was true for you and then make choices from that place which will often look different than what other people are doing that are in harmony for you. It's called harmonic defiance. It's one of my favorite superpowers in the world and it requires that you trust what I call your crazy wisdom which is another superpower and to like do the thing to take the path that to make the choice that isn't quote unquote rational or logical based on the over culture standards or based on what success is supposed to look like. And Jenny, I know you've done this. I know I've done this. I imagine many of you are. Listen, I mean just think of a time when you follow that deeper knowing, when you followed that thing that people are like she's crazy or he's crazy or that sounds crazy. But you knew that it was right for you. You knew it was your path, you knew it was the choice you were supposed to make and you trusted it. And even though you couldn't see how it was going to work out, even though you didn't know what the linear path would be something and you said step into the unknown and you did that moment you strengthened your trust muscle. And if you were smart, we keep strengthening it because you got to keep. It's like going to yoga. You're going to whatever you got to keep strengthening it using the muscle or atrophies. And over time, it becomes stronger and strong longer. So you can navigate, like right now in the uncertainty and all of this. It's not that I don't have moments of anxiety. I have little moments that go beep. And I'm like, oh, I know you. And then I slow down. I'm like, okay, what's going on in my heart? What's going on in my body, what's going on for me emotionally? And then I know how my heart, my body, my mind works so I can move through the fear and move through the anxiety or the frustration and find my truth. And that's a practice that I think is like a yoga of everyday life and how we run our lives, our businesses, our families in the world.

So, so well said. Thank you. I, too, love Harmonic Defiance. So good you have the best way to frame these things and talk about them. What I love about Harmonic Defiance and trusting your own crazy wisdom is that it has you question. I don't know if you've done Gretchen Rubin's four tendencies, but. I haven't.

But I know. I know her work. I haven't.

So there's. There's upholder. Four types, upholder. I mean, this is linear, but let's just say broadly speaking, upholder, questioner, obliger, rebel. We can talk more about it later. But I think of myself as an upholder questioner, and the questioner in me always wants to ask because I find it interesting that so often listening to our intuition and being who we really are in the world does involve some aspect where we feel crazy or someone's telling us we're crazy, or it's going against the norms. And what empowers me to trust that more is to ask, who's benefiting from the current norms? Who benefits from the current structure? I don't think at a lot of the tech companies that I've, you know, the one I worked at, the ones I've spoken to in the years since, I don't think the CEO says, let's create a complete toxic burnout culture. Nobody's saying that at the top and trying to this. I mean, some companies are growth at all costs, and they actually don't care if they turn and burn their teams. But for the most part, I think what happens is this crush, this crush of work and expectations. And let's say when you're an employee in that system, who's benefiting from you burning the candle at both ends? Not you. You're not benefiting if you're a business owner, and you're running yourself ragged, pricing too low and pleasing all your clients. Who's benefiting from that? Not you, not your business, not your team. So for me, part of just recognizing all the times, large and small, that intuition has. Has served me extraordinarily well better than my intellect and saying. And always being willing to question who's benefiting from this. And, And I think when you say slow down, part of that can be when. For me, when I feel shoulds, I need to ask myself, who created this system that I'm participating in or who created these norms? Who benefits from them? And most of the time, it isn't me. You know, by the time those shoulds arise, there's already. It's already a signal of.

Go a different way, figure out a different path, do something more creative. And I guess I wonder if you could speak to sometimes what comes with trying to go your own way is. Is looking at everyone else and saying, well, the. If this way made sense, wouldn't other people be doing it? Like, I can almost picture myself or others looking over both shoulders being like, why isn't anyone else seeing this? Why isn't anyone seeing what I'm seeing? Is it. Is it me? Is there just something wrong with me? And should I just. You know, I mean, I know it as I'm saying, but I'm curious to hear your. To hear your response to that of when. When you do feel kind of crazy in the moment or like, well, if it could work a different way, wouldn't everyone else be doing it that way already?

Yeah, well, it goes back to the fishbowl analogy, you all. And when I was. It's. It's, as I was writing, getting into the root reasons of why we haven't gotten out of this burnout culture. You're exactly right. It's like. It's not like there's some Dr. Evil, Jenny and everyone, like, you know, we're just gonna, like, control the humans. I mean, there might be a couple of those on the planet, but for the most part, people want to do good. And. But we're.

We're.

We're binded in these systems that are. I mean, at the core of it, I believe, is the financial system that is. Is what any public company is tied to. And if we're working inside a public company or we're in a nonprofit company, which is just trying to like, can someone give us some money? Like, the whole thing until we, like, lift up that linchpin. It's. It's like there's not going to be a mass awakening because people are like the fish in the fishbowl. They just want to be safe and they don't have the tools and they don't have the. And this is part of the challenge. Unless you've sought out other tools and other wisdom, as Jenny and I have. I know many of you listening here have as well, and you've been trained and in. Trained into a system to assimilate into it to survive, basically. And we haven't been really been given the tools and. Or the normality of like, to thrive until we wake up and we start questioning. I love that you're the. What was it? The questioner.

Like, give me a good reason and then I'll do it.

Yeah, well, we should. I mean, yeah, I say question everything, you know, that's a question everything. Don't just. Just don't just be a lemming, you know, and just, you know, follow, you know, everybody else. And it is courageous. I mean, that's why it's called harmonic defiance. It's not about having to rage or, you know, like post it all over social networking or be public about it. It's about. It's oftentimes the deepest, most profound leadership is actually quiet. And I always say leadership has nothing to do with your position or the letters after your name. Leadership is a choice, and it's a choice for will you lead your life from this place of harmonic defiance, which basically means saying no to the ways of working, being living in the world that do not feel in harmony for you, and finding and choosing the harmonic path and then not judging other people, which is my challenge sometimes has been my spiritual lesson, to not judge others or get upset with others for not judging. Seeing what I see. And I think that's the part if you're a person out there who sees what you feel like. I got it. Why don't they see this? Why don't they see this? One of the. I just had this conversation with a group of students last night. I said, you know, a lot of us have these inner critics who tell us that we're behind. I don't know if you have this ever, Jenny, but mine likes to say, you're behind. You've missed the boat. You've missed the boat.

About another linear time conception being behind as compared to someone else. It's a line.

It's a line. And I'm like, no, I'm actually right on time in my own life, like in my own timeline of Christina Rylo. And I'm actually ahead Like, I'm. I'm like, I'm always writing for the future, and I think that's the part of, like, embracing. I like to think of us as pioneers. You know, Like, I think of the pioneers in America that at some, you know, back in the Industrial Revolution, around that time or the early 1800s, people lived on the east coast. And at some point someone's like, let's start to move west. And so people moved to Chicago, and then the people got to, you know, to Kansas and Nebraska, and then they saw the Rocky Mountains, and they're like, oh. And at that moment, and this is kind of where we're at as a culture, and this is where we will come to these places in our own lives. We're like, well, crap. Like, those are the mountains. What's over the mountains? I don't know. And if I. If I choose to go through those mountains, I can't bring everything with me that I've had before, because it will be like, there's too. It's too heavy. It's too much. So as a pioneer, you come to this. Some people, they just stayed in Kansas. No offense to anyone who's in Kansas. They just like, not going any farther. We're going to stay here. But for those of us that are here to be part of the evolutionary shifting of the planet, and we are here to be. To, you know, to push the boundaries, to stretch time, to stretch things, to bring in new possibility, we got to look at those mountains and be like, okay, what do we need to leave behind? Because we can't take everything with you who's around us to make sure that we're not like the lone wolf going through the mountain. Because we really need connection and community with other people so that we don't. You know, I always say, follow your intuition, your crazy wisdom, but don't be a dummy pants. Which means, like, don't go into the mountains and be like, I'm just gonna live off the land and I don't need anything. And, you know, like, you bring your supplies or it's just like, if you make a job shift or a career shift or a shift in your focus, you don't cut down. You don't cut down the things that you've already created. So you. You. You siphon off your money flow. You make the transition gradually over time, at the pace of grace versus the pace of your own mind. So let me go through the mountains, and we don't know what's on the other side. And that's true. I mean, I've. I've hit that line, come to that line again and again and again. Jenny and everyone else I know you have Jenny. Where it's like, you know, I'm. In 2017, I was living in Northern California. The fires happened. I had to evacuate for three weeks. And I was renting at the time because we had sold our house to be nomads for a couple years. And I came back and the housing stock market market went down. I couldn't find something to rent for less than $6,000 a month. And even then I was like, I don't really want to live in that. And I just knew I was being guided to move. And I was getting ready to start the book, overwhelmed and over it and I didn't want to leave. I don't want to leave California. It took me like 30 years to get there. All my friends were there. I loved it. Like I even get a little teary eyed. I'm feeling a little grief this month around just this like having to have left that a couple years ago. I missed that. I missed my friends there. But I ended up trusting and going into the unknown and coming up to Washington. I didn't know I would stay here. I live on a little island off the coast of Seattle that feels like the Shire. It's a writer's haven. And to write overwhelmed and over was an epic journey. Like it really stretched my mind, it stretched my being to try to actually create a book that gave people a path to. That actually could get us out of overwhelm and self sacrifice and see these imprints that we carry in us and systemically and start to make different choices so that we could really create a world based in wholeness and wellness and sustainability and interconnectedness. Which means then if we have it within us, we can create businesses and we can create organizations and families that do that. And I still have grief about it. Like I said, I miss California, I miss my friends and. But I know I'm in the right place. And that was an act of harmonic defiance where I'm in this co creative relationship with the universe and I'm not always in control, but I'm always at choice. And I think that's the piece. If we can cultivate that within us and have people around us, we'll go through the mountains. And I could never have imagined that this island, which feels like Narnia, existed because I didn't know what I didn't know because the mind can only see what, know what it's seen other people do or Done itself. But the heart and the soul, it always knows how to keep us on our path.

Preach. Preach. That's so, so exquisite. I have heart emojis in my eyes just while listening, staring into my computer, just in love with what you're saying and you and who you are and this wisdom. And as you're talking, I'm picturing those beautiful scenic shots that you'll send me. Like the water, the calm water, the trees. Knowing that you and your man and your pup are there and, and that it, it is crazy that it kind of took your home. Literally burning down, like burning around you, even if it wasn't yours in particular. And, and then sparking this epic journey, as you said, and just so much the pace of grace and being in this call for all of us, everyone who's here listening to be pioneers for the evolutionary shifting of the planet. Wow.

Cool, right? I mean like, why would you want to be a lemming or stuck in the fishbowl? It's like we get to be pioneers and I always say it's a pioneer party. Like we, the time of the, the lone wolf and doing it on our own is over. And there are ways of working that are being and creating that are, are becoming more accessible. And so this piece of co creation is really important because in that you got to develop a relationship with the universe. It's not some refrigerator magnet. You know, we just put up our little saying. It's like being in relationship to. In Star wars they called it the Force. You know, it's the Force. It's real. You can't see it, but we've all experienced it where you felt guided or held making that pass through the mountains. And I think that's one of going back to where we started at, you know, is, is like really embracing that it's real. It is real. It's as real as anything. Just because we can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And so I love Jenny, that you have the communities that you do and that you do this podcast and everything because like us having these kinds of conversations, it's like we're not crazy. We're not woo woo poo poos. You know, we might be weird, but weird in the good ways. Like, you know, one of my yogi teacher said, why would you want to be normal? Normal in this culture is unhealthy. And I was like, that's very true.

Right, right.

I'll rather be a partner, an evolutionary pioneer. Sounds way like a way better job and lifestyle.

I'M with you a hundred percent. And sometimes for me being a pioneer, it can almost be frustrating because at first there's nobody who gets it and then all of a sudden everyone and I'm like, and I wave my hands. But I've been doing this for years. Or I'll do it the long hard way. And then boom, five years later, there's the software tool. You know, something that like.

I understand.

I'm like, I'm smiling over there. I'm nodd like, oh, it's true. It's totally true. That is the, that is the challenge of the job.

Christine, this has been so delightful as always. And wouldn't you know it, time has flown. I can't believe that it's been our full time for recording, but I'm just so thrilled to have had this conversation, to have your book in my hands, to know you, to know that your work exists in the world. You're so gifted. It's so special what you bring and how you give people permission to do the same. So thank you. I have a feeling we could do many follow ups to this. Can you let listeners know where they can find you and keep in touch?

Yeah. So the so one way to connect with me is through my podcast, Feminine Power Time. Turn off the chatter and tune into what matters. And that's it's for all people, but it's about feminine power. So that's a good place to connect. You can also come over to my website, which is my name, Christine Arylo A R Y L O or just go to Overwhelmed and over it and that will also take you to the book page and it will take you to my website and those are two great ways to connect and kind of see what's going on and would love to connect with you all.

Amazing, Christine. Huge congratulations on another epic book and body of work and thought leadership. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing all of your superpowers with us.

Thank you. So good to be with you all today.

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