Zette Harbour

Zette

After Life; After Death

Have you ever been curious about what happens after we die?

Or, maybe you’ve lost someone you love and wonder if you’ll ever see them again.

Maybe you feel afraid when you think about dying.

This book is the perfect remedy for anyone who feels fear and grief about death and dying…

Or is simply seeking a way to reconcile their experience of living.

In ​After, A Doctor Explains What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond​, Dr. Bruce Greyson has compiled 45 years of research into the science of near-death experiences.

While he has never directly experienced an NDE, in his early years as a psychiatrist, he was introduced to the phenomenon.

At that time, if someone told a doctor they’d died and left their body, it was usually dismissed as imagination, poor brain function, or some sort of psychiatric disorder.

Dr. Greyson’s lifelong grounding in the scientific method led him to question why NDE’s weren’t studied with the same rigor as other areas of medicine.

That question launched what would become a more than forty-year quest to gather and assess the evidence of Near-Death Experiences, which resulted in this inspiring, insightful book.

Along the way, Dr. Greyson faced pressure and even ridicule because he was willing to ask scientific questions about a topic at which most scientists scoffed.

His unwavering commitment to applying the scientific method to something science is unable, to this day, to explain, is what makes this book so valuable.

Dr. Greyson’s goal isn’t to prove or disprove that Near-Death Experiences are real.

He isn’t even trying to prove that there is something beyond death.

Which, for me, makes his book even more interesting and compelling.

In After, he presents a balanced view of the stories of a diverse collection of people who report experiencing something extraordinary and profoundly life-changing.

And, he shares it in a way that elevates those stories as more than someone’s fantasy or mistaken perception.

By not attempting to prove or disprove the validity of NDE’s, he succeeds in letting them speak for themselves.

The main reason I chose to listen to this book is that I’ve been fascinated by Near-Death Experiences for a long time.

However, it wasn’t until 2023, when I listened to Anita Moorjani’s story in her book, ​Dying To Be Me​, that I began to consider them as something other than fringe.

Now, listening to Dr. Greyson’s book has given me the quality and breadth of perspective that’s made it possible to integrate the NDE experiencers’ perspective into my own world view.

I resonate with the perspectives that the overwhelming majority of NDE’ers share upon returning to their bodies.

Some part of them will live on after death

Consciousness lives outside of the brain

Compassion for others

Life is purposeful

I can also relate to some of the negative aftereffects NDE’ers report…

Trouble valuing the same things as most other people

Dissatisfaction and feeling limited by physical form

Feeling disconnected with the material world

Having my perception of life be misunderstood or ridiculed

I used to think of it as having a Near-Life Experience…

Which is why I appreciated Dr. Greyson including the observation that just learning about Near-Death Experiences can create a positive impact on those of us who haven’t had them.

You don’t need to have a Near-Death Experience to receive the “comfort, hope, and inspiration” that approximately 5% of the entire population do by going through it.

So, think about that.

One out of twenty people have had the non-ordinary experience of leaving their physical body, being enveloped in a quality of love and acceptance that’s unknown to most of us, and returning knowing that what we all believe to be the most real, is in fact, the least.

Also, NDE’s have been reported across every culture and even throughout history.

They aren’t new.

What’s new is the potential for studying them, creating an objective and fair system for recording and tracking them, and the ability of the NDE’ers themselves to connect with one another.

What would you do differently if you knew that…

  • This isn’t the ultimate reality?
  • You won’t be judged or punished after this physical existence?
  • Your consciousness exists beyond your brain and body?
  • Everything that happens here is purposeful?
  • Physical existence is a relatively brief and temporary state?

Carl Jung described this way of seeing as “holding the tension of opposites.”

You can understand that this moment, your past, and your future feel like the most urgent and impactful elements of your existence…

While, at the same time, hold the awareness that what you’re experiencing today is temporary and limited in its true importance.

It’s not so you don’t feel what you’re feeling…

Rather, it’s so you can feel what you’re feeling and rest in the knowledge that its purpose is beyond what you can possibly understand right now.

Because, half of our stress, fear, or pain is the internal wrestling we do in an effort to reject our experience.

  • “This shouldn’t be happening.”
  • “I should have done it this way.”
  • “They shouldn’t be acting like this.”

Leaving room for the possibility that there is a perspective greater than what most of us have been conditioned to believe to be the truth…

Creates space for a more expansive point of view with multiple choices of what we want to do…

How we want to do it…

And, most importantly…

Who we want to be.

Why You Don’t Celebrate Yourself

You’ll have been given many thoughts about celebrating yourself from family, school, and culture. No doubt, you’ll have witnessed other people boasting about themselves and told yourself that would never be you.

Here are some more thoughts about why you’ll never be ‘that person’…

  • You don’t want to seem vain or self-important
  • What you accomplished isn’t that big of a deal
  • You didn’t do it on your own and don’t want to take credit away from others
  • You don’t want to make other people uncomfortable
  • It wouldn’t be fair to point out your successes without also acknowledging the times you didn’t succeed
  • You don’t think it’s a sign of a good leader to ‘toot your own horn’

These are just some of the stories you’ve been given and accepted as true. That’s not a surprise because early in life, collecting stories is how you figured out who you were and how you wanted to be. Because your ability to create and collect stories is almost always unconscious and automatic, it’s probably never occurred to you to examine all that’s gone into them.

In this case, your belief about celebrating yourself is tangled up with story threads of arrogance and self-aggrandizement. At first glance, you’d likely say that people who celebrate themselves are conceited and think they’re more important than others. In fact, the reverse is true. People who celebrate themselves are the polar opposite of someone who brags and boasts.

Evolved Leaders Celebrate Themselves

Being able to celebrate yourself is a powerful leadership skill as well as a key element to leading with self-love. Celebrating success is a quantum leap beyond the idea of being proud of what you’ve done. That’s because one essential ingredient of celebrating is a sense of gratefulness. 

That thread of appreciation is what transforms bragging into celebrating. It sounds simple, yet it can be elusive for someone who hasn’t been initiated. That’s where you come in as a leader. It’s your job to not only celebrate your team but to model celebrating yourself. 

When you understand and celebrate yourself, you’re less likely to make the mistake of inappropriate or excessive acknowledgment of your team members. You’ll have done the work of untangling your own stories around appropriate acknowledgment and appreciation. When you’ve created clarity within yourself, you’ll be able to create genuine moments of appreciation for others.

For instance, you’ll understand that when you celebrate yourself or another, you’re not giving praise or reward for a behavior you like. Doing that won’t have a feeling of genuineness and authenticity. And, it reinforces the belief that someone is only valuable for what they do.

True celebration includes the acknowledgment and appreciation of the person for who they are. This is where your own relationship to celebrating yourself plays an important role. 

Read these two questions and rate how true they are for you on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is not at all. 10 is 100%, absolutely! 

This is like taking your temperature. It’s only helpful if the reading is accurate, so let yourself circle the number that feels most true in this moment.

I’m most successful when I’ve made others happy or done what’s expected.

1  –  2  –  3  –  4  –  5  –  6  –  7  –  8  –  9  –  10

If I do acknowledge myself, it’s for something I’ve done.

1  –  2  –  3  –  4  –  5  –  6  –  7  –  8  –  9  –  10

If your rating was above a 5 for either statement, you have some inner clutter and no matter how you behave on the outside, these intrinsic beliefs will be echoed in your actions toward others.

The Value Of Celebrating Yourself

Much like creating healthy soil that naturally makes it possible for a tree to thrive, celebrating yourself creates benefits for everyone in your ecosystem. When you clear what’s in your way of celebrating yourself, you’ll…

  • Increase trust
  • Improve productivity
  • Enhance communication

When you have a personal and clarified experience of what celebrating yourself is, you’ll easily value applying it to your many relationships. And, you’ll be genuine in how you do it.

If you feel resistance to the idea of celebrating yourself, you likely have a tangled story. Those unconscious beliefs can be untangled so you can thrive and become the leader you want to be. 

I’m here to help. Reach out for a chat HERE and get your questions answered. Discover how leading with self-love is vital to making your vision of the world a reality.

Episode 26 Hidden Elements

There is so much wisdom within me and you. Everything you need is already within you. And, you are exactly where you need to be at this moment. My wish for you is that you set out on this journey. Reclaim your Soul. Befriend your Stories. And heal your Heart. As you do, you will walk into your next chapter, hand in hand with the Love that lies beneath. 

My book, Love Lies Beneath: How Reclaiming My Soul Through Story Became The Secret To Healing My Heart is available in paperback and as a Kindle at Amazon. 

Transcript

Transcripts are approximations

Welcome to Love Lies Beneath. I’m Zette Harbour.

I’m glad to have you here. Do you feel like stress, fear, or pain take up way too much of your energy? Have you wondered if you’ll ever be free of that heaviness of your past? Do you long to feel as good on the inside as your life looks on the outside? In this podcast, you’ll discover the story of who you really are and how to set yourself free together.

We’re going to travel into those wild spaces of our inner landscapes and dive deeply into the rich soil of our lives. Reclaiming soul through story and healing. Our hearts. My book Love Lies Beneath is the. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast. So you don’t miss any of this enriching journey. And now let the adventure begin.

In Episode 38, I read from the final section of my book, Part V Hidden Elements. And even as the book comes to a close, the true adventure is just beginning

Part V Hidden Elements Beneath Everything

Beneath Everything

The biggest question I can ask and have asked myself is…

if everything is coming from a place of Love and is designed to help me reunite with myself… then doesn’t that make even the painful stuff a gift? 

This is what I hope to have explored in this book. It is my hope that I have held up a faithful mirror in which you can begin to see your answer to this question, too.

Another reflection I hope I have successfully created for you is that it is ultimately the Truth that everything in my life calls me to discover and recover my true self and my true nature, born out of Love. All those tough experiences were and are sent to me out of loving-kindness. Deep, sometimes really deep, down, I know that. I see what I think is reality but what also exists is everything I cannot see. In some ways, what I cannot see is more powerful than what I can. 

One of the compelling discoveries in quantum physics is light’s ability to behave like both a particle and a wave. One way to think about this is that if I were to pick up a stone, I would see it in particle form. If this were occurring on the quantum level, when I throw it, that would translate into that stone suddenly occupying every possible position between me and where it will eventually land. Imagine how astonished I would be to see the rock, as an object, suddenly transform into a wave of rock energy. Eventually, the rock does land, with a thud, in a specific spot, thus eliminating every other possible outcome. 

For me, Story is much like that. I can allow myself to have the possibility of an unlimited number of outcomes. Or, I can choose one and settle in on a form. My story can be rigid and unyielding, or it can be spacious and curious. I believe that allowing for both is the key to being enriched by life. At their best, my stories define, not confine, me. 

I must take form, but I must also remember that I come from ‘not form.’ So I have to loosen my grip on the stories I have chosen about who I am to be more brilliant, expansive, and powerful. In the flow between the two states of form and ‘not form,’ I tap into the vitality of the source of life. If I am stuck in either one, I stagnate, and life feels like a struggle. 

The goal of reclaiming your Soul through Story to heal your Heart by finding the Love that lies beneath will allow you to move into and out of form and ‘not form’ with ease. As you do, you will experience your life as more energized, fulfilling, and meaningful. This will give you greater satisfaction and enable you to move with greater freedom in the world. In fact, the world becomes more like a story, and your choices about who you will be in it become limitless.

Armed with this new awareness and, the now-conscious skill, you will craft a life worthy of you. This book offers the required initiation to dive down and understand the deeper layers of your story. In gaining knowledge of what you find there, you, the heroine, acquire the items needed as you return to ordinary and present-day reality. This cracks open all of your stories. In their full, rich forms, all layers are seen and serve as treasure troves from which you construct your enriched, new life. 

There are treasures hidden in the depths, and it takes a particular kind of journey to dive down into them to gain their riches. It also requires the type of strength, endurance, courage, and just enough foolishness to believe that you are capable of it and deserve to do it. These qualities must be present for the journey to be undertaken. You know there are risks. Fortunately, you don’t actually know the full extent of what they are, or you might not go. 

Into The Woods

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” 

Albert Einstein

When Rumpelstiltskin reignited my love of folklore, I shared my excitement with a musician friend. We would often talk about Campbell and Jung, archetypes, and soul. Now, we explored this wondrous tale as if it were a powerful, epic journey with universal images and meaning. This tumbled into the idea of telling it and other stories in performance. 

I had no idea that anyone actually did that sort of thing, although I did know that the local bookstore periodically listed storytellers on the events calendar. And this is where the ‘just enough foolishness’ comes in. I decided to do some research and called the event coordinator. 

“How do you go about hiring your storytellers?” I asked.

“When do you want to come in and perform?” was her reply.

I was faced with at least two options. I could decline, hang up, and put an end to this foolishness, or not. I made my decision in the microseconds hanging in the air at the end of her question. I booked a date about thirty days away and hung up the phone. I was deep in Story now, and there was no going back.

I could not have seen what waited for me on this path. There was no way to know how much delight, heartache, camaraderie, betrayal, joy, and deep wisdom would come my way as a result of that one, simple, instantaneous decision. That pivotal moment has taken me on a truly unexpected journey. 

Because of that moment, I have performed at festivals and with symphony orchestras. My audio recordings have been aired on NPR and have garnered awards. In my workshops, I have been awed by witnessing the awakening of others to the power of Story. I have been a facilitator and presenter for university and business organizations, nonprofits, and many others.

And now, here we are. I have written this book because of the immeasurable gifts Story has brought to my life. I had no idea when I made that phone call that it would lead me here.

Release the Kraken

I have wanted to write a book since I was twelve years old. Back then, it felt like being an author was the best thing I could do with my life. I imagined it would be a peaceful, meaningful way to live. That was the complete opposite of the world I lived in at the time. It also felt like a pipe-dream and probably the last thing I thought I deserved. Everyone around me was suffering. Many of them suffered much more than I did, and I felt tremendous guilt for dodging those bullets.

It took my first thirty years just to get the lines of my life untangled enough to make it possible to see what had really happened. My stories about myself and my life had been necessarily clouded. It was too overwhelming to make sense of what seemed like a bloody train wreck. Only once I could get enough perspective would I be able to consider the work of making sense of it.

That has been my vocation over the last twenty-seven years. If I had asked my thirty-year-old self how long it would take me to recover from the trauma, she would never have imagined this. In fact, I can remember thinking and feeling back then that I was nearly done with it all. This makes me smile at myself because now, I know that there is no such thing as being done. The roots of my Soul run deep and wide, and I will be able to find places to reclaim and restore as long as I am alive.

Understandably, this perspective would not have been available to my thirty-year-old self. I could not know that the voice calling me to find my way home would be a lifelong companion. At this point in my life, I am so grateful to the voice. I would not want her to leave me. I rely on her every day now. And I love her.

Writing this book has been a deep and sometimes daunting experience. So many of the places I share have been a part of me for many years. Some of them only made themselves visible as I wrote this. No matter when I made the discovery, each place held its own demands and gifts. During this book’s birthing, my two coaches have been lifelines in navigating my discoveries.

A Finger Pointing To The Moon

Let me share some closing thoughts about the power of Story and language. They are faithful bearers of Truth. They can also play the part of the Trickster. A word makes us think that it is the thing it represents. Stories lure us into believing that they are the point of themselves. In my understanding, neither of those things is true. 

The word we use to describe a thing is never the thing itself. D O G is not the lively, loving, playful being that greets us with unconditional love at every moment. The story we use to describe an experience or an awareness is never the iridescent, will-o’-the-wisp moment itself. When I tell you about my camping adventure, I may be able to regale and delight you, but we are not actually there.

Words and Story are the candle; the flame is the Truth they make possible. With that in mind, I have done my best to use words well. By that, I mean that I want my words to point to a Truth and not get in the way of it. 

For me, this is best reflected in this Zen Buddhist quote.

“Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?”

It is my hope you look at the finger, my stories, only long enough to see the moon to which they point. For me, the moon is made up of those rich and transcendent moments of intimacy and true oneness with the Love that lies beneath. It is made even richer by the relationships I have restored with the many parts of me that bravely accepted banishment to make my life manageable so long ago. What I experience there does not have to be the same as what happens for you. Your moon will be made of different stuff than mine.

There is so much wisdom within me and you. Everything you need is already within you. And, you are exactly where you need to be at this moment. My wish for you is that you set out on this journey. Reclaim your Soul. Befriend your Stories. And heal your Heart. As you do, you will walk into your next chapter, hand in hand with the Love that lies beneath.

Begin Simply

In my work with my clients, and in my own experience, I have worked with a variety of techniques that can get you started on the path to reclaiming your Soul through Story. Here are just a few that you can explore. There is no one-size-fit-all when it comes to restoring your connection to the Love that lies beneath. Approach your own journey with curiosity and compassion. 

I invite you to give any of these a try. If you want to know more about them and about my work, we can get together for a Virtual Coffee Date.

S.E.A.L.

There is a simple, painless practice for empowering your emotions. S.E.A.L.: See. Embrace. Appreciate. Love.

Step 1: I See You

So often, the first response to something negative is to push it aside, bury it, or disown your experience of it. Rather than freeing you, this is how being sabotaged by stress begins. The real truth is, in order to stem the tide of discomfort and unhappiness you are feeling, the vitally important first step is to say, “I See You.”

Yes, let the unpleasant emotions, the difficult people, and the unsatisfying circumstances know that you are willing to acknowledge that they exist. You do not need to say it out loud because the power of this comes from within you. Just the fact that you are expressing a willingness to see whatever is causing the difficulty will create a shift. At this point, you are not trying to change how you are feeling, it is enough that you accept it. By not burying or pushing aside the stress and its source, you make it possible to begin to dissolve the power it has to sabotage you.

Step 2: I Embrace You

This step melts the defensive walls that have enabled you to be sabotaged by stress. Normally, the last thing you would want to do with something distasteful and unpleasant is to wrap your arms around it and give it a BIG hug. On the one hand, you have probably heard the saying, ‘warts and all,’ but on the other hand, no one really wants to hug a warty toad. So, how can you embrace feelings that are uncomfortable, if not truly painful?

This is not about denying your feelings or perceptions. You certainly do not need to give up your initial dissatisfaction or displeasure. All you are doing at this point is saying (to yourself), ‘I Embrace You’ which is a way of making your feelings welcome. At first glance, this can seem like a tough request, yet, once you practice it a few times you will see that it is actually not that bad. In fact, in time that toad will likely become one of your most cherished companions.

Step 3: I Appreciate You

Now you are ready to explore making a shift in your feelings toward the unpleasantness. It might seem like this step will cost you a lot emotionally. Instead, realize that saying ‘I Appreciate You’ is not the same thing as saying ‘You are right’ or ‘I am wrong.’ It also doesn’t mean that you do not deserve something better. You can practice appreciation and still be your own best advocate for transforming the conditions of your life.

One reason this step works is that often what causes us stress actually creates an environment for growth. Think of an oyster. It is the irritation and grit that gets into the oyster and makes it possible for it to produce the treasured pearl. You may not be able to see it right now, but what if the stress you’re feeling is really an invitation to grow something beautiful in your life? When you allow yourself to feel appreciation for even a seemingly negative something, you will be amazed at how it transforms.

Step 4: I Love You

By now, hopefully, you have witnessed some unexpected results from employing the first three steps of S.E.A.L. Perhaps your willingness to really see, to embrace, and to appreciate the stresses that felt like they were sabotaging your life has created surprising and positive improvements. If so, taking the leap and telling your negative emotions and whatever triggered them ‘I Love You,’ may feel pretty effortless.

On the other hand, if you are just starting out or if you find this idea preposterous, say the words whether or not you feel the feeling. It may surprise you to learn that this works just as well, regardless of your emotional status. This is because for the most part an emotion, which is a blend of neurochemistry, thought, and environmental conditions, is temporary. The practice of saying ‘I Love You’ can be performed in the abstract yet still create the desired result.

Declaration of Story Independence

The idea that you have the right to decide what Story you want to live out may feel unfamiliar. You may even feel uncertain as to whether or not it is true for you. One valuable practice is to have an articulated declaration that you can post or look at frequently. 

This is your own personal declaration of story independence. 

I believe that at my core, I am a collection of stories.

I believe that I arrived here with the right to choose what those stories are.

I believe that empowering, inspiring and evolving stories let me see just how many choices I have and how powerful I can be.

I believe that Love lies beneath all of the stories I have created about myself, my world, and my place in it.

What’s Next

I invite you to take some time over the next days or weeks and experiment with the S.E.A.L. Process. I see you. I embrace you. I appreciate you. I love. Test it out in your own life and see what your results are. And if you have questions and want to understand more deeply what this can mean for you and how this can support you in living a more expansive spacious story, I invite you to reach out and set up a virtual coffee date with me.

Because this podcast was to be a way of diving deeper into my book, Love Lies Beneath: How reclaiming my Soul through Story became the secret to healing my Heart, moving forward I’ll be opening up fresh new perspectives on everything that I’ve talked about over the past year. In the coming months, I’ll be sharing seven foundational principles.

These are thoughts, that when you are able to perceive them clearly and experience them freely, allow them to guide you, you will see your life utterly transformed. You have a powerful vision for how the world can be. And you know that you are someone here to create that impact, to make the world basically a better place.

And that you have given so much of yourself to create this vision, to bring it to life. And for whatever reason, maybe it’s your emotions feel strained, maybe your body’s giving you messages. Maybe you’re carrying weight that you can’t get rid of, or you don’t sleep enough or you don’t have energy or you have aches and pains that are chronic.

And at this point in life, the way you are able to be successful is no longer working for you. You’re realizing that you cannot be at the bottom of your own list anymore. And yet sacrificing your own wellbeing in service of this vision that you have, and this commitment you have to being a force for good in the world.

It’s what has allowed you to live the life you’re experiencing. And so if your emotions or your mind or your body are telling you that something needs to change, then these seven foundational principles will open up amazing possibilities for you. Right now, you might be thinking that you’ve done the best you can, you know a lot, you’ve probably done a lot of personal work along the way, and still the burdens of your past weigh you down despite your best intentions not to let them get in your way. And it’s a little bit like you’ve been really skillful and successful in not having the burdens from your past scattered in front of you for you to trip over or to be stopped by instead, what I see is that you have forged ahead in life and those burdens are tethered and they drag along behind you.

And it’s time now. You actually are giving yourself permission to stop dragging those burdens. And that message is coming to you through your emotions, through your body, through your sensations, through your thoughts, even through the conditions around you, which you may think have nothing to do with what’s going on inside of you, but in actuality, every difficult

or unpleasant or, or even painful person or relationship in your life is a message from your deep inner wisdom, from your soul, letting you know that you are ready to come home to yourself, you are ready to restore all the parts of you that patiently wait for you to see them, to embrace them, to appreciate them and to love them.

And I’m here for you. I believe in you. 

I’m Zette Harbour. This is Love Lies Beneath. I hope you subscribe to this podcast so you can join me on every part of this adventure you can visit LoveLiesBeneath.com and there you’ll find links to show notes to other resources. 

And also to my calendar where you can set up a virtual coffee date with.It’s 20 minutes and it’s for me to learn more about your story and the story you want, so very much, to be living. 

Go raibh míle maith agat! 

Tending The Soil

It can be easy to think of transforming your life as something that you do or something that happens to you. In fact, a more helpful way to think about it is to see it as regenerative agriculture.

You might think that what you really need to do is to get rid of the unpleasant, unhelpful, or even painful parts of yourself.

Maybe the answer is to get rid of the negative people around you. This makes sense because when life feels stressful, fearful, or painful, your brain is designed to look outside of you, identify the problem, and fix it.

This way of thinking is how we approach nearly everything in life. And it’s a reflection of what we have come to understand as conventional agriculture.

In what we all think of as normal food production, other plants and bugs are seen as enemies. So, the strategies are to attack and destroy them. And just like human-to-human warfare, there is always what is commonly described as collateral damage. That’s an aloof way of saying we kill beings that we didn’t set out to. Because they are threats to our goals, we don’t recognize them as beings entitled to live.

When these dominator strategies cause damage to the soil by killing all life and draining its vitality, manufactured chemicals must be added to attempt to mimic what was there before. This never actually works. The soil continues to be degraded every time this process of ‘kill and fill’ is applied. When this process isn’t stopped the soil becomes dirt, a gritty substance that doesn’t nourish life.

This is a metaphor for our relationship to our inner landscape.

You don’t like a part of yourself? Spray it with weed killer or engineer it out of existence.

You don’t like the pests bothering you? Remove them from your life.

It’s Just The Way It Is

You might be thinking, ‘hey, that’s just the way it is.’ This is normal because culturally, domination of ourselves and our natural world has been normalized.

It’s probably easy for you to recognize domination when a country goes to war or when police brutalize their citizens. What may be more evasive is recognizing how often and when you do it to yourself.

This doesn’t mean that you’re not a good person. Being conditioned to dominate your more vulnerable aspects is something you were taught; it’s not who you are. And, you will have gotten a lot of social validation for it, especially in those tender, formative years.

You don’t even have to have been abused by toxic parents to have been conditioned to be dominating toward yourself. This mindset doesn’t have to have been planted in extreme circumstances to have taken root. Even seemingly simple thoughts will do, like:

‘There’s nothing to cry about.’

‘You’re so sensitive, what’s wrong with you?’

‘You always get this way.’

Every time you turned your vulnerable self away in order to be acceptable to those your very existence depended upon, you used power over yourself. And sometimes it worked really well. You were acceptable. Until the next time you had a sensory, emotional, or mental experience for which you needed support but were left on your own.

All this to say, you learned how to use the weed killer and bug spray to eliminate the parts of you that others couldn’t or didn’t give unconditional love to. And, because you’re smart, you found synthetic substitutes to keep your inner soil from becoming totally lifeless.

Your Biological Clock

Today, your soil has become too much like dirt. How you know this is true is showing up in a number of ways.

Your body says, “I can’t keep this up” through

  • chronic conditions
  • poor sleep
  • an inability to choose enough nourishment
  • a lack of willingness to make taking care of yourself your number one priority
  • anxiousness
  • sadness

These are all signs that your soil is teetering on the edge of becoming dirt. It becomes harder and harder to ignore as we age, although it can happen at any phase of life.

The Cure

There is a cure. It’s learning how to tend your inner soil. You’ll find it in discovering how the other plants and bugs are partners in your blossoming. You’ll be a powerful tender of your inner soil. Once you reclaim the vitality of your inner landscape, nourishment abounds.

Sure, you’ll get your hands dirty and sometimes you’ll be a bit sore from the work. Fortunately, every inch of ground you attend to delivers rewards that right now are beyond what you can imagine.

I believe in you because I already see the lush, diverse, rich garden that is your true self. And, I’ve been tending my own inner landscape for a long time so I am confident that I can guide you in reaching your destiny.

You’re destined to let your brilliance and beauty shine into the world and I’m here to help you do just that. Start now by enrolling in the Emotional Mastery Journey group coaching program. I’ll see you there!

Episode 25 Emotional Mastery Journey

Begin to see that who you think you are and who you think you have to be is so very different than your true self. Taking this Emotional Mastery Journey allows you to truly begin to see with such clarity the story of who you’re here to be. You get to see a lot of the things that have gotten in the way of you living as your true self.

And while those things that get in your way do cause pain, they were created and installed from a place of great love. And so as you learn to recognize them, you begin to shift your relationship to them, and that begins with your mindset.

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My book, Love Lies Beneath: How Reclaiming My Soul Through Story Became The Secret To Healing My Heart is available in paperback and as a Kindle at Amazon. 

Transcript

Transcripts are approximations

Welcome to Love Lies Beneath. I’m Zette Harbour.

I’m glad to have you here. Do you feel like stress, fear, or pain take up way too much of your energy? Have you wondered if you’ll ever be free of that heaviness of your past? Do you long to feel as good on the inside as your life looks on the outside? In this podcast, you’ll discover the story of who you really are and how to set yourself free together.

We’re going to travel into those wild spaces of our inner landscapes and dive deeply into the rich soil of our lives. Reclaiming soul through story and healing. Our hearts. My book Love Lies Beneath is the. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast. So you don’t miss any of this enriching journey. And now let the adventure begin.

In Episode 37, I share the section of my book called Emotional Mastery. If you wanted to explore Yosemite, you would first want to have a map that would show you all of the really exciting, beautiful, and important landmarks that you will want to be able to visit or pay attention to along the way. Our own inner journey is exactly like that.

And in order to truly feel a sense of mastery over our emotional experience, we first need to understand the territory. And when I talk about mastery, I do not in any way mean that you will never feel stress, fear, or pain ever again. And I also don’t mean that you will get really good at stuffing it away or ignoring it or shutting it down.

None of that is emotional mastery. Emotional mastery is being present to the moment. No matter how stressful, fearful, or painful it may be learning to decode the message and truly connect to the Love that lies beneath. Because everything that happens in life and in particular, those things that we find to be unpleasant or negative, they are all messengers from our deep inner wisdom.

And they are the map showing us the path to come home to ourselves. And so as we look at this map of your emotional mastery journey, remember to bring along your kind curiosity, listen for the story, wisdom and trust that your Soul knows exactly what you need for you to return to wholeness.

Emotional Mastery Journey

In my work, I have observed and defined a pathway that makes it possible for your stories to empower you. There are three main destinations to which you need to travel, to live with joy and freedom. You will need to spend time at three specific landmarks along the way to each one. All together, completing these nine steps will ensure that you live your life of freedom.

Envision: Discover what your stories are really telling you about yourself, your world, and your place in it

Embody: Activate and renew your relationship to your Soul

Emerge: Live out your most powerful, affirming Story

Envision

Rejuvenate Your Mindset 

Move from uncertainty to confidence. If you have had to dismember parts of your Soul, it makes sense that life will feel stressful and unmanageable. Outwardly you may appear to be an accomplished, positive person. Unfortunately, inwardly you carry a heavy burden of self-doubt. You spend much of your energy coping with pain, fear, and stress without the hope of life getting much better.

By rejuvenating your mindset, you achieve increased self-awareness. This allows you to feel curiosity about what is truly possible. From this vantage point, you can begin to see the light just beginning to emerge over the horizon. Now you understand that maybe things are not as locked in as you had believed them to be and that this means you can hope to enjoy your life and yourself more.

Create Core Intimacy

End the feeling of aimless wandering and find clarity of vision. Here you will learn why sometimes life seems to go well, and other times it is frustrating and disappointing. Without this clarity, life choices are made by guessing, trying to meet others’ expectations, or by your hidden limiting stories and beliefs. 

This knowledge becomes a compass revealing which directions to move toward, as well as where to focus your energy, time, and money. The clarity you attain at this step makes it possible to continue, knowing what nurtures and empowers you. Life becomes less stressful and painful.

Heal Betrayal 

Feel yourself transform from worthless to treasured. Here you discover how you abandon yourself whenever a thought, feeling, or action is unpleasant, painful, or does not fit who you think you are supposed to be. As a result of being cut off, shunned, and forced to remain locked in suffering, that part of yourself becomes an increasing source of pain and stress. This may even manifest as severe physical illness or other major life trauma.

Create awareness that self-betrayal is a natural and normal part of human experience, especially in times of vulnerability and distress. Become willing to look with compassion at your undesirable thoughts, feelings, and actions. Here you discover that in allowing them to remain as accepted parts of you, your unhealed wounds become legitimate and worthy of your acceptance and love.

Embody

Expand your Archetype IQ

Shift your life from meaningless to meaningful. A lack of knowledge of your archetypes leaves you feeling empty, and as a result, there is more pain. You struggle to feel a sense of power over your life’s conditions and feel isolated in your suffering. You are not able to tune in to guidance that can give your life more meaning.

In this step, become aware of how being conscious of your archetypes makes you more powerful in your life and how not understanding them causes pain. Here you acquire the essential skills of listening for and to your archetypes. You learn how to put their messages to work to help you achieve your goals and desires. These potent allies become sources of energy and power.

Master your Soul Connection

Move from confusion to successful communication. If you do not understand the nature of your communication with your Soul, you will not understand why painful stuff keeps happening or how to stop it. You will feel at the mercy of life’s stressful or disappointing moments. This will leave you believing that coping is the best it can get and feel powerless to improve your life conditions.

In this step, you learn how pain and stress are a language from your Soul. Discover that the Soul does not use words as much as it uses metaphors in the form of thoughts, feelings, and actions, which generate results that are either pleasing or painful. Become conscious of what language you are teaching your Soul to use. Let the quality of your results and the conditions of your life help you learn to measure the success of your communication with your Soul.

Empower Emotion

Transform your self-criticism into self-acceptance. Right now, your criticism and lack of acceptance of yourself dominate your life. This creates feelings that you are unworthy and unlovable. You suffer from a lack of gratitude toward yourself. Knowing that you do not actually love yourself is painful. You have judged yourself, and you have come up short.

Being seen is the beginning of healing how you think, feel, and act toward yourself. Welcome unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and actions as valued messengers. Then, experience genuine gratitude without judgment of your worthiness. Finally, express love of yourself, warts and all.

Emerge

Story Wisdom 

Heal feelings of being fragmented and move toward wholeness. Without the ability to tap into the wisdom of your stories, you will compartmentalize parts of yourself as a way to manage pain and stress. This will lead to a feeling of brokenness. You will remain at a loss about how to heal internal and external fragmentation in yourself and your life. This will leave you feeling powerless in the face of painful or stressful thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

In this step, you learn what Story Wisdom is and how it plays a role in healing your fragmented sense of self. You will discover how to access the wisdom in your story to heal and move toward a sense of wholeness. Understanding what a particular event is telling you and how it can support you in becoming your fullest self brings peace. 

Transform Fear 

Free yourself from fear as a way to attain wisdom. Seeing fear as an enemy to be defended against or conquered limits you. This conflict-oriented posture leaves you powerless and deflated. Your default reaction is that fear is to be avoided or dismissed.

Learn the true nature of fear and the role it plays in growing your wisdom. Become adept at transforming what appears to be a weakness or an enemy into a source of power and wisdom. As you do, you will master the ability to glean the gifts of fear by understanding its true nature and power to deepen your wisdom.

Embrace Power 

Evolve from feeling limited to enjoying spaciousness and freedom. Being blocked from your power leaves you limited in your ability to freely and whole-heartedly show up in the world as you wish. Despite desiring more, you lack full conviction about why it is important to discover your life’s meaning, deliver your gifts, and have an impact. This creates feelings of regret and disappointment in yourself.

As you claim your most powerful story and how you want to be, you affirm the importance of discovering your gift, meaning, and purpose. You will celebrate how to live meaningfully, deliver your gifts, and make a difference in the world.

See The Story

There is so much to talk about when it comes to each of these landmarks, the three different levels that you will move through. This is where you get to truly begin to see with such clarity the story of who you’re here to be. You get to see a lot of the things that have gotten in the way of you living as your true self.

And while those things that get in your way do cause pain, they were created and installed from a place of great love. And so as you learn to recognize them, you begin to shift your relationship to them, and that begins with your mindset. So you will begin to see that who you think you are and who you think you have to be is so very different than your true self.

Our next stop is create core intimacy. And this is where you will come to know what it is that fuels your life. What has been driving your life already that was invisible to you and yet had complete power over you? And when you become intimate with this knowledge, you suddenly have the ability to allow this incredible force to let you know where is it right for me to go and how can I get there with ease and purpose?

 And after that, it’s time to look at the landmark called heal betrayal. Every single human being understands what it feels like to be betrayed, some of us much more than others. What I have learned is that something happens when we feel betrayed by others, and really, betrayed by the world.

What happens is that we actually learn to betray ourselves in that moment and we cut off, we shun, or we lock away the part of us that is suffering. And when we do this, We actually are building a barrier to our own healing and it keeps us from restoring ourselves to wholeness. It makes these betrayals actual traumas rather than events that can be a source of great wisdom for us. 

And then we move into the Embody layer and that begins by expanding your archetype IQ. Understanding archetypes is incredibly powerful for eliminating isolation and loneliness. You may be familiar with the term. You may have heard it some point in your life, or maybe you’ve even studied them more deeply. I invite you to consider that an archetype is less a label or a definition, and it is more an expression of a state of being. It’s an attempt to describe an experience and like all attempts to describe, which are stories, it’s easy to become confused and think that the story is the thing, but it’s not.

So the words we use to describe archetypes are never the archetype itself. The archetype itself is the sensations and the emotions and the thoughts and feelings that occur every time something happens to us. And the more archetypes you have to choose from to help you sort out your life experience, particularly the painful ones, the more ease and expansiveness you will have.

And then you move into mastering your soul connection. You know, soul, as I’ve described before, it is the rich soil of who you are and this rich, deep wisdom that you were born with and that you will never, ever lose, even if you lose your ability to connect to it, is a powerful source for you to guide you through your life.

And when you understand how you have unknowingly taught your soul to speak to you with negative or painful thoughts, feelings, experiences and people, you then learn, you have the power to teach your soul, that you will listen to much quieter, much gentler, much softer language in order to understand the direction of your life.

And then it’s essential to empower your emotions. So right now, even if you on the outside look confident and look like you, um, have things under control, no doubt that you have a strong awareness of your inner critic. I’m sure she shows up at all hours of the day. And most particularly when you feel vulnerable and would prefer that she not.

So when we learn how our emotions are genuinely sources of not just wisdom, but power for us, we begin to shift and you actually will find that you can begin to welcome the unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and actions, because you understand their true nature. And again, this isn’t to say that they’re going to feel good, you know, discomfort, stress, fear, pain, those are all natural human experiences. Where they become a problem is when they are translated into some sort of story.

And next you will Emerge. This begins with story wisdom. And when you are able to begin to partner with your stories and you understand their immense value and power as a way of managing trauma, unhealed pain, unhealed wounds, that you begin to understand that they have always been there as a partner, as a part of you that from a place of that deep love created these stories to protect you. And once you understand why they’re there and how you got, how you put them there and how valuable they are, then you can begin to shift the stories that you create, which takes us to transform fear.

 Fear feels so overpowering. It feels so scary. And we’re never going to not feel fear. Fear is wired into our biology. We have a sympathetic nervous system that kicks in whenever we feel threatened. And if we, especially when we were younger, experienced, overwhelming threat, either physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually, and we were not given the proper support or tools to process it, to integrate what we needed to from it and to release it.

Then it is lodged in our body and there can bring up all kinds of feelings of powerlessness and fear as well as physical disability or illness. So when we are able to, again, understand that nature of fear and really see through the message and the messenger to the source that sent it, it gives us the opportunity to tap into our deepest wisdom.

And then finally you get to embrace power. It’s so hard when we feel like we do not have our full power and there’s a lot of conditioning throughout life that tells you do not be powerful. When we were children, it didn’t have to even be adults who wished us harm. It could simply be parents or teachers or whoever else thought that it was their job to guide us, who imposed their rule on how you could be, or even who you could be.

And so we learned so early and so often that there’s a lot of danger in embracing the power of who your true nature is and how you are here to be in the world. And this really makes it difficult to truly understand your life’s meaning to be free, to deliver the gifts that you brought here. And it prevents you from having that incredible impact on the world that you know you are to give. And when you embrace your power, that means you are able to claim your most powerful story. You’re able to not just share your gifts, but enjoy your gifts, revel in their meaning, joyfully celebrate your sense of purpose. And all of that allows you to make the difference in the world that you know you are here to make

I’m Zette Harbour. This is Love Lies Beneath. I hope you’ll subscribe to this podcast.  I hope that you visit LoveLiesBeneath.com. Check out the links to the show notes, the interviews with my guests, the links for all of the resources that I offer here on the podcast. And in my book, Love Lies Beneath: how reclaiming my Soul through Story became the secret to healing my Heart.

And I welcome you to set up a virtual coffee date with me. It’s about 20 minutes long. You will get to tell me where it is you want to go in your life, who it is, you know, you are here to be until then,

Go raibh míle maith agat!