Episode 2
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Welcome to the Practical Mystic podcast where universal wisdom meets modern life. I'm Nicki Kuurman and this is a space for thoughtful conversations around intuition, meaning, and our lived experiences where awareness doesn't always make things easier, but it does make things clearer. These conversations about how we live spiritually in our everyday lives. This is about the patterns that we keep returning to and letting go of what no longer serves us.
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This is a new way of being in the modern world. This is practical mysticism.
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You seem to keep wondering why this is harder than it should be.
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The kind of tired that no amount of sleep can fix.
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There's an exhaustion and also a heightened sense of anticipation. And what's next? And also worry that you can't find that what next is this a racing and or a palpitation and an energy that wants to move. And yet you feel stuck.
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The racing mind. But the still body.
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Can't find what it is that motivates me. Can't find the thing to latch on to this energy. But when it comes to bring it into an idea, into fruition, it just fades or fizzles out.
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And the looping in your mind can see it in your eyes. It's going round and round in circles.
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No amount of asking yourself, what do I want can fix this right now.
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In fact, we need to do the opposite. We need to pause you to come back into the body. Let me hold space for you for a while. While you ship with this.
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And just listen and just breathe. And let what wants to arise come up next. So much is being said.
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When I see somebody's energy. So much is said. Without us saying a word. We can tell when somebody is off. We can tell when somebody is out of kilter. And no matter how much we try to cover it up, no matter how much we try to think that it's not the case, that in congruency of who we want to be, our potentiality and the version of us that we're sitting in right now, it's misaligned.
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Something's going on.
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We can feel it internally, but people can see it in our energy field, too. I may not be able to name it, but they can see you off. It's how you tell when somebody else is off. It's a mismatch to who you know them to be and what they're showing up as.
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And the only way we get to the bottom of these things is if we allow some space and presence. We let it come in. We let it speak to us. We have someone next to us who just says, hey, come and take a seat next to me.
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I see your exhaustion. Tell me about it.
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When we're in this liminal space of, we're not knowing what the next thing is we're trying to get to. But we know we've left behind what we no longer want. Or we. We're about to take that leap. We're kind of dancing in the anticipation of the next new thing.
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A therapist of mine once called The Liminal Space. I think that's a really great description of it. It's like the space between the liminal space between what was and what will be. And really, that is the present moment. It's hard to sit in the presence when we feel like we're in this nothing space that we can't see forward, and we can't see back.
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It just feels like a long gap, long space between these things. And we're not used to that. In that fast-paced world. We're used to jumping from thing to thing to thing. And so, when the next thing is not here, well, this is an exhaustion that I just I just don't even know where to go next because I feel like I'm hitting my head against a brick wall or I'm just so tired.
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I've got nothing left to let this in-between be. If I do not touch it. You've got to allow some space for it.
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And this is where, if you were sitting in a session with me, I'd say the first thing we need to do is look at the alignment of your body, your mind, your energy. And I would start the aligned method. And that always starts with coming back into yourself, coming back and catching this present moment in the liminal space, in all the chaos that's going on around us.
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It's caught this moment. Because this moment is quiet. It's not a breakthrough moment. Mostly, it's not even an insightful moment. It might be some awareness that drops in, but it's the space before that. That's really interesting.
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And the space before that feels like surrender.
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And that's scary, right? Because we feel like it's vulnerable. And when am I going to expose myself to.
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Can you just sit with that quiet, vulnerable nothingness, stillness of this moment? Can you find the silence?
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And sometimes it takes something to sit next to you and mirror that and hold that fully. Great friends, great therapist. Do that for us. They hold space so that we can be like and breathe. We don't have to question everything all the time. We just sit. Take a breath and we wait for the next thing to arise. Or next right step, the next moment, the next inspiration.
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I've been here. Oh my God, I know this space.
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I feel like I was in this space for a really long time. We had a lot of grief in a short period of time a few years ago, and I just wanted to burn everything to the ground. My business has wood in Covid. I was really grieving the loss of a close friend and just nothing felt like it did before there was this.
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I couldn't find the new right way up. It felt like everything was upside down and inside out and back to front. And there was all this chaos. And then once the chaos of the initial grief and the initial, undoing happened, and I was unwell, and then we lost our dog and it was just heartbreak everywhere. And after you go through that initial space of chaos, there's the silence.
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And in that silence came up all the emotion for me. And it was all of the stories. And who am I now and what am I moving to? And there was such a push to do something more, to do something different, to be somebody else, to shed this old version of me. All this unwanted emotion that was coming up here.
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There was nothing in front of me.
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Nothing. Nothing inspired me. Nothing caught my attention. It was exhausting. And my head was doing a million miles an hour. And I had nothing in my body. I couldn't get enthusiastic about anything.
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I still suffer from fibromyalgia, and at the time, I had these terrible, painful flares, and I was in such a physical state of not being able to move my body very much.
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And that wasn't helping, because I couldn't move this energy out. And I was getting so frustrated with myself, and I'm sure my whole family were getting frustrated with me too. And, and my therapist at the time said to me, you just need to pause. And it was like, yeah, I just need to pause. It wasn't a stop.
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It wasn't a stop doing everything because that even felt too much. I was too scared to stop because then what? But this pause for a moment.
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And I had already been working with this align method with clients for years, and there was a sense I had to do it a new I had delivered a new and tweak it and find a new way of being. And what is the first step and the first step that I've always said to people is you have to stop.
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But what I felt when I was exhausted and what I feared in that exhaustion is if I stop completely, then what?
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And truth be known. It wasn't about stopping. It was pausing or went off to surrender. My fears.
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To surrender the what's next? And all the things that I thought I knew or wanted. Surrender the pain and the suffering that I was actually experiencing.
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Surrender all to a higher power God universe, whatever. You see that as. Even just to myself.
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If I had known the answers, I would have done something about it. So, it had to be that there was a different answer, and I had to get out of my own way long enough to be able to hear it. And it was the friends who came with me in that time, who sat and walked besides, sat with me in moments of despair, cried with me, took me for walks, got me out of the house
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Just let me be miserable. Let me be lost. Let me be broken. Long enough for me to be able to let myself be lost. Let myself be broken.
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And honestly, once I surrender completely, it doesn't actually take that long for the clarity to arise. And that's the one thing I really notice with client work, is that once somebody surrenders and just let’s go of all the stories, what's going on? The shifts happen really quickly.
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And from then I started to take in this idea of we were only just one shift away from being a completely different version of ourselves.
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You need to pause. You need to sit. You need to listen and surrender. And you need someone to do that with a really good friend. Someone you trust to just hold you while you wait for the next right thing to hold you while you breathe, to hold you, while you soften, to hold you, while you surrender at all.
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And it doesn't need to be a huge process where you have to talk about everything and go over it and over it again. Although sometimes it can be, but it is a moment of quiet pause, a deep pause that goes down to your feet.
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And in that moment, as we slowly sink back, I think about feeling like it's like sinking back into my body. This alignment comes and we start to feel like we can open up higher. Straighter spine often straightens up a little bit. Can grant our feet into the earth.
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We start. This new energy starts to arise in our body, through our spine, in our cells and inside come more. Skin has come more often. Sometimes nothing moves in that's perfect to.
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Knowing this space so well has allowed me to learn how to pull myself out of that space, when necessary, but I still usually lean into support with it.
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I can do it on my own to a certain degree, but having somebody hold that space with me feels safer for me to go deeper.
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To have someone along for the ride.
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Allows a little bit more softening, a little bit more giving because you know that somebody's got your back.
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And when I'm in perfect flow and perfect trust, I feel the universe in my foot back. I feel the universe gathering support. But when I'm in those moments of crisis and exhaustion, I don't feel like that. I feel lost and spinning and my head's going crazy. I say, how do we get from there? To perfect alignment?
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Sometimes it's tiny steps. Sometimes it's a great big leap.
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But I know if you were sitting in front of me right now, it wouldn't take long for us to find that stillness for you to hang out there for a few moments.
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To soften and relax. To let go of everything that's no longer serving you. And to breathe in the potentiality. All that's available to you. And what might that next right step be?
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You don't need to fix anything. You don't need to change anything. You don't need to do anything in. The first thing you need to do is pause, breathe.
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Soften. Align.
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Support.
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The align method isn't about forcing clarity. The way I work at its heart is about restoring balance and equilibrium. But that doesn't mean having everything perfect, because that most of the time is unachievable for people to maintain. But it's weaving all of the pieces together to create coherence and a resonance that suits you where you are in any moment of now.
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And it's a journey. We keep coming back to alignment every day. I keep bringing myself back into alignment multiple times a day. It's easy to go wandering off and get caught up in some drama or something that's going on
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It's about restoring alignment so the next step can reveal itself naturally.
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I want you to know that you don't need a breakthrough to be progressing.
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You don't need some massive
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Divine planting of an idea or a seed, or the absolute perfect outcome to take a step.
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But what is really important, especially when you're feeling exhausted, is finding the next thing that would bring you the most pleasure in that moment.
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Would it please be more to have chicken or fish? Would it please me more to go for a walk or read a book? Would it please me more to have a glass of water and rest for a moment? Would it please me more to get up and take some action on the to do list?
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There's no right or wrong answer, but you're following you, following just a little bit of, that thread. And it doesn't have to be hugely inspiring to be so valuable.
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You don't need to push yourself out of a pause to get going again. You don't have to draw on that motivation and that hustle and that drive and striving to get out of where you are. I think that energies gone. I think that masculine focus, direct push through everything, just keep going. I can do it. I think that energy's past off.
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I don't think it works for many women. It certainly doesn't work for many women on a long-term basis.
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Sometimes we can get enough inspiration, which is inspired action, right? To take a step, but not when you're exhausted.
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There's no amount of just doing it and just striving and just pushing through when you are absolutely exhausted, there's nothing in your time. There's no amount of striving that can fix that.
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We have to reverse the process.
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If we think of everything in balance, the masculine and feminine, the masculine is light and forceful and direct and push through, and the feminine is dark and mysterious and soft and knowing.
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Neither right nor wrong. We just have to look at where you're at right now. If you're trying to push something to get out of this state, where are you allowing and going in and questioning and being curious about this state?
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Sometimes we just need to come from for another direction.
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if you're lost in that going over and over and over and you can't find direction. Yeah. We need to pull on some of that masculine energy to pull us out of it.
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That too can be a process, but both of those things start with the pause. They start with, where am I right now? Coming back into the body. Where do I want to be? What's my next right action in this moment? And I'm talking about the next three breaths.
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Over the next three days, the next right action in that moment is to breathe a tiny bit deeper, to soften a little bit more, to relax the belly, relax the body.
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To pause. To wait,
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To know.
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Sometimes what matters most is the clarity to come back online. And for clarity, to come back online, we have to be open to receive it.
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We can't be open to receiving when we're closed and busy.
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We can't be open to receiving when we hurt and shut down.
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We can't be open to receiving an exhausted.
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Multitasking.
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We can only be open to receiving in the quiet spaces.
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You probably don't need another program, another to do list. Another thing to strive for. What you possibly need right now is a space to have someone sit with you long enough to be still, to pause, to breathe and be open.
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If something in this episode has landed for you today, I'd like to offer you an aligned conversation. A gentle 1 to 1 chat with me, a pause, a recalibration, a moment to align, and for the clarity to arise. The link will be in the show notes.
