[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Practical Mystic Podcast. I'm your host, Nicki Kuurman. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been talking about grounding and the importance of connecting to the Earth and allowing our energy to flow through us more freely. And when we're feeling disconnected from our earth, our environment, our safety and stability, we can feel disconnected from other areas of our life, too.
So many women come to me, and they have a lot of safety in their life: the house, the family, the job, responsibilities, and yet they feel like something's missing. And that disconnect from joy, from desire, from passion, even from any kind of excitement in their life, really can start to unravel their confidence, their worth, and their relationships.
I used to say I have two types of clients, those who have the list [00:01:00] and those who want the list. And what I mean by that is the list is, "Okay, so perhaps by the time I'm 30, I want to be married, I want to have a child, I want to have a house," dot, dot, dot. And then there's the other women who have all of these things, "I have the house, I have the relationship, I have the kids, and I'm still not fulfilled.
What's wrong with me? These are the things I thought I wanted." And no matter what we're trying to build, no matter where we think we are reaching goals set by ourselves or social expectations It doesn't mean we're fully connected to our desire, to pleasure, to joy, to fun, and we dismiss it as something that's unimportant.
I don't really need to do that. Life is serious. I've got all these responsibilities that I have to take care of. But the soul only came here in this physical body for [00:02:00] novelty, to create, to have fun with. That's its only purpose. And so, we start looking at ourselves or outside of ourselves for answers, for certainty, for approval, for permission to be ourselves and to find something new.
And I'll share a story with you. A few years ago, I was working with Rachael Jayne Groover from The Awakened School, and we were doing a five-day workshop around heart's desire. And I'm at day three of this workshop, and I say to Rachael Jayne, "I got nothing." Like nothing. There's nothing wrong with my life, but I couldn't find a single desire, something that lit me up enough to get me off the couch to take action and do it.
But there was just this massive piece missing, and I couldn't tell you what it was, but I felt like this [00:03:00] massive gap in my body, and I just couldn't find anything to light me up. And a few friends had suggested maybe this was depression, and I've had depression or depressive episodes, so I knew it wasn't that.
But there was just a numbness, a neutrality of like nothing. Not sad, not joyful, just gradually eroding of my pleasure and enjoyment of life. What started to unravel from that was the only thing I came up with at the end of this five day is that I wanted to run away from home, and that maybe I needed a holiday.
I sat with this idea for many, many months, and I really had to look in what are the desires, what are the things I want to be fulfilling and doing just for me? And there was a huge permission block for me, a huge permission block. [00:04:00] Is it okay for me to want? I'd always put everyone else first. My people-pleasing held no bounds.
I was not pleasing myself and one of the exercises, um, that came out of some coaching later on was just starting to choose for pleasure. And I found that really difficult to connect with. What is my pleasure? And I always share with clients, now start with something simple, like choosing off the menu.
What would give me the greatest pleasure on this menu right now? Not how many calories are in it, not what other people think I should be having, not what I think I should be doing, but what would actually be the most pleasurable to enjoy consuming in this moment? And [00:05:00] perhaps it's the dessert menu, right?
It doesn't, it doesn't matter what it is, but I want you to find the most pleasurable thing and give yourself permission to partake. We've been taught for so long that we cannot be seen to be showing our desires and our pleasures, and there's so much taboo around it, and there's so much religious dogma around it.
Enough. Enough.
What would be the most pleasurable thing for you right now? Is it chicken or fish? Is it dessert or entree? Is it even this restaurant? What would be more pleasurable, more desirable, more connected to what arises passion in you
And this is hard to get to know when you're in that flat zone, right? The dead zone. [00:06:00] It led me to do a lot of research around, um, my own hormonal fluctuations, and I was going through perimenopause at the time, and I think what I really recognized is that I had spent my life being not too much, not too happy, not too joyous, not too drawing attention to myself, but also not too flat, don't make people uncomfortable, can't be seen to be down or not happy.
And so, I had shortened my range to this, and I was explaining this to my coach at the time, and Amara said to me, "That sounds like the dead zone." And I was like, "Yeah, that's exactly how it feels." It was like I was existing, but I wasn't reaching any high highs or any low lows. I was just existing. And I thought that that's what I would-- had to do.
I've been trying to just stay in the middle of my emotional [00:07:00] range all my life. My whole childhood was I was told I was too emotional, too sensitive, too much, and so I've been trying to tone myself down, keep myself small, be a good girl, stay in the zone, don't have any dramatic emotions that in the middle there, that's the dead zone.
That's flatlining We're not alive at this point And I did a lot of work around this for about a year, really connecting into my heart space, into what I wanted. But it was more than connecting into my heart space because my heart space was full of satisfaction from clients and love for people, and it was all outward love.
When I turned my eyes in and started to work with my own heart space, what really became apparent that [00:08:00] is I wasn't sitting in my sacral energy. I wasn't connected to my true source of power. When we're not grounded, when we don't feel safe, we throw energetic cords from our sacral chakra, from womb space, out into the world to people or places to give us that sense of safety and stability.
But of course, when they move, we move. When somebody else feels wobbly, we wobble. It's not a true sense of stability, and it drains our life force energy. It's the quickest way to drain ourselves, is when we're tapped into others for our own feeling of worth, connection, and stability. So, as I started to find that I couldn't reach this passion and this desire and this enjoyment in my life, I really had to do a lot of work with turning into myself and coming into this sacral [00:09:00] space.
We hear a lot about the divine feminine and the working with the sacral energy, and I had to do a massive lot of work in it, and personally, I still am. This is an area that's been affected by sexual abuse, trauma, stress, and completely abandoning myself over and over and over again for years and the slow drift, I didn't even notice how far down the rabbit hole I'd gone.
I thought everything was fine. I had everything that I'd ever wanted on paper. If I looked at my life from the outside looking in, I would be like, "Wow, you're so successful. These are the things you've always wanted." Stable relationship, beautiful home, great connection with family, friends, and loved ones, work that's fulfilling.
I just felt like I had it all on paper, and there was just so much missing [00:10:00] And one of the first things I had to learn Was that I was more connected to everyone else than myself
I was absorbing their emotions, their desires, and I was trying so hard to meet them. I was absorbing their stress, their expectations, their opinions, everything And sometimes their disapproval, or even my assumption of their disapproval, was enough to m- was enough for me to pull off my own desire, to pull away from what I wanted, just in case I offended, upset, or didn't meet somebody else's needs This is particularly difficult with family, the, the family that you live with, but [00:11:00] I had to clean up some of this in my friendships too.
There was a little bit of blurry lines of how much I care versus how much I was receiving in return. My internal compass of who I am was distorted I had outsourced what I want through the lens of everyone and everything around me
I was only happy if they were happy. I was only feeling like I was a good person when I was pleasing and that eroded my true self and my true connection to why I came here in the first place
As I sat with my soul and my higher self in conversations around, [00:12:00] "What do you want from me?" And they were always simple things like, "Have more fun. Laugh. You used to laugh so much. Where's all the laughter gone?"
Where's the colour in your life?
I was constantly scanning the external world, trying to work out what I was supposed to do, be, look like, say, have, behave, all of it. And the further I drifted from myself, the harder it became to connect with my own inner knowing again. People ask me all the time, "What's the difference between intuition and just our social conditioning?"
And a lot of people think they can't hear their intuition. They think they're so disconnected from it, or it's something that other people have and they don't. We all have intuition [00:13:00] But what is often missing is being able to hear the intuition more than the h- the fear pattern. Because our mind is pretty strong, and our mind will tell us, "No, no, that's not okay. You can't do that because of X, Y, Z." And I think often about like when I'm trying to manifest something, and as soon as I get to really strongly desiring it, I kind of feel myself pull away from it because then I can hear my mind trying to justify what it's going to be like if I have this…
What will so-and-so think? How will this person react?
I get in my own way. I'm sure many of you can relate. But that's not intuition. That's the conditioning of my mind through socialization, family values, and my lived experience. I know people who just honestly [00:14:00] do not care about anybody's opinion or ideas or emotions or anything, and they just stay in their lane.
And for me, that's always felt so uncomfortable. I was taught that those people were selfish. I was taught that those people weren't good people. And sometimes, yeah, I can see a lot of narcissism in the world, and that could be true. However, I think it's a spectrum, and that we all have the ability to be able to focus in on our truest desire and listen to what our heart and higher self are pulling us toward versus, "Oh, I have to sit and think about everything else," or, "I can't have what I want because it's not safe for me."
It's not intuition that's missing. It's just buried under the noise of all the other stuff. Other [00:15:00] people's desires, expectations, obligations, fear of disappointing people, the years of being rewarded as a good girl for not acting on your own desire. Oh, so much of that. And eventually, we're so practiced at reading the room and anticipating what everybody else needs, we forget to turn our eye inward.
I spent years in that space. Throughout my life, I've had many periods of it, but I reckon I had around five years through the COVID era and a whole lot of stuff was going on for me personally, but I just couldn't find enough passion or get enough energy up to create the next thing that I wanted.
I'd get an idea, new sparkly, shiny [00:16:00] idea would come in. I'd get excited about it, and then 10 minutes later, eh, nothing. I couldn't hold the vibration. I'd get an intuitive hit, yes, this, this, and my body would want to be pulled towards it. I'd take a couple of steps, and then boom, it would just collapse because I was prioritizing other things other than my own energy and my following my own desire.
You have to have one eye in and one eye out. One eye in on you, how you feel, your passion, your energy, your knowing, your desire. And then you can have one eye out on other people, being in the world, interacting with them It's not putting yourself first. It's saying, "Me too. I matter [00:17:00] No one can fill you up.
It's not anyone else's job to do that. So why is it your job to fill somebody else's cup? We can only fill our cup from Spirit, Source, Buddha, Allah, however you want to see that energy coming into your life. What's interesting is that disconnection doesn't always make us slow down. Sometimes it does the opposite.
Sometimes it creates overdrive, constant activity, constant ideas, projects, movement, on, jumping from one thing to the next, always chasing the next shiny new thing. And while it can look productive from the outside, there's this feeling of restlessness. It's like we're running away from ourselves rather than running toward ourselves.
Lots of movement, very little alignment. Lots of excitement, but not [00:18:00] much completion, not seeing things through. Lots of ideas and very little grounding and why the grounding matters is that in order for the energy to move through us, to light us up, to create desire, to give us the ideas and the passion to move forward, we have to ground it into the earth in order to actuate it on the physical plane.
We can have an idea in our mind, we can fill it with feelings of excitement, we can have some passion and energy and drive and a will to create it. And if it doesn't fully ground, if it dissipates at that point into doing or fail- falling flat and not seeing things through, it's because we're not fully grounding and connecting it into the physical plane through the base and earth star chakras, through our feet, [00:19:00] creating the stepping actions forward.
So, every distraction, every opportunity kind of gets dwindled away, and that also feels disconnecting in that we can't find our passion for life because we can't hold the energy of that desire. Grounding gives us somewhere to land, a place to return to. It gives us connection to the physical and the doing-ness and the having something material in our world to show for it, where we can actually have satisfaction in creating something.
So, I'd love you to sit with a few questions this week, beginning with, what do I genuinely want right now?
Genuinely, with all your heart, what do you actually want right now? [00:20:00] And then imagine lifting the lid
And saying, "What's underneath that? What would I like that's sitting underneath that?" Not what I should want, not what everyone else needs from me What do I want?
What would bring me pleasure? What would bring me fulfillment? What lights me up? What drains me? And perhaps the most important question of all: When was the last time I truly listened to myself?
The journey back to yourself, reconnecting with who you are at your core, isn't complicated but it's not always easy. It requires [00:21:00] real honesty, a willingness to stop doing the stuff that you know isn't working to feel, to listen, to trust yourself, to trust what arises through the process of tuning in because it might surprise you what lights you up.
It's probably not the same thing that lit you up 10, 15 years ago. It'll be something new, but it's always been there just waiting for you to place some attention on it. Underneath the conditioning, underneath the expectations, underneath all the noise, it's waiting for you to come home to it. Reconnecting to your soul self is exactly the work that I do with my soul guidance sessions.
If you'd like to dip your toe in the [00:22:00] water and have a session with me, let's get clear on what it is you desire, what it is you're working towards, and seeing what can come out of your most aligned future when you let your soul lead the way. Thank you so much for joining me. Please like and subscribe and follow on your favourite podcast platform.
I'm Nicki Kuurman. This is the Practical Mystic Podcast.
