Healing the World Begins with You! with Miriam Trahan
Miriam Trahan
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[00:00:00] Welcome today we have Miriam Trahan. She is a teacher and she engages in meditative and breathing, meditative practices I should say, and breathing techniques. And I'll just let her [00:01:00] introduce herself a little more and explain exactly what she does, why she does it, and you know, where we want to go from there.
So go ahead Miriam. Take the floor.
Thank you so much, Cheryl, for having me and allowing me to share with your audience what I know about breath practice and meditation practice and how it can bring us to a more rich existence, more connected and closer to our own understanding of what truth is for us.
So I started learning. Well, I, I, I'll back up. I have a degree in psychology from the 80s. So I've been studying consciousness for a really long time and I've always been very curious about meditation, but found it really challenging to actually do. I'm kind of a type A person. I'm very busy. I've always got lots going on and had one of those brains that was very hard to shut down, which is kind of a lot of us these [00:02:00] days.
Even if you're not. Consider yourself a type A person. Anyway I came upon a teacher of breath practice in the 90s, the mid 90s, and she had studied in India, a practice called Pranavayu, which means breath of life. And She had a really extraordinary story about how breath had healed her, and I was very drawn to this work because I was in a period of my life where my marriage had fallen apart, I really wanted some kind of spiritual guidance, and this wonderful, amazing person appeared.
And I studied with her for about 10 years and learned this practice from the inside out. And it changed everything because I had this very busy, anxious sort of personality that was trying really hard. It's everything, but not really feeling like I was making much personal progress. I was sort of out of breath, out of time, out of energy all the [00:03:00] time.
And the breath practice allowed me Time to slow down. But when you, when you do breath practice, it sort of gives your brain something to do so that when you finish with the breath exercises, however long you could do 10 minutes, you could do five minutes, you could do 30 minutes, which was the practice that I was taught.
And I did it every day, religiously for such a long time. When you complete the practice itself, you're left in this really clear, open space that seems to sort of arise. all what all on its own. And the truth, it's the breath practice that does it. And there's some biochemical reasons why that happens in the body.
But there's also just this kind of clarifying energy that comes from these very old practices of doing this Pranayama. And for the first time ever, I felt like I could actually reach a meditative space. And so it was very compelling. I did it [00:04:00] often, and I, it, breath practice also, in the form that, that I was doing it, in the form that I teach, is helps the emotional body, to clear and then settle.
It connects with your brain and all of your thoughts, helps you clarify what you're thinking about, what you believe, what you access to be truth from your deepest being. And when I was able to do those things on the personality level, then I was able to rise in consciousness to higher mind, to spiritual energies even just greater consciousness.
Doesn't necessarily, wasn't wasn't a dogma. There weren't. things to believe about all of this. There was not a teaching of sorts, except to be able to cleanse and clear your own energy field and find your true self, which I had spent my entire life kind of looking for. And so when she stopped teaching, I began teaching, the practice because I wanted people to practice with.
[00:05:00] So I thought, well, I'll teach people how to do this. And I had a yoga teaching certificate. I was teaching yoga asana at the time. And Pranayama is a part of the yoga practice. And so, that was really wonderful. And so I've, I've just kept with it over all of these years because it is effective because it does create a very clarifying state of mental consciousness.
Spiritual consciousness, a kind of connectedness between the heart and the mind. You know, so it brings you into a state of being one with yourself and then consequently with all of life, which I found to be a pretty nice sweet spot. It's a pretty great place to be. (ad here) Yeah,
and I really like that idea. You know, before we jumped on this call, we were having a conversation and think oftentimes we think of these meditative practices and, and breathing, and my husband's into box breathing.
He really likes [00:06:00] that. That's what tends to work for him. But
the world that we live in is just, you know, don't watch the news, because you'll, you'll feel like the world is on fire. And in the midst of this, very scary, fear, anxiety based world. It's hard to connect with other people because I, I think sometimes we feel like, you know, you think different than me.
You believe different than me. You live a different lifestyle than me. There's all these, we live in a world that wants to divide us by all of these different categories. But I, as we get into this consciousness idea of consciousness and through these practices, I believe it just eliminates, you know, evaporates all of these differences.
And all of a sudden, we find that we're far more alike, and that we can connect. It is a connective [00:07:00] tissue. And I just believe strongly that our world is in such a need of this connective tissue. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
I wholeheartedly concur. I think that where you are, that you are understanding, that these practices are drawing us back to the reality that we are far more alike than we are different. And yet at the same time we are individuals but we are systems of individuals and reality is far more cooperative than it is competitive.
There is this kind of old idea, thank you Darwin, survival of the fittest, but you know Darwin's idea was not necessarily survival of the fittest of individuals but survival of the fittest. Ecosystems of various kinds, and we humans are an ecosystem. We are systems within systems, and so I find that when people breathe [00:08:00] together, something kind of magical happens, and it can happen if you're singing, because you're breathing.
Right. It can happen if you are reciting, you know, anything that brings us into a kind of resonance with each other in training our energy systems together, then what happens is. And I believe this is a next step in evolution, and evolution happens always. It's constant, it's not something that we can stop, but my view of evolution is that it gives us problems we cannot solve with our old skill set or way of being, and we must become different in order to meet the challenges of evolution.
And so what you're talking about, all of that chaos, all of that breaking down of the old systems, are things that had have outlived their usefulness for us as human beings in so many ways. It's so self evident that a lot of the things that we are practices we are using on the planet are not sustainable.
So what do we [00:09:00] do? Well, we must be different. We must be different kinds of human beings. And that connective tissue that you were talking about, when we breathe together, when we listen to an inspiring speaker. When we watch the sun go down. I used to live in Hawaii and one of the big practices of Hawaiians is at the end of the day everyone sort of goes somewhere they can watch the sun go down because it's almost always a really great show.
Yesterday here in Pennsylvania where I live now, the sunset was so beautiful. I just sat down on the porch and watched it and those kinds of things bring us into A kind of entrainment and our energy systems themselves naturally. flow together. They naturally, all of that divisiveness just kind of vanishes all by itself.
And breath practice and meditation are two ways that you can cultivate that on the [00:10:00] individual basis. So, this 30 or 40 years of raising consciousness since the 60s, and I know it's been longer than that, but it's hard to believe it's been longer than that.
I know. We won't date ourselves.
We won't date ourselves, thank you.
That We have been working as individuals to evolve our personal consciousness, right? We've been reading, we've been studying, we've been exploring, we've been practicing. Now, what do we do with that? We come together and we see how can we make that connective tissue that you're talking about. And the truth is that from being, from these higher states of consciousness, simply being this more evolved.
personage that we have worked on, we are automatically available to that connective tissue. And that when we come together with others and do a breath practice, or a meditation practice, then the field itself becomes a blending of [00:11:00] all of what we are. So you and I have different complements of vibrational energy, different frequencies, different patterns, different ways of being.
But what happens when we breathe together or meditate together is that we can borrow that from each other. And it just happens very naturally. Our system is automatically drawn to something that is alike enough. that we might find benefit from. And as we do breath or meditation type practices, we naturally rise in consciousness, and a lot of the static and noise fades.
And it does take practice. You really, want to do it on a regular basis. And there's a talk in these types of practices about discipline and people say, well, I'm not very disciplined. It doesn't really happen. But what I found was after doing it for a very short time, it became like food and nourishment.[00:12:00]
It was like the nourishing frequencies of beauty and harmony were so irresistible that I wanted to practice. I wanted to sit and find those energies again and again, and it didn't always happen every time in the beginning. And even now, sometimes it can be what my teachers used to call psychic weather.
Like the weather around us is very disturbed. There's a lot of chaos around us, and we simply can't quite get to that space where it's just so rich and juicy, right? But We, we try anyway. And we sit every day. And more often than not, you have those experiences. And then when you leave your cushion or your chair and you move back out into the world, okay, I'm aligned.
I feel pretty focused. I've spent some time in the beauty and the harmony. And now there's more beauty and harmony in the world because I made it happen.
And when we do that [00:13:00] together, it amplify, we amplify. What do you want to amplify? When you look out at what's happening in the world, and I try to read as much good news as I can. And there's a number of really great good news newsletters, just Google good news newsletters, they're out there. And there is a tremendous amount of progress being made for humanity, for the environment, the oceans, it's all around us.
It's happening now. It's happening. It's happening. And so what we can do is we can recognize it and we can amplify it. It doesn't mean we're ignoring the problems. It means that we are advancing fresh solutions coming from an energetic basis, coming from a holistic consciousness, coming from an individual practice of taking personal responsibility for my own life, for my own well being, for my own well being of my mind, well being of my emotional body is my job.
No one else out there can do that for [00:14:00] me. And when you take that kind of responsibility for yourself, and then talk about it in your community with others, now you're spreading the good news.
Yeah, I think, I think we do this sometimes in the opposite. We, you know, just because, unfortunately, bad news is, more prevalent and easier to access.
So we tend to say, okay, there's the problem. What are we going to do to fix it? And in the process of trying to, you know, work that out, we disagree with people, we argue, we, you know, and we, we live in this debate society. Which, you know, I'm not saying there's not some value to debating, but if we started from the other side and said, Oh, look at all these good things that are happening.
Look at all this progress that is being made. Look at the wonderful things that people over here are doing. Then when that we see that bad news, or [00:15:00] we hear that bad news. We can apply what we've learned over on the good side in a positive way. I know I intentionally avoid Facebook and engaging in, you know, discussions with people sometimes, but the other day somebody posted something and, you know, it was.
I wouldn't, she was just expressing her own frustrations. That's it. And I just thought, I really want to respond to this, but I want to respond to it in a positive way. I want to bring beauty to the conversation as opposed to discontent, disagreement, and there was plenty of things I disagreed with. And, but I expect, fully expected once I posted it, and I was very hesitant to do so.
That the response was going to be like, Oh, here we, you know, and then just kind of a combative, whatever. I was shocked. She was like, this is wonderful. And all of a sudden we're 3000 miles apart. And there are [00:16:00] people that I grew up with in high school. I all of a sudden felt a connection to them that I hadn't felt before.
Isn't that wonderful? Good for you for being brave.
Well, I'm not always so brave, but, and I also on Sunday nights, I have a group that I do, and part of me is always like, Oh, I'd like to have a great big group with lots of people. And so we can, you know, but it's a really small group, only five to seven people.
But I feel like we have this really strong connection. And even though we're all over the computer, and we all live, you know, far away from each other, I feel a strong connection to these people because. I feel like our ener, our energy about certain topics resonates. And even though, you know, we disagree at times, but we all try to bring something positive to the conversation.
And I think that's what and there's times I have meditated and engaged with breathing practices and I have found it to be just like you [00:17:00] said, just like, Oh, I want more, I want more. And yesterday I made a very conscious effort to do so before I engaged in my Sunday night group. And I felt like. There was a much higher level of connection and the people in the group didn't do anything different.
I was the only one. They didn't know that I did this. And I was like, wow. And, you know, as I asked them, you can just tell by their responses and by the nature of the communication that it was, there was just a connection that, you know, wasn't, isn't always there.
Wow. Yeah, there you go. You proved the power of the breath.
And what, what I find happens when you have a regular practice, especially, but even just the spontaneous thing that you did is that your, Your resonant tone, your, how your frequencies and patterns are organized in your being matters. Our experience matters. Who we are [00:18:00] matters. Each and every one of us are contributing to mass consciousness.
And I think the way you do is sometimes about things like Facebook and social media. I'm very careful about what I post and I try not to come off as I know it all, right? Well, if we only just did it this way, you know, blah, blah, blah, nobody likes that. But if you, if you find a kind of resonance in your own being, and then just put forward something of beauty that comes from a compassionate place.
We are all struggling with this time and place that we are in. This is not an easy time to be alive. It is very, very challenging, and the challenges seem pretty huge. But one of the things, sort of hearkening back to our earlier conversation before we got on this is is, and this is kind of a philosophy I developed when I was living in Hawaii.
So in Hawaii, there are sea turtles that live in the ocean, and then the females come up on the beach and lay their [00:19:00] eggs. Then they leave their little nests behind, they go back into the ocean, and there are the nests. So there are these human beings, because beaches in Hawaii are very popular, and people come, and they bring their dogs, and et cetera, et cetera.
They wait for the sea turtles to come in. They watch the ocean shores, night and day, around the time of the year that the turtles come in. And then they mark the nests with stakes and ribbon and little signs that say, Sea Turtle Nest, stay the heck out of here. And that actually works pretty good, until it's time for the babies to hatch.
And now, more people come, and they wait. And they watch the nests, and they wait for the sea turtles to hatch, and they're there when the sea turtles hatch to keep the dogs away, to keep the curious tourists away, to keep everybody away, to give these babies the best chance possible. So for a while, I was part of the sea turtle watching group, and I went down there at dawn a couple of times to do my part.
Nothing happened. I just kind of [00:20:00] sat there on the sand just in case. I was one of those just in case people. But this was something I could do something about because it was in my neighborhood. And it felt, it felt like a piece, a small piece of activism on the part of the environment, which means, means a lot to me.
I'm, I'm very, very interested and passionate about caring for our planet. However, there's also problems with polar bears that don't have enough ice, and forests that are getting cut down, and other things that I care very deeply about. However, the sea turtles are in my neighborhood. I could have an active role in helping.
The other things, while they are important, and And I can send light in that direction. Worrying about them is not a positive contribution. It doesn't help me. It doesn't help the environment. And that's the same for the political climate, and and your things that are happening in your state or in your region, that We only all have so much bandwidth.
[00:21:00] My teacher used to call it consciousness units. You have so many consciousness units, what are you spending them on? Right? What are you spending your consciousness units on? And if you can do something like sitting on the sand waiting for turtles to hatch in your community and walk away feeling really positive about that, when you read some of the other news that's out there that feels chaotic or overwhelming, etc.,
you can stand down from that. If you can't at least be neutral or be positive, you're really not making a contribution to the uplifting of whatever that situation is. Now, if you have expertise, you have inspired action, if you have some sort of activism in your neighborhood that, that connects, Connects, connects to that.
By all means, take action and you can take action. On the inner planes concept that I've been reading about is called inner activism. So what can you contribute on an inner planes level to something that you truly care about? You can imagine it working out. You can [00:22:00] imagine those people who are close to the solution or those animals, whatever, having the resources they need, having the light that they need, having the connectivity or the, or the rendezvous with other people who can help them.
You can add. through your conscious awareness, uplifting energy to anything, anything. And that interactivism matters. And to me, this is the thing that humanity is evolving to be able to do. We can take physical action in our immediate spheres. And we can add light to that which is somewhat at a distance through our uplifting energy, through positive thoughts, through just light, just imagining it becoming more beautiful.
Oh, beauty is really powerful. Harmony. Can I add harmony to this situation? Even if I don't like those people and they're, and they're, political views. They're very different than mine. They seem very strange. They even seem like they might do me [00:23:00] harm. I'm afraid. I'm afraid of that situation. Letting these people be in charge, whoever they are, whatever your predilection is, whatever your thoughts about power and politics is, that you can Imagine the situation getting better.
You can put light toward it from your own practice. From your practice, you generate spiritual light. You generate higher consciousness. You lift yourself. Your energy becomes more resonant. Your tone becomes more organized in a very high way. So you become somewhat more powerful, not power over, but power through, a kind of service.
And so then you get to the kernel of it all. It's about service. Yes. It's the very highest calling for all of us. How can we serve each other? How can we serve our community? How can we serve the planet? How can we serve ourselves through all of that as well? And we're not saying to be so selfless that we, you [00:24:00] can't become sick enough to make sick people well.
Yes. Exactly.
You can't become poor enough to make poor people have resources. It's not a matter of going down to the level. It's a matter of lifting up. And how do you lift up? You lift yourself first. You pull yourself up into that higher space. Ah. Now you invite people. Come, come this way. Come this way. I found a door.
Let's go this way. Come on. Come on. It's great over here. Okay. You don't like that. How about this door over here? How about that door over there? They're all around us. The doors are everywhere.
Yes, I love it, and I just think, I do, it's interesting, I don't know exactly how to put this in words, but I find so often we do feel like we have to step down, and I hate using the word down, but we need to go to a different level to, to help people.
[00:25:00] When in, and a lot of times, and I love the word service, and I think I'm also really into this whole idea of redefining words. I was reading something the other day, and it said that every time we put a label on a, on an object, we'd limit its usefulness, because it's, All the sudden everything becomes about that label instead of about the object and we live in a world where we label everything.
Everything has to have a label on it and whether it's a person, whether it's a concept, whether it's a vacuum, you know, you automatically assume that a vacuums only purpose. is to clean your house or to suck up dirt or whatever. But oftentimes, you know, if you think of a vacuum in terms of the concept of a vacuum, where we might live in a vacuum, which [00:26:00] means we're kind of in this confined space, You know, it brings a whole nother, I don't know dimension to that word vacuum, right?
And one of the ones that I was doing a thought experiment with was the word bed. As soon as you say the word bed, everybody thinks of, Oh, you know, I'm going to go get in my bed and go to sleep. It's the place where you sleep. Well, then I was having this discussion with my husband yesterday too. And it was like, okay, think of all the different uses of bed.
You can have a bed a river bed. You can have bedrock. You can have
yeah,
a flower bed, a garden bed, yes. You can have like a tanning bed. You can have a massage table, which is a bed. And all of a sudden, the usefulness of this bed just becomes enormous. And one of my favorite uses of the word bed, because I, I'm into history and I do [00:27:00] historical tours here in Charlottesville, and I do them at cemeteries, and my favorite gravestones, and it This kind of sounds, I hate to use the word favorite, but are when children were buried they would have a small little headstone with a lamb and like a headstone to a bed and then, you know, the grave and then a footstone, but the little lamb at the top and it was just like, okay, here's this nice little resting place for this child who had died, you know, in infancy or whatever.
And. Rather than be oh, how sad and terrible that this child had died, and I'm not minimizing the fact that it's sad and terrible that a child would die, but it just brought about a more peaceful feeling, a more positive energy. So you're taking something that's, negative in some ways, and, and very traumatic.
Traumatic is more the word I'm looking for. And turn it into [00:28:00] something peaceful and, you know, resonant. So I think, you know, redefining words and quit labeling things. I, and I think that as we get into meditation and, and breathing and things like that, I think people automatically go down this road of, and I'm very guilty of it.
Oh, that's hard. And that's what, you know, shamans do. That's what, you know, people over in India do. That's what, you know, these other, that's, that's not what regular everyday people do kind of thing. And so opening our mind and understanding, I loved it when you were explaining how it just becomes like food.
It just like, I want this. I, I need this. It's, it's, You know, whatever. And you explained it in a way that is like, Oh, now I'm excited. I want to engage with this. I want to learn more about it. So I think that, you know, in my mind, [00:29:00] opening our, our ideas and our thoughts and to redefining a lot of the things around us.
And I'll, I'll jump back a little bit, but then I'll let you elaborate on this. Since the age of the Enlightenment, when science became so prevalent in our society that we had to prove everything, if you couldn't see it, touch it, feel it, or analyze it in some scientific way, it wasn't real. We got away from so many ideas.
of that are prevalent, this ancient wisdom. And that's what I think of, you know, I think of meditation and breathing and things like that. I think our forefathers, in so many ways, had a lot over us because they were so much more in tune and in harmony with the world around them. They weren't So constrained by science, and I'm not knocking science.
Science has many, many valuable contributions [00:30:00] but I feel bad that we have, and I, I think we're moving away from science, and I wouldn't say moving away from science. We're learning that we can have the best of both worlds.
I think that's a good way to put it. I just read, finished reading a wonderful book called The Light Eaters.
It's about plants and all of the most recent research about plants and that the root tips of plants actually move around in the soil. They're like little sensing organs and the tips of the roots are almost like a little quantum field there that they, they're incredibly intelligent, very connected.
Plants are alive in ways that we have only allowed for animals and humans. And they have an enormous range of capacities that were just, science is just beginning to be able to ask the right questions. See, it's not, science, back to Descartes in the very earliest times of science, objectified the [00:31:00] world.
And I think it was a response to a kind of, false mysticism and superstition that people were living through in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, that there was a lack of verifiability about the world and it was much more subject to people's darker thoughts and swayed by superstitions because there wasn't enough good information about the world that we lived in.
So science moved us out of that toward a verifiable approach where we could ask questions and have a scientific method in which to answer those questions. However, that objectification of the world is proving to be a false notion because there does not really seem to be any firm demarcation between ourselves and the world.
It is more like a continuum of consciousness. I sort of end here and those other things. sort of begin over there, but if you look at it on a molecular or [00:32:00] quantum level, there's no, there's no there there. There's just a continuum of beingness and a world that is much more alive than we ever had postulated with our earlier versions of science.
And so, in my view, science needs to be able to take into account the, that spectrum of consciousness kind of, idea, but also to value our inner world. perceptions, our inner abilities to discern, our experience as human beings, to to create some kind of, way to get rid of complete objectification, because that doesn't really seem to exist.
If you look at quantum physics, or just the little experiment, you know about the slit, the double slit experiment in physics? No,
I
don't. This experiment has been reproduced hundreds of thousands of times, and I don't know that I can explain it perfectly well, but basically science is, a piece [00:33:00] of let's call it cardboard, it probably wasn't cardboard, and cut two slits in it and then shot photons at it.
And what they were trying to determine was whether the photon was a particle or a wave. And it would go through one or other of these slits, sometimes it showed up as a particle, sometimes it showed up as a wave. And A lot of, across all of these experiments, it changed when it was observed. And the observation of it, recording of it, was what made it do one thing or the other.
And it comes back around to the very basic notion that our observing of the world changes it. We have an essential effectiveness just by being in the world and moving through it. So what shall we do with that? That's a remarkable power. That's like, you know, you're out there in this superhero world that we can actually make the world change by our observation of it.
And if that is so, what an [00:34:00] awesome responsibility to bring our best selves as much as we can. And that's not to say that we never have negative thoughts or we never have a down day or we never feel discouraged because all of those are part of human experience. And it's not useful at all to berate yourself for having normal sort of human reactions to things.
And. Taking some time to process things that happen to you, move through your experiences, find what it is that you can in terms of learning or growth, or what have you, from what happens to you. And sometimes those things can take many years. Sometimes things pop up in your consciousness, and this happens a lot when you undertake breathing practice.
Old energies, things that happen to you, Perhaps as long as back as childhood pop up for you because now you're in a safe, stable place and they can have some new resolution to them and that's not something that we're in control of. That is something that you are creating that container. You were talking earlier about the vacuum.
[00:35:00] Vacuum is a container of open space into which something can fill and so through your breathing practice you are creating all of this resonance but you're also creating an open space. space into which something can fill, and that something can be an old memory or experience, a traumatic thing, even if it's not like some awful trauma, like something you might read about in the newspaper, but a kind of more normal human trauma of a loss of some kind that you could not process in that moment.
Breath practice is something that can assist you in clearing that vibrational pattern so that part of you will can come into resonance with the whole. And over time, through a practice like this, you begin to clear that stuff, and it doesn't have the same emotional tone that it used to have. And so now you are emotionally present.
Things that happen now are you are reacting as a person who's living in the present moment, and not from some old damage or hurt that comes from a, you know, Much longer time [00:36:00] away that you don't even realize is still affecting you, but it is because you haven't resolved it and that's not to say there's something wrong with you because you haven't resolved it.
You just haven't brought it to consciousness yet and breath practice can help you bring that consciousness and the practice itself. And this is not to say that other kinds of therapeutics are not valuable, because I've done a lot of talk therapy in my life and found it extremely valuable to have a wise outsider give me some perspective and advice, but breath practice can allow you to work on the energy itself of that, happening that it's like a pocket of energy that doesn't really fit with the rest of your energy pattern because it's out of date.
It's old. It's from some place in the way back, right? And that part of you is still trying to help you, but it's out of sync. And so it's not very helpful. And so somebody triggers you, you have this over the top reaction. You're like, Whoa, why did I react that way to that? Well, it [00:37:00] was that thing that's. in your consciousness that you have not resolved yet.
And so as you do regular practice with breath and meditation, you find opportunities for those things to come to consciousness and be cleared simply by doing the breath practice with it and allowing your own inner wisdom to help you heal. And now, oh, you may still have a memory, you may still remember it, but it doesn't feel the same way anymore.
And it doesn't hearken you back to that powerless time or that time where you felt like a victim or something truly awful happened to you. Now you can move forward in a kind of settled spiritual maturity. Now you are a full grown mature person. Now that you have collected all these parts of your younger selves, now you're in the present moment.
Talk about living in the now. It's challenging to live in the now when you have all these pieces of yourself that are strung out along the decades, like, well, what am I supposed to do [00:38:00] about her? She's way back there, and I don't know what to do about that woundedness. Well, birth practice is something you can do with it, even if you've talked to, as I have, with therapists about those very same issues.
The energy resonance of it can still be trapped in your, in your greater field of consciousness, in your mental body, in your emotional body. And the mental and emotional body can become entangled. And so you have a feeling and it gives you a thought. Well, you have that same thought, same feeling, same thought, same feeling.
Now we're on the hamster wheel, round and round we go. And so this gives you an opportunity to go, Oh, these are two different things. I'm having these thoughts and they trigger these, emotions that also then triggers the thought to happen again. If I can breathe some space into that, just be with it, breathe, beauty, harmony, breathe.
What's there? Oh, what happened? Oh, here's a new perspective. Oh, my deeper, Wisdom is [00:39:00] trying to tell me something about this. I never thought about it that way. Oh, now I have something new to think about that. Now I feel different about that thing that had been triggering me over and over. Why do these same things keep happening to me?
Because life is trying to help you heal. Life is trying to help you heal. Understand yourself. So when you can use these practices to get to that place and unhook from those things that trigger you, breathe into them, allow some space, open up around it. Now the deeper wisdom can arise. Now you lift up to that higher place.
Oh, and you never have to feel that way again. It changes permanently. It never goes back, unless you keep niggling at it, and you can't. It sometimes takes a few tries through it. Sometimes it takes a [00:40:00] few experiences through this practice that I'm talking about. It'll come up again, it'll come up again, come up again.
But every time it does that, it's a little clearer, and it's a little clearer. And if it's especially old, and it was especially traumatic, it will probably take a few rounds to get through this. But if you stick with it, You will start to feel the relief and that's how you can tell you're moving in the right direction.
You go, Oh, that's a relief. I feel different. Now I can just move on with this and at some other place, my deeper wisdom. will help me move. Now when you have done that, those kinds of practices, and you've cleared, you go into that room that we were talking about earlier in this conversation with other people who don't believe what you believe, who don't see this problem the same way you do, but you're not triggered into fear and upset, By people who look at things differently, feel things differently, and you can come from a place of being more solution [00:41:00] oriented because you've done your personal work.
It all begins with me. Ta da! I know! So true! You know, every time I have, you know, one of these podcasts, and even though they're on different topics and different ideas, it always comes back to me. You know, if I want to make, if, if, I want to make the world a better place. It doesn't come from a place outside of me.
It comes from a place inside of me.
Isn't that the best news ever? Because you can do something about you. You can't do anything about the polar bears if you don't live in Alaska or the North Pole. And you can, you can hope that that thing situation gets better, but you can do something about yourself.
And that's so empowering to me. That's just the best news ever because I can, I can work on myself. I can, I can do these practices. I can have these wonderful conversations. I can look around for resources that will make this happen for me. And then I can show other people, well this is what [00:42:00] worked for me.
Which is basically what I talk about. Breath and meditation worked for me. Something else might work for you, art therapy, hanging out with horses, surfing. Hiking, watching birds feeding people who have need food, working in your community, all of that, all of that. And you know, as more and more of us do those kinds of things, imagine the world that we're going to create. (ad here)
Yeah,
and I love the way you state that. The world we are going to create. We can. It's so empowering. And because we live in a world, I think we are, we feel so powerless sometimes because of all the things going on around us. And we just feel helpless. Whereas we can be empowered. We can be, and we are empowered and we empower ourselves, right?
And we don't have to have this 5 million people following us on [00:43:00] X or whatever, you know, social media platform is out there. And we don't need to have a big megaphone and a whole binder full of solutions that we can, you know, present to people. It's just simply changing ourselves, changing our own energy.
And that energy then is shared, whether, whether we're having a conversation with people or not.
You're always having an energy conversation. Yes. Wherever you go, there you are. And you are bringing your field of energy with you. So the more resonant and high frequency your energies are, the more effective you can be just by being who you are, just by bringing that energy wherever you go.
And there are those that are served by keeping us in chaos and confusion.
Yes.
And it's important to keep that as a piece of information in the world, because it helps us. be more passionate about this work that we're talking about. [00:44:00] Turning away from the confusion and the chaos, finding the solutions, working on ourselves, bringing that to community, listening to each other with compassion and understanding.
Yes. So thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you, Cheryl. It's really a fun conversation. I really enjoyed talking to you.
We could just keep this going forever, but I can
come back if you want. Yes, I'll circle back in a few months or so if you like.
Definitely because I like I said, I feel this energy.
I feel this connection and I always want to continue down that path. So, you know, go ahead and share your contact information and anything you, anything else you might want to share with the audience. Keeping in mind that I will also have all of your information in the show notes so that people can reach out to you and connect with you.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, I have a podcast, it's called Miriam's Meditations, and we do a short breath practice at the beginning and then we do some kind of spiritual [00:45:00] teaching and a meditation. Right now we are working through an amazing book called Personal Power through Awareness. by Sanaya Roman.
So we're just doing a chapter a week. You don't have to have the book. All the lessons stand on their own. But they're really fun. And the way I do my teaching, I have a small group of meditators with me who are accustomed to the practice. And so we create a very powerful field of energy that anyone can join.
The podcast is free and it's available on all the major podcast servers. So check it out. Miriam's Meditations. Thank you. Thank you so much.
