How To Reconnect With Your True Self & Live With Purpose with Kirsty Gallagher #565

Summary

Podcast Summary: Feel Better, Live More with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Episode: How To Reconnect With Your True Self & Live With Purpose with Kirsty Gallagher #565
Release Date: June 17, 2025

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In episode #565 of Feel Better, Live More, host Dr. Rangan Chatterjee engages in a profound conversation with Kirsty Gallagher, a meditation and yoga teacher, spiritual coach, and bestselling author of Your Cosmic Purpose. This episode delves deep into the emotional and spiritual facets of finding one's true purpose, offering listeners both heartfelt narratives and practical tools to lead a more authentic and fulfilling life.

Defining Purpose: Being Yourself Over External Validation

Kirsty Gallagher begins by redefining the concept of purpose. She states, “[00:03:14] Your purpose, honestly, is to be you. It’s to be who you came here to be.” Rather than viewing purpose as an elusive external goal tied to status, success, or material possessions, Kirsty emphasizes that purpose is intrinsically linked to one's authentic self. She challenges the traditional notion that purpose must align with one's career, suggesting instead that purpose can manifest through various roles and passions outside of one's job, such as parenting, charity work, or cultivating a beautiful garden.

Dr. Chatterjee adds to this by highlighting research that associates a strong sense of purpose with increased happiness, better health, and longevity. He acknowledges the challenge many face in finding time for purpose amid busy lives, prompting a deeper exploration into whether purpose is something we do or something we are.

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Authenticity: Living Your Truth

Kirsty elaborates that purpose is something one is rather than does. By being authentically oneself, individuals naturally align with activities that feel meaningful and purposeful. She shares her personal involvement in the podcast as an example: “If I were trying to say what I thought you wanted me to say… I wouldn’t be being all of me, and therefore the words I’m speaking, they wouldn’t land in the same way.” This authenticity not only benefits the individual but also resonates deeply with listeners.

Dr. Chatterjee concurs, discussing the importance of choosing guests that genuinely interest him rather than solely catering to audience preferences. He emphasizes that serving oneself authentically ultimately serves the audience better, as genuine enthusiasm and interest are palpable and impactful.

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Overcoming External Pressures and Radical Responsibility

A significant portion of the discussion centers around radical responsibility—taking full ownership of one's life and choices without attempting to control or change others. Kirsty asserts, “[05:15] If we could view purposes… that would help us to find more purpose,” underscoring that personal fulfillment comes from within rather than from external validation or approval.

Dr. Chatterjee echoes this sentiment, noting that many people seek external solutions to their internal discontent, often relying on advice from friends, family, or even AI. Kirsty warns against this tendency, advocating instead for self-trust and the understanding that others may not support one's true path due to their own fears and limitations.

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Trusting the Timing of Your Life

The conversation shifts to the concept of trusting life's timing. Kirsty shares her transformative journey from a corporate job to spiritual awakening, emphasizing that significant life changes require patience and resilience. She recounts, “[07:18] It took me about two and a half years, and they were some of the hardest… yet some of the most profound years of my life.”

Dr. Chatterjee relates this to the impatience prevalent in modern society, where immediate results are often expected. Kirsty advises starting small, such as dedicating a few minutes each day to self-reflection, to gradually build a deeper connection with oneself. She emphasizes that consistent, small efforts can lead to substantial personal growth over time.

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Celebrating Progress and Embracing Emotions

Kirsty highlights the importance of celebrating small victories and tracking personal progress. She discusses how acknowledging even minor improvements can reinforce positive behaviors and enhance self-trust. “We struggle to celebrate ourselves… as humans.” She advocates for practices like journaling to document growth and maintain motivation.

Moreover, Kirsty addresses the misconception that only positive emotions are valuable. She underscores the necessity of embracing all emotions—including grief, anger, and frustration—as they provide critical insights into one's alignment and authenticity. This holistic approach fosters a deeper understanding of oneself and facilitates genuine personal development.

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Language and Authentic Expression

Dr. Chatterjee and Kirsty explore how language shapes our understanding of purpose and spirituality. Kirsty explains the choice of the word "cosmic" in her book title as a reflection of her belief in a universal interconnectedness. She emphasizes that authentic expression resonates more deeply with intended audiences, even if it might seem unconventional to others.

Kirsty asserts, “[108:59] Are.,” highlighting that authentic language choice helps convey profound truths in a way that is unique to the speaker. This authenticity ensures that the message lands effectively with those who are meant to hear it, fostering a deeper connection and understanding.

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Personal Stories: Loss as a Catalyst for Purpose

Throughout the episode, Kirsty shares deeply personal stories that illustrate her journey toward authenticity and purpose. She recounts the loss of her great-great Auntie Mabel and her friend Sharon, events that profoundly impacted her and solidified her commitment to living authentically. These experiences underscore the idea that extreme adversity often serves as a catalyst for profound personal growth and the discovery of true purpose.

Dr. Chatterjee relates these narratives to his own experiences, emphasizing that while some people may only grasp these truths through significant life events, others can cultivate self-awareness and purpose through regular introspection and mindful practices.

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Practical Tools for Reconnecting with Your True Self

To assist listeners in their journey toward reconnection and purpose, Kirsty offers several practical tools:

1. Daily Check-ins: Spend a few minutes each day to ask yourself, “How am I feeling today?” and genuinely acknowledge your emotions without judgment.

   “Put your hands over your heart, tune in and just say to yourself, what do I need today?”
   — Kirsty Gallagher [00:17]

2. Journaling: Document your thoughts and emotions to track progress and gain insights into your personal growth.

3. Mindful Movement: Engage in practices like yoga, which Kirsty refers to as "moving meditation," to connect with your body and inner wisdom.

4. Celebration of Small Wins: Regularly acknowledge and celebrate even the smallest achievements to build self-trust and motivation.

5. Radical Responsibility: Take full ownership of your life and choices, while allowing others to do the same for themselves.

6. Embracing All Emotions: Allow yourself to fully experience and understand all emotions, recognizing them as messengers guiding you toward alignment and authenticity.

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Conclusion: Embrace Your Authentic Path

The episode concludes with a heartfelt encouragement to start small and be consistent in practices that foster self-connection and authenticity. Kirsty emphasizes that even a few minutes each day can lead to significant changes over time.

“Start now and start small.… Show up and do it every day and let us know how it changes your life.”
— Kirsty Gallagher [1:15:04]

Dr. Chatterjee and Kirsty leave listeners with a powerful reminder that true happiness and purpose stem from within. By trusting oneself, embracing authenticity, and being patient with the journey, individuals can cultivate a life filled with meaning and fulfillment.

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Key Takeaways:

• Purpose Is Intrinsic: True purpose arises from being authentic rather than pursuing external validations.
• Radical Responsibility: Own your life and choices without trying to change others.
• Trust Life’s Timing: Patience and resilience are essential in navigating life’s journey toward purpose.
• Embrace All Emotions: Understanding and accepting all emotions aids in personal growth and alignment.
• Practical Practices: Daily self-reflection, journaling, mindful movement, and celebrating small wins are crucial tools for reconnecting with your true self.

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Notable Quotes:

• “Your purpose, honestly, is to be you. It’s to be who you came here to be.”
  — Kirsty Gallagher [00:03:14]

• “We can never shame anybody into making change. We can never convince someone to change that doesn't want to.”
  — Kirsty Gallagher [08:07]

• “I love that you can’t actually prove the timing; it's a belief, and sometimes the belief itself can be more useful than not believing it.”
  — Dr. Rangan Chatterjee [77:55]

• “Start now and start small.… Show up and do it every day and let us know how it changes your life.”
  — Kirsty Gallagher [1:15:04]

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This episode serves as a compelling guide for anyone seeking to rediscover their authentic selves and live a life imbued with purpose and fulfillment. Through heartfelt storytelling and actionable advice, Kirsty Gallagher and Dr. Rangan Chatterjee illuminate the path toward a more meaningful existence.

Transcript

[A]

Our intuition tends to be the inconvenient voice of truth in there that says to us, this isn't the right job for you. This isn't the right relationship for you. This isn't the right thing for you. So when you tell me you don't know what to do, you absolutely do know. But what you know you need to do scares you.

[B]

Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More Many of us are so busy keeping up with life that we forget to check in with ourselves. We follow the rules, meet expectations, and strive for success. Yet often we still feel disconnected, stuck and unfulfilled. True purpose can feel elusive, like something we're always searching for but never quite finding. My guest today is Kirsty Gallagher, someone who over the past few years has become a really good friend. Kirsty is a meditation and yoga teacher, a spiritual coach, as well as the best selling author of multiple books, including her very latest, your Cosmic Purpose. Now, this conversation may feel a little different from some of the others I have had on this podcast. It leans more into the emotional and spiritual aspects of life, but if you listen with an open heart and mind, I truly believe there is something in it for everyone. In our conversation, we discuss why your true purpose is to be yourself, not to chase status, success, or approval. How to start listening to your own truth, even if you spent a lifetime tuning into everyone else's why spending time in stillness is so important, the role of discomfort and internal conflict as signs you're out of alignment why trusting the timing of your life is essential, and how your most painful experiences may be guiding you to greater clarity and purpose. The the importance of celebrating your progress and how to reclaim your power by learning to make conscious, intentional choices. Throughout this episode, Kirsty shares stories from her own journey from corporate burnout to spiritual awakening, and offers practical tools to help you reconnect with the part of you that already knows the way. At its core, this conversation is a powerful reminder that you are the expert of your own life. Your truth matters, your voice matters, and your purpose. However small or quiet it may seem right now, it's already there within you. I thought we'd start off by asking you, you know, what is purpose and what is it that gets in the way of us finding our own?

[A]

So I always come with a really big kind of spoiler alert when I talk about purpose. Because your purpose, honestly, is to be you. It's to Be who you came here to be. And so I think we've labeled purpose as some big, elusive thing out there that one day we might find. And when we finally find it, we'll be happy and our life will be the way that we want it to be. And so we constantly search for purpose outside of us. So we look for it in our or in status or in relationships or in money or houses or cars or whatever it may be. We look for it in the material world, and we're never going to find it out there because none of that is who we truly are. So your purpose is to be the you that you came here to be, to offer to the world what only you can offer. So the biggest thing that gets in the way of purpose is, is you. Because the whole time we're trying to be somewhere that we're not, or we're trying to act in certain ways that we think we should, we're kind of strangling the very life force energy that makes us who we and therefore gives us purpose in life. Now, the other things I like to mention with purpose is that we also think our purpose needs to be our job. Your purpose doesn't need to be your job. Your job is allowed to be somewhere that you go to earn money to pay the bills, and then you can find purpose outside of that. So your purpose may be to be a parent, to raise the next generation. Your purpose may be to do charity work or work with animals. Your purpose may be to tend to a beautiful garden so that everyone that walks past that garden gets joy and upliftment and smile because they see something so beautiful. It's likely that you may start to do your purpose down the line. Because when we find what it is that we're here to do, we want to share it and teach it. And that's also part of our purpose, that everything that we go through in life is leading us to more and more purpose. So if we could view purposes rather than being this one big thing out there, if we could view the way you go to your job as your purpose, the way you navigate difficult times in life as your purpose, the way you show up every day as your purpose, that in itself would help us to find more purpose.

[B]

Yeah, I love that there's so many really beautiful options there to help people think about purpose. I think a little bit differently. I think one of the things that I've observed over the last few years is there's more awareness of purpose and how important it is. And, you know, I've looked at the research on purpose. And it's very clear that people with strong sense of purpose, the happier, the healthier, they live longer. But I think it does feel quite elusive to many people. It's like, yeah, but my. I'm just busy with work and just keeping a roof over my head. You know, how can I possibly find time to find my purpose? Right. So I really like the way you broadened it out there as you were talking. I guess the follow up that came into my mind was, is purpose, then something we do or something that we are?

[A]

Something that we are? For me, purpose is something that you are. You. You have to find it within you. The only thing that's going to give you true meaning and purpose in life is when you're doing things that feel purposeful and meaningful to you. And that's going to be different for all of us. And so for me, the more you can become who you authentically and truly are, the more you will then live a life of purpose. And then, as I mentioned, you might start to do more of that by teaching it or sharing it. And so a prime example is that my purpose right now is to show up as part of this podcast fully, truly, authentically me, and give you every part of me that I've got. That's my purpose right now. If I was sitting here now trying to say to you what I thought you wanted me to say or what I thought your audience wanted me to say, I wouldn't be being all of me, and therefore the words I'm speaking, they wouldn't land in the same way. Whereas if I can show up now and I can be fully me, and I can give you everything I've got, and I can share my experiences with you, that's how then it's going to land. And if I touch the hearts of one or two people today who make one tiny change in their life because of something we've said, that's my purpose. I'm here to serve and to help people. So I've then fulfilled my purpose by being me.

[B]

You said your purpose is to be here and serve people. Okay. It's kind of interesting for me to unpick that. Is there a danger perhaps, that if we say that our purpose is to serve people, that we can inadvertently be doing things for external validation? Right? Because it could be. You were saying some really beautiful things there. So you were saying that if I say to you wrong and things that I think your audience want to hear from me, in some ways you would actually have met the goal of helping Those people, Right. You might have said something really insightful that then helps them, but you may have changed who you are in order to do that. There's a subtlety there, isn't there?

[A]

There is. And then would I have landed the goal? Because everyone knows when we hear words that aren't authentically true, we all know there's a part of us that knows when someone is trying to say something that they think we want to say, or when something isn't coming from a depth of experience and embodiment. We all know when someone's just a wordsmith and just saying all the right words, but there isn't a depth to that as being lived and fully experienced. So a lot of our purpose comes through our lived, where we go through certain things in our life. And I believe that everything we go through in life is helping to take us to more purpose. Because I can only sit here now and share with you things from my own personal experience. What I've experienced, how I've learned and grown and evolved on my journey of life, that's then taken me towards more purpose. Now my purpose is to serve others that might not be yours. It might not be anyone else's. So that's why it's important that we find our unique individual purpose and what makes us feel most purposeful and alive.

[B]

Yeah, I love that. And I guess the reason I paused on that and sort of tries to explore it is because I was chatting to my team last week about this podcast. Okay. The team who helped me put this show out every week, and there was just a throwaway comment from someone about, you know, you're doing this to help people. You know, what is it the audience wants? Okay, let's think about how we can. Or how I can give the audience what they want. And I said, hold on a minute. I get what you're saying. But the way I serve the audience best is by selfishly choosing the guests who I want to speak to.

[A]

Exactly right.

[B]

And it's something I don't think a lot of people fully appreciate. If I choose guests that my audience want me to speak to. Right. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily. But if I'm not feeling it, if I don't feel like I want to sit opposite this person for two hours and go deep, then it's the wrong choice. And I've done that before. Yeah, okay. But I've learned over the years, no, the way I serve the audience exactly is by serving myself, which I think kind of speaks to what you're saying.

[A]

It exactly does. Because you've just. Everything that we've spoken about so far is there in that if you had a conversation that wasn't necessarily true for you because you thought it's what that people wanted, you'd still show up. Because you do. That's who you are. But your full heart wouldn't be in it and your full soul wouldn't be in it, and you wouldn't then give in the way that you give or show up fully in the way that you show up. You'd maybe have a list of questions and you go through them and you'd more tick off the questions than being genuinely interested and bouncing the conversation back and forth and being like, tell me more about that. I want to know more about that. And that's when it lands with your listeners. Because we listen to you and we can hear the passion, the interest, the enthusiasm, and the way that you then spotlight the other person because you're genuinely interested in that. So all of that adds up to that's your purpose, is to be you and to do things that are interesting to you. And therefore that lands with everybody else.

[B]

Yes, interest. One of my favorite bits in your new book, which is called your cosmic Purpose, is on page six. So early on in the introduction, you said this. You said, this may be a good time for me to say that if anything I say in this book doesn't resonate with you, that's not your truth. That's more than okay. Instead, take what lands for you and leave the rest. I'm not here to teach or tell or convince you of anything. I'm here to help you to remember the depths of wisdom, knowing and truth that are already within you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Now, I love that I underlined it because one thing I've always liked about you, Kirsty, since I met you maybe three or four years ago at Carfest for the first time, and we've become really good friends since then. Is this warmth and humility and you're very open. In this book, at various times you talk about how when you first discovered all the things that you talk about, you wanted everyone also to believe that, Right? But I think as you become, certainly my experience, I think echoes yours. I was the same when I really got into the power of lifestyle and how it can affect us, our health, our happiness. I wanted to convince everyone and how I'm not here to convince anyone of anything. I just share. And if you like it, great. And if you don't, that's fine as well. I don't need you. To believe in this, also for me to feel good. And I really like that there's a sort of. I don't know. Would you say that as people start to discover who they are more and live in that alignment with their values, do you think there is more of this. This trust, this humility, and less of a desire to convince others?

[A]

Absolutely. And I think it goes. I think it goes both ways. So first of all, for me, I'm not here to convince you of anything. All I'm here to be is an embodied example of living in this way in the hope that then it gets someone's interest. And that's what I've done in all the work that I always do. We can never shame anybody into making change. We can never convince someone to change that doesn't want to. The only thing we can be is become that embodied example of what it is to live in truth and authenticity and honesty and trust in the hope. Then we can inspire other people along the way. And I do think, particularly in the spiritual journey, I think in the beginning there is. And to be fair in life nowadays we live from the outside in. So often we're constantly looking to the outside world. Tell me what to do with this. Fix me. Help me. You tell me when I presume I know what's best for you. I strip you of all your power. And if you're looking to me to tell you what to do, you're always going to need me there to tell you what to do. And therefore you have no power of your own. So I want to actually help people to find your own power, to find your own truth, to find your own purpose that might be completely different to mine. And that's okay. And the more I think we live as the embodiment of who we are and the life that we want to live, the less than it matters whether anybody outside believes it is also doing it. So as you mentioned in the very beginning, I would need you to also believe everything I believed in. Cause I didn't fully believe it myself. So if you also believed it, then it must be true. Okay? Rangan believes it too, must be true. Over the years, though I know my own truth and my own purpose like the back of my own hand, it's become a part of me. And it helps me to live a life that for the most part, is meaningful and true and happy and purposeful and abundant. And where I wake up every day being happy to be here. And so that for me is true purpose. And so it doesn't matter whether or not anybody else believes what I believe because for me, it helps me to live that life.

[B]

Yeah, I really like that. There's a. There's a phrase that you mentioned, right? You know your own truth. And you write about that quite a bit in this new book as well, and I agree with it. I love that as a concept, your own truth. But I imagine some people are going to hear that phrase and go, wait a minute, Kirsty, what are you talking about? Your own truth? There is truth and there is false, right? What are you talking about? Your own truth? Can you just expand on that a little bit? Because I think it's a really key point.

[A]

So living my own truth means living a life that's true to me. And so maybe some people may judge that as being, as you mentioned before, a selfish thing of choosing what I want to do every day or choosing how I want to live every day. But for me, if I can move through every day in a way that feels true to me, as in it feels meaningful, it feels like I'm showing up in a full way. It feels like I'm being very true to who I am. It feels like I'm being able to speak up and share who I am. It's not avoiding certain things, it's not being afraid. That is, for me, living in truth. And it's about discovering what to bring it back to purpose. What on a daily basis can I do that helps me to feel purposeful, meaningful, alive and connected to something greater. And that, to me, is living a life of truth where I know who I am, I know what my beliefs are, I know what I'm here for, I know what brings me joy, I know what gives me meaning and purpose. And that then enables me most of all, I think I know who I am. And that's one of the big sticking points to finding your purpose is when you don't know who you are. And so I often advise people in the first stages, spend time with you, get to know who you are, and that's how you're going to establish your own truth. Because again, in the spiritual world and in every world, you know, you spoke about this so beautifully, even in your last book. We've got so many experts. This is the right way. This is the right way. This is the right way. This is the right way. If we did everything we're meant to do in a day, we wouldn't have a single moment left from doing ice baths and meditating and journaling and running and all the myriad of things we've got to do every day. Knowing your truth means knowing. I get that, that's beautiful. If that helps you, I'm so happy for you. But that's not my truth. That doesn't resonate with me. I don't need to do that every day for me to also feel meaningful if you do beautiful. So we've got like this pick and mix now in the world, and I think too many people try and take all of the stuff and then don't do anything with it.

[B]

Yeah, it's outside in, not inside out.

[A]

Exactly. So finding your truth is who am I, and in this moment, am I being fully, authentically true to me, who I am, what I desire, what I want to say? Am I filtering myself? Am I censoring myself? Can I just show up as all of me in the world?

[B]

Yeah. I mean, what you said around purpose, we can superimpose on health. Right. It's the same principle as you sort of just touched on there, in terms of diet.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Right. The reason why there's so many fights about the right diet is because in my view, most of those fights or debates are predicated on the upstream belief that there is one perfect diet. Right. But if you never believe that there's one perfect diet, the question wouldn't be what's the perfect diet? It's what's the right diet for me at this stage in my life for my current goals?

[A]

And that's your truth.

[B]

And that's your truth.

[A]

That's your truth.

[B]

I believe that people have lost, as I think you do have lost that confidence and that trust in themselves to actually back themselves on that. It's more about. Let me listen to the latest podcast with the newest person. I know actually what I'm doing is wrong. Even though I feel great, even though I feel absolutely fantastic, my skin's clear, my energy's good, whatever it. But because that expert told me about that trial in that part of the world, again, like you, I'm not saying ignore experts, but you gotta start trusting yourself more. So, Kirsty, you're talking a lot about people trusting themselves more, listening to their own truth, but some people are gonna go, kirsty, I don't know how to do that. So for someone who doesn't know how to do that and has never done that before, and is that person who's trying to meditate, journal affirmations, like, just name the list and just say, I don't have any time to do this. What do you say to them?

[A]

So I'd first of all start off by Saying just to your beautiful point then, that we have so many experts what we've forgotten, the main expert, which is you, you are the expert in your own life because nobody else is living in your body, having your lived experience. Nobody else in the entire world has lived the life that you have with the experiences that you have in the way that you have. So you're ignoring your own expert, which, which is you. Now, one of the first things I ask people to do is just to start, to really start, really simply because again, if you've spent so much time looking outside of you or taking care of everybody else and putting everybody else's needs above your own, and this happens a lot when we move into things like working with nature and the moon and things. And people will often say to me, but I don't know what I want. And that's where we need to begin. And so it may be that at the start of every day, and I try and encourage everyone to do this as much as you can, put your hands over your heart, tune in and just say to yourself, what do I need today? I used to work with women who had been so busy being mums and taking care of everyone else, they didn't even know what they wanted to eat because all they'd done is pick the scraps off the kids plates. They didn't even know what they wanted to eat. They got so disconnected from themselves. Even if you said, what do you want for breakfast? It would be, oh, well, I just have a little bit of what everybody else is having. And we don't really serve anybody in that way. So it begins by spending quiet time with you and then time going inwards and just feeling into what makes me feel good. And I think what we've tried to do a lot in the world is we've tried to logic everything. So everything needs a logical answer, a logical explanation. If we can't put in a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist, it's rubbish. And so we've forgotten this whole wisdom that we have in our own bodies. So when we start to just tune back into, and rather than making a snap decision, if you can pause and just feel into, how does that feel for me? Did that make me feel good? Scared? How did I feel when I heard that? If you don't know what to do today, imagine doing A, how does that feel for me? Imagine doing B, how does that feel for me? And we want to start to follow more of what feels purposeful, what feels meaningful, what feels like it's going to bring Us some joy. So begin by just getting to know you. Sit with yourself, ask yourself questions. You know, what would I like to do today if I could do anything? What makes me happy? When's the last time I felt truly happy? How did that situation make me feel? How did that way I responded make me feel? Get so curious about yourself that you almost start to, like, track yourself through a day and watch yourself get to the end of the day and replay it. And not in a way to beat yourself up and go, oh, God, you did that wrong. You were so terrible when you did that. But get curious, oh, why did I do that? Why did that thing bother me so much? Why did I say yes when I really meant no in that situation? Why did I abandon myself there? And the more you get curious, the more you'll start to uncover all these conditioning and layers that make you behave in a way that's out of alignment and integrity to the truth of yourself.

[B]

Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, it reminds me of one of the chapters in the second half of the book called. I think it's called Radical Responsibility, which I really loved. I mean, I think it's so important. We'll get into that in just a moment. You know, it's interesting that you said some of the women you've worked with are so disconnected from themselves, they don't even know what they want to eat. And I would imagine there's people who heard you say that and would be going, yeah, that's me. Yeah, that's me. Okay. And so if we spent our life listening to the voices outside of ourselves and disconnected from what we actually want, it's not gonna necessarily happen straight away, is it? No, it's a bit like running a marathon, right? If you sign up to do a marathon, I think with the physical, with kind of physical endurance, we intuitively understand that, oh, if I wanna run a marathon and I've never run before, I'm not gonna do it in a month. I need to start slow, walk, maybe run 1k, and follow a plan. And then over maybe two years, I'll build up to be able to run, I don't know, a half marathon or a marathon. But I've always found with things like meditation, for example, people don't see it in the same way. They try it once or twice. Oh, it's not for me. But if you try and run a marathon, no one's going out and try one run and go, oh, running's not for me. They're like, oh, yeah, I need to get trained and conditioned. And so I guess trusting yourself and listening to yourself, or what you call throughout this book, whispers from your soul. It's going to take time, practice, and patience, isn't it?

[A]

Yes, it totally is. And the thing with a lot of the work I do, and a lot of the more kind of, let's call it spiritual, is that you don't notice the difference it's making until you stop doing it. That's what I find with a lot of things, because you're making these little differences all the time. So it's like if you have a yoga practice every day and then you don't practice for a week, you go back and you're suddenly like, oh, this doesn't feel as easy anymore. Or you're meditating every day and you've got up to doing 13 minutes and then you miss it for a week and you go back and six minutes in, you're doing that thing where you're like, oh, this feels like I've been here forever. And it's often in the times that we don't do it that then we're suddenly a bit less able to do with our kids having an argument in the back of the car and our patience is a little bit shorter or we're not quite as able to deal with things, our tolerance gets a little bit less. So for a lot of the work I do, I think it's almost like the proof is in the pudding that it's only when you've done it consistently. And a lot of it also happens with kind of a hindsight whereby you will, as we know, setting a boundary for the first time, one of the hardest things in the world to do, we want to immediately call them back and go, actually, I didn't mean it. I will do it. But the more and more we do it, we get to the stage where all of a sudden we set a boundary. We don't think twice. There isn't the voice then that follows us around all day saying, you're such a horrible person. You're not this. You're not this. And then we go, had that same thing happened a month ago, I'd have dealt with that really differently. But, wow, look at how I did that. And I think one thing that's really important as well is to really, again, keep that constant checking with yourself every day of, what did I do? Well, we're so quick. If I ask, most people tell me five things you did wrong last week, they'd immediately go, oh, you're not going to believe what I Did I did this. I said this wrong. If I said to people, tell me one really amazing thing you did last week, they'll go, well, you know, kind of, if you can again at the end of a day, start to sit with yourself and go, I do it in every moment if I do something really well. And it's been really hard for me because I'm a natural doubter and I'm quite critical, but I try, even at the end of this, I'll try and take a moment to go, well done, Kirst. You did that. You did really, really well. You tried your best. You showed up. And then the more I do that, the more I start to show up for myself, be there for myself, and therefore trust myself to do big, brave, bold things in the future. So it's something that happen very slowly. But I feel like the main problem we have in the world at the moment is that we just want Amazon prime our life. We want next day delivery and everything. So I want to meditate once and be enlightened. I want to go to one yoga class and be able to touch my toes. I want to run once and be able to do a marathon, because we're so used to everything coming quickly nowadays that we don't want to necessarily put the consistent effort in to be able to get somewhere that we want to go. And finally, I don't think we noticed it. When I used to teach yoga, I'd love this. I would see the difference week on week, but other people wouldn't because they would go from not being able to touch the top of their thighs to wanting to touch their toes the next day. They wouldn't see what I saw, that every single week there was a tiny difference. And I'd be so proud as a teacher, and I'd look around the room and I'd be like, look at what you're doing now. But all they could see was what they couldn't do. But I still can't touch my toes. And it's like, but look where you have come.

[B]

Yeah, that's such a great point. And it's, I think, something I mentioned a couple of times on the show before with patients in the past, that the focus is rarely on what got better. It's what's still not good.

[A]

Still. Yes.

[B]

Right. And, you know, for many years, I would specialize in seeing chronic, complex conditions who were really struggling. And I love trying to put it all together. And I very quickly learned, oh, wow, people are getting way better, but, you know, they're 80% better. But they're still down in the dumps over the 20%. That's not better. And so a simple way, you know, I used to do it and other clinicians do it, is with what's called an msq, a medical symptom questionnaire. And it's brilliant because it's a long questionnaire. You know, it does take a while to fill in, but it allows you to map progress. So when a patient would come in after two or three months and their life is literally transformed, but they're still saying, oh, yeah, but I can't do this, and I can't do that, you could objectively go, hey, listen, I get that, but let's just see where you were two months ago. You were scoring 80 out of 100, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's how many symptoms and things were going on in your life. Right now you're only scoring 20. And you would see the whole body language change. It'd be, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, I don't have those 60 things anymore. Yeah, sure. And I'll be like, we got these 20. Look, we're gonna work on that, but let's just take a moment to celebrate. Look what's gone. It's pretty incredible, isn't it?

[A]

I don't think we celebrate ourselves enough either, as humans. I really don't. I don't think we celebrate what we achieve and how well we do anywhere near enough. And so that's a beautiful. That's why I think things like journaling are so powerful, because then you get to track where you've been and how difficult something was. Because as we know, when we're in the depths of something, we're there, we're in the despair, we're in the depths. When we come out the other side, we kind of forget what it was like to be there. And so sometimes, if we can even look back on journal entries from that time, we get to look at and go, wow, I was there. And now look at. Look at where I am. Look at where I've got to.

[B]

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[A]

Perhaps it is more uniquely bred British.

[B]

Yeah, I always think back to the first time I met Professor B.J. fogg from Stanford University. B.J. is one of the world's leading experts in behavior change and how do we form and how do we create lasting habits in our life. And it's really interesting. I remember one of the first things he shared with me is, you know, there's many, many things to try and do and he has this whole concept called tiny habits. But he says a really important part is once you've done something that you were hoping to do, take a moment to celebrate it. And he said, for example, you can say, you know, I'm awesome. And I said, bj, this may work in America. You know, there's very few Brits who are gonna do something and go, I'm awesome afterwards. Right. And so it made me think, you know, are certain cultures better at this? And, you know, related to that is something he told me, which was, it's not repetition that creates the habit, it's emotion. And I think for bj, this celebration piece is really, really important. So it was interesting to me that you're also talking about that, that it's important. And you were saying you weren't good at it, but you've now trained yourself to get good at that celebration part.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And to find something good again. We can. We can look at 15 things that are gonna go wrong, or we can find the one thing that might go right. We can look at the five things we did wrong today, or we can find the one thing that we did well. And those choices we make in life of which way to look, they start to shape our reality and shape the way that we move through the world and shape who we are and shape our experience. So I feel it is really, really important to always be looking at the more positive. And that's not to say a fake positivity of trying to make things wonderful when they're not, because I'm a huge fan, actually, of being with our deep, deep emotions and really feeling our emotions. And you just mentioned then that feeling of joy and celebration, which is very, very important. But I think it's equally important to feel those deeper emotions when we're hit with the grief or the loneliness or the loss or the frustration or the anger, because they're the emotions that really teach us. So when we're skipping through life and everything's wonderful, we're not really facing anything. And it's in those moments where we get hit by those deep emotions that we get taken in and we get to really sit with and learn ourselves, and we get to learn about where we are still getting in our own way or what's happening in our lives that we're not happy with or where boundaries have been crossed or where we're self abandoning. And so for me, it's equally really important to give an honoring. I think, for me, one of the biggest kind of disservices we've done in the modern day manifesting world is like this high vibe, high vibe, high vibe, high vibe all the time. And I'm not saying we should ever stay stuck in kind of the. And exactly like you, I think we've labeled emotions good and bad. It's good to feel happy, it's good to feel joy, it's good to feel this. It's really bad to feel angry. It's bad to feel this. Whereas emotions are all messengers. They're there to show us where we're in or out of alignment in our lives and where we are showing up in our truth and authenticity or not. And so I feel it's so important to go both to do the celebration and to feel the wonder, and then also to sit with and be with and hold ourselves in the moments that we're struggling as well.

[B]

One of the chapters that I really enjoyed reading was Trust the timing. Okay. And in that chapter, you mentioned what you just said about wanting to Amazon prime our lives, which I thought was just a really beautiful way of describing what's happened to us as a species, how impatient people have become, how. I don't know. I think a lot about. I'm thinking a lot about goals at the moment. And I'm coming to the belief that goals for many people are problematic because I believe the focus on the goal is an externality.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

So, you know, and this is why people are never satisfied even when they reach the goal, because too much of the focus was on the goal as opposed to the process that got you to it.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

And so I sort of, at the moment thinking about goals as a way of maybe giving you a bit of direction, pointing a compass at what you might want to start doing. But I guess what I'm trying to get to is this impatience that many of us have now. Right. And you talk in that chat about it's really important to trust the timing. Right. So there will be people listening, Kirsty, to this podcast at the moment who are feeling impatient, they're feeling stuck, they're feeling lost, they're feeling unmotivated. And they want some sort of insights through listening that are going to help them change their life immediately. But it doesn't always happen that way. And in that chapter, you wrote about an earlier part of your life when you were in a corporate job, and I think you'd either decided you wanted to go and be a yoga instructor or go to India. And there was initially a frustration that things weren't happening at the time that you wanted them to. And then the line that I underlined was when you say at some point that you chose to believe that everything was happening to help you get to where you wanted to go, which I think is a really interesting point. So could you first of all, just paint a picture of that part in your life, what was going on? And then I think we can speak about why it's important to trust the timing of everything.

[A]

Yeah. So I think I've been on a real spiritual journey for a really long time, trying to discover what more of my purpose was. And I'd done regressional therapy and become a Reiki healer and a crystal healer and aromatherapy and studied all these different things, and none of it quite gave me that. That sense of, like, this is it. And then. I know it sounds so cliched, but I did one yoga class, and it was sudden, like, everything dropped into place. And the more yoga I practiced, the more I realized that yoga's got this beautiful, rich philosophy. And yoga gave me an answer to every question, and it changed me so much. I was like, this is what I want to share with people. But I wanted to go to the source. I wanted to go to where yoga came from. I knew I wanted to go to India. I just had this call deep in me that said, you need to go to India and live this. Breathe it, really study it. And I was working in a corporate job at the time, as you mentioned, didn't have a huge amount of savings behind me. In fact, I didn't have any savings behind me at that time at all. And the corporate world never made an awful lot of sense to me, I've got to be honest, because the whole 9 to 5, why not 10 till 6, why not 8 till 4, why not 11? I just couldn't understand some of the arbitrary rules that would happen in the corporate world. They felt really restrictive to me. So I'd never particularly felt a resonance of that world. I worked in marketing and PR at the time, which was a wonderful job as far as jobs went. But I felt like I would spend a lot of time embellishing hotels to get people to go there. And so I'd never get home at the end of the day and go, wow, I feel really purposeful today. I really did something today.

[B]

Did you mean you had to do things as part of your job that weren't fully in alignment with who you knew yourself to be?

[A]

Yes. Yeah.

[B]

So there's. This is really interesting. So on the surface, you've got a good job.

[A]

A wonderful job.

[B]

A wonderful job. Right. A job that Many people might potentially want. Right. So you're doing that job, but as part of your job, you're having to do things that don't sit right with.

[A]

You, that weren't my truth, that were not purposeful.

[B]

Yeah. So there's an internal conflict there, isn't there?

[A]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's a very, very brave thing. So I think, just as a side note there, when I realized when I wanted to quit my job and go to India, my granddad in particular, God love him at that generation, you didn't do that. You got a job in marketing and pr. You stayed at that job for the rest of your life. They thought I was absolutely crazy to want to quit an amazing corporate job. The day I quit that job, everyone looked at me like I was slightly crazy. But I know deep down, so many people in that building wish they were brave enough to do the same. And I've had so many messages since then of people I worked with back then who said, you quit in that job when what I should have been doing at that age is wanting to climb the corporate ladder, get to the next level. Next level. The next level. And instead I was like, I want to go and live barefoot in India and be a yoga teacher. So many people have written to me and said, you inspired me. You've inspired me to follow a dream. You inspired me to be brave and to trust that stepping into the unknown would really, really help me to find a life of purpose and meaning. And sometimes to find that life of purpose and meaning, we do have to go against the grain. Because if there's no if, there's no challenge, if there's no uncertainty, there's no growth, there's no evolution. And it's through that we grow into the version of us that can hold that purpose when it arrives. So back to the story. I was working in corporate.

[B]

Well, before we go into the story, can we pause the story there? Okay, so firstly, can you remember that first yoga class you did where was. Wasn't in India. Right. So it was in the uk, I think. And what was it about that class? What was the lesson? What was the thing that at the end of that class, you thought, now, this is what I need to do? Can you remember?

[A]

I remember everything about it. It was in a little village hall. And the reason I knew that this is what I needed to give was because I won't say the whole way through that class, but by the end, when you lay in Shavasana that you do at the end of a yoga class, I felt so Connected to the part of me that is infinite, expansive, white. It's like I touched bliss for the first time. It's like I knew what life was all about for the first time. It's like I really felt happiness and joy in who I was for the first time. And it was that feeling at the end of like, like I'm floating. And this is one of the things I'll also say I've. I've practiced meditation for 20 years now. Maybe I can count you on one hand the number of times that I have become everything, Everything, yet nothing. Touch the divine being in that blissful state. But those one or two times make every other day of sitting there when 10 minutes feels like four hours worth it it. Because that feeling I get when that, that to me is knowing the truth. That moment of feeling what it feels like to be everything yet nothing and experience what I consider to be my soul, that's worth every other moment of hardship because I remember that feeling in every cell of my being.

[B]

Yeah. It's not just that your mind remembers that, your body remembers that feeling that, you know, for people who do meditate. And I, you know, I can be really be regular with my practice and I can be really sporadic for months and that's okay. Like the older version of me would, well, order as in when I was younger. Yeah, will definitely beat myself up about that sort of stuff. But now I just, I let it go with a thug. Oh, that's interesting. You were doing it regularly, now you're not. Okay, great. And what is the consequence of that? But occasionally, and I tend to experience this a lot more these days than I ever have done before, you sit in meditation and there's just this stillness, this sereneness internally and I guess this lack of thought. I had this really wonderful chat with a doctor psychiatrist in America called Dr. Kanoja. He goes by the name of Dr. K. And at the end of that conversation we really explored the true nature of happiness. And one of the things he was talking about because he's being studied to be a monk in India and is also a Harvard trained psychiatrist, really interesting combination. And one of the things we were talking about at the end of that conversation was how happiness is a inner stillness when there is a complete lack of thought. So that's one element of it. So you're saying that you experience that from time to time. It is incredible, isn't it?

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

And you want it. It's not that you necessarily want it. Again, you do initially you're like, can I want that again? But then I guess over time, you just learn to trust and go. So keep showing up. Some days it will be there, some days it won't. But it's okay.

[A]

Yeah. And it's like in those moments that we get a glimpse of what life is really all about. And again, that's not. It's not tangible. It's not something we can necessarily explain. It's felt. And so anything for me, when we start to look at the spiritual realms or the divine or higher consciousness or whatever labels we might give it, it's not something that can necessarily be logically explained. It's something that's a felt experience that each one of us has to experience for ourselves. But when you have that moment of bliss or complete emptiness, there's nothing like it in the world. And that's what that first yoga class gave me. And I was like this. If I can give people that for just two minutes once a week, that's gonna help the rest of their week. And when I went into teaching yoga more full time, I teach corporate and private yoga because I wanted to go to the people that really, genuinely needed it. And I go into a lot of law firms and a lot of big firms like that, and they'd all come in with, like, their forehead scrunched and everything stressed and their shoulders up around their ears. And they come at lunchtime, and they come a bit begrudgingly because they're like, oh, yeah. And by the end, those little thinking lines would soften and their shoulders would have dropped, and it was beautiful to witness. And I was like, that's. That's what I want to give.

[B]

How often do you practice yoga?

[A]

I practice yoga in a certain form most days. So speaking about meditation, I am. I think one of the biggest misconceptions about meditation is that we're trying to stop our thoughts, and we're not. If we stop thinking, we're not alive anymore. It's about not becoming attached to the thoughts. Because as we know, very often even in life, it's not what's happening in life that's really problematic for us. It's the thoughts that we have about what's happening and the judgment that we have about whether it should or shouldn't be happening. And the story we tell ourselves about what's happening. It's very rarely the actual thing itself. It's the stories that we tell. I mean, it's incredible. The amount of times over my life I've made up stories in my mind and hurt myself with a story. It's not even True, it's never even happened. But that story has sent me through so much drama, catastrophe, it's untrue. So when we meditate, we learn to detach from the stories. And there's a chapter in the book about you're not your thoughts. And it's to help us to see that that constant commentary all the time is necessarily true. So when we meditate, it's, it simplifies it, but it's like clouds passing across the sky. We want to just allow the thoughts to be there and to come in or to notice the ones we attach to. Well, I'll think that thought because it's a good thought, but I won't think that one again. We want to let them all just fade through. But when we do kind of the more seated meditation, that's what I call more like top down meditation. So we need to just talk a tiny bit here about kind of masculine feminine energies, which isn't men and women, it's masculine, feminine. The masculine is the doer, the fixer, get things done. It's the logic. The feminine is the intuitive, the creative, the flow. So when we're sitting in meditation and we think we have to be in lotus position with our hands in a certain position and we have to sit there for 10 minutes and not move, that's more like a masculine form of meditation where we're doing the meditation. I prefer moving meditation, which is what yoga's become for me. And so when we do a moving meditation, what we're actually doing then is getting into the true wisdom which for me lives in our body. And so when we check in with ourselves, and we talked about this a little while ago of how am I feeling today? We very rarely do that because very often we don't want to hear the answer. Because the answer is we're not in the relationship that we should be in. We don't like our job anymore and we get afraid of listening within because then that gives us a weight of responsibility that we have to do something about it. So we constantly make ourselves too busy to check in with our inner world. And on a little side note there, that's why I honestly believe one of the most asked questions I get is how do I listen to my intuition? And my answer is always, well, I give two answers, but they're the same. First of all, you have to first of all feel your emotions. Because I believe our emotions. Our intuition sits deep within, beneath our emotions. And we have to first of all feel everything we've avoided feeling because we can't selectively feel emotion. I want to feel all the happy stuff in the intuition, but I don't want to feel the grief and the bad stuff. So first of all, we have to go through all of that to get to the well of wisdom. But the reason we ignore our intuition is because our intuition tends to be the inconvenient voice of truth in there that says to us, this isn't the right job for you. But I'm scared. I don't know what. This isn't the right job for you. This isn't the right relationship for you. This isn't the right thing for you. So then we try to shut down that voice of wisdom within us so when we can start to sit with ourselves on a daily basis and maybe check in at the start of the day, how am I feeling today? And what normally happens then is an unexpressed, maybe emotional couple. We feel a little bit of sadness and we'll go, I don't want to feel it. So we'll open our eyes and we'll quickly get up and we'll go about our day. I'm too, too busy. I won't think about that. If you can sit and go, I feel sad. Okay, cursed, you feel sad. Doesn't need a story. Don't need to know where it came from. Don't need to know when it happened. I just need to feel sad. If that sad had a voice, what would it say to me? If that sad could move, how would that sad move? And then as I start to move, I start to allow those things to be expressed through my body and through me. And I give them a voice and I give them movement. And therefore I can get to the wisdom that's beneath them. And that was a really long answer to how often I practice yoga.

[B]

Oh, I love it. There was so much gold there. Actually, it's really interesting because that phrase you just used there, the inconvenient voice of truth. Right. That's beautiful. So evocative. Right. And one of the things I was gonna pick up on in your story was when we talked about internal conflict. Right. When you were in a great job. Well, let me in.

[A]

Inverted commas, the world, the outside world.

[B]

The outside world, says, Kirsty, you're in a great job. What the hell are you doing? Quitting this job. Right. But you would come home each night, or maybe not each night, but regularly. There was this whisper from within you that I don't like what I'm having to do in order to justify my position or as part of that job, Right. So we're talking about the internal conflict, which kind of speaks also to this inconvenient voice of truth. Because what I was gonna ask you was, okay, so you knew that something was slightly off and you didn't ignore it. Maybe you previously ignored it. Right? Because it's easier to ignore and keep going and picking up the paycheck and going out on a Friday night with your mates and just cracking on with life. Life. Until you can no longer ignore it. It will come out at some point. It's just a case of when. Right, but the question is then for that person who says, actually, Kirsty, I don't like many elements of my job, but that is how I feed my family, that's how I pay the mortgage, right? What's that person meant to do with what you've said?

[A]

So, first of all, make that your choice.

[B]

What does that mean?

[A]

It means make it your choice to stay in the job. So let's, let's take this apart bit by bit. You know you don't like the job that you're in. Stage one, start to figure out why. Where is this rollout of alignment? Because to your point before, and I wanted to jump in and I didn't want interrupted, you said you don't like what you have to do to be in that job. I didn't like who I had to be either. I didn't like who I had to be because I had to be someone that wasn't authentically true to me. So stage one, if you're saying to me, can't stand my job, start to figure out why is it the hours that you don't like? Is it the boss that you don't like? Is it the role itself that you don't like? Figure out what you don't like about that job. Start to flip that into what you would like, what you would like from a role, what you would like from a job. What would my ideal job be if there were an ideal world that's going to start to give you an indication of where your soul to use, to use my language, is calling you to be. Because every time we feel a niggle of discontent, a niggle that we're not in the right place, that's our soul calling us forwards into a newer version of ourselves. So it's saying, this isn't the role for you. The fact this isn't the role for you means there is another role that is for you. So start to figure out what that role could be and would be. You might say to me, but cursed. I'd love to retrain as to do reflexology, but I've got young kids and I just can't right now. And it feels like a very, very distant goal. Beautiful. Let's again take this step by step. First of all, make that your choice. So rather than say, well, I'm stuck in this job and it's awful and I can't do anything, no, I'm choosing right now to stay in this role, because right now staying here and helping me to feed my family is better for me than it would be to quit the role and go out there into the unkn. Anything where you're in indecision is one of the most disempowering places to be in life where you don't know what to do. It's so disempowering. And I call people out on this. When you tell me you don't know what to do, you absolutely do know. But what you know you need to do scares you. We always know. But when you stay in indecision, and then I'm gonna come to you, hey, Rongan, I don't like my job, but what do you think I should do about it? I'm gonna ask my friends, I'm gonna ask my parents, I'm gonna ask the Internet. I'm gonna ask AI, external, external, external. I'm gonna ask everybody. And then what we. And I say this with love, is that other people who are also stuck in jobs they don't like, they're not going to tell you to quit your job and go to India because they're not brave enough to do it. So they're going to tell you to stay in your job. You're not meant to like your job. Don't worry about it.

[B]

Well, that comes to the third point I stole you for. Right? So you're actually, it's really interesting you're addressing all of them, right. Without me even saying what they are. The third point I was going to make is when you said before that when you decided to quit, people push back all around you. You know, they thought you were stupid, right? It's not that, you know, maybe some of your colleagues thought, what is she doing? Crazy. She worked hard to get this wrong when she's leaving. And I think we often do that. We put this happens online all the time. We push back and we get annoyed at people speaking their truth because on some level we wish we could speak our truth like them. I love what you said about indecision. And it, I think it makes me think about, you know, caring for others. There's a sweet spot, isn't there? It's not always about tiptoeing around them. Like you can be. You can have compassionate honesty.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

That was compassionate honesty, right? You do know what to do. You're just not listening.

[A]

Yeah. And we don't do anybody any favors either when we tiptoe around them. Like what we do need is we need radical responsibility for our lives, but then giving everyone else radical responsibility for theirs as well. And that understanding that we aren't necessarily responsible for anyone else's lives or happiness as much as we try and make ourselves responsible for that. We can be caring, compassionate, we can do our best, we can show up for everyone around us, but we're not responsible for anybody else's life in the same way that they're not responsible for our life.

[B]

Yeah, I really like that. And as I say that chat and radical responsibility, I think is so, so important. Do you mind if I read the end bit of that chapter back to you? Because I thought it was really powerful. It really speaks to what you just said. I want to end this chapter with a little reminder that you are not responsible for anyone else's life, problems or happiness. Everyone is on their own individual journey and each one of us is only responsible for our own lives. You cannot fix, heal or rescue anyone as much as you might want to. You cannot change anyone who doesn't want to be changed. You cannot save anyone from their own life experiences or rock bottoms or dark nights of the soul. All you can do is be there to support and love them when they need it. Sometimes this also means knowing when it's time to set boundaries, put yourself first or walk away and love someone from afar. Taking radical responsibility for your own life also means giving everyone else radical responsibility for theirs. That is gorgeous, Kirsty.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

There is just so much wisdom in those eight or nine lines, you know. You cannot change anyone else. You cannot change anyone who doesn't want to be changed. There will be so many people listening who have a. A partner, a sister, a brother, a parent who they want to change. They're like, oh, you know, I get this question all the time at my live events. Dr. Shashi, I have followed the things that you put in your books. I feel great. But how do I change my boyfriends? How do I change my husband? How do I change my mum? You can't, can you?

[A]

No. And all we can do, and we touched on this before, is become the embodied example of what it is to live in this way in the hope that someone then will watch us or watch this conversation and say, okay, I want to be a bit more like this. I'm going to try this. That's all we can do, is be that embodied example of this is what it means to live a life like this. And back to my story. Being the embodied example of this is what's possible. When you quit a job in the corporate world and you sit here 16 years later on this on one of the biggest podcasts in the world, you know, this is what it means to follow the road less traveled and to do the things that everybody else thought was absolutely not and to go against all the kickback and to be brave in the moments when it was scary and terrifying and made no sense. It's hard to keep putting one foot in front of the other when you can't see the next step and everything looks dark ahead, but it's so worth it.

[B]

Yeah. Before we get back to your story, just to close the loop on something you said about that person who doesn't like their job. Right. What I really love about your explanation was that it just speaks to intentionality and making conscious choices. So, you know, please correct me if I've not interpreted this correctly, but what I think you were saying is, basically, it's okay to be in a job that you don't love, but be aware that that's what you're doing. Don't kid yourself that you're loving it, or this is the only option you've got. Right. It might be the only option you have at the moment.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

But take that time out from your day. Maybe it's that question, you know, what do I need? Maybe it's five minutes of journaling. Maybe it's a little bit of meditation, some time out where you can reflect. I go, yeah, you know what? I don't like this. I do want to learn to be a nutritional therapist, but I can't right now.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

So at the moment, I'm doing this because it feeds me and it feeds my children.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Because you're still going to the same job, but you're changing the way in which you're going to that job, aren't you? And I think that's the key thing. That's the start of change.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. And. And so a couple of things on that I then, like, I call it. I call it like, Soul School. Go to Soul School. Okay. What can I learn about myself when I'm in this job? What pushes my buttons? What irritates Me every day. How can I learn more about myself? See it as like a little bit of an exciting adventure or something. Like, okay, I'm going to explore myself while I'm still here. Then also have that longer term goal. So don't just give up on the dream, but look at, okay, when could I make this a possibility? And then look at, what can I do now to help me to get there one day? Because if you don't start now, you'll actually never, ever, ever, ever get there. So that might be if we take your point to being a nutritional therapist. You start to read books on nutrition every day. You start to use yourself as the example of a nutritional therapist and you really look at your own nutrition. You might start to help your friends around you with their permission of helping them with their nutrition. So you're doing everything that you can do now within the confines of your current life. That will mean when you're then able to quit the job because your kids have grown up, you've already got all these steps behind you and the confidence to do it.

[B]

Yeah. Or you might find out that you thought you wanted to be a nutritional therapist, but maybe you wanted to just learn more about nutrition.

[A]

Absolutely right.

[B]

So maybe again, going back to the goal idea, you have this goal, you think, yeah, you know what, I don't like this job. I think I want to be a nutritional therapist. Can't do it right now because of A, B and C. Okay, let me start taking curses and start reading about nutrition. You may find in two years time, actually, you know what, the job's not so bad actually. Like, I've learned loads about nutrition. I've changed my own health. I can help my family around, eat better, they're feeling better. It's not these binary things either. Or sometimes it's the, you know, along the journey to try and get somewhere, we learn, actually we don't even want to go there. You know, we thought we wanted to go there.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But actually, no, we just wanted that again. That goal helped shift us out of where we were so we could start experiencing something different.

[A]

And that's part of purpose, that there's so many little purposes in your life that lead you to where you want to go. So learning nutritional therapy was a purpose that might have led you to discovering that's not what you wanted to do. That might have led you to something completely different and what we're all deeply searching for. And I would kind of argue the reason most people don't like their job is because they don't feel purposeful, find things every day that make you feel on purpose, even if that's just for five minutes. So again, your purpose then gets to be outside of your job and you get to do something every day that feels meaningful for you.

[B]

Right back to your story now. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Nutrition can often seem really complicated. We get confused about what exact diets we should be following and which supplements we might benefit from taking. And that's one of the many reasons that I love AG1 and have been taking it for over six years. AG1 makes it simple to be the best version of you over 70 ingredients 1 scoop once a day for less than a cup of coffee. It's a science driven daily health drink which supports your energy, focus and immune system. It also helps support your gut health. For example, it contains calcium, which contributes to the normal function of digestive enzymes and biotin to maintain your own intestinal mucous membrane. Now, the scientific team behind AG1 includes experts from a broad range of fields including longevity, preventive medicine, genetics and biochemistry. And I talk to them regularly and am really impressed with their commitment to making a top quality product. In fact, AG1 has gone through 53 versions as they continue to iterate in line with the latest research. And the best thing, of course, is that all this goodness comes in one convenient daily serving that makes it really easy to fit into your life. So if you want to Support your health seven mornings a week, you can start with AG1. Subscribe now and get a free bottle of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription. All you have to do is go to drinkag1.comlivemore to unlock this exclusive offer and get started on your journey to better health today. This episode is brought to you by Airbnb Now. Recently, I've been traveling a lot. Between my tour, recording new podcasts and holidays with my family, I've been away quite a lot recently and that means my home has just been sitting empty. And I know I'm not the only one. A lot of us find ourselves with unused space, whether it's a spare room or your entire place, whether it's because of extended trips, remote work, or just time away. So why not put that empty space to good use and make that space work for you? You see, hosting on Airbnb is a really simple way to earn a bit of extra income for future travels or that new piece of furniture you've had your eye on and Even if your schedule is packed or you find yourself busier than usual, the new co host network on Airbnb makes it easier than ever to get started. A co host can help you create your listing, manage reservations, and take care of your home and your guests for you whilst you are away. It makes the whole experience even easier. And it's handy, especially when you're feeling busy or away for long stretches. So if you've ever thought about hosting but needed an extra set of hands, find a co [e-mail] host okay, so we're in the corporate job. We've been to the village hall, and we've experienced something really special in a yoga class. So you have this calling inside of you that you want to go to Indy, you want to go to the source and learn about yoga, right? But you didn't make that leap straight away, did you? So what was going on there? Because this is all in the context of trusting the timing.

[A]

And I tell this story very, very often. It took me about two and a half years, and they were some of the hardest and most difficult and challenging years of my life. Yet they were also some of the most profound years of my life. So I used to lock myself in the toilet every day in that corporate job. In the same way I can tell you what that village hall looked like, I can tell you what the toilet cubicle looked like. I would lock myself in there every day and I would, when I say, cry, you know, that guttural cry that comes from somewhere deep within. I would cry my eyes out every day and I would beg the universe and I'd say to the universe, why are you not helping me? I want to do something that's, like, going to be good for everyone. Like, why? Why, why? Why was my, like, plea to the universe. And I really, in that time, used to sit with, is it better to have a dream and not be able to achieve it or to not have a dream at all? I didn't know which would be worse. I'd sit with that so often and go, I don't know which would be worse, because my dream would kept me so alive, but it was so painful that I couldn't get there. And then I decided, similar to what I've just said to you now, let me use this time. Let me use this time to hone my craft. Let me practice yoga as much as I can. Let me read books on the philosophy of yoga. Let me also put that into practice in my corporate job. So when I was being bullied at the time by a colleague. But it then I turned it back on me. So rather than saying, if only she were nicer to me, I'd like the job more. What is it about her that bothers you? What is it about her behavior? Where are you playing a part in this? I used it as a way to really get curious about myself. I handed my notice in three times. Each time I got a promotion and a pay rise, which helped me to start to. To save money, to be able to go to India. And as I say, my family or thought, especially my grandparents. I mean, my goodness, my grandparents thought I was. I mean, my granddad used to be like, she's crazy. There's something wrong with her. Cause it just was not done in those days that you quit.

[B]

But that's okay, isn't it?

[A]

Because, you know, that was his reality.

[B]

Exactly. And presumably when your granddad grew up, this would have been the most ridiculous and wildest thing to do, right?

[A]

And he worked very hard to get to where he got to in his corporate job. For him, it was almost, I guess, slightly disrespectful. You would then get to somewhere and then.

[B]

Yeah, but if we can just pause on this point. Cause I actually think there's something really profound here that we really should talk about, which is this idea that when you've been listening to that internal voice and you practice it and, you know, actually, you know what? I do need to make some changes in my life. You know, this happened in, you know, in Covid times. This happened for people. They got a real awakening. And many people, you know, it's amazing how many people stop me in the street, bump into me, and will talk to me about, you know, a podcast they heard, which prompted them to leave their job and start something different. And now they can't even imagine doing the job that they used to do. Right. Which is really interesting. I'm like, wow. You know, it's kind of. I don't know. Cause it can feel scary for people, right? But the point I'm trying to get to is because when we decide internally we want to make a change, as you've already acknowledged, there will be many people around you, or there may be many people around you who don't understand it, who think you're being silly, who think you're being short sighted, but that's okay. That's their reality. And they're also allowed to have that reality.

[A]

They absolutely are.

[B]

Do you know what I mean? I think that's the key point for me. It's like like, they don't have to agree with you.

[A]

They don't.

[B]

And you can still love them even if they don't agree with you.

[A]

And the key thing is so much of what we've spoken about already, the key thing is not to look at them and wanting to change them and wanting to make them approved so that you can do it. The key thing is looking into you, so you don't need that approval. I don't need any of you to understand this leap I'm about to make. I just know I need to make it. I don't need your approval, validation, permission for me to be able to do this. I fully honor your feelings where you are. That last chapter of my book you just read. I'm not responsible for any. You can't make anybody feel something unless they allow you to. So what I need to do is, rather than want all of you to change and approve of me. Oh, my God, my parents don't approve. I need to maybe look at the parts of me that want that approval and seek it and be with those parts. But then my journey is to get to a truth so deep within me that every single other person in the world could say, that makes no sense to me. And I go, I know. But it does to me. And that's all that matters. And that takes time. And it takes a lot of time. It takes having to have done this an awful lot. It takes getting to know yourself on a really deep level. But this is the truth we spoke about right at the beginning, that when you get to a place of truth and trust in you, I know now I can step into the unknown. Anything. Because I know I've got my. And I know no matter what comes, I can face it. I can do it. So I can step into the complete unknown in life over and over again. Because I've learned time after time, I'm gonna be there for me, and I'm going nowhere. And as long as I've got me, I'm gonna be okay.

[B]

Yeah. It's living from the inside out, not the outside in. And the only way you get there, in my view, and I think your view, is by spending time with yourself regularly. Right. If you're constantly listening to the voices outside of you and, you know, you came to my London Lyceum event right, in March, and one of the things I say towards the end of that tour was I spoke about solitude.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Right. And why I believe that for most of us these days, it is the most important practice for your health and your happiness, because Unless you shut down the noise from the outside and start listening to what's going on in the inside, your life is never gonna change.

[A]

Never.

[B]

Because you're just gonna be stuck in this cycle of. Oh, who said that? Oh, this new expert said that. That expert said that. And it's confused. Oh, I need to do cold plunge. Oh, no, I've just learned about sauna. I need to do sauna now. I need to do journaling. Oh, no, no, I need to do meditation. I need to do them all. But then I also gotta see my wife and look after my children and, you know, it's too much. Too much. Yeah, so it's. It's really powerful. That. So, okay, so that's interesting. It took two and a half years.

[A]

Took two and a half years and. But I. I now know, and I know this with every bone in my body, had I gone to India one month, one week, one day sooner, I would not be sat here with you now. Because there are still ways in that period of time that I needed to grow and evolve and things I needed to learn. And when we speak about purpose, a big part of our purpose is that everything that we go through, or I call it grow through, is helping us to become the version of us that can hold our purpose when we get there. So everything I had to go through in those two and a half years taught me so much about myself, and it taught me to continue to trust and that that dream just wouldn't go away. It would have been so easy to go. It's not working. Working. It's not working. It's not happening. Gonna give up on it. And then to just stay in that life and stay unhappy. But that dream, it would not go away. It would not go away. Now, I also like to differentiate here between just trying to knock on closed doors and trying to continue to go after something that isn't for you, versus continuing to believe in a dream even when it feels like it's not manifesting. And the difference people need to understand here is it comes down to the feeling you're gonna know from a soul level when a dream is for you. That won't go away because it's gonna feel something that. A longing, a yearning. It just won't go anywhere. Resume. We're trying to continue to knock on a door that isn't for us. That feels frustrating. It feels out of alignment. It feels a bit icky. There's kind of an ickiness to. When we're trying to force something that isn't meant for us. On a kind of soul journey level versus the lesson our soul wants us to go through, to grow into who we need to be. And what's really beautiful about that story is it doesn't stop there. So I got to India. I did it, achieved the dream, did it, got there, quit the job. It was awful. I mean, traveling India as a woman on your own is an initiation. And for that first week, maybe two weeks, if someone would have given me a plane ticket, I would have taken it. It was so difficult. And I would. I found myself again crying my eyes out and pleading to the universe again. And I'd wanted to go to India. I'd had this belief that I'd go and I'd ring back home and I'd go, I'm now enlightened. I'm in India. Everything's all worked out. And instead I was like, I'm here. I've got what I wanted, and it's an absolute mess, and it's awful. But again, this is where we need to trust the timing and trust that life's always taking care of us. Because I would make promises to myself in that first initial few weeks in India, and I put my own cheek against my own shoulder, my cheek on my own skin, and I say to myself, it's okay, Kirst. I've got you. I'm going to be here for you. I'm going to look after you. You might be scared, but I'm going nowhere. And I'd make little promises to myself of, okay, today, go to the bottom of the road, and then you can come back home. And tomorrow, go and explore that area, and then you can come home. I learned to trust myself and believe in myself and be there for myself and care for myself and love myself fiercely in that time, like never, ever, ever before and never since. That time for me was so profound. And again it was, when it was all falling apart and going wrong, it was actually perfect.

[B]

Yeah. You know, this whole idea of trusting the timing, right, that everything's happening at the right time for you. Now, some people may be listening with their rational, logical minds going, well, that's just ridiculous, right? How do you know things are happening at the right time? How do you know that? Actually, had you not gone to India a year before that to learn yoga at Source, you wouldn't still have ended up where you are today, or it wouldn't have happened sooner, right? To that person, what do you say?

[A]

Who knows? Like, who. Who actually really knows 90% of the work that I do, when we look at the Spiritual realms, nobody knows the definitive meaning of life.

[B]

Life.

[A]

Until we go back home to wherever you believe home to be, none of us can say. I can say this is a glass. No one can say categorically true, there are such things as past life and this and this and this. And all the spiritual realms, there's no such thing as your soul, the universe, whatever it may be, none of us can categorically say that. But what we need to do is find enough of the truth for ourselves so that we know that to be true. So if your belief is it would have happened if I'd have gone a year sooner, that's your belief, that's your truth. And that's okay, that's perfect. And maybe it would have still all worked out, who knows? But the way it actually went was if I look at my journey of those two years and I look at who I was a year in, and I look at who I was two years in, I know that the year in version of me, she might have got that plane ticket home from India because she wouldn't have trusted and believed in herself enough. She'd not built enough resilience. So she could have come home. And then I definitely won't be sat here with you. I'd have gone and got another corporate job.

[B]

Yeah, for me, as I hear that. Cause I was just playing devil's advocate. I also believe in timing, that things happen at the right time. And, you know, the reason I've been brought up this whole story with your corporate job is it's the words with which you described in that chapter. Right. You chose to believe that everything was happening to help you get to where you needed to go.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It was a choice.

[A]

Yeah. We always did it.

[B]

It was a choice. Right. So I always think about things and I go, well, is it useful? Is your belief useful or not? Right. Trusting the timing, I would argue, is a useful belief. Right. It's a belief, as you say. How can you prove it? Let's examine the alternative. The alternative is frustration. Oh my God, I wish this had happened sooner. I can't believe this is happening to me. That person's getting in my way of me living my life. It's. It's blaming on the outside. It goes back to your taking radical responsibility chapter. Right. You have to own your life. Right. So in some ways it doesn't actually matter. The belief that everything is happening as it should, I think is a powerful belief and it's a more helpful belief than not believing that. And this is where, you know, the logical Mind versus that kind of intuitive mind. You know, we are certainly here in the UK and many other Western countries, we're very much trained to shut down the body from a young age without even realizing it. It's about, well, what does the research say? What does the science say? What does the logical mind say? Right? But I think when we were on stage together at Carl Fest last year, I think one of the things I said at some point was that, yeah, but you can't get data and science for absolutely everything, right? So I. So for example, do I love my wife? Yeah, I do. How do I prove it?

[A]

Where's the actual.

[B]

Where's the trial that shows me that it's like, well, I just know. What do you mean, you just know? No, no, I just know. What do you mean, prove it? That's how we apply the logical mind to so many things, right? So I think we just need to soften some stuff. I'm not saying ignore your logical mind. It's fine. But just let's also. So let's have a sense of awe that there are some things that we can't explain, right? That there are things out there. You've mentioned the word spirituality quite a few times in this conversation so far when you use that term, Kirsty, what do you mean by it?

[A]

Spirituality for me is having a connection to something greater. And I mean by that a greater part of me. So I would call that my higher self, my soul, and also the understanding that we are part of something greater. So whether you call that God or universal source or whatever name you start to, to give that. And that spirituality to me is living a life of meaning and purpose and devotion. So spirituality is not something that I do and then I go and live my life. Spirituality is my way of life. So spirituality means that I approach everything in my life from a place of deep devotion and meaning and purpose. So even when I'm going through. Through really difficult times when life makes absolutely no sense, I'm going to come to that from a perspective of what can I learn from this? How can I grow through this? What is this teaching me? What is this showing me versus being more of a victim to life and everything happening to me? I see everything happening for me rather than to me, to help me to grow and evolve.

[B]

And that's a choice.

[A]

That's a choice.

[B]

It's a choice to believe that. It's a helpful choice. It's a useful choice. And it's kind of interesting. Hearing you say that makes me reflect back to a conversation I Had maybe two or three years ago now with Bronnie Ware. Yeah, Bronnie's great.

[A]

That was a great conversation.

[B]

Oh, she's such a wonderful lady. And I mean, I talk about that chat quite a lot. It had such a. It had. And her work has had quite a profound impact on me. She wrote the book the Five Regrets of the Dying, the common things people say on their deathbeds. And I think your book very much speaks to that, because ultimately, through that book and her work, she's trying to help people live a more authentic life, which is essentially what you're trying to do with your latest book. Your cosmic purpose, right, is helping people find purpose through authenticity. But in that conversation, I remember asking her, I said, bronnie, did everyone at the end of their life have regrets? Oh, she said, no. I said, oh, what were the commonalities in people who didn't have regrets at the end of their life? And I'm trying to remember now, but it was. I think it was these three things. It was people who had strong relationships with their friends and family. It was people who had a sense of humor, and it was people who believed in something greater than themselves. Right. Now, all of those points are important, but let's just highlight that final one. And I feel this is when I observe the world today, Kirsty. And as you know, religion has played less of a role in people's lives. A lot of people are feeling a bit lost now, totally. They don't have a belief in something larger than themselves, and that's a problem. You know, the amount of mental health problems I've seen over the years as a clinician is, you know, everything was too logical. It's all about me as an individual in this world. What am I going to get out of it? Why am I not getting what I want? It seems it's too much of. It's all just on you. You know, that that's where the despondency comes a lot of the time you come home from. What is this all there is? Like, what? I just keep doing this. I wait for the weekends and then I, what, go for a walk on Saturday and I do this on a Sunday, then I'm back to work on Monday. You know, I was reflecting yesterday and this morning, why is it or what? What is one of the reasons why Kirsty has become so popular over the last few years? Because you have, right, you have this core devoted following, and I was reading a lot of the comments on your Instagram page yesterday, and the things that Your community say about you and how your, is it your lunar living classes have literally changed their relationship with themselves. It's kind of interesting. I'm thinking, what is it? And I imagine I'd love your take on this, but I imagine is that people are looking for something to believe in.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

They're looking for something that's greater than just their individual existence.

[A]

Absolutely. And I really feel that we found that in the pandemic. You touched on that before. And I think pre pandemic we just been, I call it TikTok. We just tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Do we like get up, go to work? Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. All of a sudden everything about life that we believe to be true all of a sudden crumbled. Nothing made sense anymore. And then we started to look for something to believe it. And I do feel that's, that's why I pray that I give people. That is part of my purpose. But I'm not going to tell you what to believe in. I'm going to help you to find that for yourself.

[B]

Find your truth.

[A]

Find your truth. Because I think we also need to be very, very aware of that. And I feel that that is part of the problem that came with religion. So if we look even to nature, I know you and I adore nature and spend a lot of time there. Our ancestors would have found the divine in nature. They would have gone to nature to worship the divine. They would have found the divine in the trees and the streams. And that's where they would have gone to religion came in and was, became a gatekeeper. You can only talk to God through me. And that's where a barrier gets put in. And that's where people then look to other people. Well, you tell me how to meditate. You tell me what the answers are. You tell me. That's not our journey. Our journey is to know it for ourselves from somewhere so deep within us. And that's what I want to help people with. And, and I say at the start of every workshop and every class that I do, I'm probably gonna really frustrate you. Cause you're coming to me now and saying, kirsty, tell me what to do with my life. I'm not gonna tell you what to do. I'm gonna help you to know what to do. Because again, if you're looking to me, you give all of your power away to me. And you always then need me to be here. I wanna give you your power back. And I think we've lost a lot of power over ourselves in this world because we live in a world that capitalizes on us looking outside of ourselves for something. We live in a consumer world that capitalizes on you never feeling like you're enough, on always believing that you need to have a certain thing to be happy, that you need to look a certain way to be happy, that you need to behave in a certain way to be happy. We live in a world that will constantly take our attention outside of us. And so we live in a world that literally profits from us never feeling like we're enough and having a deep connection to ourselves. When you have that.

[B]

That.

[A]

When you know who you are, and I think I write about this in the book, There's a big thing about being spiritual means that, you know you need to live a life of poverty, whatever it might be. That's not true. Have. Have the house, the cars, the handbags, the shoes, the fault. Have whatever you want, providing that's not the purpose of your happiness. And if all of that stuff got taken away, you could still be happy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's what I want to give people. That sense that everything you want will start to come to you, but you need it less.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because you just have a happiness in here that just is. It just is. You're here in this present moment with yourself. If loving yourself is a stretch, default liking yourself, being with yourself, showing up for yourself, doing the best you can every day. And that's enough.

[B]

Yeah. It's not the thing, it's your relationship to the thing. The best things in life can't be learnt. They can only be experienced.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

These are for me at least, and I think for you, the fundamental truths of human existence that people tend to ignore. And that's why the same lessons keep getting handed to you time and time again. Right. Until you realize this stuff. Until you actually realize. No, actually I can be my own best expert. Kirsty, to me, you have this quite remarkable grounded presence that I know many people really admire about you and look up to and probably want a little bit for themselves. I also know from reading your latest book that things weren't always that way. Are you okay sharing a little bit about your best friend Sharon and how impactful your experience with Sharon has been in terms of where you are today.

[A]

Absolutely. So Sharon was. Sharon was a light. She lit up a room. She was one of the most beautiful people you could ever hope to meet. And I met Sharon. So I haven't always been this way. And I think that the reason a Lot of people see this in me is because I've been where other people are. I used to be incredibly angry as a child, very frustrated. I played the blame game a lot in my life, I think I write in the book. I sometimes look back to those days when I could blame my boss or my parents or this person or that person for the way that my life was. It's been a journey for me to get to where I am and I feel that that's where we can teach the most when we are that we've got that lived experience and we understand where it or how it feels to be where somebody else is. So I met Sharon in the days of partying. Spirituality took a little bit of a sideline and. And I think for me, a big part of my journey, to be honest, has been. There's been a lot of death that's taken me towards this. And if I can go a stage before Sharon, I speak also about the book. My book is dedicated to Sharon and my great great Auntie Mabel. And my great great Auntie Mabel was the person who I guest started me on this journey. She read tea leaves and tarot. She was psychic. And as a little girl I adored her. She introduced me to this whole world beyond the physical world. And they lived in Yorkshire, my family were in Lancashire, so we didn't see a lot of her. And she finally moved to be near us. And I go around after school every day and sit at her feet and she'd only been there. Your concept of time is. Is different when you're a little older. It feels like maybe months. And then she got taken into hospital and I remember my mum speaking to us all that morning and saying, don't come to, to the hospital. And I was like. I was also a very, very rebellious child and I was like, absolutely not. And at the end of that day I went to the hospital and as soon as I got there to the hospital and I took a hold of her hand and my mum was on the other side and my Uncle George at her head. She. She passed away with. As soon as I got there and held her hand. And I really, truly feel like she'd waited for me. And my mum told me later that the reason she said don't come to the hospital was that morning they'd said she's got hours, she's going to go any minute.

[B]

It.

[A]

And she waited for me all day to get there. And being with her in that moment and seeing the soul leave the human body was such a. And I don't have words for it. And if anyone's ever experienced being with someone in the moment of a passing, it's something you can't find words for. But it touches your soul in a way that again, helps you to understand the meaning of life in a way that can't.

[B]

How old were you?

[A]

Were you 15? She was 15 maybe. And I to this day feel so grateful. She waited for me to be there with her, that she wanted me there with her in that moment of her passing. And it was such a. It was a beautiful honor to be there for her in that moment. And then from there, you know, she'd introduced me to spirituality. I'd met Sharon and Sharon was just. She was a single mom and she didn't live a lavish lifestyle. She'd had a difficult journey. But we spoke before about choices. Sharon made a choice every day to light up the world. She made a choice to live life to the full, to experience every moment. I'd take her to the supermarket every Sunday in a single mum budget going around Asda. We had more fun in that hour than most people have in their lifetime. She just lived lifetime to the full. And she loved life. And then we'd been on a night out and she always used to get quite bad hangovers and she'd got a headache. I'd left. I got a phone call maybe a day or so later from another friend and we had a big weekend away planned. And I presume the other friend was calling me to say, can you add me to the weekend? And she told me Sharon was in a coma. And I just remember thinking it's. It's impossible. I don't. You know, when your mind just doesn't. I don't. I don't understand what you're trying. I don't understand what you're telling me. I don't understand. And I remember going to the hospital and seeing her on life support. And again, if anyone's ever seen anyone on life support, the drugs they give them means that the body kind of bloats and things. And she just didn't. She wasn't the Sharon I knew. Sharon was full of life. Sharon was incredible. Sharon was. And I really honestly believed that she was going to get better even from going to see her. I guess those moments where your mind tries to protect you. My mind was like, no, this isn't happening. And then I remember it was a Friday. I was in work in the corporate job we spoke about. And I got a phone call of her from her family saying that we're turning off the life support. And again, you can put yourself in moments, in time. I remember, like, the whole world slowed down, and everything crashed around me. And they're almost like, no. And I remember just kind of running out of the building, and a few friends came out and followed me. And then she had an open casket at her funeral. And they'd made her look so beautiful at her funeral. She looked like Sharon, the Sharon I knew. And I wrote her a letter, and I put some crystals in there with her, and I stood and looked at her face. And in that moment, all of those silly things that we worry about when we think about, oh, but I'm a bit scared to quit the job I really don't like. Or they seemed so irrelevant because I realized, that could be me in that coffin. She was young. We were early 20s, you know, that could be me in that coffin. That could happen to me. I could leave the earth tomorrow. And would I, as we spoke about Bronnie Ware before, would I then look back and go, I was happy with what I'd done, or would I wish I'd been braver, lived a life that was more true to me, done the brave things? And so I went home after her funeral, and I broke up with my partner at the time, because, again, deep down, that little voice of inconvenient truth had been saying to me for a while, this isn't right. This isn't right. And I convinced myself. And he is. He's an incredible guy. He really, really is. But, oh, but he's not so bad. And, will you ever meet anybody else? And all those things we worry about when we're questioning whether to leave something. And I made a promise to Sharon at her coffin side that I was gonna do all of the things in my life that I wanted to do, and I was gonna do it for her because she could no longer do it. And that my life would be a dedication to her death. And so her death was one of the biggest catalysts for life for me, which we often find because it took away all the fear. It took away all the. I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it next week. I'll start next month. None of that seemed relevant when looking at her in a coffee.

[B]

First of all, thank you for sharing that. It's kind of interesting as I listen to that and think about where you are today. Right. So we've only known each other, I would say, three or four years. Right. We met at Carfest, which is people who don't know it's an end of Summer festival that Chris Evans puts on for charity. And we were on stage together, talking. And then obviously every summer we hang out there. You meet my family, we hang out. We've become really good friends. Right. And death has such a powerful way of teaching us about what's truly important in life. So for me personally, I don't honestly know if I'd be doing what I do today if my dad was alive. Yeah, I don't know, because dad's death in 2013 was the catalyst for me, for the first time in my life, to stop looking outside and start looking inside. It was only through my dad's death that I started to ask myself questions like, whose life are you leading? Right. Is it your life or somebody else's life? Right. So. And then there was a series of steps of trusting myself, spending time with myself, listening to that internal voice and following it, even when sometimes the sensible decision wasn't to do what I did. And yes, now it can all look that things are great and everything was planned out perfectly. But no, it wasn't. It was like you take those mini steps, you go, no, I think, I think there's another way to communicate with people. There's another way to heal people and help them get better. Right. So death has a powerful way of teaching us what's important in life. That was true for me in my 30s when my dad died, and it seems to be certainly very true for you as a teenager and then in your early 20s. So I guess one of the questions I have is, this is kind of eternal question for me is, can people learn these lessons, these truths that we know them to be true, Right. When we hear them, right. We may push them away, but we, you know, enough people from enough different walks of life end up stumbling upon the same truths from different countries and different cultures. Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Can you learn them without experiencing extreme adversity yourself?

[A]

Yes. And so I always give ands around things. We live in a very awe world, don't it's this or that, this or that. And I feel that. So if I was going to answer this from my deep truth and a spiritual perspective, I would say that yes, we can. But there has to be a certain level of almost deep enlightenment or purpose that you come here with, with that drives you to seek answers outside of the norms of society. I still do feel that for most people, it's those what I might call the dark night of the soul moment, whether that is a death, a shock, breakup, losing your job, that takes us to those places where we learn the Truth. Because if we're being fully honest with ourselves, and it happens to most people who maybe get made redundant or a breakup happens, that, that after they've gone through the grieving and everything else that has to take place, they will look back and go, I kind of knew. I kind of knew. So we have to have got for me to quite an evolved level that when we get that first niggle, we trust it and act on it. For most of us it's a niggle, a niggle, a niggle, a niggle. And then our soul self or whatever word you choose goes, they're not listening. I'm going to need to bring something in here that's going to help them to listen because they're really straying off, off the pathway that they need to be on. So for me, for most of us it does necessitate that moment where everything that we have thought to be true begins to crumble around us. That makes us then look at what's real about life and what's true. So I feel like there has to be that little bit of a resistance in order for us then. But over time, as you just so beautifully said, you learn to trust the niggle at stage one. And I think a point I'd just really love to make is that that I've been doing this work for 20 years. Same for you. They compare my 20 year journey with their one month journey and they're like, I want to be where you are. And people used to say to me all the time with yoga, they'd come to me and I was teaching sold out retreats all over the world and they'd say, I want to do what you do. How do I do it? And I'd be like, go and learn your craft for 10 years. That's how you're going to do it. So people look at me sitting here with you now and I know there's going to be so many people out there who are so happy for me that I'm sitting on your podcast. They don't see those. And I'm talking hours I would spend underline on the Bakerloo line, going up and down, up and down London, teach yoga classes. They don't see the times that I'd teach a yoga class and wouldn't even be able to make the room rent because not enough people came to that class. They don't see the moments I've been on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor begging the universe to give me a sign. So they compare my 20 year journey so Again, we've just got to be really gentle with how we look at things and how we compare ourselves to other people and that we get to be the ones who've gone a bit further down the path and get to say, hey, this is what's down the path. There's a little pothole there. Watch out for it. This is over here, but this is where you can get to if you continue to follow this journey. So it's easy for us now to follow the niggle niggle one because we've got all that lived experience of trusting the timing. You said before how I only have my own lived experience, that every single time it's happened at just the right time and I've gone. That's why that didn't happen sooner. That's why that didn't happen. Then everything that we need to go through needs to be a lived experience. Otherwise it's somebody else's truth.

[B]

Yeah, we want to Amazon prime our lives. Right. And that is the seductive nature of the media landscape in which many of us consume our content these days, that we think everything's overnight.

[A]

When we compare a curated highlight reel of someone else's life to our real life, that's like one minute of someone pretending to do something that they're likely not even doing in real life anyway.

[B]

Yeah, but even like, let's say through a medical lens, right, through people follow, let's say, medical doctors online for health information. Right. But every person you listen to is at a different stage on their journey. Right. So you know someone who's just finished medical school and has seen five patients. I'm not saying they don't have anything worthwhile to share. Absolutely not. But I'm saying it's different from someone I don't know, like myself, who's seen tens of thousands, maybe, I don't know, maybe over a hundred thousand patients and got that lived experience and feedback continuously. Right. You can't just learn it in a book. You learn it through experience. And that's just the way it is. Like it's not better or worse, it's just different. And I love what you say about, for some of us, we need that extreme adversity to jolt to us out of our stagnation so that we can actually listen to what we already knew. But yet, in theory, if we learn to sit with ourselves more, we don't need to wait for that adversity. We can hear the voices there. We can hear the whispers before they become screams.

[A]

That's it. And act on it.

[B]

I want to Talk about language. Okay. And words. One thing that became very clear to me as we appeared on stage together year after year at Carfest was that this is kind of interesting for me. Me and Kirsty are talking about a lot of similar themes, but we're using different words to describe them.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. And I find this really interesting because I sort of. I believe that some people will get put off by certain themes by the way I'm describing them or the words I use. And perhaps other people might get put off by. Off by certain things that. Certain words that you're using. Right. And I guess I wanna just explore that on multiple levels. Right. Level one is words are inherently limiting, I believe. Right. Cause you're talking a lot about feeling things, things that you can't always explain with your logical mind. You can't put a language to it, but you just. That gut feeling. Right. But you know, you're talking in this book and on this podcast about. About trusting yourself, taking radical responsibility, listening to your body. Right. These are similar themes to what I wrote about in my last book, Make Change At Last. But we use different language. You know, I will use the word spiritual. You're using the word soul. Or, you know, for example, let's talk about the name of the book, your Cosmic Purpose. Right. So there'll be some people who walk into a bookshop and go, cosmic. That's not for me. Right. Whereas other people will go, you're Cosmic Purpose. Oh, man, I want that book. Right. But ultimately, the truths in here.

[A]

Are.

[B]

Just the profound truths that we all need to learn. So how do you think about language? And I guess let's talk about that word cosmic. Why is the word cosmic in the title of your new book?

[A]

Because I want it to remain very, very true to me. And. And a lot of the work I do in the world that I work in is the cosmic world. It's the cosmic consciousness. It's the universe, it's the divine.

[B]

What does cosmic mean?

[A]

So I think as well, a lot of the reason we use the word cosmic purpose is because I also do something online once a week called a cosmic weather report where I talk to people about what's going on in the planets and the skies that help us to navigate life here on Earth in a slightly easier way. And they are so well watched. And people, like, people love them.

[B]

People utterly love them.

[A]

I mean, the amount of stories I get, like yours, that say, you said this in this cosmic weather report. So therefore I went and did that, and their entire lives have changed. So I Wanted to give a nod to the cosmic, to the divine, to the universe. So the cosmic for me is that part of us that we're made of, stardust. And I know that sounds like a little bit of a wee fact, but that's scientific fact that we're made of stardust.

[B]

And what does that mean?

[A]

That within us are bits and pieces, atoms within us that were created at the Big Bang. So to me, that says we are part of everything. We are part of the infinite, expansive cosmic universe that's out there. And I wanted us, through this book, to realize that we are part of something way greater, that we are the universe in a human body, that we are a soul having a human experience, and that we are here to live and experience and explore in the ways that we come here to do. So. I wanted to give a nod to that. And it's so. It's so beautiful you bring this up because this. This returns back to purpose, that we're both living our purpose by the language that we use. So if there were a script for this podcast, which there isn't, because we've just flowed beautifully. If there were a script and we got 10 people to come in here and speak the exact script, they still wouldn't say it in the way that we say it. It. They still wouldn't land it in the way that we land it. And so when we're living our purpose and we're speaking our truth, my words are going to land with someone that's going to complete. They're going to hear it. They're going to really, really hear it. And other people aren't going to. They're going to go cosmic. Yeah. No, nothing to do with me.

[B]

And that's okay.

[A]

And that's okay. And so it's about choosing who we speak to. And so I didn't want to alter the title of this book to be something that might be considered more corporate, because they're maybe not the kind of people I speak to right now just yet. Maybe never. Who knows? So there's a. There's an area for all of our voices, and this is where we come back to our purpose. And when I'm being authentically true to me and my beliefs and my truth, I can speak in a way that will affect the people I meant to speak to. And those I'm not, they'll come and listen to somebody completely different.

[B]

Yeah, No, I love that. I mean, I think speaking to the idea that we sometimes push back against things that we know are kind of relevant to us on Some level, like I said before, about how sometimes that person speaking their mind in a compassionate way online rubs us up the wrong way because we know. Wow, I wish I could be that authentic. I wish I could speak my truth like that person can. I wish I could be authentic like that person who actually doesn't care whether people validate him or not. He's just wants to share what he wants to share with the world. Right. It's also, I guess you could say the same thing here in terms of, you know, it's kind of, you know, we, we all. If you. If you even think about the fact that we're here, it is a damn miracle, isn't it? You know, how can your rational mind actually properly explain how all these cells have morphed into who we are today? Right. Sure, you can talk about your biology lessons and a sperm meets an egg and they fertilize, okay?

[A]

But there's a 1 in 400 trillion chance of that happening.

[B]

Yeah, but even that, the whole thing is remarkable. It's like that sense of awe when you watch a plant and you, you know, I wanted. We won't probably get time in this conversation. I wanted to talk about your. I think it was your fourth book, Sacred Seasons, which I really like. Okay. And in that you talk about how in the COVID lockdowns, we all start to look forward to that one walk we could have a day. And because we were all doing the same walk, we started to see how nature changed, right? Which is definitely my family's experience. And you know, that sense of awe when you could escape your life to, you know, you couldn't escape then, so you had to start paying attention to the small things, right? There is a natural awe and wonder in the world. I think that's there in everyone, even the most skeptical person speaking this conversation right now. At some point when they were a child, they did have that sense of awe at the world. There is something greater. And going back to this choice, you know, how do you want to live your life? Do you want everything to be a rational, logical, scientific explanation? Or do you want to have a sense of. Of awe and wonder about, isn't it amazing to be alive? Isn't it amazing that that like green bush can now have the most gorgeous yellows and oranges and purples because it's spring? Do you know what I mean?

[A]

Yeah, but we have those moments as adults, but we just choose to ignore them. So I would challenge, have you a.

[B]

Choice to ignore them or have we been conditioned by society to think That's a bit childlike. That's not what a mature adult does.

[A]

I think we're too busy. I think we're in a busy epidemic. We've glorified being busy. And I would challenge anyone listening to this now to come to me and say they've never watched a sunrise or a sunset and just felt that moment stir within them of like that moment the sun dips beneath the horizon or gone outside and seen a full moon in the sky. And at that moment we go like, oh, those moments of awe. But then we busy them away and we get caught up in what we consider real life to be, which is the monotony. And we talk about this a lot. We've got so many routines but hardly any rituals. So we get caught up in then the routines. Well, I've got to get this done and I've got to get that done and I've got to take that sort of the to do list and I've got to get that done. I've got to be here and I've got to go there and I'm busy, busy. And I've got to multitask and even social media platforms. There's 15 you're meant to be on and we're meant to keep up with everything. And so in that we miss those actual moments of present life. Like the present moment, we miss it. Nature's only ever in the present moment. If you turn away from that sunset in the moment it's going down, you've missed it, it, it's gone. You have to be so present to catch that exact second the sun dips beneath the surface sunrise, you have to be present. You go away and start scrolling Instagram, sun's up, you've missed it. You know, so nature brings us into the present moment. And so I feel it's a, it's a choice, but it's also a conditioning that we're made to be so busy that we don't have time to be in the present moment anymore. But that's the only moment that life ever really exists.

[B]

Exists.

[A]

And the more we can carve out moments to be in nature. And I truly believe that the reason that we feel so good when we're in nature, and some people might call this a bit too woo, but I honestly believe that the same life force energy that grows that bush you spoke about or brings the leaves on the trees or gets the trees to loot, same life force energy that grows my skin and my hair and my nails, it's the same life force energy that moves through us. And I feel like when we spend time in nature or we look up at a sky full of stars that we remember that there's something more to life than the monotony of ticking off a constant to do list. And we get to that essence of who we truly are.

[B]

Yeah, man, I love that. Kirsty. I think the book's really, really great. I think it's gonna help so many people just tune into themselves.

[A]

I really hope so.

[B]

Start the journey of finding more purpose in their lives. To sort of wrap this conversation up, there's so many insights that you've shared, lots of practical tips throughout the conversation on how people can start on that journey. But at the end there you were talking about this busyness, right, this business that seems to have infiltrated the lives of many, if not most modern human humans. Yeah, right. In a way that we never were before. Right. Even, you know, you talking about your grandparents, before even that generation, there wasn't this level of busyness and overwhelm. Right? So to wind this down for that person who does feel overwhelmed and too busy, is not in a job that they love, is not living a purposeful life. Life. Have you got any final words of wisdom for them?

[A]

Start now and start small. So anyone that tells me if you. If you tell me you don't have five to ten minutes a day for yourself, I'm going to tell you there's a really big problem in your life if you cannot find five to ten minutes a day for yourself. Ritual finding purpose. It doesn't need to be hours at a time. You don't need incense burning. The moon doesn't have to be at a certain position in the sky. You don't have to have the right music playing. You just have to carve out that time for yourself to spend with yourself. So if you're a parent and you do the school run, when you get back from that school run, do not get out of your car. Stay on the drive, set a timer on your phone for five minutes. And I say to people all the time, do what's realistic for you. If you say, okay, I've listened to this conversation. From tomorrow, I'm gonna do an hour's yoga, then I'm gonna meditate, then I'm gonna journal. You're gonna fail on day three, then you're gonna tell yourself, this stuff is rubbish, it doesn't work, or I'm rubbish, I can't do anything. We set these unrealistic expectations on ourselves that set us up for failure. Say to Yourself, I've got six minutes a day. You could still make a profound difference in six minutes a day if you showed up for that six minutes every day. Because that's part of the big thing about ritual. It's not necessarily what you do, it's that you show up, up. It's that you say to yourself, in this moment, there are a hundred things I could be doing or should. People use the word should a lot, change that to could. If you change should to could, you've immediately won. You should do that. Or you could. It gives you an option. You could be going in the house, putting the washing machine on, running around, making that phone call, doing this. But in that moment, you're saying, I'm going to make myself important. I'm going to make going within and finding meaning and purpose important. I'm going to gift myself this five to six minutes out of a day. And I almost guarantee you and I'd love people to give feedback on this if you did that every day consistently for a month, two months, three months. And this is why I wish we'd gotten to things like the moon and the seasons, but they give us natural marker points to check in. If you gave yourself six minutes a day, every day, your life would change in a month, three months, six months in ways you cannot yet even imagine and you won't know until you actually do it. It. So decide what it is for you that works. Are you going to just put your hands over your heart and check in and say, how am I feeling today? And then just listen for the answer and don't judge it. One thing we, we, we do with emotions, and this is why we don't trust ourselves, is that an emotion comes up when we feel sad. And then we'll go, why do you feel sad? You've got nothing to feel sad about. You didn't feel sad yesterday. And then we do the what about. Well, what about other people? They've got it worse than me. If you came to me, me and said, kirsty, I feel sad, And I went, well, why'd you feel sad? You weren't sad before and I spoke to you, you've got no reason to, you'd stop coming and telling me you feel sad. So the whole time we invalidate ourselves, we tell ourselves we can't be trusted and what we're feeling can't be trusted. And then we lose connection with ourselves. And that's when then we make ourselves busy, busy, busy, busy in the world. Hands over heart checking. How do I feel right now? I feel sad. Okay, I'm just going to sit with this just for a few minutes. I'm going to breathe. Breathe. It might be that you decide to keep a pen and a piece of paper in the side of your car and you just write down. I love freestyle journaling. So when you don't necessarily have something, you just write down. And I say to people all the time, just write, I don't know what's right. I don't know what's right. I don't know. And so you start to do know what's right. Something will come out eventually. It may be that you're gonna take off your shoes and go into your back garden and put your bare feet on the earth and take five deep breaths and just feel the sun on your face. And then that Find what works for you. Find a timeframe that works for you. And then make the commitment to yourself, not to anyone else. This is how you will learn to trust yourself. When you keep a promise to yourself, if you break that promise for other people, you don't trust yourself anymore. And you will find when you start this, you're gonna be too busy, too cold, too tired, too hungry. Your mind will give you a million excuses because your mind doesn't want you to come into that place of deep knowing. Your mind wants to keep you busy and constantly searching outside of yourself. If you can carve out that time and give that to yourself and show up, if nothing else, you'll learn you can trust yourself. And that means that when you get the niggle to quit your job, you're going to trust yourself enough to do it. When you get the niggle to go and do something brave, you're going to trust yourself to do it. When you have to have a hard conversation with someone, you're going to trust yourself enough to do it. So start now, start small and be realistic. And then show up and do it every day and let us know how it changes your life.

[B]

Oh, man, Kirsty, what a way to end. I've thoroughly loved. Thank you so much having this conversation with you. I've loved getting to know you over the last few years.

[A]

Me too.

[B]

The new book, your Cosmic Purpose is wonderful. And thank you so much for coming on the show.

[A]

Thank you for having me.

[B]

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas is to improve your health and happiness. In that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for [e-mail] Friday 5 Now if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world covering all kinds of different topics Happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and mood, movement, weight loss and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks and as audiobooks which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show with without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the Episode notes in your podcast app and always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more SA.