Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 - Program Announcer / Mike

Speaker 2 - Mary Jane Popp, Host

Speaker 3 - Dr. Stephen Sideroff, Guest

Speaker 4 - Enrica Feruzzi, Guest

Speaker 5 - Public Service Announcement / Promotional Voice

Are you ready for new dimensions and countless possibilities today and for the future? It's an exciting new time and the answers are out there. So join Mary Jane Popp as she explores the unique and unusual for a better life on Popp Talk and search for the truth.

And here she is, Mary Jane Popp. Hey, thanks Mike. Yes, here I am folks. I'm telling you we got a good one. This hour is going to be interesting because it's about our personal well-being.

Can you embrace change? A lot of people say, oh no, I'm doing just fine. Well, okay, good luck. But you might want to open yourself up to some possibilities a little bit later on. We'll talk about that.

But before we do that, hold your hand up. How many of you are stressed out? It could be for a variety of reasons. No matter. But are you stressed out? Do you know what to do about it?

Well, maybe. Just maybe we've got some suggestions for you that may change your life 180 degrees. Let's do it. It's Popp Talk and that's what we do. Well, you don't want to be all by yourself.

You want to open yourself up to what the possibilities can be. So are you stressed to the max? With what's happening in the world these days, I'm not at all surprised. Then there's everyday life.

Jobs, relationships, health, kids, gosh, I can go on and on and on.

Segment One - Dr. Stephen Sideroff

Dr. Stephen Sideroff says, you don't have to go backwards. It's time for you to move forward. But you need to know how to make it happen. Like reduce chronic stress, build resilience, and achieve success.

He's going to teach you how to do all that. And so comes his nine pillars of resilience. It's the proven path to mastering stress, slow aging, and increase vitality. What can you ask for?

Now the good doctor is an associate professor of psychiatry and rheumatology at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine. And I can go on and on and on with all his titles. But let's get to the story of this thing called stress.

How you doing, Dr. Sideroff? I'm doing very well. It's good to be here on your program with you. Thank you. We need it. Give me a definition of stress. What is stress? How do you measure it?

And is there good and bad stress? Good questions. So stress is anything that causes us to make adjustments. That's the basic bottom line. But when we think about stress in our lives, we're talking about something that activates us that causes us to be to go into a mode of trying to handle or deal with whatever the situation is.

And the stress causes a reaction in our body because it causes us to prepare for that danger, that threat by mobilizing our bodies. And so we mobilize and hopefully we deal appropriately with the stress.

And then the goal is that after the stress is over, you want to turn off that stress response so you give your body the opportunity to recover. But we don't know how to turn it off.

Well the problem in our everyday life is that we no longer, we no sooner finish one dealing with one stress that we're then faced with another and then throughout the day another and another.

So we're continually activating our stress response. And that's called chronic stress and that's where the problems develop. So why can some people handle stress better than others?

Well, there are many reasons for that. And that's why I have nine pillars to my model of resilience. Some people handle stress better because they learned better techniques and coping growing up.

Some people handle it better because they were more loved growing up. They had less danger in their childhood. If you have a lot of danger, for example, this is one example in your childhood, then as an adult, you're always expecting danger.

And if you're always expecting danger, you're continually turning on your stress response. And that's one of the important lessons of becoming more resilient. That you want to learn the lessons of today where you may be much better at handling situations than you were as a child, but we frequently react based on the lessons of childhood.

So those are just some of the reasons why some people do it better than others. So is stress, I mean, does it come from the inside out or the outside in? It's the interface. So a lot of people think, okay, there's something going on outside and I'm stressed and I'm having a stress reaction.

And as if that outside experience or that outside stimulus automatically triggers our stress response. And what's so important to realize is that there's an intervening variable there that is our interpretation of the event.

So if we interpret an event as being a threat or a danger, we'll have a stress response. But for example, you know, you could be walking down the street and you see someone walking toward you and you know this person.

And just as you're about to say, hi, you know, they have this disgruntled look on their face and they don't respond to you and they walk on. And now you're walking along and you're going, why is that person angry at me?

What did I say something? Did I do something and you go back to the last time you saw that person? And now you have a stress response because you're afraid that they're upset with you.

Someone else, the identical situation, their response is, oh, you know, Joe must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. Maybe he has a toothache and they will not attribute it to themselves and they will go on and have no stress.

So stress to a great degree is in the eyes of the beholder. But see, it also can help slow aging. How? Well, you know, I did an interview with a biologist Bruce Lipton who wrote a great book, The Biology of Belief.

And I interviewed him because last year I did a summit on longevity. And I said to him, okay, how do you slow aging? And his response was, don't eat. Oh, what? He said it, don't eat.

Oh, yeah? And he said it only half jokingly because, you know, we need to eat in order to fuel the body in order to survive, right? Yeah. But eating and translating that food, but through metabolism, into fuel for our bodies, causes side effects such as stress, oxidative stress, inflammation, and other things in the body that speed up the aging process.

And this is why you've heard so much about diets lately because there are some diets that cause less inflammation. But to get to the reason of the relationship between stress and aging, when we're stressed, we throw our bodies out of balance.

I mentioned earlier that stress activates our nervous system. Well, it activates the stress branch of our nervous system. And there are two branches, one that activates and the other that recovers.

And we need those two branches of our nervous system to be in balance. But with stress, we're overactivating our nervous system, we're throwing our bodies out of balance. And it's just like if a car is out of tune, it doesn't function well, it doesn't get good gas mileage, and it wears out more readily.

The same thing is true about bodies. If we don't have our bodies in a place of balance, we wear out our bodies prematurely too quickly. So is it nature or nurture on how we deal with stress?

Well, you know, we're learning more and more. And this is a very interesting point. We're learning more and more. And I would say that nurture is much more important than nature. And that you can have a gene that predisposes you to a particular illness.

But that gene may never get expressed unless you're under more stress. And so stress has the potential to alter the ways that our genetic makeup is expressed. But also, as I'm saying, how we engage with the world, which is nurture, is more important because that's what determines how stressed we are and how much we are affected by stress.

So what stresses you? Well, you know, the beauty of the work that I'm in, Mary Jane, is that I'm continually training and teaching other people lessons, important lessons, and I'm trying to figure all these lessons out.

And so I use them on myself. So for example, a lot of people walk around with a lot of regret. You know, feeling bad about a mistake that they made, right? Yes. It's not uncommon. And we sort of beat ourselves up for mistakes.

And sometimes when they're big mistakes, we have difficulty letting go of them. And things happen during the day that bother us and we go to sleep with them and we have difficulty letting go.

So one very important lesson that I've spent a lot of work on myself to develop is that if there's something I don't have control over, I'm not going to put energy into that thinking because it's wasted energy.

Now people will say to me, and people have, and clients have, well, that's easy to say, but how do you do it? And the answer is has to do with our mindset. So if you have a healthy mindset, a healthy mindset is a growth mindset.

A healthy mindset is one that says, if I'm not doing something in the best possible way, I can learn to get better at it. And so I can't make anybody go to, well, it's like going to the wall and switching a switch on and off and have you stop your thoughts that have been part of your pattern for years and years.

But if you hold the intention, I want to change this pattern. And every time it comes up, you stop yourself and you go, wait a second. You know, being angry at myself with something in the past is only hurting me.

It's not helping me. I need to let go of this. And maybe 10 minutes later, you're doing the same thing. 10 minutes later, you have to give yourself the same message. This is learning.

This is conditioning. This is changing your patterns, your fixed patterns into new learning and new behavior. Got it. So having a growth mindset in which when you have something that you're doing that doesn't serve you, you say, I'm going to work on this.

I'm going to make sure by paying attention, by focusing on it, that little by little, I change this behavior. Got it. So that's how I did it. That's how I've done a lot of those things for myself.

Anytime I've noticed something that doesn't serve me, I work on it. Now, since we got nine pillars here, we got, let's go briefly through them. Okay, just real briefly. And then they'll have to get the book to get the rest of it.

Okay. I'm happy to. I'm happy to. Relationship with self. I have a relationship with me. That may be the most important pillar of resilience because many people are very hard on themselves.

Many people are very judgmental of themselves. This is part of your relationship with yourself. How you treat yourself. So many of us have difficulty, as I said before, letting go of a mistake.

But the only person you're hurting by holding on to a mistake is yourself. And so then the qualities of a healthy relationship with yourself is that you treat yourself from a place of love, compassion, acceptance, support, care, and joy.

And so the whole marks of a healthy internal voice are those that I just said. Got it. So that your audience can start to notice how they talk to themselves. And that's about their relationship with themselves.

Now what about never. Yeah, relationship with other. Yeah. The second pillar is relationship with others. And this is whether you can say discriminate between a healthy relationship in which the person you're in relationship with is supportive, or if you're in a toxic relationship in which the person you with can be judgmental or maybe competitive with you.

So it's discriminating. It's trying to be as much as possible in healthy relationships. It's about setting healthy boundaries with people. So you don't allow them to be intrusive with you.

The third pillar is relationship with something greater. And this could be your spirituality. It could be having meaning and purpose in your life. It's about giving service and connecting to the larger community.

So that's the third pillar. I wrote an article for psychology today on how important purposes in our lives. People can go to psychology today and find that. The next three have to do with organismic balance and mastery.

And so the fourth pillar is physical balance and mastery. How quickly do I recover after a stressful experience? Do I have those two components of my nervous system in a place of balance?

The next is mental balance and mastery. And this is having a positive mindset. This is like when you start your day, do you think about what can go wrong? What do you think about what can go right?

So a lot of people that I work with are negative. They go to the negative. They go to what can go wrong, catastrophic expectations. And I work with them to shift into a more positive mindset.

The next is emotional balance and mastery. Are you tuned into your emotions? Or are you cut off at your neck where everything you have an intellectual awareness of everything? Emotional balance and mastery means when you have any kind of emotional reaction, you work to release it.

You work to work it through and let go of it. Otherwise, we wind up carrying emotional excess baggage that can get triggered by anything going on in our lives. Causing us to have these big reactions.

And that's one of the signals that you're carrying unfinished emotional business is that little things create big reactions in you. But you know, it's interesting. No, no, before you go on, it's so it's easy to say, you've got to do away with the emotion.

You can say logically, I do this and you know, you've got the logic. I can do a plus B equals C and I'll get there. But you can't turn off the emotion. So I wasn't saying you got to turn off the emotions.

I was saying it's emotional balance and mastery. And that means that number one, emotions are important. And one of the things that's important to realize about emotions is that they're not right or wrong.

A lot of times people say, I shouldn't be angry or shouldn't be this or shouldn't be that. Not true. If you're feeling something, you have to honor those feelings. But you have to find a way to work through them so you can let them go so they don't stay stuffed inside of you.

That's the point about a healthy relationship with your emotions. OK, got you. OK, so the last three are what? Engaging the world. Right. So the first one is presence. How much are you aware of your surroundings?

Or do you walk along up in your head unconscious and not noticing anything? That's present. The next one is flexibility. Am I able to shift my perspective to be more successful in my life?

If my path is sported, am I able to shift my goals so that I'll have greater success? Some people just are so stubborn or rigid there that they wind up not being as successful. And finally, the last pillar I call power, which I define as the ability to get things done.

And so this involves courage. It involves persistence. It involves goal directed behavior. It involves focus. So these all comprise the ninth pillar. OK, and there you have the whole model.

OK, but how long does it take for me to achieve them all? And so we all have certain amounts of each of these. And in fact, in my book at the very beginning of the book, I have a questionnaire that a person can self take and self score and you can derive your own personal resilience profile.

And that tells you which of these are your strengths and which of them you need for the development. And so the goal is to realize that it's an ongoing learning developmental process that begins by knowing where you start off.

And it begins by accepting where you are. That's another problem a lot of people have that they're upset that they only have this much resilience. But they have said that they keep making the same mistakes.

In life, the first pillar I said is acceptance. We begin by accepting where we're at so that we don't get into a judgment and competitiveness when we try to grow our resilience. My problem is part of my problem.

We're bombarded with what we should be. You know, you should do this. You should go there. You should develop this. And I always say if you do that, you're going to have a really shitty day.

But it's like, how do we not be bombarded? I mean, the internet tells us what we should do and how should we should do it. The movies tell us, the television tells us everything tells us what we should do.

Right. Yes. And that's a big challenge. That's a really big challenge because the goal and the goal in life is to find your own grounding, your own center of beliefs based on your experience and your judgment of what's right and wrong, not what other people are telling you is right or wrong.

We can't live other people's lives. We can only live our own. And so it's up to us to identify the healthy lessons. And that's why I did this model of resilience because in it, I talk about optimal functioning and a mindset of a resilient person.

And so it's about grounding yourself in healthy beliefs. Got it. So how do you develop a positive attitude in a negative world? Well, first by not defining it as a negative world. But it is.

Come on. Well, okay. So now you're revealing a little bit about your perspective. Yeah, and I don't mind. Of course. Yeah. There is a lot negative in the world, but there's also a lot that's positive.

That's true. Like my show. And yeah, right. And so you don't ignore what might be negative and affect you. But once you once you address that, you always want to shift into a positive perspective.

This is the perspective that helps your body function best. So you deal in your own life, you know, you have a day coming up and you know, there's the potential for emergencies. There's potential.

If you have a plan, there's a there's the potential for it to go wrong. So you plan what can what can happen and how you would deal with it. But then you immediately shift to a positive perspective.

Yeah. So you plan for what can go wrong, but you want to set as your baseline as you're grounding a positive perspective where you expect good things to happen. Uh huh. Okay. Now do you have a website?

My website is dr. Defen Sideroff.com. Okay. And that's T E P H E N Sideroff, right? Right. Yes. Okay. So Steven and that's spelled S-I-D-E-R-O-F-F correct. Correct. All right. Okay.

And the book, The Nine Pillars of Resilience, where's that available? So the book which will come out on June 4th is called The Nine Pillars of Resilience, the proven path to mastering stress, slow aging and increased vitality.

And one of the things that I about my book is it doesn't just give information. It anticipates people's overwhelm and difficulty. And so I create a construct called the path. Okay. And so throughout the book, it's about how you take steps to get onto the path so that you're not overwhelmed and that you know you're going in the right direction.

And so it's really designed as being user friendly. Fantastic. Dr. Sideroff, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. And hopefully we're going to embrace that change in realignment and go positive.

Yeah. And I will leave with you for your show notes a link to a very special offer of a free bonus for people who purchase it now. Oh, okay. What is it? So I have a six week audio program on resilience that takes people step by step.

And it's a $47 value. I'm giving it out free with the purchase of my book. Fantastic. Oh, thank you so much because boy we need that positivity and we can keep forward and we can make it happen.

That's right. That's right. Thank you for the time. You bet. Once again, folks, that's Dr. Stephen Sideroff, S-I-D-E-R-O-F-F and name of the book, The Nine Pillars of Resilience. And we can do that and we can be positive.

I know I'm a believer in alignment and embracing change. We can do that too.

Public Service / Promotional Break

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Segment Two - Enrica Feruzzi

I love Lacey J. Dalton. She's going to be on the show next week. She is fantastic. She said it all. Life's about now. The question is, do you feel that you've never totally discovered who you are from careers to relationships?

Perhaps you can use self-discovery and healing to find that inner you. Enrica Feruzzi, she did that. She shares her story that could reach out to you in her book called, Beads of Light: Story of Alignment and Embracing Change in a Post-Pandemic World.

Enrica, nice to have you with us on the show. Hi, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. You bet. Okay, I'm not so sure that we're post-pandemic, to be honest with you. I know, but it just keeps hanging on for some reason, doesn't it?

Right. So what do we do to not be negative because we were negative for what? Three years and still kind of afraid. I still have some fear. Certain places, if it's a big crowd, I'll wear a mask because I just don't feel comfortable.

Okay. Right, yeah. I mean, we still have that ghost. I call it the ghost. Yeah. The ghost fears that are, you know, we become used to behaving in a certain way and then we just think, oh, we need to do that.

Yeah, absolutely. So what was your discontent? I mean, you have a story, right? Right. Well, you know, when you said post-pandemic, I think that's just like, you know, you know, it's maybe a transition to another change in life that happened.

Of course, that meant a change for a lot of people, right? During that time of the pandemic. But for me, I worked in the corporate world in hospitality for 20 years, literally 20 years and it was fantastic, lovely, wonderful career with ups and downs, of course, and like the journey of growing and, you know, learning and loving my career.

But I had just this restlessness of needing to find maybe something deeper for learning who I was. And this is something that I think everybody goes through, but many people, you know, I'm just speaking about my experience with people I know, including my family, my close friends.

You know, we tend to ignore that voice and we just continue on with whatever society says, I mean, successes. And so that's what I did for a long, long time until, you know, my whole world was kind of falling apart.

Even though on the outside, I was very successful. I had the corporate job, you know, big title, salary, the town home, the car, whatever, stuff. My mom, who at the time, my family is from Italy, even though my mom was American, but she was living in Italy and then she became ill with cancer and then passed away in a very short time after that.

So this was 2009, 2010. And that was just the catalyst. So things were changing and happening and shifting for me as in, you know, needing some help and going to doctors to ask, you know, to ask for help.

Like, I'm really anxious and really stressed out. I need the sleep, help me. And so of course not having tools because we don't, we're not brought up with, you know, how to help your mind calm down.

And I didn't know any better. So being alone in the States and working and just having work as my, that was it. I just worked. I wasn't that a choice. Yeah, that was a choice. You said?

Yeah. Absolutely a choice, but actually not really. I was on autopilot, you know, we're brought up to learn, you know, understanding that that's what you do. You go to school, you go to work and you work for 40 years and then retire.

And then just now I say in these words, my whole everything inside of me rebels because yes, that's very noble and that's wonderful. But if you're happy. So if something's inside of you become, you know, discordant and you feel uncomfortable and have extreme anxiety and you don't know what it is and you just like, you know, you go to a doctor and they give you medicine for whatever band they think it is.

So I'm very passionate about this, as you can tell. Then there's something that needs to change. And for me, it manifested in physical illness. Like I literally became sick. Okay, before you became sick, what did you discover you were missing in your life?

Yes. And so I'm getting there. So sorry, long story, but I, you know, with my mom's with this big loss in my life, I started seeking other forms of understanding myself, understanding how to process grief and anger for my mom's loss and how to handle my level of stress.

I still have to function. We still have to function. I still had to go to work and, you know, I was a trainer and led big teams. And so, and this brought me to beautiful practices of mindfulness, which actually my doctor sent me to.

And now was the doorway to many other forms of energy medicine, spiritual practices that resonated with me very deeply. And so I just delved into different forms of energy cultivation practices.

Like, you know, like Qigong and energy healing and spiritual healing of different forms. So there are many, many, many forms of mindfulness. But for me, what worked, what really helped me become empty and I mean empty as ambitious helped me clear my mind from obsessive thinking, from being tormented by emotions and thinking.

And just, I was so disconnected from my body. On the outside, I looked very fit and very calm and everything. But actually, you know, we are a society that is completely disconnected by the body and the mind of the body.

So for me, what worked for me personally, and this is what I describe and, you know, soon when I started practicing different forms of energy cultivation, such as Qigong and Tai Chi practices.

And I've got to be honest with you, that sounds like Greek to me. Okay, so it's Chinese healthcare system. I say Chinese only because China is a big country and most people in the West know it as Chinese practices, but it's East Asian practices.

So I was trained in a lineage that is rooted in the Korean tradition, also Japanese tradition. So Qigong or Tai Chi for the listeners is just a form of, let's say, more people are familiar with Indian yoga or yoga.

I call it Indian yoga because it's from India. But yoga is a form of physical practice, but it's a very spiritual practice that involves energy principles. And let's say that Qigong and Tai Chi, well, I mean, in East Asia at least they call it Taoist yoga.

And so if we use the movements, it's a dynamic meditation. You use the physical body to bring the mind into balance, the mind. And so there are different practices. I mean, I can go on and on for hours about this, but I don't know.

I'm not sure I can pick something up that's going to work for me. It's got to be simplified. Right. So the simplification of that is there are many, many practices that involve physical movement to help one understand how to balance not only the physical body, but also our mind.

And I specifically would like to say that about when most people talk about mind is you're thinking, your thought processes. But really the mind, the body has its own intelligence. It's always wanting to go back to harmony.

And this can be disconnected by the physical intelligence and just living by what information we digest is incomplete. And so physical practices can help us balance our energy systems.

And so there's nothing to believe in here. It's not like a religious belief, but it is a little foreign for people that are not familiar, haven't been in contact with maybe these are very ancient practices, by the way, like very ancient, you know, before backing even in Egyptian ancient Egypt.

They were practicing energy medicine and spiritual practices of this sort. Okay. So this is kind of like what holistic? Oh, yes, it's absolutely holistic. So we, you know, going to an acupuncturist, they don't just, this is based on Chinese medicine.

So energy medicine, Chinese medicine, they're very ancient practices that are absolutely holistic. We don't just target the symptom because the symptom is a ripple effect of many other things.

So yes, if someone experiences a physical discomfort or distortion, such as it could be as simple as, you know, a torn muscle and inflammation, diabetes, chronic arthritis, you know, and again, we now have science that tells us this, right?

So it's not just what a lot of people say, woo, but we have science that tells us our mind is affecting our physical cells, our cells, you know, our physical form. And so the level of stress, our emotions, our patterns of thinking stories that are not even our own that society tells us, you know, believe in this, this is the only way.

It's okay. But you know, if you, if you think it's your own information and you're adopted and, and, and our content, I'm, yeah, it's awesome. So it's a combination of mind, body and spirit.

Yes, absolutely. We're a complete being if we can, you know, walk around with all of our, all of the aspects of ourselves. And so this was my story. So for me to, um, wanting to understand more where I lost pieces of who I am, why some why I felt like things were missing, nothing was missing apparently, you know, but actually something was missing, like parts of myself and, and who am I?

What do I want to create in my life? You know, these questions and I've had that my whole life. You know, I'm only 48 now, but I, you know, I've always been this way and kind of like looking at why do I think this way and how is it that, you know, what does this mean?

So it's not easy when you don't have the tools and not that I have all the tools now, but I certainly can, I certainly see life in a very different way. But it is, uh, takes discipline, you know, just like, um, you know, we use technology now these days.

So you charge your phone without even thinking about it, but we don't take care of our minds. We don't take care of our bodies. We say we don't have time. And so this, this is, you know, my story in beats of light also describes why self care and reaching for a more expanded way to live is vital.

That's what saves people's lives. So are you into this technology right now is pretty much taking over our lives? Uh, how do you feel about that? Well, I think technology can be great if you can, uh, have a balanced mindset.

So, you know, there's, I don't, I don't watch the news. I rely on other people to tell me what's important and then whatever that backup. Yeah. You rely on other people to tell you what's important.

You know, I rely on people like better of my dad, you know, people close to me to tell me what's happening that if I should be concerned about something and need to move because I'm currently living in Italy.

But I, you know, I'm very careful with what information I digest and I take in. I certainly check the headlines to, you know, be informed. But I, yeah, I know I am weird. I know. Yeah.

Do not weird. But you're just like you're turning yourself off from life. I don't want you to do that. That's not a good idea either, you know. Well, that, and I read and I, you know, appreciate your opinion.

Yeah. It's very different. I'm aware of what's happening, but I don't have the news on and listen to what is fed to me on the news. Well, it is fed to you only if you don't listen to all the sides.

You know, if you're just listening to one side, yeah, it's fed to you. Right. And you walk around like a zombie, you know, just saying whatever you say I believe. No, well, unfortunately, I think the opposite, you know, I, I experienced that part in my life where I was consumed with watching the news and all kinds of sides.

And you know, maybe I'm a more sensitive person, but it is terrible to live that way because, you know, you have these sense of fear, self doubt. You don't know what your, your own voice is.

And so I don't, I know, and I, you know, I'm totally, I, I respect the other people's opinions. And I just, you know, this is how I like to operate, but there's, there shouldn't be any judgment like, oh, you're shutting yourself out because I should, I can say the same thing.

Like, well, I know a lot of people that are asleep, listen to your own compass instead of like whatever the partial information is coming in. Absolutely. So of course, how can you decide what's your compass unless you watch the other people's compasses?

Yeah. Well, that's one point of view. Yeah. No, it's an important point of view because too many people are turning off and that, that scares me. Yeah, but it's not turning off. It's turning on other senses.

You know, I can't operate with just five senses alone. And I know that sounds Greek to you. I've been just, you know, and, and other listeners, but that it, you know, we're kind of done with, with, with following our thoughts alone.

So I'm not sure if this is the right, you know, way of operating. And for me, it isn't. So, do you know your own voice now? I've always known it. I just ignored it. We ignore it and listen to whatever's louder.

Other people's stories are trauma are ancestors. I, my, my, my grandmother had this. So I'm going to get it. You know, and so yes, I've always known my voice, but I now I choose to kind of pay attention to it more.

Ah, okay. So are you still working? I am working. Yes, absolutely. I have my own business. I teach and we have retreats. It's a different lifestyle. I don't work for corporate world anymore.

And I had a wonderful career and I have no regrets whatsoever. Got you. Now, you also said that the what you're talking about the path is not just in the physical realm, but in dream time.

Right. Yes. Dream time. Dreaming is a beautiful healing practice. But that. No choice. If we don't dream, we'll die. So. Right. However, active dreaming has been a healing practice for the, yeah, centuries.

And I've, you have described the different ways to kind of connect with the messages that people have in their dreams and not we're not just talking about sleep, you know, dreams that you have when you're asleep, but also through visionary journeys, meditation and calming the mind and becoming spacious enough, empty of your thinking and purifying your, you know, your filters to be able to discern the different symbols and messages that come through dreaming.

So it's a beautiful practice. Do you remember your dreams? Do you remember your dreams? Oh, so do I? Yes. How do you do that? Because I, most of the time I'll get bits and pieces or nothing.

Right. Well, there are many, many techniques, the one of which is first thing in the morning when you're still kind of rolling out of bed to write down anything, even if you don't have a visual image, maybe something like I have a feeling, I don't know, and whatever it is, and you might have nothing and then you have to write, I had no feeling.

I had no images, nothing for today. So the practice of writing it down with a date will help your brain remember like, oh, she's needing something, so I will give her something that I need her to remember.

It's a conscious effort to remember. And everybody dreams. So when people say, I don't dream, it's not true. We have science that tells us. But the key here is, you know, first of all, nobody is able to tell you what your dream means.

So that is an introspective practice. And the, if you do, if people do remember their dreams, they should write them down and then ask questions about the symbols that one receives in the dream and then write about it.

That's a beautiful practice as well. Okay. But you said that no one can tell you what your dreams mean, but you're asking me to look at the symbols in my dream? Yeah, but you're the one that has to interpret your dream.

So when someone says, can you tell me what this means? Yeah. I mean, one can be intuitive enough, know you and understand like, maybe this is what it means, but really it's your own message, it's your own language.

So, you know, seeing a whale in a dream may mean something to me, but it means nothing to you. And, you know, that's what I mean. So, you know, how do you turn off the mind to sleep?

Sometimes it is very difficult to just say, I want to sleep. I'm tired and then you can't. You're here. I call it monkey mind. No, chatters all the time. Yeah, it is. It is called the monkey mind.

Yeah, a beautiful Buddhist teaching. But the thing is that the mind as in your thinking, right? So your brain processes, that's what it does. It keeps going. So there are practices to help one focus, even when you're supposed to go to sleep on breathing, on visualization practices that are really helpful.

And it's a diligent practice. So it's not like, oh, it didn't work. I tried it for three minutes or 10, and it didn't work. You have to keep going. And so this is something that has to like really like it.

It's going because it's a habit. So once it's a pattern, so that's, you know, the mind is busy, but it's busy because it's your pain attention to that. And so we need to become kind of like detached and noticed like, oh, look at that.

I am worried or thinking or this is what happened today and whatever. And just observing it, creating some space between the process of thinking and you watching this without any opinions takes practice.

But it's actually very natural. It takes practice for us to become an observant again. Gotcha. Now, you said that you found some profound self discovery. Like what? Well, the fact that we are not our thinking, we are not our emotions or our physical form that we're much more than that.

And yeah, I'm not here to tell you who am I? But the reality is that we're much more than that. If we just think about the physical, not physical, excuse me, the electromagnetic spectrum, so the light, you know, between radio waves and gamma rays, the visible spectrum of what we see with our eyeballs is only 1%.

So the invisible world is much more than what we see with our eyes, but we tend to only believe what we can see with our eyes. And so that is a very limited view. However, you know, that's what's visible.

So our brain perceived so, so much more. Our physical body perceives so, so much more. So, you know, understanding that there are different levels of our mind, different dimensions to our physical body, our energy field.

This has also been, you know, studied in depth through expert, you know, the scientists. And they do. I mean, so it's not like, oh, that's just out there a little esoteric. No, no, no.

And I'm quite scientific in a way that I do like to do, to understand what is happening in my body when I do this practice. How does it call my nervous system? And then, you know, actually experiencing.

So I'm not just saying things because like I learned them in a book, you know, I changed my whole life because I knew I saw some benefit, like physical healing. So this, you know, was a revelation also bringing all kinds of frustration back into my life for not being a, why don't we know these things when we're brought up?

You know, I grew up in Italy and then moved to the States. I, you know, understanding like there are so many tools. I could have helped my mom, of course, you know, my father, my family, my friends.

And, and then of course it's a journey, right? And my goal with writing this book is of course to give people some tools and some experiences to like understand, you know, or maybe like try to understand yourself better.

We're not just what we see, who we identify with, what we identify with, but also to give people maybe some inspiration about their own story, like your own journeys, your own life, challenging moments, the successful ones and what did you learn or lost and lost and experiences and, and what are you, what are you doing?

What do you want to create? You also said that messages can emanate from the soul. What, what emanated from your soul in a message? Oh my gosh. How long do we have? That is a beautiful question.

We have a beautiful question. No, we got a minute. No, no, no. Just give me something in a minute. The key is to really understand that, you know, like your own voice. And so, you know, we can call it soul spirit.

There's many dimensions to that, but it's like what, who is, who is talking? Is it just brain processing and pulling from memories? Or is it really your truth, like what you came in with this life to do?