Deborah Meints-Pierson, LMFT

Deborah is a master therapist (licensed for over 35 years), spiritual teacher, television host, author and 3rd generation intuitive. She has helped transform the lives of thousands of people around the world. Her pioneering approach bridges Psychology, Spirituality and the Mystic Tools. Deborah is a sought out authority in the field of psychology and has served as a Palm Springs psychological expert for TV, radio & print. She wrote and Co-Hosted the popular television program "It's A Family Affair" on Time Warner Television for over a decade. Deborah has been featured in numerous shows, radio programs and publications including NBC, ABC, K-News Voice of The Valley, Desert Sun Newspaper, Desert Woman magazine and Health & Spirituality magazine.

When Deborah is not transforming lives you can find her hiking in the beautiful desert, music jamming with friends, dancing, practicing yoga, reading, & writing poetry. For more: https://www.soulpathsessions.com

Brenda Littleton, MA

As an educator & counselor based in social justice, personal literacy, eco & depth psychology, Brenda has worked with thousands of students and clients in their wholeness journey. She holds a graduate degree in education, post-graduate studies in counseling, and depth psychology at the doctoral level and is certified in coaching, trauma and psycho-biotics. Blending modalities of attachment theory, somatic healing, active imagination, dream work, restorative education, & place-based learning, she empahsizes the link between the mind-body-spirit-earth relationship for the healing.

Brenda's has served as a university program director of graduate studies, a clinical counselor for domestic violence & trauma recovery, a behavioral specialist in schools, & is a successful coach of executives, creatives and entrepreneurs. She is a reiki master, writer, speaker & continues in a lineage of Druidic animistic prayer circles. For more: https://www.brendalittleton.com

Original music by Zach Meints

Podcast produced by Homeless Betty Productions

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APP TO LISTEN TO FUTURE EPISODES. THANK YOU...AND REMEMBER TO FOLLOW YOUR SOUL, IT KNOWS THE WAY!

This first episode of Soul Path Sessions introduces listeners to the importance of embracing soul work and reclaiming the soulful parts of ourselves in healing. Deborah and Brenda share their influences and background stories during their initial training and how soul work was left out of those early teachings while introducing depth and eco psychology as part of the sacred conversation that psychotherapy was meant to be about. A conversation about how ego and soul are meant to work together in cooperation, instead of against each other, leads into an introduction into how to harvest the gold of dreams and sets the "mead-table" for a somatic exercise that Brenda uses to guide Deborah on which helps her to move from resistance to surrender by bringing the unconscious to consciousness and thus to greater meaning.

Episode 1 Chapters

00:01:38 - Eco Psychology in the Therapeutic Container

https://www.pacifica.edu/degree-program/community-liberation-ecopsychology/ecopsychology/

00:05:09 - Psyche Means Soul

https://www.yourdictionary.com/psyche

00:06:32 - Sacred Conversation

https://e360.yale.edu/features/ecopsychology-how-immersion-in-nature-benefits-your-health

00:10:40 - Balancing Ego and Soul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOkcE3vWhqw

00:17:43 - Ego as an Iceberg

https://depthpsychologyalliance.com/page/about-depth-psychology-depth-psychology-alliance

00:19:39 - Dreams: How We Bring In More Soul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOv0wKUrb6s

00:23:02 - Dream Tending

https://dreamtending.com/stephen-aizenstat-ph-d/

00:26:36 - Getting Comfortable With The Uncomfortable

https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-get-comfortable-being-uncomfortable-5204440

00:32:30 - Somatic Therapy Exercise: The Mead-Hall

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-somatic-therapy-5190064

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Original music by Zach Meints

The Soul Path Sessions podcast is produced by Homeless Betty Productions

Announcer: (00:09)

Welcome to the Soul Path Sessions podcast with Deborah Meints-Pierson and Brenda Littleton. Brenda is an educator and counselor rooted in Jungian and Eco-Psychology. She helps her clients understand the importance of the mind, body, spirit, and earth relationship for healing. Deborah is a licensed psychotherapist and has been trained in traditional and sacred psychology, exploring from the ground up. What makes our human experience meaningful, wholesome, and enlightening. Deborah and Brenda invite you to accompany them on a soul path journey as they explore the possibilities of living a more soulful life as therapists, seekers and lovers of fate.

Deborah: (00:51)

We're going to try to jump into our very first. Soul Path Session together. Groovy Brenda is here to hang out with groovy Deborah, and what makes us different in our field, which is the healing field, perhaps is that we pass as normals most of the time.

Brenda: (01:21)

True. I think we try to be normal. I think we do a really good job, but we also remember certain parts that are important to bring into our work that we were never taught.

Deborah: (01:38)

Yeah, I think for years as a psychotherapist I felt like the coolest things I knew, the things that were saving my own life, were not permissible to share with my clients.

Brenda: (01:52)

In what way?

Deborah: (01:53)

Well, back in the day I would go out in nature, I would do rituals. I lived in a really beautiful open place and I would think how can people get, well, if they're not walking around, outside crying on the rocks, hugging the trees, laying in the sand. I spent a lot of time out of my mind and in my body. And now it's gotten to be a thing that's much more popularized, somatic therapy, somatic experience. But when I was licensed, it was just like they handed me my head and said, leave the rest of you out of it and figure these people out.

Brenda: (02:36)

And my training had a lot of eco psychology and yet there was no application on how to bring it into the therapeutic container. It was more of about stimulating the relationship between the collective consciousness and what was going on as stimuli and trauma and being aware of that and how that would then live as pathology within the body. And so a lot of theory, a lot of great experiences out in nature, but as far as how to convert that into sitting with someone or sitting with a group was left to our own devices. For myself, I was raised very much like that, where I was, my earliest memories are on a river, two, three years old. And I remember trying to, well actually bringing this in as a professor in a writing class and sending students out to be with nature for just 20 minutes and the trauma and the fear that I ingested in the students. They had never sat outside and watched an ant.

Brenda: (03:51)

They had never listened to a waterfall. And I was so surprised. I was like, really? So in theory, and then in practice and then the gap in between. I really had to sit with that as a professor and then thinking, well, perhaps going into being a therapist was the modality that I really needed to express and to inform people through that container, This is not education. This is more therapeutic. And then I realized, no, you really cannot, I'm to the point now where it's, you cannot heal yourself without healing the earth. How we treat the earth is how we treat ourselves. I know that's sometimes a contagious statement, but I'm always guided by that. So, your history of doing ceremony, your history of bringing into the therapeutic container, these parts that were hidden, I think it's timely. And I doubt if you were ever really leaving it out, you were just maybe translating it in some way.

Deborah: (05:09)

Yes, I was burning incense and sage in my office. I had a French door so that the fire alarm didn't go off too often. I think it's important. I think the reason I wanted to do this soul path exploration is because so much of what is healing, people don't realize that when they go to psychotherapy necessarily. The key word here is psyche and psyche means soul. So if we really go back to our origins as therapists, we're trying to find what is meaningful to the mind and the heart and to the belly. What is meaningful about our journey? And so reclaiming the soulful part Is really the way that people heal and how I've noticed my clients heal. So when you were saying being out in nature, well, the reason we want to save the earth is because she saves us, it's so organic. She saves us. My contention is that when we spend a lot of time in nature, we would not need psychotherapists at all.

Brenda: (06:12)

That is one of the points. The mandate within post Jungian work is that we needed psychotherapy after we left nature, the modernization, the modernity of disenfranchising ourselves from the earth practices.

Deborah: (06:32)

What I notice with you, Brenda, is when we talk, I feel like I'm on a walk. I mean my experience with you is that the conversation is nurturing. It's about what matters. But most of the time, when we talk to people, we sort of compartmentalize and it gets very kind of high pitched and nerve racking. It's like a future conversation and a past conversation. It's not grounded in the moment. If conversation were a trail, you'd fall off it all the time, because you wouldn't be watching your feet.

Brenda: (07:08)

Interesting.

Deborah: (07:09)

So to me, so much of being with humans, as much as I enjoy it - I think why alcohol is such a big seller, is because it's a relaxant and it kind of brings us to this place of feeling, at least for a moment, that we're hitting our glasses together and we're in the room and we're going to drink something at the same time.

Brenda: (07:28)

It's going to be occupied by spirit.

Deborah: (07:30)

Yes. Spirits. That's what alcohol is, spirits. Then after that it can become a sh*t show because we go right back into our heads if we're not careful, or we don't have the heart-mind connection necessarily. So conversation, sacred conversation, is what psychotherapy is meant to be. We really listen and we learn each other's soul stories. So when you and I were talking about doing this podcast, we talked about how important it would be to tell stories and potentially bring other people in to tell stories of how they got connected to life itself. To notice what's really happening and the blessings that are coming towards us, that don't even notice. When I go on a hike by myself, I don't get caught up in conversation. When I'm paying attention to the blessings in my life, I'm watching what's happening throughout the course of a day. And a prayer is answered that I said in the morning, like Thy will be done. It just comes towards me because I'm paying attention.

Brenda: (08:41)

Animals, help me with that. Being non-verbal but picking up their attention, like being watched by a cat or watched by a horse and the eyes of a dog and seeing what they see and especially on the trail and behaving like them. It's that sense of being in nature, being in the moment and out of my head, completely out of my head.

Deborah: (09:13)

I like that. Going where you're curious and running freely where you're curious or holding back. That unconditional presence of animals, I think that's why people love animals so much.

Brenda: (09:29)

And we are animals.

Deborah: (09:32)

Oh yeah. I forgot. I forgot to shave my legs. There you are, poor girl. Yeah. So, this idea of a soul, what is soul? You know what I think it's kind of an interesting thing to try to define. And last night I found myself making my list. What is soul and what is it not? This is my list, but I'm going to ask you, Brenda, to jump in here. I was just sitting under the stars and I asked myself, well, how do you define this really unwieldy word? Really? It's kind of hard. And from the silence, the answer came to me, that soul understands what we truly need. It doesn't mess around.

Brenda: (10:22)

Soul understands or I would even suggest is what we need.

Deborah: (10:27)

Take that word out. Edit. Soul is what we need and it drives the unfolding stories of our lives.

Brenda: (10:40)

If we pay attention and if it doesn't, if we don't pay attention, it still is there. All of my work these days is based on balancing ego and soul. And it's not about diminishing the ego. It's having a healthy ego and to have a healthy ego one needs to rely upon soul. In fact, it's based primarily on the work of James Hillman on this one paper that he hadn't published it yet. He was giving it as a lecture. I was like 40 something and he was over 65 and I thought, oh, this is just a guy who is rationalizing getting old. Now I'm his age and I realize he had some truth in this and it really is accurate. And that when we reach the threshold, ego gets to be quite satisfied or satiated actually. It may not have accomplished everything on the bucket list, but it knows that if I continue to do and behave in a certain way, I've done this over and over again for so many decades, I'm really getting the same thing over and over.

Brenda: (11:48)

So I can release the attention toward that. And in doing so open up some real estate, and that's when soul, the unconscious, comes in and says, I'll take that space. I will fill that in for you and in doing so, it's like having a second midlife crisis because it's soul, the unconscious psyche, says, and we will get rid of all of this that's irrelevant. We will get rid of anything that no longer serves you. You don't have to maintain what ego thought was important to a large extent. And Hillman was saying, ego feels relieved. There's a sense of, all of this time we've been burdening ego to carry the load, and the more soul we allow in to function and to guide and to balance ego, ego relishes it, ego says, yes, bring it on. Let me have a partner. And that's a very different way, it is not a duality it's immersion. And it's a sense of integration. And I love that.

Deborah: (12:59)

I do too. At this age, I think it's like a wonderful invitation. For people listening that don't know the difference between ego and soul, like let's take a stab at it, you know? Okay. ego to me, my friend, Robin Winks actually shared this model with me that I really liked: You're born this little being and then you get wounded and that's like the next concentric circle. Imagine your little self is a circle born. And then outside that circle is barbed wire, where you did something and it endangered your wellbeing, your very survival. You cried too much. You didn't perform enough, or in the right way, you had to hide from a drunken parent, something like that. And so you adapted so you could stay safe. And so that's a large part of ego structure. I find as a human, as a therapist, human, that so much we think we are is "I achieve a lot."

Deborah: (13:58)

"Look how much I can do" or "I'm not the kind of person that ever gets organized. I just, you retreat from life. Whatever I've made this identity around, rescuing people or being rescued, so often as a result of that wound. And so we literally the scar tissue around the wound can be a lot of what ego is, is rewards. Then my teacher Ram Das says, you know, when you show up for tennis, you wear your tennis whites, which shows how old he is, because nobody wears white in tennis anymore. But this idea that you develop a self, Hey, my avatar is named Deborah and your avatar is named Brenda and I have blonde hair and you have red hair and we're going to play this game of being separate from our essence.

Deborah: (14:41)

So, it's a combination of play, but there's also a tremendous amount of terror. The next thing that happens, and why people come into therapy, is that the ego that's been doing such a great job of being you or what you thought was you and playing the game just suddenly stops working. So, if you're a bombshell or you're the wrong color or whatever's going on, or the right color, it starts to break down. And that is a crisis. And we crack up. That's why we call it a breakdown. Something's being broken. In our culture that's anxiety, attacks and depression. And we have more incidents of anxiety and depression than almost any other culture, Western culture. Most people come to therapy with like, put me back together again. And the thing about it, if some people have been listening, they don't know what depth psychology means.

Deborah: (15:31)

I didn't know what it meant either. It means that there's something beyond what you think is you, deeper than what you think is you, and it's trying to get in or get out. So the bigger things trying to get in and the ego is like, can you help me? Help me stay in this safety zone and we're cracking up and soul's going "come hither." And so I think of us, I think of my work at this stage much more than I do when I was younger, as being a midwife of the soul. I'm not giving a person the soul, their soul is with them. I'm just simply saying, Hey, guess what? You have a soul and you're going to be more interested and more interesting as you allow this magical mystery to unfold and you don't know who you are, and then the other part, and then I'm going to shut up, because I'm king of going on,

Deborah: (16:30)

is going back into the wound, because the wound itself will go "no way do I want you to do something weird or different? Because you know, this is how we vote and this is our religion and this is a street we live and this is how we define ourselves. And you're going to mess with that. Those are my rules for staying safe." And that's terrifying. So, part of the midwifery is every child is breach, right? We can't can't get through it. We're going in and saying, "Let's talk to the kid first. Let's find out your story. Let's find out your soul story. Let's honor why you're hiding behind the barbed wire or why you've transcended the barbed wire with this protection, this sort of like extra cushioning,

Brenda: (17:16)

Like compensation.

Deborah: (17:17)

I don't know about you, Brenda, but I tried to leap over all that and just be spiritual when I was young, just meditate and eat vegetables and read all the right books. And I hated everybody.

Brenda: (17:33)

How did that work?

Deborah: (17:34)

No, I hated everybody. I had a breakdown. I hated everybody. I didn't even need to eat at one point.

Brenda: (17:41)

Yeah.

Deborah: (17:42)

I wasn't, I wasn't..

Brenda: (17:43)

You were eating yourself. There was too much going on. From a depth psychological perspective. The idea of the ego is just so, so strong for us, for the majority of our life, until we say, please move over. The analogy, the visual, the image, is an iceberg and the very tip of a iceberg is what we see. And that's the ego, that's the conscious world. And so the ego is the manifest, the operating system of the conscious world. That's very Freudian in a sense. And that's why Jung and Freud had that split. Jung was adamant and allowed us to explore that there's more than what we've experienced in our life. You know, our dream work is not exactly what we've experienced. So the, the tip of the iceberg is the conscious ego.

Brenda: (18:39)

The ego is the operating system of the conscious life, our day to day. Underneath the ocean is like seven eights of the iceberg and that's the unconscious, that's all of our potentiality. That's not only all our own individual potentiality and our unconscious, but the collective unconscious as well. It's where we store stuff. It's where the society has stored stuff, but it's also where we download and we bring into the conscious worlds. And so one of the adages that's famous from Jung and to make conscious the unconscious is true healing. And so the idea of so much of psychology from when my younger training was deflating the ego and being egoless and not attached. And yet I found great refuge in finding Jung's work and post-Jungian, primarily post-Jungian. No, we want a healthy ego.

Brenda: (19:39)

And the way that it's attainable is to have more soul, is to have a balance of soul. To allow the ego to be balanced and bringing in, not only from the depth psychological perspective, how do we do this? How do we bring in soul? Well, traditionally it's dream work. It's it's body work. It's images, our own nomenclature, creating our own library of what the meanings are from our dreams and having a running dialogue in a narrative that the individual creates. And that's a big deal for the ego to be able to feel comfortable to do that. Because so often in an ego conscious world, we're going to go to books and we're going to say, oh, I dreamt of this bear and the bear means this, as opposed to going into the wound, the dream, the image, and having that own personal dialogue and, taking that time and feeling our way into it and sitting with it and saying, this is mine. This is me. This is what it means for me. And that's how the ego becomes comfortable and solid from dealing with soul and going into the unconscious.

Deborah: (20:57)

Yeah, I think that's a really good piece of it, to consider that every night when we go sleep, the body tells stories and it does it so in kind of cartoons, exaggerations. And a lot of people say, you know, my dreams don't make any sense or I don't dream, which isn't true. In fact, if somebody's listening and they really want to know how to harvest this gold of dreams you have to write them down and look at those images. And that's a whole other show I want to do on dreams. But just for today it's, I agree with you - If you look at it in a book, somebody said it, but if you say, I dreamed about the color green and yesterday, I was talking to my mother and she was wearing this green shirt. That's what comes to my mind. And, then all of a sudden it was on fire...fire...fire...scary...the conversation with my mother was frightening yesterday. You piece it together like that. It becomes extremely personal. And the thing is that when I started doing dream work, I realized I'm a genius. I didn't know that. And you are too. And so is everybody else because in my dream world,

Deborah: (22:20)

what I didn't want to face about me, the things that fall out my comfort zone were going to be expressed in metaphor in cartoonish exaggerations, like screaming at me from the clown car. This is what you're really feeling, Deborah, this is what you're not facing or this is what's going to happen to you because some dreams are about the future that you're not ready for. And I didn't know how to decode it. So it takes a little time. By the way, there's a book by Ann Fairaday called Dream Power. If you can find it, it was written in the seventies or eighties and I got mine in Thailand, in Chang Mai at a book stand and it's my favorite.

Brenda: (23:02)

We'll have to investigate that. I'd love to do shows on dream, dream work. The dream tending that Stephen Aizenstat created, and if you're going through Pacifica, you get certified in that and just the richness of it and it stays with you for life. I've been having a lot of vivid, horrific dreams for a week now and it's it occupies my day. It occupies the idea of inviting in your dreams and telling your dreams that you're going to respect it and honor it, and there's a little book here that I'm going to write it in and I'm not going to dismiss it. I'm going to tend to my dreams is part of the interplay of seducing your dreams, of saying that you're going to show up and, and please come. And it works.

Deborah: (24:01)

Steven Aizenstate, what I remember of some of the workshops I attended that he did, he talked about world dreams and collective dreams. And right now, as we record this, Ukraine is being invaded. I think a lot of us feel this physically. I know for me it could be terror, tears, apocalyptic fear, deep prayer. I mean, there's so much going on for so many of us right now. We are collectively engaged in so much. We just came out of the pandemic, I guess we're still in it, but we've sort of changed the topic, changed the conversation. To me it feels like the soul of the earth is saying, do we have your attention yet? Do you understand, humankind, that the game you're playing is getting really too fast and too powerful and we are being shaken. The other thing I feel very called to is, what's come up for me through this, is how much hatred I've carried.

Brenda: (25:19)

In your body.

Deborah: (25:20)

If you're harming something that I love, or believe different and I think you're going to harm, I would come at it with hatred. So that's my own war monger, that's my own inner murderer. It's made me look at my own internal violence. Like if I get angry or enraged at Putin or somebody who doesn't wear a mask or something like that, when I notice, when I pay attention to my body, it's this incredible physical pain, this pinching, this tightening off, this headache, and I'm committing this act of violence against myself and I'll only notice that when I'm taking the Advil. I'm saying did I change anything for any of these people? Did I help anybody understand anything. No, I imploded. I did a nuclear explosion inside of my body. So, not to make it all about me, but I think a lot of us can relate to it when this is the macrocosm that is doing something. I know what Carl Jung talked about. He says, well look inside, darling, because if you're reacting to something on the outside, there is a part of you that's playing out the dictator.

Brenda: (26:36)

It's equal distance. As without, same within. So, if we can identify, if we can give ourselves the grace and the lack of judgment and just stop the sense of analysis intellectually and allow the feeling of the body to inform what is that we're feeling. And then go into that and follow it and have a conversation and ask it, where are you? What are you, why are you here? How long have you been here? And actually start this dialogue with what would normally be termed the shadow part that we've repressed of oh, I'm, I'm spiritual. I'm healthy. I'm educated. I know how to have critical thinking and basically dismiss all of this other external feelings.

Deborah: (27:34)

Yeah.

Brenda: (27:36)

So we compartmentalize it and make it acceptable, but it's not acceptable. It's not about changing it. It's about accepting the unacceptable. It's getting comfortable with the uncomfortable.

Deborah: (27:51)

Now, when you're saying that, I'm thinking about the way I learned to do inner child work and the way I work with my clients and myself, just yesterday working with myself, is to do a deep see. To go into the body, like it's the iceberg, and to do a body scan and find where I feel what I'm saying or hurting about. And then to stop and leave room to look at it and to notice it's temperature, it's weight, it's texture, then extend an invitation. And remember the invitation is be going to be extended by a loving part of the self, a safe part of the self that really wants to know, not a sarcastic part of the self that's in a hurry, but a very patient self, to find out how long have you been around? So when you were saying that, what I was thinking is I have this six year old and when I was doing some work about dictators, I was feeling myself being held down and being tickled when I was little, like, it goes back to this rage.

Deborah: (28:59)

I was the youngest child with two big brothers who would sit on me and tickle me until I peed and screamed. I had this rage reaction. I won the scream contest in high school for a reason. Then we actually had a screaming contest and I won it, which I'm very proud of, but this sense of powerlessness, this child where I couldn't get up and nobody could really do much about it since they were the babysitters and it happened again and again. So I, as I looked at that and the child would say, I'm so tired of people sitting on me and it was going way back to that feeling of heaviness. And so the second piece is search and recognizance. So I learned to ask the child, what do you need? And this is a really important question that all children need to be asked. And the child was like, get them off me. Get off of me, get off of me. And I was crying, get off of me. This went on for quite some time because you have to be patient with yourself and the child's get off of me and then I want them to see how they're hurting me.

Brenda: (30:15)

What part of your body?

Deborah: (30:17)

That was my torso,

Brenda: (30:19)

Where they were sitting on you?

Deborah: (30:20)

Yeah. Sitting on my torso and it was crushing my heart and the rage went up to my forehead, so I had a really big headache. I remember when I was in graduate school, they said every behavior, no matter how violent and frightening it may appear to you, has a positive intention. And all I wanted my big brothers to do was to see they were hurting me and cry and love me. And that's how war feels like, can't you see how you're hurting me.

Brenda: (30:50)

So you weren't seen and you weren't heard, you weren't validated.

Deborah: (30:54)

No, for whatever purposes, they were dominating me and amusing themselves with my subjugation.

Brenda: (31:08)

Sounds very similar to what's going on today.

Deborah: (31:12)

My own hatred of them was really a plea to please wake up. I need you feel what I'm feeling?

Brenda: (31:27)

Part of the equation is to see the difference between the animus and anima, the male and the female, the feminine and the masculine too. Not that I'm, genderizing it, but the idea of the container of the feminine, feeling that anger and being oppressed.

Deborah: (31:49)

I guess the way I understand this, my inner masculine wanted to beat the sh*t out of my brothers. And because every woman has a dude inside and every dude's got a chick inside, I wanted to see their feminine to compassure me because you know what, they weren't bad, big brothers. They told me stories and we played games and we sat in the corner and tell stories and have fun and they could be really kind. But every once in a while, and maybe it's just an animal thing. I saw this question, why does a masculine animal want to torture things? I don't know. That's a soulful question, isn't it?

Brenda: (32:30)

Well, the idea of when you were locating it in your body and how it had this breath, this stretch from the torso to the head and it's still very present and it's the real estate of this child, a young child. I don't spend that much time with the young child so much as the actual physical sensation, the emotion or psychological energy package that is in the body. So when we locate it in the body, I actually ask you to shrink down and to be able to sit in that part of the body at what I call the mead-hall, the very long mead-hall table, where people come together. So it's you and this emotion. I ask, please ask this feeling to give you an image and the first image that you see don't overthink. It could be a color. It could be a sound, actually it could be anything. Working with the image in this particular space, in the body, invite that image to sit at the table. Thank it for coming. Thank you. Thank you, you've been here for so long and I've ignored you and I've put you off to the side for so long. Thank you for coming at my bequest.

Deborah: (33:55)

Can you give us an example of who might show up at the table?

Brenda: (34:00)

Well, let's just say this feeling that you had of anger and rage of a young child, and you're saying it's located originally in your torso. So I'd like you just to go into that space, imagine yourself in that space right now, your physical ego yourself is so little that it's in that space. And you see in this torso, you're in this area, you feel this emotional space and ask this emotion to give you an image, what it wants to be seen as today. And what image do you see? The first thing that comes to mind?

Deborah: (34:42)

Spilled cup.

Brenda: (34:43)

Okay. A spilled cup. So I want you to thank the spilled cup. Thank you. Spilled cup. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Now. Spilled cup. What name do you go by today? What name would you like me to call you? And what does it say?

Deborah: (35:02)

It's really interesting. It's like it doesn't make any sense. I'm just going say that.

Brenda: (35:10)

It's not going to

Deborah: (35:11)

It's like Tapplestay,

Brenda: (35:13)

Tapplestay. Yeah. Okay. So it's not going to make sense, this is not ego consciousness. This is the liminal space of the unconscious. So thank Tapplestay for coming. The spill cup in this region of your body, that it lives. That's been there since you were a little girl. So invited it to this table, this table that you're hosting it. And it is your most important guest. So you satiate this Tapplestay.

Deborah: (35:42)

It's just Topplestay, like a top.

Brenda: (35:44)

Top?

Deborah: (35:46)

It's saying topple it and stay like your contents are out.

Brenda: (35:50)

Okay. Topplestay. So invite Topplestay to sit at the table. You're satiating it. You're allowing it to have whatever it wants. You see the spilled cup, Topplestay, is finally having your attention. It's your guest. Now ask Topplestay What words of advice? What did it bring for you to hear today? What does it want you to know?

Deborah: (36:19)

Silver. What comes out of the cup is liquid silver and it's a blessing.

Brenda: (36:30)

A Blessing? Okay.

Deborah: (36:30)

Yea, it's a blessing. It's actually a blessing. It's so beautiful. The silver liquid comes out that everyone is invited at the table to put their middle finger in the the silver and then put it on their heart. And between their brows, like a third eye. I'm just going with the image here. There's chaos on the table, but it's alright It's like...

Brenda: (37:03)

An elixir?

Deborah: (37:03)

An elixir? Yeah. Like communion.

Brenda: (37:07)

Okay. So you're in communion.

Deborah: (37:08)

It's a communion cup. Let's commune

Brenda: (37:10)

And it's spilt and it's staying. So it's giving you this advice. Now, ask it what you can do for it. How can you serve it?

Deborah: (37:22)

How can I serve it? I can offer it.

Brenda: (37:24)

Okay. You can offer it to others. Offer it to yourself. And how long has it been here with you?

Deborah: (37:31)

You know, this is going to sound crazy, but many lifetimes. Many, many lifetimes, not just, it's a very old ornate Goblet. It's very beautiful.

Brenda: (37:48)

And ask Topplestay, what is its purpose for you? Why is it here?

Deborah: (37:55)

To be used.

Brenda: (37:56)

To be used. And ask Topplestay, how can you use it?

Deborah: (38:01)

Share. Share what you know. Through the pain, through the, falling down, through the spilling out, share what, you know, share what you know.

Brenda: (38:13)

Okay. So I want you to ask Topplestay, is it willing to sit at your table and to be part of your counsel and to be with you on a day to day basis, but out in the ego world, into the consciousness where you can rely on it and it's no longer in the bottom part of the iceberg that it's part of your council now. Can it be present in your life and inform you and guide you?

Deborah: (38:47)

Well, it's doing something kind of interesting. It's kind of like it's answering for me. It's like, of course.

Brenda: (38:57)

Good.

Deborah: (38:58)

...and away, and even away from my own table, like out in the world.

Brenda: (39:03)

I want you to check in with your solar plexus again, the area, the region that therapeutics part of your body that has been hosting this guest for multiple life times.

Brenda: (39:18)

And ...

Brenda: (39:18)

Breathe into it. How does it feel?

Deborah: (39:22)

It feels good, but I'll tell you there is a wicked part. And since we're in flow, I've got to be real. It's like saying, "poison the bad people". It's still doing that. The Goblet can be poison, like poison the bad people. And that's just genuine. I can't go phony-holy on you. It's like, I can be a Goblet of poison. And I feel like this witch part of me coming out and saying the ones that would hurt the earth, the ones that would hurt each other. I call it my inner kid. She's still like, "you're going to fight back."

Brenda: (40:03)

So see the inner child, see the young girl sitting at the table with this spilled goblet,

Deborah: (40:09)

It's turning into a therapy session, but I dig it. This is cool. Okay. I am.

Brenda: (40:12)

Just see the interaction and the sense of,

Brenda: (40:18)

Um,

Brenda: (40:19)

Acceptance.

Brenda: (40:20)

Yeah.

Deborah: (40:23)

The little kid is actually crying. She has her face down on the table, hand on the cup and she's just, she's in a surrendered position. It's not, It's like, how can I explain it? She's a little girl with braids. She's just got her forehead against a red tablecloth and that the cup is in her right hand. And she's just, just, It feels good.

Brenda: (40:47)

I mean she's no longer fighting.

Deborah: (40:49)

No, not at all.

Brenda: (40:52)

Okay. So ask her, what is she feeling

Brenda: (40:58)

Like?

Deborah: (40:59)

Surrendered.

Brenda: (41:00)

Okay.

Brenda: (41:01)

So we've gone from resistance to surrender.

Brenda: (41:04)

Okay.

Deborah: (41:09)

And actually a sense of protection. There's elders at this table that are kind.

Brenda: (41:17)

Okay.

Deborah: (41:18)

You have to work so hard. So that's, that's really a beautiful flow of protection, rage contained,

Brenda: (41:25)

Flowing out of the cup too.

Deborah: (41:27)

Exactly.

Brenda: (41:28)

Good. So you have a lot of images here that you can be working with in your daily pages, in your body, in creating a narrative.

Deborah: (41:39)

I think this is like just allowing and trusting what you're doing is you're leading me through each image as correct. And this is to me, is what it means to do soul work, to trust the process. I'm just flowing and I'm not resisting. It doesn't have to make sense to my brain. I want to capture it somehow. It feels important to do that, to include what we just did into something that I know.

Brenda: (42:14)

To frame it, to reframe it in a way that you can understand. To make meaning. So this is a personal narrative of making meaning. From a very long held emotion that has been basically captivating you. Thank you.

Deborah: (42:33)

Well, thank you. See, we just wandered into a meadow or, that field of dreams.

Announcer: (42:50)

And that concludes this week's episode of the Soul Path Sessions podcast with Deborah Meints-Pierson and Brenda Littleton. If you'd like to hear more about living a more soulful life, please subscribe to our channel on your favorite podcast app and be sure to check out the show notes and links below. For Information from Deborah visit soulpathsessions.com And for Brenda, brendalittleton.com. Thank you for listening and remember to follow your soul, it knows the way.