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://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

Acknowledgments:

Original Music composed by Zach Meints

The Soul Path Sessions Podcast is 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!

Episode 2 Description

The T.S. Eliot poem, Wait Without Hope, leads Deborah and Brenda into a conversation about mycelium, interconnection and potentiality. It's Brenda's turn to visit the "mead-hall" from episode #1 and she introduces us to the term ALTUS and a discussion about the underlying forces that inform everything that are deeply connected to soul and the importance, as therapists, of doing their own soul work in order to help their clients show up and do their best. Using writing to invite soul into one's work segues into a conversation about getting older and the value of seeking guidance from our older selves and the need to surround our self with others whose soul resonates with our own so that we can always embrace the soulful part of conversation that enriches our life.

Chapters & Links

00:05:10 - Mycelium Connects Everything

https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/

00:07:54 - Somatic Exercise: ALTUS

https://latin-dictionary.net/definition/2812/altus-alta

00:15:02 - Changing the Collective Reality: The Tipping Point

https://integrallife.com/tipping-points-eye-contemplation/

00:19:12 - The Therapist Has To Be Soulful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0qdpws0D7Y

00:24:06 - Writing In The Corners of Time

https://www.folkstory.com/

00:29:42 - The Work Chooses You: Just Show Up and Do Your Best

http://robertromanyshyn.jigsy.com/

00:31:11 - The Older Self As Guide

https://www.lifehack.org/837960/talk-to-your-future-self

00:35:25 - The Salon: The Soulful Part of Conversation

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/124843.The_Castle_of_the_Pearl

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: (00:50)

As I was looking at a poem, I wasn't even looking at it, I went out to lay on the couch last night under the stars and asked myself, gee, I love poetry, but I don't know. I don't want to work at this, I'm tired. Then the poem came to me. I didn't have to work. And of course, because I have a smartphone, I just went right to the first stanza and the first line came to me, which is typical. And it's a T. S. Eliot poem from East Coker. It's called "Wait Without Hope."

Deborah: (01:22)

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, if you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness, the dancing whisper of running streams and winter lightning, the wild time unseen in the wild strawberry, the laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy not lost, but requiring pointing to the agony of death and birth.

Deborah: (02:09)

So often, I think we're in this time historically right now we've been through so much collectively and it's hard to know what to hope for. I mean the panacea, whatever. I think it's so difficult to know what to hope for. And I think this poem came to my soul because I need to be still, I need to be paying attention. I don't know what the right thing would be. If the soul of the earth and the soul of the people are working out their drama, how do I not know that we don't need to be going through exactly what we're going through? These birth pain, this agony of, and the reemergence of, or the emergence of something new. How do I know? So, I think this is not just my poem. I think it's collectively, what do we hope for?

Deborah: (03:02)

What if we hope for the wrong thing? What do I know? How do I know what to love? What do I have faith in? So much of this being shaken right now, even the thoughts, they become so condensed and to even to be able to surrender thought, and in this darkness, there is so much freedom in that darkness. And to know that what T.S. Eliot is saying, in this beauty, in our own birth, the seed has to burst forth of painful processes, heat, and time and pressure, and our own birth. I know having given birth I just thought it was just going die to release this child into the world, this greatest blessing. And just to hold that image, that this is the possibility of this time is so difficult, but so necessary. So I believe this is why the poem visited me last night.

Brenda: (04:00)

Beautiful. I'm always shy in reading David Whyte and as Deborah reminded me, you have to repeat it three times, but I won't. This is "Just Beyond Yourself." Just beyond yourself. It's where you need to be, half a step into self forgetting, and the rest restored by what you'll meet. There is a road always beckoning When you see the two sides of it closing together at that far horizon and deep in the foundations of your own heart at exactly the same time at exactly the same time. That's how you'll know it's the road you have to follow. That's how you'll know, it's where you have to go. That's how you'll know you have to go. That's how you'll know. That's how, you know, just beyond yourself, it's where you need to be.

Brenda: (05:10)

I turn to this poem often for personal and professional. And now during this time of what I call the liminal space where the frequencies of war like terminal war is so palpable to me, I'm picking up earlier wars like maybe multidimensional frequencies of pushing isotopes and seeing dreams of the billows of nuclear explosions and mushrooms. It's interesting. I've been following the work of two writers on mycelium both Merlin Sheldrake, and the professor out of UBC whose name has escaped me now, but the idea of how we're all interconnected and searching for the mother tree and how those mycelium under the soil connect all of us. And so this poem by David Whyte reinforces being on that path and there is no other path. This is where we are.

Brenda: (06:23)

And yet the interconnectedness of this potentiality, the sense of trauma, the sense of doom, the sense of fear is like a river. And it's a frequency and I've stepped into it and it takes me backward and it takes me forward and the non locality of it, the quantumness of it. And it's something that I don't really want to contain. I don't know how to contain. I don't have those skill sets, but it definitely is part of my day to day narrative right now. I rely on my soul work to address it because my ego work, I just want to climb into bed do nothing. Just that, that paralyzation of what can I do? I read something, a meme that said, I'm sitting here, I'm paraphrasing poorly, but the idea of, I need to wash my face. Why should I bother washing my face? You know, when so much is going on. And I'm just trying to wash my face. And yet I'm, as I wash my face, I see everything that's happening in the world. And it makes even the most simplest form of self care ridiculous.

Deborah: (07:54)

Is it possible for us to play with what you just did with me in our first episode, which was to find it in your body?

Brenda: (08:03)

For me, it's my, my solar plexus as well. The interconnection between inner and outer, and my throat chakra. That connection.

Deborah: (08:18)

As you find it there, if there were a picture that might come up that would just appear, something that would match those feelings, what might you see?

Brenda: (08:30)

It's the mycelium, it's the interconnectedness. It's the coming together and then separating and climbing space and then coming together and then connecting and then separating and moving forward or moving sideways or moving up and moving down. There's this word Altus that I use A-L-T-U-S, and it means going wider, higher, and deeper all at the same time. I see that with the mycelium underground, and yet when you expose that from the underground, it dies. It becomes parched. So it needs to be cloaked. It needs to have the soil, it needs to function underneath.

Deborah: (09:14)

Something happening under the surface. So, if we take this to your mead-hall

Brenda: (09:19)

Yes.

Deborah: (09:20)

And you use a little active imagination, what happens?

Brenda: (09:25)

There is a web, like a piece of fabric of mycelium. It's kind of like the over amplified version of Medusa instead of having all these snakes and moving around, it's all of these extensions of mycelium and they're moving around. It's just this sheet of fabric full of mycelium, jetting out, kind of a combo of Medusa and octopus, octopi, which I adore, as part of my table and flowing, just flowing. But there's a lot of, actually now I see suction cups trying to land and connect and claim. So the name that comes is Mariday, Mariday, and it's been with me since I was about three. And I think that's when I first studied the Olympians mythology. So it's tied to that sense of being in bed, listening with my grandmother, reading a book and feeling safe. So the there's a sense of safety and yet there's a sense of It could be very frightening if you don't know what's power.

Brenda: (11:22)

You look very different. You look very much, as you're saying this, you almost look like the flow you're dancing with your hands and your face is lightened up. So I'm just asking you, what does your body feel like as you're describing this?

Brenda: (11:38)

I feel fluid and it feels better than being stiff and paralyzed. The idea of just seeing the mycelium and seeing the interconnectedness with octopus, with Medusa, there's a historic going into the ego and I don't want to, I want to stay with soul. So there's a sense of motion fluidity, a sense of there's lots of moving parts, lots of moving parts.

Deborah: (12:18)

I think the next question you asked, this is new to me, is how in the over world, this expression, can it be part of, how can it be part of the over world or the world outside the mead-hall?

Deborah: (12:38)

Can it be integrated?

Brenda: (12:41)

I need to get out of my head because I'm back into the flow of the question.

Deborah: (12:49)

Let's go back to what is this entity.

Brenda: (12:54)

How does it serve me?

Deborah: (12:55)

How does it serve you?

Brenda: (12:56)

How does it serve me? How long has it been here and how can I serve it? What can I do for it? It serves me, well, the most important focus in my healing path is the connection with earth. And so mycelium is the foundation of earth. Everything, it runs earth, whether we are aware of it or not. So I get a sense of, regardless of what's going on geopolitically or ego wise, that there is an abundance of activity from underground in the soul world, from my own repressed and my own unconscious and collective conscious unconscious, that's happening independent and ongoing. And yet I have this feeling of an Alliance and a sense of, don't forget this. Don't forget. There's also this don't forget.

Deborah: (14:13)

There's more of that actually, what you're just describing. There's more of that

Brenda: (14:17)

In what way?

Deborah: (14:18)

Well, the human population is a lot, but when you think about this mycelium, the animal, the animal kingdom - queendom, there's so much, there's so many more, there's so many more moving parts that we take into account on our news media. I hear like the underground, what I'm hearing you talk about this powerful force underneath all things that includes all things. And we as human beings just kind of put a frame around what we're doing is if we weren't having these fibrous connections to everything that they weren't moving while we're moving. Under the ground, up in the sky,

Brenda: (15:02)

I often wonder what reality would be for us as a collective unit. If we functioned with the infusion of information from earth, as opposed to politics or economies or capitalism, or territorial domains. If we were to actually make our decisions and our goals from a similar space as how the earth functions, that's the animistic part of my soul. The devotion of being an animist that everything has soul, everything has spirit. We are a very small part of it.

Deborah: (15:56)

And yet a really important part. One of the things I asked one of my teachers in the PhD program that I couldn't complete because it was just too much work with it and trying to also be a therapist, but it was such an important journey for me. I was going through something so painful trying to decide if I could stay in this program because it was literally killing me. And also I was going through some personal issues, a lawsuit and a divorce. It was just like my own Greek tragedy was going on. I said I don't even know how to make a choice. And she said, just one prayer, just ask for the highest and the best for all. And it really released me because it's a prayer I still say every morning when I wake up, I say, thy will be done, on my Christian upbringing.

Deborah: (16:46)

But I remember her saying the highest and the best for all, that's going be a right choice and then be led. I remember when I was studying Ken Wilber and he talked about if you could just have like 51%, it would just be the tipping point. And I just wonder how many people, how many people might be listening to this or saying, I do draw, I do ask, like in the serenity prayer to have the courage, to ask for help and to know the things I can't change, to have to surrender those things. But also I get direction. So the things that I can change, I have the I have the wisdom to know the difference. I do think there are quite a few of us now who are just sort of perplexed and so we say thy will be done. When I say thy I'm not talking about a hairy man in the sky, I'm talking about the mycelium. I'm talking about the deep ocean. I'm talking about the collective energy that has formed the cosmos. Thy will be done for the evolution of love and the evolution of holding more. That potential of that great ever widening circle, that spiral of consciousness.

Deborah: (18:00)

And just my little bit in it. I remember when we were hiking about a month ago and you were saying, I feel so small because we were under this cliff at the Indian Canyons and this idea just let me do my bit. just have this sense there's quite a few of us saying, I don't know what I can do, but I'm open. I'm just surrendered. And then we get these dropdowns like these. Oh, I think I'll take that road. I think I'll know which way to go. There'll be a general nudge,

Brenda: (18:34)

A sense of willingness and curiosity. There's a phrase that I find myself relying on when a client, a patient is sitting at the most harrowing edge, it's just show up and do your best. Just show up and do your best. And that's it.

Deborah: (18:58)

People think we know what we're doing. We do, as therapists. This is a dirty little secret, but we also go into completely open, most of us. I mean, if we're dogmatic, we're probably not going to be a very good therapist.

Brenda: (19:11)

Well, we're not, behavioralists either,

Deborah: (19:12)

Right? I mean, there's certain things that are quite procedural. Like we'll teach you a skill and then we'll be procedural. But so often we have this huge body of knowledge and like the mycelium, we're just drawing from it in the moment, we're following the conversation, the thread of conversation and the body of that person, and what's needed in the moment in a really present way. So to me to be a therapist, it has to be soulful because it has to come from that flow state, that humble place that we're drawing in the moment that's quite mysterious. I find so often, Brenda, when I'm doing a session, that the thing we're talking about in the beginning somehow comes around full circle. Do you ever notice this at the end of the hour? Well, let's say we started talking about horses or a ball game or something. And for some reason, in the context of therapy, as the hour comes to full circle, it'll be reframed that horse image, the ball game image or anything mundane. And it'll be like that was just like a tale we told. We went around all the way around the circle. We got lost. We went on heroic journey. We found resolution.

Brenda: (20:22)

And then they get up to leave and they actually say the exact thing that they haven't said right before they go out the door. And it's like, that's the real issue. And there's no time

Deborah: (20:31)

That's called a headache. But then that's the beginning of the next session. Isn't it?

Brenda: (20:39)

Or something else comes along.

Deborah: (20:40)

Something else comes along. That's an interesting idea though. I know we're riffing on that a little bit, but that happens quite a bit. Why is it that the client will wait until the very last minute to tell you why they came as you're leaving to me that has to do with attachment wounds. Like, you know, this idea that I'm afraid to tell you because you might not be able to, you might not care. So I'm going tell you, I'm going to run out the door. For me, in my practice, I don't care unless their house burned down. I'll say, you know, that thing you said when you just were grabbing the handle of the door or pushing the button to, you know, turn off the computer, I want to start there. I want to start there. Because it's been bugging me and it's also bugging me because it seemed really important and you left it for last. There's someone inside of you who wanted to be heard, but she got, or he got pushed as an afterthought. Have you ever thought that the most important thing that you need to address is in your consciousness as an afterthought?

Brenda: (21:49)

I see that as the dance between ego and soul. That the first 50 minutes or 60 minutes is ego. Then as they leave either the office or the screen, soul says, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Deborah: (22:06)

Yeah.

Brenda: (22:07)

You're not getting out of here without saying this, but time's up. And that's a boundary for ego. So there is that dance of ego and soul as well.

Deborah: (22:19)

You can't be a therapist and not work with your own ego and soul. The California Institute of Integral Studies has a wonderful presentation that I usually watch on YouTube. There were just two therapists talking about this hide and seek game of therapy and how, as therapists, we have to do our soul work ourselves, because whatever we're not dealing with, walks in the door. That's what I notice. If I'm not dealing with my thing, it's like, did central casting just send you? Because like I remember when I was going through a divorce and it was just horrendous and I really didn't know how to live as a human being, going through that. Do you know how many people walked in and said my husband cheated on me and I'm like, well shit, my husband cheated I'm not allowed to tell you that, but I don't know how you navigate that.

Brenda: (23:11)

Mirrors, smoke and mirrors.

Deborah: (23:13)

Yea, and mirrors that could light you on fire. That was to me complete surrender, not just having to surrender to the process.

Brenda: (23:22)

I'm working with a whole stable of people who want to write and they end up facing all types of issues over cleaning their house to having horrible relationships, to getting sick and physical illness, all because of their commitment to writing. And that's pretty much my path too. It was just like, oh my gosh, who's teaching whom here.

Deborah: (23:51)

Who's teaching whom. It just lights you up.

Brenda: (23:54)

I've taught writing for 25 years at a university and it was always the same conversation. So I don't know if it gets better.

Deborah: (24:06)

Last weekend I did a course with Jonathan Young and Anne Bach. They have a wonderful center for story and mythic study. They're wonderful. They were telling the story of "Its A Wonderful Life." One thing Anne does, and she's an English teacher, she stops in the middle and just makes us right for five minutes after we've been immersed in something really juicy. So, the emotions are running and she'll say, she does what you do, she'll give a prompt like "was there ever a time in your life that you felt lost and you didn't know something." Now put your pen down on the paper and don't remove it. write for five minutes, and all you get is five minutes. I found myself each time that happens, the results are astonishing and soul bearing, because it's not going to be good writing. It's not going to be good. It's going to be quick, serve it up hot, kind of. And yet it's the seed. She says, don't put it through the shredder, whatever you've written. I sometimes think I give myself no time to write. I write in the corners of time.

Brenda: (25:13)

Oh, that's a beautiful line. That's a good title of a book.

Deborah: (25:18)

That I'll never write. It's got to be deep and meaningful.

Brenda: (25:22)

Well, I have several prompts that we can enter in our future shows on self that we could share our own and then have our, our listeners participate as a call to action as well. I love the idea of being immersed and then being asked to stop because it's two different multiple ways of learning when you're actually having to not just take in material and cognitively process it. But now you're having to expel and actually participate, but you're not speaking it, you're writing it down. So your body's involved, your handwriting is involved. Because I'm assuming you're not doing it on a computer. That is shifting gears and it really informs the body on what you just participated in. It's not from the 18 inches from your heart to the top of your head, you're feeling it and you're writing it, even if it's on the edges of time,

Deborah: (26:31)

Right. This idea that we invite - my experience of writing is it's the hardest thing to do - So I invite soul and I go to the hard work of writing. But recently it's just been happening like attacks of writing when I'm deeply immersed in something. So I like that return. So for me, I've had writer's block for, well, let's see, I'm pretty old now. So like 40 years. And even though I've done a lot of writing, I wrote a book with a total block. I mean, I give myself credit. It was like dragging cement for two or three years in my life. But I left poetry behind. I was a poetry major. You can actually be a poetry major and that's what I was and I left it behind. And so what I've noticed recently, Right before the pandemic we went to Sedona and a poem fell out of me and I wrote it as fast as I could because it was falling out.

Deborah: (27:30)

But I was watching an Eagle catch, the wind in the vortex of this beautiful rock formation and the poem fell out of me. So I had to catch it. So I've been having like poem droppings. So I started paying attention to this. I have this Duck Lake that I go to in the summer and I was in my kayak and poems would start writing themselves. But it came from being in a trance state, in a deely heart informed place where I was so besotted by beauty or pain. That really was what you were saying, that the body had to expel it. And it came out as poetry. And at first I didn't think it was legit because it would come out so quickly that all it asked for was some sculpting. Just, just take off some of those rough edges, but the poem would arrive and I would wait like the way it would end, I'd go "who said that?"

Deborah: (28:26)

So in a weird way, when I read my poetry back to me, I don't feel ego is involved. It's like, when you write down dreams, it was like, I just took dictation. I dreamed this thing. I certainly didn't say oh, look what I dreamed last night. I'm quite educated here. I'm quite the, quite the dreamer. It's just these words flew out. And it had images that were really important. I don't feel for the first time in my life like I care if anybody likes it. I just know it's right. And maybe that's the gift. To go back to our conversation about James Hillman, in my sixties, which is hard to even imagine that I'm that old, that the ego has stepped aside a bit more and this soul goes, look at that.

Brenda: (29:15)

These are my metaphors, but the idea of a low tide, I grew up in diurnal tide life. There's a low tie tide and a low, low tide, and there's a high tide and a high, high tide. And there's open real estate in between. What's exposed, really exposed, to then covering it all up and being very quiet about it.

Deborah: (29:40)

The great image.

Brenda: (29:42)

So when we, this segues very abruptly, but Robert Romanyshyn was one of my professors and he's a great researcher, and he just was helping me with writing and anxiety and teaching writing and double anxiety in a newly honed position at a university while I was in a PhD program and traveling from Santa Barbara to San Bernardino and trying to be on time and be brilliant at the same time. And me not knowing why or how, but the point is, he said, Brenda, you don't choose the work. The work chooses you. And it doesn't really make a mistake. It always tries to percolate up various portals. So multiple people will have the same idea, but whether or not it's manifested and released out into the conscious world is really up to that situation, the conditions. So I'm likening this, I'm parallel structuring this, to your comment about poetry and that it's not the ego sitting down and composing. You download it, it chose you. And all you have to do is be the steward of it.

Deborah: (31:06)

Be willing,

Brenda: (31:07)

Be willing and curious. Show up and do your best.

Deborah: (31:11)

Be willing, be curious. And it's interesting, I never really looked forward to getting old. Well, my soul looked forward to getting old, but my personality, ego didn't have any place for it. You just drop off the end of the earth in a Winnebago, I don't know how you do that.

Brenda: (31:27)

The body, the body didn't really wanna get old.

Deborah: (31:32)

It still grumbles about it. But yeah, I've always been an old person, I think.

Brenda: (31:36)

I've had old hands since I was three years old.

Deborah: (31:39)

Really?

Brenda: (31:40)

Yeah.

Deborah: (31:42)

That's crazy. I had all the rheumatism when I was a little girl. My mother took me to a cardiologist and I couldn't move my neck for a week. I would get spasms. I was constantly sick. And I sometimes I couldn't see. I'd have weird things happen to my body, like zits and sweat. I just feel like there's a lot of sh*t going on just being sick most of my adult life until I learned how to care for my body. Actually as an older person, I feel better than I ever have in my life. I know how to care for my body. But getting older is just kind of like, oh, you got some white hair. So that's like, when you, I don't know, you get pubic hair or something.

Brenda: (32:32)

I was as going to say pubic hair. It's such a shock when you see a gray hair that's a pubic hair and go, 'what the hell is that?' Gandolf came and visited last night.

Deborah: (32:42)

Then it's just like, it's not middle essence. What are we going to call it? It's just this ushering into old age, older age. It's older age old, not old compared to the rocks we were hanging out with, but it's okay. You could work with it. When I was younger, I covered my zits with makeup. I don't cover my hair with hair color anymore, but this idea I can just work with the material. I can just work with what it is. You can work with it artfully, right? I work with it,

Brenda: (33:14)

Especially now that we're living older. I was on a zoom birthday party with a woman turning 100 and she was reflecting on her eighties and how she's so much better now. And I'm thinking eighties is so far away from me, and here this woman is reflecting back when she was 80 and it just puts such relative relativity in place. I realized, oh my gosh. And that's when I started to work with my older self. And now I rely on my older self to guide me. The terror of life sometimes is like, wait a minute, I have an older self, let's go and talk with her. Let's see how she did it. Let's see what her advice is. Well, how did she get through this? And it really helps.

Deborah: (34:03)

That's a really great therapeutic exercise. It was what life coach asked me to do when I was doing Soul Path Sessions so that I could start a new business as a spiritual life coach. She basically said, it's a year later, `it's December 31st, 2016, so what have you done? So I just wrote it from that place and everything manifested. Because I just sat there. I had a candle in my mind, I was sitting at this table, this wooden desk. It was just my imagination, but I wrote out what I had to look back on. And I think that's just marvelous, I've done that in group. I invite our listeners to do this exercise, look into the future and ask yourself "where are you?"

Brenda: (35:01)

Ask your older self, "how did you get there?"

Deborah: (35:03)

How did you get there? Good.

Brenda: (35:05)

What was the process? It's not an intellectual one. Is it so much as have the body remember? Because as a quantumist, the idea is nonlinear. We can go back and deal with our younger child. We can go ahead in a future and deal with our older self the same way. So, how do we get here? What did, what did we do?

Deborah: (35:25)

This is one of the things I did. It was like to call towards myself conversations with people that are interesting and awake. That would be definitely on there: find the glittery people. There's this book called Castle of the Pearl that I came across when I was a young woman. And I didn't know anybody because I just moved back to California and I was pretty much stranded with a mentally ill dad and lots of troubles. The book instructed you to name the qualities of the kinds of people you wanted to know and put them at a round table like, King Arthur, and once you named the historical people, like you want to sit with Gandhi or whoever, you put them at the table and then you name their qualities and then you made another table and you put those qualities around the table and then you went out into your community, or beyond your community, and you took risks. If you saw the smoke signals or heard the drum beat from the following village, you'd go there. I found myself engaging with people at the health food store. Just having more of a conversation then just picking up my tofu and broccoli and leaving. Going to a native American ceremony. I went to some deep immersion, like dance and drumming circles and music festivals. But I'd start to engage in conversation. And if someone glittered, I would invite them to tea. There's a thing called salon. I was reading Utne Reader at the time. I felt like a little kid, I'd say I don't know if you want to come to my office for pizza, Domino's pizza and water.

Deborah: (37:25)

This is my gourmet offering to you. Would you come over to my office and we'll sit there for a couple hours. And so I invited five, six women, and of those six women, three of them became my dearest friends. Two of them passed on now and then one is left. Then I wished upon a star for another friend. And I realized that sometimes you have to refresh your friendship circle because a lot of us, as we get older, we lose so many people. If you lived to be in your sixties, you're going to have lost friends. Just the way it goes. People that were older than you. I always liked people older than myself as they were further down the trail and a lot of them have passed away and I had to go right back and do my Castle of the Pearl and say, you gotta do it again. I have walked this neighborhood found the pretty gardens and people out there gardening and I'll engage in conversation again and see if it works. It's not my business, who's my friend.

Brenda: (38:34)

It sounds like the perfect blend of curiosity and showing up and non-judging of your outcomes. You're willing just to see what comes.

Deborah: (38:48)

Well, people are treasures when they're awakening. They offer so much. There's someone to talk to. I think that's why the Universe divided us all up into different colors and sizes and shapes. So we can all go out on our explorer's expedition and then come out and share "this what I noticed" like we're doing today. "I went journeying and this is what I found". That's the soulful part of conversation.

Announcer: (39:20)

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 more information from Deborah visit soul path sessions.com and for Brenda, brendalittleton.com. Thank you for listening. And remember to follow your soul. It knows the way.