You'll never find the spiritual fulfillment you are seeking by pretending like you aren't human.
You've probably heard things like this before. "Don't watch the news, it lowers your vibration!" Or, "anger is a dark force! Advanced spiritual beings only feel love!" Or maybe even, "this space is for love and light only!"
Intuitively, you probably realize these statements are full of dogma and feel . . . empty and judgmental. That's because they are.
Join Loraine Martinez-Bellamy and I as we talk about why this love-and-light-only mentality is spiritual bypassing, and why avoiding your humanity isn't a spiritual practice.
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SPIRITUAL BYPASSING ISN'T A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE feat. Loraine Martinez Bellamy
Julia: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Becoming Divine. My name is Julia Wesley, your host. And today I have Lorraine Martinez Bellamy with us. She is a lawyer turned life and business coach. She helps high achieving multi-passionate women shift from self doubt and overwhelm to owning and sharing their brilliance.
Her programs teach women how to become powerful decision makers and ditch the daily mind drama. So thank you so much for being with us.
Loraine: [00:00:39] Hi, thank you for having me.
Julia: [00:00:41] I'm excited to talk about how our spiritual practices are meant to help us be human and the practicality of integrating our spiritual practices.
So where do you want to start? It's such a big topic.
Loraine: [00:00:55] So I loved the quote that you had. I don't know if it's in your podcast, tagline or where it was, but it was like if your spiritual practice helps distract you from being human, it's not a spiritual practice.
And I think that's the one thing that resonated the most because I do tend to find that in my clients, when you step into a personal development journey or spiritual journey you go one way or the other. Like you go from being super Type A assertive, and then you're totally woo and cannot deal with anything except positive energy.
And I think a lot of us have gone through that process of learning new spiritual practices, and then feeling lost about how to apply that in your normal life. For example, I still am a practicing attorney and I am a life coach. So those two careers are completely, in many ways, divergent. One is very traditional, very masculine, very adversarial and life coaching is more creative, more open, more feminine.
And learning how to combine my, forms of art in both being a lawyer and being a life coach has been such an awesome journey for me. And I love sharing that with my clients, how to learn things about yourself and then integrate them into your right now. And not having to go live isolated where no one fucks with your vibe.
Julia: [00:02:15] Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly it. What I'm really hoping to avoid is toxic positivity. I think a lot of that can happen when you first start getting into the woo. Because you hear about things like raise your vibration and, you have to raise your vibration to talk to angels or spirit guides or to astral project. Or you need to make sure you're safe.
And so make sure you raise your vibration. And it comes with it, this idea that you can never be angry, that you can never experience a quote unquote, negative emotion. And I'm like, oh no, that's not how we do that. It's how we engage with our experiences. How are you engaging with anger? How are you engaging with happiness?
Because you can engage with happiness in an unhealthy way. And that's what a spiritual practice is for. It helps you gain perspective and to engage with the human experience, not to just give you another piece of dogma on how to live. I think that's what it's turned into.
Loraine: [00:03:15] Absolutely. And then being able to engage from a place of self trust and self love. And for me spiritual practices, the intention is to enhance your experience on earth as a human. And for me and my clients, I think that means being able to ground deeper into trusting yourself, into loving yourself, even your shadow parts. Because they have their time in place where they can come in and protect you.
I always tell my clients, your shadow self is like that angry self that comes out when you need to be physically protected or, mentally protected from a situation. There's still a place for every part of your psyche to have its day. And I think, like you said, when you step into the toxic positivity, there's all this spiritual bypass where you're just not feeling your feelings.
And instead, deciding that you're happy from like a weird forced happiness that what it actually does is push your actual feelings further and further down until you blow up one day and like curse somebody out. Or lose it and have road rage.
And I see so much of that in our society. That numbing and that pressing down. It's just like the snap moments.
So being able to figure out I call them sanity practices and it's just, what is it that you need to do on a daily basis to come back into yourself, to ground into your wholeness? And then be able to function from a place of like calm groundedness, which is not always positive. I could be grounded and calm and pissed off, and I'm still fully in control of my thoughts and feelings.
And I've decided to be angry right now. So having that awareness of how you're feeling, to me is the gift of developing these spiritual practices of knowing yourself more. So you can have greater self-trust and greater awareness of how you're showing up in the world.
Julia: [00:05:11] Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Especially when you talk about anger, the idea of anger has been coming up a lot for me. The idea of using anger to keep you safe, the idea of maybe even being physically angry. Is that always a negative thing? Is that always something we need to judge ourselves for?
Maybe sometimes, is it a positive thing? If you find yourself in a situation where your boundaries are about to be like grievously wounded, maybe you need to have that experience. Maybe you need to use that part of yourself to make you safe, or at least to get you to a safer place. And I think it's an interesting idea.
Because in a lot of these circles, you hear the idea of anger, being a poison that you drink and expect someone else to die from-- which is of course, I'm not saying hold onto your resentment. That's the opposite of what I'm saying. But sometimes being angry is what helps you realize where a boundary is supposed to be, but you are not respecting.
And when you're able to engage with a spiritual practice and sit with it, then you can be like, oh, I see. And so sometimes, you're right. Like a sanity practice would be okay, recognize you're angry, but give it a second, and then maybe take an action. Because when we're only listening to anger or when we're just in a reactive, unconscious state of mind, then we start to make those like weird snap judgment kind of things, which then screw us up. So this is why spiritual practices are so practical, right? Because you can save yourself a whole lot of trouble. Yeah. A whole lot of trouble. And give yourself so much grace and figure out at the end of it, how to not demonize yourself.
Loraine: [00:06:54] Absolutely. And I think one thing you mentioned this, so on point, because I do think that anger is a poison that you drink and expect someone else to die from. I get it. But to me, resentment, which is what you identified, that's really the poison. And to me, resentment is anger that you let just fester and linger without addressing. And without allowing the anger that came up for you to show you the boundary that's been crossed. And the crazy thing is I talk to my clients a lot about resentment, because I feel like it's something that's it's how a lot of people are feeling and it's so pervasive is the word I was looking for.
And sometimes a boundary that was crossed wasn't crossed by someone else. It was you not honoring your own boundaries and allowing people to not only step over your boundaries, but like almost inviting them to do that. And I find a lot of times, because of how we've been socialized as women to be helpers and to take care, there's so many boundaries that are constantly being crossed. And we no longer trust ourselves because we've suppressed that anger. And I think it's the perfect feeling to remind you of where your boundaries are and who crossed it, whether it was somebody else or you yourself that kind of dishonored the boundary. Anger I will tell you, I'm a Manifester and I'm an Enneagram Eight.
So anger is like my natural state.
It's my default. So it's near and dear to my heart. And I think that it can bring about so many amazing things if it's harnessed properly.
Julia: [00:08:30] I agree. I am also a Manifester. When you engage with anger in the way that it was intended to be used, it is such a force for change and growth.
And this is why it's so important. I am so familiar with the feeling and concept of resentment. I was holding onto resentment for decades, years, and years and years. And it got to the point where it was actually making me sick, but it was because I wasn't allowing myself to express my anger.
So I think you're spot on when you were saying that it was because again, as a woman or just, even as a kid, when you're female and young, you're not supposed to inconvenience people. You're not supposed to make other people feel uncomfortable. You're supposed to bend. You're supposed to accommodate.
And I was just like, knowing no, this isn't right. I know this is wrong. And I held onto it and I held onto it and that's what made me sick. It wasn't the anger, it was the unexpressed anger. And so I think, yeah. Yeah. And so I think you're talking about how to use a spiritual practice to help you be human, something like meditation-- it has been perfect for helping me understand what I'm feeling, how I really want to react to it, how I want to be feeling. And if I'm currently feeling something that I don't want to be feeling sitting with it long enough to let myself feel something different.
Loraine: [00:09:53] Yeah. Yeah, that's part that part I feel like is what most people are so uncomfortable with is being able to trust yourself and know that you can sit in a feeling and that you will rise up from it, that you will not get stuck in anger.
You won't get stuck, stuck in depression. And I think that's what keeps a lot of people from digging deep earlier on in their lives. It's the thought that I don't have time to fall apart right now. I don't have time to like, take my whole life apart right now. So I'm just going to ignore this like nudge and this feeling that I keep having.
I'm just going to ignore it and distract myself by buying things, by eating things, by scrolling, by going on vacations. And I love a good vacation, but I see it every day. So they have something to look forward to and don't have to deal with the state of their current daily life. So it becomes so much easier to just kick the can down the road, because I don't have time to deal with these emotions right now.
Julia: [00:10:48] Exactly. And I think it's funny when we're talking about spiritual bypassing and not wanting to feel the emotions, you're just kicking the can down the road. You haven't made it go away. You're just trying to ignore it. And so I really dealt with depression and anxiety. And when you're talking about the, I don't have time to break down right now, I'm intimately familiar with that. My depression and anxiety started when I was about 12 and went till I was about, oh, my early twenties when I was finally like, I can't take it anymore.
I had to let myself collapse and it's in the collapsing that I realized that I can use these spiritual practices to help me be present with myself and to heal. And so that's why it gets me so much when I see people being like, oh, I ran off to Saturn in my meditation and I'm like, okay, cool. But is that the only thing you're doing? Are you trying so hard to be like an interdimensional mermaid that you forgot that you're a human? Because. I think that it's a fun experience.
Right? Escapisms fun. Sometimes it's having fun and it has its place, but sometimes you're really hurting yourself with it. And that I think is what happens when you engage with spiritual practices to do that. And you're like twisting it. That's not what that's for.
Loraine: [00:12:01] I'm still laughing at intergalactic mermaid.
Julia: [00:12:04] Yeah. Sounds fun. Sounds great. Sounds like a great energy, but you're human. I, like sorry to burst a bubble, but yeah.
Loraine: [00:12:10] Yeah. And my sanity practices is journaling. So I do everything that you do in meditation, in my journal. Which I think for those of you listening, if you are a person that you feel like you're a little bit more analytical, I feel like journaling is such an easy and free way to connect your body with your mind. And be able to really embody your process as you're going through it, because you're doing something physical.
I feel the same way about yoga. Anything that where I'm thinking, but also moving my body at the same time is the best for me in terms of embodying the shifts that I feel in my emotions and in my thoughts. But I find journaling to be the way if you're at the beginning of your journey, And you don't know how to listen to your higher self quote unquote.
I, at the beginning, I would just write to myself, like how I was feeling and do thought dumps and how I was feeling right now, and then allow that kind of inner wisdom to come through and provide wisdom beyond what I am living right now. And it's weird at the beginning, but as you learn to trust yourself and start gathering those messages from within and start really harnessing that inner wisdom and becomes more of a practice. Now, if I'm feeling funky, I know it's because I've gotten lazy with one of my spiritual practices and they can be so simple, right?
I'm a new mom. I have a, almost 10 month old. So my very vibey, like luxurious mornings that I love to have with like coffee and journaling and reading and yoga. Like they've had to be like capsized into the bare minimum of what I need to be able to show up as like my best self in the day. And right now, for me, it's the being able to journal for a few minutes or read for a few minutes and drink my coffee by myself.
If I can get 10 minutes before the baby needs something, or my husband is up and asking me things, then that allows me to ground in until I remember this is a season of life. I get to decide how I think about it. I get to decide that energy I bring to it.
I find that our natural state is to, if we don't have spiritual practices, our natural state is to just fight the fact that the good is only so good because there's not so good.
You know what I mean?
Julia: [00:14:23] Yeah. No, there's so much, I love about what you said. Before I forget how you said, this is just a season of life. And that is so important in terms of perspective and healing and why you would even use a spiritual practice to assist you in your healing. Because if you don't think that there's any other option than what you're experiencing right now, you might just continuously choose to spiritually bypass or use, escapism to never try and be present. But if you're in flow with nature and the reality of reality and creation, you understand that everything changes. That was one of the things that got me through depression. And I was like, I remember not being depressed.
Loraine: [00:15:05] Yeah, same here. I remember not feeling this way.
Julia: [00:15:10] Exactly. And I was like, I want that again. I will get there. And it took time. It took dedication and it took like a practical application of me doing it every day. And let me preface this by saying I'm not a therapist. So this isn't medical advice, but I used meditation to help me process everything that I didn't want to feel.
And it eventually got me there. So to me, that's what a spiritual practice really is for, to help you realize that you were operating unconsciously. If you're operating unconsciously and you're creating a reality around you, that is reflective of your unconscious biases and beliefs and fears, and any other unexamined parts of you, you're going to see that reflected outside of you are going to be having a whole bunch of things where you're like this again, really?
Why are we back here? But if you apply a spiritual practice to it-- being present-- then you'll be able to recognize an undesired repeating pattern when it happens, shift it and change it and then create a human experience, a human life that is worth being present for.
And that is really what I hope to encourage people to do with this platform in this podcast, because I'm like, no, you don't need to escape the human experience. You can use these tools that you're already using to make it magical.
Loraine: [00:16:30] Yeah. Absolutely. I agree with that so much. I like you, what you mentioned about the unconscious manifestation of your thoughts, like this, the fact that you don't have the awareness of what you're thinking and feeling on a daily basis. So the fact that you're living this life is like just really weird. So should that happen to you?
Is this very weird? And it's all because you're not in touch with your vibration. You're not in touch with physically the thoughts and feelings that you're having, which creates a vibration that you have as a human, which is attracting what you're living in right now. And I think when you figure out that paradox, however it happens in your personal development journey and your spiritual practice journey, it's like the biggest aha moment. Because you're like, oh, If I want to change the dynamic right now, I have all of the control, right?
Even if circumstances are outside of our control, which there are many, we still have so much within our control and being able to tap into that energy on a daily basis and find a practice that allows you to tune in to how you're feeling and thinking on that day.
And then decide whether you want to continue down that path, knowing exactly what that's going to lead you to. However, yesterday worked out for you. And I think as you gain that awareness and whether it's meditation, journaling, whatever, you need to gain an awareness of what's going on in your head. And sometimes it's coaching, or therapy, you need a third person to come in and say, actually if you pause right there, that's your path, right?
I remember judging myself for having a therapist or coach. I was going to yoga.
I was learning meditation. There was so many tools in my toolbox and now I have my favorites, but it doesn't matter. There's no judgment about what it's going to take for you to gain an awareness of who you are and how you think and get cozy with your patterns from a place of no judgment. And then from a place of no judgment and neutrality about whatever it is that's going on, you can decide differently.
But I think we get so mired in the judgment, the self judgment, especially that we can't see the way out to choose something different.
And I love the complexity of my mind now. And I always appreciated that I was a deep thinker and a deep feeler, and just very much a philosopher in how I saw the world, even as a child. A few years ago, when I came across Human Design and learn so much about, being a Manifestor. So much of why I'm such a complicated person made sense.
I like to be the one providing the information. I like to initiate things. I don't need anyone co-signing what I do. When I learned human design, that was such a healing practice for me.
Julia: [00:19:12] And that's a great example of a spiritual tool helping you be, not a better human, but enjoy being human more.
It allows you to understand yourself and you're like, wait a second. This isn't the awful thing I thought this was. And I want to hit on something that you brought up a little bit earlier about sometimes there are situations outside of our control and there are many, and I think that's so important when we're talking about manifesting . Is that sometimes we're like, every option in front of me is a shitty option.
Like how do I pick from this? And when you were talking about before using a spiritual practice, You can say which one, feeling into me, which one is going to get me closer to what I want? And so it's being aware of yourself and what it is that you really want. What feels like you, what doesn't feel like you, being present with yourself again. And then you can say I still don't like what I'm picking, but I like it more than all of my other options.
And then I see it as like leapfrogging, every time you pick an option that feels most like you, if not exactly like you, then you're going to be presented with an entirely new set of options. And then you'll pick from that.
And you mentioned judgment and shame. And I think a lot of this creating our reality thing, people think that there's implied judgment and shame in it. And I like to say, I think you said this too, not what I've manifested, but what has been manifested. Because then it's not my fault that this has happened, because what good is that anyways? How has that growth? Blaming yourself for something that you didn't want?
That's just a bunch of shame that no one needs and it's not useful. And so you can say, this is what happened. How am I going to respond to it? So I just wanted to point that out because I thought that was such a really important distinction to make on those points.
Loraine: [00:21:01] Yeah. Yeah. And I always say guilt and same are like the most useless feelings in the world because they don't produce anything.
Cause I'm totally with you that anger, feelings of injustice and all those things can fuel so many good things in your life in terms of boundaries and so many good movements in terms of social justice. But shame leads you down zero paths other than staying where you are right now.
And I think that, so many of us are stuck in that feeling. And what I tell my clients is like, self-awareness is always number one to me.
And one thing that I have to always prescribe to myself and my clients, when you become aware of something is just self-compassion. Because with self-awareness comes deep shame and judgment of this is a boundary that people have been not respecting. This is a boundary you haven't been respecting.
And I do think that this is where a lot of teachers and healers and coaches are able to facilitate these breakthroughs for people is in creating a place of self-compassion for people have this awareness and then be kind of enveloped in compassion from someone else.
If you haven't yet developed the skill of providing it for yourself. Does that make sense?
Julia: [00:22:11] That makes perfect sense. Yeah. Self-compassion is probably the most important tool that you will learn in order to figure out how to relate to yourself. Because if you haven't done any of the work previous, you probably hate yourself a little bit.
Maybe you don't realize it, but you probably hate yourself a little bit. And if you haven't done the work to figure out to how to sit with yourself, because so many of us can't sit with ourselves and it's because we can't stand ourselves a little bit. If you figure out how to cultivate self-compassion to understand that if I had been paying attention to that, I would have acted different. And even if I did know better and I didn't act different, I'm still going to give myself compassion because learning new things sometimes takes time.
Loraine: [00:22:55] Yeah, A hundred percent.
I just love that little formula that you just said about, if this comes up, then this. To always have an answer for yourself, that's useful. And to make sure that you're not turning, whether it's a spiritual practice, a new something you've learned that's new, against yourself. Really cognizant of that when I learn new things like this should always-- like you were saying about manifestation and realizing that even though your current circumstances were a result of what you've been thinking and feeling-- not to make that a problem. Not to judge yourself and stay in that, oh my God, I created this in my life.
Even when you do manifest things that are crappy. I like it to serve as a red flag for myself or an alarm of hey, something's funky in your energy and that's why these things are creeping up. And I am so quick to course correct, because I'm like, I am not going down that road.
Julia: [00:23:49] Also as manifestors we manifest so quickly that we're able to course correct. I had something that I manifested. I was just, thinking about it, a couple hours beforehand, and then I manifested it and I was like, I don't want that. What was I thinking? And so I think it's, you're right.
It is a good opportunity to be like, oops, nope, got that wrong. And then I think on top of that, if you're engaging with a spiritual practice or a spiritual tool and you don't feel as if it's an opportunity for liberation, maybe put it down. Maybe it will be useful for you sometime later, or maybe it won't be useful for you at all, but if you're taking a practice like manifestation or raising your vibration, or any thing like that, and it's not something that you feel can help you change your life and be more compassionate to yourself, then don't engage with it at all.
Just set it down,
Loraine: [00:24:38] I love how like cut and dry you're putting that, because I think some of us will spend time being like, why can't I get this right? Why is this making me feel like shit? Like, why is this just move on to the next thing. There's so many different ways to do life and to expand your ability to feel and to experience and to be present that if it's not working for you, then just move on to the next thing.
Julia: [00:25:02] Yeah, I was, I think listening to a conversation or part of a conversation maybe today about gratitude. I've always had a weird relationship with gratitude practices. Yeah, because it feels like obligatory gratitude. And I'm like, this isn't gratitude. These are just things I'm supposed to be grateful for.
And it's only reinforcing how annoyed I am for trying to do a gratitude list. Yeah.
Loraine: [00:25:25] Same way. I feel like gratitude is ingrained in how I live life. So anytime someone wants me to do a gratitude list, I'm like, this is how I live my life. Like I don't need to sit here and think about things I'm grateful for.
I'm grateful all the time. It's just who I am. Like, I don't need to do like this list thing.
Julia: [00:25:44] Yeah. So for me there, during, especially my depression, I felt like I didn't have anything to be grateful for. It I'm like everything sucks. What's there to be grateful for? And, but I did recently change my relationship with gratitude.
Because I was like, oh, it's the feeling I'm supposed to be feeling like I'm not supposed to look at my couch and be like, love you couch. Even though I do love my couch. Like I use my couch as an example a lot. It's a great couch. But I'm like, you want me to be grateful for like my car, but my car has been giving me trouble.
Like, how am I supposed to be grateful for my car? It's a problem. And. I was able to change my relationship with gratitude, by understanding like the basics and then applying it to how it worked best for me. If you tell me, I have to find 10 things per day to be grateful for, then it just becomes obligation.
It becomes like busy work. It's like homework now. And I'm like this is no fun.
Loraine: [00:26:32] A hundred percent. How have you have, how have you been able to incorporate it in a way that works for you?
Julia: [00:26:38] So I actually was reading The Power. Written by the lady who wrote The Secret. And it worked until it didn't. Until I like got off track, but there's the gratitude rock.
And I have this really awesome rose quartz. And I think back on my day and I'm like, what did I really enjoy about my day? And there can be like 10 things that I really loved about my day, but I'll pick one that was my favorite. And that I would really like more of. And I'll say, thank you. I'll hold the rock.
I'll express my gratitude to the rock. If I'm really feeling it, I'll kiss the rock and then I'll put it down and I'll be like, there we go. That's all good. That wasn't too much from me that wasn't like, now this is work, yeah.
Loraine: [00:27:18] I liked that. I liked that. And I think that's how we should approach every one of these practices.
Like a lot of times my clients are like, how am I supposed to journal? And I have a journal course. So it's okay, I can give you access to my journal course, if you want to develop like a habit. But there's no right or wrong way to do it. You're just going to write your feelings and thoughts on paper. Whether that's a bulleted list, whether it's narrative form, whether it's whatever. However, it comes out of you, I just want it to come out of you.
So then you can read it back and say, oh, okay, that's what's going on. Or you can just walk away and say, oh, I feel so much lighter now.
Julia: [00:27:54] Yeah, I that's what I love about journaling. I did also use journaling in . My healing process and it was almost as if I was bleeding off the pain and you're right.
It is something about like how kinesthetic it is. Like you're physically writing it out.
Loraine: [00:28:07] That's the word I was looking for.
Julia: [00:28:10] Yeah. It's just something about engaging the body. You're right. Like yoga. Yoga is another like excellent tool for that, because you're literally moving the emotion through your body, which is where it's getting stuck.
It's getting stuck in your body.
Loraine: [00:28:23] Yep. Absolutely. Yoga is so important to me when I'm feeling like I've worked a lot on body image and body love and just being able to be one with my body. And the way that I've grown in my mindset journey and my personal development, spiritual journey. Yeah.
I'm always striving to create that same relationship of trust and love and just like wholeness with my body, and yoga is a hundred percent like the thing that I have to go to when I'm feeling disconnected. Like where, when I'm feeling like I'm so great and so is my mind and my spirit, but I really don't like this body suit. And yoga is like always the thing that I go to for this to get back in and be like, Hey, this is a package deal.
Okay.
Julia: [00:29:06] Yeah. Yeah cause it's all about embodiment eventually. That's where we want to get to with our spiritual practices is embodiment, at least from my perspective. And I think when we first discover these tools, there's astral projection, which is awesome. It's amazing. I'm not knocking it, but I think we can get enamored with it and the idea of it. And we're like, it's so much more fun to not be in a body. Cause I can explore different star systems and talk to people I've never met before and I get weird information and it's cool. And I'm like, yeah, but it can also be in your body, like you can do, you can channel, you can do it in different ways.
And push comes to shove? You're still human. And I always feel like I'm bursting a bubble when I tell people that they're still human. And I'm like, but it's going to be okay. Give it a shot. It's going to be fun.
But in terms of using a spiritual practice for yourself and making it work for you, for me in order for meditation to work-- because I dabbled on and off with it for a handful of years before I got serious.
And for me to see any actual progress I had to meditate every day. And part of just my self-care practice, I still meditate every day just because it's how I get in touch with me, how I can shut off the mind chatter because I, again operate a lot in my head. I have a really active, like upper energy centers. I spent a lot of time there and so helping me pay attention to what's going on there and not necessarily reacting to it and just observing it in a weird way, helps me with my embodiment practices. And so when I talk to people who are like I can't meditate. And I'm like, there's so many different ways to meditate.
You mentioned walking earlier, they're walking meditations. That's an excellent way to ground and be embodied.
Loraine: [00:30:47] Yep. Yup. That was like my practice. Over the summer, when I was like fourth trimester postpartum, walking was like, I can, I'm like returning back to myself because you go through a process of giving birth and it's like very disorienting.
Like you come out of the other side of it, and even if everything went perfectly well, which was my case, you still feel like weird. Just out of sorts a little bit. And I did feel like those walking meditations and I really liked walking in the summer when it was like so hot. It was just like my version of hot yoga.
I was just like walking and it was like 95 degrees and I would just like zone out. I was probably dehydrated. It was so good to just return back and have like quiet time and to feel my body moving and to just hear my thoughts and stuff. So if you need to start anywhere, just start with walking.
Julia: [00:31:40] Yeah, exactly. Cause everyone walks. And it's just about being in touch with you, your body. It's an embodiment practice and paying attention to how does my body feel when I'm walking and not trying to create something, just observing it. Is my skin warm?
Can I feel the sun on my shoulders? Do my feet hurt a little bit. Am I feeling a twinge in my back? It that's just it. And then if you can get to the point where you can enjoy it, even better. But I think it's so important to enjoy the relationship with your body or be in a good relationship with your body and enjoy your human body because it's literally an expression of you.
Loraine: [00:32:16] I love that notion. I'm going to noodle on that one, for sure. I'm going to add that one to my like thought work when it comes to body. And really integrating my body and into the rest of like my fully integrated self.
Julia: [00:32:29] I think the body is just so cool and I've had an up and down relationship with my body as well.
And it got to the point where I was like, I just need to love my body for supporting me as it has. And being an expression of me, even when I've let myself down, like emotionally or mentally, like my body has always been there for me. Yup. Yeah. That's why when I say my body is an expression of me, there's still a part of me that's always got my back.
Loraine: [00:32:53] I love that. I love that so much. Ev en in our darkest moments, it's just functioning.
Julia: [00:32:59] And even if someone, is maybe going through like chronic pain or something, and so that can be really hard. And so that's probably not a good example for that. But maybe there's another part of you that's still holding you up and it's still an expression of you. But. Yeah I want to be mindful of your time Loraine, so do you want to tell people how they can find you and work with you?
Loraine: [00:33:18] Yeah, absolutely. So my favorite place to hang out with Instagram, my handle is loly L O L Y underscore love. It was my original one before I was a grownup. Life and business coach. But you'll be able to find me Lorraine Martinez Bellamy if you search either of those. I love hanging out there. And then also on my site, Loraine with one R Martinez.com, you can find out about my journal course and one-on-one coaching program.
Those are my only two offerings right now, but I just love to be able to support people, especially those of you going through the process of oh shit. Like my "oh shit" moment was when I realized all of my goals and I turned 30 and I checked everything off my list and I was like, I'm bored. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?
And why does everyone seem so content? So if you find yourself in that place please reach out. I just love making new friends and hearing from new people.
Julia: [00:34:11] That sounds so, so amazing. I love how you managed to check everything off by, off your list by the time you were 30.
Loraine: [00:34:17] Do you know what that meant?
My twenties were like, I had a great time and I wouldn't change them, but it was a crazy, manic Type A-- this is what I am accomplishing in the next 10 years. And then it happened. And that's when the depression and anxiety, I never struggled with it before then. It was right when I turned 30 and I just hit the wall and I was like, oh no, this is not good. Yeah.
Julia: [00:34:36] And so I will have all of your links in your bio and how to contact you in the episode notes, everyone.
And I just want to thank you so much for being with us today and talking with me, I had, this was a lot of fun.
Loraine: [00:34:49] You're welcome. I had a great time. We could talk all day and go down all the rabbit holes, but we'll end it here, guys.
Julia: [00:34:55] All right, we'll see you next time, everyone.
Bye.