Finding Balance in Chaos: The Power of Spiritual Practices
EP. 05
In this episode of the Mae B Mindful Podcast, host Hannah Mae delves into the importance of spiritual self-care. She discusses the significance of practices like prayer, meditation, and self-hypnosis in maintaining balance amidst life's chaos. Hannah shares personal insights and stories, highlighting how these practices can ground us, bring clarity, and help us transcend challenges. Tune in to discover how cultivating a daily spiritual practice can profoundly impact your overall well-being and growth.
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, this is the Mae B Mindful Podcast, and I am your host, Hannah Mae. I'm a mother of six, a conscious birth instructor and educator, a spiritual growth facilitator, and a certified hypnotist. This podcast is about inspiring hope, expanding awareness and consciousness in order to revolutionize the way we live and experience our lives. You can expect thought-provoking episodes each week, spanning a range of topics drawn from both my own journey of transformation and healing and working with others. I hope you find this podcast to be informative, refreshing, illuminating, and instrumental in your own soul's evolution and growth. Let's jump right in.
Hi, welcome back to the Mae B Mindful Podcast. I'm myself again. This week's episode I want to talk about spiritual self-care. Yeah, that's really where it's at because when this is in balance, everything else can function pretty well, and it will inspire everything else to get right on track where it wants to be. Because I really believe, and I've said it before, that the soul is bigger and it can transcend anything and everything, and I believe we can heal on so many levels when we access this part of ourselves and we grow this part of ourselves.
What I want to talk about specifically is the importance of a practice: prayer, meditation. I have and teach a self-hypnosis practice. It's really powerful for creating change, and then of course, there's a conversation that we'll follow up with in another episode around blocks and things that can inhibit us stepping onto this and into this action for ourselves.
So, I'll just tell you why I think this is important, okay? And so, I don't know if anybody's noticed, but the world is [ __ ] crazy. Like, it is bad [ __ ] crazy outside my door. You know what I mean? You don't have to go very far to come into conflict with lunacy sometimes, right? And these things can affect us, not to mention our lives might be crazy, or they might at least feel crazy. There could be a lot of opportunity coming in; there could be disaster happening; there could be conflict happening; there could be tragedy happening. And if we have a practice and something that can anchor us and ground us in the midst of all of that—the good, the bad, the ugly—because even the good and even the blessings, those things can actually begin to feel burdensome sometimes and too much because they can get us very much outside of ourselves and disregulated.
And even the good things, and so, when we can build in a practice and have something that can bring us back to center and can restore us to our right minds, it's sort of like coming in from a storm and the metaphor being the eye of the storm. And we can get real caught up in the volatility of life, and it can feel very chaotic, whether it is really chaotic or it just feels chaotic, and we can dramatically shift our experience when we can enter and shift where we are standing. And by that, I mean, are we outside of ourselves in that chaos, or are we centered and aligned and grounded? And there's a lot of different types of prayer, and I'll talk about that also in another episode. And I just really want to focus on why it's so rewarding and gratifying to be able to do.
And so, you know, a lot of people think that, oh, and I've heard a lot of people say this, they don't know how to pray, they don't know how to meditate, and there's a lot of ideas and misconceptions about what that is. And there's a lot of rigidity and rules or a perception or an idea of what it's supposed to be that can stop us from actually entering into it very organically and just relaxing and allowing this process to actually become a guide for us. And it really is an incredible thing when we can get to a place where we can follow the prompts of our spirit and have it be something that can take us deeper rather than staying surface in our conscious mind and the busy chaotic part of our mind that actually is like the place where we're living, which is why we're so stressed out.
I had an experience recently where there's somebody that I was working with, and I was encouraging them to practice this, and I was encouraging them to really dive more into this practice to take care of themselves because everything was feeling chaotic, and they were being very affected and impacted by external circumstances. That is life, and then they had to deal with their life's work that also, in addition to that, they had to manage and handle, and being a mom and this and that. And it's like I had been encouraging them to step into this practice, their meditation practice. And so, they did this, and they called me back, and they left me a message, and it was so powerful to hear the shift that 20 minutes made in this person. And they had called me, and they had asked me for feedback, and they were trying to navigate something and find a way. Now, it didn't really matter what I or anybody else would have said at this point because these are the things that we need to have an experience with. There's nothing that anybody can really say to make that change in us. We have to have that rearrangement within ourselves.
So short of like reaching into somebody, which is not a tangible thing, I can't go, okay, we're going to put this over here, and we're going to just rearrange, and we're going to clean this up, and we're going to get rid of this clutter, and we're going to just make everything nice in your home so you just want to sit there and be cozy, okay? I can't do that for somebody else. Nobody else can do that for me. This is the work that I have to be willing to do for myself. And am I willing to come off the craziness, which can feel really difficult because the more I get caught up in it, the more caught up I get, and the further outside myself I get, the further away from my center it can feel. And all it really is, is a simple action in order to get back into that. But it can feel, in the mind, incredibly challenging.
So incredible to hear this shift in her disposition. She was so calm, and what she said really echoed my own experience. So everything came into perspective for her, and she said, I'm so incredibly relaxed that I don't even want to get up, I don't even want to go back to life. And of course, the goal is that we begin to integrate these experiences into life because what we've done, we've come back to ourself, and we have entered back into our body, so to speak. It's as if we have landed back at the seat of our center. And I think it's Michael Singer in Untethered Soul where he talks about, I forget the exact language that he used, but he talks about the seat at the center of our consciousness. And that language for me, unless I changed the words, which I could have done, really had so much resonance for me because that seat at the center of my consciousness is, it is exhale, it is where I want to be. And once I'm there, I don't want to be anywhere else because that is home.
And sometimes there are things that block us from getting into that inner room, that inner chamber, and that place, like, that's like that throne room within because this is where we access spirit, this is where we access the inner kingdom, this is where we can access insight, this is where we can access information. In a regulated state, we can access everything we need to know. We can't do it in a disregulated state, and the world can be so incredibly disregulated that this is the only way. This is how we grow our spiritual experience because this is how we connect with ourself, we connect with spirit, what we identify as that, and build that relationship. And the only way to build that relationship is to spend time in that relationship and in that conversation, okay?
And some people look at meditation as going to this place of nothingness, and a lot of people say, well, I can't quiet my mind, therefore I can't do it, and so they give up, and they throw in the towel really, really fast, and they judge the process before they even begin. But when we allow ourselves permission to have whatever surfaces, because we're really kind of powerless over what comes in, we can make the choice not to follow a thought, we can do our best to refocus. But if we understand that the mind is never designed to be totally quiet, even when you're sleeping, you are dreaming, whether you remember it or not, the subconscious is always presenting something. And so, the goal of meditation is to quiet the conscious mind and to access the subconscious. And so, that is actually when more things will present, which is why, I don't know if you've ever experienced this, if you're trying to go to sleep at night and the conscious mind starts to just settle down, then these other thoughts that maybe weren't given time to be addressed during the day might all of a sudden start popping up. It's like, hey, what about me? Hey, what about me? Hey, you haven't given time to me. And this stuff can keep us awake, and that's why a lot of people suffer from sleeplessness.
And actually, in this practice that I learned, that I teach, self-hypnosis practice, when you do it at night, it affects this pretty dramatically. People who suffered from what they thought was insomnia or sleeplessness, they're actually able to fall asleep very quickly when they do this because what it is, is it's actually giving space to and allowing for those things. And so, in this practice, you allow for the mind to present whatever it does. And instead of attaching to it and going off on a tangent with it, it's a guided process where you understand that it's okay if things are presenting. And the goal is not to have a totally quiet mind, but the goal is to get back into that theta brain wave state at least and come back into, like, sort of connect back to the earth's heartbeat and your own heartbeat and have those things align.
It reminds me, what just reminded me, is when you co-sleep with a child or you have a child on your chest or skin-to-skin contact, a mother's heartbeat or father's heartbeat regulates their babies, and your breath regulates theirs, and there's this resonance and harmony and synchronizing, beautiful, like an endorphin release that comes with that. And so, we can do that for ourselves, and it's really, really powerful and really beautiful and really critical, I think, so that we can step out of the emergency room, so to speak, the sympathetic, and get back into the healing room because the healing room is where we heal, of course. The emergency room is not where you want to spend a lot of your time. We should be spending something like 2 to 5 percent, a very, very small percentage of our time in the emergency room. It's designed for emergencies, so actual real situations that require a fight-flight response, the adrenaline-producing events that cause us to need to take some kind of action in order for us to survive a situation, maybe, right, or properly address the situation in a timely manner.
But if we're disregulated all of the time and our body's getting that message and we're constantly producing and pumping that adrenaline out, then we're in the emergency room a good amount of time. And over time, this is going to start to negatively impact our bodies, and certain things are going to start to break down, which is what happens a lot of time if we're experiencing too much stress, obviously, as we get older, if there's a compounding of stress and if we're experiencing stress for too long of a period of time. I had this experience recently where I was in Bali, and I was having some anxiety around some things, and some things were really weighing on me, and it was all sort of spinning around in my head. And I was like, I need to just go ground, I need to get back into a calm spot. So, I decided to go for this incredible walk down this hill that was built into the jungle, like the cliff that walked down to this river. And there were these healing pools, they're absolutely gorgeous. And I went down there, and nobody was down there, and I went down there, and I just was like, I'm just going to take a minute and do my meditation.
And actually, I practiced some of my self-hypnosis. There are these recognitions that I repeat, and I am used to going very deep into trance when I can do this because it's a practice, and I've built it in. So, it's like muscle memory for me, and usually takes like a good 20 minutes, but I'll tell you, once I get to maybe that 15-minute mark, maybe it happens a lot sooner, time distortion is a thing, and I could easily, easily sit there for 40 minutes, an hour. And that's not something that at the beginning of this practice I ever thought would be possible for me because I was like, look at that, like a crazy-ass chicken with its head cut off running everywhere. My parents, when I was a teenager, were like, we're genuinely concerned about you because you just run out and then you run in, and like, where are you going? And I was like, I'm busy, but actually, I didn't have anything I had to go do. It was just everything was an emergency, and I was constantly running on this adrenaline and anxiety, and that's how I was wired and operating for a good period of time.
So you see why I needed to develop this practice. And that had some really negative repercussions because when you're in that place and you become disregulated, it's like a self-perpetuating storm that just keeps building and building. It's like a hurricane before it makes landfall and like ultimately creates devastation. And so it was like this process of one devastating thing after another, but it was all as a result of being totally disregulated and not knowing or having the tools to really just calm down, decompress, and come back into myself. And now, most people will say to me, like, wow, you're a very calm person, wow, you're so calm, you're so this, and I'm like, if only you knew and what I have to do in order to stay calm, I have to because otherwise, I'm wired to extreme, and I don't like that swing. So this for me has been really profound, and I've had a lot of insight and things come through. This is where I get my insight and where I have these epiphanies and where I come to these deeper understandings about myself or if I need to see something differently, it's in this very regulated, prayerful, or meditative state where I'm open, where I'm seeking, and where my mind can be still enough to where I can hear.
Because it's one thing to pray, and this is how I used to pray. I used to be like, please, please, please, please, and then I'd run away, or I'd ask a question. There was a lot of desperation in it, and I had a lot of needs, right, a lot of unresolved, unmet needs, and I was like, okay, what do I do? I'll pray about it. And so I didn't think that my prayers were being answered. And the thing is, they weren't really yielding the results that they could have been because that's exactly what I was doing. I was being like, I need this, this, this, this, this, and now I'm going to run away before I can even get an answer. And so it's not that there's not this benevolent power that isn't willing to respond and meet the need, it's that we basically can't stay still long enough in order to hear it. And so the stillness is really required. And you know, I've heard it said that God's voice is quiet, it is a whisper, but when you hear it and it comes from within, it's like it springs up as this wellspring from within, and it's these living waters that we can access from within. It's not going to happen outside of us.
So if we're too far outside of ourselves, if it's too loud, then we're not going to be able to hear that. And if we keep ourselves too busy, then yeah, it's very difficult to hear that. So people say, well, how are you going to get an answer? It's like, well, have you tried getting quiet? I remember one of the most profound things I ever did when I was directed to pray this specific prayer and wait for an answer. And I was like, okay, and I did it, and I was blown away because I had an instant insight with every single time I sat and listened. And I realized as a result of that, that I never actually took the time before that to listen. I was just so constantly disregulated that I just stayed on the go.
So back to my experience in the jungle, I went down these steps, and I laid on this shed that was just very conveniently there in the midst of the jungle. And there was this deep sort of hum of the jungle. It's very alive, it's very lush, and there's all different kinds of insects and birds and water running, and the river down below. And I started the self-hypnosis practice that I do, and I kind of opened it up, and I tend to be very organic in my prayer. Sometimes it can be harder to do that, so I'll need something set. Like St. Teresa the Little Flower said, prayer is a raising or a lifting of the heart to God. And so sometimes it very spontaneously can just come from my heart, and sometimes I need to read something to focus me, and sometimes I need a practice like my self-hypnosis practice. And so I started that practice, and I dropped in very quickly. And then it was this really incredible experience where I could literally hear and feel the hum and the vibration of the jungle in my body, and I could feel my whole body really vibrating. And I became so incredibly at peace that after about, I don't know, maybe 30, 35 minutes of doing this, I had kind of lost track of time. But I was like, I have to go up because there was something I had to do, but I was like, I just don't care. I was so incredibly relaxed, and my body was able to so deeply rest that I didn't even care about the thing that I had been stressing about before. I realized that it was completely unimportant, and this was reality. This took me back to reality. So that thing that was stressing me out became—it was just—I realized it wasn't real. Do you know what I'm saying? It was just an external stress, it was a fear, and that was it. And so this completely calmed and neutralized that fear for me and put me back in my body.
But the goal is really to integrate this and start to practice bringing this into our life and to practice this enough every day to where it becomes easier and easier to access, and it just becomes this part of our spiritual musculature, so to speak, where it's like this spiritual muscle memory, where the more experience that we have with this and the deeper we go with this, the more we can easily access it no matter where we are. And maybe we have certain anchoring techniques that we can bring in to reinforce that in our bodies and bring us right back to that. So there's so much to say on this around our concept of higher power. Like, do you have to be spiritual to do this? I think it's a pretty spiritual thing in essence and practice, but everybody's at a different place with this. But the biggest thing really to get past are the thoughts and the blocks and the obstacles in our mind, and those are going to be different for everybody based on their circumstances, based on their beliefs, and based on their own perceptions and conceptions of what that means to them and what it is that they're accessing.
And naturally, there's things that when we do that, we are going to attune to in our own bodies. And sometimes, that often or maybe always, I'm just going to say, throw it out there, always, it's going to bring things up for us to address and look at, and there's always some work in that. But this is the spiritual experience that is the journey. And another reason why it needs to be a consistent thing is once we start to have a spiritual experience—I don't know if this has ever happened to you where you've had a really powerful experience, but then it sort of fizzles out and you're like, where did that go? And you want to recapture that. The spiritual experience is designed to be progressive. Once you step onto that path, you have to stay on that path if you want to continue to grow.
And I had this epiphany where I was like, my effort has to continue. Once you start to make a certain amount of effort, you can't stop making that effort or we digress because we are human, because we have these minds that are oftentimes in our bodies. In our human ways, it's just very opposite to the spiritual experience. And so which one do we want to go with? Do we want to go with what the body wants? And of course, there's balance in this, but we kind of have to choose a path. And I have found that the more I practice and grow in this stuff, the more almost it's required of me to continue to practice and grow. It's kind of like in a yoga practice, you will get strong, but it means that you can do more, and the sky is the limit really with what you can do. And you can always get stronger, and you can always expand your understanding of a concept or of a move or continue to grow that.
I know somebody that used to say, there's no ceiling on spiritual growth, which is a pretty incredible thing because in that way, when we access spirit, that means we're unlimited because the essence of spirit is that it is unlimited. And our bodies and in the human experience, we are very limited, we are finite, our understanding is finite. So to be able to access this deeper wisdom that we can really only do within and really only solve these problems here, sometimes nobody else has the answer. Sometimes we need to reach out and get support and get feedback and help us figure something out, and we need somebody's direction or inspiration, or somebody can give us an answer that can really help us. But I have found that there are certain things and times in life where there's nothing anybody can do or say to help me solve a problem that I have to be able to have an experience with in order to overcome.
I really welcome any feedback, questions, thoughts. Until next time, soulseekers, I love you guys. Bye.
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