The Wild Sage Society Podcast w/ Marcie Walker
The Wild Sage Society Podcast is where we explore the ideas and practices that help us live healthy, connected, and purpose-filled lives. Each week host Marcie Walker connects with healers, spiritual leaders, doctors and small business owners on topics such as human resilience, conscious leadership, and modern shamanism.
The Wild Sage Society Podcast w/ Marcie Walker
37- Authentic Leadership: A Journey to Wholeness with Shelley Lynn
Can you imagine powering your life with a deep consciousness, fostering a culture of care, and leading with authenticity?
Shelley Lynn, accomplished owner and director of Vision Space, joins us on our podcast to share her insights on thought leadership and how authenticity paves the path towards a fulfilling life. With her vast experience in guiding projects and individuals, Shelley illuminates the transformative power of consciousness and self-leadership.
We'll journey into the world of mind-body integration as Shelley unfolds its significance and how our lives can be enriched by comprehending our body's sensations. It's fascinating how theater has been a catalyst in Shelley's work, enabling her to harness the healing powers of presence and a secure environment in her work. Expect a deep-dive discussion on theater's therapeutic potential, the role of a witness in healing, and how self-regulation is imperative for a balanced life.
As we round off our conversation, we delve into Shelley's joy and purpose in coaching. You'll find her enthusiasm contagious as she talks about her eclectic experiences right from hula hooping on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to how it ties into the concept of the redemocratization of life. We also explore the concept of a four-day workweek, envisaging a workplace where managers are replaced with coaches, creating an environment of psychological safety and collaboration. So, tune in to this enriching conversation and get ready for a transformative journey.
Connect with Shelly:
www.thevisionspace.com
Hi! I'm Marcie Walker. I became a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist and Shamanic Practitioner on a mission to help people, who were holding on by a thread, drowning in guilt and shame, and punishing themselves with the kind of self-talk they'd never say to friends.
I believe that our inner life affects our outer life, and it is my passion to help people transform their inner selves, so they can achieve their full potential and create a life of purpose, fulfillment, and positive influence. I am committed to creating a safe and supportive space for my clients to explore their inner world, heal past traumas, and create a life that aligns with their true self.
Ready to embark on a transformative journey? Book your free 30-minute discovery call now and let's explore how I can support you in achieving your goals and creating a life of purpose and fulfillment. Don't wait, take the first step towards unlocking your true potential today!
💛 with love,
Marcie
Let's connect: Instagram
**If you have any questions you'd like answered on the topics we speak on, have comments or suggestions for guest please, email thewildsagesocietypodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for tuning in!
This is the Wild Sage Society podcast, where we explore the ideas and practices that help us live healthy, connected and purpose-filled lives. Each week, our host, Marcie Walker, connects with healers, spiritual leaders, doctors and small business owners on topics such as human resilience, conscious leadership and modern shamanism. Here is your host, Marcie Walker.
Speaker 2:Hi friends, thanks for tuning in. Today is going to be awesome. Today I have Shelley Lynn, the owner and director of The Vision Space. She's a yogi and a maven of performing art. She's tuning into today from Las Vegas, Nevada. Welcome, Shelley. How are you?
Speaker 3:Hi Marcie, hi Jesse, I am well. Thank you, I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for taking the big leap and leaning into the invitation. I really appreciate you. I'm really excited to talk about how you guide thought leaders and to talk about how you help build cultures of care.
Speaker 3:Okay, well, I'm excited to talk about it too. Thank you. Well, I think maybe I could say a little bit about both of those things first and then maybe what I do with that. Thought leaders. What I mean by that in general are people who are working with other people thoughtfully. So there is kind of consciousness that people are bringing into whatever work setting or organizational setting that they're in and they are guiding some kind of project or mission, and it could be an education, it could be in medicine, it could be in construction.
Speaker 3:I work with all different kinds of people, but when I say thought leaders, or when I wrote that a long time ago, the idea was that I would like, as the person I am this is I'm talking about them to guide us in ways that are holistic and caring into whatever this project is. So that's what I mean by thought leaders, and I think we're all, we're all up for that. I mean, we're all up for that challenge. Whether we take up the mantle or not, it's up to us to lead ourselves through our day-to-day and all the ways that we are interacting with others to the best of our ability and the highest service to ourselves and others. I mean that's the thing that I have been impressed with with other people and it's the thing that I work at, scrappily, every day. So that's what I mean by thought leaders, and Dusty is making his appearance.
Speaker 2:I love it. Let's see him. Well, if he shows up, gets closer, we'd love to see him. I love the way that you explained thought leaders and how that all comes in for you. How do you help those thought leaders? What is the vision space all about?
Speaker 3:Well, The Vision Space is all about helping people at an individual and also group level, but at an individual level, really tune into what it is they want to create with meaning and purpose and a holistic sense of themselves. What I mean by holistic is what is happening in their mind and their body and their spirit. And I don't edge back off of that, even inside a corporate setting, because you said something on one of your podcasts about getting frustrated with the woo-woo concept and I'm like, oh, I can talk with you about that for hours. Yes, I'm like, let's stop the woo-woo. How are we even still saying that?
Speaker 3:Because what we're talking about I mean for me, the spiritual side of life, is literally the things that we don't necessarily see but we absolutely are moved by every single day, and they encompass every aspect of our existence, and tuning into purpose and a sense of meaning and well-being is what I mean by spiritual.
Speaker 3:And just because you can't see that on a spreadsheet doesn't mean it isn't affecting that spreadsheet and everybody that's involved or affected because of that. So I am really interested in helping people create what they want to create, often inside a work environment or an organizational environment, because that's where I think I have a lot of interest in terms of the way, as groups, we can move a needle Our collective action and so I found myself gravitating towards people that are leading groups, because I am really interested in the collaborative effort and what it takes to put it into play in an effective way, and it's not by accident. These are intentional and deliberate constructs and facilitations that get the best out of groups. So that's what the vision space is about about helping you get really clear as an individual about what you want to create and then how you help to facilitate the team around you to bring that vision to life.
Speaker 2:You are talking about self-leadership and that is so fantastic and the reason that I like self-leadership and you mentioned that you scrappily do this every day. It's really tough to stay in our own lane sometimes, and especially, I think, with social media and watching everything that's going out and seeing the comparison mindset that I'm so grateful that you're helping leaders stay on their own lane and lead themselves and then be able to figure out how to affect the numbers in a greater degree with collaboration.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, thinking about staying in your lane. You're creating your lane. You don't even know what your lane is. You're discovering it every single day and you're being led by whatever North Star there is that you're tuning into. And I think, everything inside the vision space that I have been taught by others, by fabulous people who have been there before me, I take the tools and the methods and share them in the best way that I know how, so that this lane creation is based on your authenticity. And what is that? I used to think I knew what authenticity was, and then the last couple of years, I'm like wait a second, it's a whole other layer of things, which is who am I really? That brings me joy.
Speaker 3:What do I care about affecting and impacting in this lifetime, and what does that look like on the ground in the day to day? And that brings me back to self leadership and scrappily, because a lot of the competition that I deal with has nothing to do with anybody else. It's just in my own head. It's my own, like who I thought I was supposed to be or how I thought I was supposed to show up. And that argument is it's old and it's filled with its beliefs and I think everything that I have come across in the last couple of decades has been in the service of quietening that and really making room for the creative wisdom that is living through me and as me and just making as much space as I can for that to exist. And that's while. I'm learning how to do that myself. That's what I'm sharing with and guiding other leaders and people who are just leading themselves. So self leadership, I really like that. You said that.
Speaker 2:The what came through, why you were speaking and about we're creating our own lane and authenticity part is that some days it's I feel like I'm just two steps ahead of my clients, like I literally just went through the crap or the war or whatever happened, and then I have a client that comes in that's right after it and I think that in my past life, with over the last couple of years showing up in a different way in my more authentic self now, before I wanted to be so polished and perfect and all the things so I could fit in, so I could look like everybody else, and now you know, like just being able to be vulnerable and say, wow, that you're in a really tough space and I just went through that too. I don't have the pressure anymore to be perfect.
Speaker 3:I love that for you. That's great. And you have, you have so many gifts. It's very clear to me just listening to you and your gift of listening, your gift of articulation, your gift of care I mean, I've just met you, but these are the things that I've heard, and to allow space for that by not having to show up as anything else is like such an emancipation, and I, too, feel like I am. I don't even know if I'm two steps ahead of anybody, sometimes I'm just right alongside.
Speaker 3:And but the power of a long, long time ago, someone said to me well, you know, when I wanted to become a coach, I mean 20 years ago, they asked you know what gives you the, you know the platform to be a coach? How did you? You know, is your, your life isn't perfect and I'm like, no, it has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with being a clean and clear witness of somebody else and to be able to reflect their light and their vision and their strength back to them. And anybody can do that, A stranger can do that.
Speaker 3:We could walk into a gas station and have a minute conversation with someone but if they reflect back your truth, your bigger inner truth in that moment. That is an act of grace and that's, I think, the service of coaching. It's absolutely not that I have advice and the ideas. I mean I can share with you some tools and I'm all down for a swap and experience, but ultimately it is seeing you cleanly and clearly and reflecting that back to you so that you are strengthening your own felt sense of who you are. So that's what gets trafficked out there on the day to day.
Speaker 2:For our audience that doesn't know what felt sense is can you explain that.
Speaker 3:That's a good question. Well, there is, there's a whole field of study that would talk about felt sense Eugene Genlin, if I'm saying his name right actually coined that he's a philosopher. He's not with us anymore, but he has been a really enormous influence inside the world of somatic therapy and somatic experiencing and training, which, basically, let me say this about somatics first, and then I'll go back to felt sense. My understanding of somatics, in the way that it's been taught to me, is that soma of the body. Somatic is the meaning that the body makes, so it's how the body understands itself or the environment, or the world. So it's when you talk about a gut feeling or I felt that in my heart or my whole body is fluttering, I mean, these are, this is a way that your body's physiology and your body's intelligence is speaking to you. So when I say, and so that's somatic.
Speaker 3:So when I say somatic experiencing and Genlin's influence in that he was really interested in the experience of experiencing. So what does it mean to be alive, this existential understanding of being on the planet in a body with a mind and breath, and he was able to kind of get in to a way to language how we would be feeling, our perception. So there's the intellectual part of our knowingness. I can connect these dots and I can use these words to make some kind of cognitive sense. But the felt sense is that my body, and therefore my inner intuition, is either meaning into something it's kind of an inner yes, or it's an inner no. And so what I mean by felt sense is the way I make sense of the world through my body.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's such an important topic and I think with my clients that I spend a lot of time helping them make peace with their body and understand those exact sensations. Like you said, what is your yes and what is your internal no? Is it expansion and for you, or is it constriction and making you feel small? And it's so important because people just confuse those and then I think and I would like to hear your point on it I think a lot of people miscom, they confuse those sensations and they misinterpret them for something else.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I think culturally we have been and Buddhism is talking about this and all kinds of different thought traditions are talking about this that for however many thousands of years we have been separating unnecessarily, so We've been separating ourselves from each other, we've been separating ourselves from the planet, we've been separating our mind from our body and I mean, like I know you can go back to like day car, yeah, I think, and therefore I am, which reminds me of an interesting thing that happened when I was 10, but we'll come back to that.
Speaker 3:So, but it's, I am anyway, whether I'm thinking about it, I am. Anyway. There's a whole living, breathing experience here, whether I'm thinking, in all kinds of neat work and neuroscience has helped us start to see where the body and how the body is talking to us, with being able to determine how the neurochemicals are working and what's happening hormonally. But as a culture and cultures that has been continuing to build upon ideas of separation, we don't necessarily have any training or built in education, or at least not the majority of it where, or anything in our day to day industries that help us really marry together the mind and body, the mind and body contingent no, what would we call this thing that comes together Like a.
Speaker 2:Just embodiment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, it's embodiment, but for some people who might not know what that term is like, there's a, there's a conjoining right, there's a, there's an interface that happens and it's a translation that has a seamlessness, and we just. That's why I love theater, that's why I love a social, emotional learning programming that's making its way into schools, that's why I love steam programs, because of this understanding of like right and left brain coherence. God made us, however well, I say God, universe. We're made However you want to say it. Here we are, but we're with a right and a left brain. We didn't just have one.
Speaker 3:And this privileging of cognition and logistic thinking and a certain type of mind preference or for privilege is at the expense of almost everything on the planet, including ourselves, to start with, our very own experience of ourselves. And the integration of mind and body gives us our whole selves back to ourselves, the integration of all the genius in the room. So here, you're good at this and you're good at this, and this is your nuance and this is that incredible gift that you bring. Being able to see all of that and bring that to work cohesively is how our bodies don't work as individual organisms, they work as organelles right. My heart doesn't work without my liver, without my spleen. My white blood cells don't work without my red blood cells.
Speaker 3:I know I'm over simplifying it, but we're designed to work together internally and externally, and so everything that you were saying about you know meaning to think about. How are, whatever it is that you said which was better than that.
Speaker 2:Making peace with our bodies. To understand the sensations, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because it's peace and it's respect and it's listening, because there's information there.
Speaker 2:There's so much information there and it's taken me a long time to listen to my own body and understand what the signals and symptoms and the things are, and a lot of it was. For me to make peace with my physical body was to make peace with how I was feeling it and making sure that it has nutrient dense foods that make me feel better and not eat processed stuff. And then it was once I had that foundation, then I could really dig into the things that happened that helped shape me into the person that I am now.
Speaker 3:And yeah, Well, that's the way you're describing that.
Speaker 3:I don't know if this is exactly the case, but, like often, I think, for a lot of people that I've met in my life and also myself, a journey to wholeness that involves mind, body integration often starts with some kind of crisis of the physical body and understanding this symbiotic relationship between how I feel, how I understand myself, and what I am consuming, both in my mind and in my relationships and in my nutrients.
Speaker 3:And I love that you now have a nutrient rich diet and I wish that for all of us. I know that that can be a very privileged thing for people and not everybody has access to it, but, like, in whatever ways we can, I think I started my own really big journey with this because I had so many physical things that allopathic medicine could not attend to all the different types of x-rays and tests and goodness knows, and they couldn't find it, and so I went on a long journey through naturopathic and yogic processes which I was able to come back into a wholeness. But this thing about listening to your body ends and understanding what the body's information is, the body, like that fabulous book that's out there now, the body keeps the score.
Speaker 2:You have it.
Speaker 3:Yes, you know, every single thing that we experience in our whole lives is housed there, and what I love about so many aspects of coaching and mindfulness and wellness and the whole explosion of this part of life is this call for paying attention to the way in which we have things captured and frozen in us that no longer serve us, that were helpful in the moment if we had to survive. But being able to complete them, integrate them and move on from them and cultivate a new way of experiencing yourself is, I think, all the work of great coaching and great wellness, and I love that so much science is catching up with what sages and wisdom healers have known for centuries. It's really interesting to see this conjunction at this time.
Speaker 2:I agree. I agree. You mentioned that you had a story to share from when you were 10 years old and we circling back. Is this the time you wanna share it?
Speaker 3:Oh sure, it's a little tiny thing, but it actually was huge. It was a beautiful sunny day morning very early in the morning I was 10, I was running around outside, it was a beautiful fall day and I saw the sun coming over the trees in my backyard and it just had this. It was this moment of sort of sublime beauty and I heard this voice in my head that said you're only here because you think you're here, and I started to feel myself like lifting or doing something. That felt really unnerving and I ran as fast as I could over to where I saw my bike and I jumped on my bike and I rode and I rode. I was like I gotta get rid of this feeling.
Speaker 3:And now, all those years later, I was able to look back and like, oh, you were having like a deep, soulful kind of out of body experience.
Speaker 3:So even from the time I was little and I had great influences from my mom and my dad and their families, where they always were able to describe that there was something beyond us, there was magic that we were living within, that there was a God whether we wanted to call it God or not but something bigger than us that we were a part of and I was very appreciative for all the ways in which my interest in things that are unseen, that we do know, was cultivated by my fabulous parents. They're not with us anymore in this way. They're in spirit form now, but they're still with me, guiding and directing. There were two things I wanted to say. One is a little bit more about the background of things that were greatly influential to me, and then also the thing that you said about signals and people knowing how to follow them or not. That it's really like it connects really deeply with one of the main tools that I use, which is a lights on, lights off kind of tool. So let me talk about it.
Speaker 2:I love it. Okay, yes, please.
Speaker 3:So I'll say the thing from when I was little.
Speaker 3:So I've always been interested in theater and performing arts and I have a different understanding now about what that interest was and who knows, it's probably a past life coming in.
Speaker 3:But as a child that people could see me putting shows together and getting up in front of people and talking and dancing and getting other people to sing and dance. So I was just kind of guided into the theater. So thank God, because it was a home for me and a home for so many people, that was deeply inclusive and I know not all theater experiences are supportive but I was fortunate in the ones that I had had and my whole life and career was based in learning and training in theater and not just acting but actually making theater from scratch is a process called devising and ensemble and physical theater. So it's using all the signifying elements of the stage the lighting, the sound, the movement and also, really significantly, the experience with the audience. And the reason I bring this up is because it keeps looping back to these ideas of integration and these ideas of paying attention and listening to the material information of the environment and how the feedback loop is really powerful. So when I was seven I'll go back there there was a neighbor and she was lovely. She and her sister were lovely and we played all the time and she was always really animated with me. But I would listen to parents talk about her with a little bit of a disparaging tone, like, oh, I'll call her Mary, for right now Mary's really shy, Mary doesn't know how to interact with people and I was like gosh, you're not seeing the same person I'm seeing. So I don't really remember the legend as I say it is I'm seven, but it could have been seven, eight or nine, I don't know.
Speaker 3:But I rewrote Cinderella to include a circus because one of the games that we played in the backyard had to do with being animals that were really loud and rambunctious. So I cast Mary and myself as lions in this little circus part of Cinderella and I made sure that her parents were invited and other neighbors and what have you? We had lemonade, the whole thing. I've always been interested in production and when Mary got to the place in the script where she had to roar, I made sure I watched and her parents sort of looked at each other and I was like, yeah, see, all it takes is the right environment where someone feels safe and they can express themselves.
Speaker 3:Well, that's how the parents got to see that. But something really important happened for Mary, which is she had a performative moment where everything she had mind, body and spirit was coming together, coalescing in a moment of risk, and she got to experience herself as a different person, a different being, and that expansion came from that experiential. So right from early early days, I was committed to passionate about creating experiences that had a performance witness dynamic in order to expand what one knows of oneself and what one knows in the ease of other. So that's how I ended up in performance.
Speaker 2:And that's amazing, and you light up when you start to tell stories. Oh, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the natural little, the visual that I get. That's why it's the vision space is because I see, feel things in a visual, sensory way and that's how I see. So the vision space signals people sensing things to what is there, yes, or there, no. I was really interested in having help communicating with people, so I knew I needed coaching myself. I had gotten to the place in my performing arts and directing career where I was starting to work with quite a lot of people in some either high profile or just high stress scenarios and I realized my communication style basically sucked and I was like can't you see what I can see? And I'd be like you know, it's here. It's like I just, you know, I know this is all possible and I was like I need help figuring out how to stay calm and patient with people and myself so that the best of all of us shows up. And so I went on this big I got to find a coaching thing journey.
Speaker 3:At the same time I was finishing grad school in performing arts and performance studies and I realized that the theater itself, just as its own little nucleus, wasn't really where I wanted to aim all of my efforts, because I love theater, I want to be in theater, but I wanted to take all those skills that people were learning and training in and bring it out into the street and give it to all my other friends and family who would say things like I'm not creative, I'm not a good collaborator. I'm like, oh my gosh, you absolutely are. It doesn't matter that you're a dentist, it's wonderful that you're a dentist. Look what you just got all your hygienists to do. That's theater in its best form.
Speaker 3:So at the same time that I needed my own coaching, support and growing up help, I also wanted to take what I knew out into the world.
Speaker 3:So it just kind of converged and I did a lot of research to find the coaching methodology that I found, which is by an organization it's Lights on Learning and the founders, Kathy and Gary Hawk, run the organization called Clarity International, and the reason I loved them and it and it's been 17 years now that I've worked with them and they walked their talk the whole way is because it addressed the mind and the body and it was being used for folks that were CEOs of big companies, MBA coaches, people who run national organizations that we all know of, like it was out there in the world being effective as a developmental programming institutional thing, but it never shied away from. We've got a body, we've got a spirit and we need to bring those things to the table and we can use the body to help us understand our yes and our no. So it's really this fabulous shortcut decision making GPS and they call it Lights on Learning and I can tell you more about that. I'm going to take a breath because I've been talking a lot.
Speaker 2:It's great. Keep going, because you're, the passion that you have for everything that you are and do and how you show up in the world is coming through, so I appreciate that. One of the things that came through for me when you were talking about and I would like your perspective is you know when you were talking about production and how you like it. You know, I imagine and correct me if I'm wrong, because I have no idea what I'm talking about right now is that to have a great production, it's almost feels like there needs to be everybody in flow, everybody channeling their own medium of whatever performing art comes through, and that's it. There seems to be that there would be a parallel in corporate and flow state and getting that collaboration together. Am I even in the ballpark? Am I in the parking lot?
Speaker 3:You're actually right in center field. You got it, woo. Flow state. It's interesting. I was an observer of flow state from the time I was little in these theatrical experiences and I remember being really interested in going to university to study theater, but not necessarily because just to be a good actor. I'm like I want to understand what happens behind the scenes and people would say to me oh, you want to be stage manager or you want to be a technical director. I'm like no, no, no. I mean like, lift up the hood of this vehicle theater. What are the mechanisms that are enabling this flow state to happen? Because we start out at the beginning and, yes, of course, we're getting to know each other, but I have also been in theater experiences where flow state didn't happen and it was a treacherous experience. And so what are the necessary markers and structure that needs to be in place to enable it? And it's interesting because now, all these years later, I'm not sure if you're familiar with polyvagal theory or if that will come up at all in your other podcast.
Speaker 3:But essentially, this understanding of the nervous system and how our nervous system works in order for us to either be in a fight, flight, freeze, fawn or flow state, requires all kinds of different nuances. We can't say okay, they're chemical nuances, but we can support them environmentally. And when they are not supported because something traumatic or stressful happens, we experience the fight, flight or freeze version of it. And the great news from all of this study, in all these years of psychotherapy and how it's starting to really connect with the body and the somatics, is understanding how we can get back in there and reconstitute a place of safety inside the body and inside the mind so that the traumatic event can come to completion at a chemical level. And then, because the ease that that creates in the nervous system and I mean it doesn't necessarily happen all instantaneously, though it can, but over time then other part of the nervous system and the flow state can start to build new experiences that can become relied upon. So the way that you create that completion and flow state and healing inside a therapeutic scenario has to do with something and interception. We get safe outside first, like here I am. I'm touching this chair. I've got my hand on this cup. It's solid. I can feel my sitz bones, my buttocks on this chair. My dog is breathing behind me. I'm going to take a breath. I can see the door and the window. So I'm getting some exterior information that I'm safe and then I'm going to take some breaths and if I'm safe there then I can come in and I can get some felt sense so I can go. My heart feels like this. I noticed my stomach gurgling, I'm a little warm, right. So we can start to make it safe exteriorly and interiorly and that safe space. And although this can be done on your own, I think one of the profound things about polyvagal theory and I'm going to go back to theater with this in a second is that by having the dynamic and deep presence in relationship to the psychotherapist, it is just the nature of that witness and that non-judgmental presence, while you are reconstituting this environment externally and internally, that allows this healing experience to happen. And the thing that the therapist is doing is listening without judgment, is repeating and restating what they're noticing. You're saying so, you're having acknowledgement in a non-judgmental field, and then your own body, because it is being witnessed, seen, it's not on its own, it is a safe presence and you are being acknowledged Immediately starts to allow the nervous system to self-regulate, which is what, in an ideal world, we're learning as infants. An ideal world. We're learning this self-regulation through the more like regulation of the parent or the guardian, whoever is the attending factor. Now, none of us get that perfect. We won't for our kids, our parents who press. So we're in a world of learning.
Speaker 3:But that flow state I eat my body's in homeostasis, so I'm as coherent as I can be and therefore my genius and creativity and innovation is now possible because everything's online. That thriving that we are designed to do is made possible by those very simple environmental markers and the presence. So if we bring this back over to theater and we say, ok, well, how does the flow state happen? Well, what you have is a bunch of people in a room and, if you're lucky, you have a facilitator that is going to help you get comfortable in the environment.
Speaker 3:So you watch people in the theater studio. They're like smacking the wall and they're jumping up and down the ground and they're hitting their chest and they're echoing, so their voice comes off the walls because we're making the whole space safe. Your nervous system is having a relationship with it and then internally, that director is watching and witnessing what you're doing and feeding it back to you. So you're being acknowledged. So now your own creative commitment to that role or whatever starts to have a safe space to expand. So I think I learned about healing from the theater and now I'm so excited to know what was really going on at the physiological level and we get to reproduce that. That's the most amazing thing to me, and this is when I come to conscious leadership or engaging groups. Those techniques work for people all day, every day, because they're built into us as mammals, as humans, that we can repeat it.
Speaker 2:You are making me want to take a theater class. I'm not going to lie. You know, when I was younger I didn't have a Shelley Lynn to hold space for me to roar as loud as I possibly could for my parents. I was assigned, we had a girl that put together a play and we had to reenact Annie, and I think I blocked that out as a traumatic experience because I didn't have a you there to bring that out. So what you were just sharing is fascinating to me and it gave me a different perspective of the hypnotherapy that I do.
Speaker 2:So next month it'll be 10 years that I've been a certified clinical hypnotherapist and episode 40 that's coming up soon. My hypnotherapy mentor is going to be my guest and her model of hypnotherapy, which was channeled, was called the Paws Model, and the very first part of that was presence. It's exactly what you're talking about with felt sense. It's about tuning into your body and listening to your breath and finding a way to discover felt sense and just be totally present. And then the next step was what she called was a where witness, when you are watching yourself on your own stage, and then you can learn to stay in your own lane or check yourself when you're having that emotional response in groups. So thank you for sharing Well and congratulations on 10 years as a hypnotherapist.
Speaker 3:That's it, thank you. We want to do a experience with you because, oh, thank you. I think it would be really, really helpful. The witness thing, you know, it's out there, it's in every wisdom tradition it is. And cultivating.
Speaker 2:It's practicing non-attachment in some words, you know, in some theories and yes, yes, I'm.
Speaker 3:I'm so amazed and so grateful that the tool, the mechanism for creating peace within myself ourselves, the world, is right here. It's built in Like we have access to it and maybe not everybody and really like going back to scrappy. There are days and months and years that I have not felt like I had access to it because of the shadow and the pains and the stresses that I was experiencing. But, having great mentors around me and incredible examples and then people whom I've been very lucky to have loved me all the way through, I have been able to come back and find my witness over and over again and then learn how to be witness with others and I'm just like, wow, what a grace that we have that. I wanted to go back and say a little bit more about lights on learning and the lights on the soft piece for the yes and the no.
Speaker 3:I think it would correlate absolutely with the pause model and the presence. And then did you say witnessing awareness.
Speaker 2:So the pull, it was aware witness is a, and then "U is unwind the past, s is surrender, and then E is evoke. So you're evoking intuition or excellence in the evoke part.
Speaker 3:Amazing. I want to learn more. Okay, so when our body and mind come into a cohesive moment, there is a sense of you know, a sense of there's a physiological cascade of hormones, right. And so if we have a thought and we go over to the negative side, so let's just say I use this one all the time and teach it. If I have a thought of going to the gym and I go like, oh, I haven't been to the gym in three months, my ass is getting big, blah, blah, blah, you know, or the traffic's too much and I'm going to be tired immediately, so this healthy thing I'm going to do for myself. I've just created a cascade of hormones that are the fight flight chemicals, right. So I've raised my cortisol and my adrenaline can start coming in, and it's in 125,000ths of a second, so it's less than an instant. The great news is that if I have the same thought and I go over to the other side, which we call lights on side, and I think to myself, okay, I'm going to the gym, I don't have to go, like whoa, I can't wait, I'm so excited to go to the gym, it's going to be awesome, I don't have to polyanodist at all, I can literally just acknowledge I noticed that I don't feel great about the weight that I've put on. It is true I am tired and the traffic is a lot, that all that's true. And I know that I will feel better if I can just get there. So maybe I'll just put my stuff in the bag and I'll take that first step right.
Speaker 3:The immediate cascade of hormonal responses in that moment are your go-grow chemicals right. So whether it's dopamine, endorphins, your serotonin starts to regulate. If you're lucky it's oxytocin. I don't need you to throw some chocolate in that bag, but you know you're. And that's again 125,000ths of a second. So our inner ability to help ourselves either feel great or not great at a chemical level is there, and the when you are in your lights on side of it. So that's kind of like short term by short phrase. For all of that, when we get into that chemical combination, our body is signaling us. It's signaling we're in homeostasis for this set of seconds. We are producing new stem cells, so we are literally growing and enhancing ourselves and there is a physical and mental set of signals that tell us we're there and we can either feel them, see them or sense them and the whole mechanism behind the clarity operating system that we use the lights on. Learning is getting really clear. What does my body feel like when it's drained and going lights off? When, for whatever reason, this possibility is?
Speaker 3:a no, versus if I change what I say a little or I reconstitute a different way of doing it or I think about the other option and I get a different feeling. That's my yes, because I am now in flow and getting really good at feeling it in yourself and seeing it in others is what the whole basis of the coaching model is that I use.
Speaker 2:I love it for so many different reasons. To me, that conversation is circling back to the foundation of treating the physical body with respect, with the foods, the water that we consume, because that does play a part on the body and brain chemicals that instantly happen. And I also love this conversation so much just because it is focusing people back on the way they feel. And, for me, I feel very passionate about helping people understand what their yes no signals are. And, truth be told, it took me a long time to figure that out, just because the outside environment was not safe for me to learn those, and it took me to my knees, through a health crisis and slash identity crisis to figure all this stuff out. So I'm so eternally grateful that there is another voice in this space that's sharing. So thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you know I'm really curious and in another conversation you know I really want to know more about how you have been able to determine your inner yes and no, like how is that constituted for you? What are your signals for you? I'd love to know more about that. I don't know if there's a way to do it, but I want to know.
Speaker 2:Just briefly, it is a sense of expansion versus constriction and so basically I feel that in my body. So if I'm in, my two indicators are usually my third chakra, so my solar plexus or my throat, and those are the biggest areas for constriction. But I know when I can show up and be my authentic self because it feels like my whole central channel or my spine can. It glows from the inside out and feels expansive and free.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. The clarity operating system goes 100% hand in hand with that. So I would say, as well as expansion and constriction or contraction, we just say I feel energized versus drained, right.
Speaker 3:And those two things correlate really beautifully, because those are the felt senses of it. Am I more drained or more energized by this? You know, fill in the blank, it could be you know, this sandwich Am I? Or it could be this choice about you know, teaching this particular class or going out on this date. It could be anything, it's just am I more expansive or constricted?
Speaker 2:And joy. I talk about this when I talk, when I do our self transformation summit and we go into the fact that joy is your sacred messenger and that is your clue when you're on the right track, and you mentioned that the last couple of years that you've been trying to get really I don't want to say clear, clear clarity on what brings you joy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay, You're right, you nailed it. Wow, joy is your sacred messenger. I love that. That's a new little coffee cup t-shirt for me. Yes, I love it. It's interesting, I have a where is this Right in front of me here.
Speaker 3:So this is a little worksheet that Sharon constructed. This is like what do I want? To have more confidence and strengthen, and then what brings joy? So, as we were creating these next steps for people, it's like oh, the joy piece. You know, we are designed to really love our life, to feel deeply fulfilled in it, to be deeply connected, and you know, myself included, almost everybody that I know is in some kind of you know, challenge, challenging journey with discovering that and living to any degree that and the joy is your sacred messenger.
Speaker 3:It's like, as soon as I start to tune into what I really find joy in, it, completely reconstructed what I wanted to do with coaching. I had all this heads yes, this is what I'm doing with coaching, this is why I'm doing it, here's how I'm going to do it, here's my strategy, here's my three year plan. I'm like watch my niche, yeah, but my joy had gone way out the window and I'm like I'm a miserable coach. I mean like I can. I can take a moment, get present and be with people and enjoy their joy and feedback, their passion. I was like what, what is going on? And it took a joy inventory for me to come back and go. Oh wait, I got to bring the theater piece back in.
Speaker 2:I'm so grateful you did because I really firmly believe that everything that's happened in our life and all of these experiences has brought us to where we are and those aspects.
Speaker 2:For you it's performative art and that is just part of your toolbox and it took for me and I don't know about your experience, but it took me a long time to realize that all of those things have made me into what I am and those are still part of my skill sets and how blessed I am to have those skill sets.
Speaker 2:And the joy component came through when I do a superpower blueprint. So oftentimes when clients are missing their purpose and I see clients especially after COVID, you know, and the Great Awakening that and great resignation is that people are missing their purpose in life and they end in their careers and they're no longer willing to stay in a place that feels constricted or they're not seeing, heard or understood. So oftentimes I give the clients the homework of journaling 50 to 100 things that they are excited about, things that they want to research, and it's tapping into that joy. And I think once you start tapping into joy, just like it would for gratitude, is that it activates your reticular activating system in your brain, and then you're looking for more things that light you up.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And we start to get on that. We start to get on that train and, like Kathy Hawk, the founder of Clarity International, she says you know, if, when you follow your light, you find more light, no matter how dim it is to start with, if you follow it, more will come and and that Reticular Activating System is helping you just radar it out. And I love the list of those things and I agree with you in that the great awakening, great resignation that this, this super duper, earthly, earth shattering shake up that we have been through. We are different on the other side of it and I love that.
Speaker 3:There are people in the world that you know, you and actually now hundreds of thousands of other people, who are like let's, let's find out how we can reconstruct what we want to experience in an inclusive way. This blueprint that includes what is my joy, what are my feelings, what is my yes and I think you were saying like part of you coming to your toolbox was that you have now is like appreciating that maybe all the other journeys, the professional journeys that you've been on and those skills that you've been able to hone, from there they're coming in and coming together to be used at this time where, where we need both the magic and, like, the practical, yeah, about 10 years ago, because I've had a side hustle for a really long time, before 2020, before January 2020, when I quit my full-time gig at my dad's.
Speaker 2:And there was a joke 10 years ago because I was like, how does hula hooping, bookkeeping and hypnotherapy all come together? And so for a while they were like, oh, what do you do? I'm like I'm a bookkeeping, hula hooping, hypnotherapist. And they're like do you do that all together at the same time? And I'm like, no, but I bet I could. And so now it is coming together because I have clients that I'm working with them through self-leadership and how they want to show up, and a lot of them have businesses or are entrepreneurial or want to start a business, and so it's been having the background in bookkeeping and finance and business management, which, quite frankly, lights me up too. It's now starting to come together that I can contribute in a greater way without feeling like the hypnotherapy or the energy work is the woo-woo oh my gosh, it's so exciting.
Speaker 3:I love that combo. I hope that is on your LinkedIn. You are absolutely the person I would go to because that interdisciplinary-ness you just hit all the Chakras. You have a skill set in really important parts of your mind and body and they absolutely intersect. I have a funny story about hula hooping.
Speaker 2:Please, I know you said performing arts and all of a sudden I think hula hooping, and for me that's the biggest way for me to get embodied, or the quickest way.
Speaker 3:You're at your second and first Chakra and then also your solar plexus. You're getting in there, you're rounding and you're circling. I mean it's a right of passage.
Speaker 2:There goes your Kundalini.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in and of itself, and all that sensory stuff, because it's you and the relationship with something else in a really physical way Beautiful, fantastic. I'm making me want to go hula hoop right now. Back in, I think, somewhere in the 90s, probably like 97 or something, I was with a friend. We'd been out one of the late night kind of things, and we were at Delhi and it's like three o'clock in the morning and she was a key fit instructor and she used hula hoops and so she had like a good 17 or so in the back of her Jeep.
Speaker 3:So we're in this Delhi and we come out and we're eating and we're younger, so this is a cool thing to do. We just start hula hooping on the side of the street and all of a sudden the cops come around the corner and we're like uh-oh, we're probably infringing on some kind of thing. And they were like all right, ladies, what are you doing? And we're like we're hula hooping, would you like to join us? And they did. And then people from the day came out at three o'clock in the morning and there's these cops and all these Delhi folks and us hula hooping on the lower east side of.
Speaker 3:Manhattan. It was really fun.
Speaker 2:You are my people, it's. I knew that it was before just because of how we found each other, but now it's confirmed with the hula hooping and having them everywhere.
Speaker 3:I took a hula hoop everywhere the Virgin Islands, it's been Italy, it's been all over, yeah you're the kind of person I want, on the island with me keeping hypnotherapy, and we're gonna be fine. We're gonna be fine.
Speaker 2:And cooking was my and cooking is my love language. I like taking miscellaneous things and putting them all together to make delicious deal.
Speaker 3:Oh my god, it's done, you're, you're coming. I need to have all your contact details on speed dial. I am done. I do want to say like, just in terms of, like, the great awakening and the great resignation you know, totally linked together. It has so much to do. I think it ties back to me to conscious leadership, yes, and and authenticity and all those sorts of things like, and also the separation that's no longer being separated, like the idea of you know you're in your wholeness, you have interest in all those places and and in a. In a past world they would say you could only do one or you'd had to be an expert in one.
Speaker 3:And and I know Marie Forleo, you're probably familiar with- she talks about being a multi passionate entrepreneur and you know, if we get really honest, for most of us on the planet have interest in a variety of things, have some, have more than one skill set and hopefully they exist both at a embodied or body level and also at a mind level.
Speaker 3:And I think that part of this redemocratization redemocratization that's a redemocratization of life being how work is changing in order to address the whole person. So I'm really interested in what is the four day work we look like. I'm really interested in cooperative and different types of structures inside businesses and there's this great, really interesting new studies being done in Australia and some other places where they are actually doing four day work weeks inside big corporate entities and seeing what happens and they're discovering in the first six months of it that productivity has not lessened at all. It's actually gone up. There's also another study I can't remember where I read it, I don't think it was the New York Times, maybe Forbes where they replaced all the managers with coaches. I'm not trying to plug us in here, but they replaced the managers with coaches because the people already had the skill sets and the ingenuity to make the business operate wonderfully. They just needed encouragement, acknowledgement, inspiration, collective agreement, vision to do that thing that you talked about, which is flow.
Speaker 3:So I'm just really excited for what I think we are on the horizon of a really interesting, much more integrative world that allows our skills and our passions to be part of what becomes an economy of inclusivity and where we think about supply chain and we think about impact, which I think is what conscious leadership is. The conscious part is to need to be aware of your impact and influence at every rippling level. So, if we're getting great, do our thing and listen to what other people's thing is and what their needs are in terms of family and health. We're going to get a lot further together, because the genius is already there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's such an amazing feeling when there is collaboration throughout multi-levels of a business and that everybody can show up and feel seen, heard, understood and then come from that place of expansion instead of like because I think there was a tendency there for a long time is that you have to improve their weaknesses. And if they're showing up in their authentic self and they're showing up and how they want to make an impact and they're showing up where their psychological safety, where they can fully express who they are and their ideas, that's super powerful. I think that that's one of the ways that we're going to make a huge impact with more people.
Speaker 3:Definitely, definitely.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, thank you for showing up today, and I cannot wait for either you to come to Reno or me to come to Las Vegas, because I think that we're going to have lots to talk about, and I'm definitely going to reach out to Sharon Spann and tell her thank you for connecting us. How can our audience find you?
Speaker 3:TheVisionSpace. com.
Speaker 2:Okay, perfect. Are you on Instagram? I know you're on LinkedIn because I stalked you, yeah.
Speaker 3:Actually, I'm really. I'm vaguely on social media and have some idea that maybe someday I might become more proactive over there, but I'm really not these days.
Speaker 2:Okay, good. So theVisionSpace. com Do you want to share an email while we're here, or just have them?
Speaker 3:sign up through there Shellyitshelly. com, and it's spelled S-H-E-L-L-E-Y-L-Y-N-N. com.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you. And for our listeners who don't know how to find me, you can find me at livingmysoulspurpose. com or thewildsagesociety. com. Until later, bye.