Julie Hilsen: 0:00

Life of Love With Joy Hilsen. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to another episode of Life of Love, where we explore all the areas of love in our lives, and today’s no exception. We have a wonderful guest here Paula Conroy. She’s coming here from Australia. She got up early this morning to meet with us and I’m just so honored to have her on the show. She’s an expert in transformational rights of passage and she facilitates women in their rights of passage and also children and their caretakers in the right of passage from childhood to adolescence. It’s just a beautiful space to hold with her. I’m excited. She has a long history of living in a more conscious state. I’m excited to dive in with her. Thanks for being here, Paula.

Paula Conroy: 0:52

Julie, thank you so much for having me on your show. It’s fantastic to be here today.

Corporate Banking to Personal Fulfillment Transition

Julie Hilsen: 0:56

I’m just so curious. You were in banking for 15 years and just a quick snippet how did you come from conscious leadership and banking to be a right-of-passage specialist? I mean, that must have been a little bit of a jump for you, and I just always like to hear those pivotal moments in people’s lives.

Paula Conroy: 1:16

Totally. It is quite a change, I have to say, moving from the very hyper-corporate, hyper-masculine world of banking where I worked for 15 years, looking after large multi-jurisdictional teams in a global bank and covering a large range of global multinationals and corporate institutions. I’d say that the transition, the right of passage from that world and that life and that way of being, into what now feels like living the life that I was meant to, a life that is very much attuned to the call of my heart and the service of my heart, I’d go so far as to say very much aligned to my dharma. It was not exactly the smoothest process, somewhat messy in its transition, and it came with quite a few stark learnings and interesting discoveries about myself. But I’d say that the main reason for the change came because of this internal experience of agitation within me that I was not living the life that I was meant to be living. I was misaligned with my values my number one value is around inner peace and I was certainly not feeling peaceful on the inside or the outside at all. Something was happening in me, a state of agitation. This is not where you’re meant to be and you’re not doing what you’re meant to be doing and there’s something else for you. But to honor that call, that intuitive call that was presented in ways such as irritability or impatience or a little bit of disenfranchisement with what I was doing every day, that manifested then into having quite a few gut health issues, missing my children and not seeing my children enough, and then everything being super intense during the week when I was at work, and then super intense around the children on the weekends. There was just this pretty extreme experience that I was having across these different facets of my life, and I don’t like to call it a work-life balance. I like to call it a life balance because work is inherently a part of life. It’s not something we go and do and then we come back to our lives. It’s interwoven into everything that we do, especially if the work that we’re doing is attuned to our call our service our offering, and what it is we came here to do on planet Earth. And so for me, that experience of being able to heed that agitation and heed that intuition and heed that call took a lot of challenging dismantling of the momentum that was in my life at that stage. I mean 15 years in a corporate career, highly skilled at what I did at that stage, to then reach a point where I was willing to, or able to not even willing yet, but able to start unentangling myself from this identity that I had created over those years, a lot of it unconsciously, because I just found myself in this funnel, so to say, this passage of experience. That was my corporate career, which had enormous upsides and benefits, and I learned so much working in that institution, so much about how global institutions work and how internal treasuries work, how money moves around the world, and how large, complex teams in these organizations function. So, from that point of view, there was so much that I gained, and yet it got to a stage for me that it wasn’t aligned with this next part of my life, this next phase, which is where I am now, which is what I’d call the mature feminine of my life. I’m 41 now, so it’s this real, what feels like a potent summertime of my life. Those earlier years were in the sort of maiden years, the springtime, the up and out, seeking, searching, looking, trying on this, trying on that, testing this, testing that acquiring things, getting knocked around a bit by life, not yet fully rooted in my knowing as a woman and as a female leader. I didn’t even know what the answer to that question was. By the way, when someone would say what’s a female leader, I’d be like can’t articulate. That, I’m afraid and that for me was concerning in itself was not being able to explain am I just a female leader because I’m a woman. What is the answer to that question? And the fact that I couldn’t answer that gave me pause for thought as well. I can’t articulate what the value of having the diverse experience of men and women and all in between at the table means. I don’t know what that feels like and what that looks like. So there were some big question marks and I wasn’t finding the answers in what I was doing, and I was experiencing now this sort of fall on my health and my family flow and so dismantling that ego and being able to build the capacity and the ability to say, hey, this isn’t right anymore and this is going to require a big transition, and it means leaving behind what feels like this huge investment in this part of myself that does this thing.

Julie Hilsen: 6:23

And the security right. I mean you had built this security. It was a legacy already the way you describe it. I mean you had gone up in the company and it’s international. It’s a lot of connections. It had all those things that check off boxes, right Yeah totally Exactly, and I mean financial security as well.

Paula Conroy: 6:42

I mean my husband’s an entrepreneur and he, you know, in those early years when he started our son’s nine now he started nine years ago. You know, for the last nine years he’s been finding his way and finding his features in entrepreneurs. So for me, I was the sort of steady income earner while he explored those different parts of himself. And you know, then it was like, wow, there’s this risk. Now, when I step away from the continuity of this consistent paycheck, you know, and I can see, oh, wow, you know, like still stuck in that system in that way, and you know so, how do I structure my life around? How do we structure our lives around allowing me to heed this call and to honor that and go through that rite of passage, that transition from one stage of life into the next? And when I did that two and a half years ago, I can’t say I did it particularly well. You know it came with quite a lot of experience. For me, that was, you know, quite dramatic and letting go of this old and kind of wanting to grab the new before I let go of the old fully. It was like I didn’t want that vulnerability of not knowing what I was stepping into. I don’t want to feel those difficult feelings of this rite of passage that is like let me make sure I’ve got the next thing lined up and then I’m just going to quickly jump from that ship into the next ship and everything’s going to be perfect. And you know it wasn’t. I move from one thing into the next and I very quickly in the next thing because I hadn’t gone through the necessary part of that cycle, that is, the winter, the necessary stage of giving the autumn its full opportunity for all those leaves to fall to the ground, to compost and let it gestate for the winter and go through that transition that required and was calling for spaciousness and rest, for all of that momentum to finally die down for the springtime of this next phase to come into its fullness healthily. And I didn’t do that. So I went through one rite of passage, trying to leave that career, jumping into the next job, without going through that full gestation and that challenge of the in-between, and very quickly within the next job, I was like, oh, this isn’t for me either. And then there was the internalization of that, the self-flagellation, self-judgment, like what am I going to do? Who am I? You know where is this going, you know what am I supposed to do in the world? Please someone help me? You know, really kind of despairing in many ways. And you know, that it was at that stage that I discovered the ancient wisdom that is inherent in rites of passage and rites of passage processes. It was like I was transitioning in my life and I was not doing this very well. There are unhealthy implications of this transition, as well as the unhealthy way in which I was. And that’s when I discovered rites of passage and started looking into what these transitions look like and how we do them.

Indigenous Rites of Passage and Transitions

Well, and it became very apparent that indigenous cultures around the world have been practicing rites of passage and, you know, ceremony around transitions for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, that there’s this, you know wisdom, this inherent wisdom in these cultures of honoring and recognizing that every transition from one stage of life to the next is going to involve some kind of a challenge, and be that transition into young adulthood, our transition out of university into our first job, transition into becoming a parent or getting married and then, ultimately, the biggest transition of all, which is the right of passage of our death and the deaths of those that we love around us, and that there is a possibility of being able to be more aware, and, you know, approach these rites of passage, these inevitable transitions, with more grace and with more acceptance, when this framework of being able to understand how to transition with there always is a challenge, there’s always an ordeal, there’s always something that’s going to cause us to go into those difficult parts of our emotional spectrum, of our emotional human feeling being. You know grief, sadness, confusion, anxiety, depression, you know whatever sits in that unpreferable, you know, and I do this because it is unpreferable to our culture and yet it’s very much a part of us as human beings and it’s the unpreferable side of our feeling range, the spectrum of human emotions, this what we call the dark feminine side of our feeling is, and we avert from that and I certainly was averted from that. I wanted to jump from one to the next without needing to go into that winter, that dark feminine, that challenging emotional spectrum. So you know, it’s been a huge challenge, and yet also, within, that has been the greatest blessing in all of it because through that experience, the experience of those transitions, the experience of the challenge, the experience of the clinging to the old and the trying to jump into the new. And it was in the experience of all of that, as difficult as it was, that the beautiful discoveries of how to do these transitions better, to do these transitions well, became available for me to embody. And so now there’s this possibility of being able to hold that awareness and that knowledge and that wisdom in the processes that I facilitate for women and for parents and children or young adults going through these inevitable life transitions that happen to all of us at some stage or another.

Julie Hilsen: 12:34

There’s so much there and I hear that you were driven by inner peace and that’s. I think that that in your physical symptoms, you are realizing that, hey, this, this isn’t working and you were, you needed to change, but then you just jumped to the next thing, which that’s what you know, we just do, and I love how you, you sort of opened up your, your consciousness, to say there’s a better way. And I think what you said is you learned about the rights of passage from Indigenous people.

Paula Conroy: 13:08

Yes, yeah, primarily from an extraordinary man called Dr. Anna Rubenstein who’s done very deep work with rights of passage for many years in written books and runs camps and that sort of thing. He has worked with several Indigenous people around the world. I’ve primarily worked with the Indigenous people of Australia, the Aboriginal people, and the various mobs here, and still, to be honest, I just bow my head in humility there because I feel like I’m an absolute beginner and novice when it comes to being highly skilled at facilitating deeply culturally sensitive rights of passage processes for other cultures, such as the Indigenous people, where there is a lot of trauma. So that’s, you know, for me I’m like I would love to say that I’m highly skilled at that, but I’m certainly not there yet. There’s so much feeling and trauma and sensitivity around Indigenous cultures and how they have been impacted by colonization and Westernization and globalization that you know, for me I’m still such a novice, I’m still learning the very basics of the intimacy of being in those processes with Indigenous cultures and you know I’m studying it from the outside and you know, in that journey with them I feel like I’m, you know, I am the fortunate, humble servant at the stage of that work and you know I’m looking forward to deepening my capacity to be in those processes with Indigenous cultures and do it well, really attune to the frequency that they’re at.

Honoring the Transition of Motherhood

Julie Hilsen: 14:49

Yeah, oh, Paula, it’s. I see you as a bridge, like you’re learning from them and you’re a bridge to the Western culture, because, honestly, you don’t hear about rites of passage at all. I mean to me rites of passage. When I reflect on rites of passage for myself or my children, it’s like, oh, they’re out of diapers. Oh, you know, I can buy them a tricycle. Oh, no, now they’re onto a bicycle and now they’re going to school and we have the first day of school pictures and the last day of school pictures. But it’s like we don’t honor the developmental stages, we just buy that thing, then they get their car and then they go to college and they get their degree and it’s all about getting. And to me, the beauty that you’re bringing is this divine feminine, this receiving, and the feeling of the emotions of you know these things are happening, something’s dying. You’re saying goodbye to, like holding your child. You’re saying goodbye to what your relationship used to be with your husband when you had little kids and you could both bathe him together. And your relationship changes right, like all of a sudden. You know you’re watching, making sure they’re going where they say they’re going to go, on your phone Like it’s not tracking if their hair is clean enough. It’s tracking if they you know if they’re hanging out with the right people and drinking. You know. It’s like we are just so lacking that we need this bridge, and I just honor your space in this, that you’re bringing this compassion to these big things, like these are life transitions and they’re huge, but we don’t take space to like to mourn what we used to have and to honor the challenges that are ahead or even present. And it’s taking a deep breath and just being, like I said, present. And so your work, your work in even saying rights of passage, it’s monumental, I’m sorry. It’s a revolution in thinking and I just, I’m so honored to share this idea with people, because I know that it’s new to me and I can’t imagine it’s not new to many of the listeners. So, thank you.

Paula Conroy: 17:09

Yeah, beautiful Julie, thank you for you know that resonance that is already within you, that it’s just like wow, it just sort of wakes up in that way that it’s like, oh, fantastic, I know this on some level, I feel this on some level. It’s so inherent within us and it’s sort of like we’re just removing these veils to remember how to do these stages of life well. And I think you’ve touched on something really important there. You know, one of the most beautiful and also the most heart-expanding, stretching, sort of challenging camps that I work on is the mother-son camp, which is, you know, we do camps for what we call the young warriors. So we’ve got eight to 11-year-old children who come with either boy or girl, father or mother, and that’s sort of a light introduction to sitting in a circle and community building and telling stories and listening to the elders and, you know, connecting differently. The related field changes. So it’s a light introduction to the sort of precursors that underpin all rights of passage, which indigenous communities have done for hundreds of years, which is this concept of tribe or community sitting in circle and each person in that tribe or community being given the opportunity to speak for themselves, not posturing up to the next person and being like, oh, I’m going to support big boss over there and just give my 10 cents, and it’s like, no, there is this call to each individual within the community and within the tribe, to speak what’s on their heart and what’s coming through them, for them to make a collective choice about the way in which the community is going to move forward or address an issue or whatever that might be, which is so different, especially for me, coming from a corporate where it was like there’s a big boss and there’s an old chart and there’s a hierarchy and there’s the underlings and there’s the, you know, and it all stems down and all the workers do the thing, and then that goes up and then it all comes down again and it’s just this hierarchical structure that is so different to the way in which these indigenous communities have been operating for hundreds of years, you know. So it’s a real step change. I mean, I remember my first experience several years ago of learning, of sitting in circles and learning that I could be authentic and I could say what I, what was going on for me, and one of the facilitators there’s sort of like a primary facilitator and then two support facilitators. And one of the support facilitators said, when it was her turn, she was sharing. And she was like, oh, it was just so difficult because, you know, she had by mistake pulled out a cord of the laptop when something was playing, and then suddenly there was this big scramble around and they were trying to get the cord back into the laptop, you know. And she was like and then I just didn’t feel like you, the main facilitator, had made enough space for me, and you know, and the main facilitator was like, oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, like, is that how you felt? And for me, coming from a corporate background, I was like, was that necessary? These are the space holders. They should take this stuff out of the room. They shouldn’t be having this dialogue in front of everybody, like. For me, it was such a revelation that people could say what was going on for them. And here these spaceholders, these facilitators, who, in my view, were meant to hold a certain decorum or be a certain way or have a certain, only show this side of your personality. That’s the appropriate thing to do at this moment. Suddenly, the whole dynamic shifted and everything kind of shattered, wow, people can be authentically themselves in the space of a circle, regardless of what role they have or what kind of perceived hierarchy I had in my mind about what’s here. You know, indigenous cultures all sit in a circle, so everybody is at eye level. There’s no head of the table or throne room or anything like that. It’s like the elders and the young ones all sit in these circles. So you know, we introduced that in the young warriors camp, so these children are getting familiar with community operating in a certain way, and then the camps kind of morph from there. In this mother-son camp that we have and I reference it because when it comes to motherhood, my son’s only nine and a half, so I’m not yet at that stage like you were saying I can still bath him and he still hugs me and he waves at me Goodbye mom. On the bus, you know. Bye, mom. And he’s going to get to that stage that he’s going to go bye mom, and it’s just. You know don’t look at me, Mom, and what I see happening on these camps when we have these mothers and these 10 to 14-year-old boys on these camps for three days, you know the large pervading experience for the mother’s work that we do with the mothers on the camp. When we separate the boys and the moms out, which we do periodically to do boys’ stuff and mom stuff, and then we come back together to do stuff together that’s fun and bonding and connecting is that there is such an enormous amount of sadness and grief in the moms experiencing their changing boys, that their boys are changing and they’re moving from the intimacy of this relationship that they’ve had wiping their bums and doing all the things that moms do feeding them and you know being so intimately connected with their little boy who’s now changing into a young man, and that there’s this unexpressed grief and sadness at the loss of that part of our relationship with our boys that we can’t yet transition into. You know, largely speaking, the women that I see we get into these mother’s circle there are so many tears, so much sadness at the loss and we don’t create intentional spaces with that as the objective, like, hey, moms, come together and let’s all feel. Let’s feel what it feels like together to be a mom losing in inverted commas the boy the way he was so that we can feel those big feelings, honor them, recognize that what I’m feeling in my experience of my changing young man is the same thing that you’re experiencing in your feeling, and we can be together even though our stories are different, our lives are different. We can be from two different cultures, we can be two different races, we can be two different colors, and we can be all sorts of different. And yet, in this experience of being a mother and a son, there is grief there in the change, and I can be in that grief, resonating with you, in your grief, knowing that I’m not alone and that other people feel it’s not so isolating anymore. And that my grief was once experienced in the space of a sacred circle, the safe space for me to feel unsafe in these dark feminine qualities, these difficult, this difficult side of the emotional spectrum that our culture doesn’t support us to feel. I mean, as we well know, cultures like Oh, you’re feeling a little bit nervous, are you suffering from anxiety? Here’s a pull. Make sure you take this pull, you know, let’s just pull it away. Or you know, just keep busy, don’t feel just going. Get busy, go and do something else, distract yourself from the feeling. You know, and that’s something that I always find so peculiar when you know especially somebody, for example, that’s experiencing grief, the loss of a loved one, and people are like it’s better if I keep busy, it’s like, well, yes, it’s, keeping busy is preferable, because then we’re not being with the difficult, difficult feelings of deep grief, which are appropriate, actually being called for. We’ve been called to honor the appropriateness of feeling deep levels of grief at losing somebody that we love. You know it’s appropriate to feel those things, and yet our culture is like just keep busy, you know, just make sure you’re out there, or take this pull, or do you know, just do something to avoid going there. And so we have this behemoth of shadow that’s accumulated in our culture as a result of all the experiences that we’ve collectively had, that we haven’t necessarily digested to its fullness, that we’ve jumped from the autumn to the spring and not gone through the winter, so it’s just got darker and darker. We fed the basement of our collective, our collective dragon.

Honoring Grief and Emotions In Culture

Julie Hilsen: 25:27

You know he’s feeding on all of these dark feelings that none of us have built our capacity to feel and instead of feeling that loss of your baby and being okay to grieve that in a messy way, like and it might depend and we were talking about this before like hormones and the cycle of being a woman and having the potential for life. And then you know everything that happens in our cycles and knowing that things hit us differently at different times and it’s okay and it’s messy, and how, how we can honor that we loved being a mother so much that we’re sad that they don’t need us as much, or that we had a loved one that we are. We’re just upside down that they’re no longer available. You know, and this plane, that we can only connect to them in our thoughts and our hearts and you know so it’s, it’s a part of living a life of love is when you put yourself in this vulnerable place and you feel these intense loving feelings and there’s also the feelings of loss, and both are completely bad, valid, not what’s not good, what’s not bad there, they’re both part of it all. And that permission to feel that messy loss, to feel, to feel your, you know you’re the void because that void is opening up for another level of love that you might not even realize but if you don’t acknowledge is void and you just push on and don’t clear that space, clear your emotion, clear the energy Like you’re talking about before a pre-interview. It ends up as a it ends up as a disease because you haven’t cleared it. You just zan, next it away or Drink it away with you know, some shard and a whatever. Whatever you like, you know, I mean we’re, we’re going to grief in our family and everyone’s doing it a little different way and there’s no judgment. But I can tell you I got pretty messy and I look like, yeah, I was PMS thing when I unloaded on everybody and I did I completely unloaded and I hope I hope my family listens because I want off the rails because nobody else would, and I’m processing everybody’s emotion as the matriarch of my family. I mean I just that’s what I hold space for. You can be messy and let it go. And then this is shame like I was ashamed that I threw up my emotions and everybody. But I think it did clear the air and hearing what you’re saying, I’m like, okay, you know, no, no, emotion is unwanted and needed. Yeah, I might not be accepted by a culture, but it’s all there for a reason.

Paula Conroy: 28:18

So you know, even just in what you described, you know, I mean, I just deeply honored that Vulnerability and sensitivity of the right of passage that you and your family are in right now in the, in the last of the day beloved that was intimately connected to all of you. You know it’s such a huge experience and you know it’s such a travesty, It is a shame that you experienced in the wake of feeling your big feelings as a result of an appropriate response to losing something so close to your heart and you know it’s like. So the community around us, you know, hasn’t necessarily been formed in a way to Hold the space for us to go into actually what’s an appropriate reaction or response to the loss of the beloved. You know it’s like in the, in the wake of a, of a passing of a beloved, there is A necessary space that we need to cultivate as a culture again and as communities again, to deeply hold the space for somebody to completely lose their right and say that they probably, more than not, might not articulate it very clearly. There might not be, you know, highly sensitive to other people in that process, but sometimes we just need to Let it all out. Once it’s out, the contraction, that energy compression that is around, the difficult experience has the opportunity to move. You know, emotion is energy in motion. That’s what our emotions are and, as women, is feeling beings and you’ve touched on that beautifully. You know, we are constantly in motion as women. We have a hormonal experience happening in our bodies every month with the creation of life, the possibility of life, and then the loss of that. We go through another huge hormone surge, from 35 when Peri- menopause begins, which is often not spoken about. You know, push menopause under the carpet, don’t talk about it. Huge emotional experience as our extraordinary organic body, moves from one stage of life to the next, from holding the possibility of life, being able to bear life into the world, to then no longer holding that possibility of life, and that can sometimes be a 10 or 15-year process of Perry menopause and then full menopause and then, you know, ultimately getting to that stage where all of that shuts down. But for us to live with a month in mind, right the cycle in our bodies, and then go through this protracted experience of menopause and Perry menopause. It is such a big emotional Part of our feminine nature you know, to be able to build our capacity to be with them and our awareness to be with these transitions. These rights of the passage give us the possibility of being able to know how we can healthily digest the emotions that are happening off the back of either our physical experience or the back of what’s happening in our lives, like a life event, the last of a loss of a beloved, and we learn how, as communities and especially as a woman working with women and in sacred sisterhood and mother circles and woman circles, being able to cultivate that capacity for us to sit in a circle, for you to be able to come in and bring your grief and your sadness and all of the experience that you’re having as a result of this loved person in your life no longer being here, to be able to bring that, and for women to understand how to hold deep, integral space, for you to feel all that you can do, for you to feel all that you need to feel in that, in that passage, that you’re in that transition from where it was with the beloved there. You’re in the passage of the discombobulation and the sadness and the grief and the loss before that integration can happen when you come through that next stage of the right of passage into the new way of being, where the loss has been not integrated into a new way of being. And this is the beauty of how rights of passage work and that sacredness of circles and women holding space for women, or any circle for that matter parent, child, adult, elder, younger, whatever it looks like. You know, whatever that formation on unique constellation looks like you see it, in a meetings for example coming together in a circle is, you know, it’s this continuity of the circle. The circle never ends. It’s the quality of it to bring the challenge to the safety of the circle so that each individual that comes in can bring whatever’s happening for them and allow themselves to become unsafe in that feeling, to go into that difficult emotion and for that to be deeply held by those around them.

Julie Hilsen: 32:58

Right, be seen to be. You know, I see you and I’m here for you, where we’re connected to our energy and caring for you. I know I had, I had four friends just stand around me and just say how are you? And that was, it was so meaningful to me and that sisterhood is, you know, just something beyond. It’s beyond what you could even try to create artificially. I mean you just can’t. It’s. It’s so palpable and I share that vision with you. If you know that we could have these sisterhood circles in our communities, have, you know, sacred temple, not not like a religious thing, just a place for beauty and for women to come and support the divine feminine men to come and experience the divine feminists in a safe way that you know they can, they can go to these Intense emotions and they can let go and, and it’s accepted and safe to feel deeply, because that’s the divine feminine, is this part of that we love, we love, we love. And part of loving is going through pain because that’s just how it works. I mean you can’t hide from it, you can’t medicate from it. Oh, my goodness, you’ve opened up a whole beautiful container for somebody to know that everything’s okay, everything is valid, and I thank you for your help with this today.

The Power of Intention and Community

Paula Conroy: 34:35

Oh gee, it’s such a pleasure, you know, it’s such an interesting experience for us coming into that, that awareness and ability for us to recognize our dual existence, where wholeness exists in the, you know, in the two sides of the coin that there is always, for us to experience the joy, there is a requirement for us to know the polar opposite of that so that the two poles can come together in that unifying field. And so, in a way, as a human population, we’re kind of missing out a little bit on the possibility of joy being amplified and extended because we’re not necessarily going to the other side of the pendulum swing to create the possibility of that tension between joy and sadness to be created, for us to be able to find our center within that. And so, yeah, it’s a journey for sure to build our capacity for that pendulum swing to go both ways, instead of just always wanting it to be on that preferable side, you know, and trust that you’re strong enough and your kids are strong enough to feel grief, everybody.

Julie Hilsen: 35:46

You’re strong. You can trust that everything is there for a reason. It doesn’t need to be clouded or subsidized by something. It’s there to be felt raw and you can’t. You know, you believe, you believe that you’re strong enough to go there and come back and like you’re telling me about how awful it was with the death of your cat and finding his body months later. And then you decided to learn about the death walk and you looked into your fear. You said I’m just going to learn more, I’m going to dive into that. And it takes bravery. It takes bravery to not just say, well, I got through that and that’s over. You know, I know, live with it and feel into it. And that’s an honorable place to have the trust in yourself that you’re strong enough and you’re going to make it through. And that’s a big message I want my audience to have today is that trust. Trust that you’re strong enough to get through it and that there will be people to help you. You don’t have to go through anything alone. You have a community and just you know, ask for the community to show up, ask the angels, to show you your people, you know, and then be open to seeing it, because once you look for it, you will find. You will find your tribe, your people, and it’s a beautiful thing, believe me, you know I go alone a lot and it’s so much better to open up to the people around you, and, Paula, you’re part of my tribe now because I just feel it.

Paula Conroy: 37:17

Absolutely yeah. And you know, I concur with what you’re saying there, julie. Like, once we put that intention out there, that you know it’s, you know there’s a saying, like I think Rumi said it, but love yearns for you. What do you yearn for? The year’s for you? You know, like, what we’re yearning for in all of that is, you know this, the sense of community, that sense of belonging, that sense of connection and interconnectedness. Like All of us want to rediscover and remember ourselves in that web, of, that cohesive experience of shared humanity that we all are. And you know, I 100% have verified in my own life and it sounds to me as though you have as well that when we put out these sincere intentions that are attuned to those values that are within us, that I want community, I want sacred sisterhood, I want, you know, I want to reimagine how I am in relation to my life and the people around me. Like the universe has this uncanny way of bending to deliver the person, the course, the circle, whatever happens, like suddenly, if we and for us it’s about peeling back those layers that are holding us back from being able to recognize the gift that is being delivered to us by the universe, by the oneness, consciousness. Whatever word we like to use Everybody’s got a different word for the mystery of life but you know, for us to be able to build our ability to be clear in our seeing and our receiving of those gifts and be able to gestate, take them in and go ah, I am aware that this has now happened because I’ve been holding this space in my heart and every time we kind of click off on that awareness that I’m aware of, I’m aware, it’s like somehow the universe resounds like yes, yes, yes, and then that veil continuously seems to fall away as we respond more and more to the gifts of the universe. So, yeah, I wholeheartedly say, if there was one thing I could leave the listeners with, it would be to put the intentions out there for the life that you want to create, and you know, rarely. Hold that intention strong. Write it in your journal, write it on your mirror, share it with your friends, share it with your beloveds. You know, speak your truth, say it out into the universe. That sound and frequency reverberate out, calling it in, calling in the life that you want to create, instead of perhaps focusing too much on the life that you want to leave or the parts of yourself that you want to leave. It’s like really resounding, in that you know that creation of your reality and then patiently wait for it to fall into your open, kept hands, because the universe hears, it really does, and it’s here. It’s here yearning for you.

Julie Hilsen: 40:01

Yes, yes, like you said, don’t focus on what is not going well, focus on what you want to create, and that’s that’s the magic. You just, Paula, you laid it on the C line. That’s the life of magic, that’s the life of love, and thank you.

The Power of Positive Focus

Paula Conroy: 40:18

Thank you. It’s so wonderful to share this time with you, Julie, and, yeah, just really feeling the connection in my heart with you and this experience and what we’ve shared. Thank you so much.