Interbeing: Recent Episodes
Natalie K. Gómez
Interbeing is a transdisciplinary, embodied wisdom podcast sharing practical approaches to healing and liberation through metaphysics, science, spirituality, philosophy, and more. Website: nataliekgomez.com. Twitter: @nataliekgomez
There is room for all of you, inside of you. Rather than rejecting and casting away unwanted parts of ourselves into the shadow, we can instead make more internal space to hold all of who we are without judgment. Rather than healing, we can strive for wholeness, embracing all of the complexities that can come with a deeply lived and soulful life. In this episode, I will describe a metaphorical framework that I have begun using to create this internal space in order to nourish a more soulful life. This framework includes cultivating and tending to your inner world the way you would a landscape, as well as creating infinite space inside a "home" for all of the parts of your psyche. At the end of the episode I will lead a guided meditation, where I will walk you through a practice to integrate some of what was mentioned during the episode.
References and Recommendations:
- Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore
- "The Guest House" by Rumi- you can listen to it in the track "Kaleidoscope" by Coldplay
- To learn more about Yogananda, visit: https://yogananda.org/. I also highly recommend any of his books, especially Autobiography of a Yogi.
The path to the heart and the journey to love is one that each of us is walking in our own way, learning to guide ourselves and each other home. Many of us seek to understand, experience, and express unconditional love- but what are the limits, if any? What role do boundaries play in something that is unconditional? And what happens when the quest for love itself becomes an addiction? In this episode, I will describe some fundamental qualities of unconditional love and the heart center that I have learned through experience, as well as the pitfalls and distortions of love and the illusions of romantic love. I begin this episode with a blessing- may it guide each and every one of you back to your Source.
Books referenced:
Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood
Book recommendations:
Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks
The Spirit of Intimacy by Sobonfu Some
Journey of the Heart by John Welwood
Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab
The Mystical Initiations of Love by Kim Michaels
Depending on your lens, practice, or tradition, the word self can imply separation or can imply union and interdependence. In this episode, I will speak about the self and the journey of self-mastery as a return to God and reunion with all of life. On this journey, I have come to define three pillars that I use as guiding principles: self devotion, self fulfillment, and self transcendence. With these principles, I am learning to orient myself towards knowing myself as I am, filling myself with unconditional love, and becoming more than I have been before.
This is an episode about forces unseen. Similar to how the naked eye can only perceive a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, most people are unaware of the energetic forces that are at play in many of the dynamics on Earth. These forces include dark energy and spirits that perpetuate the story of the separation on our planet, along with forces that are meant to guide us and help us to multiply our light on our path. In this episode I will talk about how these energies influence us both in personal and impersonal ways and how to approach these dark forces on a path of healing with the aid of the spiritual realm.
In this episode, I will continue to explore the lessons and opportunities made available to us through soul relationships, including:
- The need in our collective for spiritual partnerships particularly for the conscious raising of children
- The need for healing between masculine and feminine dynamics through platonic and nonsexual relationships between men and women
- Engaging with sexual energy consciously
- Creating more communities for men to explore emotions vulnerably with other men
- Releasing expectations around love with regards to family and karmic family ties
Throughout our lifetime, and over many lifetimes, we create bonds with other beings who mirror back to us aspects of ourselves that we are meant to integrate or self transcend. Every relationship in our lives is a mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly, but some bonds are stronger than others and have a purpose connected to our Divine Plan. In this episode, I will talk about the different types of relationships we might encounter throughout our lifetime- particularly karmic connections and spiritual partners- and what purpose they serve for our soul evolution, beyond limited narratives of romantic love and through a deeper understanding of self-transcendence and connection.
You've often heard the phrase "you are what you eat". But you are also what you listen to, what you watch, what you speak, think, feel. How conscious are you of what you are consuming? Often times our ability to navigate adversity is determined by how much we have been consuming life-sustaining and nourishing energy. With conscious consumption, there is also an opportunity for conscious fasting. Just like you can fast from you food, you can also choose to abstain from limiting thoughts, beliefs, emotions, patterns. This episode is a reminder for you to reclaim ownership of your mental "home", taking inventory of everything you have taken in through consumption, and clearing house through fasting from what you wish to release.
Like a musical instrument, your voice carries a particular and unique vibration. This vibration carries information about who you are, what you believe, and what you want to create. When we begin to channel and master the power of our voice, we can also more consciously create realities that energize us and uplift all of those around us through our spoken word. This practice can begin by simply asking: "Does what I am saying raise or lower my energies? Does this open or close my heart?" Your voice is a musical instrument, and every time you speak you can either make noise or make music.
Resistance is a teacher for navigating the tension of life. Knowing this, how can we find right relationship with resistance using body based practices? In this episode, I will describe my fitness journey and how I came upon weight and resistance training alongside yoga to heal my body. We will also explore what happens when there is too much resistance, and how body armoring can either be an unconscious survival adaptation or an intentional and creative way of interfacing with our environment.
When you visualize the future, you are activating the same parts of your brain that remember your past. If imagining the future is another form of memory, then the story of who we are, what we've been through, and what we become is an act of creative will more than it is a static truth. In this episode, I will expand on these ideas with exercises to rewrite subconscious programming, create new stories of self, and transform the charge of your lived experiences.
One of the Earth School's lessons is learning to transcend a state of duality, and a soul is initiated into this lesson when it descends into a certain body in the physical realm. The soul- which is neither masculine nor feminine- incarnates into a specific body to have certain experiences particular to that sex and gender. When a soul has experienced different bodies over many lifetimes, it begins to dis-identify with being either male or female, masculine or feminine, and begins to embody more gender expansive ways of experiencing being on Earth through an inner marriage of the expansive and contracting forces that are associated to masculine and feminine, yin and yang.
Every soul and stream of consciousness is created with a unique essence and energy signature, and the soul's purpose is to expand this essence and self transcend through diverse experiences- particularly through experiences with other souls. However, this connection between self and community, individual and interdependent, can come with a cost if we do not walk the path with full awareness. Such a cost can include unconsciously opting into harmful collective thoughtforms, feeding the same systems we claim to be opposed to, or taking on limited beliefs that belong to our community but are not our own. When we become fully conscious participants in our own individuation, we develop the discernment between ourselves and our communities while contributing to a shift from separation to interdependence and the expansion of Creator Consciousness. Note: This episode expands on some of the ideas in the episode titled "Knowledge, Gnosis, and the Filters of Perception"- feel free to listen to that episode first if you haven't already!
Karma, Sanskrit for "action", is often understood as either a positive or negative consequence to a previous action. This, however, is only one paradigm and understanding of karmic energy. In this episode, I will explore three different paradigms of karma, each supported by a scientific law or theory. In the final paradigm, I will describe karma as energy that is fluid and carried in our energy body, rather than as energy that is "sent out" into the universe and "returned" with equal force. Regardless of the paradigm, deepening our understanding of karma, virtue, and morality plays a role in the way we live out our lives and play out our dharma- our true life path and purpose.
For more, follow me on Twitter @nataliekgomez. You can also purchase my guided journal, order art prints, or contact me at nataliekgomez.com.
I'm alive! In this episode, I will share my experiences on a (semi) cross country road trip from the Bay Area to Houston to live with my family. Some of my greatest lessons involved trust, release, and surrender, continually arriving to the moment exactly as it presented itself. As this new phase of my life continues, I am learning to ground and root in myself, to allow myself to be nourished by others, and to know that I can never be lost because I am my home. I am my home, so I am always home.
The word death often brings with it associations to grief, sadness, heaviness, and loss. Yet seen from another perspective, death is the gateway to full life. Death is what allows us to evaluate whether we are living consciously, it is what helps us to let go and make space, it is what reminds us to feel joy in everything that is present. With this new relationship to death as a healer, we can bring death into lives and our relationships to help us create a higher form, align with our fullest integrity, and experience the lightness of letting go.
Change is the nature of all things, and "truth" or "knowledge" itself is not exempt from this law. Yet we have been indoctrinated to seek a certain form of infallible knowledge, namely one that can be proven by measurement or physical experience and fit into a permanent mental box. A shift occurs when we come to the realization that these ways of acquiring knowledge are actually created by the perception filter of those doing the inquiry. This applies to science, history, politics, and religion alike. We are masters of storytelling and of creating stories of truth through our filters. So what begins to happen when we become aware of the filters themselves and begin to seek a different way of knowing that is not dependent on an outside source? This is the path of gnosis and intuitive guidance.
To be inspired is to be "in spirit"- to be open to receiving guidance from the unseen and feel connected to intuitive and invisible energies present all around us. In this way, air medicine and the etheric element relate closely to the spiritual realm, guiding us to feel both a light-heartedness and a deep relationship with what consider to be spirit, Creator, God/Goddess, etc. In this episode I will describe how my own relationship to the spiritual realm has evolved and changed over time, and how we can use the medicine of air and ether to lift us from heavy places.
If you haven't already, check out my website with links to my guided journal and art prints at nataliekgomez.com
When we experience pain, loss, or rejection for who we are in a way that is traumatic to the soul, we unconsciously create a "separate self" as a protective mechanism that operates from a state of fear to "protect us" from re-experiencing a trauma. In reality, these separate selves tend to replicate that same fear based energy and recreate the situation in our lived experience. In this episode we will explore fear as an initiation to full freedom, how fear has played a role in the pandemic, and how to use the element of fire to work with anger wisely as a boundary setter and transmute fear-based energy both as individuals and a collective.
Song Mentioned: "Get Free" by Mereba
Link to my guided journal: https://tinyurl.com/wakeupwiseone
The water element is intimately connected to the emotional realm and, when coupled with sound, can be a potent healing ally. In this episode, I talk about navigating the emotional spectrum from a non-hierarchical perspective and allowing ourselves to be fully human, as well as how we can use the power of sound and water to help us alchemize intense emotional experiences.
Books mentioned:
The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto
The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren
Welcome to the Interbeing podcast! This intro episode is optional listening for anyone curious about who I am and what inspired this project, including the meaning behind the name "interbeing" and the importance of embodied wisdom.
Our collective is transitioning into a new stage of consciousness characterized by interdependence rather than separation, and this transition calls forth a new way of relating to our bodies. This new way of being includes embodied wisdom, which is the practice of entering into right relationship with the body to access our intuitive guidance and release energetic blockages. In this episode, I will share a bit about my own journey with my body as well as the tendency I have observed in the collective to either over-identify or dis-identify with the body. When we no longer over- or under- identify with the physical realm, we enter into right relationship with our sacred vessel and begin to see liberation as a process that occurs through the body, rather than from it.