The Aligned Compass Podcast: Recent Episodes
Amber Christine
Show Notes:
The last several years have been crazy… but let me tell you, I can’t even imagine living that old life now.
Let me start this episode by reading an excerpt of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:
Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others. Their lives have obscured and detoured our own. As we consolidate a core through our withdrawal process, we become more able to articulate our own boundaries, dreams, and authentic goals. Our personal flexibility increases while our malleability to the whims of others decreases. We experience a heightened sense of autonomy and possibility.
Ordinarily, when we speak of withdrawal, we think of having a substance removed from us. We give up alcohol, drugs, sugar, fats, caffeine, nicotine – and we suffer a withdrawal. It’s useful to view creative withdrawal a little differently. We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energy back into our own core.
We begin to excavate our buried dreams. This is a tricky process. Some of our dreams are very volatile, and the mere act of brushing them off sends an enormous surge of energy bolting through our denial system. Such grief! Such loss! Such pain! IT is at this point that we make what Robert Bly calls a “Descent into ashes”. We mourn the self we abandoned. We greet this self as we might greet a lover at the end of a long and costly war.
Oprah says–the difference between a calling and a job. A job is what you have until you figure out what your calling is, because we all need an income, it’s survival. A calling is what you feel pulling at you–and it gives you endless energy. (See youtube video with Oprah)
I remember listening to my life long teacher, Caroline Myss, talk about the process of Spirit reorganizing your life. And it appears to others as unexplained and undeserved tragedy and bad fortune. It’s when someone not just experiences one sense of loss. It’s as if that person’s entire life comes crashing down around them.
It looks like this – a man loses his job at a company that he has been working for for thirty years. He comes home with this terrible news to find out that his wife has been having an affair for seven years and has finally packed up her things, and she is leaving him. In the months that follow, he develops prostate cancer, and he experiences a loss of assets from both his lack of employment and in his divorce. Oh, and to make matters worse, his children want space from him as he and their mother navigate their divorce. Even though she cheated and she did wrong, the children seem to side with the mother.
This sounds like an obvious nightmare to any spectators. People watching may try to explain it away, look for ways he brough it on himself.
This is something I’ve noticed – other people can’t stand the thought of a story like this – where the protagonist has zero sense of control or influence over their life and the tragedies happening within it, so the spectators look for some kind of fault, or some kind of signs that he should have been able to see. This gives them a false sense of security that nothing like this could ever happen to them.
This is where victim-blaming comes from. If we can blame the person that it happened to – then that surely means that nothing like this could ever happen to us – we’re far too smart to let something like that happen to us. What a load of crap, huh?
But it does. And the reality of the situation is that he had no control over it because there was no way of knowing that this would happen to him. And that’s a good thing.
Because this apparent tragedy in his life is actually a blessing.
Barbara Marx Hubbard said, “Just as in physical birth, the pain is necessary. When a woman is expecting, and she has a pain – it’s a good thing- she has to go to the hospital. It’s time for the baby to be born.”
Well life is the same. When some profound birth is to happen to you – your personal evolution is about to take a hike – there is a birth of the self in a way, and some very painful things can happen in this process.
The reality of what is happening is that Spirit is reorganizing your life. This may not make sense to you, but let me just explain a few things here. First of all, Spirit’s organization of life is very difficult for us to see and appreciate. The more linear, and understandable, we believe, the better. But the divine works in divine paradox. The more you can’t understand, the messier it is, the less linear things are – that is how the divine works.
We like things neat and all in a row so that we feel we have security, safety, and predictability. But this is not how life is intended. Life is messy. And if we were able to see all of life’s experiences and understand the hardships we would have to face through each – we would NEVER go toward it or through it! That is the reason we can’t know where our life is going.
And if you or someone you know is going through this reorganization – it is because they have built a life that is too small for them. They are being initiated into something bigger, something more profound. There is purpose yet for this person. On the outside, to spectators, to our tribal consciousness, it can very easily look like his life is a failure. But it’s not over yet. On the contrary, his life is just beginning – the next phase of it anyway.
If he didn’t get fired or let go, if he didn’t have all the space created in his life to birth something new, it never would have happened. This man goes on to meet another individual that he co-founds a company with. They create a solution to some big technology problem or hole in the market, and they found a company that not only turns out profitable, but that makes a difference and is tremendously committed to a mission.
Oprah talks about the whispers – life gives you whispers and gently nudges you where to go and when to move. And when you don’t listen, the whispers get louder. And it can look like this, Spirit reorganizing your life, or how others view it – it can look like everything has resulted in a huge disaster.
So. This is where I have been in the last several years. I have been experiencing my own reorganization. It started with separation and divorce, which was an initiation into being a more authentic version of myself. My life has been completely uprooted from any sense of security I had cultivated or built in it. But all of that quote “security” was a false security built in a false self. I had built myself based off of the messages society sent to me about what it means to be a successful woman here. And my spirit was bankrupt. I had to be booted from my old life so that the possibilities could be opened up to me again.
Before I had abandoned myself for society’s ideal. Now I’ve abandoned society’s ideal for my true inner self. And there is so much freedom there. I’ve been healing, I’ve been reconnecting with my creativity, and I haven’t felt this light since I was a little kid.
I hope everyone gets divorced! I want this freedom for everyone! Just kidding. I don’t really believe that. There are so many marriages that are built from a beautiful foundation of knowing who you are. Mine wasn’t, unfortunately. While I was initially devastated that my ex-husband wanted a divorce because of what it meant about me as a woman, I was also immediately relieved and felt like I could breathe for the first time in years. Even with all of the unknowns. I was so grateful that he made the choice, because I felt obligated to let go of myself and abandon myself to make sure the marriage worked. And when he made the decision that it ultimately wouldn’t matter, I was freed.
There is something beautiful to be gained here. By being forced to let go of everything, you GAIN everything. There is a spiritual power that is gained when you have to let go of life as you know it and every extension of yourself that you have been fighting to create. When you have to let go of your house, the way you’ve designed it and put it together. When you have to let go of your family structure, when you have to let go of the dreams you had for your family. When you have to let go of all the material possessions.
There is a spiritual power that is gained when you literally let go of everything. And it is the price to know your own innate power. To know how strong you stand with none of those things guaranteed to you. When you have to let go of everything that you thought defined you. There is this emergence of personal strength and power that comes from releasing all attachment.
And the result is a freedom – there is finally space to breathe, and you realize the ways you were suffocating under your old life. And you start to realize that the life you bought into, that your tribal consciousness sold you – isn’t as fulfilling as it all sounded in the beginning. That there is more, and that the ability to think more creatively about how to cultivate your life moving forward is actually exciting, liberating, engaging, fueling for your heart and fueling for your soul.
Now I’m in the process of what Julia Cameron calls withdrawal – not withdrawing a substance from you, but rather, withdrawing inward, toward the substance of your inner self. I’ve been talking about this a lot, about reconnecting to creativity and the things that light me up and inspire me, that fill me up so I can create the best things in my business and on this podcast.
When I read what she had to say about the grief process, this made so many things make sense in retrospect. I have had this phenomenon, and I wonder how many of you experience this or have experienced this, where I would think back to when I was dancing, or singing, or doing something that I really felt creatively connected to, and I would feel this loss, feel this grief. I didn’t understand it then, except for feeling sad that I couldn’t have that in my life anymore – that there wasn’t space in between being married, being employed, being pregnant and starting a family.
There is so much opportunity for women to abandon themselves when starting a family. Our body is literally taken over and isn’t ours for a whole year. And then another year with breastfeeding, and taking care of baby – it’s all devoted to this new life. It’s no wonder that it takes some time to rediscover ourselves and remember who we even are. There’s also this societal pressure to put yourself on the back burner behind your family and grow all of them – your kids, and even your husband! As if you weren’t already last in line to get your full attention with the whole birthing process.
So it’s interesting to me to talk about these whispers, and this reorganization process in regard to who you are as a woman, your family and your business. How do you respond to the whispers? Do you flow creatively with them? Do you feel like their suggestions are impossible, and ignore them and push them to “maybe someday”? Do you long for them and grieve them? Do they make you feel like a meeker version of yourself? Do they make you fantasize and dream all day?
Let’s go back to the beginning – have you squandered your creative energies on someone else’s life, hopes or dreams? Has someone else’s life detoured your own?
IF so, I have a beautiful way for you to get reconnected. I’m going to recommend the book I quoted at the beginning of this episode – The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The funny thing is I’ve only read the first two chapters, but I’ve made her practice of the morning pages an almost daily part of my routine. This is an incredible way to get all of the noise and voices shouting at you about your stresses, obligations and everything else out onto a page – you get everything that goes around and around your brain out and onto something else. It then opens up your mind to be more receptive to new ideas, inspirations, and thoughts that can carry you forward and out of a funk. It can help you to better hear the whispers so they don’t have to take a boot to your butt later.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. This is Ambie tuning out. Bye for now!
Exercise: Morning Pages
This exercise comes from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.
To help you tap into your creativity, this exercise will free you of the thoughts and habits of thinking that limit you or keep you blocked.
Ambie Christine's Meditation Challenge: https://amberchristine.mykajabi.com/med-challenge
Two episodes ago, I talked about purpose and that kind of led to this episode – that to know what your purpose is, you first have to know who you are. For many this may be frightening, but for others you may feel like this is obvious. But part of what has inspired the work that I do is having so many conversations with people who don’t know what they’re actually supposed to be doing. Like, maybe you’ve followed all the things people told you to do – go to college after high school, get a degree, get a job, get married have kids… and then you’re like… yeah so when does the happiness part get here…?
By all outward appearances, these people look successful, and they actually feel guilty for not feeling happy from the success they’ve achieved. This is so normal, and it is so much more pervasive than I thought. A survey by LinkedIn in October of 2021 found that 60% of participants felt unfulfilled in their job.
A quick google search showed me that Americans are increasingly becoming unhappier. Yes, if that question was confusing let me say it another way – Associated Press published an article in June of 2020 that Americans are more unhappy than they’ve been in 50 years, and that there’s data to prove it. Only 14% of Americans said they are ‘very happy’. This study was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago as a conclusion of the COVID Response Tracking Study. Let’s keep in mind that in June of 2020 everyone was still social distancing in immense uncertainty – the vaccines (were they out?) and isolation was at an all-time high.
Yet, even as far back as 2014, Forbes published an article that said that three decades ago 61% of workers liked their jobs, and now – in 2022 the numbers are reversed – 60% of people are dissatisfied with in their jobs. There was a major shift around the recession in 2008.
COVID was a major disruptor, and while many things have gone back to normal, there are also many things that have not. And the data from 2014 shows that this national phenomenon isn’t exclusive to the pandemic. It must have cultural ties. Something is causing us to find little happiness in our pursuit of career. What is it?
My personal conjecture is that we follow the advice of others, and our definition of success is defined by theirs. We believe that these other people know what our path is better than we do – or rather, we believe that if we follow what other people say we can’t screw it up ourselves. We abandon ourselves to pursue that outwardly defined success, and ultimately find that we may have to redefine it for ourselves again.
There is this element of wanting someone to tell us the right thing to do, because if we do it on our own we’re likely to screw it up, and it’s a lot easier to have someone else to blame than our own selves and following our own path. We live in a world where we are taught to find the right answer. And one’s path is not one answer. It is a long, unfolding, evolving thing. But we have to learn how to get back to our internal navigation system.
Luckily for you, I’ve got some great resources on how to find yourself again if you’ve felt lost.
Resources to help identify who you are
- Strengthsfinder --> https://www.gallup.com or https://www.amazon.com/StrengthsFinder-2-0-Upgraded-Discover-Strengths-ebook/dp/B01A7YXN3Y
- Enneagram --> https://www.truity.com/test/enneagram-personality-test
- Sparketypes --> https://sparketype.com/
- YouTurn By Ashley Stahl --> https://www.ashleystahl.com/you-turn/
- Astrology --> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-pattern/id1071085727
The Drag Queens
I was inspired to create this episode originally because of the Drag Queens I mentioned two episodes ago about purpose. I was so incredibly impressed with the degree to which they know who they are, and they sparkle – like not only half-ass sparkle, but they full on step into the light and own their fire, their sparkle, themselves. I find that I am especially inspired by people who have pieces of the intersectionality of their identity that fall in minority groups that fully embrace who they are, they don’t try to change it, and they lean fully into it. They accept themselves when society tells us not to accept ourselves as we are, no matter if you are even in the majority in most or all pieces of your intersectional identity.
We are all Spirit
I’ve been working with a Shaman recently, and I know this is going to hit some of you differently – because in this Western world this is like speaking another language, but here goes: we are all part of spirit. We are all connected. We are all one. We’re like a bunch of individual neurons operating one cohesive brain.
In working with the Shaman, I have been returning to this knowing that we are all Spirit. I have been cultivating my own spirituality in such depth, that I’ve been able to see MY TRUE SELF. Myself at a soul level. This has been an incredible gift. Especially after I felt like I had lost this for most of my life. I felt lost.
In gaining this awareness of my own path, I was also given the knowing for the collective, to some degree. In seeing myself, I could see everyone else, as we’re all one. We are all Spirit. We are all connected. We are all Divine. We are all little extensions of one grand being. With an illusion of separation.
The reason we all feel sick in a way, in the Western world, is because we’ve become so disconnected from our real selves. We’ve become disconnected from these spiritual selves – and I don’t mean religious selves – religion has a way of distorting spiritual truths so that they may push a political agenda.
We’ve become disconnected to our connection to the earth. To each other. To our own souls. That is why we feel unfulfilled. We don’t even know our own selves, so it feels impossible to know which direction to move in to fulfill ourselves.
What is your specific extension of Spirit?
We’re all here to do different things. Our brains all work differently and that’s a good thing! You are who you are – you’re not meant to be anyone else. What are the unique parts of you that make you weirder than anyone else? How can you embrace those more fully?
Interview with Dr. Lauren Hodge
Lauren and I had this conversation back in February, and I’m so happy to share it with you now. She’s got a program coming out this Friday that she’s going to talk about a little bit called FLOW, and she’s going to give us some brilliant stuff – unpacking the emotional process of creating and enforcing boundaries – which for those of us who are people pleasers – not only does she call us out, but she lays a foundational framework for us to navigate these more intelligently and gracefully – especially with our loved ones.
What I love about Dr. Lauren is her brazen honesty about learning how to set these herself, and her own process in growing into these.
A mindblowing moment for me was when Lauren talked about getting to say when and how people get access to me. I always have felt like my time and my projects and priorities have to come after everyone else’s are taken care of – typical mom thinking, am I right? There are so many juicy nuggets in here, just jump in and take a listen!
I have become obsessed with the question: what is my purpose? What is our purpose? What are we all doing here?
I thought this would be a great question to ponder to together and to share, because it’s a question we all ask – what am I really supposed to be doing down here? On this planet called earth? If life were to ask you right now, do you have an answer for it?
In this episode, I cover everyone's overarching purpose as well as the many nuanced purposes one person can have, and show an example with some incredible drag queens I've had the pleasure of meeting recently.
While I've taken a break for a while - for the various pieces of my changing life to integrate, I'm ready to jump back in with a new clarity and new energy for the podcast. I announce it here. Tune in to find out!
The effects of COVID have been many... for my personal life it has shown me the areas of my life that need to be altered drastically. I know I'm not the only one, so I wanted to share my experience and a brief look into my story.
Because there are so many things we are all adjusting to right now, and possibly experiencing a heavy dosage of grief and sadness, I thought it would be beneficial today to talk about some things to keep you up and functioning like an adult. I’ve got ten things to keep your head above water, in what I call my Depression Protocol.
I came up with the Depression Protocol from this idea of protocols that we have in our businesses, and in our professional lives. There are things to keep productivity in place, right? You’ve got an order of operations, and multiple eyes on something to make sure the right quality of product is delivered and that nothing gets missed before it gets to the customer. There are systems in place that ensure that there is nothing that can possibly slip through the cracks and allow you to miss your game with any of your important clients.
We need the same thing for our personal care, especially now.
Because there are so many things we are all adjusting to right now, and possibly experiencing a heavy dosage of grief and sadness, I thought it would be beneficial today to talk about some things to keep you up and functioning like an adult. I’ve got ten things to keep your head above water, in what I call my Depression Protocol.
I came up with the Depression Protocol from this idea of protocols that we have in our businesses, and in our professional lives. There are things to keep productivity in place, right? You’ve got an order of operations, and multiple eyes on something to make sure the right quality of product is delivered and that nothing gets missed before it gets to the customer. There are systems in place that ensure that there is nothing that can possibly slip through the cracks and allow you to miss your game with any of your important clients.
We need the same thing for our personal care, especially now.
Ok… so about a month into the Colorado stay-at-home order, and we’re all dealing with some pretty intense stuff at home. How do you deal when you are being triggered by your nearest and dearest? Here are three tools you can use when you are being triggered, so you can process in real time, and not perpetuate the pattern and the trigger. For the guided meditation to keep you centered in uncertain times, NO MATTER WHAT is happening to/around you, click here.
How do we benefit from times like this?
I know it’s really hard to see. But we’ve got to try. One of the things about me is that I have to look for the lesson on the other side, because my life has taught me that everything has a lesson in it. This takes you out of victim mode, it takes you out of powerlessness and it takes you out of the feeling and thought pattern of, ‘why is this happening / why is this happening to me?’
This episode explores the hidden lessons and ways we can move ourselves forward.
This episode we are going to explore neuroscience to see what’s possible, and the magic your body is capable of.
We focus on a pattern-interrupt known as meditation, and see just how and why it is such a game-changer.
How do people and businesses survive in times of economic crisis? They get scrappy and creative. They have to think differently than they’ve been taught. And most of all, they show up as humans in times where that heart and connection are most rare and hard to find, and most needed. Your compassion and heart then become more valuable in a sea of businesses that are falling into threatened, survival mentality.
I’m going to show you the neuroscience behind “threat” mentality and “resourceful” mentality and why it is so important to transcend the former.
Here I would like to focus on the death of our twenties… or thirties or forties or whatever. What does it represent? The last chance for it to be acceptable that we haven’t achieved all that we thought we would when we were seven years old, playing house?
Does thirty, forty, fifty make us finally face that we aren’t this perfectly cultivated adult that has the degree, found and trapped a husband, went on that mission trip to Africa to shave anemic gorillas, works out enough to fit into size negative-two jeans, gets eleven hours of beauty sleep a night and already won an acceptable medal (not bronze) at the Olympics?
Ok, I totally hate it when you hear people say – “get this one thing in your business and it will turn your life around!” But I have to tell ya… this one is pretty key. It’s not a hack or a shortcut by any means. In fact, it’s committing pretty heavily to a long-term process. But it is the key to determining whether you will reach success or not.
There are three reasons why this one thing is so important to your long-term success that I’m going to cover in this episode
Reason Number One: It makes you believe in yourself harder
Reason Number Two: It makes your people believe in you harder, and
Reason Number Three: It helps your brand grow and build momentum
So what is the big word of the day that is the answer to my cryptic questions? Tune in to find out!
I throw the word 'frequency' and 'vibration' around a lot... and I think we can all have a slightly different idea of what that actually means. So I went down to a bare-bones explanation of why we use that buzz word in the spiritual community, and why it is important to understand.
Tune in to this week's episode where I uncover five ways to quickly and easily change your vibration to reflect the life you want to live.
Every day we get a certain amount of energy to invest in our lives. Each day we make choices about how to manage that energy. Are you making sound investments, or are you spending it frivolously without any awareness that you had it to manage in the first place?
Listen to this episode to find out how we manage our energy with different unconscious habits and attitudes, and a couple of stories that show how this comes into play with real life situations and the beliefs that follow.
I know there is a difference between studying theory and being immersed in experience, so I wanted to give you an example of chakra medicine at work with a story of my own.
It's surrounding the Root Chakra, the territory it reigns and how I healed an imbalance of it and the resulting change in my psyche (...or how I had another Reiki practitioner help heal it for me...).
I hope this gives you a little taste of chakra medicine and what is possible for you :)
What is a chakra? In the last episode, I talked about Creation through the Chakras, and I wondered... how many people don't know what a chakra is? So I did my own research, and found a basis for it in ancient cultures across the world.
This episode lays out a concrete definition for those who have only a mere familiarity with it from hearing mentions of it in the spiritual community. Find out how a chakra integrates the whole of your life.
In this episode, I explore the process of creation for any business, idea, project or venture.
This is a super potent episode for creators of any kind - especially including entrepreneurs. Knowing the process for creation can aid in your ability to tune into whether or not a project is something you should stick with or abandon.
I know we all have experienced doubt and questioning with certain things that have landed in our laps - things we feel we need to take care of but maybe don't feel any energy behind it.
This builds off of the ideas in the last episode of this podcast, Birthing versus Forcing, but takes it further. We look at the pieces of your intuitive body that have a voice, and information for you in any creation you participate in.
There are times when something just magically comes together. You've had that before, right? You get this magic idea that seems to come from somewhere else, and then you just sit down and start to make it happen, and next thing you know, it's living and breathing in the world!
What is the main distinction between when this happens, and when something you've been trying desperately to get going just won't happen?
In this episode I talk about Birthing versus Forcing, and how to know when you're doing one or the other.
In this episode, I cover a brief but powerful concept about why it is important to use intuition and guidance in your business, continuing from the previous episode about the various ways of how to interpret guidance.
To get the FREE Guided Meditation for Entrepreneurs I mention, click here. This is the Get More Done & Be More Focused Guided Meditation for Entrepreneurs and People in Business.
In today’s teaching I wanted to cover guidance, what it is, and how you can interpret it. What are we even doing here in this series? We are connecting with our spiritual practice on a monthly basis, and to do that, you’ve got to have some rapport with what I call, your guidance team.