Dealing With Stress And Becoming More Productive With Karen Newell

If you are into the woo, this episode is for you. I don’t want to scare you off but I invited the beautiful, Karen Newell, to join me. I wanted to have an expert come in, somebody with the credentials and know-how, to talk a little bit more about what you’ve been hearing from previous guests around intuition, getting into your body, sinking into the being instead of the doing and vibrations. This is a common theme that is coming up over and over again. I wanted to connect and explore in a deeper and scientific way around the concept of intuition and vibrations, and then getting ourselves more connected with ourselves in the being through meditation. Karen Newell is the woman and she has spent a lifetime seeking wisdom through all sorts of things like esoteric teachings and firsthand experience.

She’s exploring things like the realms of consciousness, including developing skills and meditation, lucid dreaming, telepathy, remote viewing, self-hypnosis, astral travel and a lot of other forms of energy healing. She is into the woo. Karen has learned to align with her higher nature and its connection to the loving force of the universe through heart awareness. She empowers others by demonstrating how to connect to inner guidance, achieve inspiration, improve wellness and enhance intuition. That’s exactly why she’s here on the show. She is the Cofounder of Sacred Acoustics, an innovator in the emerging field of Brain Wave Entertainment Audio Meditation. She’s the co-author of Living In A Mindful Universe with Dr. Eben Alexander. The thing about Karen is she didn’t start off this way. That’s why I love this conversation with her. Without further ado, let’s welcome Karen Newell.

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I have a couple of my own thoughts swirling around things that I believe stand out after my conversation with Karen and listening back to it. I do that and I look for those gold nuggets and how they apply to you as a leader of your organization, as a high performer, as a woman who is looking to achieve greater levels of success. It doesn’t matter if you are super woo or not. I believe that there are tidbits in this interview for you. She doesn’t get too out there honestly and most of her work is based on science and evidence. Here’s why this is important and one of the reasons I felt strongly about having Karen on the show is she provides you tactical techniques for how to deal with stressful situations. Who in this world doesn’t have stress? If you don’t call me up and let me know, I want you on the show because I want to learn more about you. I want to unpack what’s going on with you. These techniques that she shares around meditation are critical for decreasing stress and increasing productivity. As a woman on fire like me, you are looking for tips around how to do that, how to have less stress and more productivity. She makes meditation sound so approachable. That’s what I love about it.

The other thing that I found fascinating in this conversation is the fact that we go into being a high-achiever. We talk about the push versus the flow. She says specifically, “You cannot quantify success.” What she’s talking about there is the importance of modifying for the individual, for respecting individual strengths. For you as a high performer, I believe that you’re going to find that segment of the conversation insightful. The last thing that Karen and I talk about that stood out for me is around this idea of feminine and masculine as it relates to or pertains to intuition. Karen certainly has a lot more expertise in this area than I do and so I stood up in my chair. I took note when she shared with me her idea that intuition is available. We always think about it as that’s a female’s intuition or women have that more than men.

Her take on it is that both men and women have the same access to intuition but certainly, women are more prone to hearing it because it’s a more feminine quality. You can hear more around that conversation but that was of interest to me, especially with the hundreds and thousands of people that she has guided. I thought that’s an interesting take and an interesting tidbit that I hadn’t heard before. I could keep going on and I do have a couple more thoughts to share, but I will hold them until after the interview. Without further delay, let’s welcome the beautiful, Miss Karen Newell.

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As a starting point, what I would love to ask you, Karen, is about your history as a leader in corporate. Where and when did you start to incorporate intuition or thinking about the intuitive aspect of you and using it for effectiveness in your role?

My background consists of a 25-year career in the publishing industry. We did weekly newspapers and regional magazines at the company I worked for. We were on a constant deadline. I was a manager of the people in the Art Department and I was also a member of the strategic planning team. I was involved in my business at a higher level in strategic planning and then also down and dirty daily deadlines and managing people. One thing that was important to me when I would manage the employees that were working for us is that when we would have our reviews and we’d always ask them to tell me, “What are your greatest strengths and what are your greatest weaknesses?” We like to start with the weaknesses because this was where we could start to learn from someone else what they thought their downfalls were. I could match that up with my own thoughts, but they would be the one saying it. My angle would always be from their perspective of how they were doing in their work.

My intuition was a part of these regular reviews. On the other hand, I was involved in this bigger picture planning. I wasn’t always keyed into my intuition. I was a planner. I could take any problem. I was known as a great innovator so I could take any problem and come up with a plan to correct that problem. This is what I did. In my mind, I was doing this intellectually, cognitively, and my mind naturally could handle a lot of information at once and find patterns. What I realized is that my intuition was at play. In about twenty years into my career, I started to get more interested in actively generating personal experience with the unseen realms. That sounds mysterious but it is learning more about, “Why am I hearing? What is my purpose and finding little blockages that might have been holding me back?”

As I was doing this, I’ve learned all about HeartMath. I learned how to hold my heart energy in such a way that I could imagine myself breathing in and out of my heart into a bubble around my body. This was fine to do in a meditation class and things like this, but I found it especially fascinating to apply this breathing technique while I was in a potentially contentious business meeting where there might have been a lot of stress and a lot of opinions. I would start breathing in and out of my heart with these feelings of gratitude. I would look around the room. I didn’t have to say a word, but I could feel the energy calm down. I was known as someone who could keep the balance. I never told anyone what exactly I was doing. I could keep walk into a stressful deadline situation and bring calm to the whole environment. This was because I was actively focused on my inner balance and knowing how HeartMath works, which automatically affects the people around you.

You said that at the beginning of your career, you were tapping in intuitively but you didn’t know it quite yet. You didn’t realize that’s what you were doing. Now looking back on it, during that time, how do you see or know that was true? Did you have something in your body? What were the cues to you? 

A lot of it was how the external world responded to me was most of my evidence. I didn’t necessarily feel anything different inside. What I learned was about the electromagnetic fields of the heart. That’s when I realized that’s what was going on. This can be researched through HeartMath Institute, HeartMath.org is their website. They’ve been studying the heart for decades in Northern California and they found that from everyone’s heart is this electromagnetic field. It expands and contracts around your body in the shape of the torus. If you don’t know what a torus field is, that’s like a donut with the hole in the middle and your heart is the thing that’s in the middle. This energy moves around your body constantly. It expands and contracts based on your emotional state. Most of us aren’t aware that this is going on.

Especially in my work environment, when someone would come after a commute in the morning complaining and whining about the weather or whatever it may be, all of us would retreat from that person. Someone else might walk in the room with a big smile on their face and they’re all happy and you feel better around that person. What I learned is it’s the electromagnetic field that we feel in other people. Many of us might think, how can I protect myself from all those with our heart field? My strategy was a little different. I wanted to make sure that my heart field only affected other people in positive ways, especially when I was at work in a stressful situation. I would always try to maintain my center and my calm state within. This serves to help people around me without even having to say a word.

This HeartMath Institute has discovered that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. This is where my cognitive mind and everything might think that I was in charge, that the brain and the thinking part of us is in charge, but the heart plays this much bigger role but it doesn’t have a linguistic center. It’s a feeling that you need to incorporate as opposed to some information to analyze. Our hearts are gathering information out in the world and bringing it back into the body. This is one way we can look at how intuition works. We’re gathering this information and then our brain then interprets what is all of this mean, then our actions and behaviors stem from that.

I’ve had a few discussions with people in leadership about leveraging their intuition or even knowing that they weren’t as much of an expert as you. They knew the times when they were being told in their body in some way, shape or form that, “This is the direction we need to go. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not the logical decision to make.” You probably even talk to people of these experiences. Do you recall a time when that’s how you were feeling, but you didn’t move in that direction because it was against all popular belief? It was against the strategic team but you knew inside that it was the wrong decision.

It’s a balance that you need to come to from the intuition along with all of the other information. I can’t say that there was a situation where my intuition was telling me something that I didn’t follow. I usually combined all of that effectively. There is a feeling that I feel when I know and feel something to be true. It may feel a little shiver or a little sense of chills where you’re a little chilly but it’s not cold. That feeling over time has developed into something I can count on as an internal feeling that something important is taking place.

That’s what I get too. Other people might think I’m crazy but over time when something is this spot on, it’s a hundred a million percent, I get chills on my upper back. I know it’s spot on when it goes strongly down both my arms. I’ll even tell people, “That’s it. That’s exactly what you’ve got to do. No more discussion.”

A lot of people describe that chills feeling, wherever on their body it comes up. For me, more on the back of the neck is the most important thing. It can run through my body and it’s almost like an adrenaline rush, but not quite as strong as that, a little more subtle. This is something that many of us will shake off as some coincidence. I must have been having a shiver at that moment because they’re similar and they feel similar to what we call shivers. We should not wait. We have been accustomed to in our Western world ignoring that intuition. We’ve been told, “That’s nonsense. Wishful thinking. Some byproduct of chemistry in the brain.” Something like that. What I’ve come to realize is that it’s real. When we can start to tap into it, when we can start to validate and acknowledge it, then it becomes rife.

I can hear the shout from the other side of whoever is reading going, “Thank you, Karen. You’re giving words and descriptions to what a lot of women feel.” I don’t know what you’ve found in your research and your journey if there’s a stronger intuitive factor in women versus men. 

I wouldn’t say it’s statistically researched or anything, but I do have the sense that generally speaking, women are more in touch with this than men. It’s not to say that men aren’t in touch with it. In fact, men can tap into it as easily but it’s more of a feminine trait. I like to compare masculine and feminine qualities, not necessarily men and women. Masculine energy is external and active. Feminine energy is more internal. It’s more passive, not necessarily in a bad way, but more of allowing things to happen as opposed to pushing to make them happen. In our world, the masculine energy is more valued than the feminine energy. I want to be very clear here because many women need to adopt these masculine traits in order to even be taken seriously in the world. In my job, I was managing the Art Department but I was also the Technology Director. I had a lot of hats. In technology, that’s all men. When I would go to conferences, this was years ago, there would be huge rooms full of men. The energy was very different. In that case, technology is external. It is something that is or isn’t. You flip the switch and all of this.

I’ll tell you a little story. I was in charge of technology for my company. When email was invented and the internet and all of that, it became very critical to our daily business. When a server would crash or something, it was my responsibility to fix it. That’s where that calm balance would always come in handy. When I would go on vacation or when I would be out of town, I had an assistant. I had two different assistants over time and one of them would always say, “You’re going to be out of town. The server’s going to crash and I’m not going to be able to handle it.” Sure enough, that’s what would happen for this woman. Something terrible would happen and she’d call me. I’d walk her through and it would always turn out okay. I had another assistant who would say, “It’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine. Don’t worry, have fun on vacation.” That’s exactly what would happen. Our inner world, our attitude, our behavior, the way we look upon a certain thing, absolutely seems to have an effect on the unfolding reality. I don’t want to make any specific claims on how all this works. We can all experiment with this in our own lives. I always still maintain the attitude that when I’m around computers, they work better. This kind of attitude in a particular problem seems more productive in the long run.

I love that you called out that this isn’t a male or female thing. It’s the energy and we have aspects of both. I came from corporate too and I was thinking you’re describing almost every high achiever and high performer I knew at that time. Everything was a push and completely not using that flow and ease. For myself, that’s why I struggled quite a bit.

We’re women and we naturally have a different demeanor. It almost feels uncomfortable to be aggressive and be pushy. I can be that way. There’s no problem at all. I find that when I’m a little more laid back like when I would interview the employees, I wasn’t telling them. I was asking them, “What do you think about your performance?” and getting them involved. That’s a more feminine way of approaching an employee review. There are all kinds of other ways. I often would be the one who was a mediator between different departments who might be having conflicts. It was very important in all of those cases to listen to every single person’s inner complaints, inner understandings and perspectives of what was going on.

It didn’t matter what was going on outside, their perspective is what mattered. When you could shift someone’s perspective, sometimes that alone would solve problems. It’s much more effective, especially as women. I don’t want to come off as women are somehow superior. What I believe is that men and women are equally gifted with certain traits that need to come forward in order for us to be successful. It’s almost a balance between the best qualities of men and women, masculine, feminine energy, the divine masculine, the divine feminine. When we can find that balance from within, all of us can have better success in anything in our lives, from relationships to work, to anything that you put your mind to.

I wanted to give a little more attention to that push comment you made because this goes to that inside-out game that we were even talking about before we got started. I was in a lot of sales organizations. What would happen is the company or the teams would want to benchmark the highest performers, figure out what they’re doing to be successful, and then create a repeatable process for the other members of the team. This would be somewhat common. It wouldn’t work for most of the people because they weren’t addressing what was going on internally for the individual. 

That’s the exact same thing that I tell people now that I help people go through the process of exploring within their own consciousness or meditation or whatnot. I know I went to countless courses on how to feel the energy, how to meditate, healing touch for animals and all of these different courses. We would learn all these different techniques. Not all of them worked for me. Not all of them worked for everyone in the class. What I learned is that each of us needs to through trial and error and experimentation to find that specific combination of techniques that works for us. It also has everything to do with the perspective of that person because as it happens, each and every one of us has a different brainwave state. They came out with the evidence that brainwaves can be used as fingerprints.

That’s how unique they are from one individual to the next. It’s no wonder that the same exact meditation techniques won’t work the same for everyone. It’s no surprise to me that techniques through use during a business day are not going to work the same for everyone. One person might want to barrel through all their emails first thing in the morning, while others need to do them spaced out throughout the day in order to be effective. You cannot quantify such success in anything. I would even guess that even sports athletes have slightly different skills. You’ll hear Tom Brady, “Here’s the best workout for so and so,” but I bet if that person has a particularly weak hamstring or something, they’re going to need to modify it a little bit. This is how we need to look at things and respect the individual for who they are and modify such instructions accordingly.

It explains why you can have somebody with two Master’s and a PhD, who’s a low performer and then someone who took a chance on and they barely got through their Bachelor’s and they are killing it.

I can tell you academic learning is not necessarily a marker of success. That would apply to people who learn technology and very focused on technology. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have good people skills, time management skills, the ability to take a break when they need to in order to be the most productive they can be. Working with their nose in a book is what they’re used to in the academic world. To write all those papers and pass all those exams. That’s not the same kind of skills that you necessarily need in a business environment. My college degree was Liberal Arts in Communications. It was very broad. In my degree, we were taught to think for ourselves, all of those critical thinking skills. At the same time, we had to regurgitate all of the information that the professors need in order to pass the exam. It was a combination of our own critical thinking and analysis but also a certain level of memorization. Like anything, those academic people come with huge amounts of knowledge and it’s a matter of how do then they use that to apply it in effective ways.

I came back from a conference with Advancing Women in Product. What was interesting to me having been out of corporate for many years, the amount of discussion by the speakers around the human elements and the importance of human skillsets, communication and intuition, being able to understand people is what it was at the end of the day. I found that fascinating. It was so much not about the bottom line.

That’s great to know that things are moving along.

It made me think of that. You talked about meditation and this is not something I do successfully and I know much about. Every time I read a book or hear an interview by someone who we would say as very successful, 99% of the time, they are engaging in meditation in some way, shape or form.

That’s not a surprise. They started studying meditation in the Western world in the ’90s. It was specifically to measure what was going on in the brains of these Tibetan monks who had been meditating for thousands and thousands of hours. Their brains were different and our Western brains were different from theirs because that is not how we spend our days. We’re very busy. It’s no surprise that meditation can be challenging to learn because it’s not a natural part of our daily life. Something we learned from when we were young, they do in other societies and belief systems. When I first started to try to meditate, I resist it because I thought about monks, caves and things like that. I thought I’m the suburban simple mom making a living. It was a little bit intimidating to me. Often you would hear about meditation classes from Buddhist groups. I thought I don’t want to become a Buddhist, but I want to learn to meditate.

The benefits that they talked about were so alluring like lowering stress, better immunity and all of that. I wanted some of that. I also was interested in understanding that greater part of me, that inner world but it was very challenging at first. I would sit and do that simple guidance that you often get from meditation teachers to pay attention to your breath, focus on your breath. I would try to do this and I thought what was supposed to happen is that my thoughts would fade into the background and I would have this blank mind, but that’s not what happened.

I had plans that I was working on. Those details would come in, conversations I’d had the day before or as I was planning to have the next day. Some arguments I had had with one of my daughter’s teachers or something like that. Whatever it was would come into my mind. I thought it was a waste of time and yet, I still kept hearing about the benefits and I wanted to learn. Everything else I had tried to learn, I could learn in a certain amount of time. This was very different and frustrating. There were two keys for me. One was the attention to the heart. I’ve mentioned a little bit about that but the other bigger key was a particular type of sound.

I’ve co-founded this company, SacredAcoustics.com. We make these recordings that help people get into that quieter state. These recordings contained binaural beats and there are a lot of binaural beat producers out there, but ours were a little different. We combine monaural beats with our binaural beats and every carrier frequency that’s included in our recordings is harmonic to every other. It’s a little different than how most producers make the approach, but these kinds of sounds helped to start quiet my mind.

For me, it took a little time. It was not an immediate thing but I could tell something was different. When I listened to those tones while I was trying to get into a meditative state, it was much easier to do. I think of them as training wheels, especially for the Western mind. Lots of longtime meditators listened to our tones and told us they can go even deeper. Other long-term meditators who have techniques that work for them say they get in the way.

You were clearly into this early. I would say there’s an interest there on your part. How does one end a publishing career and start another company? How does that happen? What goes down behind the scenes? 

What happened was I left my company in 2011. Leading up to that time, I had developed all of these skills in web development, managing networks, email servers and all of this. I wanted to use my skills to support publications and websites that were more in-line with my personal values. We were doing a magazine that was very focused on wealthy people. Rolex watches and furs were always driving all of our sales. I wanted to find something that was more in-tuned with my values. I left the company to be a freelance web developer. That was my intention. I did do that for a couple of years. As I left the company is when I started getting involved with these sounds.

I had met this person, Kevin Kossi, who lives in Manhattan. He’s a mechanical-electrical engineer who owns several companies right there in Manhattan. He was also interested in exploring these kinds of realms. He had had a near-death experience. He wanted to see if he could connect with what he had touched during that time. Since he was a Mechanical-Electrical Engineer, he told me that he was going to make his own binaural beats when I met him. I thought he was crazy. I learned that he was building an airplane right in a loft in Chelsea Piers and he had his own biodiesel fuel plant and all of these inventive things.

I started sharing with him the vast library of recordings I had acquired over the last several years at that time. I was living in Baltimore. He was living in New York but we would share these files and start to figure out how they were made. We started to make them ourselves. At that time, it was a personal hobby. It wasn’t something I thought would become a business. I was busy as a freelance web developer and more and more the recordings were becoming a bigger part of my life. It was when I met Eben Alexander, who is a neurosurgeon who wrote that book, Proof Of Heaven, back in 2012. We met in 2011 and he was exploring using sound to reconnect with the realms that he had encountered during a near-death experience.

You can’t make this up that I meet these two people, but at any rate, he was the first person besides Kevin and I who listened to our recordings. He’s the one who was encouraging us to make them available to others. At that time, I had no intention of teaching anyone how to do any of this. It was Eben who wanted me to help him teach other people how to access these kinds of realms. I met people along the way. It’s almost like if I had planned this, I would have got in my own way. If I had known when I quit my job that I was going to meet someone and become some meditation teacher, I would have thought that was ridiculous and moved back to the West Coast or something. It’s almost better when you don’t know what’s coming.

There must have been moments where it’s like, “We’re going to start this company or we’re going to grow this company. I can’t do that. Nobody’s going to show up.” 

That’s what I thought. I had all kinds of doubts and I thought, “I’m no expert in this. I’m just some girl who was helping people with their computers and stuff.” I had no inkling that anyone would care at all with what we were doing. Eben had a big platform at that time and it was him who got the word out. It made it very easy because I then needed to put the website together, find out a way to fulfill all these orders and help the customers. It was all the skills that I had learned during my 25-year career. I did not have to pay someone else to do those things. It all stayed in my hands. That’s what made Kevin my business partner in Sacred Acoustics. We have done a great job with doing most of the work ourselves without having to farm it out, which people appreciate because I answer customer emails when they’re having trouble, not necessarily with the technical issue. I have helped with that. If someone is having trouble with a particular process, I’m the one who answers them directly. I enjoy having that interface with the people because I’ve been through this myself. I know what it’s like to want to have certain experiences and not know how to generate them.

If I’m on your small but mighty team at Sacred Acoustics, what is the required meditation practice time?

I don’t have a strict rule on that, but I do recommend at least twenty minutes a day, especially if someone is feeling a lot of stress at a particular moment. If you take a little time out and focus on calming yourself down, you’ll be much more productive instead of trying to push through. Back in my corporate time, I wasn’t meditating much but I always long for an afternoon nap. I thought that would make me more productive to take a little nap after lunch. This is something that all of us should be able to have that flexibility and find our most productive times. Fortunately, my company allowed me to have a flexible schedule and I would go to work much earlier than everyone else and then I could leave a little earlier. That was a nice thing as well.

This has been fascinating. I could keep going. I have a suspicion of who’s reading here either is somebody who’s right where I have been or they know about some of these things and they’ve been feeling some of these things, but they’re not talking about it. Where’s the next best place for them to go?

If you’re not talking about it and you feel you want to dip your toe and feel a little bit about this kind of community, I did create two different opportunities with Eben Alexander. Both of them include some Sacred Acoustics recordings. You can go to EbenAlexander.com/33days. That’s one option. That’s a completely free 33-day email course that will introduce you to all the concepts that are a part of our book that we wrote together, Living In A Mindful Universe. You will find that more than 8,000 people have taken that course and hundreds of them have left comments. What’s great about this course is when you go each day at the bottom, it’s set up a blog or all of these comments and beautiful experiences people are sharing, attitudes or beliefs. Eben and I will put some concepts out there and we don’t necessarily think everyone needs to swallow them hook line and sinker, but it’s an opportunity to have a conversation about it. It’s a discussion that moves us away from the dominant worldview paradigm that’s in our Western world, which is the physical world is all that exists.

That’s the materialist paradigm and that’s shifting very rapidly in science, although the ones who write about it in the mainstream media haven’t quite caught up yet this woo-woo is becoming more mainstream. That word, woo-woo, makes it sound not important but it’s incredibly important because as it turns out, our consciousness has a role according to all of the experiments in Quantum Mechanics. The observers in all of those experiments are influencing the results of those experiences and that consciousness is us. The other opportunity is InnerSanctumCenter.com. This is a brand-new thing that Eben and I have created. It also includes some Sacred Acoustics recordings. One part of that is free and that’s a live Q&A that we did that you can enter your email and we’ll tell you how to access a 93-minute Q&A that Eben and I did with opportunity as well to respond and discuss with others people, although that one is newer and doesn’t have as much participation yet. You’ll find a lot richer material on that 33-day journey.

The other woman that’s reading and that’s like, “I don’t want a community yet. I’m not even sure about this, but Karen said something about feeling less stressed and I would love more of that.” Where does she go?

In that case, you go right to SacredAcoustics.com, look for the button that says Free Download, we’ll send you a free recording that you don’t even have to tell anyone you’re listening to. When I would come back from some of my retreats and trips that I would take to learn about a lot of this stuff to my job, people did look at me like I was a little funny. I’ve got to be known as a little weird around the office. Someone would have a strange, interesting dream and who is the one they would come to? They would come and ask me about what could this possibly mean? If you download that free download and you don’t know what to do with it, there are also free series of training videos, where I explain what to expect. You don’t need to communicate with anyone. You can do all of this all by yourself in the privacy of your own home. We do recommend that you have headphones to get the most effect from these recordings.

Thank you so much, Karen, for being on the show. 

Thanks, Michelle, for inviting me. It was a wonderful conversation.

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I want to know what stood out to you in this interview? There are a few ways to do that. You could head on over to the show page and leave comments there. That would be fabulous. Reach out to me via email. You could do that through the website or you could even leave a review on iTunes. Find me on LinkedIn. There are many ways to connect with me but the main thing here is I’m curious. I want to have a conversation with you about these things and unless I can know what you’re thinking by you leaving a comment on a post or sharing, I don’t know what you’re thinking. That’s not as fun. For me, the fun is having a conversation.

There was one more part of this interview that I felt strongly about for you reading because when I am interviewing and chatting with women who are on the spectrum way towards higher levels of success in what they’re achieving in their career, they figured all this stuff out. Each of them would be the first to share with you that they didn’t come out this way. It took time, an incubation period for them to haphazardly figure some of this stuff out for themselves which is why I’m doing this show. It’s one of the many reasons, so that I can tease out for you and shine the light on some of the things so that you don’t have to be sitting there and feeling all alone going, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I figure this out for myself?”

Those were a lot of words to say. One of the other aspects of this interview was when I asked Karen, “Did you automatically know that you were tapping into your intuition? How did you know that it was indeed your intuition? What did you feel in your body?” That’s one of the things I heard from a lot of the other interviews I’ve done thus far. Women that are experiencing sensations are getting that gut feeling. What was fascinating to me is Karen did not say that. She said, “I did not feel anything internally at all, but the evidence was in watching how externally the world was responding to me.” That was what intrigued her to figure out why that was happening.

If you’re somebody sitting there going, “I don’t get any chilies down my arms, Michelle. I don’t have any feeling in my gut.” That’s okay. This is still available to you. I thought that little tidbit, all the gold is in the tidbits. That’s why I tried to tease this out for you that even somebody like Karen who’s now built a successful business around this. When she was first tapping into her intuition, she wasn’t feeling anything. I find that encouraging for you if you’re the person who is sitting there going, “This is not available to me. I don’t even know where to begin. I’m not even having woo-woo anything going on.”

I also loved how Karen made this available to you through her description of meditation and showing that despite now being totally on the other side and living in the land of woo. When she was first approaching meditation, it was simply listening to her breathing. That’s so good because it feels unapproachable, yet it’s very approachable. If you want to be like me, I am not going to raise my hand and say I’m even listening to my breath and doing meditation every day. My meditation is getting onto the yoga mat. That is one of the only places that I find where I can focus on my breath, get out of my head, and into my body. It took time by the way. It wasn’t like, “Go one time and now we’re all good.” It took a lot of time to be able to release surrender on the yoga mat. The more that I keep up that meditative practice for myself, the more insights I get. Whenever I go to a 90-minute yoga session, I walked away with some enlightening ideas, thoughts, reflections and intuition about what I need to be doing next. Those were some of the things that I was thinking about when I was listening to the interview with Karen and wanted to pass along to you. I would love to hear your thoughts. Find me somewhere. Find me on social, reach out through the website, EvolutionizeMedia.com and let me know what you’re thinking. Let’s have a conversation. We’ll talk to you soon.