Midlife Becoming: Transforming Into Your True Self - Soreya James

Saying Goodbye And Letting Go

My whole all my bodily functions had let go, and I was like breathing very shallow.

And I I remember lying there with my hand on my heart and saying goodbye to my son.

Wow.

And my parents and all the people in my life. And I was like, because people die of dengue feet all the time. And I just and I and I looked, I had my hands on my heart, I was lying on my back, and I said, okay, if this is the way I go, so be it. And I've had a good life.

Midlife Rebel And Today’s Guest

Welcome to the Midlife Rebel Podcast. It's time to rewrite the midlife story for women who refuse to be put in a box. Because maybe midlife isn't a crisis. Maybe it's an awakening. Today I'm joined by ceremonial speaker, author, guide, and mentor Saraya James. Soraya's work is grounded in the understanding that our hardest experiences often shape our deepest growth and that purpose can emerge through the process of healing ourselves. She's here today to talk about how she supports others in finding their next evolution. Short and sweet for that intro, Saraya. I'm really excited about this conversation. And it's and as we've sort of said in our preamble, it could go in a number of different directions, but um I think evolution, transformation, metamorphosis, they're the kind of key things that we're going to be talking about. I'd love to start briefly by um reading out an abridged version of the message that you sent me before we uh teed up this interview to give uh the listeners a flavor of what might be to come. Okay. So you said to listen back, it was a while ago. I'm definitely a mid um, I'm definitely a rebel in my field and have navigated some huge moments in my life outside of the rules and outside of the lines. I'd love to bring some controversy to the systems, structures, and boundaries that women have to work with, especially in their 40s and 50s. There we go. That was a little very true. Yeah, so I'm like, all right. Where should we start?

What A Ceremonial Speaker Does

Can you tell me, first of all, before we do go any further, um what a ceremonial speaker is? Because it was the first thing I mentioned about you, but I don't actually know what that role is.

It's a good it's a good term, isn't it? It's something that I kind of coined myself. So, you know, we have keynote speakers and transformational speakers and motivational speakers. And generally they will come onto a stage and they will deliver a 60 to 90 minute talk or a TED talk and they will speak to the audience and give some information and there might be some form of transformation in that period of time. What I do when I'm speaking to an audience, be it you know, a small group or a larger group, is that I actually take them through a process. So it starts from me coming onto stage, and there's musicians, and I start by I open with a song. So I'm you know, me singing, not just a song playing in the background. And it's a very specific piece of music that is curated for the audience that I'm speaking to. And it elicits some type of emotion. Um it creates a sound current and a vibration in the audience that then I begin to speak about, about how the sound and the vibration that I use, and that every word that we say has a vibrational essence through it. And then throughout the keynote, if you like, it's like I am the key and the note, and the audience is the key and the note. And then I start to get them to kind of soften into their bodies, and you know, I'm reading the room always, reading the energetics of the room, because some people are sometimes sitting there with their arms closed and you know a bit resistant, and so I'll speak into what I see and what I feel, and then I get us to breathe as a collective audience, and um and then the energetics of the room shifts, and I use music, and and I'm I don't have a written speech, like a lot of keynote speakers have this one written speech and they deliver it over and over and over again. Mine is always different, and so it's creating more of a ceremonial space. I don't want to use the word sacred because that sounds a bit woo-woo, but it is a little bit like that, um, where the whole audience as one consciousness shifts through the delivery of, you know, the the the channeling or the transmission that that comes through my words. I never know what I'm gonna say. I never know what's gonna happen from one moment to the next, but I'm always in awe of what takes place in a room. I'm I'm I'm actually presenting this weekend, and one of my co-organizers is like, you know, have you organized this and have you planned this? And I'm like, no, no, no, no. There's no plan, no structure. Let me just show up and open and see what comes through.

And she's like, Oh, see that lack of trust over there is with you.

That's amazing. That's so cool.

The whole room becomes like the symphony, like it's like an orchestra, you know, and I'm just I'm just one instrument. So yeah.

What sort of events um do you do that for?

So oh bird just came in, just kind of banged on the window. So predominantly I've been presenting and teaching at large festivals for the last 20 years, so spiritual festivals and yoga festivals and dance festivals. So I I uh globally, um so this weekend I'm actually I've actually created um a yoga and meditation well-being festival here in our local towns. We've got 135 people coming. And um, so I'm I'm speaking and presenting through through the elements of of nature and through breath and sound and movement. Some people might call it yoga, it's not. Um it's a transmission, it's moving life force. So yeah, mostly at festivals. I've done a few keynotes to um different organizations, like you know, the the Pink Ribbon Um Soci Society, uh Association, I think it's called, and um, you know, more not for profit, non-for-profit, non-profit organizations. But it's just it's not really my thing. It's not really my thing because they're coming along and they're not really fully engaged in you. They're there because they're they well, they've chosen to be, but they don't really know that what you what you're going to say or deliver. You know, they just know there's a keynote speaker. So preferences to work with organizations and um events that are actually coming for this specific delivery. Yeah, it makes it much easier.

Finding A Calling Outside The Rules

I know that you've been working doing this stuff for a long time, like throughout your life, really, haven't you? But how did you ever figure out that that was your thing and that you could do that? That you could a chat, like, you know, get in front of an audience, use music, use breath, channel what you were gonna say. How did you ever figure that out?

Um my mum's always said that I danced out of the womb. Okay, and and I was talking at nine months old. Um, I was singing as a little girl. I was always in the limelight. You know, my grandparents or my grandfather used to put me on a chair in front of his friends when they were having a few beers in the garage and go, sing for us, darling. And so, you know, there I was singing, you know, like the the little star. I mean, Saraya means the sun. So it's you know, it's a part of my the destiny that's inside of, you know, if you think about the creative energies that every one of us has, it's like, well, mine is this, and so it's it was just something that um that I was born with, like it's innate. And I was a dancer and I was a singer and I was an actor as a teenager, and then at the age of 19, I went to my first transformational experience, a three-day workshop, and then it was 120 people, and this man and his uh it was a I don't I don't know if they're husband and wife, but this couple delivered this absolutely potent body of work over three days. It was it was intense. Like I was in the room with gang members and addicts and ex-prisoners and the CEOs, and it was kind of you know, the right at the early stages of that kind of cathartic transformational work when Tony Robbins was just coming on the scene as well. And I had a really profound experience that particular weekend. Um, and one of these beautiful men said to me, This is your calling, like this is what you need to be doing. Because the at the end we had to present on stage our breakthrough, our transformation, and it just felt so natural for me. So, you know, that was 30 something years ago, 35 years ago, and I it's yeah, it's a calling, it's not a job or a it's a vocation, you know. And every time I tried to step off the path and go into a job, yeah, life just brought me back and gone, no, we're not wasting your talent. We're not. I'm like, okay, you have to listen. And that's a hard slog, yeah. And it really is, you know, but here I am.

I was gonna ask you how smooth that had been, because I certainly know that there have been many twists and turns in my own, you know, going from the age of 19 to now in our early 50s. Like, was that was it I was gonna say, was that smooth, smooth sailing? You know, this is my vocation and that's what I'm gonna do.

No, not at all. Not at all. Um it's been a tumultuous journey. And at the same time, life's always taken care of me in the greater sense. You know, my son said to me on the phone this morning, he's like, Mum, how do you keep going? And I said, darling, I've got faith. But I don't believe in God. I said, It's not about faith in God, it's faith in me, it's faith in this greater universal consciousness that kind of organizes the energy around us, you know, and in us. So, no, it's been a really challenging journey, but that's the human journey. Nobody has it easy, like nobody's exempt from suffering or challenges or pain, or you know, uh, it's I mean, since I was 19, I've been through some harrowing experiences. I've had three near death experiences. I've parented a child and on my own, you know, like that that in itself is is a tough job. And you know, really, I mean, I could fill a list of all the things that I've um that I've had to face. But thank goodness I have had the tools from a really young age. Like to have that as a as a almost like a a backbone, if you like, you know, a foundation, that's what's always brought me back. And I was just saying to a friend the other day, sometimes it's it's not it's harder being aware and awake. Because you know, the the the mind is always going, come on.

Once you know, you can't unknow. You can't unknow. But for someone who doesn't know, like life's just doing what you do, isn't it?

Like this people like, you've got it so easy, but no, they don't. No, they don't, they just don't know. Um, so yeah, it's been a really, really crazy journey. I mean, you know, the book that I wrote when I read it back, I'm like, oh god, this poor woman.

Yeah, it's well, I'd love you to share some of those experiences. But I would I do have a question for you, and that I know that you've said you are not what happened to you. You like you feel that way about yourself, you haven't become what happened to you. They've been experiences that you've had growth through. But how easy has it been for you to let go of the stories? Because we we create stories, don't we, through our experiences? Um, and we look for proof as well that you know that's that thing that happened to me equals, you know, you could easily, if you say that you've had three near-death experiences and here you are, you know, sitting smiling, but you could easily be the victim of those stories and like be like, oh well, the world's out to get me. So, how easy has it been for you to let go of that narrative and to just accept that this is part of your life process?

Yeah, I feel quite so because quite so is that good English. I because I was in um almost immersed in this work so young, you know, my mum and dad are yogis, not okay, spiritual yogis, but they introduced me to alternative therapies at a really young age. Um, and you know, I had this body of work in my sort of early 20s, and then I entered into the world of Tony Robbins, and then I stepped away from his um his teachings to work with a beautiful woman called Brandon Bays in my late 20s, and her work is is working with grace and the divine, and it's it's potent, potent work. And I trained as a practitioner under journey therapy. So from a really young age, I had this sense of knowing I am not my body and not my mind. Like I, you know, I've spent time in India with yogis and I was with a community for 13 years, oneness community, and I was always moving towards spirit as opposed to um the material. And so there's this innate knowing that I'm not my story, I'm not what happened to me, I'm I'm not my past, I'm I'm not my future. Um I am actually consciousness, I'm space, I'm energy. And you know, the mind comes and tricks you, of course, but I'm because I've been on this path for so long, and I've you know, I've I've dedicated and devoted my life to awakening, essentially. You know, I've been practicing Kundalini yoga meditation for probably I don't know, over 20 years daily. I'm always moving the obstructions, and so when the mind comes in and says blah blah blah blah, I it it's almost like straight away a breath comes through me or a mantra comes through me, or the voice of you know, my soul comes through me. It's it's automatic now, but that's taken a long time, yeah. And it still takes work, you know. I'm I'm not a superhuman, I'm still very human, but I feel really blessed that I have the gifts and the technology to shift the shed, so to speak. Yeah, yeah.

So

Near-Death Moments And The Body

you've been through some pretty hectic uh life experiences. You've as I've mentioned, and you mentioned, three near-death experiences. Can you talk us through? I know you have one quite recently with the the dengue dengue fever, dengue, yeah. Yeah, but in those moments, can you talk us through that a little bit? Would you mind?

Not at all.

I'm just really curious, and I think other people will be too. Like, in those moments where you really are life and death situation, like how do you break through to like accept that this is all part of the process?

It's so interesting that when that question comes up, because it has a few times, my body remembers you know, and there's always emotion behind it because it was such a critical, crucial moment. Um, so I'll talk you through the car accident, which happened a few years ago in the United States. I had a head-on collision. I I had been um teaching uh on a teacher training for a week and I was really exhausted. And I came out of this driveway, you know, left-hand drive, left-hand road, and I just kind of had a moment of forgetting I was in the US and I was, you know, doing 100 kilometers an hour and came around a corner. And in this moment, I was like, oh my god, I'm on the wrong side of the too late. And a Jeep came in and we collide collided. It's a big impact. And I was I was knocked unconscious, I was dragged out of the car and put on the side of the road because the car was you know smoking. And when I finally came to the very, very first thought that came into my mind or in into being was I'm not my body, I am not my mind. And with that, I gave I gave went through this body scan, and I was like, you know, trying to I was in shock and trauma and all the things around me. I did a scan and I was like, I'm alive, and I shouldn't have come out alive out of that car crash, and there was nothing broken, and I was feeling my body, and I was like, there's no, there was a bit of blood, and there was some cracked ribs and things, but because I know myself to be energy, I was able to expand outside of the pain. And people were all, you know, sort of around me. I was aware that people were around me and trying to get my attention and what have you, and I just sat there, you know, and allowed my body to shake, allowed the nervous system to do its thing, allowed the tears, like I let out this wailing tears to let the sound and the and the the shock leave my body. And then this mantra came in that I know is for stress and shock, and I started chanting it in internally. And some part of me believed that there was a moment where I passed because I don't I don't know how long I was out, and there was definitely a darkness and a light, and there was a breath that was taken, and there was all this drama going on with the people that were around me, and there was a photograph taken after the accident of the car, and I was like, There's no like I shouldn't have gotten out of there, and there was a there was a like almost like a mandala kind of light where the passenger window was.

Wow.

If you look at this photo, it's otherworldly, it's not a reflection of light or anything like that. And and I honestly believe that that something happened in that space. And people were just like bewildered as to how I managed to be there and be so incredibly calm and and not impacted by what had taken place, and so it was the same with dengue fever. Like, I didn't know I had dengue fever un until about five days in. I never had it before. Um, I was in my villa in Kosamui. It was we were in a massive storm, so everything was shut. I had only been there for a short time, so I didn't know anybody. I didn't have a scooter, I didn't, I was just kind of hanging out, you know, and finding the lay of the land. And and when I kind of clocked, oh my god, something is really happening to my physical being. It's not a cold or it's not a, you know, all the things. And then I remembered one of the women that was but uh staying beside me about a week beforehand, uh, that she had dengue fever. I went, oh my god. And then I started looking at the symptoms and I was like, oh my god. But because I didn't know anyone, I didn't know how to get a hold of a hospital. I was trying to Google all these things um to try and get help. I I couldn't. I couldn't, and then it came on so fast the fever, the pain, the the head, the headache, the the sweats, the Diarrhea, all the things that came on so fast that I just had zero energy. So I thought I just have to go through this. The only way through was through. And I kept on hearing that in my mind. So it was 15 days.

Holy doobie.

The storm took out the electricity. My phone died. I had no food for I think if I remember rightly, it was about six days. I was just sipping on little sips of water. I was lying naked on the cold tile floor because it was 40 degrees, but no, no air conditioning. And there was a point where my whole all my bodily functions had let go. And I was like breathing very shallow.

And I remember lying there with my hand on my heart and saying goodbye to my son.

Wow.

And my parents and all the people in my life. And I was like, because people die of dengue fever all the time. And I just and I and I looked, I had my hands on my heart, I was lying on my back, and I said, okay, God, if this is the way I go, so be it. And I've had a good life and I've done good things.

And I just slipped into this unconscious state. I was hallucinating and I was all delusional. And and I went and I I just went with peace. I just went with peace. And I honestly thought I wasn't gonna wake up.

Wow.

And it was a really beautiful experience. Like there was no fear, there was sadness, and there was grief, and you know, of letting no who would find me, you know, all uh this was an hour, hours and hours, this process of you know, feeling all this, and my poor parents and rah rah. And then I was woken by the air conditioning in the fan and the lights coming back on. About about, I still don't know the timeline, but I think it was about two and a half days or one and a one. I still don't know. It was it was one somewhere between one and three days, like that my sense of time was just gone. Um and I remember kind of waking up and taking this breath and kind of being almost like shocked with all of the things coming back on, and I was lying there in not a great state, and there was some spark of life force in me that had shifted, and it was you know, this death portal that I'd gone through. And what was really interesting is I was delivering a uh the metamorphosis online workshop at this time, and I'd said to the women online, I said, we were in the cocoon phase, and life had taken me into the cocoon, and I said to the girls, I don't think I'm gonna be able to be online, you know, next week. And so it was this time of this two-week period, and then I came out and we started uh working on the the immersion phase. So life actually took me through the you know, the experience of what I was teaching, because we can't teach from knowledge, we can't teach from intellect, we have to teach from the direct lived experience, and it's like thanks.

Yeah, that was pretty intense experience though.

Yeah, it was it was super intense, and you know, there were moments of fear, yeah, absolutely, but it was more like I'm never gonna see my boy again. Yeah, and he had no idea, he had no idea. Nobody had any idea that I was as bad as what I was, so yeah, it was an intense, intense experience, and um and I knew what I needed to do with my body. I went and detoxed my body for the next couple of weeks and just stripped it right back um to release the virus from my system and you just use everything I I know. And then I went and climbed a mountain. Oh wow, what a comeback. Yeah, I yeah, I I I knew that that this virus had stripped me back to my bare bones, and so if I used myself as a human experiment, like how much power do we actually have? How much life force do we actually have? And it was only two weeks after that that I was in Nepal climbing to the base camp. Wow, and then I would have waterfasted and dry fasted and just completely cleaned my system. It's incredible. See that it's a long story, I know.

No, thank you. I really appreciate you sharing that with us.

Welcome.

Um, wow, yeah. So those those key words that we used at the yeah, I really um thank you because I know that brought back some emotion for you, and I totally get it. Like that would be my first thoughts would be for my children. If anything was to happen to me, yeah, the people that you're gonna leave behind, that kind of experiencing that grief would be pretty yeah, and my parents, because they've already lost one child, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, who knows what the cycle of life is, though, like yeah.

Okay, let's talk transformation. So you have, as you said, you've talked you teach through lived experience, and some of us don't necessarily have to go through such an intense experience in order to still be able to share and you know potentially help others. But but um yeah, I'd love to hear more about your work because you said that you want to bring some controversy to the system structures and boundaries that women have to work with. And I've also recall reading that your work

Fast Trauma Change Beyond Talk

takes women to places that other therapies and other transformational processes just don't go. So I want to know about it.

And that's it's a generalized statement because I I honestly I don't know that to be true globally. I mean, there's some amazing people, there's amazing people doing your experience and from what you've heard with the people you work with. Yeah, yeah. What I know is that you know, I've had I can't count now, but so many clients over the years that have said things to me like, I've been in therapy for 10 years, Sarah and what we've done in three days has just you know blasted everything I've been trying to work on, or I've been on medication for you know a long period of time and I don't want to take my pills anymore. Not that I advocate for that, right? I'm not telling people to go off their medication, but but naturally people feel like this is a key versus you know this other way. Um because I work with a an ancient technology. I mean, the the teachings are 35,000 years old, or maybe longer, maybe not as long. You can't like you can't argue with what actually happens in the human psyche when when I do the work that I do with with my clients. It's very visceral, it's very palpable, and it's very quick. So where you know, if someone comes to see a counselor, a psychologist, a psychotherapist, I mean, they're all doing great work, right? People have to have different entries of uh levels of entry.

Yeah.

But talk therapy only gets us so far, and often we're re-telling the story and we're looping. Yes. And then there are you know energy therapies where your practitioner has their hands on you or they're doing the work that they're doing, which is also beautiful work. But the way I work with people is I'm guiding you to have your own visceral experience inside of your body through moving the obstructions and generating energy and letting that energy organize itself in the same way as your heartbeats, your hair grows, the same way as you create a child, and that child grows inside, and then your blood turns to milk and you feed it, and it grows up into an adult. Like that's the infinite intelligence, right? So I'm working with this ancient medicine that gets you in direct connection with your own infinite intelligence, with the with the creative consciousness inside of you that's moving my hand and moving my mouth right now, and going into the very um core, like cellular body, to open up the cell receptors to let old memories and and old trauma, you know, pour from the cells without you needing to really tell the story. You simply feel the energy moving in your body, and sometimes it's very, you know, it's shaky, but once it's once it's gone, once it's unhooked, and then the neural pathways also unhook and shift and change, it's permanent. It's permanent change. So your talk therapy is you're speaking the thing over and over again, it's almost like you are managing the story, you know, and and we play the victim from that and uh all the things. This is actually a client comes to me and I say, you know, let's give you half an hour to tell me the story, like the real guts of it, without all of the drama around it, just like this is what happened, this is how it was, and then close your eyes, we're going in.

Okay.

And we immediately go into the very core of that trauma. And if they can't quite get it, it's like go deeper, go deeper, go deeper, and it's a process. And then once they get to that core memory, that's when we start using the technology, you know, through the breath work or through the moving the sensations or whatever it is, like it's all so bespoke, you know, there's it's not cookie cutter at all. There's 8,000 teachings that I can pull from in this library. So I'm I'm it's like a precision technology. It's it's it, you know, if you go to a doctor and you say I've got these symptoms, they put into their computer and it spits out a prescription. It's kind of how I work. So someone comes in and says, This is what's going on, and I go, I put it into the infinite consciousness computer. Which is you, which is me, which is them, which is us, and it spits out a prescription specifically for them, and it's always different. Um so you just gotta answer your question because I we're kind of, but I want to know what it is, but you can't tell me.

It's kind of like you can't tell me because you don't know what it is, it's just whatever it needs to be at the right time.

Well, that's the thing, like it's so hard for the mind to actually conceive what it is. You have to have the experience. Yes, you have to have the experience. Someone comes in and 90 minutes later they're like, What just happened? No, and so then when you bring that into three days or three months or three years working with this technology, because it's a complete map from Is there something that you created that you've created through your own experiences or that you've learned from other modalities and pulled together? It's a bit of both. It's a bit of both. So it's bringing you know my whole life lived experience as well as all the technology that I've learned, but there's something that's kind of come through, I suppose, in the last decade that's very unique to each person that I work with, that has elements of what it is that I've learned or know. But essentially, I'm working with this intelligence that you know created a cyclone in our country yesterday. Like that's the mind. The mind is like a cyclone, and then today it's sunny and it's still and there's no wind. That's the human psyche too. So I'm just working with this intelligence and I'm tuning into that person or that group in front of me, and and kind of it's it's almost mystic or magic. I don't even have to put a name on it. It's just it's just beautiful. It leaves me, whatever it is. Yeah, and people are like, But are you a this? And they're trying to put this label. Are you a yogi? Are you a coach? Are you and I'm like, I'm not in anything.

I can be whoever you want me to be.

Are you transmitting? I'm like, oh my god, stop trying to figure it out with your mind. Just come and have an experience.

Yeah, right. Okay. I want to talk more about some of the other things.

And it's science. It's not it's science.

Oh, there's plenty of stuff that's being proven now to yeah, absolutely, as you said, be beyond the um the realms of what we try and yeah, make logical. I actually had a guest on uh a couple of weeks ago, and she was talking about the quantum entanglement and that sort of thing. And and I think one of the things that she said was that that's what science has been doing for so long is trying to rationalize and make sense of all of the things, how our bodies work, how our minds work, how nature works, right? Like making things, oh, what does this do with this, you know? What did like and we're just trying to make it into something that's very rational in a in a yeah, and that's been going on for thousands of years in one way or another, right? Um, you know, how can we make this rock create fire? If you guess, but um yeah, so so that like I totally get where you're coming from when you say it doesn't make sense, but we but we are we we're always trying to make sense of it. Um I'd love to talk about some of the things that you can kind of give name to, like your somatic therapy, kundalini, I'd love to know more about, and also the psilocybin therapy process. Um, but before we do, I'd be keen to hear like who who are the women that come to you? Like, are they in groups like this workshop that you're doing in New Zealand? That might be worth paying for a flight to come over for. Or is it you know, individuals who find you because they're stuck do and they've been do trying to do the work and nothing seems to be working? Like who aren't who are they? Who are these women?

It's changed over the years, Nadine. Um, you know, because they've been doing this for a long,

Who Comes For This Work

long time now, and the I guess the the main thing is women seem to say, and not just women, I've worked with plenty of men over the years, but majority of women, they will they will ar they would I'm just gonna take a breath. The one thing that I've heard the most is I've tried everything. Yeah, and everything has its place. But I often will have women come to me when they've hit rock bottom. And everybody hits rock bottom at some point in their life, or at least get close to it, you know, and so people are scrambling on the outside. I've worked with um teenage girls that have been sexually abused, and I have eating disorders, um, addictions, and I have them in my home for several days. I don't do that so much now, but I used to do these immersions with them where they would come in and and I would be with them for three or five, six days. Um, I have run teacher trainings in the type of work that I offer. This weekend we've got 135 people in a beautiful big venue that are going through what's called the arc of transformation. And it's not just me, there's 17 of us offering our gifts and magic. Um the majority of my clients are probably over 40. Some are women that are in the public eye, you know, high visibility, that just don't have the or are meeting a new capacity in life, um, that that doesn't match their nervous system capacity. And so that's when burnout happens and you know breakdowns happen and the psyche starts to change. So all walks of life, you know, as soon as I someone asks me to sort of hyper niche, I'm like, oh I I can.

Yeah. But I kind of I kind of uh yeah, understand that you don't want to kind of narrow it down to one particular person. I get that, and the niche thing kind of, you know, gets if you help lots of different types of people, then it is very hard to niche. Um, but I guess is there a similarity or a thread? Uh I guess the transformation is like they're ready for change, right? They're ready for change, they feel stuck, they're in a cycle that they want to break. Like whoever they are, that could be a teenage girl, that could be a midlife woman.

Yeah, it's a time of transition, and it's not-I mean, women don't just come to me because they've got something wrong, you know, because there's something that's broken away, you know, broken. But you know, I often work with women who are who are really elevated in their life and and have got businesses and families and are doing incredible things, and they're wanting to elevate that. So I meet them where they're at. You know, we're working in this magnetic field of pure potentiality. You probably hear those words often, but that's the truth. And so if someone comes to me and they're like, I've got all of these areas of my life so sorted, yeah, there's one aspect. So it's like, great, let's concentrate the life force into that aspect and then bring it down into the facets because there's layers of the subconscious mind that we're working in, and there's there's layers and layers and layers. So it's not just women that are coming because they've got you know challenging um challenges going on in life. It's it's women that are like, I just want to level up, yeah. Nice elevate, I want to expand, I want more abundance, more, yeah, more love, more joy, more bliss. And we're like, great, let's go.

Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Okay, back to the back to some of the processes. Um, I'd love to know more about your work with psilocybin. I have had a guest on who has written a book about psilocybin therapy. She's in Canada, I think, or North America, where it's been legalized. Um, and it was a really cool conversation, but I'd love to hear how you use it because I would expect that someone, well, you know, I'm putting myself into a midlife box with other midlife women, and some of the experiences that we might go through, you know, with hormonal changes, questions about purpose, like

Psilocybin As Mother Nature’s Medicine

what is this all about? You know, all of those, and I I feel like there's something missing, those kind of things that happen in midlife. But it's not for the faint-hearted for one of those midlife women to come to someone like you and decide that they're gonna take a trip to try and process some of that or or use it as part of their journey. So, how does that all look?

So, first of all, it's not legal in New Zealand.

No, it's not legal. Oh, I think it's legal with like certain psychologists or something here, psychiatrists now, but yeah.

So this is where I step outside of the systems.

Uh-huh.

Right. So, how dare anybody tell us that we can't take nature's medicine? And especially when they're throwing, you know, pharmaceutical medicine down everybody's throats. And we have nature's medicine right outside our front door. And it's the most powerful medicine on the planet. I mean, there's many different forms of psychedelics. Yeah. I have worked with quite a few over the years, but psilocybin for me, it's she's my mother. So I have my mum who gave birth to me, and then she's my mother. She is mother nature, she is underneath our feet. And she's this mycelium network that is so, so beautiful and full of love and joy. And so when I first started working with Silasaibin, that's what she showed me. She was like, Sarah. If ever you need advice, you come to me. You don't go to books anymore, you don't go to seminars, you don't go to your mom and dad, you don't go to anyone else, you come to me. I have the answers for everything. So when you get that, it's like, all right, you know, and we got that in a journey. And so since then, I've been uh microdosing. So I've only ever done two major trips. Sorry, three. And they were powerful experiences. You don't need to do any more than that.

Were they guided? Or did you do them?

First one was, yeah. And the other two um self-guided. Okay. And that was a massive trust exercise for me because it's like, you know, that first one was really intense. It was eight hours and it was off the charts intense. You can't explain what a journey like that is. But the second time she guided me and she said, you need to learn to trust, trust life, trust me, trust this. And it was a smaller dosage, but it was still a very deep journey, and it was so beautiful. And she showed me she showed me so much that nothing else could have, you know. And so I've been microdosing with her. And the last journey I did with her was again, it was a small dosage, but she she was the one who said to me, You need to go to Thailand. And this is why, and and that was the reason why I went to Thailand, and that's a whole other story, but it's in the book. Um, so then what microdosing does, and I don't microdose often, it's as I feel called, is it just gives me that direct connection with the source, yeah, which I have mostly in my, you know, I can tune in every day anyway, but sometimes it's just that little bit of help. It's like taking your daily vitamin or taking an antibiotic or you know, whatever it is. And it's a very, very small dosage, it's subperceptual. I don't ever feel anything, but I know she's inside of me. And when I take her, it's like thank you, thank you, thank you. And it's like just reconnecting with the source, and she's so gentle. Like these these journeys are not they can be, they can be, but they're not that she's gentle. And I will only work with her when she tells me. I will only work with her when a client is ready, and many of them aren't. Yeah, I will only work with her um subtly. So, you know, I won't go in and give someone five grams. It's like that's a lot of practitioners do that, and that's like, no, we start off and we check in. Check in, let's just take a little weeny tiny bit, see how your system receives it. Sit with her in meditation. Um, it's always, you know, uh clinically supported, so we're not sitting in nature in the jungle. You're in a very safe container, safe environment. There's always music, and I'm guided. So I take a tiny bit as well, and then she guides me. She tells me which piece of music to put on, when to speak, when to give them silence, when to come in, when to touch, when to move away. It's just magic. Absolutely magic. And it's not something to be scared of. No, she's she doesn't, she actually wants more and more, more and more people to connect with her, and that's why she's making a resurgence at the moment.

She's like, mother wants to be, you know. She's like, get out of the way, dad. It's a time for mum, you know.

That's kind of what she's like. She'll give you a little bit of a slap, as mothers do. Clip around the earth. She does. It's if you need it, you know, but mostly she's full of compassion and kindness and nurturing and nourishing and love and and joy. Like, I've had so many giggles and epiphanies, and like, oh, it's it's just beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Yeah, I highly recommend it.